The year 2016 belonged to death.
It dawned dimly on New Year's Day with U.S. Sen. Dale Bumpers' passing. It continued through November's pulling of life support on an Arkansas era of progressivism, economic modernization and political moderation that Bumpers helped launch in 1970.
The year took the lives of David Bowie, Glenn Frey, Antonin Scalia, Nancy Reagan, Merle Haggard, Prince, Gene Wilder, Muhammad Ali, Elie Wiesel, Arnold Palmer, Leonard Cohen, Leon Russell, John Glenn, Zsa Zsa Gabor, George Michael, Carrie Fisher ... and, most tragically of all, fact and truth.
The exploding digital world gave everyone instantly searchable confirmation for whatever polarizing belief they insisted on harboring. Fact and truth gave way to personalized versions and to patient Google searches for a supposedly verifying link.
Here is a typical conversation for me in 2016:
"Where'd you get that BS in your column this morning?"
"I'll send you the link to a piece from the New York Times."
"The New York Times? Give me a break. That's a lying liberal source."
"It's a great and time-honored newspaper. You can disagree with its editorials. You can disagree with the subjects it chooses to explore and the display its gives articles. It makes mistakes. But its standard of professional reporting within those articles is golden. While reporting is not a true profession, since it is a constitutionally free exercise that has no standards for licensure, it is a profession in the sense that people train to practice it as a career. They submit to the oversight of more experienced editors and to accepted newsroom practices. To dismiss the greatest newspaper in the world as a partisan organ is to discredit a trade, a craft, a discipline, and all who engage in it."
"What malarkey. The New York Times is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Hillary Clinton campaign. Its failed agenda was to beat Donald Trump."
"Actually, Hillary Clinton hates the Times. She thinks it concocted Whitewater from whole cloth and made too much of her emails and has generally held Bill and her to a standard of privacy intrusion not applied to others. Real journalism invariably angers both sides. Check that out at PolitiFact, the Pulitzer Prize-winning fact-checker."
"PolitiFact? That's a mainstream media news site, as bad as Snopes. Of course it'll stand up for the mainstream media. Fox is the only reliable fact-checker. And don't give me that Pulitzer Prize stuff. The liberal media establishment hands those out to itself. Name me a conservative who ever won a Pulitzer Prize."
"Paul Greenberg."
"They thought he was a liberal."
"As for Fox as a fact-checker, do you mean Bret Baier reporting that indictments were likely imminent against the Clinton Foundation?"
"There were, but Obama got to Comey."
"Prove that."
"How about you prove he didn't?"
Here is a more focused conversation:
"You keep writing that Hillary got more popular votes than Trump. But that's just California, where illegal aliens vote."
"There's no evidence of that."
"I'll send you a link."
"And I'll send you back to PolitiFact, which rates the statement as false because no one making it has backed it up. It is entirely possible some illegal aliens voted. But no one has ever quantified it, much less at a substantial number. Florida tried to do an extensive study and ended up striking the grand total of 84 people from the voter rolls. A lot of illegal immigrants try to lay low, not traipse out to vote."
And one more: "Look," I say to the barber, "you disagree with my opinions, and that's fine. Opinion differences are vital to our political dialogue, provided we can generally agree on the facts from which the opinions are drawn. The opinions in my column are based on facts I've determined over decades of training as a professional journalist."
"Yeah, your facts."
She does a good barbering job with what little she has to work with. And she held the scissors. What was I going to do?
Maybe next time I'll decline to pay her on the basis that I don't accept that she just cut my hair.
If she puts a mirror to my face to reveal hair shorter than it was moments before, I'll explain to her that the mirror is hers and that the mirror I trust is at home.
So what if she calls the police? When Sgt. Joe Friday asks for "Just the facts, ma'am," she'll be stymied.
There are no facts anymore.
To be serious, we remain a place where a barber is generally accepted as a barber and a haircut as a haircut. In politics, though, we're now a place where the guy looming over you with scissors and bellowing that he's going to make barber shops great again, and that he'll style your hair magnificently, just like his ...
You can't bolt from the chair, not for four bad-hair years.
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John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, was inducted into the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame in 2014. Email him at [email protected]. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Editorial on 12/29/2016