¡Startling!

2025 began, as predicted, with calamity. A terrorist attack in New Orleans had the effect of punctuating the beginning of the year with one of those upside-down exclamation marks used in Spanish to denote the start of something startling. And now, the startling has begun.

I began the year in my own somewhat startling fashion, telling Anderson Cooper and Andy Cohen, live on television, that following my appearance on their show I planned on returning to my hotel room to “rub one out,” which caused my Have I Got News For You co-stars to blanch with embarrassment. If you’ve never seen Black people blanch, I recommend it. (And, for the record, following the program, while I did return to my hotel room, I did NOT enjoy the pleasure of my own company.)

Best caption ever: “Michael Ian Black revealed his New Year’s Eve plan.” Look at Amber’s face.

Another startling moment occurred when I spoke to my family later in the evening. As is our habit, we regularly FaceTime each other when communicating and so it was with some small shock that a very pretty young woman answered my daughter’s phone when I called. Turns out the young woman was my daughter, who is 21, and was fully made-up for a night on the town with her friends.

Although I’ve seen photos on her Instagram of her fully dolled-up, it was my first time witnessing it live, and I got a little emotional just because I could see – for the first time – the woman emerging from the girl I’ve always known. She greeted me by saying that her friends didn’t understand my “rub one out” joke, and could I please explain it to them?

(Of course, they all understood the joke. She was trying to embarrass me, and it worked.)

I expect 2025 will unfurl in exactly this manner, moments of horrendous cruelty endured with lots and lots of humor. We’re in it now, boys, and while the shit show has been burbling along in all of its sulfuric glory for years without any of electoral legitimacy, electoral legitimacy has been granted to the shit show nonetheless. Expect the stench to grow worse.

Rather than thinking of the new administration as an aberration, I’m choosing to look it as the natural outgrowth of a world in transition, a kind of species-wide puberty we all seem to have hit at the same time.

Consider the outlandish rate of change the world has experienced over the last hundred years or so. Change that is only accelerating. Our collective body is undergoing profound transformation and, like a kid who knows they’re experiencing metamorphosis but doesn’t understand why, we’re trying to reconcile the person we thought we were with the person we are struggling to become.

One way to deal with change is to resist. That’s what we’re seeing in countries around the world. People are meeting change with obstinance. The illiberal movements we see springing up everywhere are the result. Well, good luck with all that. Your outstretched palm won’t do much to beat back the wind. That planet is changing. I don’t just mean climatologically, I mean that the human species is the early stages of examining some fundamental questions about what it even means to be human.

Consider AI, which will soon be able to perform nearly all tasks better than us, and to do so in ways that the human brain doesn’t even understand. We have created machines that are our betters, which would put any moderately-intelligent species into a bit of a funk, no?

The whole of science, which has been our lodestar since the Enlightenment, has become so specialized and complex that, at times, it borders on the theological. Ironic then, that it was the rule of priests and those who whispered to the gods that the Enlightenment set out to overthrow. Yet here we are, back at the edges of understanding and looking to aliens and gods for our redemption. We dismiss the extraordinary at our peril, yet we are stuck with a rigid worldview that rejects the extraordinary out of hand when it does not fit the model.

We are living in an age of paradox. How could it be otherwise when we elect a felon to uphold the laws of our nation? The impossible no longer feels impossible. In fact, the impossible now feels probable. How do we walk into a new year with such uncertainty about where to place our feet?

The world is starting to resemble a Mandelbrot set, a mathematical construct of increasing complex fractals, and which is used – among other things - to study disorder. Well, we’ve got disorder a-plenty, haven’t we? And yet, I can’t help but think there’s some underlying organization at play that we haven’t yet figured out. To paraphrase Bob Dylan, who I wrote about here, something’s happening and neither you, nor I, nor Mr. Jones have any clue what the fuck it is.

A Mandelbrot set: you are here.

No wonder that people are digging in their heels and screaming, “No more!” But it’s about as useful as complaining about the song on the radio as your truck heads towards cliff edge. We are along for the ride, all of us, whether to wish to be or not, and we can either figure out a way to steer this thing or drive straight into the abyss.

Well, America has decided it would rather keep changing stations until we find something we like, unaware that the problems we face have little to do with any of our various entertainments. In fact, I would argue that it’s the entertainments themselves that keep us from dealing with the problems. After all, why look too deeply at ourselves when a circus clown is juggling chainsaws.

2025 has begun, as predicted, with calamity. The massacre in New Orleans won’t be the last. There will be more of the same, no doubt, here and abroad. Tragic as they are, these catastrophes will be insignificant compared to those unleashed on the population by a corrupt and malevolent coterie of robber barons set to, again, reside in the White House as occupiers. We are startled, yes, but not surprised. The upside-down exclamation mark tells us that something extraordinary is about to begin. But it gives no hint as to when it might end.