As Covid recedes into memory here in the United States, Shanghai — a city of some 26 million that is more like a small country — is under something very close to martial law. How fares the rest of the strongman world? The allegedly mighty Russian army is seeing its tanks towed off by laughing Ukrainian farmers while rodential expat oligarchs spend their days trying to hide their yachts from Fijian port inspectors. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia is stewing after his fiasco in Yemen and looking to buy his way back into the good graces of the United States. Kim Jong-un is banging his nuclear spoon on his highchair. Recep Tayyip Erdoğan turns out to be not the new Ataturk but the new Hugo Chávez — or, worse for him, the new Jimmy Carter.

And the United States? We have two jobs open for every job-seeker in the market, our shops are busy, and our restaurants are full. We are getting together over $7 coffees to complain about $5 gas. And we may even have done ourselves the great favor of learning from the dislocation and disruption of Covid to appreciate the blessings of normalcy, the little joys and pleasures of private life in a thriving commercial republic that is a lot happier than the cable-news hooters and talk-radio howlers would have you believe. We’re probably headed for a short recession as the Fed tries to remember how to wring inflation out of the economy, but we’ll probably get over that pretty quickly and go back to bitching about $3 gas over $7 coffees.

So, let’s send Xi Jinping a care package. We can afford it, and it would be very amusing to watch him try to figure out what to do about it.