January 21, 2021
The header picture shows the rotunda dome of the People’s House as first seen by me in a video captured on 1/6. I had been to Washington years before. I had viewed the Jefferson Memorial through the cherry blossoms, attempted to enter the Washington Monument (the stairs were accessible, but the elevator was broken), explored the Smithsonian, stood in President’s Park and gawked at the White house before following the route of the deplorables to the Capitol grounds.
On 1/6 an insurrectionist, a domestic terrorist, gave me my first glimpse of the Capitol’s interior. He had entered the Capitol by a broken window, creating a running video as he did so, complete with voice commentary. He navigated the confusion of the interior hallways until he arrived in the rotunda. There his feet stopped; his commentary reduced to an incredulous gasp as he encountered the immensity above. I shared his experience of that instant. My heart skipped a beat, I felt an identical rush of breath as the camera lifted towards the dome. We were both in awe of the architecture and ornament, the majesty of this space limned with light, the incomparable human-crafted heaven of the dome. For an instant I was at one with the insurrectionist, both of us transfixed with humility as our minds processed the incredible beauty around and above us.
This is the first item in the defense of Mr. Trump. It is most facile and inconsequential from a legal point of view. But from a human perspective, 1/6 was the first opportunity granted many Americans to gaze upon this space, to behold the wonder of this place of work, the gilded factory of democracy. The Court will not care a whit for these sights. The inadvertent presentation of them to the American people will be deemed irrelevant; the Court will be unimpressed by Mr. Trump’s role in this presentation. All these things are true. But the American people may come to thank Trump for causing their first introduction to the sacred space of this political temple.
I now caution the reader that she or he may wish to cease his / her reading of this essay. What follows is an attempt to set out the truth of 1/6 and the defense of Mr. Trump. It may be a grisly truth, an uncomfortable truth. It may be a warped truth, a biased truth, a sad truth, a revelatory truth. Whatever form of truth you may find it to be, it is as honest and uncompromising as I am able to make it. If you, dear reader, are easily offended, or made uncomfortable by an expression of truth, then you should turn away from these pages. Contemplate your own memorial, your own ceiling, your own cherry blossoms. Or plan a pilgrimage to this shrine to opulence, the great cathedral of capitalism built of stone quarried by slave labor in Maryland.
Generations from now, ordinary citizens will come to gaze on the same sights that froze the insurrectionist and myself. Tour visitors will shuffle like slow penitents through the halls of the Capitol. Arrived in the magnificence of the rotunda, the great dome of mammon, they will be fixed in awe as both the insurrectionist and I were fixed in awe. And, after some minutes of silence, perhaps one of them will inform the tour guide that his great grandmother entered this space when she was 33 years old. That on her first encounter she too was overcome with awe just as I and the insurrectionist domestic terrorist were overcome.
The old man will go on to say she too took a video, but it was confiscated as evidence on her arrest and, when finally released, it became impossible to view because of all the changes in digital formats over so many years. That the only remaining record of her experience were some faded legal papers, a discharge certificate, something else which recorded her jail time. There was a family diary that spoke of the difficulty his grandfather had in the years without her.
And the tour guide will lean in close and thank him. For 1/6 had entered the historical record and was now recognized not as the ending of the great tyranny, but as that moment in time when the great tyranny was first pulled into focus, when it first became visible to the American people. The guide will ask to shake the old man’s hand. And then he will turn to the other tour group members and explain, and they too will thank the old man and speak well of his great grandmother. Others will disclose they too have come because of the stories passed down through the generations, because of the Hollywood movie, having listened to the family history, reviewed faded records, old notebooks, pieces of glass from a broken window collected by a family member as a souvenir of that fateful day.
Outside the Speaker’s Lobby there will be a wall plaque which records that in this place Ashli Babbit was felled by a single gunshot. The weapon was a 9mm automatic and the range was less than 5 feet. The bullet had a muzzle velocity of 1,180 feet per second and was through and through, grazing Ms. Babbit’s spine before it exited the back of her neck, continuing its upward trajectory until it embedded itself in the wall of the Capitol high over the head of all the subsequent visitors to this space.
