The scene on the Capitol steps is chaotic. Photographs and videos show islands of plaid and camouflage, fire engine red and fluorescent yellow cutting across shifting waves of black hoodies and blue jeans. Flags—Betsy Ross, Don’t Tread On Me, Blue Lives Matter, Trump 2020, South Korea, South Vietnam—are ubiquitous, rippling in a steady breeze beneath the rotunda and an overcast winter sky. A tear gas canister opens a wound in the crowd and is hurled back at the security forces between it and Congress. The range of expression on the hundreds of faces runs the gamut—wrath, surprise, boredom, amusement. Heads are topped with Stetsons, beanies, paddy caps and buckskin. Superman and Paul Revere are here. At some point in the melee Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick is struck—with macabre symbolism—in the head by a fire extinguisher and dies. It is, in a word, a siege.
Inside, behind a single barricaded door, Senators are prostrate beneath their seats. A man in a Carhartt vest swaggers between portraits of Charles Sumner, an abolitionist, and John C. Calhoun, defender of slavery, with the Southern cross. Another swings the same astride the Cavalry Charge component of the Ulysses S. Grant Memorial on the easternmost edge of the Capitol Reflecting Pool. Someone erects gallows on its opposite. In images more semblant of Paris than D.C., demonstrators ascend the Peace Monument, their banners whipping across the figure of Victory. Above her, weeping into the marble shoulder of History, is Grief.
It is, in another word, abominable. But in a year of abominations it is only the latest, if not the most egregious. Journos of every stripe and caliber have since picked the event’s carcass clean in search of disease, spilling retributive talk and ink enough to make a cri de coeur for penance from the cheap seats wholly unintelligible. Knowingly or not—the latter, I think—they have instead found (and wish to linger at) this political moment’s angle of repose, i.e. the event horizon beyond which things become irrevocable. This, of course, is a precarious point at which to plant one’s flag, for both journalists and Americans at large. Clarity tends to come at a remove—how can we discern a way to reconciliation when our view is so microscopic? So myopic? Everything is foreground—most of what I see and hear today are lashing tongues.
When the Russian military invaded Prague in August 1968, Josef Koudelka pointed a camera down his city’s streets, made strange with tanks and trucks of soldiers with bayonets. He saw faces twisted into sculptures of fury and dread. One man—perhaps he’s a lawyer, or an ad man—stands stock still in the self-conscious costume of the consummate professional—briefcase, trench coat, carefully combed noggin—a passing array of heavy artillery betraying the ordinariness of the scene. It seems he has just emerged from the office with thoughts of dinner still pulling him towards the train station.
I’m experiencing something of his bewilderment as I watch footage of foul-mouthed men (and women) stalking the halls of Congress. Hunting. “Where are they?” one asks. It is, in a third word, despicable. Was their burglary a coup d’etat? I don’t think so. Brezhnev’s putsch at least glimmered with the sheen of plausibility. (The presence of T-55s will do that.) This one reeks of mere happenstance, if not staggering incompetence. The faces of the participants—others have called them insurrectionists or traitors, simply protestors and, not inaccurately, terrorists—have the swollen look of the “see food, eat it” dieter, the over-acted grimace of unproven, self-mythologizing proud boys. Where are the adults?
In my city, at least, they are distributing needles in parks to drug addicts. In my state, at least, they are instructing kindergarteners (four to six years old) how to identify nipples, the vulva and penis, anus and clitoris. They are brawling on airplanes, driving stoned and opting out of civic duties for online glory. They are seduced and consumed by fantasy and conspiracy. Politics has, naturally, become dramaturgy. (Perhaps it has, to some degree, always been so.)
Viktor E. Frankl writes in The Doctor and the Soul of a “deformation” that humanity experienced in the concentration camps of the 20th century. Most of the inmates, he says, “had once been ‘somebodies’ and were now being treated worse than ‘nobodies.’” He describes, however, how a minority tended to cohere around a “megalomania en miniature,” assuming a “power altogether out of proportion to their sense of responsibility.” Instead of calling on an inner spiritual strength to resist apathy and anger, this group had succumbed to “the physic-psychic influences” of the camp. The circumstances of the environment had, perhaps understandably in this case, superseded the will.
