The late comedian Red Skelton had a humble way with an audience but a wicked sense of humor about the rich and powerful. When tyrannical Columbia Pictures head Harry Cohn — the man who turned Margarita Carmen Cansino into Rita Hayworth and Marilyn Novak into Kim Novak — passed away, his funeral was well-attended, to which Skelton remarked, “It just goes to show you: Give the people what they want and they’ll turn out for it.”
Jan. 5, the people of Georgia turned out to send two Democrats — Jon Ossoff and the Rev. Raphael Warnock — to the United States Senate, giving the Dems a one-vote majority in that body.
Jan. 6, President Donald J. Trump’s cult followers turned out, too, taking four years of disproportionate white, working-class grievance to the Capitol, where they acted like thugs — disrupting the Electoral College vote counting that would once again certify Joe Biden as president-elect; running through hallways, banging on doors, stealing mail and podiums, breaking windows and furniture; and generally disrespecting the place and the people who work there as their actions led to four deaths and countless injuries. Of all the terrible images, the one I can’t get out of my head is of one of the MAGAts posing with his red MAGA hat on a statue. If someone did that in my house, I would say, “Hats are for closets. Yours will be handed back to you as soon as you leave.”
Complicity in this begins with Inciter in Chief Trump, who has finally been forced to admit that a new administration will take over Jan. 20 while still clinging to the fantasy that the election he won by a landslide was stolen from him; that he’s for peace and law and order; that his supporters are “special” and that he “loves” them. He didn’t win. The election wasn’t stolen. He’s all about chaos. His supporters are not special, and he doesn’t love them. He needs them. All narcissists need an audience.
The mixed messaging, the “look at what he does not what he says” excuses won’t work this time. This time a line has been crossed and it cannot be recrossed. There’s no going back. (So much so that the conversation about 25th Amendmenting him — that is removing him via Vice President Mike Pence and the Cabinet that’s now fleeing — is picking up speed, endorsed by no less than the Republican-leaning National Association of Manufacturers (NAM). You know when you lose the business community, you’ve already lost Wall Street, which already looking forward to a Democratic administration.
I doubt Pence is going to take up the 25th Amendment, but House Speaker Nancy Pelosi could move to have Trump impeached again and then wait to send the articles of impeachment to the Democratic-controlled Senate once Ossoff and Warnoke arrive, post Trump’s departure. That way she gets a conviction, a convicted Trump can’t run for president again and the Republicans who are now shedding him like a winter coat in Miami get rid of him without having to worry that he’ll be back for their nomination. (Not that we’ll ever be rid of his opinions. But it is possible that he can be marginalized like Sarah Palin.
Jan. 6 was also the Feast of the Epiphany, fittingly as we’ve certainly had one. We heard much talk in the Senate, especially from Republicans — who are now in deep trouble for enabling Trump for four years — that this violence is not who we are. Yes, it’s true that everyone is more than his worst day. And it’s also true, in the words of the novelist George Eliot, that it’s never too late to be what you might have been.
But this violence is precisely who we are, born of white, male entitlement. For more than 200 years they’ve ruled the roost. Now they’re no longer cock of the walk but instead of reinventing themselves in the country of reinvention, they’d rather play barbarians at the gates where they were welcomed by white Capitol Police who saw in them their own reflection. (Had those been Black Lives Matter protesters, it would’ve been a different story.)
White, male entitlement isn’t just a keen part of America’s past, however. It’s central to the carnage of America’s present. It’s given Trump a base, kept the Republicans in power, provided the rich with tax cuts, given social media an ax to grind and some in the professional media one whale of a daily soap opera while enabling China to become the most powerful nation on earth. Many have benefited from the outsized, amorphous rage of mostly white, mostly male, mostly working-class people, who have never understood that they’ve been played for chumps.
Still, manipulating a mob is like trying to ride a tiger: You can’t control it. That’s what we learned Jan. 6. That was our epiphany. We also learned something else beyond all the usual blather about America being a beacon of democracy. We learned that the one thing that makes us Americans is not freedom, an overused, misguided word since none of us is really, totally free, but the law to which we adhere. That law, the constitution, is what we profess. Indeed, it’s the only thing we as disparate individuals have in common.
What we were reminded of Jan. 6 is that no one is above that law. No one.