‘It Was Wild’

 

Last week, a sitting U.S. President, loser of a recent national election, urged his followers to show their support of him, by marching on the Capitol and showing their belief that the recent election result was a mistake. He saw the show of numbers that was planned on January 6th, apparently orchestrated to express strong public disbelief in the validity of the election result amongst his supporters, as a joyful event: ‘It’ll be wild!’ 

Well, it certainly was exactly that. It was wild. 

The U.S. Republic, from its buildings and its design, to its Constitution, is designed on the Roman plan. Its emphasis on democracy, individualism and on the rights of its citizens, is also a Classical foundation. 

To protest against the validity of a process that takes place in these conceptual spheres and physical buildings of justice and legislation, you have to speak the language and look the part. 

The 45th President’s attempts to appear and be Presidential were somewhat erratic and impulse-based. His communicative style was informal, and his irreverence appealed to his supporters, who were frequently approving of his raucous, bawdy, crude and vulgar presentation. He was seen as the embodiment of individualism and praised as an original. 

His supporters, however, the most visible ones who stormed the Capitol and climbed walls and broke windows and doors, definitely breached not only the security parameters of the building which represents U.S. governance, but the limits of tolerance extended to him by even members of his own Republican Party. 

Ivanka Trump initially attempted to describe the protestors as ‘American Patriots’, but deleted her comment as the footage of the violence was visually broadcast throughout the world. If you are focused on appearances, and what PR and marketing executives call ‘optics’, you realize it’s not a good look to be calling people ‘patriots’ when they are desecrating and defacing public buildings and historically significant statuary and items of furniture which are of symbolic importance to the people. 

There are a lot of theatrics involved in coups, insurrections and insurgencies. Trump is quoted as saying later that day that he wished his supporters didn’t ‘look so low class’. Many of them were brought in by bus from the regional areas of the country, and had only imperfectly understood the principles of the glorious revolution that their leaders had planned. And overestimated their leader’s seriousness when he promised he would ‘be there with them’. 

On a basic level, they were told that they were going to be making themselves heard, that they were going to ‘conquer the Hill’, that they were going to ‘fight for their country’, that they were marching to ‘take back their country’ and ‘occupy the Capitol because it belongs to them’. 

These foot soldiers were going to protest the election, because under the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment, they are entitled to express their opinion, and entitled to engage in peaceful protest. They were armed, because under the U.S. Constitution’s Second Amendment, they are entitled to carry weapons for self defense.  

But ropes and ties which can be used to restrain people and take them hostage are not weapons of defense; and a hanging gallows is nothing but a threat of assassination, and flag posts and fire extinguishers used as clubs to beat policemen and guards were not used in defense but in assault. 

Some elements of the mob came prepared to intimidate, wound and kill the perceived enemy, including lawmakers Pelosi and Pence, as leaders of the administration they considered fraudulent in their practices. 

The mayhem that ensued looked as if it was a film, rather than a real event. It looked tribal, and primitive, as if the building had suddenly been co-opted for a giant cosplay event. It looked like scenes from the French Revolution, except in this era people had mobile phones to record their acts of  ‘patriotism’, and through which their presence in an insurrection can now be traced, and held against them. 

Attempts to glorify what happened over the hours of January 6th are not likely to succeed. It was too public, and too crude, too obviously orchestrated - and too wild. 

The organizers had apparently lost control of the situation, and now have subsequently lost control of the narrative about who is right and who is wrong. Their chosen form of assertion of their rights lacked any balancing measure of any sense of responsibility. 

Howling like a wild wolf in the seat of legislative process made one vegan man famous. But the caption to his meme embodying American individualism might well have been written by the poet Walt Whitman: 

‘I too am not a bit tamed. I too am untranslatable. I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world’. 

The 45th President has been praised for not starting a war during his term in office. He has not started external wars. But he has incited civil war, within the country, fracturing a divided nation over which he presided, to the point where neither side respect nor trusts the other, and every act and word is seen as politicized and partisan.

Flash Point

What happened on January 6th in the U.S. Capitol was the equivalent of what psychologists call a ‘Flash Point’. This is the point at which a conflict of values or an internal or underlying struggle becomes violent, and emerges into the open in a way that cannot be glossed over or denied. 

