A convert from the riot at the Capitol
There never was a more appropriate punishment for a firsttime offender than the one I was told a judge gave to the initial Jan. 6 Capitol rioter sentenced for her crimes.
The way I heard it, apparently rehabilitated former boogalooer Anna Morgan Lloyd, a 49-yearold grandmother from rural Indiana, was told by a judge to repent for her sins — hanging with the mob trying to overturn an election — by reading “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee” and the volume “Schindler’s List” was based on, and then writing book reports on these seminal stories of genocide.
What a great summer reading list for a White supremacist so loyal to Donald Trump that she was one of the first storm troopers to enter the nation’s seat of government in an attempt to reverse the election results!
“Best day ever,” the sweet old granny had posted on Facebook the day after the attempted insurrection.
Imagine how her mind was opened, I was thinking, when she read Dee Brown’s 1970 history of the way Native Americans were massacred in the 19th-century Wild West, or Thomas Keneally’s tale of a German industrialist saving a thousand Polish Jews from the Holocaust.
Turns out I heard the story wrong. Lloyd did get schooled on how lousy the genocide of an entire people was, and the foolishness of fealty to an autocratic leader entirely uncommitted to democracy once he got elected.
But it was her very smart lawyer, Heather Shaner, who, presentencing, got her client to get right with God by trying to impress the judge about her post-insurrection activities.
While Lloyd says she did indeed read “Wounded Knee,” about which, so far as I can tell, her only response was to claim to be “part Native American,” she watched the film version of “Schindler” and saw “Burning Tulsa” on the History Channel.
And she did write a review of the Spielberg film: “This movie was very moving. Hard to watch and hard to not watch. It’s hard to believe there are people who say this never happened. One of my Sons-in-Law is 1⁄2 German. His mother was born in Germany and has never became an American Citizen. My Son-InLaw doesn’t believe the Holocaust happened as it did. He says ‘Only’ a million Jews died. One person being killed because of their faith is too many!”
Talk about your healing power of art. Wonder how the Nazi apologist son-in-law is taking being thrown under the bus in the name of Momma Anna avoiding the big house?
After hearing about her deathbed conversion, Judge Royce C. Lamberth actually sentenced Lloyd to three years’ probation and a $500 fine. Plus having to hear his lecture about how Republican electeds who say Lloyd and her fellow thugs were “tourists” in the Capitol are spewing “utter nonsense.”
Of course the judge was right not to give Lloyd hard time.
Clearly he believes in the proper George Gascón theory about incarceration: Why put a reformable person in a giant school for scoundrels, where she would surely be jumped into the Aryan Sisterhood?
Instead of breaking rocks in the hot sun, Lloyd is now free to do that all-American thing: improve herself through literature. Here are her indelible thoughts on Bryan Stephens’ 2014 “Just Mercy,” about helping free wrongly convicted African American men on death row in Southern states: “Reading this book makes me reconsider my view on the death penalty. It was far too easy for the people to convict a man of a crime that he could not have committed. How many more Walters are on death row. It would be better if a hundred men guilty of murder spend their natural life in prison than one innocent man die.”
Amen, sister!