TO BE OR NOT TO BE...WHATEVER

• Share

If the character of a year is composed of issues and statistics, 1996 looks all right. The money was good, workers got jobs, there was peace in our time. Problems too big for government to handle were acknowledged as such or reduced to manageable size in local pockets. Bill Clinton discovered America, and America discovered in Clinton a repository for a political centrism unimaginative yet safe.

The only things missing in the year were nobility, honor, beauty, moral action and a sense of how to live in the world. But even in America one can't have everything.

Enter Hamlet, mirthless, disheveled and on cue, at the year's end in a Kenneth Branagh movie that resurrected the melancholy, not-quite-corny figure yet again and plunked him in the middle of the aging New World. Here was the eternal young man, immensely gifted and born to high expectations, who had an overwhelming moral problem and either did not know what to do or did and could not do it. His inaction would never have been as poignant had he not been encumbered with the wild idea that a person should do whatever is nobler in the mind.

He tromped about his country, which he no longer recognized, was of it and out of it at the same time, feigned this and that, and intuited the presence of a monstrous lie while harboring only a suspicion of the truth.

He was a royal pain in the ass, a walking conscience, the sort of brooding spirit people need but do not want around. He could not have come to America at a better time.

The year 1996 was mainly notable for what did not happen. At the beginning of the year the U.S. government did not happen. The Republican revolution did not happen. The Whitewater scandal did not bring the President down. Fifteen U.S. Senators did not run for re-election. Colin Powell did not run for the presidency. America did not get involved in a larger war in Bosnia and did not intervene in Burundi, Liberia, Zaire or Sudan. No fuss arose about the illegal fund-raising practices of the Democrats. No fury erupted when it was revealed that Swiss bankers kept Nazi loot stolen from Holocaust victims.

Richard Jewell was not the Atlanta bomber. The cause of the explosion of TWA Flight 800 was not determined. A senior executive at Texaco was found not to have referred to African-American employees as "niggers," as had been reported. The burning of black churches in the South was found not to have been the work of organized bigots, as had been reported. The arrest of a militia group in Montana did not end in a shoot-out.

The Cleveland Browns did not remain in Cleveland. Tiger Woods did not remain an amateur golfer. Mike Tyson did not beat Evander Holyfield. The Chicago Bulls did not lose the N.B.A. championship. The New York Yankees did not not win the World Series.

Last winter everybody talked about the weather but no one did a thing about it.

There was no great movie of the year, no great play, no great fashion statement (no new look, no new old look), no great new television show. There was no major work of fiction, and the novel that drew the most attention was purportedly written by no one, who, when he fessed up to being someone, contended that his subterfuge did not matter.