I’ve been trying to scroll less and read more, and as part of that hopeful self improvement program I came across a piece in Esquire about shitty 20th anniversaries. (Sorry, no link. Paywalled).
Of all the 20th anniversaries this year (Mean Girls! Napoleon Dynamite! J-Kwon’s “Tipsy”!), the most significant is this: 2004 was the year that set our national unraveling in motion. We didn’t feel our brains breaking at the time, and therein lies the problem. We got angry at the wrong people ( Janet Jackson), shrugged off dangerously precedent-setting practices (swiftboating), and entertained ourselves to death with the things that would be our undoing (Facebook, Donald J. Trump).
ANNIVERSARIES OFTEN CELEBRATE EVENTS that have propelled the world forward: 2024 marks the 55th anniversary of Neil Armstrong’s walk on the moon, the 35th of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the 30th of Pizza Hut’s PizzaNet (the first pizza-delivery site). This year’s 20th anniversaries feel different. From here, the big events of 2004 don’t feel like innovations so much as the first tiny cracks in our collective foundation. We didn’t see them until the cracks widened and deepened, and now the floors are sloping and the walls are askew.
We fucked around; now we’re finding out.
It was such a weird but obvious idea when I thought about it that I immediately googled up some results for Australia.
Two of the first:
John Howard won his fourth term as prime minister.
And…
The Australian government announced a multi-million dollar cruise missile program, set to give Australia the region's "most lethal" air combat capacity.
JFC. I’m never doing that again.
And I don’t believe we ever did get those cruise missiles.