The live video of the January 6 attack on the United States Capitol was largely images from a distance: a sea of attackers climbing the stairs and the entrances. It was like watching a malevolent tide slowly threaten to drown democracy. It couldn’t get any worse than that.
But it could. And so it was, as more close-up videos and graphics of the American carnage that the Trumpists unleashed on Capitol surfaced on social media and on TV over the weekend.
Wednesday’s uprising was one of the rare live TV atrocities that became more disgusting, more terrifying, more infuriating as more days passed. What we remember from the 9/11 attacks, for example, is largely what we saw in the early hours: planes crashing, towers collapsing, pedestrians fleeing. Terrorist attacks, mass shootings – the shock hits us right away and then we sue it.
But the last Wednesday seemed to last for days. New videos of violence on smartphones were released one by one. The horror came in waves, the attack revealed with each image as more bloodthirsty and deplorable.
Watching the impressive coverage on Wednesday, I continued to notice all the flags waving in the crowd. In a video that aired on CNN this weekend, the flag becomes a weapon. An attacker outside an entrance hits a police officer prostrate with the flag of an American flag, while others hurl them at defenders like darts, the kind of metaphor too perfect that only reality can escape.
In another, the crowd smashes a policeman at the door as he screams in pain. In another, the troublemakers chant: “Hang Mike Pence! Hang Mike Pence! “In another, the attackers hammer the door and then a shot goes off – through the door, you see only the gun and the hand that holds it – killing a woman in the crowd.
In a video captured by Igor Bobic of the Huffington Post, an officer causes an angry crowd to turn left and chase him down a corridor, dodging him from the unprotected door of the Senate chamber. Even that moment of bravery is frightening: how close history may have come to turning the bloodiest right.
Even the view of the outcome showed how brutally intimate the breach was. On Sunday “60 Minutes”, Nancy Pelosi took Lesley Stahl through the Chamber chamber and her office suite: a shattered mirror, the conference table under which she said her team hid in the dark for two and a half hours as intruders knocked at the entrance.
The horror was not just that the Casa do Povo was ransacked and bloody. The horror came from having already seen it live, and then realizing that we had barely seen what was going on. Could it be that we were just minutes away, on the wrong track here or there, from a assassination of vice president, a massacre of lawmakers on camera, perhaps until the effective end of American democracy?
Seeing how close we can get is irritating, not just against the crowd, but everyone who downplayed the danger of this mass illusion, everyone who euphemized the kind of bigotry on display here, every responsible person who hadn’t prepared for the attack, every leader who served the fantasy of the stolen election that encouraged this spasm of insanity.
As shocking as Wednesday was, many of the initial images focused on what catches the eye and even the absurd: a rowdy with face paint and Viking horns, another parading with the pulpit of Pelosi as a state fair award.
On Wednesday, we knew it wasn’t a harmless joke. But the widely shared images may have suggested that it was a secondary carnival show, a last gasp for attention hunters and cosplayers.
The big mistake of the Trump years was not realizing that a thing, or person, can be ridiculous and dangerous. We live in an era of armed irony and killer clowns (a central image of recent pop culture, from “Joker” to “American Horror Story: Cult”). The crowd that tried to assault democracy on Wednesday was both cosplaying an uprising and genuinely committing it.
The wave of new images also helped authorities to accuse and investigate more suspects, which complicated the media’s misinterpretations of the Trump era and the Trumpists.
These were not simply basement yahoos or “economically anxious”. Some of them were policemen, ex-soldiers, elected politicians, wealthy conservative bourgeois, flying to Washington to demand the electoral result they wanted or to expel someone from Congress.
This constant trickle of videos and reports, each bit seemingly more disturbing than the last, created a sense of late-onset trauma. Many viewers probably saw them for the first time on Monday morning, when the morning programs aired featured video packages and timelines, with graphics illustrating how close the violence came to being a potential massacre.
On the other hand, the pro-Trump bastion “Fox and Friends” focused on impeachment and directed several segments of “Big Tech Censorship” in the tech industry’s actions against the right-wing social media president and Parler. Only brief fragments suggested the inconveniently awful video context behind all of this news happening in the first place.
For those who have eyes and will see, however, the enormity of what happened Wednesday – and what could have happened, but did not happen – has only deepened.
I felt it this morning, when cable networks started receiving live news from Congress, where Democrats presented an impeachment article against President Trump for inciting insurrection, in the same corridors that we saw under siege. The images were simple video wallpapers; employees circulated in the sober environment that we associate with long speeches and marathons from C-SPAN and, frankly, boredom.
But even watching this relatively static scene, I could feel myself tense, my eyes wandering to the door, waiting for the jump to jump.
Who knows how long it will take before looking at Congress may seem tedious, or safe, again?