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Last month the News-Gazette printed a cleverly written lampooning in a letter to the editor so expertly craf ted, I expect most folks mi s u n derstood its intent. I did until I reflected on the well-known facts not mentioned.
The letter opened, “Arguments over whether Donald Trump attempted to insurrect the American government has now exceeded the normal limit on how long reasonable people should continue to pleasure themselves with fairy tales.”
This statement provokes memory of a preceding “fairy tale” – that the 2020 presidential election was “stolen.”
This first ironic fact-between- the-lines: Trump and his followers have been “pleasuring themselves” with that “fairy tale” since his loss on November 3, 2020. They’re still “pleasuring themselves” with that myth over three years later!
Is he also subtly implying they are not “reasonable people”?
This author is a student of trenchant wit. Anyone who has read Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” (q.v.) will appreciate the use of an outrageously absurd idea to show the contrast between the circumspect and the incognizant.
The letter goes on to proffer “the U.S. government January 7, 2021 was the exact same government as it was on January 5. Nothing changed …”!
Another fact caustically presented. The coup failed!
This craftsman of irony knew what he was doing. Using understatement, he excused these rioters for merely exercising their “First Amendment civil right” to lure in those believing the “Election Fraud ‘Fairy Tale.’” It was a pretense of ignorance to lull insurrection supporters into believing he was championing their overall excuse, that January 6th was not an illegal, violently rebellious attack on the seat of our democratic republic, but merely “a rowdy crowd [that] ran a bit loose ventilating their grievances because their candidate lost.”
Contradicting that sardonic line of faux irrationality are the unspoken, but wellknown and well-published facts of that day lurking.
To wit:
• A gallows built complete with noose to chants of “hang Mike Pence!” because Pence committed himself to following the Constitution (q.v.).
• 140-174 Capitol and Metropolitan police officers criminally assaulted by the rioters in the attack.
• One officer, hospitalized for injuries sustained in the attack, dying of a series of strokes; two others committing suicide.
(So much for MAGAs’ “Defend Police” posters on their front lawns.)
• Through July 7, 2022, monetary damages exceeding $2.7 million.
• Since the insurrection, over 1,200 rioters arrested and charged with a variety of federal crimes, including injuring law-enforcement officers, destruction and theft of government property, and conspiracy to obstruct a congressional proceeding.
That cagey use of irony: Ignore unimpeachable facts that mock the assertion that rioters were, as many of their apologists insist, “a peaceful group of tourists”!
This letter presents MAGAs with a Morton’s Fork of sorts: Was this a totally spontaneous but justifiable, sedate protest to a stolen election? Or a violent, wellorchestrated insurrection instigated by a man so charismatic that he had the power to move thousands to attack the United States of America?
Here is a man who achieved what nobody in American history has before. He incited thousands of patriotic men and women to rise-up and violently assault our government solely on his behalf!
MAGA congressmen and senators, fleeing the riot and hiding in terror fearing the latter, came out from hiding excusing it as the former because they feared more for their privileged positions.
There are many instances of individuals hijacking pliable people to further their own ambitions.
In 1997 39 followers of Marshall Applewhite, leader of the Heaven’s Gate cult, committed suicide on his instructions, supposedly so they could catch a spaceship to paradise.
In 1978 over 900 people at Jonestown, Guyana, where cult leader Jim Jones had moved his followers to escape the U.S. government, committed suicide or were murdered on Jones’ orders.
In 1923 Adolph Hitler led 2,000 Nazi followers in a coup attempt in Munich, Germany. When confronted by a police cordon resulting in the deaths of 16 Nazis, four police officers, and one bystander, Hitler fled.
Crowd size estimates at the January 6th Insurrection vary from 10,000 to120,000 depending on whom one believes. Trump supporters, admiring his ability to enrage his partisans, go with inflated numbers. Trump impugners counter with deflated numbers.
Most reports, however, agree 2,000 insurgents entered the Capitol, vandalizing and stealing property and threatening members of Congress.
Even at its most conservative estimates, the number of people the MAGA “Furor” encouraged to attack our sitting government dwarfs those other examples of misled followers.
But this writer satirically demotes Trump’s great achievement to a “rowdy crowd running a bit loose”!
A very astute evisceration!
