Goodbye to 2024, America's Craziest Year

A decades-long mission to fill a spiritual void with politics finally collapsed this year. Will America finally get a life?

Clockwise from top left: Hurricane Milton from space, invading cicadas, earth’s “reversing” core, the late great Hannibal Lecter, Crowdstrike panic, an April eclipse

From the Washington Post editorial board’s year-end letter this morning:

Millions of Americans have stopped following the news, many because they’re so certain it will be bad news that they’re tuning out. They’re missing out. It’s easy to lose sight of the reality that it’s never been a better time to be alive. The poorest Americans have access to better medical care than the richest royals did a century ago…

How different will the world look on Jan. 1, 2050? Or 2075? Or 2100? A new guard of leaders will emerge at home. But Russia will also almost certainly be without Mr. Putin, now 72. Will what follows be better for the Russian people and for global stability? We hope so, but no one can say for sure. Rather than assume the worst, let’s resolve to do everything we can to help engineer the best possible outcome for the world.

Yes, people have begun tuning out the news, but they shouldn’t, because an American homeless person can walk into any emergency room and get better care than Frederick the Great. Also, Vladimir Putin probably won’t live to 148, and while we can’t be sure what follows him will be good, we can certainly plan for the best.

A million years ago, when I edited a joke newspaper called the eXile, I was responsible for the house editorial. The running gag was no matter what we argued, the essay’s last line had to be, “One thing’s for sure: time will tell.” We were spoofing the format of the old “objective” era’s editorial pronouncements, which boomed stentorian gibberish before dismounting to versions of Who the fuck knows, but something something. Seeing the Post return to that old saw today brought a tear to the eye.

When historians look back on 2024 they’ll doubtless have a lot to say about this year’s furious partisan divide, but this was really the year in which a national spiritual crisis broke into the open. It was the year in which loony religious crazes that paralyzed educated America for a decade were finally undone by failure and doubt: