An Out-Of-The-Body-Politic Experience

 

Experts say repeated exposure to contradictory, abusive, or crazy behavior, especially when one is unable to resist or withdraw, leads to trauma and that the imprint of trauma on the psyche then interferes with healthy functioning. Children experiencing extremes of hostile, hurtful, or simply negligent actions by caregivers may compensate by escaping mentally from the situation and are prime candidates for addiction as adults.

My dear, late friend Miguel had exactly this life trajectory. His overburdened and detached parents were unaware that he was being sexualized at age 9 by an older teen; he described to me how he learned to leave his body and in his 20s developed both a cocaine addiction and unusual psychic abilities. 

The metaphor for our collective experience as Americans over the last four years writes itself. Week after week, month after month, we were relentlessly assaulted with ever-escalating doses of madness and gaslighting. The source, himself permanently intoxicated with the trappings of faux adulation that accompany power, rewrote the script of our tentatively shared reality in such staccato bursts that we could scarcely digest one irrational claim when a dozen more came raining down on us out of the Twittersphere. The effect was the same as that perfected by the CIA in its far-flung empire of dungeons: disassociation and learned helplessness. Some of us self-medicated with news fixations, substances, Russiagate fantasies, or blogposts.

As adults, we could at least step back and apply our analytical tools, see what was happening to us, consult our peers for grounding and reorientation. Yet, the effort involved in the constant struggle to remain standing during this never-ending turdstorm sapped our energies and imbued our cells with stress hormones. Now we know what it’s like to live as an abused minority, fearing for our children and constantly pouring our psychic resources into staying sane and not flying off the handle. When we failed out of exhaustion, we could do no better than to float our beleaguered social souls upward and away from the body politic to a magical inner realm where people behave humanely and resentment and rancor do not rule. Our collective dissociation, while providing needed relief, came at a cost.

Miguel wandered very young into a new life in Argentina and found a boyfriend who introduced him to injection drug use. He relates that when he came back from the doctor with a positive HIV diagnosis, his first thought was, “At least now Charlie cannot leave me.” Nonetheless, Charlie did.

One effect of Miguel’s traumatic life was his ability to pay extra-corporeal visits to anyone he was thinking about. I once heard him relate an entire conversation that had taken place between an ex of his and the ex’s new lover across town, later confirmed in its details. He didn’t develop this ability further nor make anything of it.

Miguel never lamented his fate nor wasted his short time on blaming anyone, including the injecting “friend” who had failed to inform him of his own HIV-positive status before sharing a syringe. In our brief friendship, I only once, late in his illness, heard him say something that hinted that he wished things had turned out differently: “I’m so young!”

The body politic is damaged by what it has been put through. Nonetheless, it has acquired uncanny perceptivities of its own, perhaps not including astral travel but certainly a sharper eye for the aural presentations of public figures. It’s no accident that Bernie’s mittens are attracting nearly as much attention as Biden’s entire 100-days program. Bernie’s now-famous grumpy-uncle photo, known by some as the Jewish yoga posture “Waiting for the Wife Shopping at Loehmann’s,” aptly reflects our crouching, self-protective national spirit, the mittens themselves an offhand populist rebuke to the purpled elites on the elevated platform.

Miguel shook off his cocaine habit though he slipped into unrecognized alcoholism, which killed him. He was a spiritual giant and died a hero. The trauma never embittered him, never distracted him from making the most of his 31 years on earth. He had a vision of better things; everything he had been through he alchemized into wisdom, compassion, and solidarity.

As we emerge from the chaotic mental landscape left behind by the raging id that permanently tasered us these last years, we can and should hold the perpetrators to account. Magnanimity cannot be a cover for impunity. At the same time, we now have a keener sense of the dangerous forces left to seethe just below the surface of our social body and cannot pretend that the millions of people abandoned by the depredations of capitalism have nothing to do with us or our comfortable lives. Perhaps the new body politic can travel to a higher plane; after all, we have new, trauma-enhanced powers. The violent explosion at the Capitol shows us where we are headed if we do not use them to reset and renew.

Avalanche

The grounds are shifting, and an earthquake may follow. 

Ten Republicans defied their cult and accepted the prospect of having to go shopping with bodyguards for the foreseeable future to join in the vote to impeach. 

While the decision to eject Trump from office remains a minority view in the GOP, it is also unlikely that the hirsute vandals hooting around the halls of Congress represent the cultural and stylistic inclinations of the people in rural Wyoming and the Chicago suburbs who just tried to give Trump a second term. 

Nor are they indifferent to the decision to beat a uniformed police officer to death with a fire extinguisher nor, for that matter, lesser crimes like shedding armpit hairs over Nancy Pelosi’s stationery with your feet propped up on her desk. 

Mitch McConnell’s stunning signal that he’s undecided on the impeachment vote is a warning to the president that he’d better STFU and go quietly or he may find himself heading for the Arctic Circle on an ice floe.

According to a new poll (by "Avalanche Insights," no less), 44 percent of Republicans think Trump’s gang “betrayed American values,” and 29 percent think their actions were treasonous. His approval rating has dipped to its lowest point ever. 

In the coming weeks and months, we will be treated to a steady stream of arrests, indictments, and trials, all of which will repeatedly remind us in excruciating detail of the behaviors on display Jan. 6. 

