~a column by Colleen O’Brien
After the election of Joe Biden as our 46th president, I relaxed, let go of politics. My four-year low-grade fever subsided. If I reverted and thought about politics, it was while I was catching up on things that didn’t have to do with divisiveness, cruelty, disdain, bullying, lying. I looked forward to peaceful discourse – at least that which would be emanating from the White House. I thought now and then about the return of diplomacy, honesty, goodwill, statesmanship.
And then one ordinary Wednesday, like the rest of America trying to get onto Zoom for a meeting, I was pulled to the screen of my smart phone by panicked news folks describing and videoing screeching terrorists storming the United States Capitol building.
I was transfixed, watching madness. The wild-eyed craziness, the maniacal screaming, the ferocious gritting of teeth, the s˟˟t-eating grins – Hollywood will be taking lessons from the violent action of men scaling the Capitol building like Spiderman, smashing doors and windows like criminals and breaking furniture like juvenile delinquents.
The scene was eerily like a movie I’d watched recently of a takeover of the White House. The real-time 2021 terrorists wore their blue jeans and red ballcaps, their boots and beards. The movie terrorists wore sleek skin-suits, climbing boots…and masks.
And both invaders – those filmed in the controlled playacting of a Hollywood movie set and those filmed live on site by CNN and Fox, other cable companies, all networks, and print media from around the world – were attacking and breaching government buildings with no good intent.
Fact was copying fiction, and it was only the reality that roiled my gut.
This was neither a two-hour movie nor just another check of my texts for the latest Tweet. It was several hours into the night of not taking my eyes off the melee: male and female break-in artists pushing cops until they gave ground, breaking windows, tearing down art, smashing furniture, stampeding through the rotunda, leaping up stairwells. Their F-bombs reverberated as, unbeknownst to me watching a screen far away, they urinated in corners and spread human feces from the bathrooms they’d used.
And then, apparently weary of insurrection, many of them had to collapse in the comfortable-looking rotunda armchairs chatting, high-fiving, selfie-ing, buying little flags from a vendor set up along the edge.
Were these just the tagalongs? And the guy relaxed feet-up on Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s desk was the in-charge White Supremist? The guy repeatedly smashing in a window was the Nazi? The horned one was QAnon? Was it not an ordinary Trumpet but a Nationalist carrying Pelosi’s lectern out of the building? Was it just the Proud Boys and Girls doing the dirty work of general smashing while the other thousands from across the country were just there for the break-in? And their leader, unwilling to be a part of it all after goading them into it, watched from a TV in the Oval.
Hard to tell. It was like the bar scene from “Star Wars,” except so many wore the same hat. Which must have confused the Pentagon also – first some bureaucratic hesitancy to give the word for the D.C. National Guard units to rescue the fort – and then some slip of the synapses when they thought they were watching anarchy in the Garden Club and officially named the whole riot scene “First Amendment Protest.”
Where do you suppose that moniker came from?
Although after the fact, the word of the night was “surreal,” it was not. For ‘surreal’ means merely “oddly dreamlike.” This was on the other end of the spectrum at absolutely real.
This was truly frightening – it was real Americans smashing their own building, these real Americans who have been desecrating the flag for four years – I guess their dress rehearsal, and last Wednesday was the opening show.
Although I take that back: the off-Broadway openings have been happening for some time: White Supremacists breaking, smashing and setting fires in Portland and blaming peaceful Black Lives Matter protestors. The extreme antigovernment group Michigan Liberty Militia*white supremacists strongarming themselves onto the floor and gallery of the Michigan Statehouse to protest mask wearing. The President, in order to hold up a Bible in front of a church and get his picture taken, clearing Lafayette Square near the White House of peaceful protestors by tear gas, beatings with police batons and men on horses.
Last Wednesday was more frightening because it was a form of self-mutilation, a masochism – Americans attacking America. I watched faces above weapons – they were into it, shoving and hitting police, gleeful at destruction. These were people just like me, ordinary citizens.
Except the reason these citizens were there demolishing the Capitol building is that they were willing to take four years of a daily dose of lies: they listened, they believed, they acted when called upon to do so by their liar.
If I had listened and taken to heart that Democrats were the enemy, as well as most women and especially Hillary Clinton, immigrants unless from Norway, Blacks, Indigenous, people of color, and the Press – would I self-style as “patriot” of the USA, too, by God? Would I fully believe that I was a righteous revolutionary saving the democratic republic of the United States of America from “socialists,” “pedophiles,” “sex traffickers” “crooks” and “slimeballs?”
What else would I, innocent American soaking up lies and not listening elsewhere for the truth of things, be able to do but march on DC? Misinformation drilled into human brains rally after rally, tweet after tweet, hour-by hour via sycophantic news stations and far-rightwing radio hosts…and every single front-page above-the-fold headline in the Mainstream Press and network or cable broadcast communicating to the gullible and cynical alike the lying word-by-word of the gang leader? Well, lies are likely to attach to the brain cells that are left after each harangue unless one stays informed from all sides of the question.
Who has time for that?
Those of us who didn’t protest enough, was it purposeful? Accidental? Are the Republican Senators and their leadership culpable? The media? Church leaders? Am I, lazy and self-satisfied white mainstream American?
I know who the liar is, for he divided so thoroughly, starting with blue states and red states, sanctuary cities and “black” cities, white skin and skin of color, precinct by precinct, neighbor by neighbor, friend by friend. And finally, family member by family member, he filled 36 to 37 percent of us with hateful language, damning accusations and lying statements. My family is intact, but I have lost friends and neighbors, and when I wear my mask, I see the unmasked looking at me with derision…just one more seed of division sown.
We, and here I mean me, and maybe you – Fox News, The New York Times, Republican Senators and Congresspeople, bureaucrats, big business – we, all of us, weren’t smart enough? Mean enough? Honest enough? Caring enough? To see through him, get rid of the bully that he is, and push him back? Most of us who’ve dealt with bullies know that to stand up to them is to deflate them; and yet we didn’t. I certainly didn’t do it often enough or to the right people.
The Press failed to communicate. I failed to communicate. My representatives failed everything. I didn’t feel I’d been hoodwinked until last Wednesday, when I realized I was fairly good at fooling myself. Some of us more than others can do that, especially when it’s a day late that we understand just how fooled we’ve been by a guy who is over-the-top wild and crazy entertaining, puzzling and terrifying, crass, uncouth, mesmerizing, cunning and street smart.
Smarter than me, too, huh? Never thought he’d get this far – and I was thinking this right after his nomination the summer of 2016. Fool, I, that I didn’t do more about it.
We all are the dupes, whether we fought him, followed him, believed in him, ignored him, talked only to our choir about him. But the problem now is that we all are operating from either side of a line of demarcation – the once mere Civil War of Words morphed, as it could only do, into what is now an outright physical, uncivil civil war.
And what are we to do? All of us? Both sides?
Can I ask you that? Or only myself? What am I to do now?
There has to be an end to the inciting. There have to be consequences for the inciter and his horde. There has to be some kind of coming together, listening to one another, to what we think we know, and then what we think we can do about it that does not involve hate and blame.
I wish I knew how we are to do it, how I can do it. ɤ
*Southern Poverty Law Center
ɤ Although I had not read it prior to my submitting this column, I have since, and would like to thank to Art Cullen, editor of the “Storm Lake Times,” for his editorial published in the Jan. 9, 2021 edition of the “Washington Post,” in which he answered my problem.
