In the middle of the night, between January 6 and 7 of 2021, I awoke and, lying there, wondered if I were going insane. What is reality and what is fantasy? Is my life actually my personal experience or a metaphysical solipsism? Can anyone, besides me, read these words I’m writing?
Maybe the feeling is a result of the movie I watched last night. “Unknown.” Actor Liam Neeson awoke from a coma resulting from an auto accident and found his identity was not recognized by his wife and others. He finally discovered he was really a trained assassin and had assumed, as his own reality, the cover-story invented by his team, including his “wife,” in order to eliminate a biochemist who had developed a new species of corn.
Surely the newscasts I had watched, before and after the movie, did not depict reality. The images of American citizens storming the Capitol Building in Washington, D.C., having been excited to riot by the President of the United States, who desired to remain in power, having been voted-out by a majority of the people and a plurality of the Electoral College, could not be true. This had to be part of my imagination. But since it seemed so real, I must be hallucinating. I might be on the verge of insanity. Or it was an instance of metaphysical solipsism where I am the only existing mind and everything external to my mind does not truly exist.
I finally recognized I had not been imagining what I remembered about the television news programs I had seen. President Trump had really called on his Trumparians to march on the Capitol. Perhaps he thought they would mill around outside and not enter the building to vandalize it. They would not stop Congress in its ceremonial recognition that the Electoral College had legally elected Biden as President, to be inaugurated two weeks from now. After all, the fifty states, themselves, had certified the correctness of the count for each one. Almost sixty ill-fated federal and non-federal lawsuits confirmed the legality of the elections. He had, indeed, not won, as he had been claiming for the last month, by a record-breaking landslide which had been thwarted by those who were not Trumparians.
In a video message, he had claimed his Trumparians were “good people” who should “remain peaceful” as they occupied the Capitol building and made the Senators and Representatives seek hiding places as they, themselves, mocked the democracy they claimed they were defending. He continued to love them. Fortunately, those he loved did not have the wisdom to destroy the certified records waiting to be reported. They had been content to dress as Vikings waving Confederate flags and merely occupy the building, until the Capitol Police and National Guard forced them to leave, thus finally allowing Congress to carry out its governmental role late into the night, about the time I awoke to question my own sanity.
As I write these words, it is unknown what the next days and weeks will bring. Will the Cabinet, as some postulate, invoke the 25th Amendment and declare the current President incompetent to retain his office for the next two weeks, thus inaugurating Mike Pence as the shortest-governing President in some two and one-half centuries? Will those around him be able to sequester his actions for the next fortnight and preclude his overthrow of our democracy? And if there is, indeed, a “peaceful transfer of power,” as has been reported on his behalf, will there be a “peaceful continuation of power.” Perhaps the answers lie, not in a question of my own sanity, but that of the Trumparians at the gates.
Yesterday, January 6, was the Feast of the Epiphany of the Lord. It commemorates the “showing forth” of the coming of the one whose intent was to bring forgiveness and peace to people of good will. We still await the second Epiphany, the second coming of the One who will rule after the apocalypse. It is also said that in the final days, the Trump will sound. The question remains: what blast will be heard at that instant?