It was difficult to look away, or turn the sound off, as video footage was broadcast on every news channel, with the visual evidence being decorated with lavish amounts of subjective and biased opinion by journalists and media reporters. 

Some called it an insurrection, some a peaceful protest that was sabotaged by other more radicalized elements. Two people could view the same footage and frame it in completely different ways. 

The 45th President’s daughter deleted a tweet in which she had called the protestors ‘American Patriots’, and urging them not to resort to violence. Even she could clearly see by then that people who were destroying government property - smashing windows and breaking down doors, making death threats to the existing lawmakers and defiling the statuary and buildings with excrement - could not be described as engaging in ‘patriotic’ behaviour. 

Just like a person who deliberately destroys a home cannot in truth be called a ‘home maker’. 

The right of the public to question the decisions made by elected officials is recognized and upheld in a democracy. Indeed, the right to freedom of speech and lawful protest is protected by the First Amendment of the United States Constitution. 

The Second Amendment protects the rights of citizens to ‘bear arms’, meaning  the right to carry weapons like guns and rifles and shotguns, with suitable licenses, for self protection. 

These weapons are permitted in the hands of U.S. citizens. And the normalization of violence in their culture has occurred as a result, and is celebrated in their film industry and the popular culture media networks which the U.S. globally dominates. 

The protest that took place on January 6th in the Capitol took some hours to reach a flashpoint. But it was relatively easy to trace the underlying buildup of tension which led to it being entirely foreseeable, in the two months since the November election results, which were contested continually and publicly by the loser. His declarations undermined people’s belief in the validity of their own  processes of governance. 

In speech after speech, sound bite after sound bite, this leader of a nation of 330 million citizens vehemently declared his belief that the election was ‘stolen from him by fraud’. This was his justification for mobilizing his followers and encouraging them to ‘take their country back’. 

People rallying outside the Capitol were heard saying the building was theirs. They wanted to show their ownership of it, by overrunning it, by disrupting its processes, disrespecting the work and lives of the people within it, and threatening those who protected it. 

Ordinary Americans amongst the rioters were seen in casual clothes, rifling through documents left on desktops in the room where the votes were being counted, putting their feet up on Speaker Pelosi’s desk, leaving handwritten notes for lawmakers, stealing laptop computers, and documenting what they were doing, including defacing and taking selfies with statuary and against the backdrop of paintings from U.S. history. 

One of those rifling through files and documents said they were ‘looking for “Intelligence”’. This interesting comment suggests that there were multiple aspects to the planning of this event, and a number of different kinds of perpetrators: a mob, hungry for food, opportunity, freedom or justice; political and corporate figures - including senators and lawmakers - who funded voter dissatisfaction and encouraged the protestors, by bussing or flying them into the Capitol on the day; and peaceful protestors who genuinely believed that their Democracy was being violated by fraudulent voting processes. The mob got the public attention, but the political and corporate figures behind them do not want the recognition (and the damaging consequences) for their support of what is now being called ‘incitement to riot’. 

In many revolutions and uprisings throughout human history, we see this kind of behaviour. The mob delight in degrading the sanctity of respected spaces, mocking and calling into disrepute dignified activities, and forcefully lowering people - who have been seen as ‘elite and superior’ to common people - into the mud, and humiliating them. 

There was even a noose and hanging scaffold (a supposedly non-working symbolic visual prop) which was seen in the vicinity, accompanied by yells of ‘hang Mike Pence’, the Republican Party Vice President, who was among the earliest to be taken to safety, for refusing to declare the election a fraud, thereby legitimizing the transition of power from one party, his own, to another. 

Many outraged commentators condemned the protesters, and described what happened as ‘not being a reflection of us’. 

But one of the U.S.’s most beloved poets, Walt Whitman, gave us a perfect caption to accompany the bizarre sight of one of the protestors, bedaubed with tricolor paint, and decked in animal skins, a self-described ‘Shaman’ loudly yelling in the room where the democratic processes of government are supposed to take place in dignity: 

‘I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable, I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.’ 

Flash points occur when the parts of us which are ‘not a bit tamed’ erupt into the social discourse. Like a child telling its parents that they are not going to obey their dictates, but will choose their own way; like an employee handing in their resignation when their requests for improvement are not heeded. 

