Dear Citizens and Elected Officials:
I could not let Democracy’s “Day of Day’s” — January 6th, 2021 - pass without commentary.
By now you are, as I am, flooded with accounts of the events, and the calls for removal of Mr. Trump by a variety of means. I do not want to write a long technical piece on the choices; it is not an area that I feel fully competent in, but will note that Representative Jamie Raskin, (D, MD-8th) has drafted the Articles of Impeachment already, and I trust his good judgement and expertise in these matters, having cited in earlier postings here at the Daily Kos his book on the 2000 election tribulations. And of his background as a constitutional scholar.
The Congressman and his wife Sarah Bloom Raskin (former member of the Board of the Federal Reserve) have just lost their only son, Tommy, on the very last night of our terrible year of 2020. So in the strange but inevitable ways of history weaving its way through our personal lives, like it or not, Congressman Raskin has a crisis of the Republic thrust upon his very capable mind at a moment of grave personal tragedy, and when his skills are most needed.
I could write 30 pages on the merits and demerits of the three major courses of action now put forth by the left and the Centrist Democrats, but I will not. If the Vice-President and the remainders of the Trump cabinet do not remove this despicable man from the White House via the 25th Amendment, and it is very unlikely that they will, then the Democratic Party must tread down the Impeachment path, no matter all the practical objections to it about timing and future impact.
Insurrection and the storming of the modern international symbol of Democracy require no less, and no turning back.
This morning, on one of the few sunshine filled Winter days we’ve had in Frostburg, Western Maryland, I placed this mounted poster of the Acropolis outside to catch and be illuminated by the full south-shining rays of that weak winter sun. For all to see after Democracy’s “Day of Days.”
I chose it back on December 7 because I needed inspiration, and the choice came to me from the work of M.I. Finley, especially his Democracy: Ancient & Modern (1973,1985) which I had read before I saw Yanis Varoufakis’ posting at Yves Smith’s blog, Naked Capitalism which cited it as well.
That was in 2014 and you can perhaps still benefit from reading it today here .www.nakedcapitalism.com/… I left many comments that day, and the last time I looked, they are still there under my penname of “The Gracci Bros.”
Yes, the Greek Democracy which flourished for about a hundred years in the 5th Century BC did not include women or the many slaves who were the frontline workers of the economy at that time, but it did, for the first time, give the average male citizen a voice relatively free of the property obsession, an obsession still so much with us.
So much that Thomas Piketty’s latest, long and magnificent work, Capital and Ideology (2020), is centered around the obstacles that property and wealth ownership present to democracy, and to a more egalitarian distribution of wealth, income and...drumroll please: power.
Piketty’s charge, and plea, is that we “desacralize” property and the power relationships which make all egalitarian gestures, whether they be progressive taxes, MMT, or universal health care...dare I say Green New Deal — near religious threats. Piketty does not want to abolish private property, just to be clear, but he spends 1,000 pages describing the costs of its rule across many different cultures, including non-Western ones, to show how it has operated throughout history. And the rationales it uses to maintain its grip.
As for my title, Democracy’s “Day of Days,” it comes from the second installment of the Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks directed HBO series “Band of Brothers,” about Easy Company of the 101st Airborne Division which jumped in the pitch of night into Nazi occupied Normandy ahead of the dawn landings on the beachheads. About the bravest act of human courage I can think of, that jump into the unknown.
June 6, 1944 was that “Day and Days,” and the commander of the company, after a full day’s fighting under very confusing circumstances, finally looks out at the dusk scene of burning buildings, an image which made me think of the most ghostly and ominous of Hieronymous Bosch’s works, the flames and smoke silhouetting the ruins of French culture and history...if not Western history itself…
He prays that if God would spare his life in the coming days, he would retire after the fighting to a small farm and spend the rest of his days in peace. I could write much more about this series, what it left out and why, and its perhaps far too American-centric view of WWII, but somehow in re-watching this year, what has stuck with me was the incredibly beautiful cinemaphotography of Nature, the French, Dutch and Belgium landscapes, amidst all the carnage, and, at the very end, the landscape at the heart pulse of the Nazi movement, Bavaria.
At heart, you cannot take Nature out of me, or us, I hope, despite all the wreckage of our failed politics and economy.
And the need, perhaps to fight, however we each individually chose to fill in the meanings of that term. On the left, as a very last resort after civil disobedience has failed, giving ample room for the Republican Right to show their true and awful colors first, just as the guns of the yet to be formed Confederacy boomed out over Fort Sumter at 4:50 AM on the morning of April 12, 1861, following the Inauguration of President Lincoln on March 4, 1861.
All that goes into my reflections upon “Democracy’s Day of Days.” A second day of “Infamy,” indeed.
It remains to be seen if we can convert it to a day which reversed the descent which began with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980.
the best to you all, and to our Democratic Republic...
Bill of Rights
Frostburg, MD