The climax of the Youtube video below, which documents the shooting of Ashli Babbitt by U.S. Capitol police during the insurrection at the Capitol on Wednesday, is beyond chilling. There’s the stunned look on the late Ms. Babbitt’s face as she lies on her back — her arms up like she’s a prisoner of forever. Then comes the cruelty of fellow rioters/voyeurs who shine their lights in her face, out to capture the moment when she’s done…But there’s more to the video than its End (which has been shown on network tv and at the Times website). The rest adds shadows to the distinguished thing on Ms. Babbitt’s blankening face.
Click to watch here
The film was made by a disingenuous (at best) “documentarian,” Jayden X (AKA John Sullivan). He sometimes pretends to be a kind of reporter (in the moment and after), but during the storming of the Capitol he seems entirely down with the rioters.[1] That’s one reason why his video conveys their mass movement of mindlessness. Around 15 minutes and 30 seconds, there’s a compelling sequence when the rioter-auteur turns tourist. He enters two rooms in the Capitol with statuary and high ceilings. His own astonished cries alternate with non-questions that speak to his awe: “What is life?” “Oh my God…oh my God…oh my God.” He’s shook by the look of the place, but then he remembers, he’s there because there’s…too much government: “I can respect the statues…But people might burn this down, I’m not gonna lie.”
His candor reminds me of a comment once made by Joseph de Maistre–the French diplomat and anti-Philosophe whose “throne-and-altar” authoritarianism became an enduring fount of Reaction in the late 18th C. De Maistre scoffed back in that day at the news that a Capital called Washington was to be built:
In essentials there is nothing in this beyond human powers, a town can be very easily built: nevertheless, there is too much deliberation, too much of mankind, in all this, and it is a thousand to one that the town will not be built, or that it will not be called Washington, or that Congress will not sit there.
Trumpists are low versions of de Maistre. Any institution (other than a golf course?) that hints at “too much deliberation” is an insult to them. Locked on shock and awe that comes with force, they can’t quite get their minds around the notion humans might make something that deserves reverence even if it doesn’t go boom.
That Trumper-for-a-day documentarian, though, was torn. He couldn’t deny his human/aesthetic response. In tourist mode, talking with another rioter[2], he wondered at the ethic implicit in the architectural surround: “They were all about light.”
I’m reminded of the following passage from Obama’s memoir which I quoted on New Year’s day, but it seems even more on point in this dark week:
One thing cameras don’t capture about the Oval Office is the light. The room is awash in light. On clear days, it pours through the huge windows on its eastern and southern ends, painting every object with a golden sheen that turns fine-grained, then dappled, as the late-afternoon sun recedes. In bad weather, when the South Lawn is shrouded by rain or snow or the rare morning fog, the room takes on a slightly bluer hue but remains undimmed, the weaker natural light boosted by interior bulbs hidden behind a bracketed cornice and reflecting down from the ceiling and walls. The lights are never turned off, so that even in the middle of the night the Oval Office remains luminescent, flaring against the darkness like a lighthouse’s rounded torch.
It occurs to me Bruce Springsteen once wrote a glow-in-the-dark song that might serve as a soundtrack for the state of the nation now. I’ll allow, though, Bruce’s light stuff may not be perfectly apt. Joe Biden and his crew of competent, deeply un-charismatic pros aren’t exactly avatars of rock ‘n’ roll attitude. (Not that I’m carping. They’ve earned their shot at the Apollonian stage.) Still, maybe Bruce’s song fits. After all, inside that term “deliberation,” which makes anti-humanists retch, is…liberation. So what the hey–let’s sing it loud: “I’m just around the corner to the light of day…”
Notes
1 YouTube commenters didn’t buy Jayden X’s after-the-fact cover story and called him out immediately. Jayden X is a black guy who apparently has ties to extreme leftists, but his ease among the right-wring rioters didn’t suggest he was engaged in some kind of false flag operation. He seems to be, instead, an adrenaline junky who shared an impulse to burn it all down with other extreme knuckleheads.
2 Jayden X’s on the fly interlocutor sounded like another black guy–“We all up in here now.” Don’t ask me how that brother-Trumpist assimilated the “patriot” with the Confederate flag in the rioters’ ranks.