My Blog Week: January 3 to January 9

A Word on the Week

Shame on Us

How do people get this unhinged?

Or, how is it possible, even with a Trump mob wanting to lynch Mike Pence, a police officer killed, strong indications that the president and his circle expected exactly what happened on January 6…how is it possible any elected official would not denounce the violence, the instigators of it, and the perpetrators?

Where is there room to think a treasonous insurrection is the work of anyone who needs catering to? However, Ted Cruz and others seem to have found room, not so much in the dark corners of their minds, but under the mud of the hog trough.

America won’t return to sanity until we address magical thinking, and the proliferation of garbage reasoning that TV and social media make money on. All ifs, maybes, could bes (in some other place), might bes (at some other time) allowed as arguments in the public discussion, are fundamentals of magical thinking. They create conditions and avoid realities. They allow people to style themselves as they imagine, as good, brave, on the side of right, while doing horrible things—while omitting to stand up against horrors, because under the right circumstances, they would. Under the right circumstances, they would come out and say they never liked any of this, or agreed with it…

If a criminal gang, or a dangerous individual, is alleged to act in ways undetectable, unprovable, indemonstrable, indefinable, and unchangingly so over weeks, months, years, the matter is functionally the same as if the entity did not act at all. Or exist. A nefarious plan can’t alter anyone’s outcome, if the nefarious planner gives every appearance, and continues to, of being just a regular person going about regular business. If our national security agencies were looking for signs of new terrorist groups, they would look for acquisition of weaponry, the raw materials for creating weaponry, acquisitions of vehicles for transport, of information; also training, insignias, ideologies, patterns of communication, a number of things that share the feature of existing. If agencies ruled out nothing whatsoever, antifa could be a terrorist group…but so could a bowling league.

And even antifa members, being anyplace, would be identifiable humans, just like the men arrested—having been identified—after showing up in videos of the Capitol assault.

We don’t know if some of the GOP members of congress have really fallen off the deep end. Paranoia works that way, each bit of crazy making the next bit seem (to the addle-headed) more probable. But never again should those offering a media platform allow assertions to go unchallenged.