Inauguration Day (still doesn’t feel real)

I am writing this only a few hours before Joe Biden officially becomes president of the United States, and it still doesn’t feel real to me. I’m just not able to process this fact, and I’ve been wrestling with that for a few days now.

I don’t have answers. The coming days are going to continue to be long and difficult, and an end to the disastrous Trump presidency is not a magical undoing of all the damage he and his administration inflicted. “We survived”, many say, but of course many more didn’t (including but not limited to the over four hundred thousand who have died from COVID-19).

But what I want to acknowledge, briefly, is the collective trauma and abuse we have all experienced over the last four years (both from the administration and their supporters), and the effects of that are going to linger far beyond the change in political leadership. I would be far from the first person to compare the Trump administration to an abusive relationship, to gaslighting, and so on, but nonetheless that is an important lens for processing these feelings as we go forward. For better or worse, it has been a huge source of anxiety, and that’s not going to go away immediately. We’d do better to acknowledge this openly than try to downplay it.

I do have some hopes things will improve, but for better or worse it’s going to be a slow process and we have to keep paying attention. (This is not the time to get complacent, though I certainly don’t begrudge anyone needing a break.)

If you feel weird, if things still don’t make sense, if you find events difficult to process, you aren’t alone.

 

Insurrection

Today was a very stressful day, as I’m sure anyone paying the vaguest amount of attention to news out of the (not-so-) United States can attest. I am writing this, not because I have any particular insight or anything noteworthy to say, but merely because I would feel more uncomfortable saying nothing.

The day started off well, with decisive results in the Georgia runoff elections that have been worrying so many. Warnock’s win over Loeffler was clear fairly early; I was a bit concerned at how close the Ossoff-Perdue race was, but as the day went on and further returns came in it seems to have edged past the recount margin. This is the best we could have hoped for out of those elections, and frankly something of a pleasant shock. Democrats will now have the slimmest possible majority, which means McConnell is out as majority leader (fucking finally) and theoretically it might be possible for them to actually accomplish something. It remains to be seen whether they actually will, but the possibility is there. (For better or worse, a lot is resting on the cooperation of West Virginia’s Joe Manchin…)

Also today came the announcement that Biden plans to appoint Merrick Garland to Attorney General, which seems ironically apropos.

That said, today was also marked by an enormous mob of seditious white supremacists (don’t argue this one, look at all the photos of them carrying Confederate battle flags) storming and successfully occupying the Capitol, interrupting the certification of the Electoral College result and sending the Representatives and Senators fleeing to safety. As I write this, as far as I know they are still on the premises. Similar groups have stormed quite a few state capitols as well; this is not an isolated riot.

I am not exactly surprised to see something like this happen; the right-wingers have certainly been hinting about it long enough, and people like Sarah Kendzior absolutely saw it coming and attempted to warn the rest of us. Nobody with the power to do anything seems to have been paying attention.

This is terrifying, for obvious reasons. I am not sure whether the best term for these people is domestic terrorists, insurrectionists, traitors, or something else, but those phrases at least mark out the general space they occupy. There is ample evidence that this was action was premeditated (among other things, several people present were wearing printed T shirts referring specifically to this event on this date). And their action is supported by the supposed president of the country, who continued egging them on via Twitter until even that company felt obligated to step in (and do the bare minimum, thanks ever so much Jack).

DC police were either unable or (more likely) unwilling to stop them from gaining entry, and I read the Pentagon apparently refused to send in the National Guard. This could have been prevented or stopped. Remember the ludicrous amounts of violent ‘riot suppression’ that were deemed necessary by these fuckheads when there were peaceful protests saying Black Lives Matter? A fraction of that violence should have sufficed to dissuade these cosplaying yahoos (these are the sort of people who love dishing it out but can’t take anything), but for some reason it wasn’t considered (we all know what the reason is, they’re mostly white men and law enforcement is full of fascists and the fascism-adjacent).

This is very serious. This is, let us be clear, a coup d’etat. I do not particularly expect it to be successful, but it does not need to be to cause a great deal of damage. As such, it is imperative that the incoming Biden administration take this seriously and prosecute those involved to the fullest extent of the law. (And this includes “president” Donald Trump. It appears there are going to be attempts at impeachment and/or invoking the 25th amendment, finally, in these last 14 days of his administration; I don’t know if I dare to hope there will actually be some attempt to hold that man accountable for anything, but this sort of behaviour needs to have consequences because the next person to attempt it will not be nearly so inept as Twitler. The question about that is why the fuck did it take this long, why the fuck is this the line that had to be crossed? For fuck’s sake.)

It looks like the Senate are back in session to finish the certification, at least.

I will stop here because I don’t know what else to say. Here are a few pieces on the subject over at Freethought Blogs I thought worth reading: One Two Three Four

Loten here with an update some hours later (Mitchell is probably asleep, at least he had better be). It’s over, for now at least. Four of the mob are dead, and there are reports of at least fourteen policemen injured – many of these thugs had tear gas and body armour, and two bombs were found and removed from the nearby Democratic and Republican National Committee headquarters. There have been more than fifty arrests so far.

Congress have reconvened and are in the process of confirming Biden’s election despite yet more Republican attempts to stall, and the Democrats have two confirmed wins in Georgia to give them the majority so desperately needed. Trump has been banned from Twitter for 12 hours, Facebook and Instagram for 24 hours and Snapchat for some length of time as well with orders to delete some of the worst messages or face permanent suspension, as well as Youtube removing at least one video. While this is a pathetic token gesture at best, it’s also as far as I know completely unprecedented and for that alone it’s a good start. There has been universal worldwide condemnation.

Biden has also explicitly termed this ‘insurrection’, ‘assault’, and ‘bordering on sedition’, and we can hope he follows up and takes action.

This whole mess has also led Pence and McConnell to grow spines, which is probably the most surprising thing (I doubt anyone thought they actually had limits to what they were prepared to swallow), and at least one Republican senator – Kelly Loeffler, runner up in Georgia – has changed their stance and backed down as well. As with just about everything else he’s ever said or done, this has blown up in Trump’s face. Imagine my surprise.

 

Hench: A Novel (Natalie Zina Walschots, 2020)

[amazon]

This book has been on my to-read list for a while, ever since I happened to see the author in some Twitter conversation earlier this year (I don’t remember the context, for better or worse). Anyone who’s known me for any length of time is probably aware that I love stories that subvert expectations and explore the perspectives of characters who normally tend to be glossed over (villains, servants, etc), or which attempt to interrogate tropes through the lens of “what if we take it seriously and let reality ensue”. I also tend to enjoy what I’ll call “competence porn”, which it looked like this might be (it is). If anything, this book seemed too perfectly designed to push my buttons so I worried it might be too good to be true, but I was cautiously optimistic nonetheless.

I finally got around to reading it (in more or less one sitting) this week, and, well. I did end up having some quibbles here and there (as I tend to do; I’ll get into them later in this review), but overall I can’t help but say I absolutely loved it. It feels weird to say something so explicitly positive, but it’s true.

Hench is an ambitious book (especially for an author’s first novel) that is willing to engage with a lot of complex and charged topics and unabashedly take sides, while remaining fast-paced and entertaining, and it genuinely impressed me. It is also very refreshing to see a story like this in which the main characters have no powers and the narrative is firmly on their side. We need more books like this.