An insurrectionist had filmed the gunshot, filmed Ms. Babbit’s collapse, filmed the last twitch of her body, filmed the attempted resuscitation, filmed the fruitless attempt to restore life to her body. The bullet remains embedded in the wall, the film remains embedded in the mind of each viewer, embedded in the consciousness of peoples around the globe, embedded in the history of humankind’s struggle for freedom. The original recording is embedded in the National Archives along with the Zapruder film and the Bobby Kennedy film and the Martin Luther King film and the Regan film and the 9/11 film, and all the other films maintained by a once great state attempting to preserve some record of its people and their times of great distress. None of this has any application to the defense of Mr. Trump. But it was during his second term that he ordered the preservation of various records and artefacts and caused the Architect of the Capitol to uncover the original hole in the wall and remove the coverup plaster and paint ordered by Speaker Pelosi. He also ordered the plaque which was affixed to the wall beneath the restored bullet hole.
This is the second defense of Mr. Trump. It will not by accepted by the Court as the law forever looks backwards. The Court imposes the rule of the past upon the present. That is the intent of the law – to create stability, continuity, to avoid the fevers of the mob and the intolerant. To examine the facts of a case with care and honesty and give full respect to the law and its precedent. The era of the quick lynching died out years ago. Or so some people claim. The absence of precedent was ignored on the date the Congress arrogated to itself the right to convict a political opponent who was now a private citizen. This action set a new precedent in American law. This was the start of the “troubles,” so called because it was unsafe to speak of them due to the danger of summary conviction. But historians generally agree that the moment the Congress assumed the power to try political opponents for offenses under the Jefferson Truth and Reconciliation Act marked the onset of the “troubles.”
The third defense of Mr. Trump was ruled to be fake news and therefore inadmissible. When It became known that a Republican representative advocated the rounding up all Trump supporters and confining them in Guantanamo, the Bidenists applauded this suggestion. It conformed with the dictates of Biden’s inauguration speech on the importance of unity of the American people, and American political parties. The initiative hit a small snag when it was realized Gitmo lacked the capacity to accept 78 million Insurrectionist Domestic Terrorists. Then the new government of United Afghanistan offered space in Abu Ghraib on a contract basis. This was followed by similar negotiations with the Government of Independent United Iraq to accept the Insurrectionist Domestic Terrorists as indentured labor to clean the DU – 38 from the sands of Iraq.
This was celebrated by the BPA (Blue People of America, the name adopted by the United political party composed of former Dems and Repubs and inspired by the films of James Cameron) as it solved a variety of problems: First, it addressed the horrible problems inflicted on these two countries by earlier Trumpist adminstrations. It was thought only fair that those who caused the problem should be forced to clean it up and accept the personal risk of DU-38 contamination.
Second, it created lebensraum within the continental United Peoples of All Races Creeds Sexual Identities Belief Systems and Blue Loyalists (this was the later shortened form of the renamed Bidenist united state. The original name had included all the TGLGBHRXUBCY rainbow acronyms and the great diversity of personal pronouns (numbering in the hundreds and too many to fully document here). When the BPA introduced the Free United Bidenist Androgynous Recognition (the FUBAR medal, the highest honor in the new state) it was realized that a medal alone was insufficient recognition for the heroes who had led the peaceful protests which erupted across North America in the summer of 2020. More honor was needed. More recognition. It was quickly realized that once the convicted Insurrectionist Domestic Terrorists entered into indentured service with the Government of Independent United Iraq, they would be forced to abandon their houses and property (following the Bidenist precept that it was inhumane to separate a child from his, her, or its, parents it was decreed that the entire family of any Insurrectionist Domestic Terrorist should be sent to Iraq to atone for the great damage they had caused there. This created surplus housing stock throughout the nation and FUBAR recipients were granted first choice of this housing).
