America is Certifiable

There’s a bleak irony in the fact that the January 6 certification of the most abnormal presidential election winner in American history was carried out in a normal manner. But does that mean we have to normalize what happened on that other January 6? For a lot of people, the answer, sadly, will be yes. Aaron Blake describes the syndrome as the meh-ification of Jan. 6. And David Frum explains how the memory of January 6 is vanishing from Trump’s new Washington in The Atlantic (Gift Article): Don’t Mention the Coup! “The coup makers won. The coup resisters lost. Washington is not a city that spares much sympathy for losers. ‘This never happened,’ advises Don Draper on the television series Mad Men. ‘It will shock you how much it never happened.’ So it will be with the first attempt by a serving president to overthrow the government he was sworn to protect. Not all of us, however, have to live in the world of Washington transactions. Some of us need to volunteer to keep talking about the inconvenient things.” The certification of someone certifiable shouldn’t change this.

+ In WaPo (Gift Article): Joe Biden explains what what Americans should remember about Jan. 6. “In time, there will be Americans who didn’t witness the Jan. 6 riot firsthand but will learn about it from footage and testimony of that day, from what is written in history books and from the truth we pass on to our children. We cannot allow the truth to be lost.”

+ But for millions of Americans, that truth has not only been lost, it’s been obliterated. That’s one of the reasons we’re experiencing a day when Kamala Harris presides over the certification of Donald Trump’s election win; a win the the incoming president promises will be followed by the swift pardoning of the Jan 6 rioters. So what’s the point of clinging to reality? If doing it for democracy is too abstract an answer, then consider the much more concrete reasons offered by Aquilino Gonell, a former sergeant in the Capitol Police who was injured protecting the Capitol. NYT (Gift Article): For Many of Us, Jan. 6 Never Ended. “Mr. Trump is returning to the presidency at 78, while I had to leave the career I’d worked for my whole life at 42 as a result of injuries suffered while doing my job. I sometimes wonder why I risked my life to defend our elected officials from a mob inspired by Mr. Trump, only to see him return to power stronger than ever. It’s hard to witness a rich white man get rewarded for treachery while I’m punished for fulfilling my duty. Maybe that’s why so many people don’t do the right thing — because it’s hard and it hurts … At least I get to hear my son call me his hero, as we remember the people who put everything on the line to protect our democracy and continue to tell the truth about Jan. 6.”