Meet the new year, same as the old year.
It is no more than a habit of mind, this expectation that adding a number to the last digit of the date marks a big change. And seldom in recent decades has it felt more like a slightly mocking fiction.
Time isn’t what it used to be. It doesn’t seem to want to pass. The years melt into each other.
The word “variant”, that is supposed to be a synonym for different, actually means that we are stuck in a loop. TS Eliot’s East Coker has become mere realism: “In my beginning is my end… In my end is my beginning.”
Fintan O’Toole: 2021 – a year of miracles and disappointments in a new Age of Reason
Fintan O’Toole: Assange persecution is to scare off more inquiries into US secrets
Fintan O’Toole: Believers in a united Ireland without trade-offs are as bad as Brexiteers
Fintan O’Toole: If Eta can say sorry, why can’t Sinn Féin?
The history of our times is becoming a bit of a bore, a tale told, if not quite by an idiot, then at least by a raconteur whose anecdotes we have all heard a dozen times before.
The words that once had a ring of novelty about them now land with the dull thud of cliche. Like wearied children, we know our ABC picture book of pandemic vocabulary – antigen, asymptomatic, biohazard, community spread, contact tracing, Delta, lockdown, N95, Nphet, Omicron, PPE, PCR test, quarantine, R rate, social distancing, Verifly, Zoom – off by heart. Enough already.
It’s not just the pandemic, though. We already know what the other big global story of 2022 will be: the floods, the droughts, the wildfires, the storms, the once-in-a-century extreme weather events that are now becoming our annual apocalypse.
Politically, the undead roam the earth. Oh look, there's Berlusconi who wants to be president of Italy. Isn't that Donald Trump who wants to be president of the US? Could it be Macron versus Le Pen in April, so France can party like it's 2017 and it's deja vu all over again?
And we in Ireland are strapped to our seats, forced to watch yet again the most monotonous zombie movie of all time: Brexit. It was supposed to be, according to Boris Johnson’s election-winning slogan of whatever year that was, “done”.
Denis McShane coined the term Brexternity and it seems more and more apt. As with the pandemic, Brexit has spawned its own lexicon – protocol, Article 16 – of mind-numbing tedium. It is a merry-go-round without the merry.
Fresh hell
Brexit will continue to prompt the question: what fresh hell is this? And to provide its own answer: no fresh hell at all, just the old hell grown staler. Instead of going off like a rocket, Brexit has just gone off – and the signs are that many of those who voted for it are going off it too.
Domestically, of course, we can look forward to a dramatic twist more breathtaking than the Wizard of Oz (the wizard is a conman!) and The Sixth Sense (he’s been dead all along!) combined. The new taoiseach will be – curb your enthusiasm! – Leo!.. Varadkar!
In whatever year it was that the deal was made – 2020? 2019? 2021?, one of those anyway – Leo said that there will be “a kind of poetry” in him becoming taoiseach again on the 100th anniversary of the foundation of the State, December 15th, 2022.
Things have become so predictable, paradoxically, because humanity has ignored what was all too predictable
But what kind of poetry? The kind, I’m afraid, that goes “Ho hum, ho hum, ho hum, ho hum/ Ho hum, ho hum, no hum”.
The idea of a “rotating taoiseach” may have had its own sheen of novelty when it was first unveiled, but we have more than enough of rotation right now, of things coming around and around again and going nowhere.
It all feels like the opening of Samuel Beckett’s novel Murphy: “The sun shone, having no alternative, on nothing new.” Or like WB Yeats almost a century ago: “We are closed in, and the key is turned/ On our uncertainty.”
We might call this condition the revenge of predictability. Things have become so predictable, paradoxically, because humanity has ignored what was all too predictable.
Horribly surprising
If so many of the big things that are happening around us seem achingly overfamiliar, it is because they are horribly unsurprising. Our news is mostly a chronicle of things foretold.
From the very beginning of the pandemic, it was abundantly clear that it poses a global question to which there cannot be national or regional answers. The most important truth – nobody is safe until everybody is safe – is a cliche precisely because it is shop soiled with overuse and empty promise.
Brexit, too, is the same old story. All the things that were dismissed by the zealots as Project Fear are happening in reality
This is what we often do – we turn truths into truisms, so that they become what “everybody knows” and nobody has to think about. The obvious truth, that in a global pandemic, ever more transmissible variants will spread from populations that have not been vaccinated, has been stated, restated – and resolutely ignored.
We know that by June 2022, wealthy countries will have almost a billion doses of Covid vaccines more than they will actually be able to use. Yet, in low income countries, fewer than one in 20 people will have access to a vaccine.
And we know exactly what this will mean. No vaccine justice, no peace from the ever-evolving virus.
The same is true of climate change. What is happening is exactly what we were told would happen – told again and again, with increasing scientific certainty, for at least the last 30 years.
Brexit, too, is the same old story. All the things that were dismissed by the zealots as Project Fear are happening in reality. They are the inevitable consequences of choices that were made over the last six years.
Domestically, too, there is nothing new or vaguely surprising in the crises in the housing and health systems that are reshaping Irish politics. What did we think was going to happen if we stopped building houses after the great crash of 2008? What did we think a grossly inequitable health system with inadequate provision for vital services would look like? In both cases, exactly as things are now.
Exciting departure
What would be genuinely new in 2022 would be the ability to take the predictable things seriously enough to act on them. We need to stop thinking about threats as emanating from unknown forces and strange happenstance.
Just being able to deal with what we can see in front of our noses would be an exciting departure for humanity. We do not need great leaps of the imagination. The mere capacity to respond to what we already know for sure would be a giant step for mankind.
In Ireland, we say that dreary times and events would put years on you. If we are to take the burden of years off ourselves, we need to make 2022 one in which we make time pass by changing our numbing habit of pretending that all-too-familiar facts of life are somehow a mystery to us.