Remarkably and almost sadly, the frat-boy perpetrators seem to be struck dumb by the fact that after they faithfully responded to a clarion call issued by the chief legal authority of the country, they nonetheless find themselves utterly defenseless and facing hefty prison sentences for doing so. We the citizenry are like schoolmarms confronting misbehavior at recess only to hear the familiar excuse that “Johnny dared me to do it!” “Johnny,” in this case, being the principal. 

Meanwhile, congressional Democrats must be rubbing their hands over the prospect of the reverse-Benghazi that they can and probably will play on their meathead counterparts across the aisle. Count on months of relentlessly tedious and yet explosive hearings on who undermined Capitol security, what orders were or were not given, how many sitting members colluded with the Chewbacca brigades, up to and including possible criminal acts. 

Add to that the possibility of a revealing exploration of racism within the Capitol Police itself, which left many nonwhite officers facing down an armed mob sporting Auschwitz tee shirts and Confederate flags. 

As the Fantasyland accusations fade of mass voter frauds that gave Biden millions of fake votes, the dozens of GOP members who backed Trump’s delusions are going to look increasingly seditious as well as silly.

It remains to be seen how much of this rather sudden reversal of momentum will spill over into a broader repudiation of not just Trump but Trumpism, the grotesque continuation of the decades-long upward redistribution of wealth, negligence of our grave ecological crisis, and permanent imperial war-making. 

Trumpism, after all, is less a breach with our recent past than an exaggeration of it taken to explosive new heights. Biden has made it clear that he has no interest in turning the ship of state any more than a few degrees toward sanity, but the Democrats’ control of two branches of government now cuts away convenient excuses about what they can and cannot do. 

The Trumpster fire of last week opens the door for us to catapult the political pendulum back in a humane direction at long last. Since we create our world, it’s an opportunity not to be wasted.

Blacks elect two Deep South senators; lynch mobs descend on the Capitol

 

Democrats politely returned to their seats. Are we due for another round of loyal bipartisanship?

The most extraordinary scene in the extraordinary episode of January 7 occurred after the dust had settled and the solons had returned to the vandalized chambers to proceed with their deliberations.

 

The President had just rallied with a band of violent fanatics, some armed, to demand the overturning of the election he lost by 7 million votes. Mobs then broke into the seat of the country’s legislative branch and nearly succeeded in seizing the official records of the Electoral College vote. Members fled for safety.

 

One person soon lay dead of a gunshot wound. Three others died later in obscure circumstances. A uniformed officer also died of his injuries the next day (Blue Lives Matter!).

 

No Democrat, female, nonwhite, or insufficiently Trump-toadying Republican member hated by the invading mob was attacked physically or killed. They could have been. One camo-wearing invader was photographed carrying zip ties and other military gear.

 

The incidents were triggered by a bogus series of objections raised to the voting procedures that had no bearing on the wishes of the nation’s citizens but were instead attempts by the losers to find technical reasons to enable the minority to cling to power.

 

In a sane country run by sane individuals, this blatant attempt to cheat and interrupt the peaceful transfer of power would result in the utter repudiation of the perpetrators. They would slink away in disgrace and be compelled to apologize for their seditious plotting.

 

Instead, Democrats returned to their seats and quietly tolerated Lindsey Graham’s further perorations on the alleged instances of voting fraud—exactly the kind of lurid, evidence-free accusations that had stimulated the assault on the Capitol.

 

None of those legislators who had just escaped harm at the hands of the president’s shock troops dared to shout down the continuation of the white supremacist conspiracy. None angrily left the chamber and refused to be part of the ongoing spectacle of disloyalty to the core democratic principle of majority rule.

 

However, it does appear that Trump has finally, finally gone too far.

 

After four years of pious hand-wringing followed by votes authorizing all the key funding measures demanded by the allegedly dangerous Trump, Democrat lawmakers and their leaders are changing their tune—11 days before the end of Trump’s disastrous rule.

 

They were personally affected. They experienced danger to their own bodies and lives.

 

I guess that’s what it takes sometimes to rattle sense into people. As long as it’s happening to some other people in some other neighborhoods living some other lives, it remains a “concern.”

 

Someone else’s 13-year-old kid getting murdered by a trigger-happy cop? Tragic, tsk tsk.

 

Someone else’s family compound being drone-bombed into smithereens? We should try to avoid “collateral damage” in pursuit of our laudable war goals.

 

Someone else’s livelihood being threatened by capitalist dysfunction? Yes, but there is no money! We can’t be raising taxes on the middle class!

 

But when it touched the members of Congress themselves, all hell broke loose. Someone must pay.

 

Who knows how long this sudden rush of outrage will last. President Biden and his team are itching to take office and announce the End of the Bad Dream. “Looking to the future, not the past” was the slogan of the incoming administration until 48 hours ago.

 

I can imagine that many criminal defendants would love to employ that approach to their own circumstances: “Your Honor, I ask the court to Look to the Future, not the Past!”

 

It is a line tailor-made to cover up the convenient crimes that Biden will inherit and exploit. Democrats did not really oppose most of the Trump program, the proof being their control of one chamber of Congress with the power to halt it.

 

There is too much confluence of interests among the representatives of our ruling oligarchy to expect any sustained challenge to the outgoing Trump crime family. And I have serious doubts about any of the legal issues Trump faces prospering whether or not he tries to pardon himself as rumored.

 

That said, the breach of the top politicians’ assumed privilege as members of the elite has come as a shock to them. There may yet be consequences.