The Capitol

January 11, 2021

On a warm morning in September 2015 I stood with thousands of others in front of the Capitol reflecting pool and listened as Pope Francis, high on the south portico, spoke about the world’s need for peace, charity, and courage. Earlier, he had addressed a joint session of Congress. He said:

“The contemporary world, with its open wounds which affect so many of our brothers and sisters, demands that we confront every form of polarization which would divide it into these two camps. We know that in the attempt to be freed of the enemy without, we can be tempted to feed the enemy within. To imitate the hatred and violence of tyrants and murderers is the best way to take their place. …

“Our response must instead be one of hope and healing, of peace and justice. We are asked to summon the courage and the intelligence to resolve today’s many geopolitical and economic crises. … Our efforts must aim at restoring hope, righting wrongs, maintaining commitments, and thus promoting the well-being of individuals and of peoples. We must move forward together, as one, in a renewed spirit of fraternity and solidarity, cooperating generously for the common good.”

Just over five years later the entire world has been sickened by last Wednesday’s spectacle.  Nihilistic thugs attacked the same site, stampeding the balcony where the Pope had spoken, into Statuary Hall and into the House and Senate chambers, trying to carry out Trump’s orders to destroy American democracy.

What happened in those five years? The first, 2016, was consumed by the presidential campaign, filled with venom and obscenity. Sixty-three million voters preferred a morally and intellectually diseased man-child of a New York slum empire and failed casino owner to a Democrat branded as a creature of the Washington political establishment, then headed by a Black president. The next four, just now ending, became the Trump nightmare.

A new branch of the publishing industry—dozens, maybe hundreds of books and magazine articles—has grown up devoted to parsing why Americans then supported Trump and why many still support him. Theories range from the long-term decline of manufacturing, nervousness about erosion of cultural values and gun rights, the Afghanistan war, rising healthcare costs, and racial hatred ingrained since Reconstruction. All of that, the pontificators have suggested, translate into resentment of liberal “elites,” a theme massaged 24/7 by Trump acolytes and psychotics using social media.

Then there was the “economy.” Elect me, a no-nonsense businessman to bring back jobs in mining, steelmaking, etc., etc., and meanwhile balance the federal budget, Trump said. Millions of relatively well-off people, maybe uneasy about Trump’s pornographic personality, went along, expecting a Republican-led economic renaissance.

Covid and Trump’s callous indifference to it helped demolish that myth. The centerpiece of his 2020 campaign, an avalanche of lies, was not enough to win him a second term. Instead the Trump presidency metastasized into Wednesday’s rabid mob attack.

Still numb from watching the recycling TV footage of the Capitol assault, Sandy and I tramped to the medical oncologist Thursday. He advised me of my sentence to approximately four weeks of radiation therapy to “clean up” the thymic carcinoma cells likely left behind after my surgery two weeks ago. Last Monday the surgical oncologist, a dynamic leader in the field, had said with a warm smile (behind his mask) that he “enucleated” perhaps 99 percent of the lesion stuck to my ribcage and diaphragm. But with cancer, 99 percent is never enough.

The docs at the Prisma Health Cancer Institute here in Greenville, S.C., are the best at what they do. Surgery, radiation, chemo—they’re on top of it all. So we left after the twenty-minute appointment—friendly, positive, but no-nonsense—with the sense that things will be OK. We’ll keep hunting for a house, expanding the search from the city to the burbs then maybe beyond, to the closer reaches of Upstate boondocks, where you can see the gently undulating spine of the southern end of the Blue Ridge.

We get along doing that by recalling what moves us to joy. Tired of the video of the criminals in the Capitol and of the coward-crybaby president telling them to attack while he watches on TV, I recall the Pope’s brave and eloquent words of that September day: “… hope and healing, peace and justice.”

“Move forward together,” he said. I keep asking myself, how do we do that? For starters I’ll keep these upcoming appointments. Then as time and the rapacious local spread of the pandemic allow, we’ll keep looking for a home. For all Americans: no way out but to admit that Trump already is only an ugly stain on American history. The nightmare is over. Time to leave the four-year-long dark age behind, to move on, to heal.