What's in Dave's Head

A number of years ago I was director of corporate communications for a developer of large shopping and entertainment complexes. It was an exciting time, as we were expanding aggressively in the U.S. and making inroads in Europe. My job was to get positive coverage in national business media, like The Wall Street Journal and Forbes, that could drive up our stock price, or in local media that could help us get approvals or build consumer excitement for development projects. One of our projects, Madrid Xanadu, opened in 2003. I got to make a few trips to Spain to work with a local public relations firm to make sure the press (there wasn’t much in the way of electronic media then) adequately covered our development milestones – regulatory approvals, groundbreaking, tenant signings, and so forth. One of the early milestones was obtaining the tract of land the mall would be built on. We had put a deposit on the land, about 20 miles outside the city in an area called Arroyomolinos, with a

 Each January humorist Dave Barry does a month-by-month recap of the previous year. The format has gotten a little stale, but he will have plenty of material for the edition covering 2020. It’s hard to put in words what a disaster 2020 has been. We’ll be telling our grandchildren about what it was like: The life-altering pandemic. The economic shutdown. Wildfires and hurricanes. The rise of white supremacists. Police shootings of unarmed black men recorded on bodycams. Protests and rioting. The unbridling of a toxic, intolerant, virulent and hate-filled culture. A highly polarizing president and other abominations. This year has a lot of similarities to 1968, another year of extreme turmoil (and a divisive presidential election) that I remember well as a twelve-year-old. In 1968 the Vietnam War was raging, and two iconic American figures were gunned down – Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who was about to become the Democratic presidential nominee. The war was