Today, many of us watched in shock as a horde of unkempt ruffians, many of whom looked not a little unlike the Unabomber, with wild hair and beards and sneering visages, descended upon (and then ascended the walls of) Congress, in what can only be called an attempted coup, as pathetic and misguided as it was.
This is not meant to be a political newsletter, but one that explores joy, personal growth, love, food, travel, and discovery. Needless to say, politics is none of these. I find the back-and-forth struggle, the balancing of scales, the swinging of the pendulum, what have you, exhausting and tedious.
But, as former British Prime Minister Harold Wilson said during the egregious 1966 Aberfan coal mining disaster in Wales, when it comes down to it, everything is political. Especially those events that directly and forcefully impact our day-to-day existence.
Today brought us one of those events.
Watching these “insurgents” in horned Viking hats, fur pelts, bullet-proof vests, and bright red MAGA caps waving American and Confederate flags, rappelling from the balcony of the Senate chamber, getting stoned in Nancy Pelosi’s office, knocking pictures off of walls, and ripping a Chinese tapestry for the fun of it was bad enough.
More appalling, and aggrieving, however, was the sickening realization that these marauders were able to breach the U.S. Capitol with incredible ease, while our politicians were in chambers attempting to certify Joe Biden’s presidential victory.
Imagine the response if a phalanx of armed Black Lives Matter protestors stormed the building and began scaling the walls in an attempt to force their agenda.
I’m afraid we all know how that would turn out. Annihilation, most likely. Wholesale.
The blatant and obvious racism here is abhorrent and distressing.
Not only did the “officers” fail to stop today’s trespassers, but many seemed to tacitly accept them. A quick scroll through Facebook reveals multiple posts of the miscreants taking selfies with Capitol cops, a sharp divergence from images of heavily-armed, stony-faced officers in riot gear standing shoulder-to-shoulder against peaceful BLM protesters a few months ago.
The nation’s police force appears to be in cahoots with Trump’s fever dream of overthrowing the will of the people. If this is true of the Capitol cops, how many other individual officers in our nation have been infected?
And if they are actually in support of this nasty, lawless, incompetent, would-be king, how did this come to be?
Trump himself is bad enough, with his frothy spout of lies. Now that he has publicly endorsed QAnon supporters as "people who love our country," the hydra is growing multiple new heads.
QAnon launched with the bizarre notion that President Trump is waging a secret war against elite, Satan-worshipping pedophiles who happen to be democrats, and that the coming battle will lead to the rapture. As the movement has morphed, it now encompasses neo-nazism, white supremacy, and other troubling ontologies.
The New York Times recently reported that QAnon has gotten stealthier, infiltrating a wide number of diverse online communities. In addition to anti-vaccine, wellness, and mother’s groups, QAnon is now said to be contaminating cops with its bilious rhetoric.
Recently, QAnon arrived to my own shore. A friend who sells bone broth told me earnestly that democrats are pedophiles, didn’t I know that? Haven’t I seen the Jeffrey Epstein documentary? Turns out, she also believes the Covid-19 vaccines will change our DNA, inserting miniature tracers that will allow Bill Gates and his ilk to control the global population through 5G cell phone towers.
A week later, I visited my massage therapist. As he worked to dissolve the knots in my right shoulder, he asked, “How are you?”
“Honestly,” I said, “I’m rattled by a friend who believes the vaccines are some sort of ploy to control the global population.”
I laughed.
He was quiet for a beat. Then he said, “Don’t be too quick to dismiss her. I think she’s right.”
Mind you, I live in the San Francisco Bay Area, a relatively liberal, coastal bastion with a population that prides itself on being reasonably informed.
If the QAnon phenomenon is managing to thread its noxious tentacles into every bit of not just the country’s but also the world’s social fabric, if it’s winning converts here, on the peripheries of my social circle, imagine the impact it’s having in the rest of the country.
I shudder to think.
I keep trying to figure out why people believe all these blatant lies. And I create all these circumstances of class and shattered ambitions, of comatose educational upbringing, of fractured real-world exposure, etc., to try to understand it all. And then oft times, most times, nothing fits. And then I think of Hannah Arendt's description of "the banality of evil." And how that description wrought her many enemies. She attributed to Eichmann what she termed “thoughtlessness,” an inability to think from the other’s point of view. Maybe these folks who bludgeoned to death a capitol police officer with a fire extinguisher or all of the other marauders hellbent on tearing up Congress were pure evil. Or maybe they have just been so forsaken and so low that their only way to go high is racial purity.
I remain puzzled.