Quotes of the Day

This was a fake year, a retro year, a year when new ideas were kicked to the curb like some dorky futuristic scooter. If someone came to you 10 years ago and told you that one of the biggest U.S. news stories in 2002 would be a big-time politician saying nice things about racial segregation, you would tell Future Boy to get back on his dorky scooter and go home. And if he told you that one of the year's biggest European news stories was going to be the supposed rise of anti-Semitism, you'd tell him Joel Stein is actually a Dutch name.

Maybe we're living in the past because we feel all freaked out about the future. It just feels good to retreat to topics previously explored and controversies already settled. Instead of devoting extra airtime to terrorism in Bali and Israel, unrest in Venezuela, nukes in North Korea or arms laundering in Yemen, we gobble up huge scoops of recycled news. Reading the newspapers this year was like settling back with some frozen-in-time Austrian Zeitung whose headline declares governor of Carinthia denies he worships Hitler. Wait, I think that really was in the Austrian papers this year. And in the New York Times, which I occasionally read during boring meetings, I found out that the Dow crawled back to 1997 levels and swept away all those confusing new companies I never bothered to understand in the first place, with their energy trading and e-tailing and telling people they've got mail. None of the news seemed at all appropriate to this year: Attacking Iraq? Jimmy Carter getting a peace prize? Oil tanker spills? Axis of evil? Airline bankruptcies? Ozzy Osbourne? It's as if CNN was replaced by CNNClassic. In fact, I'm pretty sure they're rerunning old infrared shots of Baghdad.

The terrorists that struck the U.S. in 2002 weren't recruits from international sleeper cells but the regular crazy homegrown kind: a sniper spending time with a kid who calls himself his stepson in the ickiest father-son bonding since Bill Wyman's son nearly became his dad's stepfather-in-law, and a college kid who was planting mailbox bombs in order to make a happy face on the map. A happy face? What year was that kid living in? We call them emoticons now. In Britain, the worst royal scandal anyone could scare up this year was over a rape that allegedly occurred in 1989. And a gang of thugs wanted to kidnap Victoria Beckham, a.k.a. Posh Spice, now — that's like stealing someone's Enron stock.

Even weirder were the public debates. Last year we were arguing about cloning and stem-cell research. This year, we pretended to argue about things we agreed upon long ago. The New York Times used its new front-page editorial section to lead the U.S. into a brave fight over whether women should be allowed to join golf clubs. This is a decision that was last grappled with by Darren on Bewitched. It's a little late to take a stand on this when we've already got women reporters in the male golf-club locker room. Jean-Marie Le Pen had French pundits discussing why fascism is bad. Trent Lott had U.S. pundits discussing why segregation is bad. It was as if the international debate team accidentally picked up topic lists from 1939 and 1958.

The U.S. Supreme Court listened to a big case on cross burning, a subject so universally agreed upon so long ago that even Justice Clarence Thomas felt safe enough to talk out loud about it. More amazingly, the Catholic Church convened a two-day conference in Rome to discuss what to do with pedophile priests. You'd think after the first half-hour, when someone said "How about we put them in jail?" they'd all go home. But they kept going, coming up with a long proclamation that somehow was something other than "How about we put them in jail?"

We couldn't get enough of stating the obvious. People wrote news stories that seriously examined Ulrika Jonsson or fat people suing fast-food restaurants, leaving very little for Have I Got News For You to do. After extensive video review, we determined that people should not dangle their babies over the railing of third floor balconies, or shave off their entire nose. We pretended to get newly upset about all sorts of things we already knew, like that some priests are creepy or that figure skating judges are corrupt. Wait until people find out how boxing works.

I know we're worried about dirty bombs and biowarfare and I know it's comforting to agree, but we're not going to get anywhere if we spend 2003 debating the ethical dilemmas of debtors' prisons and how many fifths of a person a slave is and whether the Stones have gone disco. We need to get back to facing the difficult, finely nuanced, real moral dilemmas facing us today, like J. Lo's wedding.

• JOEL STEIN
• 2002 was Déjà vu all over again, says Joel Stein