Nothing to Get Hanged About

No, Elise, I don't have any expectation that you will ever experience shame. I'm not concerned with your feelings at all.

I want you out of government. The first and most vital step in protecting our Capitol is keeping people like you and Jordan and Mo Brooks away from it.

— Intimidating Smirk (@Yastreblyansky) July 28, 2021

Then again, she also seems to think something bad happened—a "tragedy"—because she's blaming it on Speaker Pelosi, as Alexandra Petri notes at the Washington Post:

But also, the events of Jan. 6 were all Nancy Pelosi’s fault, because she denied the Capitol Police the support they needed, although they didn’t need the support because it was good that the tourists were there having a pleasant, wonderful, jovial day (except for the antifa provocateurs, who weren’t, but they were only visible to some people who were sufficiently pure in heart), and they barely had any weapons at all and meant no harm.

I noticed Brit Hume equally confident that the crowd was "mostly peaceful":

There's a sneaky little logical jump in there. Probably most of the 10,000 people on the Capitol grounds didn't get into the Capitol. Maybe 2000 did? So "most" of them were "peaceful" i.e. not directly involved in violence, therefore it was a "mostly peaceful" crowd...

— Intimidating Smirk (@Yastreblyansky) July 28, 2021

By the same token, the Terror in Paris in 1793-94 was overwhelmingly peaceful. Hardly anybody at Place de la Concorde was doing any guillotining. The vast majority were standing around minding their own business, catching up on their knitting and singing folk songs like "La Carmagnole":

Antoinette avait résolu
Antoinette avait résolu
De nous faire tomber sur le cul
De nous faire tomber sur le cul
Mais le coup a manqué
Elle a le nez cassé

Dansons la Carmagnole
Vive le son, vive le son
Dansons la Carmagnole
Vive le son du canon

Son mari se croyant vainqueur
Son mari se croyant vainqueur
Connaissait peu notre valeur
Connaissait peu notre valeur
Va, Louis, gros paour
Du Temple dans la Tour

Dansons la Carmagnole
Vive le son, vive le son
Dansons la Carmagnole
Vive le son du canon

(Antoinette decided to knock us on our asses, but her coup fell through and she got her nose broken. Let's dance the Carmagnole, long live the sound of the cannon! When her husband thought he had won, little did he realize how brave we are—Get out, Louis, you fat crybaby, from the Temple Prison up to the Tower! Let's dance the Carmagnole, long live the sound of the cannon!)

Petri (in a pretty somber mood, for her) goes on to note that the audience of this propaganda effort isn't really expected to believe any of the stories they're cooking up, which make no sense; rather, they're meant to abandon any hope of knowing the truth about anything:

The point is that the specifics don’t matter; what matters is that we are being told, blatantly, repeatedly and without shame, that we simply did not see what we saw, and we are expected to go along with it. This is an exercise in power, to see how malleable our reality really is.

It's the same thing we first heard about from Peter Pomerantsev, talking in the first place about the Big Tsimtsum of Communism in the former Soviet Union, when all the meaning drained out of the ideology, and when they set about reconstituting political language they built it out of pure emotion—with utterances that sounded like assertions of fact but were actually signals of shared irritability and fear, and not meant so much to be "believed" as accepted, like a song lyric. You don't exactly "believe" what the Leader says, in the sense of a coherent picture of why it's so (you can't have that if it's a tourist party and antifa terrorism and an FBI plot and a justified protest all at the same time), but if you're on the team you say the same words and feel the indignation. The pep rally never ends!

It occurs to me to think of it as at least a bit more complicated than that, in the current Republican practice, because it doesn't simply divide the population between tribe members and their enemies; it also has an effect on the would-be neutral gatekeepers of the media. Namely, they've come to understand, after a long struggle through the Trump years, that they have to take a position on lies in the mouths of politicians, whether they like it or not, or completely discredit themselves as members of the "reality-based community". But every time the Times or the Post or CNN refers to a Trumpy statement as a "lie" or as "false" or something for which there is "no evidence", they give the Trumpies a chance to accuse them of partisanship and producing "fake news". Thus contributing themselves to the atmosphere in which truth is just unavailable—there's just power and slogans.

And from that to the theater state situation in which even that isn't fully real—nothing to get hung about, as the song says. It's just performance, and Beavis and Butt-Head have the right idea.

It's an awful dilemma, but I think more and more I just don't want to talk to people who can't share some basic assumptions about what constitutes evidence—I just want to write them off altogether, or treat them as mysterious exotica.