When Wackos Try To Go Straight - How Tarted Up January 6th 'Insurrectionists' Get Schooled

The image of the Viking-helmeted, face-painted crazies on the steps of the Capitol on January 6th went viral, a display of the hijinks of the day.  While Democrats wailed the worst, the beginning of the end of democracy and the coming of the anti-Christ, most Americans were unmoved.  The whole thing was a marvelously American show - a circus act of grand proportions, Sturm und Drang, sound and fury signifying absolutely nothing.  

It hadn't been orchestrated by any Rasputin or Kremlin plotters.  It was a bunch of halfwits rounded up from the Idaho Panhandle, Appalachia, and Humboldt County, given war paint and feathers, put on any conveyance East, and let loose in the Nation's Capital. 

No one knew they were going, any more than old-school panty raids on Hadley Hall or the gay Halloween parties that broke out of Castro walk-ups onto the streets - happy bacchanals, whose revelers were tarted up, costumed, and half-naked and bridled were marched up and down by their hostlers and Simon Legrees. 

Why didn't the Capitol Police or the Secret Service know the march was coming? Had they failed in their duty to protect the very temple of democracy?  Of course not  The revelers, all doo-dadded up,  bangles, toy store Ninja swords, and fright wigs were here to party, not insurrect.  Leave them be.  This is America, and even busloads of crazy idiots are normal in a free country. 

So this great eclectic, random cluster of wingnuts from the farthest, most remote and forgotten shitholes of the country somehow cohered, coalesced like a New Year's mob and when someone yelled, 'To the Capitol', off they went like a flooded river, going this way and that until it found its course and headed up Pennsylvania Avenue towards the iconic dome.  To do what and for what, they didn't know.  They had no idea other than camaraderie.  

When a thousand of them like catfish had been pulled and plucked out of riverbanks by noodlers, or hung over from moonshine rousted out of straw tick beds, slipped into overalls and work boots and hauled onto cattle cars only to disembark on the Mall, the shrine of America, who was to question purspose?

This was their time for once.  Every forgotten bit of America finally recognized and given their due; and so they marched to their own drummers up the Avenue, shouting, cheering, hawking and spitting. When passersby, bureaucrats who had spilled out into the winter sunshine for a break from tube lighting and cubicles, saw the parade, they waved and tossed their hats in the air.  Their dull, grey, thuddingly boring life finally had some cheer. 

The rest is history.  This group of backwoods hole-dwellers and crackers got ambition, and dumb as they were raised the ante and burst through the doors of the Capitol as crazy as ever but without a clue as to what they were doing there or what was expected of them.  They had no leadership, no marshals, generals or drill sergeants to give them orders.  They were an inchoate, ridiculous crowd of dopes suddenly realizing that they had been caught with their pants down. 

Now, this episode is only a historical prelude to the real point of the story.  While a few of these wild men were arrested, convicted, and thrown into jail, the rest of the lot went back home.  Not easily, mind you, because these numskulls had no money left after blowing it on beer and street hookers of Anacostia ('Let's get us some chocolate pussy', said one good ol' boy from Arkansas), but return they did; but once they'd seen the lights of Gay Paree, leaky shacks in the woods where it seemed to rain all the time were not exactly they way they wanted to spend the rest of their lives. 

The Humboldt gang had enough to live on - cooking meth gave them incidental change, and day labor on fishing boats or clearing brush in national forests kept them in potted beef and cornmeal - but the Washington caper had shown them another world beyond this one, and the American Dream began to take shape.  They would make something of their lives, make a difference; but just as they had not one coherent idea in their heads when they boarded the busses for the Capitol, none came to them now.  Just a kind of Barbie pastel scene of blondes and broad avenues. 

It was peripheral vision that had done it - the bureaucratic onlookers on Pennsylvania Avenue, probably all with wives and children, a mistress on the side, sirloin and Cabernet at McCormick & Schmidt's, all cheering them but probably laughing at the excess, the boorishness and unkemptness. 

Despite the fact that the 'Insurrectionists' - a label pinned on them after the escapade was over which they proudly adopted - were cheered when they returned to their back woods and hollers, there was a dreary down that settled in quickly.  Ok, maybe they were just out-of-work marginalia, dumb as stones not because of lack of native intelligence, but bad circumstances, all of which could be overcome, American style.  Not exactly chuck it all for lawnmowing and house painting like the Mexican wetbacks in Southern California, but something...'ennobling', a word that one of them had heard along the way, rolled it over on his tongue enough times that it stuck. 

Wayne Fricker caught ambition on his excursion to Washington.  He looked down at his piss-stained overalls, stanky work shirt, and miserable surroundings, and said, 'I am an American'. 

Yet, as it turned out, inclusivity did not include the likes of him, a notion reserved as it was for everyone but white trash who were supposed to be as privileged as every fat-assed white prick at General Motors. Why, who knew if he was really white?  He never knew his father and his mother had led the sporting life for a while in El Paso, so he could claim something other than what he was, probably Mexican. 

When he made it out of the woods to town - a small lumber town with one sawmill, a hardware store, and a saloon - he was stymied but had enough sense to walk over to the mill; but one look at this disheveled, shambling mess of a human being and he never got past the girl at the counter; and from that moment on The Land of Opportunity became nothing more than a seedy brothel, two-bit whores and rotgut whiskey. 

He tried again down the coast, something, anything other than cheap day labor.  He wanted to be signed up, enrolled, chartered in a good place; but one look by management was enough to send him packing, out the door and back up into the woods. 

No such luck, America had passed him by and would continue to do so.  He was detritus, leavings, replaceable and insignificant, noticed by no one, recruited or addressed by no one.  Insurrectionist? If only he had been, perhaps that political cachet would have legitimized him, given him some record of having belonged.  As it was he was flotsam, trash, street dirt. 

Yet, at the very least he could say, 'I did that', and for a long time he knew he could again, would, and should.