On a Painting Hung Upside-Down

1.

It was 20 years ago when my partner remodeled the corner office in my law firm.  A rather cantankerous senior lawyer had been ousted after years of drawing his full share of firm profits without accounting for much in the way of billable time.  (I think that in his last two years, he wrote down a total of eight or nine hours time for billing in that interval.)  The attorney who had engineered, as it were, the ouster of the senior partner took over his office located on the sunny side of the building.  This corner office was spacious with two windows opening onto different aspects of sidewalk and parking lot.  Beige-yellow wallpaper brightened the big square room.

The office’s new occupant was an ambitious fellow in his mid-forties, gregarious, with many friends who were highly paid executives at the local Fortune 500 firm.  He determined that the new regime, as it were, required a complete remodel of the corner office.  Wallpaper was stripped and replaced with a less gaudy color, still blonde to exploit the light gracing the room at midday and late afternoon.  New carpet was installed and, remarkably enough, a contractor was hired to create a slight, but perceptible, tilt in the room’s ceiling – I never understood why this was desirable.  Several tasteful Piranesi engravings, architectural fantasies of Roman ruins, were hung on the wall next to my partner’s desk, flanking an elaborate tinted etching of a parsimonious-looking Victorian widow in a purplish bonnet glaring at an attorney who was himself poring over a large manorial map.  A scrivener in a bright green waistcoat was scribbling some notes and a coy-looking, half-naked cherub or goddess fashioned from plaster was set atop a glass-fronted bookcase.  The name of this delicately colored engraving was “The Right of Way” and the picture referred to the fact that my partner was a prominent real estate lawyer.  

These appurtenances were purchased from a local interior decorator.  This woman was the stylish wife of a local physician of excellent repute.  She operated a studio in an old mansion a couple blocks off Main Street.  Once the mansion had been a wealthy man’s home, but later it had been converted to a funeral parlor, and, then, a photography studio.  The place had big windows and, when I strolled by, I could see the work tables heavily burdened with scraps of wallpaper, samples of carpet, and big catalogues.  The interior decorator had beautified many office suites in the headquarters of the Fortune 500 company and she had exquisite taste.  She was also quite expensive, a factor that caused the other lawyers in my firm to grumble at the exorbitance of the remodel in the corner office. I think it was the ostentatious slanted ceiling that most earned our sotto voce derision.

A large, colorful artwork adorned the wall next to my partner’s desk.  This was the piece de resistance in the room’s decorative scheme.  I don’t know how to exactly describe this big framed image – it was not exactly a painting, not really a print nor a collage, but some kind of mixture of these forms.  The art work was comprised of a number of lozenge-shaped cells each colored brightly blue or purple or turquoise.  These modules of color were separated from one another by raised gilded strips, somewhat the way leaded bars hold panes of stained glass in a church window.  Some calligraphic curlicues decorated the edges of the picture.  The thing was big and square, four feet by three, and expensively framed.  Everyone admired the picture.  It was the sort of abstract art enjoyed even by those skeptical of modern paintings.

The picture had been in place for almost half a year when someone noticed that the decorative scribbles around the bottom edge of the cells of bright color were, in fact, musical notes arrayed on staves faced by a treble clef.  These notes and the clef governing them were upside-down.  At first, we wondered whether the artist had intentionally inverted the musical notes, as if, perhaps, to render a familiar form unfamiliar and abstract – a little like the way that the artist Georg Baselitz painted his figures to be hung upside-down.  But my partner called the interior decorator and she rushed over to the office with the catalogue from which the picture had been purchased.  In fact, it was upside-down.  A little embarrassed, the interior decorator supervised the efforts necessary to rotate the big and heavy picture until it was properly oriented.  As we admired the picture now hanging right side up, everyone agreed that the art object was even more resplendent and forceful than it had seemed before.  But, in fact, there didn’t seem to be much difference between the picture inverted or displayed properly upright.

The notion that modernist, abstract art has no clearly defined up or down begins with apocrypha.  Critics asserted that one (or several) of J.M.W. Turner’s pictures had been displayed upside down for some period of time without anyone noticing the mistake.  There’s no evidence that this was true and some writers think that the tale was suggested as a pun on the artist’s name (“Turner”).  It is true that many of Turner’s paintings represent glowing voids with only a few clues as to where sky and sea are to be found.  Paul Klee and Matisse both painted images that were displayed upside-down.  Klee’s image, “Ludus Martis,” is wholly abstract and one can readily understand how this picture could have been inadvertently rotated into the wrong orientation.  The Matisse painting schematically represents a boat and its reflection in water – the image is, in fact, devised so as to create confusion between up and down.  At the University of Minnesota art gallery, a showy painting of red flowers with black stamen by Georgia O’Keefe hung rotated ninety degrees from the image’s intended orientation for more than 40 years.  (I attended the University when the painting was hung with its long axis sideways as opposed to vertically oriented – I gazed at the picture many times and didn’t notice anything unusual about it.)  When the mistake was discovered, the curator observed that the painting “looks terrific” either way.  Since the image of the blossom is circular, it’s easy to see how the error was made.  

The Tate Gallery owns a painting by Mark Rothko called “Black on Maroon”.  No one knows how this painting is supposed to be displayed.  (Rothko isn’t talking; he’s been dead since 1970).  Viewed in one orientation, the canvas shows two glowing maroon voids, one atop the other, outlined in heavy black  brush strokes.  Turned on its side, painting looks like slots in a black field, a bit like the plug-in for an electrical appliances.  The Tate displays the picture in one orientation for a couple of years and, then, turns it on its side to be viewed from that perspective as well.  

There is a 1933 Paramount film called Girl without a Room.  A subplot in the movie involves a young Bohemian painter who wins first prize in a Parisian art competition, discovering only after the award that his picture was hung upside down.  The film’s catch-line is “She had no bed of her own” and the movie’s poster shows a naked girl clutching a pillow in front of her body.  It’s pretty clear that the picture’s concerns were remote from the aesthetics of modern art.   

  

2.

There’s an anecdote about the eccentric polymath Athanasius Kircher, a Jesuit priest who claimed, among other things, to have decoded Egyptian hieroglyphs.  Kircher, who lived in the 17th century, was also an expert on Chinese culture and calligraphy.  According to the story, Kircher produced a beautiful translation of Chinese characters crudely scribbled on a piece of parchment.  The writing, it seemed, had an occult and mystical meaning.  Someone noticed, however, that the handwriting on the page was inverted and, in fact, just a short-hand form of Italian.  The text was something like a grocery list. 

Something similar is visible in two versions of a lyric poem by the German, Peter Huchel.  This poet is one of Germany’s greatest 20th century Dichter but he spent much of his career behind the Iron Curtain in East Berlin and, so, is not as well-known as other writers of his generation.  Huchel’s early poems are formally conservative – they are cast in strongly metric patterns and rhyme.  Although the subjects of his lyrics are familiar to students of German poetry (rural life and nature, often refracted through intense pathetic fallacy), he uses innovative and bold metaphors and there is always something surprising in his verse.  In his later poems, Huchel’s imagery darkens and he specializes in landscapes disfigured and made grotesque by war.  Despite conservative elements in his early verse, Huchel is heir to the surrealists and the nightmare visions of German-speaking lyricists like Georg Trakl, a poet that he resembles in some respect.  Surprising features in his diction, accordingly, can sometimes seem arbitrary, even capricious, that is, an avant-garde extravagance.

A poem illustrating these factors is Huchel’s lyric, Die Schilfige Nymphe, first published in 1931, but later appearing in the poet’s first volume of collected verse after the war in 1948.  (Huchel opposed the Hitler regime and refused to allow any of his poems to be published between 1933 and 1948.  He was conscripted into the army and ended the conflict in a Soviet prisoner of war camp.)  The poem is five short stanzas rhymed ABAB with three pulses or accents per line.  I won’t attempt to capture the sound or form of the poem in the translation below:

The Marshy Nymph

1 : The marshy nymph / The water continues to wither / The bellies of frogs in the swamp / wither – note: the water welk fort (continues to wilt) in the second line; verdoerrt – withers in the fourth line.

2 : On the midday wall / The shadows plunge / The breath dances out of fire / On the lizard’s stone.

3 : In the candles of midday / In the hollow reeds, that are silent / The heart is sad / The music of dragonflies.

