Well folks, at this time of the year it's traditional to look back on the previous 12 months and reflect on what has come to pass.
Well I don't know about you but that sounds like far too much like hard work, so here's a review of 2001 from our pals at The Evil Gerald what did be popping into my inbox late last year (6.10pm yesterday evening, to be exact)...
Well I don't know about you but that sounds like far too much like hard work, so here's a review of 2001 from our pals at The Evil Gerald what did be popping into my inbox late last year (6.10pm yesterday evening, to be exact)...
Dear readers,
At this time, we often turn to reminiscing on the events on the past year, the better to avoid having to talk to our loved ones or family. We at the Evil Gerald hope you will join us in looking back on 2001, which will surely go down in history as the one after 2000.
The year began in January, as humanity once more refocused its jumbled and incoherent desires into a slim set of mutually contradictory hopes and dreams. Mostly people wished for peace, an end to poverty at home and abroad, and above all a quiet, uneventful September. Members of the rock group Oasis aimed to improve upon their recent musical output, while zookeepers fretted about budget cutbacks that made it increasingly difficult to buy pandas.
In Ireland, children continued to grow, but there was simmering discontent. Newspapers carried lengthy special reports with titles like “Who Eats The Fruits Of This Tiger?”, and the peace process resembled a sticky mess. The wealthy gloom was alleviated by the publication on the online computer internet of the country’s first website, the Evil Gerald, which shocked many with its feisty attitude and determined refusal to obey basic design rules. Reflecting the Zeitgeist and also the spirit of the times, we led with stories on GM food, Fianna Fail’s financial difficulties, and the irrepressible rise of rich pricks.
Meanwhile, there were oil spills around the Galapagos Islands, beloved by fans of evolution everywhere, and George W. Bush entered the Oval Office, before getting stuck in a closet while looking for the way out. All was well, except for the stuff that wasn’t.
February. The Tribunals continued to provide amusement to the Irish public, as Liam Lawlor, George Redmond, Denis O’Brien, Michael Lowry and Ray Burke took it in turns invent fanciful, exotic tales of implausibly far-fetched reasons why they kept getting caught stuffing bags marked ‘Swag’ into mattresses in a back room in Dr. Quirky’s Good Time Emporium.
By March, Foot n’ Mouth disease had made its somewhat unwelcome appearance in the British countryside, which soon found itself besieged by forbidding bar-charts, burning animal heaps and apocalyptic news correspondents. Parents were warned to check their children for hoofs, a tell-tale sign of being a cow. The Evil Gerald leapt into action, commissioning sophisticated graphics from lowly-paid artists we found painting angels on College Green footpaths, and penning erudite editorials that showed how we were right and should have been listened to more. Surely, everyone agreed, this was the big news story of the year, so monumental that everybody should just stop trying to do historic stuff until January 2002 at the earliest. Some people refused to listen to such common sense, however.
April – Warmer weather returned to Ireland, and the first temperatures over five degrees were greeted by the traditional sight of shirtless knackers parading around Grafton St. Elsewhere, crap Irish dot-com companies were going belly-up at a fantastic rate, but not fast enough for McDonald’s and other employers looking to pick up more minimum wage ‘associates’.
Nothing of any importance whatsoever happened in May.
June was little better, with the main events of interest being the amusing result of the Nice Treaty referendum in Ireland, and the victory of New Labour in the UK’s general election on a highly inspiring “More Good, Less Bad” platform.
July saw hundreds of thousands gather in Genoa to bang bongos, try to score each other, and, oh yeah, protest against globalization or something. A young Italian man named Carlo Giuliani was killed by an even younger Italian policeman, inspiring fellow-protestors to incorporate his name into new chants.
August saw U2 play Slane twice to adoring crowds. Bono made a fool of himself as usual, inviting his ‘soul sister’ Neil Jordan on-stage to sing a Thin Lizzy/Steps medley, and phoning up Koffi Annan mid-set to ask for “more peace”.
September started as it meant to go on, with pointless bigotry: the world got a vicarious thrill out of watching groups of fuckwits throw abuse and pipebombs at wee kiddies on their way to school, and the RUC suffered half a dozen casualties a night while being accused by both ‘sides’ of going soft on the other.
On September 10th, men wearing “You don’t have to be an Islamic fundamentalist to bomb America, but it helps” t-shirts buy tickets for airline flights the next day in Boston and New York.
On September 11th thousands of people died needlessly, some of them in New York and Washington, as three planes hijacked by members of the terrorist group sponsored by all-round dickhead Osama bin Laden were piloted into buildings where people were sitting working, talking on the phone, photocopying their hands or just surfing the net. The American air force probably shot down another plane in Pittsburgh, but we’re not meant to say that as the memories of some heroic passengers who supposedly overpowered their hijackers was later hijacked as a justification for the completely unheroic killing of lots of other innocent people in Afghanistan.
There was a national day of mourning declared in Ireland, prompting some to accuse Bertie Ahern of abjectly pandering to the United States, prompting others to wonder why he should stop doing so now, of all times? In the healthy intellectual discussions that followed the September 11th attacks, anybody who disagreed with anything was accused of everything.
Later that month, another group of violent fundamentalists magnanimously decided to secretly destroy some of their weapons, and hilariously tried to dress it up as a gesture of unparalleled humanitarianism.
