The moment America died.
'Tis the season for year end reviews, and our own list is of the twelve political events in 2014 that have me, personally and professionally, convinced that the very end of the world is nigh. Oh God, we're only on March? All right, let's muddle through somehow.
March was the month in which we got to hear from a bunch of supposedly serious people—and I don't know that there's a font invented that can properly express the emotion intended on that supposedly part—told us that the problem with the movie 12 Years a Slave is that it showed American chattel slavery in too negative a light. That is a thing that happened. Nothing any of us can do will reverse the fact that it did happen. Chuck Norris and apple pie good, depictions of actual historical events as they were told by those that they happened to bad.
But is it a sign of the imminent destruction of the republic, or merely a sign that some among us have not yet emotionally gotten past the 1860s? No, I think we must look elsewhere for our signs of doom. In March a Malaysian airliner went missing, and it was as if the heavens had opened and Jesus himself had given CNN a new reason for their existence.
“It is a tremendous story that is completely in our wheelhouse,” said a senior CNN executive, who asked not to be identified defining the network’s strategy for its coverage.
They went on to discuss internet theories of a "
black hole" swallowing the plane and/or whether God
spirited the plane away. They also consulted
a psychic.
That moment, right there. That is the sign we are all well and truly screwed.