Third, the adoption of the FUBAR housing rewards scheme created vacancies in some of the most desirable homeless encampments across the BPA. All the vacant tents, rusted out recreational vehicles, and cardboard mansions, were now available to accommodate the surge of new immigrants who flooded the BPA in search of the BPA dream. They could not be disappointed. Each immigrant was assigned its own tent, vehicle, or mansion. If they were unsatisfied in any way, they were immediately found in violation of the Insurrectionist Domestic Irredentism Overseas Terrorist Act. Referred to in secret as the IDIOT Act, this was used to convict those persons who refused to accept the united policies of the BPA which were strictly enforced to ensure no further social upheavals such as had occurred during the extremist assault on 1/6. The Cubans objected but were quickly convicted and exported.
Fourth, many of the enlightened regimes in the United Middle East had changed their names so as to repel the B-52s, the big drones, the mini drones, the wasp drones, the F-39s, the F-57 [all 57 varieties were equally lethal and equally invisible] and the Tomahawks regularly conducting freedom of air navigation operations in all the disunited regions. These newly united countries had also suffered great harm from the past decades conduct of prior Trumpist administrations. They too began to contract for Insurrectionist Domestic Terrorists as cheap labor to deploy as servants, grounds keepers, household pets, houseboys, second and third wives, and a great many other utilitarian purposes. Even this demand was insufficient to exhaust the excess supply. This was especially true once the United Muslim Countries of Europe began to apply the lessons learned from the BPA for the purpose of uniting their own populations. So great was the surplus labor that it was decided to employ it to clean the DU-38 from the sands of the Sahara and then to go on and scrub the melting icecaps of Greenland and Antarctica before any residual trace of DU-38 found its way into the sea. Once the icecaps were scrubbed, the next herculean task was the cleansing and reforestation of the Amazon basin. The Bidenists were hailed round the globe as a force for good by peoples of all the major 52 sexual identities and the 643 minor identities.
The Fifth Defense of Mr. Trump was based on the argument that he could not have incited the Insurrectionist Domestic Terrorists as the assault on the Capitol commenced while his supporters were still in President’s Park nodding off to his speech which eventually ended at 13:13 pm. Trump sought to introduce images obtained from Google which showed that it took 33 minutes to walk the 1.6 miles from the site of the Save America rally to the place of insurrection. Google objected to this use of their intellectual property and this evidence was refused.
Trump then sought to introduce press reports which showed the assault on the Capitol commenced while he was still speaking 33 minutes away. He claimed it was not possible for him to incite an activity that was 1.6 miles distant and beyond earshot of him. The Articles of Impeachment made specific reference at Page 4, Lines 7 and 8, to a phrase uttered at the end of his speech; by then the assault had been underway for over 20 minutes and therefore could not have been incited by Trump. This evidence was dismissed as conjectural.
Trump then attempted to introduce a series of screen captures from a blog. These described the day’s events from a supporter’s perspective and were contained on a series of slides. Unfortunately for Trump, his manacles made it difficult to operate the projector (Trump had been refused all counsel because of his of political views. Giuliani was in a holding cell three down from Trump and the guards continually played the excretable songs from the inauguration to prevent the two either sleeping or communicating).
Senator McConnell then asked Trump if he was trying to make a mockery of the proceedings. Trump said no, he was making a beautiful defense, really beautiful, and then claimed all the slides had been in perfect order before he was placed on suicide watch (the attending Doctors were unable to determine if the cause was Brooks, Lopez, or Gaga. Trump claimed it was all gaga and the physicians ordered the music to be dialed down to 11). Senator Harris then asked Trump if he thought this was a Kangaroo court. Trump gave a puzzled look and before he could answer Senator Saunders rose on a point of order and informed the assembly that Kangaroos enjoy protected legal status and that was not the case in this proceeding. After much discussion it was decided it would be unwise to accord marsupial rights, or any rights at all, to the defendant. The Chief Justice appeared to nod his head in approval. Others claimed he was just having a nap.
