The year 2005 was one in which life became ever-more-surreal and the standards with which we hold other human beings to (particularly the ones in elected office) were eroded even further. To recap, President Bush’s approval ratings sank to lows that would make Richard Nixon snicker, New Orleans became a third-world country, the U.S. military death toll in Iraq eclipsed 2,000, and Tom DeLay was indicted. Elsewhere, Pakistan suffered a devastating earthquake, the Pope died, Britain was terrorized, and Paris burned with racial tension.

The closing days of last year offered news events just as sensational, tragic, and absurd as anything else that had happened, and the New Year promises to be no different. The holiday season kicked off with the imagined tension generated by a manufactured War on Christmas. Indignant fundamentalist Christians with too much time on their hands screamed highway robbery, claiming that by changing the Yuletide slogan from “Merry Christmas!” to “Happy Holidays!” their sacred holiday had been hijacked by scheming heretics (i.e. liberals, and anyone else who thought Jesus would be rolling in his grave at something so inane). I myself was quite fond of the previous year’s, “Merry ChristmaHannuKwanzaakan!” They complained that Christmas was being secularized, as if that was any different from Christianizing the Winter Solstice over 1,500 years ago.

Next we received an unintended present from the White House: a revelation that in 2003 President Bush authorized the wiretapping of phone calls made by American citizens to people overseas, without a warrant from a judge. Not only had we the people not been told about this, neither had Congress; one has to wonder what the point was in them spending long hours debating how to modify the PATRIOT ACT in order to be effective while still protecting civil liberties, when Bush was content to ignore any conclusions they came to anyway. Even people in Nixon’s cabinet who were convicted for trying to monitor (Democratic) phone calls were outraged. Alas, however, I must say I felt very nonchalant about the whole thing when I found out about it. After the cherry-picked intelligence leading up to the war in Iraq, the Terri Shiavo incident, the paying off of news commentators to plug policy initiatives, the production of fake news stories to (again) praise Bush’s policies (both here and in Iraq), and the allowance of Jeff Gannon (right wing pseudo-reporter by day, gay prostitute by night) into White House press conferences, the exposure by Karl Rove and I. Lewis Libby of CIA operative Valerie Plame’s identity; after all this, when I learned Curious George had ordered his intelligence agencies to listen in on American citizens’ phone calls, a mere “Oh. Darn.” was the best I could muster. I was pissed, but I sure wasn’t surprised; my anger had since given way to apathy.

The White House and Capital Hill were struck another severe blow with the indictment and guilty plea of big-shot lobbyist Jack Abramoff, who’s had his greasy hands in many a politician’s pocket, both Democrat and Republican (but mostly Republican). He’s promised to cooperate with the investigation of numerous bribed politicians, many of whom promptly threw his money at various charities in order to maintain a façade of integrity, and one of which (Tom DeLay) stepped down permanently from his position of House Majority Leader. There’s justice after all.

Or maybe not. Much like the tsunami on December 26, 2004, many people’s residual jubilance was dashed the morning following a capital-H Holiday. On January 2 an explosion in a coal mine in West Virginia trapped 13 miners; when help finally reached them it was reported that of the 13 trapped, only one died and the others survived. The miners’ families and loved ones’ spirits were raised, only to be cruelly dropped and shattered when it was revealed that the opposite was true: all but one of them were found dead. This was after the bogus story ran across the front pages of all the nation’s newspapers. One person told CNN, "People who had been praising God a minute before were cursing." I can’t really blame them.

Our Christmas vacation was bookended and healthily sprinkled throughout with (what else?) Middle Eastern tensions. Early in December the leader of Iran, who just happens to be pursuing nuclear power in order to make a bomb, doubted the authenticity of the Holocaust and said Israel should be “wiped off the map.” It was also revealed (So many revelations these days … hmm … that Iraq’s Shiite-run Interior Ministry was engaging in the torture of at least 120 prisoners, most of them Sunnis, in two of its prisons. While no one has suggested that the U.S. ordered or even actively encouraged this behavior, it’s hard to imagine the Iraqi government thinking their American benefactors would disapprove, given their recent attitudes towards harsh treatment of prisoners in the War on Terror. At the beginning of the year, and near the end of our break, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon suffered a life-threatening stroke (his second), effectively ending his political career and, quite possibly, any chance of stability in the Israel/Palestine region.

This last bit of news, combined with the Iranian saber-rattling, has the fundamentalist Christians murmuring of a Biblically-proportioned smackdown in Israel. Christ is due to make his encore appearance there any day now, and according to Pat Robertson, Ariel Sharon was smitten by God as retribution for giving up land to the Palestinians, “’Tis the end of everything!” scream the right-wingers, in barely-concealed rapture. On the left end of the political spectrum, the environmentalists have looked to the increase in natural disasters and funky weather as the effects of global warming and are also saying we’re going to reap what we have sown.

Forget the fact that people have been saying Christ was going to be back soon before the blood on the cross had even dried, and that earthquakes have nothing to do with weather. Let’s just give the doomsayers the benefit of the doubt and assume that in the near future (maybe even this year!) Jesus is going to be riding a global-warming induced tidal wave back to Earth to raise hell. It’s really not as crazy as it sounds. Given recent events, anything could happen.