The great impending OMG of 2011, By Mark Morford

[madokie]

It was, to my slippery and wayward mind, one of the wonkiest, wobbliest, most sputteringly interesting years in ages, full of sound and fury and shrill, insufferable conservatism signifying nothing, but in a way that makes it seem like, you know, everything.

Do you remember much of 2010? Is it already a big blur, a fading Polaroid, a smeary dreamscape of pain and wonder and random celebrity deaths? Do you remember, say, Mel Gibson's sociopathic rants, Gary Coleman's sad demise, Christine O' Donnell's ditzball witchcraft? Do you care much anymore? Of course you don't. Then again, in a way, you totally do. Because you remember. It's all in there, somewhere. Ain't it strange?

This is the astonishing thing: All end-of-year lookbacks at the major stories, scandals, dramas and traumas contain one shared ingredient, one bizarre commonality built straight into their media DNA: How insanely fast we forget all about them. No sooner are we all aflutter, enraged and atwitter over one issue or conflict, then we shrug it off and leap onto the next Incredibly Important Thing, barely remembering what all the fuss was about in the first place.

It is your great reminder, repeated here for the 1,000th time: All those events and spectacles we think are so imperative at the time, so mandatory to our very survival, vanish in almost an instant. The 24-hour news cycle coupled with our short attention spans and hooked into the fact that life is a ridiculous mystical circus dreamgasm of joyful futility means, well, we don't understand nearly as much as we think we do. Also, the Great Play is still unfolding exactly as it should. ...

(Full URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2011/01/05/notes010511.DTL&nl=fix)