No Forgetting, No Forgiveness

 “Our tribune, gentlemen of the jury, must be a school of truth and plain concepts.” Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

The news is depressing. Insurrection. Pandemic. Life disrupted, upset, fucked up and fucked over. I can’t get the horror of the images from the January 6 Insurrection, and the deeper meanings they represent out of my head. When large numbers of people buy into the notion that elected officials deserve to be attacked, beaten, kidnapped, or murdered for taking a political stand or voting on principle, when we get to that point, a border has been crossed and we’re in a different country. Collective fury from a mob, armed and prepared to exact mortal vengeance on their fellow citizens, police officers, and democratically-elected political representatives over political disagreements, is the hallmark of countries on the brink of collapse. 

Consider this strange tableau -- 20,000 National Guard troops protecting the presidential inauguration from attack from American citizens. Not the Germans, the Japanese, the Chinese and the Russians, not Cubans or Vietnamese, not evil members of Al-Qaeda or ISIS. Americans. This is the kind of shit I saw on black-and-white TV when I was a child, Walter Cronkite reporting while images from somewhere in far away South America rolled behind him. We looked with scorn or pity on unstable banana republics ruled by dictators, believing ourselves to be different, better, permanent residents of Reagan’s shining city on a hill, bathed in George H.W. Bush’s thousand points of light and Barack Obama’s American indispensability.  

What happened on January 6 cannot be forgotten or forgiven, swept under the carpet as if it wasn’t a heinous blow against democracy. Both Democrats and Republicans are responsible for protecting the country from right-wing domestic terror organizations. We should name them as such, and shut them down using every tool in the Federal statutes. They crossed the line on January 6. As a society, we have to demand the insurrectionists get a straight red card, and if convicted in a court of law, a penalty commensurate with their crime.  

That’s the hard task ahead of Biden. He must do nothing less than back America away from the abyss. It’s a tall order for any political leader, let alone one of Biden’s age and conciliatory disposition.

I have only one question for Joe Biden: Will you hold those people responsible for the Insurrection, whoever they are, by investigating, indicting and convicting them? Or will you exhort us to “forgive & forget, look forward, not back, to the hopeful future rather than the dark past…” The usual political flimflam, in other words, a tiger with no teeth. This is not the time for pardons, amnesty, or forgiveness. There must be penalties, accountability, expulsion, sanction, and incarceration. 

Will the Democrats finally seize the narrative, the story, and make voters understand who bears responsibility for the past four years? It’s not a sexy idea, but it has to be part of the narrative: Trump and his GOP enablers and collaborators forced the nation to the brink of violent overthrow, and Joe Biden is attempting nothing less than a rescue mission from a three-headed monster: seething political unrest, a broken economy, and a wicked pandemic that has killed more than 350,000 Americans, the largest death toll in the world. America is number one -- in Covid deaths. A price must be paid by Republicans for years of calamitous misrule. This isn’t a matter of fixing or replacing some broken furniture -- the house has been torched from inside and the rafters are still smoking. Renovation and restoration are needed. Cosmetic improvements will not do. That’s the hard task ahead of Biden.  He must do nothing less than back America away from the abyss. It’s a tall order for any political leader, let alone one of Biden’s age and conciliatory disposition.  

I saw one hopeful piece of news glimmering in the darkness: the National Rifle Association has filed Chapter 11. Perhaps this is a sign that the arc of the moral universe that Dr. King talked about is still functioning.