By Chris Hedges
June 14, 2022:
Information Clearing House
--
The Select
Committee to Investigate the Jan. 6 attack on
the U.S. Capitol, whose first of six
televised hearings began last Thursday, is
spectacle replacing politics. There is nothing
substantially new in the accusations. The
committee lacks prosecutorial power. No charges
have been filed by Attorney General Merrick
Garland against former President Donald Trump
and none are expected.
The choreographed hearings, like the two
impeachment trials of Trump, will have no effect
on Trump voters, other than to make them feel
persecuted, especially with more than 860
people already charged (including 306 guilty
pleas) for their role in storming the
Capitol. The committee echoes back to Trump
opponents what they already believe. It is
designed to present inaction as action and
substitute role-playing for politics. It
perpetuates, as Guy Debord writes,
our “empire of modern passivity.”
The committee, which most Republicans
boycotted, hired
James Goldston, a documentary producer and
former president of ABC News, to turn the
hearings into engaging television with slick
packaging and an array of pithy sound bites.
The result is, and was meant to be, politics as
reality television, a media diversion that will
change nothing in the dismal American landscape.
What should have been a serious bipartisan
inquiry into an array of constitutional
violations by the Trump administration has been
turned into a prime-time campaign commercial for
a Democratic Party running on fumes. The
epistemology of television is complete. So is
its artifice.
The two established wings of the oligarchy, the
old Republican Party represented by politicians
such as Liz Cheney, one of two Republicans on
the committee, and the Bush family, are now
united with the Democratic Party elite into
one ruling political entity.
“What should have been a serious bipartisan
inquiry into an array of constitutional
violations by the Trump administration has been
turned into a prime-time campaign commercial for
a Democratic Party running on fumes.”
The ruling parties were already in lock step for
decades on the major issues, including: war,
trade deals, austerity, the militarization of
police, prisons, government
surveillance and assaults on civil liberties.
They worked in tandem to pervert and destroy
democratic institutions on behalf of the rich
and corporations. They desperately work together
now to stave off the revolt by enraged and
betrayed white working men and women who support
Donald Trump and the far right.
Committee members cloyingly seek to sanctify
themselves and their hearings by holding up the
Constitution, democracy, the Founding Fathers,
due process, the consent of the governed and the
electoral process.
Bennie Thompson, chairman of the committee, talked about
“domestic enemies of the Constitution who
stormed the Capitol and occupied the Capitol,
who sought to thwart the will of the people, to
stop the transfer of power.” Liz Cheney called the
Capitol “a sacred space in our constitutional
republic.”
There was no acknowledgement by committee
members that the “will of the people” has been
subverted by the three branches of government to
serve the dictates of the billionaire class. No
one brought up the armies of lobbyists who are
daily permitted to storm the Capitol to fund the
legalized bribery of our elections and write the
pro-corporate legislation that it passes. No one
spoke about the loss of constitutional rights,
including the right
to privacy, because of wholesale government
surveillance. No one mentioned the
disastrous trade deals that have
deindustrialized the country and impoverished
the working class. No one spoke of the military
fiascos in the Middle East that cost taxpayers
over $8
trillion, the for-profit
health care system that gouges the public
and prevents a rational response to the
pandemic, already resulting in over
a million deaths, or the privatization of
institutions of government, including schools,
prisons, water treatment, trash collection,
parking meters, utilities and even intelligence
gathering, to enrich the billionaire class at
our expense.
Spectacle Taking the Place of Politics
The gaping hole between the reality of what we
have become, and the fiction of who we are
supposed to be, is why spectacle is all the
ruling class has left. Spectacle takes the
place of politics. It is a tacit admission that
all social programs, whether the Build Back
Better Plan, a ban on assault weapons, raising
the minimum wage, ameliorating the ravages of
inflation or instituting environmental reforms
to stave off the climate emergency, will never
be implemented. Those who occupy the “sacred
space” of “our constitutional republic” are capable
only of pouring money into war, allocating $54
billion to Ukraine and passing ever higher
military budgets to enrich the arms industry.
The wider the gap becomes between the ideal and
the real, the more the proto fascists, who look
set to take back the Congress in the fall, will
be empowered. If the rational, factual world
does not work, why not try one of the many
conspiracy theories? If this is what democracy
means, why support democracy?
