The Ugly Duckling of truth

Members of congress pose for photos before the House select committee tasked with investigating the January 6th attack on the Capitol holds a hearing on Capitol Hill, in Washington, U.S. Jabin Botsford/Pool via REUTERS

NEW YORK—Say your home had been broken into and vandalized, valuables stolen, and you were beaten and came close to losing your life. You would of course report the break-in to the police. And the police—and you as well—would want to determine who the intruders were, and how they gained access to your domicile. All these, so the criminals can be tracked down and captured, while beefing up the security of your home to prevent future break-ins.

On January 6, 2021, a mob of Trump loyalists descended on the nation’s capital, and believing the lie that their man had been cheated, broke into the Capitol, the people’s house, vandalized the premises, beat up the Capitol police, some of whom died, posed for photographs, stole various items as keepsakes, and threatened to hang Vice President Mike Pence and kill Speaker Nancy Pelosi,.

The January 6^th House Committee was formed about a year ago, to investigate this unprecedented break-in, a coup attempt by pro-Trump mobs, apparently orchestrated by Trump and his allies, to prevent Congress from certifying the results of the 2020 presidential elections that saw Joseph R. Biden decisively win. It seems, however, that quite a number of Americans look upon the committee’s efforts as a misdirected exercise. They argue that that’s over, and we should look to the future.

The way the argument is presented posits a false dichotomy, that either one focuses on the past or on the future. It isn’t an argument that would pass muster in Logic 101. Investigating how this insurrection came about—the past—in fact helps determine how we approach and shape the future. Moreover, such an argument is clearly partisan and seeks to distract from determining the genesis of the crime, the who, what, when, where, and why. Part of this strategy is to insist on overhauling the electoral process, to render it more secure, even though the 2020 elections have been judged by experts, Republicans and Democrats alike, to be among the fairest and most secure in our time. This is simply a ploy to remove the inquisitorial spotlight on then President Donald Trump who in the words of the Committee’s vice-chair Republican Congresswoman Liz Cheney, “summoned the mob, assembled the mob and lit the flame of this attack.”

This very strategy of downplaying the past is favored, for instance, by Holocaust deniers, and more recently, by those who insist rather piously that we look beyond the brutal history of slavery in this country. Regrettable as that was, they say, but shouldn’t we move on and not be mired in the past? And by the way studying critical race theory does exactly that and should therefore not be included in a school’s curriculum.

The same argument was utilized to devastating effect in the May 9^th presidential elections in the Philippines that saw BongBong Marcos and Sara Duterte win. With their army of trolls and media influencers’ dominant presence in various social media platforms, the campaign did manage to get a majority of the voters to hark to their promise of another “golden age,” a revival of the supposed halcyon days of peace and prosperity under the benevolent rule of BBM’s father, his namesake. Thus was the late unlamented dictator remade as a savior.

There is a Tagalog proverb that most Filipinos are familiar with: Ang hindi lumilingon sa pinanggalingan ay hindi makararating sa paroroonan. You will never arrive at your destination if you turn your back on whence you came. This view of time is holistic, tying the past to the future and the future to the past. One ignores this at one’s peril, for the past is never past. It is in our DNA, in our bodies, in our culture, our history.

In the case of the January 6^th insurrection, why wouldn’t anyone not want to know the details of how power was abused in order to suppress democratic freedoms? It is a question that can be asked as well of those who feel it is time to move on past the sins of BBM’s father, and the degradation the nation suffered under his and Imelda’s rule.

We all know why.

If the past is an inconvenient truth, then best to ignore it. Better still, rework it wherein the ugly duckling of truth is transformed into the beautiful but imagined swan of a hallucinatory reality.

Copyright L.H. Francia 2022