Thread by @antoniogm

Yes, I have a January 6th take.

Triggered by the superb documentary 'Four Hours at the Capitol' by @visitjamie and @danreed1000, I've shared a few thoughts on the events a year ago today.

thepullrequest.com/p/american-inn…

@visitjamie @danreed1000 Firstly, go see the documentary, either on HBO or via the free link available in the subscriber-only post.

It’s 'Jackass' meets 'West Wing'; an Insane Clown Posse concert somehow invading the set of 'Mr. Smith Goes to Washington', and you can’t take your eyes off of it.

@visitjamie @danreed1000 The action oscillates between pitched hand-to-hand combat and carnivalesque scenes of total absurdity: some yahoo reclining on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s desk; an officer talking shaman guy off the Senate podium like a museum guard telling someone to not touch the artwork.

@visitjamie @danreed1000 The rioters seem simply agog that they’ve somehow managed to take the Capitol building. A stoner named Nick Alvear lights a joint and begins passing it around. They stand there buzzing high, a toke break to their unplanned action movie, contemplating the cupola’s grandeur.

Amidst hooliganism and confusion, there was heroism. A small group of Metro cops in a tunnel staged a last stand: a couple dozen of them held off thousands of rioters.

“I didn’t want my name going down in history as the guy who gave up the Capitol,” recounts their commander.

What struck me was the naive tentativeness to it all: the cops prefer to retreat than to fire on rioters; the protestors capture a cop and beat him badly...then realize the insanity of what they're doing and return the guy to the police line. Nobody seems to have an actual goal.

This is very unlike countries where such political dramas are routine. For example, in Spain, when a group of insurgents take the parliament building and mount the speaker's podium, they don't pause to take a selfie as shaman dude did.

In countries where domestic political dramas aren't a LARP--I cite personal anecdotes from the Basque region and Belfast--violence is used as another tool of politics as domestic life descends into a miasma of mutual hate, terrorism, and tit-for-tat aggression.

What you see in 'Four Hours at the Capitol' is a (formerly?) sane country in the Anglo Saxon liberal tradition flirting with the violent turmoil that plagues much of the world, and almost trying to figure out if it likes it or not, while not quite realizing where it leads.

This is as true of the post-event commentariat as the rioters themselves: the constant refrain of 'coup' and 'insurrection' for what seemed eminently unplanned and direction-less. The constant comparisons to Weimar and the Reichstag incident as imminent menaces.

The Reichstag reference is particularly tortured: If you’re citing the example of an elected government exaggerating the importance of an attack on the parliament building in order to give itself sweeping power, then by analogy the modern-day Nazis are … the Democrats.

In countries where coups really happen, semantic debates about the meaning of coup or insurrection aren’t necessary: You can look up and see a different face in power addressing the nation, a different political party running the show, possibly even a different flag flying.

The willingness of everyone involved in this January 6th clusterfuck to suddenly engage in the theatrics of domestic realpolitik is an alarming trend, reflecting a fundamental naïveté about where this path ends.

This is not how it's supposed to work in America.

I'm am an American: my life is not subject to the outside world’s political insanities. Ours is a political experiment where the old rules don't apply: blood and soil are not supreme, the government’s depredations are constrained, this is a ‘nation of laws and not men’.

Every time I get back to the US, whether from Belfast or Israel or Cuba or anywhere politics aren’t a LARP, I have one thought: God bless America. Land of hysterical bullshit, but no soldiers checking papers, no bombs, no bitter unresolvable ethnic conflicts going back centuries.

There's one particularly jarring scene (in a film full of them): Trump gives a speech asking the rioters to stand down, which is broadcast from megaphones, almost like a Batman signal. As if a switch had been flipped, the wind goes out of the mob’s sails, and they disperse.

A violent rabble indulging in some personality cult and following the dictates of a great leader: This isn’t how America is supposed to work.

That’s the world you leave behind when you land on a plane at JFK or MIA.

Long may this innocence of the hard realities of dysfunctional domestic power politics last in America, and brief may our fascination be with living in some Weimar-esque powder keg, egged on by both sides of the political divide.

Because the non-LARP version of domestic strife in a country as large (and well-armed) as the US is too horrible to contemplate, and anyone who clamors for it has never seen the real thing, nor understood just how long the historical scars of such conflicts really last.

We may grow so intoxicated with this increasingly real-world memetic warfare of ‘stop the steal’ and #resist, that like the protestors in the Capitol that day, we rush into something much bigger than we bargained for and which we ultimately regret.

Lastly, I interviewed the filmmakers this morning about the film, and we discuss everything in this thread and much more, particularly about how they pieced together the complex set of events via footage and interviews.

Give it a listen.

callin.com/episode/januar…