I'm reading a book about the year 1000. The event that that time nearly always invokes is the first European discovery of North America, featuring the expedition of Leif Ericsson, Viking explorer extraordinaire (who, apparently, wasn't the first).
While that's a feature of this book, it's actually kind of a sidelight. Because so much more has been discovered about civilizations that existed then, so much that has connected them through trade and even art. There is reason to believe, for example, that some Vikings, like the English Pilgrims later, got lost. That the Atlantic current carried the Norsemen beyond our coastline. It might have carried them to the Yucatan Peninsula.
How the heck they got there without all of them perishing would make one great interview. But the Mayan art of the time, writes author Valerie Hansen (nice Nordic name there), features paintings of people with blonde hair. Nobody who lived there at the time, nor natives who live there now, have such hair. And nobody else, from nowhere else, at least as far as we know--the point exactly--had decided to make the enormous leap into the unknown at that particular moment in history.
I taught Ericsson's travels to Cedarburg High kids, but I didn't know about the Mayan art. Wouldn't it have been terrific if we'd have known that, if that had been common knowledge? Wouldn't it have been fun to speculate?
Mitch McConnell doesn't want to do that. He says that we already know enough of what there is to know about January 6. We don't need to go over the same stuff, he says. We'll discover nothing new. It'll just be a rehash.
That's nonsense and he knows it. It was said casually, so he could slip by despite its impact. That comment is so empty it's beyond ridiculous. It's an ignorance of the meaning of history.
Think, for instance, of the thousands of books written about Lincoln. Even more about the Civil War. Believe it or not, like it or not, we're still discovering new information, more than a century and a half later.
Because history means an endless inquiry. It means going over the same event again and again and discovering more and more, things we couldn't have known before, things that bring decisions and mistakes into a new light. In other words, facts; something that Republicans seem to be avoiding at every turn.
It means that you're underlining something that either is important or should be, subjecting it to further research. To pretend that January 6 is an event that we simply need to move on past brings it into a comparison to burnt dinner, to blame it on the oven. It flushes responsibility right into a toilet of pretense.
It insults the families of those who died--yes, on both sides, including the woman who was shot trying to enter the House chamber while the members were in session. They, too, deserve to know exactly what she was doing there, how she was misled, how deep was the rabbit hole into which she, too, dived.
Yes, there would be things reported that we already know. But to pretend that nothing else would be discovered is the height of denial. It is an attempt, tired though we now are to consider it, to whitewash reality. It feeds into the narrative of the very ex-president who fomented this chaos: Don't think about the past, just think about pleasing me.
McConnell is quoted as having told his fellow Senate Republicans that he would consider it a personal favor if they voted against a commission. That means that something like 37 chits will be called in at some point, minus the four who voted for it and the nine who didn't vote. He considered it that important that he will have to run around and satisfy that many future demands.
History happens regardless of result or intent. Journalists and historians like Valerie Hanson will continue to investigate, no matter how much McConnell wants to hold it back. The books that follow, after the research that taxpayers should pay for but are now blocked, will indict him and his fellow Republicans and make them look absurd.
Besides, the books about the horrible president we've just had have not ended. The ones that have been already written stand unmitigated and unlitigated. The uncovering of his corruption hasn't ended, either. A whole bunch of people who matter aren't letting that history slide, either.
The history the Senate Republicans make, too, will be all that more astonishing to future generations who will try to make sense of their utter abrogation of purpose. What follows from this cannot be good, but it will be enormously consequential. It will be placed eventually at their feet, like Leif Ericsson's, for another thousand years.
Be well. Be careful. With some luck, I'll see you down the road.
Mister Mark
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