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| Triumph of Fear, a painting by Sandow Birk from 2016, proved to be a harbinger of things to come. |
I'm not a patriot. I don't feel a sense of ownership or belonging when it comes to my citizenship in the United States. I've always felt like an outcast. I've always felt disregarded, disrespected and dismissed by the powers that be. I've never let myself get emotionally attached.
I consider myself a citizen of planet Earth, a member of an international Black diaspora, a part of the global community of artists. And America is just where I tell people I'm from on the very rare occasions when I'm abroad. I don't feel any particular connection to America or any love for this country. I just live here.
I wasn't sad to see what the crowds who descended on the Capitol did last Wednesday. Its halls aren't sacred to me. I wasn't shocked to see the angry mob gathering. I wasn't surprised. What happened last Wednesday was inevitable. The plot was set in motion when a spray-tanned con man descended his golden escalator and dragged us all into the abyss. The subtext became the text of his American Carnage inaugural address. And last Wednesday was the day when Checkov's gun was fired.
As the siege began, I felt numb. I only began to feel sadness and anger when I considered how peaceful protestors had been treated so violently last summer, and in the early days of Black Lives Matter (and every day in between), and the disabled activists yanked from their wheelchairs, and the brutality visited upon the water protectors at Standing Rock, and the casual pepper spraying of Occupy activists, and the intimidation tactics used against high school students imploring their representatives to do something about gun violence. As someone who was enraged about the actual stolen elections in 2000 and 2016 and disappointed that so little was done about them, I couldn't help but indulge in imagining what it would look like if leftists were the ones to descend on the Capitol en masse. And I think the protests would have been nonviolent, probably sit-ins, but the reaction to them would have been extremely violent. We never would have made it inside the building. And why? Because of the challenge to the status quo. Things are very different when the protestors are wealthy and fighting for the status quo to stay that way. Things are very different when law enforcement is working in harmony with the coup. Journalists were maimed by aggressive police who targeted them last summer while they were simply reporting on peaceful protests; last Wednesday some of the officers seemed to be letting the hordes of intruders into the building when they weren't pausing to take pictures with them.
Watching them was like watching a movie. I even made popcorn at one point. What kept me glued to my TV screen was witnessing the restraint shown to invaders brandishing actual restraints, plus weapons and blatant symbols of hate groups, and the apparent nonchalance toward people who authorities would later discover had brought explosive and incendiary devices with them, and even a gallows.
Of course, they didn't have the same rapport with the Black officers who were there because "blue lives matter" is fundamentally opposed to Blackness. What did surprise me was that no one stopped them from getting inside the building in the first place. With all the security theater we've been forced to live with since 9/11, I had expected the Capitol to be more secure.
The Capitol, the place where for generations decisions have been
made that left countless American citizens dead, diseased, poisoned, wounded, widowed, orphaned,
traumatized, indebted, exploited, uninsured, underpaid, unheard, impoverished,
imprisoned, stranded, enslaved, excluded, disenfranchised, unprotected,
uneducated, and homeless; the place where decisions were made that have
left so many dead around the world because of unjust wars, imperialism, corporate greed,
disregard for climate change, and American arrogance. A place where sometimes the will of the people goes to die because it is at odds with what lobbyists want. A place where sometimes legislators have done the right thing, despite the inherent sleaze, grift, corruption, backroom deals, horse trading, and horrible compromises endemic to the American political system. A temple to the ideals America rarely lives up to, built by people whose lives were destroyed by slavery. But it was targeted last Wednesday not in the interest of any demands for justice or reform, but in an effort to make it the stronghold of a strongman's hateful minions who want to take "their country" back from the rest of us.
Once the mob got inside the Capitol, I was worried about the legislators inside the building. But at the same time, I felt their leadership had brought this crisis upon themselves. Some of them supported the rioters in word and deed and gesture.
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| Josh Hawley saluting the crowd that would later invade the Capitol |
And too many others spent the past 4 years trying to work with a tyrant as if he was an ordinary politician, as if they could reason with an unreasonable man, as if authoritarianism can simply be voted out, as if elections are automatically guaranteed to be free and fair just because of the American flag. And all along they ignored the warnings of experts and seemed to distance themselves from their own members whenever they spoke out about the dictator-in-chief. What happened last Wednesday was the consequence of their hubris. The Republicans who supported the illegitimate president throughout his reign of terror, encouraged their constituents to "stop the steal" since the 2020 election began, and refused to do anything meaningful to stop him are complicit. And so are the leading Democrats whose default position of acquiescence and an avoidance of confrontation (offset by a few meaningless gestures expressing their displeasure) did nothing to slow the momentum that built up to the January 6 coup attempt.
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| What was this supposed to do? |
And isn't it weird that social media companies shut off one of his
primary sources of narcissistic supply before any legislators did (even
though it took them forever)?
This is supposed to be a democracy, not a monarchy. So it's the people's house, the people's furniture, the people's artwork, bought with our tax dollars. It should be obvious that doesn't give anyone the right to use legislative chambers as their personal chamber pot, but that didn't
prevent their disgusting acts of defiance. Besides evidence of having no
home training, there's a psychoanalytical symbolism in that act, and
possibly traces of coronavirus, and definitely traces of DNA that can
help identify whoever did that.
They claimed to be patriotic, yet they stormed into the halls of Congress like a band of marauding pirates. They're the types who use photos of ancient Roman statues as their avatars and Latin usernames when they're on social media, but they acted like pillaging Visigoths.
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| Before you laugh, consider his white nationalist tattoos. |
There was so much destruction left in their wake. And who is left to clean up the mess they made?
