I knew 2012 was going to be an odd one when I watched Kim Jong Il’s casket pass through the packed streets of Pyongyang last December.
As the throngs of North Koreans prostrated themselves and wept, I remember thinking: Ah, there goes one of the greats.
First Osama bin Laden, then Moammar Gadaffi and now Kim Jong Il? This generation is running out of iconic villains.
Luckily for us, Vladimir Putin bought himself another election in May and United Artists remade “Red Dawn.”
We started 2012 in a funk, the economy was still puttering along and we were acutely aware this was an election year — Washington had virtually shut down, and nothing was getting accomplished.
Watching the 2012 election was like seeing a crappy sitcom get picked up for another season: Barack Obama and Mitch McConnell, two wacky guys with polar opposite political views, living in the same house (of representatives).
I wish they would have cancelled Congress instead of “CSI: Miami,” and I don’t even like “CSI: Miami.”
For better or worse, we weren’t the only country holding elections this year.
In May, Nicholas Sarkozy lost his job in France, paving the way for Socialist Francois Hollande, who has promised to raise income taxes on the wealthy in his country to 75 percent — still 16 percent less than what upper income taxes were under John F. Kennedy here in the U.S., but yeah, all right, Obama is still clearly a communist.
At least Sarkozy got to blow up Libya before the French gave him the boot, and he can successfully go down in history as not having the European Union crumble like a burnt tiramisu on his watch.
A month later, Egyptians put Mohammed Morsi in power, making Morsi the 2,000-year-old nation’s fifth democratically elected leader.
Morsi promptly ran up the state credit card and took out a massive IMF loan, and just last week he made the presidency more powerful than the judiciary.
If history is to be our guide, we probably won’t be seeing Egypt’s sixth democratically elected president until 2042.
Elsewhere, the People’s Communist Party of China met to appoint a new hive-mind/overlord for the P.R.C.
But elections haven’t been the only thing to make the international headlines in 2012.
The U.S. consulate in Benghazi was attacked September 11, resulting in the deaths of four Americans, including Christopher
Stevens — one of the United States’ most prolific and effective ambassadors in recent memory, may he rest in peace.
Sadly, the manufactured controversy over whether or not the president classified that incident as a terrorist attack in a timely fashion seems to have eclipsed the loss of four of our best and brightest.
Syrians continue to butcher one another; I suppose that puts Bashar al-Assad in the running as next year’s villain-in-chief, although there hasn’t been much news coverage coming out of Syria — I guess their civil war couldn’t compete with our Black Friday.
Last but not least, Gaza and Israel decided to end this year with a bang.
CNN was determined to report what was happening in the Gaza strip as though it were a war, but that was a hard story to spin when only one side had tanks, helicopters and smart bombs.
It seems we’re leaving 2012 in much the same shape as we found it — our economy is floundering, the government is still stacked with the exact same people pulling the levers, and the rest of the world isn’t any better off.
Well, at least we have one another — that and plenty to talk about next semester. Happy holidays, and good luck, y’all.