4 : The dark dragonflies / Of the lakes fall silent. / What sounds is only the shrill / heart-bitter shrilling.

Note: Es toent nur das grelle / Herzboese Geschrill – literally “There sounds only the shrill (or glaring) / Evil to the heart shrilling.  

5 : The luminary (or luminous one) / Inclines into the reeds / The wind that is scared toward desolation / Giggles alone.

Secondary sources advise me that that “marshy nymph” refers to the Havel River.  “Nymph” may also have something to do with the imagery of dragonflies – the dragonflies are nymphs as well.  The poem presents an image of the Havel River and its adjacent wetlands suffering under the onslaught of the midday sun.  The water evaporates and the frogs die as the wetlands are consumed by the sun.  It’s hot at midday and the sun casts shadows on walls.  A lizard basks in the “fire” blazing from above.  The reed, used for flutes and blowpipes by the shepherds of ancient poetry, seem to be candles standing upright and mute.  Everything is blazing.  Instead of pan-pipes, the air is full of the buzz of dragonflies that somehow embody the midday heat and desolation in the wetland.  Then, the heat is too much even for the dragonflies.  They also fall silent amidst the marshes.  Something sounds, perhaps, crickets and there is a sense that the landscape is screaming with pain that embitters the heart.  The sun, like a great lamp, is now setting, descending into the reedy landscape.  A giggling manic wind blows toward desolation.  

The Havel River described by the poem is a 202 mile tributary to the Elbe that flows near Berlin.  Although Huchel often affects the bucolic pose of a humble plow-boy, he was, in fact, raised in Potsdam, a suburb of Berlin.  And, it’s true that the Havel River expands into a series of big lakes between Potsdam and Berlin.  These include the Grosse Wansee, probably the chain of lakes referenced in the fourth stanza.

So how was this particular word-painting hung upside down?

Let’s look closely at the fourth stanza that I will quote in German:

Die dunkle Libelle / der Seen wird still. / Es toent nur das grelle / Herzboese Geschrille.

“The dark dragonflies / of the lakes become silent. / There sounds only the shrill / evil-to-the-heart shrilling.”  

This is the central inflection point in the poem.  In the midday heat and silence, it seems that the Great God Pan makes an appearance.  Instead of the domestic agrarian melodies of pan-pipe and flute, the silence is infected with a sort of shrieking.  I think this scream, which is shrill and evil, signifies “panic” – that is, the sense of the malevolence and indifference intrinsic to nature and, when perceived with full force, terrifying to human beings.    

In several versions of this poem, the second line in this stanza is printed with a typographic error, or, perhaps, simply the poet’s variant: Die dunkle Libelle / der Seele wird still – that is, “The dark dragonflies / Of the soul become silent.”  Seele means “soul”; the version printed in Huchel’s authorized “collected works” uses the word Seen – that is, “lakes.”  

If the two-line sentence is read as “The dark dragonflies of the soul become still,” the fourth stanza (and, indeed, the whole poem) has a different tenor.  The poet’s spirit is vibrating in accord with what he beholds: the musical dragonflies hovering over the marsh are now within the poet.  They have become an inward phenomenon on the basis of pathetic fallacy.  The poet’s drowsiness in the midday heat makes numb the soul – and, the soul’s vacancy, as it were, sets the stage for the invasive “shrilling” that signifies “panic,” the arrival of the Great God Pan.  In other words, as with much modernist verse, a word or words can be substituted arbitrarily and some sense retained.  The notion that the poem is an organic unity from which nothing can be added or subtracted is evidently not entirely true.  Here the soul can be substituted for lakes without demolishing the poem’s broader meanings.  In German, the soul is ordinarily imagined as a winged being, something like a butterfly (Schmetterling) – in this context, figuring the soul as a dragonfly is somewhat transgressive but not incoherent.  

How would we choose between “lake” and “soul” if we didn’t have Huchel’s ultimate approval of the reading “Seen” (“lakes”)?  We would have to assess the totality of Huchel’s poems and develop a notion as to his sensibility.  In other words, we would need to read the text in the larger context or Gestalt of Huchel’s writing.  At least as a young poet, Huchel is materialist, rooted closely in the realities of soil and vegetation.  He has an affinity for boggy, marshy, reedy landscapes.  He doesn’t have much time for abstractions.  To read “soul” in this setting would be to implant in the poem a Victorian aesthetic that doesn’t seem exactly fitting.  Huchel’s poetry seems to me to be affiliated with the Neue Sachlichkeit, the “new objectivity”, that was the banner under which the arts in Germany advanced after Expressionism.  On this basis, it would seem to me correct, if not self-evident, to prefer the word “lake” to “soul.” But there’s no doubt that this picture can be hung askew.

3.

What about Zelda Fitzgerald or Antonin Artaud: are their more extreme utterances evidence of genius or insanity?

4.

Several years ago, my wife and I took the car-ferry from Wood’s Hole to Martha’s Vineyard.  I had printed maps that showed the way from the ferry docks to the motel where I was staying in Edgartown.  The crossing from Cape Cod to the island takes about 45 minutes.  It was a fine cool, and clear evening in mid-summer and the sea was smooth.  The great mansions on the island’s headland were half-concealed in groves of wind-sculpted trees.  On some of the heights, big old houses stood, grey, with their sides eroded by the gales.

The big boat glided into the harbor a little before dusk.  The village was crowded with cars and pedestrians.  When I drove my rented car from the belly of the barge, the map told me to turn right on the first reasonably large thoroughfare, a two-lane county highway running from the village out of town and over the spine of the island to my destination.  But there was no road at all to the right of the lanes leading up from the harbor to the village.  I drove for a half-mile without finding the highway out of town and so I retraced my way back to the ferry docks and tried again, hoping that, perhaps, a road had materialized in the intervening minutes.  But the highway promised by the map simply wasn’t there.  I thought I could identify other landmarks on the map, but the road that I needed to leave the village was missing.  

The sun began to set.  I decided that the map was a picture hung upside-down.  Features on the map appeared to be reversed.  Perhaps, right meant left.  And, so, I returned to the dock, the ferry long since departed, and turned around, taking the first left.  This route led me onto streets that became increasingly narrow and residential, after a few blocks I found myself at a small park surrounded by little cottages closely packed around a meeting house that was built like a large, burly barn.  This seemed to me completely wrong – it was as if I had found my way to some kind of elaborate summer camp where people sat on porches in the gloaming and an orchestra on a bandshell was playing a hymn  in the green twilight.  It seemed that I had lost my way not only in space but time.  I inspected my map again and thought I saw marks showing where the park was located and so I drove slowly to the edge of town and, then, zigzagged back and forth inland, following roads that were marked on the paper.  The roads didn’t seem to be where they were supposed to be, but enough of them lined-up that I gradually made my way into the island.  At last, I came to an intersection with the highway that I was supposed to follow for twenty minutes to Edgartown.  

The next day I discovered the source of the problem.  My ferry itinerary said that the boat would land at place called Vine Haven and the map instructions were designed with that assumption.  But, in fact, the car ferry had docked at Oak Haven on the other side of the harbor.  The reason that my map was inaccurate was that I was in the wrong town entirely.  

The map wasn’t reversed or upside-down, its reader was.  

On the Coronavirus (X) and the events of January 6, 2021

 

1.

“Are you still here?”

Still here.

To belabor the obvious, the darkness grows in this cold night.  Rates of infection nationwide are increasing with no end in sight.  It’s become tedious to report on this plague.  Sickness isn’t interesting.  In fact, sickness is the exact opposite of interesting.  And the virus has shown the truth of the adage that while the death of one person is a tragedy, the death of hundreds of thousands merely a statistic.  Death isn’t photogenic and the virus hasn’t found its metaphor, its objective correlative.  It remains a wearying gnashing of teeth in the outer darkness, unseen except on the Cable News networks, and, largely, reported with images as to its opposite: instead of seeing corpses and patients in hospital beds, the media reports drunken gatherings, airports full of people, restaurants entertaining powerful authorities who have told the rest of us to stay home, all of which is reported with the proper seasoning of disapprobation and outrage.  The dominion of the virus is a lung slowly filling with pinkish fluid – nothing to see here folks.

