January 2021 (ii)

American heraldry, January 6



One of the many maddening aspects of the Trump Era is the seemingly proportional relationship between how bad things get and how stupid they look. On Wednesday, we all watched a horde of Trump fans break into the US Capitol Building in what the New York Times called a “siege” but which looked more like a white-nationalist yard sale or a NASCAR tailgate. 

It was, by all accounts, a bad thing: five people died, offices were vandalized, and rioters brandished Confederate battle-flags and Nazi regalia. It was also, by all accounts, a stupid-looking one: the dress code was part Call of Duty, part Johnny Appleseed, with rioters sporting neopagan tattoos and waving obscure Revolutionary War flags. Sure, there were odd subcategories like these pro-Trump nuns (talk about echo chambers!) but overall it was a scattered, self-devouring aesthetic of ‘Murica cosplay, militarism, and Trump merchandise.

January 6, 2021, was a weird day in American history in part because it seemed to be somehow about American history, at least in the way the 2000 film The Patriot, in which Benjamin Martin (Mel Gibson) kills a horse with an American flag, is about American history. (“Patriots” was also how Trump and many of the rioters referred to themselves, as in “patriots who have been badly & unfairly treated for so long” and “They’re supposed to shoot BLM, but they’re shooting the patriots.”) Another early-aughts movie that kept coming to mind, as I watched the MAGA mob wander around as if on some field trip gone wrong, was National Treasure, that 2004 film produced by Jerry Bruckheimer and despised by history teachers everywhere. Particularly the scene where Benjamin Franklin Gates (Nicholas Cage) strides into the rotunda at the National Archives to look at the Declaration of Independence. He’s convinced it will help him find a Knights Templar treasure hidden away by the founding fathers (spoiler: it does), and paraphrases it to suit his own ends: “It means that if there’s something wrong, those who have the ability to take action have the responsibility to take action.” A beat. “I’m gonna steal it.” I understand that National Treasure is a fun-for-the-whole-family Disneyfication of The Da Vinci Code, whereas Trumpism is an authoritarian production that leads to actual violence. But what they do have in common, in addition to a conspiratorial way of justifying drastic action, is a view of American history as basically a history of paraphernalia.

For Trump, American history is a Hard Rock Café full of whatever he remembers from the third grade: Davy Crockett’s coonskin cap, various spaceships, Betsy Ross’s flag, winning World War II. His Independence Day speech in front of Mount Rushmore last year, held in defiance of protests over Confederate monuments, was a wild and revealing list of American excellence that included “the comedy of Bob Hope, the power of the Saturn V rocket, the toughness of the Ford F-150 and the awesome might of the American aircraft carriers.” “We are the people who dreamed a spectacular dream,” Trump announced, “It was called: Las Vegas, in the Nevada desert.”

As the turmoil unfolded on the Hill, a similarly blinkered notion of history was in the air: Sen. Ted Cruz justified his own gutless role in the riot by pointing to the election of 1876. Sen. Lindsey Graham, who sounded drunk, rambled about how the Compromise of 1877 led to Jim Crow, which he prefaced by saying, “I love Tim Scott,” the only black Republican in the Senate. Sens. Josh Hawley and Dick Durbin both referenced Abraham Lincoln, that better-angels brand ambassador for both parties, while Nancy Pelosi went for an awkward historical parallel by describing the flag pin she was wearing: “On it, it says, ‘One country, one destiny.’ […] That was also what was embroidered in Abraham Lincoln’s coat that he had on that fateful night.” Former President George W. Bush, who helped manufacture a two-trillion-dollar war that we are still fighting, lamented that “This is how election results are disputed in a banana republic,” no doubt unaware that the term banana republic was coined in 1901 to describe the USA’s corporate exploitation of Caribbean nations.

No surprise, then, that a chorus of politicians from both parties disavowed the mob as un-American. President-Elect Biden, who in 2003 gave a eulogy at segregationist Strom Thurmond’s funeral, claimed that “America is about honor. Decency, respect, tolerance—that's who we are, that's who we've always been.” Sen. Ben Sasse explained that “What happened today isn’t what America is”; Sen. Chuck Shumer said, “They do not represent America.” The obvious question is: what else could they represent? White people with flags and firearms and a strange sense of history going where they aren’t supposed to and blabbering about Jesus is as American as it gets.

By Wednesday being about American history, I guess what I mean is that it felt like we were watching the same tired American myth in real-life conflict with versions of itself at varying degrees of decay. I don’t equate Trump’s rallying of patriots with Nancy Pelosi’s meandering comments about Lincoln and prayer, but what they share is a lack of clear-eyed rhetoric about what is actually happening and a retreat into grandeur that long ago stopped being meaningful or coherent to the rest of the country. That the MAGA mob was decked out in a grotesque pastiche of American memorabilia seems to me less like proof that American myths still resonate with people and more that people are trying desperately to make sense of the scraps. Comparisons to dumb movies fit the moment better than anything else because those movies don’t make sense of history by offering new perspectives. They make sense of history by making it something else.

Trumpism does differ from Biden’s tedious rhetoric of America as a “citadel of liberty” in a crucial way: its messaging is structured not upwards to lofty ideals but within a closed loop of disappointment. Trapped between the past of Make America Great Again and the future of The Best Is Yet To Come, the present is doomed forever to nostalgia and expectancy. (Perhaps this funhouse-mirroring of Christianity’s loss of Eden and hope for eternal reward explains those nuns.) The rioters made no demands because there were none to make; the point of the riot was to say, as one patriot did, “We are here. See us! Notice us! Pay attention!” Trumpists can either ratchet that up to more overtly anti-Semitic and racist versions of the same idea, like Charlottesville’s “Jews will not replace us” or “All lives matter,” or they can go back home to their lives, which the spectacle of government has made more titillating without making any better. Trumpism is a willful displacement of everything good to some other time—imaginary past or barely-imagined future—until its adherents feel resentful and orphaned, with no sense of history and nothing to lose. It’s even sadder when you remember that the imaginary past is a skip-to-the-good-parts version of history where the good parts are Bob Hope and truck commercials.

I’m looking forward to the transfer of power on January 20. But while I do think Joe Biden genuinely thinks that America is all about decency, I think he’s a fool to think so. In one prominent photo of the day’s events, a Proud Boy dangles into the Senate chamber, the Latin words ANNUIT COEPTIS emblazoned on the balcony behind him. Annuit coeptis, “He favors our undertakings,” is the motto on the reverse side of the Great Seal, which depicts an unfinished pyramid watched over by the eye of Providence. When Charles Thomson submitted the design to Congress in 1782, he explained that “The Eye over [the pyramid] & the Motto allude to the many signal interpositions of providence in favour of the American cause.” On Wednesday, what most people in power seemed to be repeating, even as the mob they had conjured was kicking down their doors, was the unconvincing idea of America as a nation divinely blessed and forever unfinished. It increasingly feels like putting an unfinished pyramid at the heart of the nation’s heraldry was one of the smartest things the founders did, part of a savvy PR strategy that rebrands stagnation as aspiration.

Towards the end of the riot, as I watched the New York Times livestream on my computer, the camera settled on a young white man talking on the phone. “Don’t worry about me. I’ll be okay,” he said casually, as if getting dropped off at a high school dance. In a recent interview, Jerry Bruckheimer said that a National Treasure TV series for Disney+ is in development, and will feature a “much younger cast.”

ben tapeworm


ben tapeworm’s almanac is amateur apocalypse pamphletry.To get new entries in your email inbox, please email bentapeworm@gmail.com to be added to the mailing list.