It’s been three spectacular years since the January 6th attacks of the United States Capitol, and, I think enough of a time frame to allow us to look back and see what’s been accomplished. Because you ask anyone who’s “into” politics, who treats their political party like it’s a sports team, and they will have strong opinions about that day. It’s a contemptible and vile day for many, an anniversary of fear, forever etched into the edifice of time. January 6th. Uttered with a trembling pronouncement. A meme of immortalized trauma.
But then for others it’s yet another example of the government’s tyrannical impulses, its darkly shrouded immolations of power, of its greased-up gears of corruption, an obvious false flag meant to dupe everyone else. About a quarter of Americans believe it was an inside job, a plot by the FBI to overthrow Trump once and for all, a reason to justify kicking the orange freak out. At first, it’s tempting to roll your eyes and scoff at that, and smugly deride them as a bunch of bucktoothed Alex Jones conspiracy types. But then again, they’re not entirely wrong. Or rather, they’re not entirely wrong for believing that. Agent provocateurs have instigated the use of violence and property destruction certainly in many leftwing demonstrations throughout the decades. The WTO protests in Seattle in 1999 were famously infiltrated by agents, who engaged in property destruction in order to justify a denouncement of the demonstrations altogether. Leading up to the Republican convention in 2000, state troopers infiltrated a protest group, executing mass arrests for the completely fabricated claims of their plans to make and use bombs, when in reality they were building giant puppets for a fun-spirited day of mocking the servile event with a parade. In May 1970, in one of the myriad illegal projects under the umbrella of COINTELPRO, during the protests following the Kent State shootings, an FBI informant burned down a building at the University of Alabama, giving the police the excuse they needed to execute mass arrests. So, it’s not totally unjustified paranoia. But it’s also a bit dense for the January 6th protestors not look at their reality tv leader calling for a violent uprising, and not blame him even a little.
In newspapers across the country the following morning, headlines described it as an “Insurrection”, and “attempted coup”, a “pro-Trump mob invades” “Under Siege” “Assault” “Attack”, all the bold capslock headlines that are usually reserved for most serious stuff. Kamala Harris said in a speech that January 6th will echo through history in the same way Pearl Harbor and 9/11 do. A bit of an outrageous self-indulgent claim. It’s a perfect articulation of her brand of liberalism, a theatrical victimization, a what’s-happening-to-me-is-as-bad-as-9/11! mentality.
But to describe it in these terms is granting it enormous credit, as a source of power, I think. Because it wasn’t a real attack, at least not in the sense of being an actual attempted coup, not a militarized civilian uprising the way the press made you believe. It seemed more like the culmination of a paranoid schizophrenic’s outburst because they didn’t get their medicine in time, or really, because the golems of superstition shrouded the night sky in heavy armory, and screamed obscenities, because the shadows danced and mocked you and the only way to fight back was to fight, in the blackened choler of distress. I have no doubt that most of the attackers believed democracy was actually being stolen from them. They wouldn’t have so blatantly bypassed all rationale and marched into the Capitol building so brazenly without hiding their identity, and risked getting sentenced to several years in prison if they didn’t believe deeply in what they were doing.
But then again, they didn’t do anything. Four people died, one of them was shot and killed by an officer, but the others just keeled over and died. One died of a stroke. One was on the phone with his wife, and had a heart attack, and just dropped dead. There was a rumor for a while that claimed some guy accidentally tasered himself in the balls while trying to steal a painting inside the Capitol building, and he died. It was later fact-checked that it wasn’t true, but I still believe it. The claim alone is obviously true. You do not fact check a thing like that and spoil the fun for everyone, you do not ruin a good story that already is. You are a friendless imbecile, the kind of person who asked the teacher for more homework in school. It is true. Someone did kill themselves by tasering themselves in the balls. Go look back on the footage from that day. The only action, the only tension from that day was at the police line, when the shoddy barricade of cops in their bicycle helmets tried desperately to keep these bundled up pig-people from entering the pastures of the Glory Dome. When they crammed through the narrow entrances of the Capitol building, a sort of bottleneck of obesity, madness broke a new threshold. It looked absolutely awful, a place you could get crushed to death. But once they got into the building, and started roaming around like hogs set free from the slaughterhouse, looking for the coup or the revolution they were planning to happen, they resorted to taking photos in Nancy Pelosi’s office, pretending to take phone calls, throwing papers around, marching off with pedestals, you quickly realized the level of threat was nonexistent. They risked their inevitable fate of a decade in federal prison in exchange for taking selfies in the Capitol building. They scaled the exterior walls in awkward vertical crab crawls, ugly sexual positions that made you gag. It was such a theatrical disorganized mess, it would have been impossible if someone didn’t taser themselves in the balls.
When you rewatch footage from that day, you understand why. It was like a heaving bovine army, ghoulish pigs oinking their way to revolution, the first time they heaved themselves off the couch to do something physically active, the first cold January air they felt tingle their skin, their pink flesh like marbled plaster. So, it wasn’t a real attack, and certainly nothing even remotely considered a coup. It is sometimes referred to in the academic circles as an attempted self-coup—when the nation’s chief executive makes an attempt to not give up any power.
