The New Lost Cause

 “History is the consequence not only of people’s actions, but also of their forgetfulness.” Salman Rushdie, Victory City

Tucker Carlson and his employer, Fox “News” want us to forget what happened on January 6, 2021, and replace what millions of us saw with our own eyes with a fantasy. The mob inflamed by Donald Trump, all those fools carrying flagpoles, clubs, baseball bats, bear spray, firearms, knives, who smashed windows and rifled offices and chanted for Mike Pence to hang, never happened according to Carlson and Fox. January 6 was simply a peaceful gathering of patriots exercising their Constitutional freedom to assemble. Any violence that happened, the injuries and deaths, were committed by radical left Democrats and Antifa. 

Right. And when the moon is full and the wind blows from the east pigs fly like eagles and crows shit nuggets of gold. 

At this moment, American politics and right-wing media is populated with some of the most vile, ignorant, intolerant, and corrupt people I’ve ever seen. When the execrable and dimwitted Kevin McCarthy gave access to thousands of hours of surveillance footage from January 6 to Tucker Carlson -- and no other news outlet -- I knew what was coming. A whitewash. It was predictable that Tucker and his crack team of propagandists would cherry-pick the footage to show their viewers that nothing unusual, and certainly nothing violent, happened on January 6. It was just another day in America’s capitol city…

How stupid does Tucker Carlson think his audience is? How gullible? How infantile? He obviously believes they will swallow any lie that tumbles from his lips. That’s astonishing in and of itself, but what’s more outrageous is that Carlson is pulling this crap while Fox is being sued for defamation. 

Television occupied our American brains many years ago. Images and sound bites replaced words on paper. Facts became negotiable, mutable, malleable and it became possible for politicians and skilled propagandists like Rush Limbaugh and Tucker Carlson to create their own facts. When reality didn’t conform to the narrative they wanted to push, it could, like the script of a reality TV show, be rewritten, reframed, and re-contextualized. With enough repetition the new take could become a new truth. 

Carlson, with help from his buddy McCarthy, is trying to create a new “Lost Cause” for MAGA world. After the Civil War, the defeated but unrepentant plantation bosses and Confederate politicians and generals and soldiers, began spinning a new take on the war. States’ rights not slavery had been the central issue and reason for all the bloodshed. The Federal government led by Abraham Lincoln had tyrannically forced itself on the poor, beleaguered southern states, leaving them no choice but to take up arms to protect their culture and freedom. The South was noble and true, fighting for a great principle that had nothing to do with enslaved Black people. You see, Black people enjoyed their status as unpaid laborers and thought of their masters and owners as family. It was a benevolent relationship, not exploitative. Robert E. Lee wasn’t a traitor, he was a hero and patriot. 

The Lost Cause narrative was repeated for decades in newspapers, pamphlets, speeches, and in monuments to heroes of the Confederacy; it found its way into history textbooks and popular culture. No defeated population wants to see itself as evil. 

Will Tucker Carlson succeed? I want to think not, but this is a country awash in falsehoods and lies and outright lunacy. We’re a gullible nation. A certain percentage of Carlson’s audience is bound to believe that January 6 was simply a peaceful protest by thousands of red-blooded American patriots. Others might begin to doubt what they witnessed with their own eyes that horrible day. 

January 6, 2021 wasn’t a peaceful day in Washington D.C. A mob whipped into a frenzy by Donald Trump breached and ransacked the Capitol and disrupted a congressional proceeding for several hours.  It happened. People died. Hundreds suffered serious injuries. 

What’s outrageous, at least in this citizen’s estimation, is that none of the key players or architects of the attempted coup, including Donald J. Trump, have been held to account more than two years after the fact, and I think there’s a very good possibility that they never will be. I can hear Attorney General Merrick Garland in my head, explaining in his calm and measured way that the report by Special Counsel Jack Smith, though damning, will not be acted upon -- for the good of the nation, of course.