Don't Make Me Revisit 2024

It landed us in Pandemonium. Next year lets try figuring out an escape route.

John Martin, Pandemonium, 1841.

Did you know that the great blind bard John Milton coined the word “Pandemonium”? In Paradise Lost it’s the palace Satan builds after he’s cast out of heaven. The word derives from the Greek “pan” and “daimonium,” and means, literally, “all demons.” Milton makes it sound like Trump Tower, or perhaps the White House next year after Melania completes her second refurbishment, “the Gates/ And Porches wide, but chief the spacious Hall” where

High on a Throne of Royal State, which far
Outshon the wealth of Ormus and of Ind
Or where the gorgeous East with richest hand
Showrs on her Kings Barbaric Pearl and Gold,
Satan exalted sat.

If you have trouble picturing Pandemonium, consult the painting above, which I noticed for the first time on a trip earlier this month to the Louvre. (I must have been more receptive to images of hell than on earlier visits.) John Martin was an English Romantic painter whose older brother Jonathan, an excitable Wesleyan minister, set fire to an Anglican cathedral in York; the trial found him guilty but spared him the death penalty on grounds of insanity and sent him to Bedlam instead. John painted this scene a dozen years later.

On that same trip to Paris I was lucky enough to attend the first Mass open to the general public at Notre Dame cathedral. No, I’m not Catholic, but my forebears were Portuguese crypto-Jews so I’m hardly the first Noah to fake my way through a Mass. The cathedral’s restoration five years after its own horrific fire was pretty much the only good thing that happened in 2024.

But wait, you say. The Washington Post edit page has a list of 24 good things that happened in 2024. It’s pretty lame. I don’t care that pandas are back in Washington, I don’t care about sports (therefore don’t care about the popularity of women’s sports or the Paris Olympics or the Washington Commanders stirring back to life), and though I’m gratified that Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich was sprung from a Russian jail cell it’s outrageous he was imprisoned in the first place. It’s good that Assad’s regime fell in Syria—unless the successor regime turns out to be worse, in which case it’s bad. Ask me next year.

The Post wouldn’t have run this feature were it less obvious that 2024 was a dead loss. Even the movies were lousy. It was a stinker year especially for the Post itself, with one-third of the Post editorial board resigning after it declined to issue a presidential endorsement and the departures of editor Sally Buzbee, managing editor Matea Gold, and various star reporters including, most recently, Ashley Parker and Michael Scherer.

My latest piece in The New Republic explains why nobody wants to review this past year, least of all me. You can read it here. Next year lets figure how to negotiate an escape from the Pandemonium that 2024 landed us in.