By Rebecca Wakefield

I had relatives in town this Christmas. I love them dearly, but it is best they left when they did. My mother had started to seriously look around my apartment, with an eye to the many improvements required to make it livable. She even left me a list of New Year’s resolutions, tacked to my wall. Gotta love British imperialism. My father had begun asking questions about the Venezuelan perfume salesman who roared up in the immaculate RX7 and leapt out of his door with a bunch of flowers and a wild stream of chatter reminiscent of John Cusack in Say Anything.

“He’s nice,” I explained, “but we haven’t had the conversation yet.”

“What conversation?” my father asked.

“Hugo Chavez, Dad,” I elaborated. “It’s kind of a Miami thing. Here, you can’t get serious about anyone until you’ve talked dictators.”

Anyway, let’s talk about this crazy year. It was 365 days of scandal, intrigue, disaster and dramatic irony. A brief selection:

International

This is the year the American public as a whole began to see that our involvement in Iraq is an expensive quagmire made inevitable by poor planning, bad intelligence and willful tunnel vision. At best.

The kind-faced and thoughtful pope of Generation X, John Paul II, died. The Catholic Church elected a flintier fellow with old-school ideals, Germany’s Joseph Ratzinger, to wear the pointy hat.

National

Hurricane Katrina demolished the vibrant and polluted New Orleans, while exposing America’s schisms of race and class. Katrina also revealed the damage unbridled cronyism can do to vital public agencies such as FEMA.

Two Supreme Court justices left the bench, signaling a conservative judicial shift that could reverse landmark decisions such as Roe v. Wade. President Bush also embarrassed himself by initially nominating his legal nursemaid simply because she had “a good heart.”

A whole bunch of Republicans got in trouble, notably vice presidential chief of staff Lewis “Scooter” Libby (for leaking the identity of a CIA agent to reporters), who was indicted. Also, Senate Majority leader Bill Frist and former House Speaker Tom DeLay faced serious inquiries related to money.

New York Times reporter Judy Miller went to jail to protect Libby’s confidence, then eventually fessed up and got pushed out of the Times. Unfortunately, the damage she caused with her erroneous reporting on WMDs in the run up to the Iraq war had been done.

Deep Throat (former G-man Mark Felt) tottered out of hiding in search of a book deal.

The “intelligent design” pseudo-debate set back real science to the Scopes trial era.

Florida

The morally bankrupt natures of some of our leading politicians were exposed by the Terri Schiavo case. Gov. Jeb Bush, a number of state legislators and members of Congress moved to block a court order that the brain-dead woman’s feeding tube be removed (after she spent 15 years in a vegetative state). Fortunately, the courts rebuffed these callow efforts.

Hurricane Wilma knocked out the power and a bunch of windows in South Florida. It also left thousands homeless and pointed out our enormous gaps in affordable housing.

The state continued its wholesale gutting of public health programs such as Medicaid, under the thin guise of privatization.

But a ban on lobbyist gifts to state lawmakers offered some hope of at least making legislators work harder for their graft.

The single most important local debate this year (and next) was about the Urban Development Boundary. The County Commission, at war with the mayor, sold its favors to the legion of lobbyists and developers, electing to send the question of whether to move the UDB to the state, which will rubber stamp its extension and send it back to the county.

Former Miami City Commissioner Arthur Teele committed suicide in the lobby of the Miami Herald building, touching off a series of unfortunate events in media and political circles. Herald columnist Jim DeFede was fired for taping Teele’s last call without his knowledge. Longtime New Times editor Jim Mullin resigned from his post after the paper was blamed for publishing a salacious police report on Teele that is believed to have sparked his final act. Meanwhile, back at One Herald Plaza, shakeups included the removal of managing editor Judy Miller and news that Knight Ridder had put its disintegrating newspaper on the auction block.

Raul Martinez ended his reign in Hialeah. Love him or hate him, Martinez was the embodiment of an era in Dade politics and things will not be as interesting without him.

The hollow promise of the condo boom as panacea of Miami finally became apparent to most, as the crisis in affordable housing and transportation sharpened along with gentrification.

Ricky Williams came back to the Miami Dolphins, while Shaq and Dwyane Wade made Pat Riley want to be a coach again. Shaq also decided to moonlight as a Miami Beach cop.

An enormous python lost its battle with an alligator in the Everglades, leaving us with a spectacular picture of Mother Nature’s sense of humor.