The Love Bomb
What if you could roll up love and throw it like a grenade?
Where is the chariot of reason you ride into the fray?
How come we can’t arm ourselves with the softest bullets ever shot?1
January Sixth raises fundamental problems for any American who sees democracy under threat:
There is the problem that old divisions about what it means to be an American, to be human, and to govern society have been exposed again, widened anew, and re-fortified too. Barbed wire, a trench filled with alligators, sharpshooters all around . . . nothing bi-partisan or neighborly happens in the border between left and right, red and blue. All non-trolls have cause to stay on their side.
There is the problem that while people die and turn to dust, ideas live on and poison the thing they once nourished. The beautiful idea of America--checks and balances, a more perfect union, all people created equal--now spurs oligarchs, self-interest, and tribalism. A bad king might have, on occasion, given way to a good one. Democracy decays into fascism and the fascists know the chemistry of that decay.
Which is to say the problem is what Yeats articulated:
The best lack all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity.
Those with conviction on the left coddle themselves, confuse academic politics with actual battles for justice, and imagine “identity” as an antenna for slights rather than a muscle you build in service. And this intensity pales to those on the right who would hang the vice president, who presume Jesus loved automatic weapons, and who equate a shit taken in The Capitol to Washington surviving Valley Forge.
The best? Where are they?
It would help if VICE and CNN and NBC and all the rest hosted a one-time “on all channels” broadcast to give election experts time to show why it is impossible to steal a national election and for a first-year law student to review why every court case disputing the election’s integrity has been thrown out. A kind of “put up or shut up” broadcast. (Invite Fox too. They won’t come, but their refusing will increase the audience.)
But I find that holding on to the truth helps. Not just the truth shaped by facts but truth exposed by the broken mold viability. That is, why did the Democrats change millions of ballots for Biden but not, in the process, also steal more seats in the House and Senate? And why steal six states when it would have been easier to just grab Florida and Ohio? And how, even during Trump’s term, did the left/deep-state grow powerful enough to pull off the impossible without anyone finding an email or a text message about their plans? Like imagining every hospital in the world has signed up to pretend that Covid is happening, the vessel of such claims crack under any inspection.
(I have always been struck by how social media before January 6th told the MAGA crowd to show up and fight like hell which they all understood that to mean “stay away” yet Antifa understood this to mean, “show up and dress like Trumpers.”)
It helps too to view social and historical truth through two lenses, one of the now, the other of a species long history.
Right now, our job is to make today better for one person. Never mind the ship going down, get a meal to someone before it is time for all of us to swim.
While through the long, long, run of time you see that people managed to live and love and carry on even amidst the most horrible of circumstances. Yes, the failure of the American experiment, if that is what we are seeing, means people who might have lived will die and people who might have thrived will suffer. But, well, at least for a brief moment America, at its best anyway, moved some part of the world into the light or gave us each a sense of what the light could look like. As a species, we might have done worse.
Can we still do better? I don’t know and I am often led to doubt it.
It half helps to remember that those people fighting their way up the steps of The Capitol really thought they were doing the right thing. They are doing wrong, but they do not want to be doing wrong. They want to be good. Maybe that will lead their grandchildren to something better.
In the meantime, what helps the most is to remember that I will not become like them.
Lock up the guilty. Put Mr. Trump in The Hague for crimes against humanity. I will not weep if Roger Stone chokes on his hat.
But I won’t pick up a gun or break into a government building or spread my feces there. Not because my side lost. However impotent it is against my enemies, for myself I prefer the love bomb.
Some things are better to die for than to kill for. The rule of law is one of these.
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Here are two long articles on January 6th worth reading
How Does This End?
Trump’s Next Coup Has Already Begun
See The Flaming Lips