It's the end of the year, and I feel … fine? A cultural review of 2017
CHICAGO - Sometime around Inauguration Day, I started to notice the tall slender man at the southern edge of Lake Shore Drive. He stood perfectly rigid, his head thrust backward, staring skyward, as if watching an airplane pass. The man - a sculpture from artist Tom Friedman - is long and silver, made of baking tins and scrap foil. He was installed last fall on the lakefront. He's hard to miss, but only after Donald Trump entered the White House did I start to wonder what he was watching. Did he see an asteroid approaching?
Was the sky falling?
There is culture that speaks to the moment, and there are moments so loud and dissonant that it becomes hard to distinguish where the moment ends and the culture begins. Or vice versa.
What if nothing much happened in 2017? What if it had a been a year like any other? Some losses, some triumphs, an outrage or two, then the next year began, institutions intact, morality intact, status quo. Would that slender man have felt ominous then? Would the culture we occupy - much of it planned long before the 2016 election - have looked different? Or were things trending downward for a while, fed on an ugliness lying in wait? This time last year, I was finishing a story that was partly about whether 2016 was the worst year ever. Turns out - nope. If you're in need of an episode recap of what happened in the
