History Ended Five Years Ago

T he president was shot in 1963. People still want to know what happened, and Donald Trump is promising to release the last government documents about that time. Why don’t we want to know what is far more shrouded in mystery: What happened to us in 2020?

Certain four-digit combinations that make up a year seem to stamp themselves on my mind. In my medieval studies, I contemplated 1115, the year the founder of the Cistercians, Bernard, founded a new religious house, Clairvaux Abbey. I spent time meditating on how the reforms of Cluny two centuries earlier had remade religious life for capable and spiritually ambitious men like Bernard.

Modern dates have been just as impressive. 1968! I thought I could touch something of the tumult of this year, when, a decade ago, I sat across from Pat Buchanan in his living room. He recalled to me his view from the Conrad Hilton Hotel in Chicago overlooking a raging sea of youthful dissent below. The phone rang. Nixon. “Buchanan what is happening there?” Then he pantomimed pushing the phone out of the hotel window. “All you could hear was ‘F*** you, Daley! F***, you Daley!’ . . . That’s what’s going on.” The tectonic plates of American politics shifted that fiery night.

History was my way into understanding man’s angelic and demonic impulses. I’ve read the romantic nationalists of 1848 and felt their patriotism surging in me. I’ve read the Austro-Hungarian liberals mourning the loss of their world before the Great War, and wept with them at the depredations of nationalists. I’ve seen the worst depravity of man holding the first-person photographs of my father-in-law’s father, who liberated Dachau in 1945.

For years, delving into my Irish roots, I tried to unravel the Easter Rising. It wasn’t just the bullet points. The Strange Death of Liberal England. The Covenant of Ulster. The Curragh Mutiny. No, I steeped myself in the fanatic heart of Patrick Pearse, singing to myself and my child the Irish-language marching songs he wrote. I cried reading the rebels’ pre-execution letters to spouses. But not just that. I also read and sympathized with the frustration of his historian colleague and comrade, Eoin MacNeil, who calculated and dreaded that his fellow nationalists were carried by emotion rather than strategic thinking. I felt as if I could feel myself into the heavy tweed jackets they wore, the smokey pubs in which they plotted. I could play each of them in a debate, and feel their hearts racing and their ears straining as the gunship Helga roared against rebel Dublin from the Liffey. My nerve endings somehow know 1916.

But now a doubt has crept over me: I lived through 2020, and I will never come close to understanding it. Obviously, I can come up with a series of facts to recite — about the shutdowns in industrial China, followed by what seemed like a medical enormity in Lombardy. I understand why people got scared. I understand why people wanted to join in some great common effort to hold back the wave of death. Five years later, the very people who misled us about the pandemic are starting to make embarrassing admissions. But this all still feels like a faked version of historical reckoning.

All the emotions are wrong, somehow. Where is the rage at years lost? Rage like that should translate into a burning desire for truth — for exacting inquiries. For justice — punishments falling down upon the enforcers of false expertise, the purveyors of junk science, and junk consensus. Or will it express itself in violence? Won’t it? Why is business at the Wuhan lab just carrying on as if none of it happened at all? Francis Collins goes around and plays guitar in public appearances, admitting only to myopia. We actually have the evidence of his participation in a conspiracy to lie to the public about key facts on Covid. Anthony Fauci is still kind of admired in some quarters, even when he admitted halfway through the pandemic that he just made stuff up on the fly.

There’s no real zeal even to find out whether these guys, you know, funded the research that led to the disaster. Which led to the learning loss. The suicides. The surge of deaths of despair. The impaired funerals. The missed weddings. The wrecked families. The economic fallout and worldwide inflation.

Are we afraid to look back? Maybe. I hate myself for how long I put up with the impairments inflicted on my family. I do not sympathize with or understand my reactions anymore. I sometimes feel a strange guilt, as if I should have made more room for rage in my heart and dipped my hand in blood. But whose? And to what end? I cannot think of the most simple alternate course that would have made sense at the time. Moving away from extended family was not the cure for over-isolation.

It’s fearful to consider how much of our law and Constitution just seemed to evaporate and how swiftly and completely it was replaced with the Absolute Sovereignty of Liberal Professional Class Conventional Thinking, however brain-dead or self-serving. The Sovereignty of Liberal Professional Class Conventional Thinking is why kids wore masks for a year after a vaccine was available to adults. And why schools had bizarre barriers on desks, and why it suddenly became okay to congregate outside so long as it was a Black Lives Matter riot and not something else protected by the First Amendment, like a Jewish funeral in Brooklyn. The Sovereignty of Liberal Professional Class Conventional Thinking is why I credit David Leonhardt for the end of the misery. Once his newsletter said we could relent, public health officials felt safe to allow it. God damn him. God bless him.

My inability to accept, or understand, 2020 puts a shadow on all history before it. If I cannot even know the year I lived through, how can the eleventh century or the Irish revolution, or the late 1960s be made into something legible and sensible — where each fact, even the most horrible ones, has some sensible relation to the facts before and after? One supposed symptom of long Covid was brain fog. But that’s not what we’re suffering from.

I’m worried that, for me, history ended in 2020. That the dark cloud that has crept into my thought since then is beginning to throw its shade on everything I thought I knew. After that year, only one thing makes sense. From Ecclesiastes: There is no remembrance of former things; neither shall there be any remembrance of things that are to come with those that shall come after.