Well, it’s over: For 2020, it’s finally and officially curtains. That giant mystical vaudeville hook in the sky quietly did its job, yanking our grungy, troublesome past year off the stage. On a related note, did you watch the televised Times Square ball-drop on New Year’s Eve? I did, which turned out to be a terrible mistake.

Okay, it was actually worse than that. It was downright soul-crushing. At the time, I thought I was a genius, using the moment to celebrate 2021’s arrival not on Mountain Standard Time, where we were at the moment, but on New York City time, which was two hours ahead. (I have some friends who regularly celebrate the New Year on Italian time, which rolls them into bed neatly at 9 p.m. or before. Spectacular!) “Let’s watch the ball drop in Times Square!” I cheerily suggested to my kids, a doe-eyed innocent unknowingly treading into a dark, dark wood. “It’s a national tradition! And then we can all go to bed! Hooray!”

If you watched the ball drop, you know what came next: tragicomic disillusionment. How can one describe what occurred in Times Square during those last desperate moments of 2020? My mind wanders to Philip Larkin, poet-laureate refusenik of England — being a persnickety and reclusive sort, he declined the honor — looking up at the moon in his haunting composition “Sad Steps”: “Lozenge of love! Medallion of art! / O wolves of memory! Immensements! No.”

No, indeed. There were no immensements in Times Square that night — only one Bill de Blasio, mayor of New York City, high king of tone-deaf incompetence, a Marie Antoinette for our time, grandly dancing center stage with his wife at a wildly expensive event that almost every other New Yorker was banned from attending. He was flanked only by a few clusters of Potemkin revelers in roped-off corrals, most of them wearing terribly awkward and over-the-top Planet Fitness–sponsored headgear. Even the event’s television hosts, impervious this time not just to subtlety and pain but to the disconcerting fact that at least one of them was dressed like the deranged Caesar Flickerman in The Hunger Games, seemed a bit depressed.

Oh, and right before all of that, just to add insult to injury, there was a nails-on-the-chalkboard rendition of “Imagine,” which might be the worst song written since the Chipmunk Christmas carol. In short, the whole event was cringeworthy and banal and a strangely perfect end to a ramshackle year.

To be fair, we all know 2020 wasn’t the worst year in the planet’s history. As a headline at the satirical Babylon Bee recently put it, 2020 was “Rated Worst Year Ever, Provided You Never Lived at Any Other Time in History.” Rather than facing down war or famine or even the average day of a peasant in the Middle Ages, the Bee noted, “most of the respondents who called 2020 the worst year also enjoyed delicious food being delivered to them for 8 months while they sat on their couches with the air conditioning on and binge-watched shows the whole time.”

I can neither endorse nor reject these sentiments. What I can do is hesitantly suggest one upside of 2020: For those of us suspicious of government power, the past year delivered object lessons in spades.

Forget Bill de Blasio, clueless dancing machine: He’s just the tip of the iceberg. Over the course of 2020, countless proverbial masks worn by supposedly benign, altruistic public servants were summarily ripped off all over the country.

Who can forget the insufferable governor of California, Gavin Newsom — he who through relentless lockdowns, shutdowns, regulations, and sanctimony has pretty much convinced half of his state to move to Texas next week — getting caught red-handed at a supposedly forbidden-for-all indoor dinner party at the ultra-fancy restaurant The French Laundry? How about the Chicago Teachers Union lackey who pushed for walkouts in the name of “safety” while she vacationed poolside in Puerto Rico?

My personal favorite, however, has to be Steve Adler, the Democratic mayor of Austin, Texas. If you are not familiar with Mr. Adler, consider him a sort of bizarro version of Gavin Newsom: While politicians like Newsom push countless Californians into the warm, freedom-loving arms of Texas, Mayor Adler seems bent on ruining Austin before they arrive.

In early November, as COVID-19 cases flared, Adler made national headlines after releasing a short video warning Austinites to “stay home if you can” and declaring that “we may have to close things down if we are not careful.” Further, he intoned, “this is not the time to relax.” What he did not mention was that when he made this somber film, he was down in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, vacationing with a group of friends. Now, I have been to Cabo San Lucas only once, but I can tell you that it is (a) not careful and (b) definitely a place to relax. In fact, one of Cabo’s most notable venues is a beachside restaurant called “The Office” where the prime attraction is a guy wandering around offering tequila shots out of a gigantic sombrero, which is likely not COVID-compliant.

Well, details, details. Rules are for the rest of us, am I right? Don’t worry, though: There are still a few politicians who occasionally get the joke. Florida governor Ron DeSantis, for instance, recently warmed my heart with his response to questions about the COVID vaccine: “I’m willing to take it, but I am not the priority. . . . Granted, I’m an elected official, but whoop-de-do.”

After all we’ve seen over the past year, let’s hope that attitude is contagious.