FAREWELL TO 2021, 2020’S DULL HANGOVER:

Joe Biden, meanwhile, spent much of 2021 slipping on banana peels and trying to pass it off as rhythmic gymnastics. Spring brought gas lines and inflation and crime, the 1970s without the gnarly sideburns. Hot Vax Summer was canceled as the delta variant made itself comfortable. The troops finally left Afghanistan, yes, but not before the Taliban had occupied Kabul, driving home just how little progress we’d made in that country. Pressed for answers, Biden’s Democrats seemed unable to do anything except spend money, and even then their Build Back Better package ended up in the Senate’s legislative graveyard.

2021, then, really was like the 1970s, in that it felt like a collective hangover, like we were too ensnared in entropy and sclerosis to solve our own problems, or even grasp what the solutions should be. We couldn’t beat Covid with masks; we couldn’t whip inflation with government dollars (huh?); we couldn’t remake Afghanistan into a Madisonian democracy; we couldn’t even keep Kim and Kanye together for the love of God. Zoom in the lens and you saw more quarantines, more canceled plans, a collective sick-day sigh as we sprawled back on the couch and flipped on episode 724 of the 42nd season of Friends — again.

That isn’t to say 2021 was all bad, of course. We managed to annoy the French, which is always great fun. The judiciary held up well: our juries put away some bad guys and acquitted some not-so-bad ones, while the Supreme Court looks poised to strike down the most heinous legal precedent of the 20th century. And it’s worth emphasizing that the worst many of us had to endure this year was another socially distanced brunch. I don’t mean to downplay the very real grief of this pandemic, but the Black Death this is not, and we should be grateful for that.

Marking a bad year should always be a comparative exercise, and so it is that we turn to the historians, who say the worst year in human history was not 2020 but 536 AD. That was when the world literally went dark thanks to a mysterious fog that researchers now attribute to a volcanic eruption in Iceland. This caused temperatures to drop, which caused crops to die, which caused mass famines.

I blame the lack of federal emission standards on sixth century SUVs.