Covid and Trump’s presidency have demonstrated to impotence of the media to direct action or instigate change.  Four solid years of vehemently biased and disapproving media coverage seems to have not moved any of Trump’s supporters to dislike the president, let alone to act to repudiate him.  The media can induce outrage, but a steady diet of outrage isn’t nourishing – it merely leads to fatigue and inanition.  Similarly, the media has continuously castigated people for gathering at bars and rallies, on beaches or Thanksgiving meals, but no one’s behavior seems to have been changed.  The TV news is chock-a-block with shots of people standing in lines at airports or partying in tightly packed bars. Neither Trump nor the virus has shown the slightest effect from daily inoculations of media outrage.

The exhausting aspect of this situation is that nothing seems to make any difference.  Events will not be swayed from their course. 

2.

Three days before Christmas, the morning sky was all creased and seamed with red fire.  “Red sky at morning, sailor take warning” – is that the saying?  Above the skeletal trees rimming the eastern horizon, the entire heavens were all folded and pleated with brilliant red oozing from the edges of clouds with the space between these veins glowing with pale yellowish-blue light.  It was as if the sky had been somehow folded and folded again and, then, the fabric of clouds wrinkled into a blazing drapery, something like the involute bunched and furrowed garments draped around the lap of one of Duerer’s virgins, this whole celestial drapery set afire to glow from horizon to zenith across the entire eastern sky.  It was a massive display, bloody and terrible, painting the heavens across an entire sky-quadrant.  Such a spectacle seems a sign and wonder.

3.

And, then, the blizzard, a day later, on the afternoon and night before Christmas Eve.  This sort of storm is particularly deadly because it is presaged by warm winds, billowy pillows of mild air, puffing up the trees and wagging the Christmas lights on eaves and evergreens.  You feel that the weather is kind and comforting, meltwater in the gutters while tattered black clouds rush past overhead.  This is good weather to be out and about, the torch of the wind is temperate and invigorating and, then, suddenly, the gale turns cold – the wind bites and howls and the temperature plummets, dropping forty degrees in a matter of a couple hours.  The air turns white with blowing ice and, even in the shelter of town, you can’t see beyond the end of the block, curtains of snow writhe in the wind.  

At noon, when I walked my dog, the temperature was 49 degrees.  At five o’clock p.m., with snow blowing horizontally through the dark, the air was 6 degrees with wind-chills of ten to fifteen below.  By midnight, it was one degree below zero and the wind chill 25 below zero.

4.

At the end of December, the New Yorker magazine publishes a long essay by Lawrence Wright, a staff writer, reporting on the Covid pandemic.  The essay occupies most of the magazine, an exceptional event in the history of the periodical.  (The most famous earlier essay filling the whole magazine was John Hershey’s reporting on Hiroshima.  In effect, the editors of the magazine, it seems, are inviting a comparison between the atom-bombing of Hiroshima and the Covid pandemic.)  Wright appears on the morning news shows to promote this special edition of the New Yorker.  I watch him interviewed on Morning Joe, a news and commentary show on the liberal cable network MSNBC.  

Wright is asked about those factors that best explain the United States’s ghastly failure to control the virus.  First, he mentions China.  In late 2019 and January 2020, a man named Redfield at the American Center for Disease Control spoke with his counterpart in China, someone named Gow.  The Chinese infectious disease official lied about the virus in just about every way imaginable.  Gow said that there was no evidence of person-to-person transmission of the virus, that it was essentially a form of pneumonia, and that Chinese authorities had the illness well under control.  None of this was true, but Americans at the CDC took Gow at his word and, therefore, regarded the threat to the United States as minimal.  

The second factor that Wright regards as consequential in America’s ruinous response to the epidemic is the failure of early versions of testing for the virus.  One of the three component agents in the tests was defective.  Remarkably, it was later discovered that the defective ingredient didn’t affect the accuracy of the test if simply removed from the compound.  But a month or more was lost when tests initially developed to identify the virus were withdrawn on a wholesale basis.  American covid testing capacity never ramped up to levels necessary to reliably identify the virus in a timely and efficient manner.  Therefore, the spread of the disease could not be effectively measured and tracked.

The third aspect of the American debacle was initial chaos in messaging about wearing masks as a guard against transmission of the infection.  At first, the CDC failed to understand that the disease was transmitted by aerosolized secretions.  This was partially a result of unreliable medical information provided by the Chinese.  Accordingly, the CDC initially dismissed the notion that mask-wearing could make any significant difference in rates of transmitted infection.  By the time the actual mechanism of transmission was reasonably well understood (and, further, that asymptomatic carriers could shed the virus in disease-producing quantities), it was too late.  Much of the public believed that wearing masks was not only inconvenient and uncomfortable, but, in fact, also pernicious – the CDC initially suggested the people bothered by their masks would touch their faces more frequently and, thus, actually enhance the risk of disease transmission.  By the time, the true facts were known and broadcast to the public, the issue of masks had become irremediably politicized: Trump supporters decided that wearing a mask was a gesture of disloyalty to their chief; Democrats, hastening to seize on any issue to discredit Trump, similarly made the public use of masks a symbol the so-called “resistance” to the President.

These facts were demonstrated cogently by Wright.  But his presentation was inadequate as far as the liberal hosts of the morning news show were concerned.  Obviously, China’s campaign of disinformation about the virus is approximately (if only very approximately) consistent with Trump’s characterization of the covid as the “Kung Flu” – that is, a Chinese Communist Trojan horse injected into America’s body-politic.  Trump certainly can’t be blamed for the technical failure of the tests initially deployed to detect the virus.  And Trump is also not at fault for the CDC’s initial missteps on the subject of masking.  So Jonathan Lemire, smirking as always, read aloud a lurid passage from Wright’s journalism accusing Trump of being the “saboteur” of government measures to control the spread of the virus.  Wright, who is a New York liberal, immediately responded by denouncing President Trump on the basis of Lemire’s leading question.  The other hosts on the show, then, followed-up with half-dozen more questions all of which had this general tenor: Please explain how Donald Trump is personally responsible for the more than 330,000 deaths that have occurred due to covid infections in the United States.

Again, when one observes this spectacle, one can only take note that Covid is real and not a hoax (contrary to whatTrump claimed at one point) and that the so-called Trump derangement syndrome, a hysterical conversion pathology by which the President is blamed for literally everything that goes wrong, is also very real and not a hoax either.

5.

On the news, someone reports that in almost every country in the world, the battle against the Coronavirus has forged consensus and built unity.  There are two exceptions: Britain and the United States.  In those nations, the virus has led to increasing polarization and partisanship.

6.

On the last day before the snow, I walked my dog along one of the routes that I take at mid-day.  In this Summer at least, the heat was too severe for my Labrador Retriever, an elderly dog, and, so, I divided her walk into two excursions – one around noon and a shorter walk late in the day and after work.  Needless to say, during my noon walk, I often cover the same territory, loops of 12 to 14 blocks radiating away from my house.  At night, the route is shorter and, mostly invisible, to onlookers because we walk after dark.  The dog has become accustomed to these two walks and, therefore, I have continued this practice during Winter.  (It is probably safer, in any event, to venture the longer walk in daylight where I can scrutinize sidewalks and streets for ice.)

As I was walking though the grey and windy day, I sensed a car behind me, prowling along the road.  The car swung up past me and stopped in an intersection ahead.  A middle-aged woman emerged from the car and said that she saw me walking my dog almost every day.  She handed me baggy containing a candy cane and several Lindt chocolates wrapped in blue tinfoil and, then, wished me a merry Christmas.  Then, she returned to her car and drove away.

This seemed to be a kind gesture and I was impressed by the woman’s generosity.  But, then, evil thoughts invaded my imagination: what kind of person gives candy to a stranger?  What was her motive?  Was the candy, perhaps, infected somehow with the Covid virus?

7.

Media flourishes on scandal and here is the outrage de jour.  Trump’s lieutenants promised delivery of 20 million doses of anti-covid vaccine by the end of December 2020.  But this promise overreached and, now, appears that expectations as to the alacrity of receipt and administration of the vaccine greatly exceed what can be accomplished in reality.  As of this writing, two days before the New Year of 2021, about eleven million doses of the vaccine have been made available in the United States.  However, the logistics of injecting this vaccine into the population has been profoundly flawed and lags far behind the promise of 20 million doses administered by end of the year.  (About 1.5 million vaccination have occurred.)

