After 12 months of griping and scowling, the season of renewal beckons and we settle down to celebrate the year’s more joyous moments. Let’s clear a paragraph for Katie Taylor’s sequence of amiable demolitions in the London Olympics. Mention should be made of Barack Obama’s victory in the US election and of the hilarious paralysis that (momentarily at least) fell across Fox News. Didn’t some little girl get rescued from a tree in August?
Oh, sod that. If you want to feel warm and cosy, watch The Railway Children. It’s sure to be on somewhere. We can have far more fun discussing the most irritating phenomena of 2012.
This is probably not the place to ponder truly ghastly events and personalities. But no opportunity should be squandered to turn one’s nose up at Vladimir Putin and note his increasingly effective efforts to make Ivan the Terrible seem like a model of executive restraint. Pussy Riot would, no doubt, concur.
There’s Jimmy Savile and company. The revelations about the moral corruption that characterised 1970s television cry out for some angry attention. One is reminded of that unreliable myth concerning those Native Americans who looked towards the invading European ships and, because they didn’t have the mental machinery to process the image, saw only an uninterrupted expanse of benign ocean. For a decade or two, we watched various increasingly superannuated men snuggling up to visibly discomfited young women and concluded that it was all in good fun. Collective delusions have rarely been so potent.
Grotesque behaviour by satanic representatives of the National Rifle Association in the US after the Sandy Hook shootings deserves attention. Once again, however, the story is a little too grim for a new year banquet of snark.
Rifle nuts
A better candidate for real-life pop-culture nightmare is the recent elevation of Piers Morgan to the status of hero after bashing gun lobbyists all about his television studio. Some tens of thousands of rifle nuts are now calling for his expulsion from the United States. Can I live in a world that has Piers Morgan as one of its good guys? Can I? Can I?
There’s more. After decades of idle threats, the ironic Christmas jumper has finally imposed itself fully on western European high streets. The fall of the Roman Empire spun out at a faster pace than that creeping catastrophe.
South Korean pop music went from exotic novelty to all-out menace in a matter of minutes with the dizzying rise of Gangnam Style. If you wanted to be an insufferable bore this year you knew which dance to do when wearing your Christmas jumper.
Did we mention stupid Star Wars? No? Well, don’t fret. Now that Disney has revived the franchise, we find ourselves doomed to talk about little else until the heat death of the universe. The days when news stories complained that 98 per cent (or some other made-up figure) of internet traffic was pornographic in nature already seem unimaginably distant. An even greater portion is currently taken up with speculation as to the colour of Boba Fett’s helmet.
Let’s not waste any more time. Setting aside all the unmediated monsters and unspeakable tragedies, there is really only one serious candidate for the most irritating, unstoppable, brain-numbing phenomenon of the year. Stand up Fifty Shades of Grey; your time has truly come.
Overused analogy
The first novel in E L James’s mucky trilogy – originally devised as Twilight “fan fiction” – actually emerged back in 2011. But the erotic series did not achieve unavoidable status until the early part of this year. In this instance, the overused analogy with a virus really does stand up. On Tuesday you were entirely unaware of the condition. By Thursday morning you were vomiting violently while clutching your sides in desperate agony. By Friday evening you found it hard to believe there was a time when the Grey trilogy did not exist.
James’s prose may be fairly wretched, but it is significantly less terrible than the chaotic spew of pedantic adjectives that adhere pungently to the pages of books bearing Dan Brown’s name. The nauseating notion that women can achieve empowerment by allowing themselves to be ever-so-slightly beaten up hardly needs disentangling.
What truly grates is the slavish obedience of the reading public. If you really want to learn about “submission” – a key theme of James’s novels – then recall how unquestioningly punters fell for the inexplicable craze. In one news report, booksellers wearily recalled customers bringing the trilogy to the counter and, while their card was being processed, casually asking what the blasted thing was about. Meanwhile, a hundred stupid columns used the phenomenon to draw insecure conclusions about the state of society.
Hang on. Isn’t that what I’m doing now? Pay no attention. Read Fifty Shades of Grey. Or don’t. Oh, do what you like.