The right-wing also communicates through
spectacle. What were the four years of the Trump
presidency but one vast spectacle? Spectacle
versus spectacle. The aesthetic of spectacle, as
in the dying days of the Roman Empire or Tsarist
Russia, is all that is left. “Our politics,
religion, news, athletics, education and
commerce have been transformed into congenial
adjuncts of show business,” Neil Postman writes
in Amusing
Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age
of Show Business. The current ruling
class, blinded by their hubris and pomposity,
however, is not very good at it.
The far right, which believes vaccines cause
autism; angels exist; a cabal of satanic,
cannibalistic sexual abusers of children that
run a global child sex trafficking ring are
trying to destroy Trump; and the inerrancy of
the Bible, is far more entertaining, even as it
accelerates the solidification of corporate
tyranny.
If the republic is dead, do you want to watch
President Joe Biden mumble his way through
another press conference or the burlesque of
Sen. Rand Paul chain-sawing the tax code in half
and Sen. Ted Cruz accusing former President
Barack Obama of trying to provide “expanded
Medicaid” to ISIS? Do you want to wake up to the
newest rhetorical outrage by Trump, who when he
campaigned for president accused Obama of
founding ISIS, suggested Ted Cruz’s father was
involved in the assassination of John F.
Kennedy, argued that noise from windmills cause
cancer and recommended ingesting disinfectant to
fight Covid, or pay homage to a set of values
long ago discarded by the ruling class for lies,
corruption and greed?
In short, since the system has betrayed and
fleeced you, why not take it down with the
vulgarity and crudity it deserves? Why not be
entertained by political arsonists? Why engage
in the polite civility and political decorum
demanded by those who destroyed our communities,
wrecked the nation, looted the U.S. Treasury,
oversaw a series of costly military debacles and
took away our ability to make an adequate
living, as well as our children’s future?
Weimar Germany
In 1924, the government of Weimar Germany
decided to get rid of Adolf Hitler and the
National Socialist German Workers’ Party, or
Nazis, by trying Hitler for high treason in the
People’s Court. Hitler was clearly guilty. He
had tried to overthrow the elected government in
the botched 1923 “Beer
Hall Putsch,” which, like the Jan. 6 riot,
was as much farce as insurrection. It was an
open and shut case. The trial, however,
backfired, turning Hitler into a national martyr
and boosting the political fortunes of the
Nazis.
The reason should have been apparent. Germany,
convulsed by widespread unemployment, food
riots, street violence and hyperinflation, was a
mess. The ruling elites, like our own, had no
credibility. The appeal to the rule of law and
democratic values was a joke.
There was a revealing moment in the hearings
when Capitol police officer Caroline Edwards,
who suffered a concussion during the storming of
the Capitol, related an exchange she had with
Joseph Biggs, a leader of The Proud Boys who
was indicted, along
with four other Proud Boy leaders, for
seditious conspiracy in connection with the
storming of the Capitol.
“The tables started turning, once the — what is
now that — the Arizona group — that’s what you
said — the crowd with orange hats, they came up
chanting ‘F-U-C-K antifa!’” Edwards told the
committee. “And they joined that group. And once
they joined that group, Joseph Biggs’ rhetoric
turned to the Capitol Police. He started asking
us questions like, ‘You’ve — you didn’t miss a
paycheck during the pandemic,’ mentioning stuff
about — our pay scale was mentioned, and, you
know, started turning the tables on us.”
The brief exchange highlighted the yawning gap
between the haves and the have nots, which, if
not addressed, will turn Trump, his supporters,
Biggs, the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers into
martyrs.
Congress is a cesspool. Corrupt politicians
whore for the rich and get rich in return. This
reality, which the hearings ignore, is apparent
to most of the nation, which is why the hearings
will not bolster the flagging fortunes of the
ruling political class, desperate to prevent
displacement.
The old ruling class is slated for extinction,
not that what follows will be better. It won’t.
But the game of pillage and corruption in the
name of sacred democratic values no longer
works. A new game is taking its place, one where
narcissistic buffoons, who stoke the fires of
hate and only know how to destroy, entertain us
to death.
Chris Hedges
is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a
foreign correspondent for 15 years for The
New York Times, where he served as the
Middle East bureau chief and Balkan bureau chief
for the paper. He previously worked overseas
for The Dallas Morning News, The
Christian Science Monitor and NPR. He
is the host of show “The Chris Hedges Report.”
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