It's not our lying eyes
January 7, 2025
Mule deer buck in a thicket at Riverside State Park, Jan. 6
Reflections on the darkest of American Mondays
It is a reminder of advancing seniority that I have to remember to take eight pills with a small breakfast and coffee. It’s tricky. I have trouble remembering much of anything before coffee, though that doesn’t include several things I’d prefer to forget, but cannot. They’re welded into my memory, much like the half-inch divot in the bone above my left eye records a bloody collision with a table when I was four.
High on the list of days I’d like to forget is Jan. 6, 2021.
With millions of others I watched and listened to broadcasts as the day unfolded, beginning with Trump’s outdoor speech, on the Ellipse where the defeated 45th President memorably said: “We fight like hell and if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.”
Trump directed the boisterous crowd to the Capitol and the rest, as they say, is history. The Capitol was invaded and desecrated; a noose for the narrowly escaping vice president swinging from a makeshift gallows in the cold outside, where Trump’s mob was chanting “hang Mike Pence.”
In real time it reminded me of the horror of watching the surviving video from the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, the deadliest natural disaster of the 21st century, thus far. It was also reminiscent of the passenger planes crashing into the World Trade Center on 9/11/01. The difference, of course, is that an American political leader, still in the White House, had orchestrated the event and watched the violence unfold, for hours, before asking his followers to back off.
Surely, there would repercussions, maybe even something like justice. Both the Republican leaders (of the House and Senate) were there that day. In the days following the failed insurrection, both denounced Trump with indignant speeches.
GOP House leader Kevin McCarthy: “The president bears responsibility for Wednesday’s attack on Congress by mob rioters.”
GOP Senate Majority leader Mitch McConnell: “The mob was fed lies. They were provoked by the president and other powerful people.”
McConnell’s speech, a month later, is untarnished by partisanship, and as clear as can be. Here’s an excerpt:
“January 6th was a disgrace. American citizens attacked their own government. They used terrorism to try to stop a specific piece of democratic business they did not like. Fellow Americans beat and bloodied our own police. They stormed the Senate floor. They tried to hunt down the Speaker of the House. They built a gallows and chanted about murdering the Vice President. They did this because they had been fed wild falsehoods by the most powerful man on Earth—because he was angry he’d lost an election.”
From here, one can fill in the gaps with almost any sort of theory for how Trump escaped any consequences for his actions and plowed a new path that will return him to the White House in a couple weeks.
I may not have heard every explanation. But I’ve heard enough. Enough to retreat and reach for subjects that nurture my curiosity about the natural world (i.e. Andy Knoll’s wonderful book, A Brief History of Earth) and adventures that warm my heart (i.e. traveling with my daughter to visit dear friends in Arizona).
Inevitably, my brain limps back to the same deep chasm. How did so many millions of Americans buy into for the “Big Lie” that Trump insists upon? How could so many Americans accept (or choose not to care) that January 6th wasn’t about what Mitch McConnell described as “terrorism” but, as Trump describes it, about “a day of love”? He’s as much as demanded: Who you gonna believe? Me or your lying eyes?
This is no ordinary juncture in our history. We have a long history of cynical power plays that undermine efforts to create a more equitable and just society. Trumpism is different on account of its scale. It puts domination—owning the libs, tax breaks for the rich, de-regulation, the flow of dark money, etc.—ahead of any other measure. I suppose we can take some momentary comfort that when the election results were certified by Congress, yesterday, it took little more than a half hour or so of a relatively polite process. But that’s only because Trump had won. It’s easy to imagine the tense standoff (to say the least) that would have occurred had he not.
In 1937 my father was about the same age as I was when my head collided with the edge of our coffee table. On a spring day that year, there was commotion at the end of his block on Staten Island. It became one of his first memories. The smoke in the distance was from the tragic fire that was consuming the German airship, the Hindenburg, the world’s largest zeppelin as it was being moored for landing in nearby Manchester Township, New Jersey. The photography of the disaster (in which more than three dozen people perished) is as vivid as the live radio broadcast and journalist Herbert Morrison’s wailing voice: “Oh the humanity.”
My father was young and could have been mistaken. But the camera images and Morrison’s broadcast confirm the deadly event he and so many others witnessed. As a thought experiment, I wonder what the reaction would have been if Hitler took to the radio to say the fire and smoke was from a festive bonfire, instead of an aviation tragedy; that the eyewitnesses were anti-German or anti-zeppelin, or that the photography was a fraud, and that Morrison was the “fake news.”
Flaming skeleton of the Hindenburg, May 1937. (Photo courtesy Wikimedia images)
Perhaps the decorated journalist and long-time Trump-watcher David Cay Johnston is correct when he opines that Trump is unsurpassed in the annals of American con men. Trump’s record as a charlatan keeps on growing, despite the debacle of the Trump University fraud, his long and baseless campaign to challenge the validity of Barack Obama’s birth certificate, and being caught in the lie (even by Fox News) that he and J.D. Vance were promoting, accusing Haitian immigrants of eating pets in Springfield, Ohio.
Today’s dispatch is free to all readers. Please consider supporting The Daily Rhubarb with a paid subscription at the link below.—-tjc
More than 1,000 people have been prosecuted for crimes associated with the 1/6/21 riot at the Capitol, with well over 600 receiving prison sentences totaling more than 1,000 years overall. Given the U.S. Supreme Court’s remarkably broad conference of presidential immunity in United States v. Trump [https://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/trump-v-united-states-3/] it seems highly unlikely that Trump will ever be charged for fomenting the violence of the day. Moreover, he has indicated he will quickly issue pardons for “the vast majority” of those currently in jail for their involvement in the violence at the Capitol. We’ll find out soon enough about the pardons.
The hard truth is we’re now living in a warped political culture where reality itself is up for grabs, where fealty to a con man is viewed as a shrewd investment rather than a betrayal of the common good. As a writer and a human who would rather foster hope than cynicism I honestly struggle with this, daily, and (given his appeal to so many other Americans) would be doing so even had Trump lost. The journalists I most admire are the ones Trump and Kash Patel—his nominee for FBI director—would like to prosecute. The scale of his movement—and the thuggery it promotes and celebrates—cuts to my core.
Not that I won’t keep trying. Not that I won’t write about other subjects, or find warmth and succor with the people I love and who love me back. But this is the monster in our human wilderness, the one that can blind and drag us to Auschwitz, Jonestown, My-Lai, the 1921 Greenwood massacre and the killing fields of Cambodia or Gaza. It lives. It’s more real than we’re prepared to accept.
It tends the bar at Mar-a-Lago.
—tjc
