National Post (National Edition)
Ominous sign of things to come
`This is not who we are as Americans,” said U.S. p re sident-elect Joe Biden during the siege of the Capitol on Wednesday.
But the sinking feeling among many people who were watching the events unfold from abroad and who love the United States — including myself — was that, yes, in part this is what America has become.
After order was restored, the questions began about the spectacularly inadequate security response. Were the authorities somehow oblivious that violence was haunting the land?
American cities burned all summer. On election day, merchants — small shop owners and major retail chains — boarded up their buildings, expecting the worst. They got the time and place wrong that day, but they knew what was lurking in the streets.
Watching some of the coverage on ABC, I was struck by one commentator who said, “I was getting texts from inside the Capitol that we normally see during a mass shooting.”
Normally? In what kind of country are journalists accustomed to what is routine during mass shootings? Wednesday brought into the Capitol what actually took place elsewhere in Washington last year. But the Capitol is different, and so the gravity of this invasion was unique.
The invasion of the Capitol by a rampaging mob, set on using violence as a means to achieve their ends, was met by the most solemn words in the political lexicon: sedition and insurrection.
As the awful day dragged on and a semblance of order was restored, another word emerged, given the need to acknowledge the distinctiveness of the site: desecration.
“Our temple of democracy has been desecrated,” said Democratic Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer.
There have been desecrations aplenty in the United States and around the world over the past year. Hardly a day goes by without a holy place suffering desecration somewhere. On New Year's Day, St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York — the most famous church in the country — was vandalized.
The U.S. Capitol is not a place of worship, but there is something sacred about it. It is a repository of the nation's identity and the heart of its institutions; it points to ideals that transcend the mere arrangements of administration.
So it is right to call the assault on Wednesday a desecration. Which makes it all the more ominous. For what is afoot when a mob of thousands decides to engage in wilful desecration?
My thoughts on Wednesday afternoon turned to one of the great desecrations in recent times, the 1979 siege of the Grand Mosque in Mecca. It was a much bloodier and prolonged affair than the Capitol riot, and the Grand Mosque is a holy place for more than a billion people, not a political building of just one nation. The consequences of the siege on Mecca would shape global affairs in subsequent decades.
Politics is not religion, and the Capitol is not as important as the Grand Mosque. Yet the menacing lesson is that when people are willing to desecrate their sacred sites with violence, it indicates a crisis of legitimacy and portends more, not less, violence to come, in more, not fewer, places.
No one killed on 9/11 thought that what took place 22 years earlier in Mecca was a mortal threat to them. But the blasphemous violence of 1979 was both a symptom and the cause of something sinister, an extremist poison that would leach out far beyond the Arabian desert.
The U.S. Capitol, the Washington Mall and the entirety of downtown Washington, D.C., will now become even more locked down than it usually is. In the future, peaceful protests will proceed only under the watchful eyes of hoards of armed police.
The poison spilled on Wednesday in Washington will leach out across the land. After all, once you take the Grand Mosque, what are America's Twin Towers? After you invade the Capitol, what other place is off limits?
Perhaps it is too dramatic a reading of events, too coloured by the shock of seeing a shirtless man in a horned headdress usurping the presidential chair of the American Senate.
But it did happen. That seat was duly secured and sanitized no doubt, but something akin to a secular exorcism was really needed.
The fervent hope, before the violence at the Capitol, was for a return to normality after a year of pandemic and political crisis. The fervid fear is that the desecration in Washington is what normal is going to look like.