Human beings are very bad at reckoning with large numbers.  It was clearly magical thinking to believe that millions of doses could be injected in people’s arms in the scope of a month.  Just consider the facts: Assume a thousand doses, each requiring two minutes to inject.  This will take a single worker one day (24 hours) and 9 hours to accomplish working around the clock.  Assuming eleven hour works days, one worker will labor three days to inject one-thousand doses – and this is working without breaks and assumes a perfect assembly-line of willing (even robotically cooperative) patients.  More likely, it would take a skilled nurse between 4 and half and five days to administer 1000 injections.  And, of course, a million is a thousand thousands.  One million injections take a nurse working without interruption or complications of any kind 4000 days – this is more than ten years (again working with interruption).  Assuming the present rate of vaccination, one estimate is that it will take thirty years to vaccinate the entire population. 

And, already, glitches are occurring: for instance, a hospital in Wisconsin lost 550 doses when a worker removed something from a refrigerator, displacing a crate of vaccine that was inadvertently left out on the counter and, therefore, spoiled.  Before this pandemic is over, oceans of vaccine will be ruined and dumped into fields or down drains – doing what damage we don’t know.  At this point, the likelihood that a sufficient number of people will be vaccinated to create herd immunity any time soon seems highly unlikely. 

8.

On January 6, 2021, my wife, Julie, received her first vaccination against Covid.  A second “booster” injection is scheduled for the end of the month.  She described the process as painless and said that she detected no adverse symptoms.  A small bandaid patch was placed over the injection site.

Normally, Julie goes to bed about 10:00 pm.  However, she was awake at 11:36 pm when I came to bed.  She wondered if the vaccine had not affected her in some way, causing a strange infusion, perhaps, of manic energy.  It’s my surmise that her nerves were affected by media images of the mob storming the United States Capitol, vandalizing its interior, and threatening legislators.  

9.

Millions of gallons of ink and billions of photographic pixels will be sprayed across the media to describe events that occurred in Washington D. C. on January 6. 2021.  I am writing these words on the morning after the insurrection.  (The word “insurrection,” perhaps, is too tendentious.  An insurrection displays more signs of organization than the riot that we witnessed on January 6, 2021 during that day’s early afternoon hours.  More precisely, the event seems to have been a violent demonstration that evolved into a destructive riot.  However, historians will have to untangle evidence as to the degree of advance organization animating events.)  What is presently known about this riot may be summarized as follows:

1. After losing both the popular election and the electoral college vote, Donald Trump proclaimed that the process was corrupt, that the election was rigged, and that he would remain president notwithstanding the Joe Biden’s victory at the polls;

2. Trump litigated the election in more than 60 lawsuits and lost all (or almost all) of them;

3. Nonetheless Trump persisted in his claim that the election had been stolen from him by fraud;

4. Most of the Republican party either remained silent or persisted in supporting the President’s claim that he was the rightful victor in the November 2020 elections;

5. On January 6, 2021, Congress convened in both of its bodies for the formal declaration of electoral college votes – Biden had 306 votes; Trump 236;

6. Fourteen Republican Senators defied their majority leader by announcing that they would contest the electoral votes and object to their certification, proposing instead a ten day hiatus in which a “electoral commission” would study the results of the November 2021 vote. (Similar objections, and with far larger Republican support, were scheduled for simultaneous argument in the House.)  This measure was ostensibly to assure “millions of Americans” that their votes had been properly counted and that there was no widespread fraud – but, in practical effect, the objections were lodged to slow and obstruct the process of declaring Joe Biden the President-elect;

7. For weeks before January 6, 2021, Trump and his surrogates summoned the President’s supporters to a protest scheduled for the day of the proceedings in Congress;

8. A large crowd gathered to hear President Trump speak at mid-morning on January 6 at the “Ellipse”, a location near the White House and within walking distance (1 ½ miles) of the Capitol building;

9. Trump declared that he was the rightful Presidential-Elect and called upon his supporters to march to the Capitol to demonstrate in his favor, that is, to “fight like hell;”

10. Trump’s two sons also spoke to gatherings, asserted that the November election had been “rigged” or “stolen” and threatened disloyal Republican legislators with political annihilation;

11. The President’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, spoke to another large gathering and said that the time had come for “trial by combat” and urged the crowd members to converge with other supporters of the President at the Capitol building;

12. Trump did not accompany the protesters but retreated into the residence of the White House to watch TV;

13. Trump’s children, after speaking, allegedly left town;

14. A large and agitated crowd, probably numbering about 10,000 people, gathered on all sides of the Capitol building;

15. Inside, in the well of the Senate, Vice-president Mike Pence was presiding over the proceedings to formally count the electoral college votes; Pence had earlier announced that he regarded the process as a formality and didn’t intend to contest the vote or support objections to it;

16. Senator Ted Cruz spoke, objecting to the vote and moving to delay proceedings so that a Electoral Commission could be convened to study the 2020 presidential election.  Cruz claimed that he was not trying to overturn the will of the electorate but that sufficient allegations had been made so that popular opinion existed that the election was invalid.  Cruz postured his objection as being “institutional” – that is, a measure intended to support the integrity of elections;

17. Several Senators spoke in opposition to the measure including Republican senate-leader Mitch McConnell, a staunch Trump loyalist, who, nevertheless, said that this vote was the most important in his nearly forty year career in Congress and that the electoral college results should be honored;

18. Minnesota Democratic Senator Amy Klobucher addressed the Senate and opposed Cruz’s objection;

19. Meanwhile, with the apparent complicity of law enforcement and security, the protesters had gained access to the terraces surrounding the Capitol and immediately adjacent to its outer walls.  The building was now entirely encircled by a dense mass of people brandishing American flags and Trump banners and shouting their defiance of the proceedings inside the building;

20. The steps leading to the marble platform on which the Capitol is erected are no longer used, apparently from a variety of concerns including handicap-accessibility and security.  Therefore, the general public is not allowed on these steps nor on the terraces surrounding the Rotunda.  Nonetheless, several thousand people were now on those terraces and pressed up against the building.  The steps leading to the terraces were congested and protesters were observed scaling side-walls to reach the entries to the building into the rotunda.  Several dozen protesters occupied a scaffolding built next to the structure for the Biden inauguration. Although federal government snipers were positioned on the roof, it appeared that several protestors were also milling around on top of the building;

21. Around 1:45 Eastern Standard Time, the protesters broke windows and pushed through doors to storm into the Capitol building;

22. After Klobucher’s speech, the Senate was evacuated and its members taken to an “undisclosed” location or locations somewhere in the complex of buildings;

23. The House of Representatives was not wholly evacuated.  Protesters gathered at the entry to the House and were met by security personnel who pointed guns at them;

24. Pepper spray was used by both sides and there were continuous volleys of flash-bang detonations;

25. The mob raged through the building, vandalizing offices and taking selfie pictures in the empty Senate and House of Representatives chambers;

26. A woman was fatally shot as she clambered through a window at one of the corridors into the building.  As I write, it isn’t clear who shot her.  (Later, information is released indicating that the 35-year-old dead woman was a fourteen-year veteran of the military, Air National Guard; she was killed trying to crawl through a window.  At the time, she was shot, the woman was wearing a Trump banner around her neck as a cape.)

27. Apparently, three other people were killed in the melee although the circumstances of these deaths are unknown to me at this time;

28. The rampage in the Capitol lasted about ninety minutes before the corridors and chambers were cleared of the rioters;

29. Very few, if any, rioters were arrested;

30. Congress returned to its chambers after a hiatus of about five hours;

31. The Mayor of Washington declared a 6:00 p.m curfew.  By this time the National Guard was present as well as thousands of local law enforcement officers.  The protesters were now vastly outnumbered and, after a cursory show of defiance with respect to the curfew, simply melted away into the night.  Few, if any arrests were made for curfew violations;

32. Trump issued a video denouncing violence in broad and mostly vague and unspecific terms.  However, he also maintained that the election had been stolen from him and that he “loved” the protesters and, in effect, wished them well;

33. Of the fourteen Senators who had vowed to object to the certification of electors, only six maintained that position, apparently shaken by the violence at the Capitol, during the vote on the Arizona electoral college tally.  Seven Senators joined in an objection to the Pennsylvania electoral college count.  More than a hundred Republican senators objected to these electoral college tallies in the House;

34. Biden was certified as the President-elect during the early morning hours of the 7th of January.  Trump issued a statement that he would participate in the “peaceful transition of power” – a little too late it seems.  Again, he denounced “violence” in vague terms but persisted in statements that the election had been stolen from him.     

