Andrew Sullivan has a good year-in-review essay at the back of this week’s issue of Time magazine — and I’m not just saying it’s good because it begins and ends with a Lord of the Rings analogy (though that certainly helps). :)

James Poniewozik’s 2003 wrap-up article is also worth reading. He argues, essentially, that this was the year when the cultural “mainstream” ceased to exist (and that “in some ways the mainstream is now itself a niche” — case in point, Clay Aiken). Excerpt:

Of course, no sooner had the printing press been invented than some pundit was probably bemoaning how people, individually consuming those newfangled “books,” would lose the community spirit engendered by Passion plays and witch burnings. And it’s worth remembering that mass culture was a 20th century anomaly. …

Increasingly, the events that most deeply, if briefly, unite that floating mainstream are deaths: Johnny Cash, Bob Hope, Katharine Hepburn. The intensity of response to the passing of John Ritter, a likable actor from a campy ’70s sitcom, seemed to surprise even his fans. In a culture with few common cultural referents, the past is what we share the most. …. When old stars pass, they take with them a piece of a time when we weren’t so niched and subdivided by the market and our own choices. To make the metaphor a little homier, the pop-culture mainstream is a family that used to get together for dinner once a week but now does so only at weddings (or dating-show finales, anyway)–and funerals.

This is an interesting point, too:

In fact, it was easier for a work to provoke discussion if no one saw it. Possibly the most debated works of 2003 were The Passion of the Christ, Mel Gibson’s unfinished movie about the Crucifixion; The Reagans, a TV biopic that no one outside CBS saw before the network canceled it under protest; and Daniel Libeskind’s World Trade Center rebuilding design, which spent most of the year on the redrawing board.

I’m sure you can pick apart Poniewozik’s arguments and find various inconsistencies and instances of b.s. in there (though I’m too lazy to do so at the moment), but overall, I think he’s got some good points.

Oh, I like this excerpt too:

And in Iraq, unlike Vietnam, there was no Walter Cronkite to speak for the great middle. Ratings for cable news shot up, while big-network newscasts stayed level or even dropped. Some viewers’ media choices became a kind of political secret handshake. Pro-war, you watched Fox News, learned that the war was a rout and disdained the liberal big media. Antiwar, you watched BBC News � or al-Jazeera on satellite � learned that the war was a quagmire and disdained the jingoistic big media. Pox on both your houses, you watched Jon Stewart.

Or you voted none of the above. What network did the most people watch the night the ground war began? NBC. While ABC and the Fox network went with war news, the Peacock had the sense, bravery and civic responsibility to air … “Friends.”

Heh. Read the whole thing, as they say.

Oh, by the way, in case you were wondering, the title of this post is a rather random reference to a Makem & Clancy song. (Hi Dad.)