Shock and awe. World watches as Trump’s lunatics take over asylum
THEY came. They stormed. They wandered. On screen, a ragged line of polyester-clad insurgents sauntering through the vestibule of the Capitol, the red ropes on brass stands confirming their status of visitor or tourist to the home of their government. At the cordon, they seemed to lose their anarchic zeal, lining up between the ropes, raising their phones to record the moment of their arrival, literal and metaphoric. An incongruous sight.
Shock came with the signal shaman in bared teeth, chest, furs, horns; the ‘freedom-fighter’ advertising Camp Auschwitz; rebels in assorted MAGA gear designed by fear, embroidered by hate, the camo of billionaire treachery; the police apparently caught off-guard, meek, obliging. A different force to the masked guard, a different country to the America that faced down the song and dance of BLM, set dogs on philosophers, tear-gassed veterans, stretched grandfathers, skull-split, on the sidewalk.
On TV it was ‘a coup’, they said. ‘Insurrection’ they said. ‘Revolution’, ‘rebellion’, ‘sedition’. Only the ‘coup’ had occurred when a serial bankrupt-cum-billionaire, size-sensitive, self-aggrandising, pouty, paranoid, vindictive, was selected by the GOP as the best man to occupy the White House, lead the Free World.
In the end, reasonable suspicion of shenanigans by old-enemy agencies clouded his election. Within days of taking office, he banned entry from seven predominantly Muslim countries, instigating the order on Holocaust Memorial Day. Eminent public servants who demurred were recategorised as ‘career bureaucrats’.
The inauguration speech, where traditionally, new presidents extend hands, heal hurts, speak with grace and gravitas to America and the world, set the tone. To the greatness of America he admitted impediments of racism, hate, suspicion. Instead of Arcadia, or a renewed republic of kindness, decency, the common good, he offered personal peeve, sneer, darkness, a vision from Armageddon. From the outset, it was all the US had ‘brought democracy’ to their countries. The mob were “special”, “patriots”. He “loves” them. For the politics of exclusion and suspicion, hate and incitement, debt and poverty, lies and manipulation, January 6, 2021, was the Epiphany for America and the waking world. Obviously, millions of disenfranchised would never invade the Capitol, but there were enough who would and did, even at the edges of chaos. Swathes of Republicans should hang their well-coiffed heads, be politically charged, for what they have fomented and unleashed. But there are questions, too, for Democrats whose elitism and corporatism have blinded them to the abandonment, need and suffering of their fellow Americans.
To them, President Bernie Sanders was unthinkable, because he would have made them Untouchables to the financial status quo. New entrants to the Democrats bring new thinking. Until that is established and widely, the new administration will have its work cut out. If a wound heals from the edges in, the 46th President of the United States must attend, immediately and exquisitely tenderly, to the poor and forgotten of America, not raised up, but savagely exposed by shallow, manipulative politics that governs of itself, by itself, for itself and its co-dependent lobbies.
As Joseph Biden Jr takes office, the virus is exposing precarity, loneliness, injustice, inequality across America, Europe, the world. In essential services, it’s showing societies how the ignored Nobodies, are in fact, the Somebodies; how ‘Important’ people are not always Valuable; how Valuable people are, too often, not Important or Valued at all.
Simultaneously, while the trivia and trash that fascinate on social media are creeping into MSM news and analysis, what is of real import in the continuity and continuum of public life, can be trivialised, avoided, ignored. It is arguable that deference by some media, and certainly social media, to Trump and his lies, helped torch decency and humanity, rile by headline, radicalise by algorithm, give comfort to suspicion, community to conspiracy, bring chaos, death to the Capitol.
Mark Zuckerberg has banned Trump from his platforms for the rest of the presidency: days, hours. Outrageous courage in dissing a dangerous, departing and hopefully, disappearing (as Donie can explain to America and I suspect Biden understands) “Believe Me” bollix.
Good health and luck to Biden and Harris. The votes and the Capitol stand. God bless America.