Journalist Muntadar al-Zaidi probably said it best: “This is a goodbye kiss from the Iraqi people, dog.”
With that, he hurled his shoe at President George W. Bush in a fit of disgust. Bush dodged the heeled projectile before another one came flying his way. “This is for the widows and the orphans, and all those who were killed in Iraq!” al-Zaidi shouted before he was thrown to the ground and assaulted by security guards.
Later, in the incendiary Counterpunch newsletter, U.S. writer Dave Lindorff described al-Zaidi as a “hero of the profession” in a laudatory piece called “Finally, A Journalist We Can Look Up To!”.
Bush said that U.S. troops were bringing stability to Iraq. With that outburst, al-Zaidi demonstrated that he was fed up with the bullshit.
In some respects, this was a year in which the public collectively latched onto news anchor Howard Beale’s slogan from the movie Network: “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore.”
Here in Vancouver, NPA politicians claimed they were addressing homelessness. Voters who spent any time walking the sidewalks could see the reality: the number of homeless people was going up, not down. It didn’t help that the incumbents, including NPA mayoral candidate Peter Ladner, all voted in favour of a secret $100-million loan guarantee for a developer. Vancouverites were mad as hell, and they weren’t going to take it anymore. No wonder the NPA was turfed out of office and Gregor Robertson was elected mayor.
Premier Gordon Campbell got a taste of this outrage in two recent by-elections in Vancouver. He tried to talk a good game on the economy. In Vancouver-Fairview, people were mad as hell about how the Canada Line destroyed businesses along Cambie Street. Downtown, voters were mad as hell about tenants getting evicted and rising rents. As a result, there are two new NDP MLAs in the legislature.
Prime Minister Stephen Harper milked this collective anger by claiming that Stéphane Dion’s carbon tax would screw everybody. That’s the best way to do politics in this era of grumpiness. Act like you’re mad as hell and there will be enough stupid, furious schmucks out there who will vote for you.
Harper stoked public anger about crime. He pandered to the underlying rage among rural and suburban residents of English-speaking Canada about French-Canadian politicians. It culminated in a bunch of patriotic malarkey about how coalition governments are somehow not Canadian.
This mad-as-hell mentality also worked for the occasionally hotheaded mayor of Burnaby, Derek Corrigan. His party won every seat in the recent municipal campaign. NDP Leader Carole James adopted a similar approach at the provincial level. People were mad as hell about those pay raises for deputy ministers. And so was James, though she resisted the temptation to remove her shoe in the legislature and fire it across the aisle at the premier.
But no Canadian politician could match the smoothness of Barack Obama, who managed to fuse public outrage with a marketing message that stirred the world. “Change you can believe in,” Obama’s campaign promised. The public loved it. Then he reappointed Bush’s secretary of defense, Robert Gates, to reassure the old boys at the Pentagon and the weapons manufacturers that they needn’t worry about the new kid on the block.
Obama stayed cool, but his former preacher, Jeremiah Wright, was sure mad as hell. He said the fathers of the country lied when they claimed that all men were created equal, citing the historical treatment of Native Americans, Japanese Americans, and African Americans. “The truth is they believe all white men were created equal,” Wright declared in a rage, before shouting, “God damn America.”
That got a lot of Americans mad as hell at Wright, which nearly cost Obama the presidency.
In the end, Obama was saved by financial turmoil on Wall Street, which, along with Tina Fey’s impressions of Sarah Palin, destroyed the Republicans. Share prices plunged. The U.S. real-estate market collapsed. The bottom fell out of oil prices. The auto industry imploded.
Ski instructors in Whistler and construction workers at Southeast False Creek got angry upon learning they were at the mercy of the guys in New York who wear red suspenders to work. And taxi drivers talked knowledgeably about hedge funds, subprime mortgages, deflation, and collateralized debt obligations. It was that kind of year.
Even the entertainers got pissed off. Guy Ritchie compared Madonna’s body to gristle. Madonna called Guy a gold digger. Sarah
McLachlan broke up with her husband, Ash Sood. Christian Bale said he was angry about Heath Ledger’s death, even though the latest Batman flick generated nearly a billion dollars in box-office revenue.
Trash-talking hockey star Sean Avery riled the NHL brass by saying, “I just want to comment on how it’s become like a common thing in the NHL for guys to fall in love with my sloppy seconds.” Canuck fans seethed at the Sedin twins when the Canucks failed to make the playoffs.
One of the year’s memorable moments came after auto executives flew into Washington, D.C., on their private jets seeking a government bailout.
“It’s almost like seeing a guy show up at the soup kitchen in high hat and tuxedo,” Democratic congressman Gary Ackerman said in a fit of exasperation. “I mean, couldn’t you all have downgraded to first class, or jet-pooled or something to get here?”
The year has ended with astonishing revelations about Bernie Madoff’s $50-billion Ponzi scheme, which ticked off investors like Steven Spielberg. In the memorable words of New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, much of the financial-services industry appeared to be about destroying value, not creating it. “The pay system on Wall Street lavishly rewards the appearance of profit, even if that appearance later turns out to be an illusion,” Krugman wrote dismissively.
Throughout the past year, Krugman repeatedly ripped into the Bush administration for wrecking the economy. He was angry. No wonder he was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics. Like al-Zaidi, the committee members who grant these awards were mad as hell at George Bush and they weren’t going to take it anymore.
Rod Filbrandt
Animals
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