Some of these facts are partly wrong.  But I preserve my errors.  This is literally the first draft of history, the things that could be known on the 7th of January 2021 when I wrote this note.

10.

The word “surreal” was used hundreds of times by news broadcasters and pundits during these measures.  The term is a misnomer in some respects.  “Surreal” suggests events that happen according to the logic of dreams or the unconscious.  What happened at the Capitol was the result of carefully orchestrated and efficiently executed demagoguery.  In retrospect, the storming of the Capitol was fully predictable and happened under the direction of President Trump and his surrogates.  The President had repeatedly stated that he would not accede to Biden’s election and that he didn’t intend to leave the White House.  As always, people in power and the media fail to take Trump’s declarations of intent as literal statements of what he will do – this failure is bizarre in light of the fact that Trump’s chaotic method of governance is to clearly state his intent to do something destructive and, then, in fact, do that thing.  In some ways, Trump’s regime has been the most honest in Presidential history – when he states an intent, he follows through with it.  Of course, this species of honesty is limited to his declarations of pernicious intent.  His rationales for action are always specious and, indeed, founded upon the most obvious and pernicious prevarications.  His program of massive deceit, however, has led to a general view that what the President says is not reliable – however, this is true only when recites the fictional facts supporting his deeds; when he states what he is going to do, he is generally in deadly earnest.  And, so, therefore, the cries of shock and outrage emanating from the media and Republicans as to the rampage at the Capitol are predictable but disingenuous.  For a long time, Trump has been conniving in full view of the cameras to disrupt the transition of power to his successor, the hapless doddering Joe Biden.  Therefore, it comes as no surprise that a “surrealist” intervention at the Capitol occurred on the 6th of January 2021.

11.

In popular parlance, surrealism means the juxtaposition of two disparate things in an environment that has been rendered uncanny by their association – the beautiful chance meeting of a “sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table” to cite Lautreamont.  If this notion of surrealism is adopted, images ubiquitous on the media that show the riot deserve that appellation.

A burly man wearing a helmet with buffalo horns stands in one of the houses of Congress.  The man’s face is painted red, white, and blue and his huge biceps have been tattooed to depict a brick wall.  He seems to be bellowing like a bull-buffalo. Another rioter sits in Nancy Pelosi’s office with his feet up on her desk.  Some rioters have climbed up onto the plinths of marble figures in statuary hall and stand beside the sculpted luminaries with their arms familiarly wrapped around the statue’s waist or shoulders.  A man nimbly scales a wall of the Capitol building – he climbs like an action figure in a super-hero movie.  Several rioters occupy a suspended scaffolding on one side of the building.  As they lean forward to survey the mob, the planked platform tilts forward in an alarming way threatening to pitch them out and one of their banners falls into the crowd.  A lone Black man, not even a cop but some kind of security guard, is armed with a frail-looking baton.  The mob approaches him in one of the corridors of the Capitol building.  He waves the baton but, then, takes to his heels.  He runs up a stairwell and stops on the first landing to again brandish his baton.  The mob pursues him.  He runs up to the second landing, stops, wiggles the baton in a threatening way and, then, darts up another flight of steps.  On the floor above, he runs to the middle of a room and turns to confront the mob.  They cautiously approach and he flees again.  And so on, up to a higher level where, at last, a group of four or five uniformed cops appear and the mob stops its pursuit.  Another man is filmed merrily marching across the rotunda with an antique carved rostrum over his shoulder, apparently, looting.  He grins at the camera.  At the door to the House of Representatives, the mob has smashed out panels of glass in a window adorned with diamond-shaped panes.  Several faces appear in the window.  Cops aim their pistols at the faces showing behind the shattered glass.  On the floor of the House, congressmen and -women are cowering: some of them wear gas masks.  A woman who has fallen to the floor seems to be hyperventilating, gasping for air with her hand gripping her chest – the congressman sprawled on the ground next to her holds her other hand. A man wielding a Confederate flag on a long lance-like pole (in this riot flag poles are weapons) marches through the Capitol.  (Trump has accomplished what four years of Civil War could not achieve – the display of the Confederate States flag triumphantly raised in the United States capitol. The mob has broken into the rotunda where there are heavy stanchions that support velvet ropes for crowd control – it’s the way crowds were once managed at old movie theaters.  The mob is clearly nonplussed about suddenly finding themselves in the halls of Congress.  The rioters have no idea what to do and seemed puzzled by the fact that they have gained access to this place.  In an orderly fashion, they amble through the rotunda, obediently following the path between the old metal stanchions and the velvet-covered ropes.  One recalls scenes from Eisenstein with vast crowds storming the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg during the Bolshevik Revolution.  (It’s said that more people were injured in Eisenstein’s epic staging of the event than during the actual uprising.)  In Eisenstein’s vision, the inflamed mob acts with ideological precision and purity, swarming over the artifacts of the despised Czardom.  When this mob seizes the Capitol building, its members remain obedient to the rope-lines in the rotunda, almost no one steps outside of the prescribed path.  

12.

Of course, many rioters took care to photograph themselves storming into the Capitol and desecrating its corridors and assembly rooms.  But, I predict, no one will be convicted for these outrages, notwithstanding pictorial evidence showing them engaged in criminal trespass.

First, law enforcement largely supports Trump and, therefore, his supporters.  Who is going to arrest these people?  My surmise is that law enforcement has no inclination to arrest people who are, probably, aligned with their own personal political preferences.  And, if people are arrested, won’t they simply state the obvious?  “I saw the security guards removing barricades and inviting us to enter” or “no one stopped us and I thought it was okay to go into the Capitol” – the complicity of Capitol law enforcement with the rioters will deter any successful prosecution of these trespassers and vandals. 

13.  

In the wake of the rioting, the media is excited by the notion that the 25th Amendment will be invoked and Trump deemed “unfit for office” due to mental illness.  This will never happen.  Some people in Congress and the media want the President to be impeached again.  To what end?  Of course, there is widespread terror (mostly feigned I think) that Trump will do something even more destructive and irrational in the last two weeks of his tenure.   But it’s hard to envision anything worse than what occurred on January 6, 2021.  Media commentators note that he still holds the “nuclear codes” and could unleash armageddon on the world.  My guess is that the President is isolated and that people are carefully keeping him from mischief.  (Although, in light of what we have seen happen, I have no idea what dumb optimism makes me believe this.)  Simple exhaustion causes most people to think that the storm has passed or the “fever broken”.  I am writing on the 7th of January and we will see what we will see.

14.

Mick Mulvaney, one of Trump’s principal enables and his former Chief of Staff, resigns from his position – apparently, he incurred Trump’s anger and has been exiled to a post as ambassador to Northern Ireland.  Mulvaney appears on TV, declaring that “enough is enough” and that he can no longer be associated with the President.  But this is 13 days from Trump’s departure from office.  It’s transparently obvious what Mulvaney is doing – he’s angling for a news commentator or on-air analysis position with Fox News or one of the other cable networks.  It is no longer expedient for him to be associated with Trump and so he is a rat fleeing the sinking ship.

One must credit the thugs around Hitler, at least, with some sense of loyalty.  Most of the bad guys in the Third Reich went into the bunker with Hitler, either literally or figuratively, and perished with their Fuehrer.  Joseph Goebbels, of course, killed his wife and large family with cyanide before putting a bullet through his brain.  But, Cable News is uniquely corrupting.  Today, I assume Dr. Goebbels would be announcing his resignation and sending messages to Fox that he is ready for his retainer as a cable news on-air analyst.  

15.

Much lip service is paid to the notion that everyone likes democracy (with a small “d”).  But this is transparently untrue.  People like democracy only so long as their side is winning.  And, of course, the great mass of human beings have no affection for democracy even in the abstract.  People want to be governed by a Strong Man with a broad chest covered in medals and an iron fist.

16.

One thing is certain.  If Black men and women had advanced with menacing intent on the Federal Capital on January 6, 2021, the marble rotunda would have been awash in a sea of blood.   

17.

