“To Put the World Between Us:” On the White Washing of January 6th, Amnesia and other episodes in collective forgetting.
“Do Americans Have a ‘Collective Amnesia’ About Donald Trump? It’s only been three years, but memories of Mr. Trump’s presidency have faded and changed fast,” note Jennifer Medina and Reid J. Epstein, of the NY Times. “In an era of hyper-partisanship, there’s little agreed-upon collective memory, even about events that played out in public. But as Mr. Trump pursues a return to power, the question of what exactly voters remember has rarely been more important. That pattern is particularly clear on how people remember Jan. 6. In the three years since the attack played out on television, Republicans have become less likely to describe the rioters as violent and more likely to absolve Mr. Trump of responsibility, according to a Washington Post-University of Maryland poll.”
I had a sense that this was happening over the years, watching Republicans distance themselves from the riot that threatened our democracy and left seven people dead.
I saw this watching reactions to a post of mine last week after the Supreme Court ruled that individual states cannot bar Trump for sitting on the ballot.
“So much for states' rights,” I wrote on Facebook.
The body blows that destroy democracy don't happen in one fell swoop. But every once in a while you wake and see the damage. I felt like that in 2000 when the Supreme Court ruled Bush would become president, rather than allow ballots to counted or recounted. Same thing today, when the Supreme Ruled that states can't kick Trump off the ballot. Let's remember five of the people on the court were nominated by presidents who did not win the popular vote. Democracy is on the ropes. We hear about states rights until the Supreme Court doesn't like what a state is doing. No recounts in Florida, no autonomy in Colorado to block someone from the ballot who engaged in an insurrection.”
A family member began writing asking how many were actually hurt on January 6th 2021? Wasn’t it just one person? No it was five said another observer. I noted seven people associated with it died, one by a heart attack. Dying of heart attack hardly counts as being killed, noted the family member, seeming to split hairs and minimize damages, before resorting to ad hominem argument before the conversation ended.
In “Historical Revisionism and Worldwide Conspiracy: Techniques and Agendas of Three Holocaust Deniers,” Erica Spinelli notes that “ Although “each professional denier has developed an expertise” in the tactics he uses to deny the Holocaust (some dispute the six million death toll, whereas others deny the existence of the gas chambers), Holocaust deniers generally agree that there was no systematic policy of extermination carried out by the Nazis on the Jews.”
This felt like what was happening. Its a slow insidious process that undermines memory, doing damage to what we know and how we remember.
Thats what it felt like.
Cops getting killed by protesters and the damages minimized. Imagine if the shoe was on the other foot and it was the left who had done such damage. I remember dozens of arrests in DC when we were arrested for just arriving at the capital or for a hearing, much less armed, pushing down barriers, beating people. After the first wave of protesters got inside Jan 6th, many of us who’d been in DC for all the confirmation battles and skirmishes over tax cuts thought that it was an inside job, or they were allowed inside. We certainly were not allowed when we showed up.
For Gore Vidal, we’ve always had a problem with memory. “We are the United States of Amnesia, we learn nothing because we remember nothing. The matter on which I judge people is their willingness, or ability, to handle contradiction.”
Garcia Marquez traces the workings of collective amnesia in 100 Years of Solitude, as a plague descends on the village of Macondo, with its perniscious symptom: collective amnesia.
It feels like that plague is everywhere. You see it in mass condemnation of immigrants from those who thrive in a country of immigrants.
The gap between our lives and the lives of others can vast. The line between our world and others can be a cavern. It can be everything. “It is psychotic to draw line between two places,” writes writes BHANU KAPIL in Schizophrene, a collection of poems taking on themes of immigration and trauma, memory and gardens, pathology and health, fragmentation and the feelings of a new place, memories of those “left behind – neither place can be called home, or perhaps both can. Exile and diaspora is not entirely a new concept as far as Asian-American literature is concerned.”
We all live our lives, doing our best to recall what came before.
In “Because I Liked You Better” A. E. Housman puts it”:
“To put the world between us
We parted stiff and dry;
“Good-bye,” said you, “forget me.”
“I will, no fear,” said I.
Many of us remember the cold war years of conflict with the USSR / Russia. Others tend to forget the lessons of the cold war, built around containment and alliances.
Biden would address the gap in his State of the Union message. The speech began with comments on support for Ukraine to condemnation of the gradual erasure and denialism of Jan 6th from the political consciousness. The president condemned banng books and supporting a two state solution in Israel. "Let's not erase history. Let's make it....To my transgender americans, ill always have your back..."
“The message to President Putin is simple,” said Biden.
“We will not walk away. We will not bow down. I will not bow down.
History is watching, just like history watched three years ago on January 6th.
Insurrectionists stormed this very Capitol and placed a dagger at the throat of American democracy.
Many of you were here on that darkest of days.
We all saw with our own eyes these insurrectionists were not patriots.
They had come to stop the peaceful transfer of power and to overturn the will of the people.
January 6th and the lies about the 2020 election, and the plots to steal the election, posed the gravest threat to our democracy since the Civil War.
But they failed. America stood strong and democracy prevailed.
But we must be honest the threat remains and democracy must be defended.
My predecessor and some of you here seek to bury the truth of January 6th.
I will not do that.
This is a moment to speak the truth and bury the lies.
And here’s the simplest truth. You can’t love your country only when you win.
As I’ve done ever since being elected to office, I ask you all, without regard to party, to join together and defend our democracy!
Remember your oath of office to defend against all threats foreign and domestic.”
20 Days at Maripol won best documentary, a year after Navalny won. He was memorialized after passing, killed in a penal colony a few days ago.
Said the director of the film, Mstyslav Chernov: “20 Days in Mariupol” is the first Ukrainian film to win an Oscar. “I wish to be able to exchange this to Russia never attacking Ukraine, never occupying our cities,” Chernov continued. “I wish to give it all the recognition to Russia not killing tens of thousands of my fellow Ukrainians.”
The conflict seems to be expanding.
“Do psychiatrists register the complex and rich vibrations produced by their dreaming subjects?” wonders BHANU KAPIL in Schizophrene, “erasing distinctions between what is outside, the sky and whats beneath it? What digs into the head? … A schizophrenic narrative cannot process the dynamic elements….” (p.7).
No comments:
Post a Comment