Throwing stones

For several months, I had only a vague idea of what happened at the U.S. Capitol on January 6th, 2021.  I'm a Canadian, for one thing.  For another, I found it unutterably depressing.  I do remember thinking at the time:  Holy Cow, my cousin was right.

Said cousin lives in California, and was sending me distressed texts in late 2020, saying that democracy in the US was in severe danger.  

I have awoken deeply concerned. None of Trump’s many minions who now fill the seats in the Senate and House have in any way acknowledged the validity of the results of our free and fair election. Their silence is ominous. Ignoring the votes of the American people is outrageous.  He is calling for Civil War. Many of his most ardent supporters are heavily armed.

Democracies around the world need to stand up for the sanctity of the democratic process. This slide towards authoritarianism  must be stopped. Globally, we cannot afford to lose American democracy. The American people have done our job and voted him out in a free and fair election. We urgently need our international partners to speak up.

Back in December 2020, I thought she was overreacting.

It was only when Home Box Office came out with a documentary entitled Four Hours at the Capitol, that I sat down to watch and listen.  It's still unutterably depressing, and I'm still a Canadian, although events in Ottawa earlier this year make trying to understand what went on in Washington DC more pertinent.  No country, after all, is immune to populism, and I'm getting worried about democracy in Canada, to tell you the truth.

Four Hours at the Capitol, which tells the story with no narration other than interviews, and follows events through phone footage (mostly by marchers and attackers), security cameras, and police vest-cams, has been criticised for giving screen time to insurrectionists, but I don't really see how a documentary on the subject can leave them out.  Besides, to someone like me, who has only a faint idea of the various factions involved, it was of some help, although I was quite confused at first.

Early on, I had to sort out just who the interviewees were.  They are identified, of course, as they speak, but the protesters are often described in rather vague terms. I was particularly interested in the testimonies of journalists, whom I ended up having to Google -- which also worried me, because it makes my search history look peculiar.

The three journalists that we hear the most from - mainly because they were in the thick of it - are Taylor Hansen (The Gateway Pundit), Brendan Gutenschwager (described as an "Independent Videographer"), and Ashley Gilbertson (an Australian photographer for the New York Times).  Hansen and Gutenschwager are youthful; Hansen looks as if he's only recently begun shaving.  Gilbertson has the air of a grizzled news veteran.  All of them give clear and articulate accounts - a relieving counterpoint to the mob's limited cache of simple slogans (ie. "1776!" "F*** Antifa!" "Stop the steal!", etc.) but it's only as the documentary progressed that I got a handle on Hansen's sympathies - I'd never heard of the Gateway Pundit.  He uses the words "patriot" and "patriotic" a lot, and he uses them as a synonym for "Trump supporter".  Gutenschwager is harder to nail down, he apparently has documented many demonstrations in the US, and sells footage to major news outlets.  Gilbertson just sounds incredulous, someone who followed the crowd into the Capitol, and couldn't believe what he was recording.

For me, the most unsettling witness is a guy called Nick Alvear, a young, pretty, bearded guy who looks like he could have stepped through a time portal from the late sixties and early seventies. 

He was filmed firing up a joint in the great hall of the Capitol, after members of the mob broke in. Apparently, it occurred to him that he had seven additional joints on him, so he passed them out. Months later, in his interview for this film, he beatifically contemplates this gesture, commenting on how he toned the energy down and perhaps stopped some serious s*** from happening. 

He looks like several of the young men I knew at the Unitarian church when I was a young woman (a hotbed of liberalism), so it's jarring to hear him earnestly declare that Trump is speaking out against the enslavement, rape and torture of children. 

He's referring to the truly bizarre "Pizzagate" myth, which has become part of the overarching "QAnon" conspiracy theory. Our soft-spoken alt-right quasi-hippy somehow misses the irony of thousands of children separated from their parents at the Mexican border under Trump's "zero-tolerance" policy towards illegal immigration (i.e. refugees) -- something that is actually documented, unlike Pizzagate. 

There's further irony: Alvear was born in Venezuela, under the name Eduardo Nicholas Alvear Gonzales.      

The violence is difficult to watch, and I'm not the first one to wonder how violent it would have been, had the crowd been anything but predominantly white.

Particularly gripping are the testimonies of those inside: the woefully outnumbered security personnel, the senators, and staff members.  A young woman on Speaker Nancy Pelosi's staff, who is clearly the same age as my daughters, describes the hours of hiding under a table in a locked room, not daring to text her parents for fear of weeping and telling them goodbye.

We see insurrectionist Ashli Babbitt shot, by a clearly terrified Capitol Police officer. (Taylor Hansen describes her as "so patriotic".) She died almost immediately. We see a policeman hauled out into the crowd, beaten and tasered repeatedly.  He survived, but was badly injured and traumatized. We hear of the four police officers who committed suicide in the weeks following the attack.

Mostly, I was left with an impression of lasting damage, both physical and emotional - and a frightening revelation of how much damage was there before this march got out of hand, and how deeply much of America is in the grip of delusion.

It's the long weekend of the Canadian Thanksgiving.  I could be grateful for being a Canadian - and I am - but, about the same time I first saw this documentary, the truck convoy invaded Hades.  I have a painful story about that, which will have to wait until I can bear to tell it.

Holy cow.  My cousin was right.