The Daily Cartoon and Live Briefing: Thursday, January 2, 2025

Notably: In the final weeks of a year cartoonists who contribute to the two syndicates I use for the Daily Briefing produce those inevitable drawings of the old man as the dying year and the little baby as the new, of the old man as worn and grizzled and glad to be going, of the baby as innocence and pinkness, of the old year as a horror and the new one as the hapless rookie, of the old year as what we’re all happy to be rid of, as if the new would be any different. Those same cartoons have been reappearing in one variation or another for as long as I can remember. But was 1977 or 1957 better? And better for who? Golden ageism is tiresome. This “propensity of mankind to exalt the past, and to depreciate the present,” in Gibbon’s words (“that enormous stratum of the middle class that is distinguished by its ability to recall better times,” in John Cheever’s words), also relies on a propensity to make mush (myth would be too lofty) of history. Isn’t the entirety of the maga mystique built on recovering better days? Solzhenitsyn was the first maga type, make Russia great again. To him, the Tsars were the great ones. Imagine that. He even called their era “golden days” in his Gulag Archipelago. It gets even worse when the Tipper Gores and Bill Bennetts and Dan Quayles of the world (remember that potato head?) start talking about the decline of the family, as if child abuse, wife beating and child abandonment were inventiones of the countercultural 1960s. There’s terrific irony in golden ageism. Voltaire bitched about his own century for 50 years. He wrote as if France peaked under Louis XIV the previous century, and here we are, our own American system built on the rays of the Enlightenment, though who would trade a single iPhone app for life in 1750 Paris (which even Voltaire had escaped: he was in exile from Paris from 1734, when he was last threatened with prison over his English Letters, which extolled England and the 17th century of John Locke, until his triumphant return as a cancerous walking dead in February 1778, a trip that took his life by the end of May, after his literal coronation with laurels on a stage with none other than Benjamin Franklin.)  In 1816 William Bentley, the American Unitarian minister and journalist (he was what today is called a columnist, or a blogger) was complaining of how newspapers had devolved into pure entertainment, anticipating the complaints about the vast wasteland of television, and the vaster wasteland of the internet. Now those newspapers are fodder for doctoral theses, the way Twitter–or X–content will be in a few years, if it isn;t already at New College. But Frank Kafka was not wrong when he referred in one of his incomprehensible stories to “the gruesomeness of the living present.” This seer must have foreseen the 2024 election. You can’t dress that one up. It really was gruesome in so many ways, with Democrats helping too. So there’s good reason to bid this year farewell, but not as heartwarming a reason to look at the year ahead and think: hmmm. We won’t have to drink as much. To say happy new year may be too much, too glibly blind, though of course I wouldn’t wish anything less on you or me. But there is some kind of wonder about it–that we’re here, that It’s Still a Wonder Just Being Here, to quote the title of my friend Paige Dalporto’s poetry collection from 1990s West Virginia, and really, that’s not a small thing. Not just on December 31, which puts a deceptive accent on things, but all 365 days. No starting point, and let that end point remain the unalterable mystery it usually is. 

—P.T.

 

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If the cosmic calendar is in fact all of time, most of which has not yet occurred, in another two months any number of things could have happened to the cool marble of earth and none of them promising from a life point of view – a wandering star could throw the whole solar system out and earth with it, a meteor strike could cause mass extinction, the earth’s axial tilt could increase, the flexing and drifting of orbits could eventually eject some planets, and in all events it’ll be in roughly another four months, five billion years, that the sun will run out of fuel, expand to a red dwarf and consume Mercury and Venus. Earth, if it survives, will be scorched and arid, its oceans boiled dry, a cinder stuck in an interminable orbit of a white dwarf black dwarf dying sun until the whole show ends as the orbit decays and the sun eats us up. And this is just the local scene; a minor scuffle, a mini-drama. We’re caught in a universe of collision and drift, the long slow ripples of the first Big Bang as the cosmos breaks apart; the closest galaxies smash together, then those that are left scatter and flee one another until each is alone and there’s only space, an expansion expanding into itself, an emptiness birthing itself, and in the cosmic calendar as it would exist then, all humans ever did and were will be a brief light that flickers on and off again one single day in the middle of the year, remembered by nothing. We exist now in a fleeting bloom of life and knowing, one finger-snap of frantic being, and this is it. This summery burst of life is more bomb than bud. These fecund times are moving fast.

—From Samantha Harvey’s Orbital (2023). 

The Cartoon and Live Briefing Archive.