The Outraged Majority; The Equivocating Few.
On September 11th, 2001, my wife called from her office and told me to turn on the TV. A plane had hit one of the Twin Towers in New York. It was, as I remember it, the single most chilling experience of my entire adult life. As the events of that day unfolded before my unbelieving eyes, I felt a pang of surreal horror (forgive the cliche) as it became clear that this was an attack on the sovereign power of the United States by the grim visage of theocratic fascism.
At some point, I turned the TV off and wept, feeling drenched in hopelessness and pity and fear and moral exhaustion and a new fury.
As for so many, that day changed my life, even though I watched from afar. I don’t claim that my experience supersedes anyone else’s, especially since I didn’t lose anyone on the planes or in the buildings or the western Pennsylvanian fields or at the Pentagon. Yet, what I saw and continued to see was a uniform movement to repudiate the deeds, but still strike some balance in order to keep criticism from falling on the Christian side of the argument. Pat Robertson, the eel-like head of the 700 Club, and Jerry Falwell, the behemoth blowhard who created Liberty University (a name so ironic, it hardly bears scrutiny) both began looking for a scapegoat to explain away God’s apparent inability to intercede; it was, they agreed, the fault of the spread of homosexuality in America that let God’s wrath fall on New York, Washington and Pennsylvania. They bemoaned the violence, but they also touted “doctrine” that was just as dear to the hearts of Osama Bin Laden and his ilk, too. This bald-faced equivocation showed that these hideous con men likely knew that unless they played their parts just right, the jig would be up for them. Alas, Falwell hardly lived long enough to see his son’s farcical leadership become mired in a sex scandal involving a pool boy even as he endorsed and fell about himself adoring Donald Trump. Robertson is a shell of his former self and looks propped up at best, but still manages to dribble his nonsense.
It took several years for me to see clearly through the miasma of my own upbringing within the evangelical movement to descry that these cretins were no less fiendish than the sullen barbarians hiding in caves in Pakistan who had orchestrated the horrible events of 9/11. They used the same rhetoric to justify the imperialism of the Reagan and Bush administrations, their war against homosexuals and the poor and their carefully but barely concealed racism. But they couldn’t have it both ways for long.
I cannot and do not look at photographs or video clips from the day of, simply because they awake in me that hollowed-out, helplessness and feeling of white-hot outrage mingled with deep sorrow at the terrible loss of life for religious zealotry and martyrdom. As for the rantings of the theocrats here at home, I already knew what they were preaching and didn’t even need to hear it or see it once to know that it would forever be a shameful blemish on their foreheads.
The intervening years provided some relief from the religious barbarism on both sides, as the atheist movement awoke in the aftermath of 9/11. It was and has been for the most part enlightened and brought to the foreground such thinkers and writers as Professor Richard Dawkins, Daniel C. Dennett, Sam Harris and my own hero (if I had heroes) Christopher Hitchens, as well as Ayan Hirsi Ali, A.C. Grayling, Stephen Fry, Stephen Pinker, Victor Stenger, Michael Shermer and Penn Gillette, among many others, who, speaking for a secular society longing to be free of the scapegoating, unctuous numenism and paltry miracle worship of the religious, took it upon themselves to “come out from among them, and be separate”. Faced with this new wave of unbelief, the denizens of television Bible hour shows found to their dismay that people were leaving their churches in flocks. The monstrosity of child rape within the protected chasms of the Catholic church also gained a steady and piercing beam of attention, as well.
In the meantime, despite the faltering and possibly hamstrung attempts of the Bush administration to make satisfying ends to the War in Iraq and Afghanistan, it seemed as though we were progressing as a nation toward a more generally enlightened period, both politically and ecumenically. The conversations were no less polarized, but the topics were worthy of discussion and argument. Humanity was trying to do away with the ridiculous free check it had written to militant monotheistic power ,mantled in a blind attempt to “respect the faithful”. Free thinking men and women were standing up for the secular ideals of free speech and free inquiry once again.
Luckily, I had managed to forget the feelings I had that September day. I didn’t need to summon them in order to work up anger at the voices of credulity and of diminished (or willfully cast away) critical faculties around us. As I wrote my column for the local paper, I attempted to square the circle by saying (sometimes euphemistically or via cliche) what I hoped the local readers needed to hear despite their obviously right-wing leanings. (I don’t pretend to have made much difference). I’ve outlined elsewhere my own position that the Trump supporters and movement are the direct spawn of the tea party movement. I hold it as a small celebration that I was attacked by one of these mentally stunted egomaniacs in my place of work. This subnormal yokel threatened my job, my family and my safety, because I had challenged his mental health in a missive written on social media, and decided it was okay to walk into a local library and spit invective at me. It shook me then, but I didn’t yet see in this madman’s behavior the foreshadowing of lunacy within the Right that was certainly on its way.
