The personal rituals around New Years are important, and, for many of us, causes us to be a little more straight headed about things for a week or two, a little more tender and well-intentioned, a reset of our inner workings and attitudes. But most of our resolutions end up being generally banal and selfish. We flesh out reasons of vanity, committing every denial of the existence of this torridness supreme. So you want to eat healthier, be on Instagram less, read, exercise, and not just sleep, but dream, really dream these kaleidoscopic marvels of other simmering realities not yet manifested. So, instead of personal resolutions that fizzle out and get lost in the sandbox of enormous distances and desertions, meaningless little bulletpoints designed for you to cheat on, I will make a resolution list for the world, goals for us to agree on, to anticipate a self-made manifestation that there is more that we agree on than we don’t, that our divisions and tribalisms are mostly theater to pass the time.
I think there is great promise that 2024 is going to shape up to be a bastion of absurdity’s goriest and most pointless yet, that the comedy of what it doles out will outweigh everything else, that it will render on the side of slapstick, and we will emerge on the other side in unison, laughing ceremoniously, arm in arm, a bloodstained camaraderie like we’ve never had before that will hoist us into yet another year with even more promise for that one. Even if we just brush away New Year’s as an artificial passage of time, or as just another reason to take whippets with your homies, to take another round of hippie flips or candy flips or whatever combination of drugs it is that remind us we’re actually just in the midst of some enormous invisible tidal wave of love; regardless of any of that, New Year’s can make us momentarily pensive, to consider the movement and rapidity of our life, like we were just one little self-hating maggot who waddles around the rotting carcass of Time and only wants to be liked by others before they die. So let’s get started.
1. America can and will elect a real leader.
This is an election year. Well, it is formally I guess. It’s the year all three-hundred thirty million of us go down to our high school’s auditorium, write our guy’s name on a piece of paper, toss it onto the gargantuan heap with all the others, and light the thing on fire, and then we get to hoot and dance and gallop around the bonfire together, speaking in tongues, heaving through immolating fits of rage, screaming like witches, tying our torn loincloths into tribal bandanas, one band smearing a dab of turds at the center of their forehead, the other impressing just a nice thumbprint’s worth of unidentifiable goo there instead. 2024, we get to vote. And we will.
Election years are by far the best. And this year, the debates between Trump and Biden could be the most historic and funny yet. Even with Trump’s age, he doesn’t seem to have lost any of his insulting wit, his ghoulish cartoon villain demeanor that knows how to rile up an audience. But his sad diaper-senility does seem to have turned itself a little more over to anger than before. He writes in caps lock almost all the time now, his speeches are rattling spectacles of self-pity, even his hallmark hairstyle that was once a valiant predator’s frill has collapsed into a stringy and itchy hamster bed. In 2016, he had nothing to lose, and by some accounts he wasn’t even planning on winning, which made his approach to the contest of the debates better than all of the comedy shows. Presidential primaries are usually the best part—in 2016 there were seventeen Republican candidates, by far the funnest debates ever televised, including Jeb Bush, Scott Walker, Ted Cruz, Ben Carson, and my favorite, Mike Huckabee, all slowly realizing the new attitude of their performance required, taking new awkward turns at profanity—Marco Rubio saying on stage at a campaign rally that Trump had a small dick, Ben Carson asking a group of fifth graders to point to the worst student in the class, Rick Perry challenging Trump to a pull-up contest. So, this year probably isn’t going to be as fun because the candidates are all but secured, but it will historic nonetheless.
Although the current Republican presidential primary debates and campaign speeches that we do catch glimpses of are indeed quite entertaining. Ron DeSantis has proven himself to be professional slapstick—clacking around in high heels, his weird Jimmy Fallon castrated style of laughter. He shamed a little girl for the sugar content of the Icee she was drinking. But all-in-all, the debates and rallies of other candidates are a tertiary sideshow, and resolutely pointless. Because Donald Trump won’t participate in any of these debates, watching the rest of the candidates insult and sneer at one another, miming their best attempts to be as crass and bombastic as the Trumpian brand is, is all a bit depressing. And there’s no outlier to get excited about. Dr. Cornel West unfortunately isn’t going to garner the popular uprising that Bernie did in both of the last election cycles, so as much of a disappointment as that is, it may allow us to just let go and enjoy the show for what it’s worth. (That said, the personal investment that so many of us had in Bernie’s candidacy should be a lesson to us all, specifically in that the social and political change we seek cannot come from the top of government, it can only come from the grassroots level, in organizing and collecting real change from the ground up.)
It’s Trump-against-Biden that we are really anticipating. Their rallies, their debates, their doddering awkwardness. Biden will not know where he is. He’ll wander onto the stage, look around him in every direction, think Trump is his aide or his friend, shake his hand and smile his big white plastic smile. He’ll still be wearing his aviators, he’ll call Rachel Maddow ‘Jack’, and he’ll yell one of his famous bits about how poor kids are as smart as white kids, and then smile again as everyone claps.
