Acknowledging An Anniversary, Dubiously

JANUARY 6 was a painful day for me, as it was for millions of good Americans. For millions of bad Americans, not so much. It was all over the media, of course, as it should have been. That fact alone made it more painful, "mixing memory and desire" as T.S. Eliot said, but, as Lord Acton said, paraphrased, "those who fail to learn the mistakes of history are condemed to repeat them". The media attention of itself was enough to bring out the bad Americans, led by Trump and followed by his followers, all of whom still beleive that we are making, as Shakespeare said, "much ado about nothing". People who think that are, of course, idiots and traitors. The date will, as FDR said, "live in infamy", along with Pearl Harbor Day, JFK asassination day, and a few others which should be equally or more infamous but are not, due to our unique American penchant for forgetting anything which happened more than ten minutes ago. My entire life I have acknowledged Pearl Harobr Day, althougH I wasn't born yet when it happened, and since I was nine years old have scknowledged JFK Day. "Insurrection Day" now joins the list, along with the day my mother died in 2014, January 8, and a few other personal ones. On every day of the calendar year something horrible has happend in the seemingly never ending saga of horrible human history; our negatively remembered dates thus become a purely personal matter. The trump insurrrection arguably has a special place of its own in the annals of the infamous. For the first and we hope only time in American history a president who was quite plainly and badly defeated for reelection refused to accept defeat, lied that he had actually won, and, without evidence, convinced seventy five million Americans that his lie was not a lie, simply because it suited their purposes ande egos to believe a lie rather than what was for them an unbearable reality. Failing to overturn the legitimate election result by lies or litigation, Trump resorted to violence. The mob, the attack on the Capitol, the deaths it caused, and the damage it did to American electoral democracy all belong to Donald Trump, and to those who enabled him. He will be rememberd as the worst president in American history, because he was, and his followers will enter the history books as the worst traitors, surpassing the loyalits who remained loyal to King George III in 1776 and beyond, equalling the confederates of 1861 who abandoned then attacked their former country and made war, all for the cause of perpetuating the evil but economically expedient institution of slavery. The confederates fought for "state's rights" to the extent that they fought for the right of states to enslave human beings. Trump and his traitorous supporters fought to overthrow the United States government, not as they claim, in order to right a great wrong of the election of 2020, but rather, to perpetuate tyranny. Their claim that the actual insurrection occurred with a stolen election remains, and shall forever remain, fatuous, and treasonous. Between one hundred thousand and two hundred thousands Americans who refused to support the revolutionay cause between 1776 and 1781 left the country on ships bound for sundry destinations. The confederates would have done a greater service ahd they done the same thing, leaving free African-Americans and a great deal of real estate behind. Trump and his insurrectionists know exactly where they can and should go.