The face of the riot is the man dressed as an American Indian with bison-horn helmet.  The right-wing media spins the story that the man is an anarchist associated with Antifa.  But this is untrue.  The guy is a far-right conspiracy theorist, Jake Alberti, well-known in Arizona, a crazy who haunts the State Capitol grounds.  His nickname is Q-Shaman, meaning Qanon-Shaman.    

18.

On the day after the Capitol was stormed, over 4000 citizens died from Covid.

19.

Something that looked vaguely like Donald Trump appeared at prime-time on January 7, 2021.  The figure’s eyes seemed ill-focused and its gestures were like those of an automaton.  This spray-tanned apparition spoke very swiftly, perhaps, as if trying to complete its rhetorical assignment before vomiting or spilling internal greases and oils all over everything.  At one point, there was a conspicuous edit, a cut to a different camera-angle  – it was as if the machine had broken down momentarily or, perhaps, balked at what it was saying or, as if, perhaps, the device had gone off-script.  The thing spoke vague words about the “heinous conduct” of the mob that had rioted in the Capitol building.  The machine also conceded the 2020 election to Joe Biden.  But, if you looked closely, the automaton’s moving lips weren’t exactly synchronized with the words spoken.  If this was CGI, it was inept.

20.

There seems to be a rule that political extremism always yields equal and opposite harms.  The vandalism of the Capitol will now trigger a reaction, a tilt toward authoritarianism on the part of the Left.  On the extremes of the political spectrum, it is a commonplace that radical Right politicians revert to Hitler and radical Left demagogues channel Mao.  The pendulum will now swing toward the radical Left and remedies proposed by those politicians will likely be as pernicious as the insinuations and incitements committed by those on the far-right.  We are now entering the phase of “punishment” for the events on the 6th of January.  “Law and Order” is a powerful mantra for both the far Right and the far Left. Contrary to my earlier predictions, a sweep by law enforcement is now underway and the vandals in the Capitol are being rounded-up and imprisoned as I write these words.  Exactly how they will be prosecuted remains unclear.  But, at this phase, prosecution isn’t the point.  The point is retaliation and retribution.  Get the soccer stadiums ready for their new tenants.  At the trials months from now, most of these people will be acquitted – it is now apparent that they stormed the Capitol enjoying aid and comfort from large numbers of law enforcement.  But what happens at the trial is immaterial to the retribution that occurs in the figurative soccer stadium – that is, in the process, of herding the malefactors into the criminal justice system.  

21.

On National Public Radio, a well-meaning and soft-spoken host is interviewing an African-American woman who professes African-American studies at Princeton.  The host asks how the Princeton Professor would propose to heal the rift in the country.  The Black professor says something to the effect that you can’t negotiate with White Supremacists.  The host, then, pauses and asks: “I wonder if it is helpful to call your adversaries ‘White supremacists’.”  The question, really a proposition, is stated in the mildest possible terms. The African American professor is indignant.  “Goodness knows,” the woman says, “we’ve had enough racism in this country.  And I’m not going to ignore it.”  She goes on to say: “There have to be consequences.  They have to be punished.”  But what does this mean?  In a Democracy don’t you “punish” your adversaries by defeating them in elections?  It’s apparent that this woman is seeking some kind of retribution that goes far beyond merely ousting the villains by lawful votes at the ballot box.

22.

The Democrats, of course, overplay their hand significantly.  Nancy Pelosi appears at a Press Conference demanding that President Trump be ousted from office under the authority of the 25th Amendment.  She calls Mike Pence, who would have to invoke this Amendment.  Pence, thoughtfully, leaves her on hold for 25 minutes before an aide announces that he can’t come to the phone.  What is he doing?  Taking a shower?  Washing his gleaming white hair?  Pelosi demands that Trump be impeached yet again.  His tenure in office has now 12 days remaining.  

Several cabinet resignations have occurred.  The execrable Nancy de Vos (Department of Education) resigns.  At this stage, this gesture seems not so much evidence of character as cowardice.  I presume, although possibly incorrectly, that Trump is under constant surveillance and that he’s not allowed to go to the toilet without supervision.  

23.

The outcry swells.  The liberal media demands that the President, Giuliani, the President’s children, Ivanka, Donald, and Eric, all be charged with the crime of inciting the riot at the Capitol.  (The situation is further inflamed by the fact that a Capitol police officer has died as a result of being beaten with a fire extinguisher during the mayhem in the building.)  However, even some of the most rabid Trump-haters express reasonable concern about charging people in Washington for making speeches.  There is, after all, something called the First Amendment with particular protections for political speech.  If Rudy Giuliani can be charged with inciting a riot for his words demanding “trial by combat”, what will happen the next time Black Lives Matter activists call for their protesters to occupy a freeway overpass or march on a State Capitol?  The door always swings in both directions.  The moment that irresponsible speech is outlawed, a lot of people on the Left will find themselves in jail also.  The Left is every bit as capable of trampling on the Constitution as the Right.  

24.

The Wall Street Journal calls for Trump to resign.  (And says that he should be impeached.) This is also hollow and a gesture in bad faith, too little too late.  The WSJ enthusiastically supported this President when he championed barbaric practices at the southern Border, when he gutted regulatory agencies, and, further, has defended his intemperate rhetoric innumerable times – “Trump was just being Trump.”  But once his own armies of the night trash the Capitol, commerce is threatened and the economic hegemony of the United States is questioned throughout the World and, so, now, with less than two weeks remaining in his regime, the Journal sees the light and says that this maniac must go.  But everything that has been made manifest in the last several days was implicit in the man and his politics from that very first day when he came down the golden escalator at Trump Tower in an aureole of glory after accusing Mexican immigrants of being murderers and rapists.  The man ran on the proposition that he was going to build a “beautiful wall” across Texas and New Mexico and Arizona and that, somehow, Mexico would pay for it – an obvious lie that was a fundamental element of his political platform.  And the Journal all but anointed Trump as the savior of the Union and righteous avenger of wrongs committed by Barack Obama.  It takes enormous chutzpah to claim that now the scales have dropped from your eyes after the man unleashes a mob of “deplorables” (the sort of ignorant common folk that Journal editors despise in practice if not theory) to rip apart the halls of Congress.

In fairness, I should admit that, although I despised Trump from the outset and publicly proclaimed my opposition to him, after he was elected I thought that he should be given a chance to implement his policies.  And I told people that the man couldn’t possibly be as bad as portrayed because, after all, he had been elected President and that is no small thing involving the votes of millions of good citizens and that the role of President is not as powerful as is commonly believed – indeed, I argued that there was little that Trump could really accomplish because of institutional limitations to his power.  I made these remarks to a young friend as we walked the streets of Mexico City in January 2016 just before the President’s inauguration.  My friend, whose family comes from Mexico, was skeptical.  He said that he expected Trump to commit the evil acts that he had proposed when he ran for President.  “It will never  happen,” I said.  “He will have to get the Congress to endorse these acts.”  

Of course, I was completely wrong and, indeed, proven wrong within days of Trump’s inauguration when the President’s first act was to implement an unconstitutional “Muslim ban” by executive fiat.  Institutional limitations are only as effective as the institutions.  And we have seen that American institutions, designed for the exercise of sweet reason, are unavailing when confronted with madness and intemperate folly.  

25.

Cable News’ need to cover the insurrection has led to a new look.  On Saturday, January 9, 2021 MSNBC’s Ari Velshi stands outside of the Capitol.  Velshi is done up in full internet-insurrectionist  combat-gear: he’s wearing a black baseball cap, black mask that seems pleated with rubber treads, a tightly zipped black jacket with an inscrutable logo over his right nipple, and, I suppose, that if the camera were to back away from him, we would see his black Doc Martens tightly laced on his feet.  Velshi come from Canada and he’s a little fellow who tends toward corpulence with horn-rimmed glasses over his cherubic face and a shaved head.  I suppose the theory expressed by his garb is that if the mob suddenly appears again, he can melt into its frenzy and explore the bowels of the Capitol building at first hand with them.  But the streets of Washington look lonely on this morning.

CNN, I think, has a correspondent who speaks with an Irish accent.  He’s small and rotund with a mop of uncombed reddish hair.  He doesn’t have the kind of face and figure that you are accustomed to seeing on TV.  CNN’s thinking must be the same: if the shit again hits the fan, this little nondescript Irishman will be able to wriggle up close to the spinning blades.

