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Lost for Words

Photograph by Brett Davis / Flickr

Around 1:30 pm on January 6, I turned on the TV so I could, as I told my girlfriend, “watch the shitshow at the Capitol.” At that time, I was talking about the hot mess of looming objections to the presidential ballot certification, orchestrated by 140 members of the House and a small but notable cadre of Republican senators. I tuned in midway through Senator Ted Cruz’s shamefully cynical invocation of an irrelevant incident from 1876 juxtaposed, on the screen, by the gathering on the Capitol steps. I watched with tired indifference up through the moment when another Republican senator, James Lankford, was interrupted by a member of his staff saying that, “the protesters are in the building.”

Over the last four years (ignoring the decades-long arc from Gingrich to the Tea Party, and the broader history of colonialism and white supremacy that preceded it), we’ve watched an erosion of norms and endless expressions of bold-faced complicity. Four years of kleptocracy, criminality, abdication of duty, greed, racism, xenophobia, and nationalism, aided and abetted by an increasingly cynical armada of right-wing propaganda networks. Looking at that previous sentence, it seems at once so extreme and so insufficient—to invoke so many absolute

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