Merriam-Webster Dictionary announced Monday that its official word of the year for 2016 is “surreal”, which the dictionary defines as “marked by the intensity of a dream”.

Truth is evaporating before our eyes | Francine Prose Read more

Seems about right. This year has felt like a bad dream from the start. Just from the music perspective, David Bowie died on 10 January, just after releasing a harrowing, beautiful album very specifically about his own death. He’d had cancer and kept it secret. In April, Prince died, overdosing on the pharmaceutical opiate Fentanyl at the way-too-tender age of 57, just a month after announcing that he had signed a contract to publish his memoir in 2017. In November, Leonard Cohen would complete the trio, dying in his sleep a month after releasing his 15th album, You Want It Darker.

Sad and bewildered, and after a string of terrorist attacks, England’s devastating decision to “Brexit” the European Union, more unarmed black people shot to death by police here in the states, and the divisive, race-baiting, presidential campaign of Republican nominee Donald Trump, music lovers and pretty much any other people around the world would be forgiven for saying: “It was plenty dark enough already, Leonard, thanks.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Photograph: Edel Rodriguez/Time Magazine

As it’s used in our contemporary lexicon today, the word “surreal” probably most often conjures images of surrealist art. Inspired by the dream analysis and free associative techniques of Sigmund Freud, early 20th century European painters such as Max Ernst, Andre Masson and Joan Miró took the physics-denying, time-and-space-twisting images that reside in our subconscious and developed a visual language to bring them to life on canvas. It was shocking art, and not always pretty.

Probably the most famous image of surrealism in the world, the melting clocks in Salvador Dalí’s 1931 masterpiece The Persistence of Memory, showed up this year, in a sense, in the form of a pair of stunning but ultimately ill-advised Time magazine cover. In August, to depict Trump’s seemingly self-sabotaging campaign, Time ran an Edel Rodriguez illustration of Trump’s face – mouth agape – melting like an ice-cream cone on a hot summer day.

“Meltdown” was the one-word cover line. Two months later, with Trump still trailing in the polls, just a month before election day, Time brought it back – this time an even more melted Trump, an orange-and-yellow puddle, and one added word: “Total Meltdown.”



Facebook Twitter Pinterest Photograph: Edel Rodriguez/Time Magazine

The problem of course, is that Time magazine, and just about every other media outlet in the country, had it wrong. Trump was not melting down. In hindsight, it seems pretty clear that he was gaining momentum.

Three weeks after the second Time meltdown cover, one day after Leonard Cohen died, Donald Trump pulled off one of the greatest upsets in American political history. That’s when 2016 went from being a bad dream to full-on waking nightmare, one that’s just gotten worse and worse, and more and more surreal.

The proliferation of “fake news” propaganda around the internet was worse than many of us had thought too. The Russian government meddled in the election in support of Trump, it turned out – something out of a James Bond movie. Trump denies this, putting himself at odds with the intelligence departments of the very government he’s about to inherit command of. It’s an unprecedented mess, and a dangerous one, a truly scary one.

The electoral college representatives vote Monday to ratify Trump as the next president of the United States. Thirty-seven Republican voters have to go “renegade” – switching their assigned votes away from Trump – or he’ll be the one sworn into office at the inauguration on 20 January 2017. It’s not likely that many electors will do so, but I’m hoping against hope for one more great big burst of surreality before we bid 2016 adieu.

After all, the word of the year is “surreal”, not “apocalyptic”.