Is this not the psychological condition on display at various scales—and on both ends of the political spectrum—in the United States today? Of course none of us is bound to a concentration camp—that is my point. Minority groups, united in a shared illusion of victimization, have impressed upon the majority their particular grievances, often with intimidation and violence. As a consequence it is difficult to distinguish perceived oppression from the actual. Feeling betrayed and unjustly described, the accused return a volley of smite upon the accuser, and they dance. Neither party sees the open grave in the path of their tango.
And yet one gets the impression that it is their desired destination. Destruction is tantalizing. Is it surprising that our penchants for voyeurism and spectacle have achieved their fullest realization in the political sphere of the 21st century? (The exiting president’s election—and his interminable contretemps with media and critics—was perhaps the zenith.) The pageantry is irresistible, hypnotizing even. To that effect, I’d argue the events of January 6 and this past summer’s nightly sprees are two kinds of personal vision quests masquerading as acts of service to this-or-that cause. (The actors, remember, are the cultural descendants of the “‘Me’ Decade,” of Ian Brown of The Stone Roses wailing, “I wanna be adored.”) The obedient servant of a censored ideology does not ascend the throne of a supposedly illegitimate king and pose for a selfie or pause to phone a friend, as the bearded invaders did in the Senate chambers. No, he takes an axe to it. January 6 was narcissistic self-care taken to its ultimate, ugly and pathetic extreme.
One tends to turn to antiquity when modern analogies fall short. Perhaps it is unavoidable; “democracy,” “policy,” “tyranny”—the most potently charged strands of our national discourse have their origin in the Latin of the ancient Mediterranean and its storytellers. Narcissus is too on-the-nose, a too-innocuous mascot for our times. Pygmalion, on the other hand, seems more representative of the sinister thing that seems to have found a host in the American people. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses he carves a woman out of ivory—he is, by trade, a sculptor—and becomes infatuated. He so fervently wants the delusion to be true—wants her to be real—that his wish is granted. The simulacrum overthrows blood and bone, except that outside of literature and mythology simple physics eventually intervenes. The left has described the failure of the coup-y uprising on January 6 as the “triumph of democracy,” in so many words. In truth, it was the triumph of the hard sciences, of physics over fake.
In physiology, the scientific study of biological mechanisms, Westphal’s sign is the absence of a “knee-jerk reaction” to a doctor’s tap on the patellar tendon. It is abnormal, in other words, to lack an automatic reflex when presented with a stimulus. So, perhaps the news- and podcasters (not to mention our neighbors, colleagues and local letter-to-the-editor scribblers) can be forgiven for preferring the “hot take” to the deep rumination—it is to-be-expected, both culturally and biologically. Time, after all, is of the essence, we are told ad nauseam. Now is the time!
Indeed, it always is. Ring the bell, then, and resume class. Let this awful recess from responsibility and compromise be over. Put the troublemakers in the corner—vengeance cannot be allowed to pull civilization, in a prideful and awestruck trance, into its clutches. Are we not men?
We have a new president, Joseph Robinette Biden, who “will to the best of [his] ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.” He may, and he may not. There is little I can do about it. Writer André Gide advised “gentle and total resignation” as an antidote to the mess and inexorable suffering of life that, from Schopenhauer’s vantage, results from striving. Renunciation. It has been a difficult lesson for me to learn. To that end, I’d like to put the keyboard away for a minute. In my folks’ yard, there are tulips breaking through their beds. (It is not yet February!) The sun, with each passing day, is more patient in his arc. There are still strawberries in the markets! Death is real! Christ has overcome! Let us turn (our cheeks?) from our screens and face each other, again, as men, not ciphers.
Let us shut up a minute.
Impolitic 