The live video of the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol was largely images of a distance: a sea of attackers seeping up the stairs and through the entrances. It was like watching a malicious tide slowly threaten democracy. It could not possibly be worse than that.
But it can. And it did, as more through the weekend appeared more close-ups and graphic videos of the U.S. massacre that Trumpists unleashed in the Capitol.
Wednesday’s uprising was one of the rare live TV atrocities that only got sicker, more frightening and more furious as more days passed. What we remember from the September 11 attacks, for example, is largely what we saw in the first few hours: the planes that crashed, the towers collapsed, and the pedestrians who fled. Terrorist attacks, mass shootings – the shock strikes us, and then we process it.
But it looks like it’s been going on for days last Wednesday. New smartphone videos of violence have appeared one by one. The horror came in waves, and the attack revealed with every image more bloodthirsty and deplorable.
When I looked at the beautiful cover on Wednesday, I kept paying attention to all the flags waving in the crowd. In a video aired on CNN over the weekend, the flag becomes a weapon. An assailant outside an entrance strikes a downed police officer with the pole of an American flag while others throw them like defenders at defenders, the kind of overly perfect metaphor with which only reality can get away.
In another, the mob crushed a police officer in a door while screaming in pain. In another rioters sing: ‘Hang Mike Pence! Hang Mike Pence! “In another hammer attackers at a door, then shoot a shot – through the door you only see the gun and the hand holding it – which kills a woman in the crowd.
In a video captured by Igor Bobic of the Huffington Post, an officer gets a scrambling crowd to turn left and chase him down a hallway and divert it from the unguarded door of the Senate Hall. Even that moment of bravery is cold: how close can history take a bloodier turn to the right.
Even the face of the aftermath showed how cruelly intimate the offense was. Nancy Pelosi walked Lesley Stahl through the living room and her office suite on ’60 minutes’ on Sunday: a broken mirror, the conference table under which she said her staff hid in the dark for two and a half hours while intruders entered the entrance stamped. .
The horror was not just to see the People’s House looted and bloodied. The horror came when we saw it already alive, and then realized that we had barely seen what was happening at all. Were we a few minutes away from here, some wrong turn of an assassination of the Vice President, a massacre on the cameras of lawmakers, perhaps even the effective end of American democracy?
To see how close we have come is furious, not only against the mob, but also all those who have minimized the danger of this mass error, all who euphemize the kind of triviality that is fully exhibited here , every responsible person who could not prepare for the attack, every leader who served the stolen election fantasy that encouraged this shrinkage of madness.
As horrific as Wednesday was, many of the initial images focused on the striking and even the absurd: a riot in face paint and Viking horns, another involving me. Pelosi’s pulpit was like a state scholarship award.
We knew on Wednesday that this is not a harmless thing. But the much-shared imagery may have implied that it was part of the carnival sideshow, a final snap of attention seekers and cosplayers.
The big mistake of the Trump years was not realizing that a thing, or a person, can be ridiculous and dangerous. We live in the era of armed irony and killer jokes (a central image of recent pop culture, from “Joker” to “American Horror Story: Cult”). The crowd that tried to fight democracy on Wednesday committed the uprising as well as the reality.
The rush of new images has also helped authorities upload and investigate more suspects, which has complicated years of misperceptions about the Trump era and Trumpists.
It was not just yahoos in the basement or the ‘economically anxious’. Some of them were police officers, ex-military, elected politicians, wealthy conservative citizens, who flew to Washington to demand the election result they wanted, or to knock one out of Congress.
This steady drop of videos and reports, which seem more disturbing than the previous one, has created a sense of traumatic trauma. Many viewers probably saw them for the first time on Monday morning when the morning programs were presented with video packages and chronologies, with graphs illustrating how physically close to the rampage is a potential massacre.
On the other hand, the pro-Trump bastion “Fox and Friends” focused on accusations and carried out several “Big Tech censorship” segments over the actions of the technology industry against the president and the right-wing social media Parler. Only short snippets alluded to the awkwardly awful video context behind all this news happening in the first place.
For those who have eyes and will see, the scope of what happened Wednesday – and what could have happened, but did not – just sank deeper.
I felt it this morning when the cable networks changed to live news from Congress, where the Democrats instituted an article of accusation against President Trump for inciting insurgency, in the same halls we besieged. The images were ordinary video background; officials grinned in the tranquil setting we associate with long speeches and C-SPAN marathons and, frankly, boredom.
But even as I look at this relatively static scene, I feel tense, and my eyes drift to the doorway, waiting for the leap.
Who knows how long it will take before it can be boring or safe to watch Congress again?