Certification One Year Later

“Freedom is the sure possession of those alone who have the courage to defend it.” -Pericles

When I quoted Pericles on the morning of Jan 6, 2021 I was duly scolded by a relative, a respected elder. Yet I had my own inalienable cast of mind and remained true to it. What weighs on such a fierce mind one year hence?

From the moment of the riot (and proceeding it) there have been two narratives. Competing narratives. As the riot unwound and diminished into the late afternoon hour, the horror of it marked a historic moment in the nation’s strife and countered Chaos’s riveting, animal spirits.

Despair came in winding down, due to our knowing that this moment would not resolve itself as so many others. Not to be blown away in the winds of time, to become the dust we hardly recall as happens with so many dramatic events. No, it would stay with us for some time.

Both narratives would persist. Each narrative would war with the other. War evokes bitterness before a reconciling peace. War destroys. We had an inauguration of burnt ashes; not a peaceful transfer of power. Another relative had sat for half-hour on my back deck a week or so earlier. He had to depart quickly for the airport. Before he raced away, I asked of him the most pressing thing on his sharp mind?

It was hope for a peaceful transition, for his children and my child. We all breathed delicately in hope, knowing erst-while what slender reed the times offered for it. We hoped together and wished and witnessed. And continued with our judgments. He for his new President, me for my not-conceding incumbent.

I had stood and supported my incumbent through his term and no plea from me sufficed for any turn of thought among compatriots. Actually, it was not only my elder loved one who scolded in searing terms, but a host of fellow peers and thinkers. Even a very close relative takes to repeatedly denouncing the man as an utter scoundrel.

Alas, it was the case that those few like-minded who also loved the former President, far and few between, were also denounced and violently scorned. So I could get no justice in giving a well-reasoned article from mature and careful thinkers to my peers or relatives. Oh no, their dismissals would tear at one’s soul.

A soul. Think on it. Throughout my support of President Trump, I had recommended one thing over and over to his detractors. I asked them to please weigh virtue and vice, to look to the virtues amid the vice they saw in that benighted soul. Conrad Black calls him a singular force of nature, one of those figures history gives that defy the ordinary course. Not ordinary, rather he bestrides History itself to make our History. He is that, either reviled for it or loved.

There are two sides to my counsel on the virtue of the President. First, there are the two contrasts; virtue and vice. My compatriots admit to no virtue whatsoever in the man. Their condemnation is complete. It is whole and blooms in every vibrant, loud hue. So if one mentions the man’s daring, his singular initiative, or his grasp of raw business life, it likely comes to nothing.

Compatriots will dismiss any virtue with sneers and no thanks. Even as simple a matter of the man not drinking or smoking will be reviled, including among those in a relatively conservative group. “Teetotaler, so what!”

Thus I cannot bore by lengthy lists of the many virtues of the President. I will get to my second point on virtue and vice and their relation in the unusual context of the President. Vice so often emulates virtue and often is a twisted, perverted, form of it. All the bluster and braggadocio of the President brings this home readily.

My friends rage at the man’s lies and harangue me for refusing to denounce them. But I generally found his purported lies so transparent, so glib, that they hardly were lies. This can explain some of how 71 million people became entranced with the character. His lies were so often rude jokes and outrageous flubs, that in any case exposed the ironies and treacheries of the times. Was he lying outright or was he revealing thoughts stifled and silenced by their harsh realities?

Was the man never earnest behind his manipulation of his voters? My opposed compatriots have, they suppose, the definitive answer. But in humility, who among us know the rock-bottom depths of another soul and motivation? The man is called a traitor for his omission on the afternoon of January 6th. The opponent sees it as clear evidence.

But his supporter? A man is in a dining room next to the Oval Office, watching the riot on TV. His daughter comes twice, thrice, to beg him, please – address the crowd and tell them to disperse peacefully, immediately. Please, daddy, please. Your legacy, our country! This you must not forsake now in this moment, Father. Antigone to Creon, does it fall upon deaf ears?

We don’t know what the man was thinking at that table, watching. Really. Even the length of time tableside is in dispute, three hours or half an hour? Do we know if there were good thoughts or bad, evil, thoughts in his mind before the bestilled human was roused to act? He got up finally to tell his followers to go home. Perhaps one day he might tell us what he was thinking.

I do know though that a few times in life, shock has provided monumental thrusts to action or inaction. In shock, one grasps the phone to dial 911, too soon before even shaking from a calamity: One is moved to direct act before emotion catches up.

But shock is volatile enough that one is sometimes moved to utter inaction, as though by becoming a statue one might secure a repose in trauma’s upheaval. Inaction alone is not a sufficient indicator among competing narratives that history delivered to divide the day.

I think of a man at a dining table. I see not only a man. I see a soul, a spirit, a conscience, a hope. I see someone who was once a child and is now old, with time’s ravages and errors. I see someone very alone amid 71 million people and someone who is never alone, among a host of loving grandchildren.

Kant says nothing shines more that the starry heavens above or the moral law within. And in that, the moral law really is within, for in one year since January 6th, I will not say what the man thought. And neither today I will call him a traitor.

The candidate does not concede.