Then, on January 6th, 2021 after months of hotly contested election results and the inception of what is now being called “The Big Lie” by the press and the media, a crowd of purposely incited goons, slathered in ‘patriotic’ face paint and draped in flags and Trump paraphernalia, stormed the U.S. Capitol at Donald Trump’s (and his cronies) behest and killed a police officer, attempted to find and kill the Vice President and Speaker of the House and others and did countless millions of dollars of damage to life, limb and liberty and the building itself.
As my horrified attention was drawn to this siege, I once again felt the hollowing terror of seeing part of my own nation attacked by mindless ruffians and openly hoodwinked Q-conspiracy swillers. Instead of the face of Islamo-fascist lunatics, or as we used to call them, terrorists, the visage of the attack was plainly American, uniformly white and clearly playing the part of the victimhood and white rage militia-ism that for so long had been at the bottom of the deck of the United States’ national security list of most deadly and dangerous enemies. Now, the enemies were us, they were roused by the mammal America had elected president in 2016 and they were, it seemed, a would-be junta, hell bent on keeping this man in power at all costs.
As the days and weeks passed since 1/6, those Republican members of Congress who had stood in solidarity with Trump dissembled behind an argument for “unity and bipartisanship” especially since they had lost their majority in the Senate in runoff elections in Georgia. The rightfully elected 46th president, Joe Biden, got right to work on January 20th, and in the meantime, Donald Trump had suffered the cat o’nine tails whiplash of losing his platform on Twitter and being impeached in the House for the second time in his term and finally, leaving the White House. He promptly retreated to Tampa, Florida, to await the postponed Senate trial, so that Congress could get to the necessary work of approving Biden’s picks for his cabinet in the meantime.
Then, on February 9th, as the House impeachment leaders began their opening arguments, they played a 13 minute video of the events of 1/6/21 alongside audio and video of Donald Trump’s tweets on that day and his remarks at a “rally” in Washington that were obviously meant to incite the rioters to take the reply significant succession process of certification of Electoral College votes and dash it against the rocks of impotent political outrage, conspiracy theory fairy tales and a false line that claimed that the election had been stolen.
By the end of the opening day of the trial, some Republican Senators were visibly abashed by the video and the opening arguments leading to a vote to continue the trial, while others who have made their lives about being Trump sycophants, like Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley, et. al. admitted to reporters that the former president’s defense team had rendered their arguments into steaming piles of excrement but refused to capitulate, nonetheless. These same Senators looked away from the video and the personal testimony of one House impeachment manager who said that he had family in the building on that day and had watched with horror as his peers called loved ones to tell them that they were about to be killed by foaming, wretched hordes of Trump-loving zombies. The opening arguments were enough to have the vote pass and the trial continued and though many pundits now say they believe that Trump will not be convicted, the prosecution isn’t playing this particular trial with kid gloves.
Some commentators have suggested that, if successful, the prosecution will put the Republicans mentioned above in the unhappy position of having to vote for their beloved former president and then losing the votes of their constituents, or voting against their dear leader, and admitting that they were wrong, and are in fact opportunist hypocrites and deserve to be expelled for their support of his ridiculous claims. Sooner or later, they will face the same fate as the religious leaders who found a means to scapegoat the destruction of 9/11 as part of God’s will: forgotten or despised or both.
The interim, as Hamlet points out, is ours. It remains to be seen how things will turn out. The equivocation and equanimity of those supporters will eventually be their undoing, even if it doesn’t happen this week. Polls suggest that more than half of the American public have turned against Trump, meaning that some former supporters have been so aggrieved by his actions that they have changed their stance. It is only a small majority, but it is enough to show those in the Senate acting as jurors in this particular trial that they are, if nothing else, also to blame and therefore are also on trial in the minds of the public.
We are right to feel hollowed out by these events committed by our ‘brethren’. America’s sovereignty was saved by the power of the right to vote. The attack on the capitol is an attack on the heart of our society’s freedoms and rights of succession. We’re not out of the woods yet, and we may only be at the beginning of a terribly long, cold war with ourselves, but the slight majority may become a larger one, as we see and follow the events, seen close up, that prove that the fatuous lunatic raging alone in his Tampa palace (and his lickspittle followers at all levels) should never see the inside of a public office again, unless it is to face sentencing for their misdeeds, crimes and misdemeanors.
