How long will Jan. 6 live in infamy?
Jan. 6 is at the center of a Venn diagram that includes crime, unethical journalism, and a mass attempt to explain away what could ultimately sink us.
This past Saturday, a group of volunteers descended on Ivoryton’s town green to begin to unwind and store the town’s holiday lights. For the past month, those half a million bulbs turned the little village into a magical place. If you love illuminated islands that serve as beacons in the winter gloom, you might look at the weekend volunteers as holiday’s anti-elves, but those are the same people who put the lights up in the first place. So thank you, volunteers. You made December — and a small corner of January — bright.
On Saturday in Hartford, for the first time since the pandemic began, camels loped along Park Street to mark Dia de los Reyes — Three Kings’ Day — when tradition tells us three wise men anxious to explore a bright star in the east came to visit to the baby Jesus. The Hartford crowd was appropriately festive, and the camels looked — as always — as if they were powered by a puppeteer.
On social media, Saturday was celebrated by people posting video after video of insurrectionists dressed in our national colors, and taking sticks and flag poles to beat law enforcement officials in Washington, D.C. They broke into our capitol during what was anything other than a “normal tourist visit” — though a Georgia politician later tried to paint it as such. Online, insurrection supporters — and the insurrection adjacent — were muted, which was probably a good thing, considering the FBI is still sharing on social media the photos of asyet-undiscovered suspects. The insurrection supporters who posted (including the eldest scion of the former president) mostly bemoaned that people are still talking about Jan. 6.
But we should be talking about this and not just on the anniversary of that day when some 2,000 insurrectionists broke our hearts.
Why? Because we cannot let a lie overtake the truth, and a recent Washington Post-University of Maryland survey says that a quarter of Americans believe the FBI was behind the Jan. 6attacks. Maybe some folks simply cannot believe a randy crowd could be manipulated into sending our country to the brink. Maybe some folks are too far gone for salvation.
Saturday was the anniversary of our most recent day that will live in infamy. Sept. 11 is another one. It will be years before we stop marking that sad attack — but we most likely will stop eventually. Time passes and people die and stories — even tales that should forever be part of our national conversation — stop being told. Decades ago, when I was working full-time at a newspaper, an editor neglected to make mention of Dec. 7, the original day that would live in infamy, on that day’s front page. The omission was an oversight and — it must be said — the editor was on the youngish side, and not overburdened with a sense of history. The outcry was quick and understandable.
But Jan. 6 should be different, because the onslaught on our democracy didn’t start that day, and it hasn’t ended. The former president is doing his dead-level best to avoid taking responsibility for his sexual abuse of women, his cooked business books, and his captaining of a first-of-its-kind insurrection. Jan. 6 was strictly a visual, a symptom of our challenges. The House select committee, the indictments, trials, and tearful confessions mean nothing if we treat this as anything less than one giant step on the road to somewhere very, very bad.
Jan. 6 is at the center of a Venn diagram that includes crime, unethical journalism, and a mass attempt to explain away what could ultimately sink us. How much time have we spent trying to decide if the former president is a fascist? And is that a conversation we need to have when the man himself promises he’ll be a dictator if he’s allowed a return engagement? Since the McCarthy era, the state of Illinois, with a March 19 primary, has a loyalty oath (now voluntary) that candidates sign to say they are citizens and they “do not directly or indirectly teach or advocate overthrowing” either the federal or state government. President Joe Biden has signed it, as has Republican candidate Ron DeSantis. Trump hasn’t and we are too far in to assume that was a simple oversight on the part of his busy campaign. Jan. 6 is not, though Mitt Romney recently tried to frame it as such, a “dead political horse.”
Once the evening snow started to fall Saturday, I walked down to Ivoryton’s green to witness the darkness for myself. The volunteers had left lights on a long hedge and a large tree, which I appreciated. That Post-UMD poll also said 46 percent of respondents believe Trump’s actions on Jan. 6 should disqualify him being president — and another 17 percent said his actions at the very least cast doubt on his ability to lead the country. I may be overly optimistic, but I see a little light gleaming there, deep in the branches.
Susan Campbell is the author of “Frog Hollow: Stories from an American Neighborhood,” “TempestTossed: The Spirit of Isabella Beecher Hooker” and “Dating Jesus: A Story of Fundamentalism, Feminism and the American Girl.” She is Distinguished Lecturer at the University of New Haven, where she teaches journalism.