Stonekettle (a.k.a., Jim Wright) on yesterday’s Jan. 6 anniversary spoke about his career in military intelligence, about learning to overcome one’s biases and to see and present facts, data, as they are. He spoke about the men he came to respect who trained him. Reflecting on last year’s riot yesterday, he asked, besides “guys like Karl goddamn Rove,” well, “How did we get here?”
President Barack Obama.
Because the election of a young, dynamic, smart, educated, articulate, kind, compassionate, and funny liberal black man galvanized the foul racist mean underbelly of this country like nothing else ever had.
Those who attacked the Capitol a year ago today. They are in almost every regard, the antithesis of Barack Obama, mean, crude, uneducated, ill spoken, filled with rage and blind ignorant loud blustering false patriotism.
And those men I had admired? Those veterans I respected?
Like me, they were trained to be objective. To put aside their own bias. To demand proof. To require evidence. To check and doublecheck the information.
And they threw all of that away, all of it, when a black man took office.
They forgot everything they ever knew.
They forgot who they had been.
They watched Fox News all day and they lost their humanity. They lost their objectivity. Without the supporting structure of the military and the purpose it gave them and the impartiality our profession had imposed upon their worldview, they lost their very identity.
They became, literally became, different people.
It was horrifying. Like watching a loved one eaten alive by Alzheimers.
They included me on increasingly insane email chains that quoted Nancy Grace, Rush Limbaugh, and Glenn Beck as fact. They sent me racist mails quoting the comedian Jeff Foxworthy as if that guy was some sort of expert on anything. They posted racist memes to their Facebook pages and said with a sly wink, it’s not really racist if it’s true. Heh heh. They sent me dire proclamations from the NRA how the negro in office was somehow coming to take their guns — these were men who’d been trained in firearms by professionals, who’d served honorably in war, who laughed at a bunch of unholstered swaggering goons like the National Rifle Association and yet here they were now suddenly quoting Ted Nugent.
And it got worse.
It got so much worse.
They joined the fucking Tea Party. They began to trade in the most insane and ridiculous of conspiracy theories. There was no lunacy too great, no rage so unhinged, that they couldn’t embrace it if it came from Rush Limbaugh. And then when the next election came, these men that I had once so admired, who had served steely-eyed in war and who would have once risked it all for the truth, who had once led every day by steady example and who had been supremely contemptuous of those blustering frauds, the paper warriors, those of stolen valor and empty bravado, suddenly these same men were cheering … Sarah Palin.
How did we get here?
That’s how.
There is much more, both before and after what’s quoted above. And it’s powerful. What’s more important now, though, is “how we get out of here.”
This is the moment, right here, right now.
This is the moment where history turns on a single sharp pivot and the very fate of civilization hangs in the balance.
And rarely — if ever — is that moment so clear while it’s happening as it is right now. THIS is history, this moment right here, and what we do in this moment is how history will remember us.
A century ago, Germany could not stop its slide to destruction and those people, the craven cowards and the innocent and the monsters alike, had to ride the horror all the way down.
But we have their terrible example before us and we don’t have to suffer the same fate.
We can stop it.
We can restore democracy and save The Republic.
But the time for half measures is long, long past. It is time now for bold action. This is our nation. This is our democracy. It’s worth fighting for and it’s time we take it back from these miserable sons of bitches and send them back to the fringe where their rotten ideology belongs.
As much as it pains me to say it, Karl Rove is right.
Those Republicans who still believe in democracy and their duty to The Republic, if there are indeed any such left, have a duty to condemn the riot and those who refuse to acknowledge it.
There can be no soft-pedaling what happened and no absolution for those who planned, encouraged and aided the attempt to overthrow our democracy.
Love of country demands nothing less.
That is true patriotism.
