The end of a year is often a time of reflection and retrospection. January, the first calendar month, gets its name from Janus, a two-faced god of Roman myth, one of whose aspects looks forward and the other of which looks back. But as January 1, 2023, has not yet come, it seems meet to look back.
Doing so as someone whose livelihood somewhat chains him to the news cycle can be bewildering. Even though 2022 doesn’t fully measure up to its two immediate predecessors in terms of pure chaos, it still contained plenty of craziness. To think of all that happened this year is to feel like the astronaut David Bowman at the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey, as he enters the monolith’s stargate and wordlessly watches as lights and colors hurtle past him. Some of the year’s events, to be sure, are easier to recall than others; their implications are with us still. In this country, the overturning of Roe v. Wade in the Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson decision in June (leaked in May) continues to affect politics and culture, in ways we do not yet fully understand and are unlikely to soon. Abroad, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, a horror begun in February, continues to command attention; it is, obviously, ongoing.
But some other events happened this year that we have perhaps already forgotten about. Just before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, China hosted the 2022 Winter Olympic Games, even though it shouldn’t have. They were a shambolic spectacle: reliant on fake snow, held in a city that often wasn’t even that cold and often in the midst of apparently dystopian urban environments, and consistently hamstrung by the same sort of authoritarian Covid protocols that the Chinese Communist Party has uniquely mastered. And yet, somehow, Covid-19 lingers there, the land of its origin. Imagine that!
You didn’t have to go that far to find further examples of Covid authoritarianism. Also in February, Canada, our typically boring neighbor up north, provided a tyrannical spectacle on the North American continent. In response to protests led by truckers against vaccine mandates and economic restrictions, the government of Justin Trudeau behaved in a fashion more befitting Fidel Castro than Trudeau’s father Pierre (also a prime minister). Protesters were not merely cleared out of Ottawa streets, but also targeted by an “emergency” law for the decidedly nonemergency aim of cutting them off from the financial system itself.
More pathetically, in this country, governments in some major municipalities, including Washington, D.C., implemented a vaccine-passport system, whereby entry to certain establishments was contingent on proof of Covid vaccination. In D.C., the policy, unevenly enforced, ended up lasting only a few weeks, its ephemerality making the memory of it even more bizarre. Likewise, on the disease front, the memory of monkeypox — excuse me, “mPox” — now seems blissfully evanescent. This, despite the fact that the early-on failures of the public-health establishment to privilege medical objectives over political sensitivities arising from the primary demographic of the afflicted did have the makings of yet another catastrophe.
Other stories from this year have more to say about the media itself than about what they covered. The slapping of Chris Rock by Will Smith at this year’s Academy Awards ceremony (honoring last year’s films), after the former mocked the latter’s wife, occasioned a seemingly unending stream of takes. Was Will Smith in the wrong? Was Chris Rock’s joke funny? Will the Academy Awards ever be the same? The altercation was analyzed from every possible angle — and yet I bet this is the first time you’ve even thought about it since then. Often, things that seem, in the moment, of the highest importance, that make themselves the center of attention, drift so quickly into irrelevance that it can strike us as ridiculous that we ever cared about them in the first place. Maybe we shouldn’t have.
The idea that we should, and would enjoy doing so, was the premise behind the one-month life of CNN+. In case you wanted more news than CNN could give you, and would pay more for it, CNN+ would be there to give it to you. Well, until it wasn’t. Because it turns out that, despite what McKinsey told CNN brass, nobody actually wanted this. And so CNN+ shut down, mere weeks after beginning.
This recounting is not meant to be exhaustive; only Dave Barry can do that kind of thing. But it is meant to be suggestive. Of what? That, amid the hurly-burly of the news cycle, it is worth keeping in mind that what matters in the moment may not end up being what really matters in the end. And that, often, only the passage of time can separate the two — which makes it necessary for those of us who participate in the media world and those of us who partake of it to pay attention. But it doesn’t mean we have to get carried away. Something to keep in mind next year, as this one comes to a close, whichever way you end up facing during the year to come.