The Globe and Mail
Published January 7, 2021
STEPHANIE KEITH/Reuters
. He lives in Portland, Ore.
It is difficult to watch a day such as Jan. 6, 2021, unfold – the pathetic spectacle and madness of it – and not retreat to the comforting perch of objective truth. An empire brought low not by a rival empire, not by some unpreventable natural calamity, but by a gaggle of proudly uninformed, bilious racists role-playing as freedom fighters. Surely, one day we will make sense of all this, assign to it the authoritative, damning narrative it deserves.
But what was irreparably fractured this week was the American narrative itself. Beyond the fault lines that have always run beneath the social ground of this country, there is a sense that the United States as a civic entity has no more interest in anything resembling a shared reality – if it ever did. The men and women who stormed the Capitol on Wednesday – who climbed smirking through the shattered windows and turned the House Speaker’s podium into a looter’s prize – are less members of an aggrieved political class than participants in a mass delusion,