26.

I earlier expressed skepticism that anyone would be arrested for this assault on the Capitol.  (My skepticism should have been couched in terms of whether criminal convictions will be successfully obtained.)  In fact, the more prominent actors on January 6 have earned fame on the Internet and their names have been named.  The task of hunting these people down is now underway.  The man grinning at the camera as he totes an antique rostrum (taken from Nancy Pelosi’s office) through the Sculpture Hall has been identified.  His wife is a physician in Palmetto, Florida (D.O. specializing in Family Medicine.)  The podium thief is said to attend church regularly and have five (or 6) children.  There is a less famous picture of him next to sign identifying Nancy Pelosi’s office.  Journalists have called him a cheerful-looking “surfer dude.”

Another figure prominently shown in news footage has also been identified – in an article in The New Yorker by no less than Ronan Farrow (Mia Farrow’s son).  This is the man in black combat gear carrying in his hand a sinister bouquet of zip-ties.  The meaning of these white flexible handcuffs is clear enough.  When activists targeted Michigan governor Gretchen Whittmer for kidnaping, trial by the people, and, presumably, execution, the conspirators were apprehended with “ties” or flexible handcuffs of this type.  The man with the zip-ties is a retired officer in the United States Air Force.  He claims that he entered the Capitol as a spectator and that he made the mistake of picking up the zip ties when he found them fallen onto the floor in rotunda.  Like most of these fools, he’s happy to speak to the press and, of course, his words will be used against him. (He was identified by Internet sleuths studying closely his combat patches and former unit designations on his uniform.  This sort of detective work appeals to shut-ins – and many of us have that status on the basis of the virus.  You can use your computer to scrutinize images and track individual members of the mob from place to place in the Capitol building.)

The FBI is encouraging people to snitch on their compatriots.  This is an effective strategy particularly with a small award ($1000) for tips leading to arrest and it will, further, drive wedges of hatred and enmity into the mob, an organism that was an ephemeral creature of opportunity in the first instance.  Nothing sows more destructive discord than encouraging villains to snitch on each other.  (By January 14, 2021, the award has increased to as much as $50,000.)

27.

By contrast with the Covid epidemic, the assault on the Capitol was intensely photogenic.  Covid is invisible – when it is shown, the virus has the face of a nurse weeping with exhaustion, a pundit opining nervously, or a hospital bed trailing cords and tubes all over the floor with people in space-suit gear encircling someone who’s face has been blurred beyond recognition.  There’s nothing much to see when it comes to the virus.  The attack in Washington is another matter entirely.

Images from outside of the Capitol show the famous dome hovering above tatters of tear gas while mobs terrible with flags and banners encircle the place.  Low-angle shots are contrived to show bellowing rioters, many of them colorfully dressed, with the great cumulo-nimbus formation of marble rising into the sky overhead.  American flags ride on surges of men and women assaulting the building and blue Trump banners are everywhere.  The mob looks like irregulars from some Western skirmish during the Civil War, long beards, buckskin, flak vests, tear gas masks buckled to belts or worn like barbaric head-dresses.  A black-clad man dangles from the terrace above the mall, hanging by one arm from a ledge on which the Latin words Annuit Coeptis are inscribed.  Some of the tableaux have the grandeur and glamor of 19th century history paintings, waves of men and women beating like surf against crumbling barricades.  Where combat is joined, flags and batons rear up into pyramidal compositions, dense tangles of men entwined like the cavalry and lancers in Uccello’s “Battle of San Romano” or the Russians and Teutonic Knights in the battle on the ice in Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky.  Still photographs convert everything into monumental history, statuesque friezes of violence.

The cell-phone images of the female air force officer shot outside the House of Representatives are less colorful and more chaotic.  A few very young and frightened-looking security guards stand in front of a heavy door with its panes of glass still intact.  Shot through the glass windows in the door, the image shows members of the House of Representatives (some of them recognizable), forty feet away and retreating deeper into the building.  The rioters are howling at the guards, alternately cajoling and threatening them.  Over it all, you can hear the shrill voice of a woman screaming invective.  Apparently, reinforcements to the guards in tactical riot gear with long guns are approaching somewhere behind the place where the cell-phone, aimed at the door and emptying corridor beyond, is located.  The window to the right of the seam between the double doors is broken.  A tiny woman wearing what seems to be a blue vest approaches the window.  (In fact, she has tied a Trump 2020 banner around her body and is wearing it as a cape.)  Suddenly, a gun appears beyond the door.  It’s a black service revolver and, it seems, weirdly detached, hovering in the air.  People scream “gun! gun! gun!”  The camera tilts to the right to the woman who is lunging at the broken glass, then, turns back to the gun.  The gun fires once and the camera tilts down to show the woman lying on the floor her face, shoulders and neck all blurred-out to spare our tender sensibilities (weaned on TV murder and mayhem all our lives.)  At no point, can we really see the person who has fired the weapon.  That person is out of the frame to the left of the door that is being attacked.  It’s an eerie scene to behold – the rioters lunging at the door and the firearm hovering motionlessly in mid-air, a disembodied apparition, just beyond the window.

28.

You can buy on the internet MgTech Heavy Duty Police Nylon Double Cuff Zip Ties Handcuffs (Disposable Black Plastic Cable Ties, 27.5 inch, 250 lb. capacity, one pack of 25 reduced from 34.95 to $19.95 for quick sale.  A pack of 25 of the white variety (400 pound tensile capacity) can be purchased for $19.95 (reduced from $21.95) – these are advertised as being suitable for police and detention work.   

29.  

During the rampage at the Capitol, legislators were herded into safe rooms.  Apparently, it was crowded in those places and some of the Republican legislators, who believe Covid is a hoax, lounged about without wearing their masks.  Now three members of the Democratic caucus in the House of Representatives have tested positive and they have publicly blamed their Republican colleagues.  We have reached the point in which legislators claim that they have been literally sickened by their colleagues of the opposing persuasion.  This doesn’t bode well for the national reconciliation that prospective President Biden has vowed to facilitate.  

30. 

People continue to die from Covid at such an alarming rate that ambulance drivers in Los Angeles County have been given discretion to not transport patients who are unlikely to survive hospitalization.  The hospitals are overwhelmed and there’s no benefit to delivering people soon to be corpses to already jammed intensive care units. This directive, of course, transfers the agony of triage to the EMT personnel required to make house-calls.  From a practical perspective, it seems hard for me to believe that an ambulance driver will feel justified in telling the family of some Covid victim drowning painfully in his or her own fluids that they should just wait patiently for the inevitable to occur.  

Several funeral parlors in LA county have now acquired eerie-looking annexes of bluish, translucent plastic, modular structures erected in alleys and parking lots as temporary morgues.

The assault on the Capitol in Washington has sucked all of the air out of the COVID story.  It’s now relegated to eight minutes per hour on Cable News, an afterthought.  In Indonesia, a Boeing 737 vanishes over the sea, plunging a thousand feet in a few seconds, and, then, crashing into the waves with all aboard.  This tragedy merits about sixty-seconds coverage about three times a day during the 24 hour cable news cycle.  

31.

Biden identifies several of his cabinet members and appoints the frail-looking, if gracious, Merrick Garland as the leader of his Department of Justice.  In his speeches, he says all of the right things.  But no one is listening.  After four years of sound and fury from Donald Trump, Biden’s patient, low-key, and reasonable demeanor seems milquetoast.  There’s no fire in his words, no invective, nothing to spur outrage.  We’ve been ruined by the non-stop reality TV show hosted by President Trump.  After the entertaining, if nauseating, spectacle Trump sponsored, day after day, month after month, Biden is more than a little bit of a disappointment – he’s a prudent, harmless old man.  Who wants to watch that on TV?  When Biden speaks, I turn the station to something a little more lively – ancient alien astronauts or an old episode of Seinfeld or drunk people puking on each other on video anthology shows like Ridiculousness.

32.

The House of Representatives, after two hours of almost uniformly dishonest debate, votes to impeach Donald Trump for a second time – the sole article of Impeachment is that the President incited a mob to an insurrectionist attack on the United States Capitol.  There is also talk of indicting (or criminally charging) Trump for inciting this riot.

