Insultingly Ignorant Nonsense

      That describes all of the comments I have received so far to yesterday's post.

      I stayed at home most of 6 January 2021, with the TV on while I worked.  I watched the events live, usually with the sound down but not always.  I know what I saw: chaos, mobs, doors being forced, windows being broken, chanted threats.  The rhetoric at the rally earlier had come just short of inciting violence.

      Since I had watched extensive coverage of the BLM demonstrations and subsequent rioting in Indianapolis earlier in the year, it was pretty familiar, and the gradual sorting-out of the crowd as the most violently-inclined moved themselves out from the people who were only there to wave signs and make noise was familiar, some of the sign-wavers being swept up in the moment.

      I work in television.  I am aware of the context-limiting nature of TV cameras, and channel-hopped, looking for wide views.  I know what I saw that day.  I wrote about it that day.  I wrote about it the next day.  I wrote about it the day after that.  I stand by what I wrote.

      I saw it happen while it happened.  Not an edit.  The cameras available for live coverage that day didn't catch everything but they didn't add anything.  So what should I believe, my own eyes or the retconned fictions of the Right-wing punditry?  (Or for that matter, of the Left; despite a lot of speculation, to date no clear evidentiary line has been drawn from the Trump Administration or the rally speakers to the subsequent riot and insurrection, and given the chaos of that day, the lack of cooperation from witnesses and some missing call logs, there may never be.  On that, I have my opinion -- they were egging the rioters on and hoped to put a scare into Congress -- but no, I can't prove it.)

      I'm going with what I saw.

      I'm going with my observations about who was serving up distorted versions of the events afterward and what those distortions were.  Fox pundits and the news providers to their Right were peddling bullshit and politicians on that side, after a short period of shock and a few condemnations, joined in and pushed the fantasy even farther.  Pundits on the Left exhibited a kind of rueful glee, but the fantasy content was much lower.  Actual mainstream media, in their actual news segments, generally stuck to the facts.

      You are welcome to your own opinion.  You don't get your own set of facts.  What happened, happened.*

      For the record: no Trumpist Republican will ever get my vote.  Insurrectionists and fellow-travelers don't get votes from me, not now and not ever.  If you vote for this vileness, you are voting to put an end to America's great experiment in popular rule.  Don't the Founders and Framers deserve better than a descent into Caesarism?  Don't we owe it to to them and to our posterity to not let it come crashing down in exactly the way 18th-Century critics predicted it would?  The French had the Terror followed by Napoleon; let us learn from history, and not follow that path.

     The economist Adam Smith comforted a friend, "There is a great deal of ruin in a nation."  Things can go on almost as before even while the underpinnings fall to pieces.  Rome outlasted her Republic by some five hundred years.  Nevertheless, there's nothing good to be gained by trying to hurry it along.
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* In a telephone conversation about an entirely different topic with my oldest niece last night -- she's a retired Nurse-Practitioner, who specialized in difficult intensive-care work -- she pointed out that human beings are not wired up to process really terrible news all in one go; people have to hear it over and over, and the worse the news it, the more times it may take.  In some cases, it may take nearly twenty encounters with the same facts before the hearer can accept them.  An attempted coup in the service of people willing to tell outrageous lies in order to hold on to power is very bad news indeed.  Denial is a normal part of the grieving process -- but it does eventually run out.