Austin at Large: Just Another Wednesday

We got a nice letter last week from a reader marveling at our timely coverage, in the prior issue, of the Capitol rioting that wound down only an hour or so before we went to press, but that was ready for y'all to read about by the next sunrise. We make it look easier than it is. Last week, we put the paper to bed mid-impeachment; this week, we're approaching the first sunrise of the Biden presidency. His speech was fine, the poet was better, everyone's winter coat game was yet more excellent, and even Garth Brooks did all right, singing all by himself in the cold. Best of all, once Apesh*t went wheels-up on Air Force One for the last time, nobody thought about him ever again. For real! It's a Confederate Heroes Day miracle.

I was afraid we'd have yet more crises today, with Apesh*t and his goons breaking heads and news all over our front pages, another unwelcome Wed­nes­day tacked onto 2020, the year that wouldn't leave. I didn't want to write up the end of the Age of Apesh*t until I saw the plane in the sky, and hoped to not see more casualties in D.C. or in our own highly secured streets and those of every state capital. Though the boogaloo lacks the competence and credibility that would allow it to truly threaten the nation, even the dumbest liars and least smooth criminals can hurt people when they play with sharp things. But as I write, it does feel like it's becoming just another Wednesday, and I'm way past my deadline.

We Are All So, So Tired

In these first few post-MAGA hours, it really does seem obvious that when these fools and crooks don't have the presidential platform to stand on, their ugly noises die down to trivial and ignorable squeaks. Simply kicking Trump off social media had a dramatic effect on insurrectionist energy and morale, and probably in turn on planning, which to me makes it at least a little easier to accept why the tech titans were afraid to do it before. They knew exactly how profound the impact would be. (That's why they're so rich; they've monetized the value of our attention.)

I suspect that further revelations of what went down on and before 1/6/21 will make it untenable to blow the MAGA-bellion off entirely and, say, forget to send Apesh*t's impeachment over for trial in the Senate. It's surely not something members of Congress will overlook; his followers really did intend to kidnap and kill people to prevent a Biden-Harris victory from being certified. That wouldn't have prevented Joe and Kamala from taking power – it would in fact have hastened it – but the participants' failures of strategy and tactics only partly constrained their ability to do damage, which could have been much, much worse, even as their God-Emperor and commander in chief abandoned the battlefield to watch it all on television.

But with literally every hour that ticks by in which Apesh*t is an ex-president to whom nobody need pay attention, the whole accountability thing seems like more of a chore, and Lady Justice is tired, and so is everyone else, red or blue. You don't need to be a naive believer in "unity" or think that "we need two parties" to luxuriate in these clowns' absence from our thoughts and resent the need to bring them back to be spanked. We have other rewarding things to do; even the boring business of functional government feels sparkling fresh after years of chaos and psychosis.

Really, There's Time to Wait

If you're doing as I've instructed and not soaking your head in our socially mediated discourse, you can feel this too for as long as you please. Those who feel compelled to react to all the takes about how everything that each side does or doesn't do proves that people should be aggrieved and air those grievances right now before it's too late ... it's just fine to let that energy burn itself out for a little while before paying attention. Rejoice and be glad.

You may, for instance, not have even noticed that Biden's proposed COVID-19 relief package calls for increasing stimulus payments for rank-and-file Americans to $2,000, rather than by $2,000 (that is, to $2,600). If you did, you may have also noticed that our new president says he expects details to change as a bill works through Congress (a process that, unlike Apesh*t, he plans to pay attention to) and that more relief bills are likely. If so, then you avoided 24 hours of extremely online political nonsense, which at its most keening points felt like our fragile new purplish-­blue majority coalition just assembled was headed for inevitable collapse, and that has now evaporated. And that's just among the Democrats!

As we discussed last week, while all the folks on the red team should be more or less equally embarrassed, they're not all equally culpable for crimes and treason, and some will continue to play provocateur (the likes of Rep. Dan Crenshaw) within what are now more clear boundaries, we hope, without risking their careers or their freedom. You'll have plenty of time to be upset with them later, preferably in the next election cycle. For the rest, like Sen. Ted Cruz and Attorney General Ken Paxton, it's already past the point where anyone is willing to risk breaking a nail to help them; certainly Apesh*t won't. (His pardoning pen ran out of ink before their names came up in the stack, after Lil Wayne.) And without his inexhaustible supply of volatile gases, what will make this machine run?