The Casual Blog

Yesterday — January 6, 2021 — was a day that will live in infamy.  After a rally in Washington in which President Trump encouraged his supporters to keep fighting and never admit defeat, a group of them attacked the Capitol, where Congress was in the process of certifying his defeat.  The proceedings were halted and the legislators were evacuated.  The mob then vandalized the building.  There were several injuries and one shooting death.  

By the time I started watching on television, the mob was no longer inside the Capitol, and they seemed to have calmed down.  They lounged on the Capitol stairs, and milled about on the lawn.  I watched the show for several hours, trying to figure out who these people were.  Apart from Trump flags, Trump hats, and other Trump paraphernalia, they looked normal.  There were no visible symptoms of rampant mental illness or extreme emotional states.

Even some steadfast Trump supporters, including Pence and McConnell, spoke out in opposition to the violence.  Some of the right wing media, including figures who have spent years feeding the Trumpist movement, tried to distance themselves by blaming the attack on liberals and antifa.  This will not wash.  The mob may have been of the extreme extreme right, rather than simply the run-of-the-mill extreme right.  But their actions were a natural extension of several years of florid right-wing fantasies.  

One thing we can be fairly sure of:  the people that attacked the Capitol sincerely believed.  They swallowed the Trump line whole, and were convinced that evil liberals had stolen the election and were wrongfully taking over the country.  When every traditional, reputable source of information conflicted with Trump’s lies, they concluded that everything was fake news, except for the statements of one man.

These folks were particularly gullible, susceptible to propaganda, and prone to anger and hateful fantasy.   Still, they were in many ways normal Americans.  The America that produced them is our America, with its many problems still to be addressed.

The January 6 mob reminded us that, as Faulkner said, the past is not dead.  Our history is still with us.  The one-sixers, almost all white, included some who carried Confederate flags, glorifying our history of racial oppression.  Some of them raised banners with mystical evangelical sayings.  Their conspiracy theories, like QAnon, echoed earlier American strains of millennial authoritarianism.

And there were so many American flags!  It is a great paradox that those most inclined to throw out elections and end American democracy are often the ones who wave the American flag the most vigorously.  Few one-sixers wore covid masks.  There’s another great paradox:  those most susceptible to paranoia and groupthink are the loudest cheerleaders for idealized  freedom and individualism. 

It was a surreal day, but we got through it.  Against tough odds, Georgia completed the election of two democratic senators, enough to divide the Senate 50-50, with Vice President Harris in charge of tiebreaking.  Early this morning, the Congress finished addressing the last spurious election fraud charges, and certified the election of President Biden.  It’s a new day.      

The pictures here are of Sally’s orchids, which continue to grow beautifully.