Trump drew attention to the fact the first of his supporters to reach the Capitol found the assault well underway. He presented video which showed a man smashing a Capitol window while the surrounding black clad cloud chanted “Antifa, Antifa, Antifa” in an endless cycle. Then a red hatted Trump supporter entered the frame from the left and pulled down the man smashing the window before he was himself battered down by the black clad mob. Trump asserted there were two groups at the Capitol on 1/6. The first, early group, did not wear red hats and commenced the assault. This crowd of organized active assault teams prevented the later, second group, of Save America attendees from immediately getting close to the Capitol. Most did not climb to the west terrace but remained on the expanse of lawn before the Mall.
Trump also claimed there was emerging evidence of preplanning and organization. Trump stated that over the past four years the chief complaint against him has been that lacked any competence in these two areas. Press reports disclosed the F.B.I. had advanced knowledge of the attacks. Trump asserted that throughout his time in office, the F.B.I. leaked intelligence to the press but rarely informed him. Trump was forced to rely on the fake news to find out what was happening in his administration. The fake news contained multiple accounts by government office holders proudly stating they were secretly doing all they could to undermine government policy and direction. Some of these proud persons were alleged to be senior officers of the F.B.I. and other senior department heads.
When Trump paused, the Chief Justice asked him if the defense wanted to rest and Trump replied “No, please. No rest. I would rather stay here. I don’t want to face the music.”
“In that case may I examine you?” asked the Chief Justice.
“You can do anything if it stops the music.” Trump looked fearfully around the chamber as if searching for hidden loudspeakers.
“As I understand your theory of events, your defense, if you want to call it that, rests on two key assertions. The first is that you were down in President’s Park putting your followers into a deep hypnotic sleep until 13:13 pm. Is that correct.?
“It wasn’t just them. I had to go back to the house for a beautiful nap.”
“I understand. While your followers snoozed in the Park, 30 minutes from the Capitol, at approximately 12:50 pm, group of dark, radically black clad leftist insurgents were initiating a concerted pre-planned Domestic Terrorist attack on the Capitol. And it is therefore impossible for these insurgents to have been incited by the remarks cited in the Articles of Impeachment, which remarks came toward the end of your speech near to 13:13 pm.. In fact, the attack had commenced some 20 minutes before,” the Chief Justice placed great emphasis on the word before, “you uttered the alleged words of incitement. That is your second key assertion. Am I correct?”
“You said it beautifully. Completely beautiful. Very, very nice. Thank you. All my supporters thank you for making that clear.”
The tone of the Chief Justice’s voice had changed. It was deeper, more resonant, a sound of concern. “Mr. Trump, do you possess any knowledge of these leftist radical extremists having the support of agencies affiliated with either of the Chinese or Russian states?”
“Oh, your honor.” Trump sounded greatly relieved as the true culprits hove into view. “You have it beautifully. It is bad. Very bad. Much worse. It affects my supporters, everyone.”
The Chief Justice had by now snapped fully awake and fixed Trump with an intense stare. “And who do you think was the dark force behind this attack on our cherished democratic freedoms?”
“Pelosi. She controls everything up here. None of this could have taken place unless she was co-ordinating it. She is a master of the dark arts. The only other person is Brennan. He does this stuff all the time. He even does it on air. Comey too. They write books about it! Then there are the love bird weasels and . . .”
The Chief Justice immediately smashed his gavel down with a sound like a thunderclap, drowning out the loud murmurs racing around the chamber. “At this moment we are adjourned for an early lunch of two hours duration. This hearing will resume at noon o’clock.”
Everyone filed out of the Chamber. Trump was led away in his manacles and such an overly large orange jumpsuit it looked like a misappropriated circus costume. Everyone forgot about the slide projector which had been startled into life by the resounding thwack of the gavel. The projector appeared to be stuck, or being operated by some occult force. It flashed an image on screen for 3 short repetitions, then flashed up the same image for three long repetitions, immediately followed by a further three short repetitions before it allowed five seconds of darkness and then repeated the cycle. As it continued flashing, the projector seemed to speed up, continually flashing the identical sequence but at ever more urgent intervals. The image itself slowly dissolved. Before the hearing reconvened, it had almost completely melted away.
Part One of this series: On Democracy
Part Two of this series: What is to be Done?
The Impeachment Hearing will be reconvened in Part Four
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