Well it has actually happened, Trump has left the building. We take a look back at the outrages few weeks on the lead up to President Biden’s inauguration and the calm after the storm. You can find the latest Current Patter Podcast below or on all podcast platforms – @ThePatterPod
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A Smudged Picture of Capitol Hill
By Ewan Maguire
Democracy insists upon participation and democracy must take to heart the noise of those who cry out against real and perceived oppression. At first It really should take these two protestations to heart to the same degree. To real oppression it owes a righting of wrongs, a plan and a progression towards justice (in reality this process can be slow-moving, many instances taking generations, lifetimes or still, to this day, enduring). To perceived oppression it owes an explanation, a demonstration of facts and counterchecks. But what to do if this explanation is not accepted, is not believed, or is ignored?
If a small faction does not accept an explanation, or forgoes it all together, they might be ignored with the belief that they will gutter and extinguish from lack of oxygen. If a large and violent faction are unsatisfied or further provoked by an explanation, another tact must be taken. It feels, at least during this scenario, that either the protest will not go out by itself, or, for that matter, cannot be left to go out by itself because of the possible damage caused in the process. Retaliative violence is not condonable, nor is it productive. So, how do you convince earnest people that they have misplaced their convictions?
A leader’s mea culpa might sway some. But then a leader often becomes a representation, forged early -an idea that can outlast the real utterances and behaviour of the person. A leader’s retraction is always in danger of being seen as a betrayal by that person of the ideal of the representation.
The trench-deep question remains of what this representation means to those who vaingloriously wave it as a flag and feel led by it to the steps of Capitol Hill. Has a real resonance moved between people who want something constructive, who stand for something that constitutes a betterment? I hear no solidarity for working people, no discernible manifesto. What I do hear is anger and ignorance and nothing else in earnest. Besides these, there may be no other convictions to contend with here.
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I feel torn over writing that last sentence. I feel a slight guilt for judging those who are not the conscientious and calculating members of this patchwork movement that saw Trump for what he could be made into: a half-empty route through which their paranoid ideology could travel from rickets-inducing bedroom-obscurity to national conversation. Beyond the anger and behind the hysteria, there might be questions people want answered and issues they feel impotent to influence.
What has to go so wrong to enable a fertile ground for conspiracy and enraged fantasy? Are critics guilty of oversimplifying and lacking a desire to understand where this swelling comes from? If this phenomenon can be understood, and we are not wasting our time by trying to make sure Hannibal Lecter understands what he did wrong, I cannot see any underlying issues being addressed if they remain manifested in an impenetrable cloud of conspiracy and aimless malcontent. It may fall to those who feel a visceral disagreement with the most visible elements of this movement to investigate if anything coherent can be made out of the tumult.
Separately, for those working-class Americans who saw Trump as a means to gain attention unforthcoming from the wilfully amnesic administrations of the past, sympathy must be felt and an overdue righting of wrongs must be made.
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