Look at the real coups of the past. US history is littered with coups and coup attempts. Every government in existence today was some kind of coup, whether diplomatic or violent. But there are the famous ones that went bad. When Augusto Pinochet enacted his coup d’état, he was backed by Nixon’s CIA, he commanded the whole takeover from the safety of a suburban command center, and directed military aircraft to fire missiles at the Palacio de La Moneda. This was not some brash uprising. There was an extensive propaganda machine building up to this. The coup was in 1973, but it was back in 1970 that the CIA kidnapped and killed the Commander-in-chief of the Chilean Army for not using the military to prevent Allende’s presidential inauguration. Salvador Allende, after all, was the first democratically elected Marxist in Latin America. You probably know all of this history already, and so you probably already know of the relentless brutality of the Pinochet regime. Under Allende, Chile was relatively prosperous and stable, with a moderate middle class. And then under the military junta government put in place by Pinochet, led to the next seventeen years a legacy of unbelievable death and suffering. In Peter Kornbluh’s The Pinochet File, he recounts much of what has been declassified in the CIA files—the kidnappings, the killings, the torture, the rape and sexual torture, many waterboarded or heads bound and nearly drowned in vats of piss and shit, rats climbing into assholes and vaginas, “unnatural acts involving dogs.” It was organized and delegated. In the days following the initial coup, on September 11th, Marxists and dissidents were rounded up and taken to the two main sports stadiums in Santiago. This is a real coup, a real takeover and attack. January 6th was not.
Or look at the Banana Wars the US conducted throughout Central America and the Caribbean in the early 20th century. In order to solidify economic and political influence throughout the area, and dominate trade flow through the Panama Canal that the US opened in 1914, it infiltrated several countries in the area. The corporate monolith, the United Fruit Company, needed to solidify its monopolies in fruit, tobacco, and sugar trade, and with the help of the US navy and army, dominated influence there. The Banana Wars are a much too large and spanning series of conflicts to dutifully cover and summarize here, but the Panama Canal is a point to consider specifically. During the Thousand Day Civil War in Colombia, Panama was supported by the US government to secede. This was years after France’s first attempt to build the canal, which was marred by yellow fever and malaria, an estimated 200 men dying each month. But controlling that fifty-one mile stretch like it was a divinely clogged artery was tantamount to maintaining itself as the dominate economic global power, and the US knew this was worth the investment. There used to be only a railroad across the isthmus, transporting most of the gold found on the California west coast to the east. And before that, there was only the inhospitable dense jungles. So, this is perhaps an economic coup or sorts. January 6th was not.
What about an “insurrection”? This is the word also tossed around a lot to describe that day. But a true insurrection is more akin to a slave revolt, an uprising of ill-equipped and outnumbered heroes bent on overthrowing the unjust and tyrannical powers—exactly what the January 6th people see themselves as. The rebellion led by Spartacus was an insurrection. It’s academically referred to as the Third Servile War, but more heroically as the Gladiator War or the Spartacus Revolt. And it is heroic, the story of Spartacus is that of a noble rebel, a gladiator slave who deserted the Roman army, who escaped with other gladiators and banded together in the suicide mission of defeating the Roman Empire. I just read through the Encyclopedia Britannica’s entry on the Third Servile War, and you can’t help but enthusiastically root for Spartacus and his men, for their unfailing stance for freedom and justice, and you realize that this is probably what the January 6th people designate themselves as—as unapologetic Spartacus types, fighting not because they think they can win, but fighting because it’s the right thing to do. The leftist journalist, Chris Hedges, ended a series of speeches with the same line: “We fight fascism not because we think we can win. We fight fascism because it is fascism.” And the smatter of applause ignites only a dignified response of self-congratulation. It is a noble sentiment, and we all like to think of ourselves as the good guys.
The January 6th attack on the Capitol was another installment of the Tea Party thing. It was fun to play dress-up, to do the Civil War reenactment theater, wear the curly-cue white wigs and aristocratic penguin coats splattered with mustard and barbecue sauce, their tricorne hats flopping around in a naval Halloween costume party, but instead of the tricorne hats, they had the MAGA hats. They bounce around yelling revolution commands in this libidinal heist of domestic lethargy, this branded exile of the heart, masses of people mid-tantrum, playing pretend. Because January 6th was pretend. They did it because it was fun. That’s the thing with Trump—there is so much rhetorical energy wasted, so much allusion to some revolutionary type of nostalgia, the vagueness of the heart’s desire, but he did everything so half-assed. It wasn’t even half-assed, it was utterly inept and lazy in its delivery. Everything failed before it even started. He is their man. The game show host with a mail-order bride. The guy with the infomercial selling steaks. The casino villain. Biff in Back to the Future II. He’s hilarious. But it’s the trembling reactions from mainstream liberalism that give it the power they crave. It’s powerful because it scares. And the looming election that will very possibly give us a second term of Trump is at the edge of the horizon. If he’s elected a second term, he’ll probably pack the courts with radical Christian judges, and they in turn will strip the rights of gays and women and minorities. And it will be awful. But one thing that won’t change, is they will still be the victims. And you will still be the victim. And I will still be the victim. And there will be outbursts of lyrical slogans, there will be self-congratulatory protests, marches with the next iteration of either pink knitted hats or red baseball caps, and big cardboard signs, and millions of selfies taken and uploaded for their friends to see. And that will be the end of it. And we’ll carry on, more satisfied in our contempt than ever before.