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By Masha Gessen
One of the highest lines cited in American nonfiction is that of Joan Didion: “We tell each other stories to live on. “This is the first sentence of “The White Album”, an essay in which Didion recounts facts, photographs and Didion felt that he had lost the ability to chain stories into narratives and, as a result, life itself seemed to fade. It was riddled with symptoms that were interpreted in various ways as neurological or psychiatric, or, after the fact, through Didion itself, as a general reaction to 1968, which may have caused dizziness and nausea to anyone. Outwardly, it seemed to work, when he did not, when his brain was besathed by dissexeous words and an overwhelming sense of existential terror. , probably insurmountable because it is well-founded.
Nations, in this way, are like people: they cannot without history A non-unusual sense of the afterlife and the future, a broad agreement on organizing principles, a confidence that their near and remote neighbors have a general understanding of the truth and existing occasions – all of this is mandatory for any kind of policy to work. American politics today is like Didion’s life in 1968: a mess of fragments, a thin layer of ability, and a well-founded abyss of existential fear. we are deciding whether to revise to forge a coherent story.
In Donald Trump’s first indictment in November 2019, I wrote that it was highly unlikely to hold hearings without first opting for two overlapping views of reality, two other stories. In one story, Trump has continually abused force and ultimately He was accused of one. In the other, Democrats had been searching for Trump for years and had nonetheless latched onto an inconsequential incident, staging a witchcraft trial to get rid of the president. This week, the Republican Party continues to close ranks. Wednesday’s impeachment hearing, like the first one, was readable only by one of two executives: either Trump organized a coup attempt and was indicted for it, or, as Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio put it in his speech at the Chamber, “It has been communicated that you have to get the president whatever happens. It is an obsession. “
Although several Republican officials claimed that the violence at the Capitol on January 6 was terrifying, reprehensible, and un-American, some compared it to the Black Lives Matter protests, or to what the Black Lives Matter protests imagined. mistake, the left in the United States has incited much more political violence than the right,” said Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida. “For months, our cities caught fire, police stations caught fire, our businesses were destroyed and they said nothing. Logically, since no one has been prosecuted for, for example, the property damage suffered in Minneapolis last year protests against George Floyd’s death at the hands of the police, no one deserves to be accused of inciting chaos at the Capitol.
President-elect Joe Biden issued several hours after the House voted on the motion of political judgment. The timetable seemed designed to indicate that political judgment is not one of Biden’s most sensible priorities. jobs for the political trial while also running on other urgent issues in this nation,” he said. Overall, Biden distanced himself from the process, noting that he saw his paintings as assembling his cabinet, accelerating vaccine distribution, and passing on his financial aid program. On Thursday, just over 24 hours after the political trial vote, Biden gave a speech in which he did not mention it, neither to Trump nor to January 6.
Most Democrats in the House have based their calls to trial on the claim that Trump is a “clear and provides danger” and will have to be removed from the workplace immediately. Framed in this way, the procedure turns out to lose its urgency after Trump. Then, supporters of the political trial will focus on the imperative of preventing Trump from applying for re-election. As wise as Trump is, can the task of banning him in the federal workplace be as urgent as the law that will have curtains with an effect on the life and fitness of millions of Americans?
As long as the procedure is strictly directed at Trump, the arguments in favor of urgency will become increasingly difficult to formulate; instead, the purpose of the Senate trial deserves to be explained as locating and telling the fact about the insurrection. of what we deserve to call the January 6 occasions. “Any wording is useless if it diminishes the guilt of those in positions of strength who have committed the lie that the election was stolen,” he wrote. the Senate therefore deserves to produce the first draft of those history books.
All too often, we think that trials, whether in court or in the Senate, exist to impose sanctions, which want to identify the facts only to the extent that it is mandatory to make a decision on the fees presented to them and determine the appropriate penalties. Next week, the question of whether Trump deserves to be removed from the workplace will cease to be an operational issue: a Senate trial alone against Trump would possibly not attract the attention of the media, the public or even lawmakers themselves. If the Senate trial spits, the January 6 story will be told in dozens, if not hundreds, of separate trials in federal courts in other states. Different judges will make a decision on whether other defendants were guilty of breaking in, harming federal property, assaulting agents and journalists, and participating in an insurgency. It will not be the task of any of these judges to paint a complete picture of what happened on January 6, which led to the insurrection and what made it possible.
In the absence of such a story, the task of saving him from long-term insurrections will fall to the F. B. I. and uniformed services. Security in the Capitol and the capital will be strengthened at all times; National surveillance will increase in scale. In other words, the United States will respond to this crisis as it has to other crises: securitisation and political rights relief. the way for such an answer. But the insurgents weren’t terrorists. Its main objective is not to generate terror in the general population; Your goal of preventing you, the president-elect, from taking office, unlike the top terrorists, acted directly on your goal, going to the headquarters of political force in the United States and trying to capture force, following what the President of the United States perceived as orders.
Rethink Trump’s Senate trial as a truth-seeking project that as a punitive business demands a more authoritarian voice than that of a senator or even a majority in the Senate, requiring the voice of President-elect Biden. Biden’s political instincts: the concept that he deserves to concentrate on his own management and legislative agenda; The culture of advancing the call of healing; Knowing that doing things in the Senate is counting votes, negotiating, making concessions; the preference to achieve effects as effectively as possible.
An attempt to tell the story of the insurgency, and the story of the Trump presidency, which made it imaginable, would not be effective; would have to be extensive, ambitious, great. The president-elect and senators would have to use all their political and intellectual power, not because it is obligatory to punish and ban Trump, but because Trump cannot rely solely on fragments of randomly floating stories. Biden is in fact afraid that insisting on a thorough and comprehensive Senate trial would further alienate Trump supporters. sure that almost a portion of Americans will stick to the procedure without having to challenge the concept that Democrats are in a position to get Trump. Can you be drawn to a more detailed, truthful and certainly more disturbing story?however, without telling a story, we cannot live.
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