These allegations are irresponsible and will be futile.  I’ve listened to Trump’s speech to the faithful an hour before they launched their assault on the Capitol.  Trump is a lousy speaker and his harangue was border-line incoherent, really just another declaration of rage at an election that he continues to maintain was stolen.  If Trump can be convicted of incitement on the basis of his inept rhetoric, I presume that there will be jail in the future for a great many folks speechifying at Black Lives Matter rallies.  This is the problem with the indecent cycle of outrage and, then, reprisal now predominant in Washington.  No one ever seems to be aware that their own rhetorical devices can (and will be) turned against them the moment the situation is reversed.  Charging Trump with some kind of incitement crime will merely lead to a wave of similar charges lodged against BLM leaders and other progressive firebrands.  Under the pressure to respond instantaneously to the latest outrage, people forget that the worm turns and, soon enough, they will be looking down the barrel of their own arguments now turned against them.  

Trump’s speech was fairly strong stuff, but not, in fact, incendiary.  He engaged in some political hyperbole and said that he would join the rally at the Capitol – another one of the lies with which he regales his supporters.  I don’t think that anything that he said amounts to criminal conduct.  

Of course, Trump is responsible for the violence at the Capitol, although not on the basis of the events of the morning of January 6, 2021. (And criminal charges require direct, not metaphysical, causal connection between provocation and effect.) Trump’s responsibility, however, is moral and not legal.  His mindless repetition of claims that he had won the election and, indeed, “by a landslide” created the atmosphere that engendered the assault on the Capitol.  The Capitol assault wasn’t the work of one morning, but rather the outcome of almost 12 weeks of continuous and intentional deceit as to the results of the 2020 election.  By his concatenation of lies, Trump managed to create a miasma so heavily charged with hatred and paranoia that it was no surprise to anyone that lightning struck, and pierced, the Capitol dome.

But you can’t indict someone for lies.  This is because all politicians lie all the time.  This is a truism.  But, perhaps, this article of faith needs to be challenged.  

33.

Once upon a time, the Republicans were the party of sober calculation, the party of businessmen with their eyes sternly focused on the bottom-line.  Republicans had to be cool and calculating because they were a minority party and could not win elections without much conniving and strategy – activities that require sang froid.  (Of course, there are exceptions that prove the rule – for instance, the hysteria induced by Joe McCarthy before my time and some aspects of the party’s “law and order” plank.)  Republicans prided themselves on their Realpolitik and pragmatism.  The Democrats were the party of passion, the party of the misericordes (the “tender-hearted”).  Democrats, as the name implies, believe in universal suffrage and lower-case “d” democracy.  Republicans were committed to elitism and representative democracy – elected officials, not vulgar plebiscites, should be entrusted with decision-making.  Indeed, within my lifetime, Republican political conventions were once carefully brokered with decisions made in “smoke-filled rooms” as to the suitability of candidates for public office.

These values now seem to be reversed, at least, in part.  As the Trump revolution shows, Republican voters can suffer just as much misericordia as Democrats when their fragile sensibilities are exacerbated.  And, as the revolt in Washington shows, the Republicans can be every bit as passionately democratic as the opposing party.  The perversities of our primary process have resulted in politicians becoming progressively more radical and, therefore, more polarizing.  It seems that small-letter “d” democracy is much more vulnerable to dangerous demagoguery in the home of the brave and the land of the free than may have hitherto been appreciated – from the time of Plato, democracy has been distrusted in other parts of the world.  Indeed, there is some reason to think that democracy as an institution is afflicted with fatal flaws and contradictions and, perhaps, can not long endure.  Most people couldn’t vote in elections until the 20th century and it seems probable that we are discovering only now those dangers that manifest themselves when democracy becomes less representative (that is operated through ministerial representatives) and more fundamentally democratic.  It may be no accident that the most open and inclusive election in American history is also the most savagely contested.  The more people that vote, the more radical, it seems, the candidates and the more problematic the outcome.  (To be sure, Biden is a centrist figure but there is considerable suspicion that he is a cat’s paw for more “progressive” – that is, radical – elements in the Democratic party.)

It is not immediately obvious that extending the franchise to anyone able to turn on a TV and find the cable news networks is a good way to elect a government.  (I will concede that this inclusive approach to democracy is, perhaps, the least pernicious – politics, after all, is the function of choosing between the lesser of evils.)  This is because modernity, once the preserve of avant-garde poets and anxious Leftist Existentialists, has now extended its hegemony over the entire population.  The notion that truth is always provisional, that efforts to improve the human condition are futile at worst and wicked at best, the collapse of organized religion, the growth of universal skepticism and the progressive degradation of popular taste and sensibility – all of these elements consistent with an anguished and ineffectual modernism –are now widely disseminated throughout the culture.  There is simply no moral and ethical center any longer.  Trump corroded the moral and ethical underpinnings of our society in the most vulgar terms – honesty and loyalty were for suckers, losers (“pussies” as Trump told his Vice-President).  Under this banner, Trump’s cynicism embraces the aesthetics of so-called advanced thinkers who have also doubted verities and pious cliches foisted upon the masses as a means of social control.  Trump’s right wing cynicism shakes hands with leftist nihilism.  And the result is a situation in which it is not apparent that democracy can survive the double-pronged assault poised against it.  

Until I was in College and, even, during the first years of my law career, there were only four TV stations available in Minnesota.  ABC, CBS, and NBC controlled prime time and determined both what news was fit to broadcast and the entertainment transmitted into people’s homes.  Public TV was more elitist and refined than the networks and so news and entertainment created in that forum were, even, more conservative culturally than what you might see at prime-time on the commercial stations.  Local stations broadcast old sit-coms and movies heavily censored for TV.  I used to always marvel at how the most popular shows on TV were persistently and overtly didactic.  Every single situation comedy set up an instructive ethical dilemma, always resolved rationally and in accord with Enlightenment values within the half-hour program.  Cop shows like Dragnet emphasized law and order and the necessity that members of the public remain obedient to authority.  Westerns, once the most popular form on TV, emphasized conservative values.  Shows like Bonanza, The Andy Griffith Show, Mary Tyler Moore and Bob Newhart all preached mini-sermons to nationwide audiences every single night.  These shows taught that your word is your bond, that vanity makes people look comically foolish, that pretense is inevitably exposed, that people should be courageous, honest, loyal, and law-abiding.  Community values were important and had to be upheld.   Someone (or some several) designed these shows to be fiercely didactic – it was as if the creators of these TV programs had great anxiety about the ability of Americans to behave honorably unless they were continuously prompted to do so.  

Where are these kinds of shows today?  What do you learn by watching a reality show like Jersey Shore?  What is the moral of American Idol or The Masked Dancer?  The Cable news shows are a fire-hose of opinion in constant spate, much of it ignorant and incendiary, sprayed through the television screen.  Public TV reminds us incessantly that the foundations of our Republic are fatally flawed.  Cable-TV movies are a sewer swimming with serial killers, flesh-eating zombies, and all other kinds of maniacs.  These are the bread and circuses upon which the electorate is reared.  

34.

After the violent skirmishes at the doors to the Capitol, after the clashes in the pillared and subterranean halls of Congress, after the fierce encounters in the marble corridors of the building, some of the rioters reached the Senate and House chambers.  They ambled around the empty rooms, most of them, it appeared, afraid to touch anything.  Their energy seemed diminished without having the  violence of the mob to feed upon and, of course, most of the insurgents didn’t breach the Capitol to its very core.  The majority of the insurgents, it seems, were roaming about the periphery of the building, searching for Mike Pence to lynch or hoping to stumble upon the offices of congressmen and -women who were persona non grata to them.  The men who reached the House and Senate chambers seemed baffled by their success.  They didn’t know what to do.  A strange, uncanny calm seems to have descended upon them, turning these violent reprobates into sleepwalkers.  TV footage shows one man seated on a pew against the wall, all alone, his hands crossed over his lap.  Another man sits astride the throne reserved for the presiding officer.  He tweeted that he was occupying Nancy Pelosi’s chair.  (In fact, he didn’t know he was in the Senate and sitting in the place from which Vice-President, Mike Pence, would normally preside.)  The rioters at the very heart of their vast, deadly, and treasonous enterprise seem utterly confused.

They have reached the center.  But the center is empty.  There is nothing at the center.

January 14, 2020