And, it seems safe to say, nowhere out there among the 50 billion times 100 billion stars was there this year a presidential campaign as dispiriting as the one that occurred on our little portion of this itsy-bitsy planet. When the student paper at Berkeley endorsed the California Civil Rights Initiative, which bans racial preferences, indignant defenders of civil rights destroyed 23,000 copies of the paper. When a 16-year-old sniffed computer cleaner to get high, then drove off a road into a lake and drowned, his parents sued the store that sold him the cleaner, the builders of the road and the engineering firm that designed the lake. A court ruled that the Constitution’s proscription of ““establishment of religion’’ was violated by a probation officer’s recommendation that attendance at Alcoholics Anonymous meetings be a condition of probation for a person who had been convicted three times of drunken driving. Some students at Emory and Henry College in Emory, Va., protested that cheering for the college mascot, the Wasp, sounds distressingly like speaking well of the unspeakable–white Anglo-Saxon Protestants.
This year Britain’s ““Dictionary of National Biography’’ began to be available on CD-ROM, with entries like this one on King George IV: ““There have been more wicked kings in English history but none so unredeemed by any signal greatness or virtue… He was a dissolute and drunken fop, a spendthrift and a gamester.. . a bad son, a bad husband, a bad father, a bad subject, a bad monarch, and a bad friend… his word was worthless and his courage doubtful.’’ Speaking of his sort, Fidel Castro visited Vatican City. There, in the home of the pope who lit the fuse that blew communism to smithereens, Castro proclaimed it a ““miracle’’ that he got to meet the pope, who now will visit Cuba. (How many divisions has the pope got? Castro will find out.) Castro posed for photographers in the Sistine Chapel, in front of Michelangelo’s depiction of the ““Last Judgment,’’ an event Castro will find instructive. At memorial services for the spy Alger Hiss, he was praised as ““strangely without bitterness.’’ Think about that.
This year air bags were pronounced more dangerous than Richard Jewell, and a man who lost a Bible-quoting contest shot the winner. And in addition to Di’s divorce and John-John’s marriage, and a Hawaiian court’s decision that same-sex marriages cannot constitutionally be denied, 1996 enriched the annals of modern romance with this: a prenuptial agreement (the third marriage for him, the second for her) stipulated that the couple will have ““healthy sex three to five times a week,’’ she will do inside chores, he outside chores, and they will buy Chevron Supreme gasoline. A U.S. Postal Service ad said: ““In 1940, a one-pound loaf of bread cost 8 cents, and in 1995 cost 79 cents; a half-gallon of milk went from 25 cents to $1.43 in the same period; and a first-class postage stamp went from 3 cents to 32 cents. Which, bottom line, means that first-class postage rates remained well below the rate of inflation.’’ Not exactly. Noting that the price of the stamps rose 9 percent faster than the price of bread and 105 percent faster than the price of milk, Jeff Jacoby of The Boston Globe asked, ““Doesn’t anyone at the Postal Service have a calculator?’’ Not yet. It’s in the mail.
““Hold Mummy’s hand and be a good girl’’ were the last words her father said that night on the Titanic to 7-year-old Eva Hart, who died this year in London at 91. In Connecticut, Mary Bidwell, believed to be the oldest American, died at 114 even though she said she never drank, smoked or bobbed her hair. Dominguin, the matador who deserves some of the blame for Hemingway’s celebration of bullfighting, ““The Dangerous Summer’’ (1956), died at 69. The rapper Tupac Shakur, who celebrated violence, was shot to death. For Spiro Agnew, Heaven is a place without The Washington Post.
Faraway places with strange-sounding names–Bosnia-Herzegovina, Rwanda, Zaire, the Bronx–continued to provide televised examples of three recurring factors in the history of this century, refugees and war criminals and the New York Yankees. Time was, faraway places really seemed far away. Seventy years ago, in 1926, one of the year’s biggest news stories was Admiral Byrd’s flight to the North Pole. This year, a scholarly analysis of the diary Byrd kept on the flight strongly suggests that he never got there and knew he did not. In 1996, assuming that everything we think happened did happen, and considering the possible calamities that did not happen, we had a tolerable year, given who and where we are.
This is who and where, according to Galen Strawson, writing at year’s end in the London Times Literary Supplement, about how hard the millennium has been on human hubris: ““Copernicus displaced us from the centre of the universe, Darwin closed Eden, showing that we are apes with shrews for ancestors and cabbages for cousins. Freud pointed out that we are not our own masters even in our own heads… Modern genetics showed that we share over 98 percent of our genes with chimpanzees.’’ This has all been part of what Strawson calls the process of ““our dispossession, the story of how we learn to acquire a sense of proportion.’’ It is a process of ““disillusionment,’’ and that is a positive term. It is fine to be without illusions. However, it is an illusion that the dignity of our species is diminished because we are at the back of the beyond of the universe.
