(Photo courtesy of Reuters)
Chased by Psy and his Gangham posse, we were cornered at the brink. It was the end of 2012 and the reckoning was here.
In one direction of the dial was “Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve” sans Dick, but instead featuring a glammed out Psy splat down in the middle of Times Square.
In the other, we could peer down the tube and watch the hard news coming out of Washington. It was dire as we gazed down the fiscal cliff. Do we dance with Psy or jump?
Do we take our bitter medicine and as a nation, a culture and a global economy, dive off the edge into the abyss? Or rock on?
Still stuck in 2012 with only inches to go, were we going to go over like Alice and fall into an unknown Wonderland? Or do we stare longingly at the party happening with Psy and his Gangnam Style? Making the real all the more fantastical, even Honey Boo Boo, the blonde Alice of reality TV fame, made a strange cameo on CNN turning the fantastic into an even stranger Bizarro World as we contemplated falling.
Then just as we approached the edge, the show we were all in cut to, “To Be Continued.” And just like that, a sequel was in the works. We could tune in again later to see how it (we) all turn out.
Even the lewd, low-brow infotainment, that had been mistaken for news kept rolling and bled into 2013, as Kathy Griffith, like some crazed Times Square hooker a few minutes past midnight, kneeled down to kiss Anderson Cooper’s crotch, calling it a sardine for all the world to see.
Nothing changed, except again we realized, the place we think is real, the Wonderland of Alice, is the place we’re living in. And the other world, beyond the cliff, out there somewhere, doesn’t quite seem real to us yet.
Abe Novick is a writer and communications consultant and can be reached at abebuzz.com.