The Worst Year Ever, Until Next Year
A meme is currently circulating on Twitter in which people post two contrasting photos: one is “me at the beginning of 2016”; the other is “me at the end of 2016.” Popular entries have included a duckling holding a butter knife vs. a raven holding a serrated blade, a young Leonardo DiCaprio in “Titanic” vs. a frozen DiCaprio in “The Revenant,” and the Statue of Liberty as it stands currently vs. the decaying, beached Statue of Liberty from “Planet of the Apes.” Like all meme jokes, it stops being funny when you write it down. But you get it: the joke is that this year’s depravity has permanently embittered us. The joke is that 2016 was very, very bad.