Editor’s Note: Strange day at the farm. Satellite connectivity was sporadic and required long conversations with service agents who do not work near here by a few thousand miles. So, news coverage of the remarkable emotions abroad in the land were punctuated by long sessions reduced to old DVR’s, originally purchased to provide coverage when I bought the place more than a decade ago.

We watched “Cocoon,” a marvelous film directed by Ron Howard. The stars are all dead now, but greats like Don Ameche and Wilford Brimley and Hume Cronan made appearances as old men confronting a visitation of aliens and the possibility of life everlasting. Fun. Then an hour on the phone with Satellite Service. Together, the joint forces of Directv Offshore Service and loyal customer managed to bludgeon the satellite into cooperation, the news popped back on. It was quite a transition, and added to the sense of unease in the few days left before the inauguration. The House impeachment hearings set the tone yesterday, and that was loud and fierce. I am hoping that things settle down a bit shortly, but there are things in motion. Some of them are seen, and others not. Talk about more than 20,000 National Guard troops at the Capitol adds to the drama. We will see how it goes. Meanwhile, Marlow is doing what he does best.

Healing

In November 2016, at the age of 228, our Constitutional Republic was awarded via an open and free election a kind of leader, one whose kind hadn’t been seen since the 1830s. He was one crafty boy.

We the citizens of this Republic spent the following four years among the media lefties and righties, the parties of Republicans and Democrats, and social media partisans of all stripes, colors, and fantasies shooting at one another. We learned how to dodge their many word bullets. Some would say that it was good exercise. I am not so sure, since a kind of battle fatigue had set in, and automata responses to any random stimuli led to the unprogrammed heinous stupid we saw on January 6, 2021.

On that date early that afternoon, the President’s dead-ender supporters breached the first barriers around US Capitol. What is surprising is that this event occurred per a NY Times reporter’s timeline while the President was still speaking some two miles away on the Mall. It took around 90 minutes for them from this point to breach the building. When these schmucks arrived in the various small offices in the building and in its lower chamber, it was a moment of joy tinged with a bit of tiredness. You could see it on their transfixed faces. Under the main rotunda you could see via press and partisan social media posted photos and videos that it was crowded with Red Hat folk taking selfies, people shouting and waving flags. Hell, even several of the Capitol Police joined in the merriment, snapping selfies with these dirtbags and providing directions to the invaders where high value targets might be found.

While it was happening live, I was waiting for some speech from the Speaker’s rostrum or office podium to signify that something really significant had begun because my whole childhood had been marked by the great historic speeches of Lincoln, Roosevelt and Kennedy whose most significant passages we memorized in school. Silence.

All we got was photos. What the photos gave us was a wordless “Here we are.” That was it. They soon went back outside leaving the place trashed with some taking souvenirs and stuff that they shouldn’t. The crowd outside yelled and cheered, the partisans raised their trophies, shouted festive things, and flashed thumbs up. Yet these pictures en toto were not worth a 100, let alone, a 1000 words.

Social media like television conveys images, but the succession from one frame to another hinders a sense of finer grained resolution and understanding. Everything happens fast, but nothing actually happens. Each story on these essentially “newsy” feeds is “breaking” until it is displaced by the next one. So, we got hit by wave upon wave that day but never saw the ocean. It takes words and concepts to lay out the shape and significance of these events. We got none. Just tsunami after tsunami of stimuli on an endless loop. Watching those feeds that day was little more than looking at folks who were also looking at pictures and videos with us. It was a collective trance we willingly fell into. I am still slowly crawling back out of it.

Unfortunately, when the yahoos with their swag exited the Capitol, there was no champagne to celebrate. Apparently, no one was assigned that task in the STORM OPORDER.

We had been told that permanent political warfare was the normal condition for our Republic in the tech-supercharged 21st century. We discovered that a Resistance was not just a WW II thing nor only a local DC beltway phenomenon but a nationwide one. We learned new, exciting words like networks, conspiracy theories, deplorables, dark web, low and high info voters and so on. We also were told we needed liberation. And that it would not come from waiting passively for it. It had to be taken.

Yippee.

Will we remember these partisans with hats of red? How so? Here’re some starter atmospherics — Sticking close to their desk top computers and smartphones, if they could pay for one, they spent their nights listening to video messages and reading 140-character long calls to action. They were cryptic — covfefe — and at times wryly poetic in a nervous hospital kind of “funny” way. All of the main man’s messages were marked by his followers with “likes” and thumbs-ups since he was in their eyes a man of legendary courage. He became their hero. His opponents claimed he was a closeted monarchist, then a despot, then an authoritarian, and finally an evil totalitarian. Regardless his beloveds were so strongly anti-elitist that any valid critiques bounced off them like so many dandelion seeds floating on spring’s zephyrs.

In the aftermath of January 6th, some say that this was a children’s war of liberation of the Capitol. Barf. They go on to say it was a predictable violent result of the nation’s bitter divisions, and that all we need is national reconciliation. I think that that prescription is repressing the true central bottom line here. If reconciliation means compassion and respect for all those who demonstrated outside the Capitol but did not enter it or deface its exterior, I’m good with that. But, we must remember what happened inside, find, charge, convict, and imprison those who were there and solemnly swear that “we” must not allow this to occur again. That means we must fix ourselves and this country. This means specifics in legislation.

Calls for passive amorphous healing are bullshit. Using a temporary truce in our beltway political wars to pass wedge issue laws will only start the loading up of snake and nape for subsequent future mission drops on the dead hands of the despot du jour.

PS The contradictory infosphere we have lived in during the past four years was due to an extreme political and ideological discombobulation — a rigid one with daily predictable structured confusions. We should have had a TV Guide to save us some time switching channel feeds.

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