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Goodbye, 2016. We Couldn’t Take It Anymore

There’s a goofy, easy, never-not-amusing joke that tends to materialize online as soon as the news cycle turns particularly brutal: As the headlines start cluttering up our screens, someone will inevitably string together a few bold-faced proper nouns, throw in a musical-note or flame emoji, and point out that we are experiencing an IRL redux of "We Didn’t Start the Fire," Billy Joel’s shout-sung 1989 history lesson, and the tune that’s topped readers’ polls in Overexcitable Social Studies Teacher magazine for more than a quarter-century now. The "Fire" joke has been so used so often that I don’t even know if it qualifies as a joke anymore; it just became a Thing We Sometimes Point Out on the Web, maybe because world events are so tough to deal with head-on. Or, I guess, because rhyming celebs’ names is always funny, or because late-’80s Joel references invariably delight a certain kind of nerd. (And so it goes.)

Yet throughout 2016–a twelve-month Shataclysm full of unimaginable strife and horror and loss–I saw those references to "Fire" appear on my various social and personal feeds more than ever, sometimes even multiple times in the same week. And often, the person invoking the song did so less with tee-hee jocularity, and more with a sense of absurdist despair:

Brian Raftery

Full Story: https://www.wired.com/2016/12/good-riddance-2016-essay/

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