It’s not often you get to forecast history, regardless of what news outlets would have you believe. But mark January 6th on your calendar, because the showdown will not only be epic; it will be historic.
Technically, Wednesday will see the U.S. Congress gather to validate the Electoral College’s election of Joe Biden.
But in truth, Jan. 6 will mark a Scopes-Monkey-Trial-level battle between faith and reason, in this case embodied by the U.S. flag and the U.S. Constitution.
The American flag has come to represent nothing if not our toxic addiction to identity politics. We turn ’em into t-shirts, bumper stickers, tank tops, toilet paper, you name it.
The American Constitution has yet to become a t-shirt craze, though many of the lawmakers who gather in congressional halls will certainly wipe their asses with it Wednesday.
And we should note everyone who does, and remember them, by name. Because those will be the elected officials who formally declare that they consider claims valid even when when they are unaccompanied by facts.
Wednesday’s ringmaster, of course, will be Donald Trump, the P.T. Barnum who has already signaled some elephants in the GOP to prepare to stand on their chairs when he sounds the whistle. He already sounded another whistle, of the dog variety, over the holidays to supporters, Proud Boys, QAnoners, and other slackwits for what he promises will be a “wild” rally Wednesday.
Make note of them, too.
Because the Dunce Confederacy that will gather in marble halls and outside them pose an existential threat to this world, country, and you individually.
These are the people who refuse to believe the globe is heating up, round, or overseen by primates. These are the people who believe that voting is a privilege, not a right (a white, male privilege, to be precise). These are the people who believe if you’ve been saddled with a vagina, melanin or uppity attitude, you don’t deserve a seat at the table.
Oddly, or perhaps fittingly, the person at the center of the showdown is not Trump, but Mike Pence. For it’s Pence who will be tasked with calling the Electoral College’s results legit, and to admit political heresy by conceding there is no god, er, Trump, er Higher Power. It’s hard to tell them apart beneath the patriotic cloak of faith.
It’s worth noting that should reason win out, it will be a profound affirmation of the Founders and the power of their thesis paper. They could not have been more prescient: They may have pictured King George when they penned independence, but they painted Donald Trump in their cautionary tale of governance gone mad. What a layered, measured prescription they wrote for the body politic! It remains prophecy on parchment.
If faith wins out, god help us all.
Because faith requires conviction, not evidence. Reason requires evidence, not conviction. When the former holds sway, what chance, the voice of the muted? What armor, the threadbare?
It’s not often that fools and traitors put their names in a registry. When they do, let’s go Memento on their asses. Let this be OUR tattoo to jog the memory:
Lincoln may have been a Republican, but he was killed by conservatives.
