These Times

Kirk Ericson | Jun 20, 20240

Note: I’m taking three weeks off of paid labor, so this space will be filled with reruns of some favorite columns. The following ran in the Jan. 14, 2021, edition. Fresh, unfocused-group content returns June 27.

“It’s coming to America first, The cradle of the best and of the worst.” — “Democracy,” Leonard Cohen

OLYMPIA — In the midafternoon of Jan. 6, a day that will live in infamy — and reverence — across our schizoid nation, I was in the parking lot on the south side of the state Capitol having a post-insurrection chat with my friend Mike.

It was 4 p.m., just a few minutes after the last white militants had been shooed from the area around the Governor’s Mansion and a few minutes before the Washington State Patrol began clearing the west side of the Capitol Campus, saying anyone who remained would be arrested.

Mike and I revisited the events of the previous hour, including witnessing two State Patrol SUVs accelerate toward us at a high speed and then take the corner we were on so fast I could see the vehicles’ frames tilt toward us into the turn. The SUVs re-accelerated toward the end of the parking lot, near where the Governor’s Mansion was having its guests.

While we talked, I saw a lone woman, maybe in her 30s, crossing the wide avenue that leads to the Legislative Building, her Trump flag furling behind her. The woman’s shoulders were as straight as a soldier’s at parade rest, her chin was raised and her head was on a swivel, perhaps seeking one more chance to share her insights about politics, culture and depravity.

Her eyes caught mine from 20 yards away. She yelled, “Joe Biden is a pedophile!”

This I did not know.

“How do you know that?” I shouted back.

“I saw the emails on Hunter Biden’s laptop!”

“Where did you see Hunter Biden’s emails?”

“On the internet!”

“Where on the internet?” I yelled.

“You can’t find them anymore. They’ve been deleted!”

A half hour earlier I stood near another woman, who had just retreated (tactically withdrawn?) from the mansion area, while she complained about cops harassing people “just for ringing a doorbell. All this” — she made an indignant sweep of her arm toward the sprawling law enforcement presence — “for ringing a doorbell?”

The woman didn’t mention the doorbell was attached to a home that was reached by storming a gate. Nor did she mention that the finger on the doorbell belonged to someone who was part of a mob, many of whose members had guns. But still, when you’re trying to make a point …

Those women clearly had some frayed wires sparking upstairs, but it’s understandable. Dining on the sludge that this president has force-fed us for 5½ years has made some of the sanest of us unravel a bit.

Those people who failed to quash our representative democracy Jan. 6 are unlikely to get another chance soon. By 3:45 p.m., when the clot around the Governor’s Mansion was breaking up, I had counted at least 80 law enforcement vehicles on the campus. More vehicles were still arriving and WSP employees were still strapping on riot gear at a time when it appeared the anarchists were leaving the scene.

I figured some insurgents must be in the mansion, but I learned that wasn’t true, so the donning of riot gear and the flow of arriving law enforcement seemed redundant. Then I figured it out, maybe: They were letting the insurrectionists know just what was in store for them if they ever came back with insurrectionist intent.

Considering the terror and horror that was visited upon their brethren and sistren at the U.S. Capitol, I presume that this state and these law enforcement folks are done indulging these nihilists. I imagine the thinking is the same in Washington, D.C.

At that same moment in Washington, D.C., law enforcement was bum-rushing those women’s comrades-in-delusion off the grounds of the U.S. Capitol. Many of those Trump-addled patriots had gone to the U.S. Capitol after departing — completely coincidentally, of course — a Donald Trump rally just up Pennsylvania Avenue.

Those people who invaded the U.S. Capitol were dogs that finally caught the car. They hadn’t received a detailed battle plan from Col. Trump, so they did what such patriots do: They took selfies, injured police, chanted “USA! USA! USA!” and shot pictures and videos of their fellow travelers, making it so much easier to identify them.

Thanks for not wearing masks. That was helpful.

It was truly a hard week for democracy in America, but let us at least be glad that this furious vanguard of Trumpism, the tip of this particular spear, is not composed of the brightest gardenias in the garden.

Which reminds me of a story. Several years ago, a Pierce County Superior Court judge told me the story of a defendant who was accused of having a duffle bag full of drugs. In court, the judge asked the arresting officer how he was able to connect the duffle bag to the defendant. The officer said the defendant’s name was on a tag attached to the bag.

“And how did you connect the defendant to that name?”

“Because he had his name tattooed on his forehead.”

“That was convenient,” the judge said.

“Your honor,” the officer said, “we don’t catch the smart ones.”

The invaders’ motivation and fervor remains a mystery to many Americans, including those Americans who remain under his spell, so I’ll share one of the best descriptions I’ve come across in the past 5½ years to explain Donald J. Trump’s appeal. It comes from my friend John Van Eenwyk, a clinical psychologist, world traveler and an ordained priest in the Episcopal Church:

“What his supporters like are four things: If they are rich, he’s made them fabulously richer. If they are poor, he’s free entertainment. If they are angry, he’s their spokesman. And to the paranoid, he assures them they aren’t mentally ill.”

Many names are being used to describe the people who stormed the U.S. Capitol and acted like they had just stepped onstage at a cosplay festival: Terrorists, patriots, thugs, Trumpists, protesters, extremists, freedom-lovers, white militants, insurgents and insurrectionists. But those people who crashed our totem of representative government were playing the game well inside this country’s sidelines, on a field where many of their kind have been playing for centuries.

It was these people who massacred hundreds of Lakota Sioux at Wounded Knee in 1890, who bombed the federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995, who shot and bayoneted hundreds of Vietnamese in the village of My Lai in 1968, who slaughtered a wagon train of settlers in the Mountain Meadows Massacre of 1857 and who killed a townful of Blacks in Colfax, Louisiana, in 1873.

But it was also these people who secured voting rights for women in 1920, who developed a vaccine for polio in 1955, who rebuilt Europe with the Marshall Plan after World War II, who aided Harriet Tubman in running the Underground Railroad, who risked their skin to integrate restaurants and schools in the South in the 1960s, and who fought for tribal fishing rights in this state in the 1960s and 1970s.

Let’s call those people what they really are: Americans. And until we fully recognize the potential within us, we won’t be done with days like Jan. 6, 2021.