Reliving Reality
As I await departure for Sedona this morning, I am watching the news, which is heavily focused on the start of the January 6th Commission, set to begin tomorrow. I was sitting right here at the kitchen counter on January 6th when I watched in horror as the insurrectionists broke through the lines and pushed into the once sacred Capitol building. I remember opening the door to the unfinished deck and yelling out at the deck crew of three (at least two of whom had voted to re-elect Donald Trump) that we were in the midst of a coup. They thought I was over-reacting, but cha ged their minds by the next day when they saw the replay. None of them thought what had happened was right. I was agitated and greatly troubled by what I was watching, which felt like our democracy being stripped away by a gang of louts. And here we are, over six months later, watching the Republican politicians trying to redefine reality by saying that there really was no insurrection. All this while the FBI and DOJ are still in the midst of the largest investigation and indictment process in their century history. I suspect at least one if not both of the Trumpers among that crew have now found a way to either rewrite or rationalize the events of that day that they too found abhorrent in the moment.
It was George Santayana who said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”. This seems such a relevant quote in a time of memory distortion that we are undergoing at the moment, that I spent a moment learning about George Santayana. He was a native Spaniard who naturalized as an American and taught at Harvard as one of the great Twentieth Century philosophers. I will be honest and say that up until I did this paltry research, I might have mistaken Santayana for Carlos Santana and I am guessing I am not alone since Wikipedia has about three times as much information about the Rock band than it does about the philosopher.
Santayana was a student of Baruch Spinoza, a Seventeenth Century Dutch philosopher who led what is called the Dutch Golden Age of rationalism. He rejected the thinking of the dominant strict religious philosophers of his time. He so happened to be a Jew and was censured by the Talmudic community. Centuries later, it was David Ben-Gurion, the founder of the state of Israel who cited Spinoza as the first real Zionist even though the concept had not really yet blossomed in Spinoza’s lifetime. Spinoza died at age 44, which is amazing to any of us that think that sounds awfully young to have such deep thoughts and such enduring notoriety.
I have never read more about the world repeating the mistakes of the past than I have in the last year. We all naively thought in 2015 that Trump was not a serious candidate. That thinking persevered through much of 2016 and culminated with a very rude awakening that there were larger forces at play than just Trump’s ridiculous wall to paid for by México and his foreshadowing admonition that the only way he could lose was if the election were rigged against him. We then equally naively assumed that Trump would be cowed by the enormity of the challenge of the presidency and would bow to the expertise of smart but perhaps reactionary professionals. But that was not to be as the Trump idiocy of a presidency unfolded before our eyes with more horror than any of us could have imagined and more lies and rationalizations from his followers than could be believed. So, we put our heads down and our wallets out and muscled our way to a solid electoral victory, none of us believing that Trump would actually make good on his threats to disavow any result short of a Trump landslide win. Or at worst that no right-minded Republican would follow him over the cliff to political suicide brought on by a return to reality. Even some of the worst political hacks and most powerful in the Beltway were beginning to distance themselves. Reality was settling in.
Everyone hits the wall sooner or later and politicians eventually have to pay the piper for their deceptions and inadequacies. Republicans would flee the sinking ship. The dogs of vindication would exact their revenge. The base would see that Trump had misled them and underdelivered while setting a new bar for extreme cronyism. As the song from Evita says, “but the money kept rolling in….from all directions.” The early indications were still bound to a shred of reality and the ludicrousness of Rudy and the fringe crazies was mere fundraising theater and would drive the last nail of realization into the Trump coffin. We knew the lessons of reconstruction and Jim Crow, but that was a sesquicentennial behind us. We knew that the National Socialist rhetoric had worked its mind-numbing magic on very serious and sober nations like Germany and Japan, but though only eighty years in the rear view mirror, that could never happen again and certainly not in the home of the brave and the land of the free.
And when the blatant threats and rhetoric implied violent action on January 6th, and the shock of a senatorial majority win in Georgia drove up the stakes like spittle in the eye of the riled up Republicans, our fervent belief in the rule of law and belief in the democratic process never waned. This was America and we could rely on the justice of our system to keep us safe from the surrealistic crazies. Or could it?
The events of January 6th were getting more and more horrendous as more and more bodycam footage and eye witness reports found their way into the media. No one could possibly deny the wrongness of the acts that have led to 575 indictments and a massive DOJ/FBI investigation that seems without end and sometimes without bail. But in this moment of truth, this harsh light of reality, the vast majority of Emperor followers were declaring Trumps robes more grand than ever while he walked naked among us in his wretched and unwashed nakedness. When the little girl and boy (Liz and Adam) stood out from the crowd and innocently proclaimed the Emperor as being without clothes, their tribe, instead of waking from their stupor and admitting their reality, stoned the young apostles and sang the song of the eternal apologists that starts with a stanza of the need to step back and consider the “Big Picture”. The only way to describe this picture is to call it what it has become, an ends justification for the most deplorable reality of means.
It is said that once a person buys into someone’s lie, the path narrows to requiring more and more acceptance of lies until reality finally comes crashing down upon them and the error of their ways. Ex-COVID patients who choose to celebrate their saved lives by saying they would STILL not have gotten a vaccination are rare, but they do seem to exist. Kamikaze and Kaiten followers will break themselves on the rocks rather than admit defeat, but most people have stronger self-preservation instincts than those which force irrational rationalizations. They will soon be facing a reliving of reality as these Congressional hearings move forward.