FEBRUARY 12, 2021 – Yesterday afternoon I took a personal biz call I’ll call “Mark.” It started off cordially with his, “How ya doin’?”
This simple question was a match aflame. The fuse: my response, “I’ve been watching the impeachment trial.” Match to fuse: my question, “Have you watched any of it?”
When Mark said, “No, I haven’t seen any of it and don’t intend to” my brain . . . EXPLODED. Call it “crazy.”
I’d assumed from earlier conversations that Mark was middle-of-the-road; mature, articulate, knowledgeable—by no means “an idiot.” More in his favor, he didn’t hang up in reaction to my uncontrolled explosion. He listened—politely—but he had a financial incentive not to hang up. After all, America is nothing if it ain’t about money—and the freedom and liberty to make smack-gobbing piles of it or . . . to grovel for the remains.
As the dust settled around my unsettling rant, Mark allowed that he was a fan of Bill O’Reilly, and that he, Mike, “was fine” with my [lunacy,] since he has plenty of discussions with his 18-year-old son, “who’s pretty liberal.” I managed an apology, tantamount to admitting that I was, in fact, “crazy.”
But wait. What about the presumption of innocence and burden of proof? Oops. Too late. I’ve already confessed. Well then, what of the finer point of American jurisprudence: the “Yeah, but . . .” doctrine? Yeah I’m crazy, but . . . I suffer from temporary insanity. Moreover, I’ve been driven to insanity not by willful consumption of falsehoods but by unavoidable exposure to Republican contempt for truth and democracy.
Take for example, Sen. Inhofe, who said, “The more you hear it [evidence of Trump’s inciting the insurrection], the less credibility there is in it.” What the !@#$$!? Apparently that principle doesn’t apply to “Stop the Steal”—after nearly 60 cases alleging voter fraud were summarily dismissed, not for lack of proof but for lack of evidence altogether.
Then there’s Lindsey Graham, who, when asked if he’d heard anything that would change his mind, replied, “Nope.” What’s worse—“Nope” after attentively witnessing every minute of the impeachment managers’ presentation (in fact, he was absent for much of yesterday’s hearing) OR . . . “Nope” after contemptuously ignoring all or most of the evidence while sitting conspicuously pre-occupied with unrelated matters (e.g. reading newspapers (Cotton; Grassley); writing in the names of countries on a blank map (Scott); paying bills (Hawley)) or absent altogether (15 other Republicans)?
Then there’s Trump’s lawyer, David Schoen. In criticizing the videos and other evidence of the insurrectionists’ citing Trump as the instigator of the attack, Schoen said, “I think [the presentation] is offensive, quite frankly. It’s the antithesis of the healing process to continue to show the tragedy that happened here.”
No, the “antithesis” of healing is the president of the United States standing at one end of Pennsylvania Avenue and telling his goon squad to march to the other end and “fight like hell.”
With such insanity afoot, am I crazy to think it’s . . . “game over” for American democracy?
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© 2021 by Eric Nilsson