It’s an election year, but of course, every year is an election year. The American presidential election never ends anymore; there is an infinite campaign, stretching through an infinite orbit, a dizzying nostalgia as it returns again and again, more grotesque and mutant than the election before. We’ll elect someone, we’ll invest ourselves personally. We’ll be reflections of the scabby, anemic shivering personification of our country up there on the stage, fortified behind their podium, talking about weapons and national security, talking about death and assassinations, and why he’s a proud American, why this act of war makes America the greatest nation on earth. Oh, and they’ll overemphasize and over-enunciate ‘Merry Christmas.’
This brings us to our next resolution.
2. War.
If 2023 taught us anything, it’s that war is not fought like it used to. Wars are not just fought and won, or fought and lost like a football match. They drag on for an eternity until they eventually whither away into an unresolved stalemate, when most of the civilian population has either been slaughtered or been wholly displaced from their homes and homeland, breeding another several generations of reactionary populations and politics. We should have learned this in Vietnam. We should have learned this in Iraq and Afghanistan. But instead, the wars in Ukraine and in Gaza are proving as depositories for our military budget to spend freely, giving out M1 Abrams tanks and JDAM missiles and Hydra 70s like Oprah giving out free Pontiacs. Everyone gets one, no one gets left out.
Here in the US, we can call each other perverts and argue over gender reveal parties turning into ambiguous announcements of who-identifies-as-what, while our government mails out 45,000 tank shells to Israel. Biden criticizes Netanyahu’s approach to killing Gazans—he thinks it should be done differently—but he just bypassed Congress a second time, sending Israel another $150 million in military aid.
Israel will most likely annex Gaza in its entirety, send the last few Gazans who managed to survive the calamitous ordeal to Egypt, and turn that last sprawling patch of blood-soaked rubble into a parking lot and shopping mall. And several generations of reactionary terror will hatch out of their nascent dwellings, and we’ll carry on into this entropic nightmare forever, until there’s nothing left to bomb except memories and the stories of their parents like they were ancestors.
2024 can be a year where we do war differently. We can commit not just to our involvement in the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, but everywhere. We can find some leader we don’t like in a country we’re vaguely familiar with, somewhere where five percent of Americans can identify on a map, and figure out a way to convince the rest of the world that they are evil-incarnate and a threat to civilization as we know it, and we must bomb their civilian population while we are trying to get this said leader. This is a new year for us, the possibilities are endless.
3. Read less. Watch more.
This, I think we can all agree on. For the last several years we’ve convinced ourselves that we’ve been reading the news by reciting headlines, and then more recently we’ve submitted that down further by reading memes. But we’re still reading. You’re somehow still reading this essay. You clearly need a therapist. If you can slouch there on your bed with your jaw slowly curling into a multilayered chin like a time-lapse of seasonal change, and still be reading some laborious self-indulgent thing about resolutions, then you need professional help. I’m not even a recognized writer. I’m an unlicensed contractor, I do slave labor for a living, I went to my first AA meeting the other day. Reading is not going to fulfill any need except quell some passé feeling of guilt that will be easily ironed out within a generation or two at most. So you may as well start now, if you’re brave enough.
The literary critic Harold Bloom said in an interview that a reason to read literature from authors like Shakespeare or Chaucer is that it gives you “cognitive power. That is to say, an increase in one’s own ability to think, and one’s own ability to talk on the basis of that thinking. And the next would be rhetorical power—the ability to understand better the uses of metaphor, which according to Aristotle was the special mark of genius in everyone of us. But beyond all that, a real capacity for apprehending Otherness, for on the one hand realizing that we are trapped inside our own mortality, and on the other that our only hope for getting beyond that trap of mortality is to have some real sense of other selves.” But, as you have noticed, I didn’t read that quote, I watched it. And Bloom came across as a severely depressed man towards the end of his life, so it didn’t really work out so well for him, did it? The world rushes by you as you read; and reading literature especially is too great of a realistic investment to ask of anyone, as even the speed of reading news headlines is rapid enough. It could take a month to read book, a couple months to read something as thick as a Dostoyevsky or Tolstoy novel, and honestly, what do you really get out of it in the end except to say that you read them. If you sludge through with a self-pitying patience and actually finish some grand thousand page epic like David Copperfield, do you really re-enter our world with a more Dickensian lens of seeing things, of an understanding and empathy towards the poor and towards the injustices of our world? Or do you just become annoying? Such a démodé bildungsroman story and its morals is that of thoughtless enmity for a readership, a pompous oversharing of how hard he had it—it is an autobiographical novel, after all—without any regard for how hard any of us have it today, in the here and now.
Bloom says elsewhere that universities are guilty of no longer teaching literature, but instead they teach ideology. He goes to great laborious lengths as to why it’s such a moral calamity why doctorates in the humanities graduate with honors at thousands of universities without having read any Shakespeare or Wordsworth or Chaucer or Proust, but they have read Zadie Smith or Maya Angelou, because that is who the universities are teaching now. Ideology is what it’s all about. They’re teaching a course on Taylor Swift at Stanford, and they’re doing it for obvious reasons—that’s where the tides of the cultural psyche are headed, and there’s no point wading through the slough of Shakespeare for the millionth time.
Resolutions are a collective effort. It takes a village. At the end of Song of Myself, Whitman says “I stop somewhere, waiting for you.” We have different abilities and strengths, but we encourage one another along, and make it through together. I believe in you. I believe in me.
Excellent read ! Spot on !!