While Dickens penned these words to describe Paris and London leading up to the chaos of the French Revolution, he might as well have been describing the world in 2020: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.” The year of our Lord 2020 almost feels like the wrath of an Old Testament God hell-bent on exacting his retribution on us for utterly obliterating the planet and allowing a host of individuals, ranging from criminally insane buffoons to morally bankrupt draconian bullies, to dominate global politics. God, it seems, is beaucoup pissed. And I don’t blame Him. As such, He’s gone medieval on our asses. No, He’s gone apocalyptical. We’ve been ravaged by the greatest plague since the Dark Ages, our economies are teetering on the brink of irrecoverable collapse, there are rampaging forest fires and stampeding hurricanes simultaneously decimating large parts of the United States, and the world has never been more ethically divided over race issues. At the same time, thanks to TikTok and social media in general, never have human beings been more collectively vapid, self-obsessed and inane. Indeed, I would not be surprised if TikTok was created as a kind of cerebral superweapon/digital opiate by the Chinese government, with the objective of radically diminishing the IQ of the average user to make Generation Z more docile, servile and totally oblivious to the dystopian realities unfolding around them. I mean, who cares if Rome is burning if you can “Yaaasss queen!” with your #squad as you gyrate your posteriors to that diabolical Siren song?
For personal reasons, I thought that nothing could be worse than 2019, a year that was relentlessly onerous and that finished December off with the coup de grâce to my testicles that was
