The First Anniversary Of January 6
Exit Stage Left
The Great Insurrection will be analyzed to death. But here’s a few thoughts you maybe didn’t think of about what it means when we look back or what you may have missed since then.
The first video of an interrogation of insurrection released was of a colored person sitting in a room with the police. Really? That sounds a little purposeful, I thought, almost as though to color the event that wrong way. Whitewashing pun intended.
Really, the FBI, one of America’s most white-defending federal police forces that spent decades spying on black civil rights activists for being, well, black? The one that wanted to spy and prosecute homosexuals led by a repressed homosexual for decades, J. Edgar “The Queer” Hoover? And of course the Senator McCarthy communist scare of the 50’s with full televised trials of that witch hunt? (FYI- Great film by Clint Eastwood starring Leo DiCaprio and J. Edgar’s affair with repression and his male secretary).
The FBI had got reamed out by four Olympians who tore their director, Chris Wray, and their Inspector General Horowitz to shreds for letting a pedophile gymnastics doctor go un-arrested after these gymnasts repeated attempts to get Dr. Larry Nassar stopped. The failure of his arrest by the FBI meant over 100 more underage girls got raped and/or sexually abused. Yeah, that FBI. (You can access the full video and skip to the good parts of these four ladies absolutely tearing up the FBI and revealing their vast incompetence.)
Note: Their devasting testimony is NOT about the abuse or Mr. Nassar, who was tried and put in jail. It was about: How the FBI and USDOJ Failed to Stop a Pedophile. The Congressional committee listened, and probably will write a report about how the USDOJ and FBI should do better after failing to take seriously the abuse report multiple times by young women, blah, blah, blah. That’s just what Congress does, lots and lots of investigations, followed by stern reports.
So, by absolute chance, by coincidence, apropos of nothing but wanting to show they are effective, they show they are doing their job and Danny Rodriguez is the first video they release. A kid that has a Latino name and looks perhaps blackish in the screen shot. And that kid? He appears in the video more like a clueless bystander than an insurrectionist. They couldn’t have made the first video released a video of one of the leaders, one of the confederate flag planters, one of the Capitol Police beaters, one of the Proud Boys, one of the put your feet on Nancy’s desk guy after smashing her office?
In other words, the first symbolic gesture of Merrick Garland’s new USDOJ is of them interrogating a colored looking guy who stumbled into the crowd? Such a show of strength and intent. But Chief Garland let us know you have to start at the bottom and work your way up, and the bottom happened to be, surprise, a blackish Latino.
What’s next, Merrick Garland, finally, after almost a year, getting up and saying with committed ninniness from his teleprompter, “Oh, we are doing some things and have some arrest some rowdy bunch of troublemakers. We’ve handed out some fines for smashing the windows, and we scolded them for messing up the Chamber. We’ve asked them to sign a form that says, ““I will respect democracy.””
Wow, what a show of absolute force. His cue card read speech looked like one he hadn’t read before reading it to the cameras on January 5, 2022. Yet now I suppose you can really trust them to investigate and prosecute the leaders of the Insurrection, the Lost Cause losers who still haven’t accepted defeat for the Civil War, let alone the coup from just a year ago.
Yeah, I feel like our democracy is protected now under Biden’s Merrick.
January 6th marks the days that hundreds of angry whites stormed the Capitol to Stop the Great Replacement, the Stealing of American white male power. It was based on a lie endlessly repeated and talked about by the media generated by a President who had just lost the election but denied it and still does. He announced the day, January 6th, on December 20, 2020, to meet in DC, and then pointed on the 6th and said very clearly, “Let’s now march to the Capitol, and I’m going with you.” Not an exact quote, I don’t care to look it up. But I remember it clearly from live TV: I’m going with you.
Then, that small group, 700, 800, kept our country hostage for four hours, and it continues to keep it hostage by capturing the media’s attention.
It seems like it is always that: a small group of angry conservative white males dominating with their anger.
I’ve decided to remember the opposite of that day, July 4th. The Day of Independence marks the day a group of white male liberals declared that universal principles emanating from the masses and not a ruler were the basis for a revolution to free themselves from a small white male group of males that headed a tyranny inherit by right of blood and riches, not competence. It was the day when Humanist Secular principles won and declared victory.
These principles developed during the Enlightenment, or The Age of Reason were understood fully by a maybe only a few back then, like David Hume, a recently deceased atheist Scottish philosopher who shocked the intellectual European world by his deathbed declaration that he won’t believe in God before he dies. He’s remembered more for that act then his works, as it represented a bringing into being of an idea, a substantiation. This was the school of thought brought to America when Ben Franklin took one bankrupt printer, second rate philosopher divorced loser and brought him to the U.S., Tom Paine.
Paine went on to operate Ben’s printing press and described in his manifesto booklet in his spare time a vision of humanist philosophy practiced by probably 5 to 6 people to that date. Paine’s book, Common Sense, was by percentage the biggest U.S. best-selling book by proportion for over 200 years. In its time of publication from 1774, the American colonies had by some estimates the greatest rate of literate population in the world, 76%, compared to Britain, estimated in second place at 50%. Brain drain most likely, dreamer immigrants educated and escaping dictatorship. It planted the idea of universal governance by the people until it became the background justification in 1776 as a unifying reason for 13 disparate states headed by their own rulers to agree to self-governance. What does this got to do with January 6th?
Yes, there are two sides. Trump was right. Wrong for saying it maybe Freudian slip-like outloud, but still right. History is torn between two sides, two small groups of white men with the vast majority between: one group on the far right, angry, armed, ready to repress when they don’t get their way, reacting with violent emotion and weakly reasoned rational for their actions. The other group on the far left, principled liberals, weak in body, not ready to get violent, even pacificists, like Quaker Ben Franklin, simple of dress, but full of facts, quelling emotional outbreaks to allow for thoughtful scientific reasoning in their mind and debate to occur and for strong reasoning skills to win out over repressive tendencies of the inner animal king of the wolf pack spirit.
History doesn’t happen slowly. Men –as opposed to women — like force as a solution. And the leftist liberal Franklin freed his slaves and was joined by abolitionists, freed blacks like Douglass, women like Stanton in the 1840s building suffrage movements, gays at Stonewall.
On the right though: The world’s 220 nations are still ruled largely by countries enthralled by autocratic “strong men.” Liberals on the left are still repelled by them, liberals who ideas usurped brute force as the way to decide, whose principles won out once, if briefly, and those principles still stand like a beacon with a plaque at the base of that statue on a small island given by the French as a gift of thanks, in part for inspiring their revolution’s principles.
These are the ideals of America: even if not grasped yet in the soul of its people, always struggling to emerge but maybe not ever fully realized. The American principles struggle, once unchained, to stay out of their cage.
They cannot be contained by a white picket fence, can’t be trampled and shut up by a mob screaming down the corridors of Congress to kill Pence, ideals that instead run wild, free, untrampled by would be kings, let out from pandoras box, like demon snakes embedding themselves in the minds of those around the world searching for hope, and the ideals on the far left are the ones I will always try to move toward.
