Mob Epiphany

 

It seemed like a good idea at the time.  Choosing Wednesday as blog day, I mean.  Middle of the week, a day fair and balanced, avoiding the tawdry extremes of a Saturday or a Monday, giving me the time to read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest some recyclable Weekend Something on a slow news day.  So naturally the Barbarians arrived at the gates a few hours after posting time on a Wednesday, the Day of Epiphany.  The show they put on was so grotesque, so violent, so unaccountably unopposed, indeed so appalling in every way that I probably could have nothing interesting or novel to say about it in any case, but certainly not after every scribbler and talking head in the land had had a six-day-and-twenty-hours head start.  Yet it is too big an event to pass over in silence, even if my only contribution is some reflection on the shared opinions of the scribblers and the talking heads—two of their widely shared opinions in particular:

 

            This was a coup or, at the very least,  an attempted coup.

            This is not America.           

 

            Calling this violent but inchoate melee a coup is an insult to lexicography that, if uncontested, threatens to besmirch the reputation of all acts of violent and illegal seizure of power.  Real coups always begin with the capture or effective disruption of some important center of power, communication, or transportation.  Readers of Joan Didion may remember the American lady in A Book of Common Prayer who hangs out in Boca Grande, an imaginary Central American banana republic with a political culture we ourselves, after several near misses, have at last achieved in actuality.  One day she rushes to the airport to fly to Miami and get away from the latest coup, leaving the sardonic narrator to point out that if the airport is still open, it’s not a coup.  At first glance it might seem that the Capitol is indeed an important center of power, but think about it a little.  If the Viking, or the guys with the Stars and Bars or the one with the “Camp Auschwitz” T-shirt, were serious about power,  they wouldn’t be vandalizing Nancy Pelosi’s office or being photographed in boorish postures in the swivel chair of the President of the Senate.  They would go after power.  They’d be out in Silicon Valley arresting Jack Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg.

 

            Read about the famous revolutions, coups, and putsches of history.  They all start with busting open prisons, capturing the post office, the telegraphy center, the telephone exchange.  Lenin, in one of history’s more unhappily consequential coups, seized the Smolny Female Seminary for the Education of Noble Ladies.  So it was perhaps fitting that among the first international expressions of Schadenfreude that came to my attention—including  solicitous inquiries from the Turkish Strong Man concerning the health of American democracy—was a sincere private communication from a friend in Paris.  He is an American ex-pat who teaches English at an institution very like Smolny, the  Maison d'éducation de la Légion d'honneur at Saint-Denis, one of the prestigious schools established by Napoleon for the female offspring of the copious numbers of dead heroes supplied by his endless military adventures.  How was my friend to explain all this to his highly intelligent girls in this elite institute, many of whom, despite a shared national default anti-Americanism often only skin deep, were actually secret admirers of our great nation with its punk rock and its fecund invention of emojees for text messages?  The poor best I could come up with was to point out that at least we didn’t kill any Carmelites.

 

            Yet what killing there was was more than enough.  Some unknown rioter killed a cop with a fire extinguisher.  A policeman shot a woman armed with wild conspiracy theories and an American flag.  These are hardly laughing matters, but some things are sad beyond tears, a thought that brings me to my second refutation: “This is not America.”

 

            Partly because of a demographic background that leaves me with Trump-supporting relatives and some partial understanding of the way they see things, and partly from weariness of long years spent in a  burgeoning illiberal academic monoculture, partly because I am a genuine democrat, and one well practiced in being  on losing sides, I was more disposed than many were four years ago to cut our new president some slack.  Though I could not vote for the man, I thought that, duly elected, he deserved the time and opportunity to show us a competence, or normal human empathy, or simple fidelity to some recognizable and consistent political principles of the sort that perhaps cannot shine through the fog of a chaotic and partisan election campaign.  But disillusionment came rapidly, and was repeatedly reinforced by the President’s improper,  boorish, or dangerous behavior, which has not stopped short of incitement to sedition.

The riot was a complex event animated by varied and incompatible motives, extending over several hours.  Despite the fact that only a minority of the huge crowd gathered before the Capitol actually attacked, vandalized, and looted it, one can understand the press’s reserve in  withholding their customary “mostly peaceful protest” label in the journalistic take that has already jelled.  No such violent action in history has been uncorrupted by the madness of the mob, though not a few have been retrospectively  sanitized in the history books by partisan or romantic sensibilities.  At this point no clear path to national moral rehabilitation is discernible, but we might start with some wise advice from Mark Twain.  “When in doubt tell the truth,” he says. “It will confound your enemies and astound your friends.”  I suppose it was inevitable such a shocking event would require some pious prevarication from our President-elect, many other political leaders, and a large choice of pundits and “influencers.”  We certainly got it.  This is not America, says Joe Biden.  We are better than this says Kevin McCarthy of the minority party.  This is not the only America, nor is it the essential America.   But it certainly is America.  Our much vaunted “diversity” extends to the ethical realm.   Our history of violence, including political violence is pretty appalling, from the French and Indian War to the latest drive-bys in Chicago.   We are better than this usually. The unpleasant but necessary task of the moment is not to seek refuge in the rhetoric of our aspirational best but to face with honesty the bitter truth of actual gross turpitude.  Cheap grace is no more efficacious in politics than in religion.  No cross, no crown.  There are three parts to penance, the first non-negotiable being genuine contrition, which requires real soul-searching, and the second confession, requiring truthful speaking.  One wonders whether our Vice President, whose toadyism endured so long and so heroically through four years of humiliations, could clearly hear the raucous chant of the flak-jacketed patriots echoing through the Capitol corridors: Hang Mike Pence!  Did there flicker through a sensibility so well versed in the Bible that awful question: What doth it profit a man to gain the whole world if he lose his own soul?  And to have made the bargain for a short-term lease on a house in the Naval Observatory!  Do Vice-Presidents read Shakespeare?  Or even Hilary Mantel?  “Had I but served my God with half the zeal I served my king, he would not in mine age have left me naked to mine enemies.”

 

            Meanwhile in my little locked-down Covid world it is once again Wednesday, and foolish consistency, the hobgoblin of my little mind, requires me to post this essay rather than to wait some hours to see whether the President is impeached.  Looking further ahead, I foresee missing the Inauguration next Wednesday in similar fashion.  But anyone seeking commentary on these subjects is unlikely to be in want.  I shall try to search out some eccentric topic more in the spirit of Gladly Lerne.