JUNE 21, 2021 – Yesterday we returned from a quiet, pleasant weekend at the Red Cabin, surrounded by the sights and sounds of nature. Our time up there always has a calming effect and helps put the noise and nonsense of “civilization” into perspective.
Soon after arriving home, however, we returned to Alice in Wonderland—first via a glimpse but then by attentive viewing of CNN special about the January 6 attack on the Capitol. The more we learn about the horrific event, the worse it becomes and the more troubling its implications. The CNN production sounded major alarms for American democracy. As I watched the footage of barbaric behavior and persistent belief in the face of abundant, contrary evidence, I felt as though the operator of a phoropter had brought crystal clarity to the eye chart.
What leaped out was the fact that we who rely on evidence have an ineffective means for confronting thoughts and beliefs that are not only anti-American but rooted in falsehoods. The people who stormed the Capitol were driven by unfounded conspiracy theories, not fact-based notions of what things are and how they should be. This disposition played directly into the modus operandi of You-Know-Who, whose life-long sociopathy has been one long detachment from truth. With up to half a dozen exceptions, Republicans in Congress and the voters to which they pander are also on the “facts don’t matter” bandwagon.
How can this be? How can so many people be moored to nonsense? Quite easily, if you view the whole mess through the lens of pure power.
Yesterday, a leading anti-American, Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, told his first truth since he said he “couldn’t in good conscience” support You-Know-Who for president: “If Republicans don’t challenge and change the U.S. election system, there’ll never be another Republican president elected again.”
This explains the continuing momentum of “Stop the Steal,” election “audits,” voting suppression legislation, outright voter de-registration, and You-Know-Who’s chokehold on hostages within the Republican Party. More bluntly, “Graham’s Truth” is the banana peel of our nation’s current slide from an imperfect but functioning democracy into unabashed authoritarianism.
On Saturday as we cruised past the lakeside home of one of my brothers-in-law, an ardent Trump supporter and fan of FoxNews, we saw his over-sized American flag hanging from a balcony. If ever you’d find a “flag-waver,” it is he. What goes through his mind, I wondered, when he hangs out the colors? What is his flag fetish all about? What is his America in Wonderland all about?
Those are rhetorical questions. Though smart and successful, in education and associations my brother-in-law—and millions like him—never moved past a narrow, tightly guarded, superficial image of “My Country Tis of Thee.”
If the myopia that frames that view—and fear of potential loss—isn’t over-powered in 2022, the country will pass the point of no return. We will find ourselves wholly untethered from democracy and steaming toward disintegration, unless catapulted there by revolution.
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© 2021 by Eric Nilsson