The outgoing President’s refusal to recognise his public loss is in keeping with his own consistent mockery of those he calls ‘failures’ and ‘losers’. It is a psychological pathology which many people in public life possess. Self belief is an important part of their appeal, and surrounded only by their supporters and parasitic entities who seek to enrich themselves while their leader is in power, they uphold that belief in the face of everything that threatens it, especially evidence based in facts which (of course) they call into doubt at every opportunity.

He has now been served a vote of ‘no confidence’ in a recent election. And the recent public conduct of his followers has amplified that loss. No amount of gloss and gilt can shine this flash point into something admirable. 

Trump’s most telling comment, in my opinion, was that he wished his supporters did not ‘look so low class’. Perhaps he could have attracted a higher class of supporter by lifting his own leadership game to a better level.

None Other

Sometimes it is best not to look too far  under the smooth surface of a long term friendship. The wisest people understand this, but usually only after age has mellowed them, and sandpapered and refined the spiky demands and adrenaline-fuelled ambitions of youth. 

Our expectations and their degrees of relationship to reality are a huge factor in our collective lives. If grossly unrealistic, and fuelled by egoism, the disappointment of unfulfilled hopes can feel abrupt and serrated, unexpectedly cutting us off from a line we had thought secure because it was untested. 

A realization of this kind happened to a friend of mine, because of something a person told him in confidence. His wife had been nominated for a major award. And she had no knowledge of it. But he had been told of it. Because the committee had been so surprised, that a person who had been nominated by the candidate in good faith to write a testimonial as a referee for her would have been so apparently off-hand and casual about it. 

It was for a National honour, you see. People throughout the nation were asked to nominate people, in various categories of achievement, anonymously. And people who received a lot of recommendations were then further taken up for consideration by the committee, who investigated all the claims and assertions, and asked for detailed character references - not only from the candidate’s employers but from their peers - that final court of tribalist judgment. 

The candidate in question, the wife of my friend, was an outstanding person of colour. Her curriculum vitae, seen in full, was a thing of beauty, unfolded like a painted fan. Her certified career path was a long, starry list of ‘firsts’: First Class Honours, first person from South Asia to graduate in her subject from Oxford, first woman from her nation to be internationally published, first woman from her family to enter into the corporate world. She was peerless.

And the immigration policies were such in that progressive era that it would look good to have a woman of colour, burnished bright, on the national Honours list. If Australia had still been calling them Queen’s Birthday Honours that would have been a different matter. The candidate would have sent a polite refusal to the proffered tribute, being proudly anti-colonial in her views. No way would she have wanted to be called a ‘Dame’ of the British Empire. 

And so the lengthy process of selection continued through its various checks and balances, unknown to all the considered candidates, until the peer review stage was reached. And at that point, four out of the five referees responded with a chorus of glowing recommendations and personal reminiscences, barely containing their statements within the indicated word limits. 

But, (and this is a big discourse marker), one referee, self-described as a personal friend of her family for 20 years, wrote only a few brief, understated words, saying ‘This lady doesn’t need any help from me’. The committee were at a loss to understand this laconic comment. Could the national traits of terseness and abbreviation in the vernacular republic be operating at cross purposes with the committee’s requirements as explained? What sort of support was this? Was it self-deprecating irony? Of the ‘this person needs no introduction from me’ variety at a Rotary International Luncheon meeting? 

Deliberations ensued, and eventually the referee was courteously asked by follow up letter to go against his own ingrained habits and expand on his statements, until what was deemed to be a suitable standard of positive endorsement was reached. 

The candidate received her well-deserved national honour at the age of 50. She looked wonderful in her colorful national robes at the ceremony of investiture, where other people in their Sunday best - from journalists hosting infotainment shows to public-minded people who had cleaned racially and sexually offensive graffiti off the walls of Australia’s cities - joined her and her family at the sandstone colonial home beside the harbour, in a congratulatory haze on a beautiful, clear winter day. 

It rained a little, in the afternoon, but the photographs were full of colour and life. There was a particularly gorgeous one, with the candidate serenely seated near the sandstone fountain, with every pleat of her silk garment perfectly in place. 

It took a quarter of a century before the person who recommended her was honored in his own field. It was sad, really, because by that time the photographs were not so beautiful to look at, in the annual email roundup the family sent out to all their friends and acquaintances, celebrating their many experiences and achievements.