2020 finally ends
In the spirit of almanacs, I tried to think about 2020 things that were somehow iconic or illustrative of the year: Bernie’s much-memed plea for donations, Nancy Pelosi malfunctioning mid-interview, the lurid bombast of the RNC, Australia on fire, California on fire, the Amazon on fire, street-flooding BLM protests, Herman Cain tweeting from the grave, the 30-year-old man whose last words before dying of Covid-19 were “I thought this was a hoax, but it’s not.” But one soundbite from the spring, when I was stuck inside my Brooklyn apartment listening to ambulance sirens all day, keeps coming to mind.
“And then I said, supposing you brought the light inside the body, which you can do either through the skin or in some other way” is one of many things the President said in a late-April press conference while Dr. Deborah Birx, the Coronavirus Response Coordinator for the White House, sat staring at her feet. The press conference was a spiritual sequel to Trump’s 2017 announcement of the return of the National Space Counsel (“At some point in the future, we’ll look back and say, ‘How did we do it without space?’”), with former astronaut Buzz Aldrin as the bewildered bystander instead of Birx.
Aldrin and Birx, of course, were swiftly turned into Today We Are All [Insert Name Here] reaction videos, a genre of meme that seemed to thrive under an administration that was, above all else, deeply stupid. For all the grim soothsaying of people like David Frum (a former speechwriter for our last deeply stupid president, George W. Bush) and all the self-described bravery of the “Resistance,” I found that the best way of trying to make sense of things was just to watch my own feelings of disbelief slowly spread across other people’s faces. In 2020, Today We Were All Jonathan Swan, Chris Wallace, and Lesley Stahl—journalists who, faced with ever-weirder Trumpisms, seemed less like intrepid reporters than babysitters out of their depth.
So much of the President’s schtick is borrowed from the American tradition of televangelism, and “Supposing you brought the light inside the body” is some combination of Billy Graham, Jim Jones, and your grandma who thinks climate change isn’t real because it’s snowing outside. Aside from maybe Bong Joon Ho’s Oscar acceptance speech way, way back in February—“I will drink until next morning, thank you”—I can’t think of another quote that sums up the nihilism of 2020 quite as well. It’s a slogan for a year adrift from reality, an odd and accidental distillation of the same spirit behind Trump’s more feral campaign-trail chants: Lock Her Up! and Build The Wall! and Stop The Count! are all part of the same quest to insist loudly enough on his own dim worldview that it becomes the world. And sometimes it seems to have worked: in the days after the press conference, poison control centers around the country reported a spike in calls about exposure to disinfectants.
Perhaps the polar opposite of such chants was another sort of slogan of the year, though people have been saying it for years. Despite all the corporate co-option and millennial-pink Instagram posts, Black Lives Matter is an insistence on something that is accepted in theory (for some, not even that) but, in all kinds of situations and settings, disregarded in practice. Black Lives Matter is a reminder of the gulf between how we say the world is and how we live in it; part of why it’s radical is that it has to be said in the first place. All the Trump stuff, on the other hand, insists that there’s no such gap, that by bending the world to our own notions we can vindicate ourselves without ever having to change.
ben tapeworm