March 14, 2021
Cathedral City, California
There was an amusing bit in the social media two months ago, in the aftermath of the Trumpist storming of the U.S. Capitol. It was a short film clip of a young woman weepily telling a reporter that she’d been hit with mace upon trying to enter the building. She seemed to be complaining about it, as if she thought she had a right to get in that had been abridged. At the end she said, by way of explanation for her own actions, “We’re storming the Capitol. It’s a revolution.” She said it in a sort of deadpan, plaintive way.
Besides being sad and pathetic, the young woman on January 6 bore signs of the same feeling of childlike disbelief people in my generation used to display at times similar to that—when they’d been tear gassed or beaten or whatever—while in the act of, say, demonstrating against the war in Vietnam or attempting to occupy the administration building of a university. Only in this person there seemed to be less of ideological vehemence and more of a whiney whiff of entitlement, minus any real political underpinnings.
All that got me to thinking about “revolution” as I’ve come to look at it in this country, and I got sort of peeved. Not at the thought of self-described revolutionaries languidly storming a building and temporarily occupying it, sitting in the symbolic seats of power, putting their feet up on desks, and so on. Hell, that’s old hat. My generation more or less invented that routine, although we thought (and I for one still think) that our causes—opposing the Vietnam war, institutional racism, and capitalism in general—were nobler and more just than preserving the presidency of an idiotic demagogue who wouldn’t know the truth if it came up and bit him in his fat ass. What bothered me was that I realized that I’d come to think of occupying buildings as being the rightful, even proprietary, province of the American left, not the right-wing proto-fascist bunch on display on January 6. I found myself saying, “Hey, YOU cracker shitheels don’t get to do that—WE get to do that. You get to drive trucks with big tires and honk the horn and fly the rebel flag and tote guns and all that cornball shit, but we left wingers get to storm the barricades.” I felt intruded upon, and somewhat upstaged. “Aux armes, citoyens, formez vos bataillons” just doesn’t go with people looking they just wandered in from a Civil War battle reenactment, where they played Confederate troops.
Of course, despite what we’re learning a little at a time, once they got in there they didn't really appear to quite know what to do, and in fact didn’t do much, other than to piss and shit and take selfies, and that was even without any really serious pushback from law enforcement. Oh sure, some of them had aspirations. Maybe that’s an indication of their lack of intelligence, generally, or maybe they were simply imitating their leader, who, never seriously having expected to get elected, didn’t quite know what to do once he got into office, and whose sole aspiration once he got there was simply to stay there. Likewise the Capitol stormers, once they got into the chambers and halls and indeed some offices, didn't quite know what to do. I’m not saying we won’t find out more in the months to come, or that the FBI won’t root out more sinister stuff about the people they’ve arrested (assuming we don’t just get bored with the whole deal in the afterglow of a new, more adult-like administration). But just looking at what they’ve fed us so far, it doesn’t seem as if anyone really had a plan, except in their own heads. Many who have been arrested will try to hide behind Trump's bulky torso, but they won't get to use that as a defense. Certainly they did a shitty job of coordinating with one another once they entered the Capitol. Again, chalk it up to stupidity, or the vast diversity even within the right-wing white-supremacist fringe, but for some reason they never pushed their advantage while they had it. They really could have chased down a Democrat or two and beaten him or her to death, perhaps thereby delaying the vote on the electoral college even longer, but they didn't. And once they "occupied" the building, they very soon got bored with the whole idea and ended up filing out instead of holding out. No one insisted on being dragged out by the heels or the hair.
I think my fear that the country will get bored with the re-hashing of the January 6 event will come true, especially after the CNN/Fox/MSNBC mini-series on it aired, in the form of the trial of Trump in the Senate. Okay, everyone will say, that happened. Now what? Meanwhile the people who have been arrested will eventually be tried, which is good, and will probably receive sentences of some kind. Nowhere near what they should get, I imagine, but something. They'll get some time in federal prisons, join the Aryan Brotherhood, and just keep on truckin'. And the real pity of all that is that they won't be able to conclusively establish that Trump was the inciter of insurrection, in a legally binding sense, so he'll slide on that.
Some revolution.