Now, in the aftermath, pundits, politicians, and the President-elect have the clueless audacity to proclaim "this is not who we are" again and again as if repeating that lie will make it true. Useless talking heads on cable news have asked why the police were "unprepared" that day, not willing to see the obvious collusion or connect the dots between a well-documented increase in law enforcement agencies being infiltrated by members of hate groups and the current administration's gutting of the agency that used to fight against domestic terrorism. Another bullet in Checkov's gun.
Even the language used to condemn the white supremacists is problematic (a "black mark?" A "dark day?")
You want to use "banana republic" as an insult after what the USA did in support of United Fruit Company in Central America? You want to keep feigning innocence like the white 22-year-old "girl" who tackled a Black teenage boy she accused of stealing the smartphone she carelessly lost?
I am so angry about the meaningless gestures of forced forgiveness, the insult to injury in the goal of "coming together" with people who want me dead. (And want anyone who disagrees with their bizarrely conspiracy theory informed worldview dead as well!)
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| Can we not? |
I can't stand to hear any more false equivalencies between "both sides" the media has been promoting since 2016, giving the made-up excuse of "economic anxiety" as the dictator's supporters' primary motivation. I'm sick of the pleas to consider the "forgotten Americans" who tried to take over last week. How are they forgotten when reporters haven't stopped interviewing them in diners for the past 5 years? Who could be more
forgotten than those of us who can't even assert that our lives matter
without people screaming at us for saying so? The dictator's supporters are given psychological profiles and sympathetic backstories while
our motives are treated as though they are as unknowable as the behavior
of wild animals.
I'm also mad that last Wednesday's madness overshadowed the historic Georgia election. And that more people were arrested for protesting the unjust verdict (not guilty) in the trial of the policeman who shot Jacob Blake on that day than were arrested for the coup attempt. Not to mention that it happened in the middle of an ongoing pandemic, on a day when the death toll was climbing even higher.
Seeing the pictures coming in from the individual rioters was also infuriating. There's something about the glee on their faces that echoes the expressions of the faces of lynch mobs 100 years ago.
It's the self-satisfied smile of a woman who believes that she'll never get caught, and certainly won't face any repercussions if she does. Look how proud they are in the shirts they designed just for the occasion.
How they reveled in the festive melee, live-streaming their rampage on social media for their followers. Some of them were wandering around like tourists at first. They were responding to their leader's invitation to march to the Capitol. All that was missing was him opening up the White House for a raucous celebration, kind of like the one after his idol Andrew Jackson's inauguration.
You don't want to meet your adoring public face to face? You're not throwing them an after party at your place?
As the chaos continued, their father figure appeared in a video, telling them he loves them and they're very special. He told them the go back home while still emphasizing that the election was stolen from him. I should note that he was an absentee father figure, because although he blustered about marching with the crowd to the Capitol, up until that point he had been nowhere to be found.
And then law enforcement played a fun game with them, giving them a 24 hour head start before announcing the manhunt. Their escape was abetted by the airlines that ignored the pleas of flight attendant unions to keep them off their planes. The arrests of the most visible rioters seem symbolic. So many of the perpetrators are still at large, and they're not just buffoons incapable of climbing walls.
There were plenty of militia members in the horde. And I'm sure some of them have used the stealth they learned from their military and law enforcement training and have likely returned to their communities undetected and unsuspected. What they were able to accomplish has only emboldened them and taught them strategies they can use to plan their next coup attempt.
But sure, let's reconcile with these abusive people. Let's let bygones be bygones. Let's ignore the fact that this attack was planned out in the open on social media where everyone could see it, and that there were coordinated attacks the same day at state capital buildings.
There seemed to be a troubling lack of both situational awareness and self-preservation in the response by the legislators to resume the day's proceedings but delay and delay and delay any punishment for those who incited the attempted coup, both in their midst and in the White House.They could have been assassinated or held hostage, their offices were ransacked and papers were stolen, yet something about their reaction reminded me of the band on the Titanic, resigned to their fate. Some seemed too hamstrung by precedents, procedures and traditions to take swift action. Others had to face the monster they created, still unwilling to do anything about it. Maybe they were still dazed by what had just happened to them, but it seemed bizarre and incongruous to me in some ways. And it wasn't lost on me that things would be very different if the electoral college had been abolished and Washington, D.C. had statehood, but those two issues always seem to be put on the back burner or deemed unreasonable or unrealistic. It should be apparent now that both initiatives are overdue. And now the 11th hour impeachment on the horizon, like Twitter's long-delayed account suspension, feels like too little too late.
Last Wednesday was a day of irony, double standards, and hypocrisy. Its events revealed America's continued refusal to reckon with reality. Last Wednesday was a mirror. And America might finally see just how ugly it truly is when it looks in it. Yes, America, this is what you've always been.
This is the inevitable outcome of a culture that believes its own hype and refuses to do better, too high on its own affirmations and platitudes about its supposed exceptionalism to accept any critiques, no matter how valid or urgent. It could become the kind of country it thinks it is and claims to be if only it would face the truth about itself for once. As James Baldwin said, "Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced."
This is the inevitable outcome when a man who seems to have no conscience faces no consequences for his entire life, not even when occupying the highest office in the country. There is something anticlimactic about chickens coming home to roost. The inevitable was bound to happen.
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| Art by Victoria Cassinova |
Links:
Dr. Cornel West Reflects on Trump's Fascist Coup Assault on the Capitol Building and America's Long Catastrophe, The Chauncey DeVega Show
Georgia Runoff with LaTosha Brown, Black Diplomats Podcast
Georgia Runoff with LaTosha Brown, Black Diplomats Podcast
Nothing surprised me. Can't believe we're expected to still act like it's new. Lame and looking for shortcuts. You said it all.
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