We’re Just Going To Keep Doing 2020 Again Until All The Wrong Stuff Is True

In a bunch of ways, there is no real percentage in remembering what things were actually like during the worst years of the COVID-19 pandemic. Beyond all the uncertainty and suffering and death, there is just not a lot to hang your hat on. It was, in the manner of every single thing befouled by Donald Trump’s sticky palm prints, very manifestly going to be made worse and more damaging for all that nasty attention, and was in fact made much worse and more damaging for it. From one moment to the next, it was brutally or just banally bad, the latest and worst in a long line of collective national traumas that was fractured, in classic American fashion, into a wilderness of atomized and alienated and terribly isolated instances of individuated suffering.

It was also, in every moment, just so obviously and crushingly a colossal and humiliating waste. There is, for those who have made it to the other side of it, the blank satisfaction of having done so, and memories of some hopeful and uncertain eruptions of solidarity during it and the tentative return to everyday life in the long and unfinished after. But for those who remember what it was actually like and how it actually went, about all you’ve got is that alongside a great deal of sadness over the lives lost and the brighter possibilities that have gone so determinedly unrealized in their wake. You don’t need me to tell you that it sucked, and that the damage it has done to our culture and politics is grievous and ongoing. It is in every way the sort of experience you would be anxious to see shrinking away in the rearview mirror, and then ideally not see at all.

There is a less mournful and more active way to think and feel and be about all this, as it happens. It is demeaning, stupid, and wrong, but also impressively modular. Where actually remembering what this particular bit of extremely recent history is an endlessly revolving locked groove of recrimination and grief, the Choose Your Own Adventure approach favored by a large and growing segment of the American populace—and the current leadership of the federal government’s public health agencies, and virtually all national Republican elected officials, and an exhaustingly heterodox tranche of media types—is positively sprawling. What this approach lacks in coherence it more than makes up for in options. In place of what actually happened can be more or less whatever you want, or just want to be upset about. The familiar and dispiriting and already plenty infuriating herky-jerk realities of public health policy conceived and executed under pressure is replaced not with one singular sprawling conspiracy but an endless algorithmic scroll of Intriguing Questions.