And The Apple Roller Of the Year for 2016...

Man, this was a tough decision. For most of the year I thought sure the only possible candidate for Apple Roller of the Year was going to be Boris Johnson, the man who led the charge to make Brexit happen.  He was the loudest voice in the chorus demanding that the UK leave the Common Market, and then when the votes showed that Brexit was -- by about 51% -- what the British public wanted, he immediately bailed out.  He left the Eurozone, all the countries that have dealings with the Eurozone, and of course his home country thoroughly destabilized. He even made newscasters wonder aloud whether it meant there would be another vote in Scotland to secede from the UK. BoJo took the Prime Minister with him when he left, and I don't know how many other steadying hands that used to be firmly on the rudder of Britain. It was really quite an achievement.  It's still totally up in the air whether this apple-rolling is going to HELP or HURT.

I didn't want to use Donald Trump, but as the year came to a close I thought, man, it's gonna hafta be him.  It's not exactly a Cinderella story, because he was BORN RICH and used his wealth and his status as a reality-TV star to bluster his way into the White House.  But it IS one of the unlikeliest outcomes in American political history.  In an earlier blog entry I compared him to Jefferson Davis, noting how he's used completely un-American ideas, particularly a string of irresponsible racist comments, along with campaign promises so ridiculous that they border on the DELUSIONAL, as a kind of pry bar to jimmy open the front door of the White House, his voting constituency cheering him on every step of the way.   But going with Trump seemed so obvious, you know?  Jeb Bush even CALLED him "the Chaos candidate."  And their hair is so similar, I was worried that my adoring readers would have a hard time telling The Donald from BoJo:

 

 

But then it occurred to me:  a major reason this ultra-close presidential race ended with Trump winning is the fact that many, many voters simply hated his opponent, Hillary Clinton.  Someone said to me the other week that she didn't care enough to vote and wasn't going to bother, but when she heard her daughter was voting for Hillary, she cast her ballot for Trump "to cancel her out."  I know that's common practice in this country -- voting against the candidate you dislike and choosing what you see as the lesser of two evils -- but the way this campaign has gone, I wouldn't be surprised to hear that it happened a lot more this time than usual.  Are Hillary's divisive, ugly-natured, out-of-touch-with-the-people tactics -- calling half of Trump's fans "deplorables" springs to mind -- the reason we now have an unbalanced real estate broker with a string of bankruptcies on his record, who refuses to show anyone his tax returns, packing his bags to move to the White House?

 

 

 

But then it hit me.  Whether you're talking about BoJo, Hillary or The Donald, the real power broker in the picture is someone else.  In Britain, that power broker looks like this:

 

  

 

Yeah, baby.  The same power broker was pulling the strings in Italy when Beppe Grillo, a comedian by profession, made his own splash in the Italian government.  He is currently working on getting enough signatures together to make it possible to hold another referendum, to get Italy out of the Common Market the way BoJo got the UK out.  Like the Joker in the USA, Grillo is known in Italy as the Clown Prince. 

 

 



But again, Beppe Grillo is not the most powerful man in Italy, any more than Trump is here or BoJo is in the UK.  This is the most powerful person in Italy:

So here's the winner for 2016.  Every voter who uses that right -- whether that's happening in Libya, Germany, Japan, or Burkina Faso -- is the one who rolls the apples this year.  Congratulations, everyone!  You're doing an incredible job spreading Chaos.  I mean that sincerely.