There are many ways to look at what happened in our nation’s capital yesterday.
Since I am a mythologist, I tend to think of human life, affairs, and public events in terms of story. And that’s my angle today.
To me, yesterday’s incident was the finale of a four-year long saga: the “final episode” of a series that has been cancelled.
Let me be clear: I am not about to say that the insurrection in the Capitol was “only a story,” or “wasn’t real,” or was not a serious blow to the well-being of our democracy.
Nor am I saying that there is no such thing as truth, or a true account of the incident.
I am not trying to minimize anything. When I talk about story, I am being deadly serious.
Story—myth—what we tell ourselves to make sense of our world—makes a huge difference in our lives.
Story allows us to deal with the difficult, confusing, chaotic realities that often don’t make sense logically.
What is out of control and inexplicable, we control with story. The ancient Greeks did it. We do it.
The current president (I am not going to use his name—sorry, I just can’t do it) knows perhaps better than anything in his life the power of story.
Before he became president, he was most successful as the host of a television reality show that simulated the business world. This show ran in various formats for 15 years, longer and more successfully than just about any television program you can name.
Much of his personal celebrity and a large part of his ability to win the presidency hinged on this show and his storytelling abilities.
“The Apprentice” fostered the impression that the host was strong, smart, decisive, and decisively in control; indeed, that he was wealthy because of these qualities. This impression resonated with voters in 2016, especially in a political climate where some were calling for a more diffuse, non-traditional power base, giving a say, rights, and equity to the disenfranchised and discounted.
The host-turned-candidate used the power of his story to reinforce to eager voters that power should be concentrated among the few and the rich.
Once the candidate became president, he continued to use story to create a new reality show. “The Apprentice” morphed into a show called “The President.”
The president leveraged Twitter to provide his audience with a continuous stream of content—episodes, so to speak. The more outrageous his tweets, the more buzz they created, and the more media of all types amplified the content until it became a kind of self-generating content machine.
The president thus created one of the highest-rated reality shows that was never officially a reality show.
“The President,” the reality show, developed a rabid following. These followers are, simply, fans, viewers, consumers of entertainment. They are not political in the traditional sense. They are not interested in the way government works or how their lives may be made better through policy. They are mainly concerned with consuming and maintaining the story that the president is a great man who made America great again.
This is why the supporters of the president seem so disconnected from reality that they would not acknowledge, among other things, the danger of the Covid virus or the legitimacy of the November elections.
If you believe the world works in a certain way, you are going to seek confirmation of the world-view.
And sadly, the president decided to ignore realities like the pandemic and his electoral loss. It didn’t fit in with the story he was telling.
But now “The President” has been cancelled.
His fans, understandably, are angry. They are like any fan base that wants a show to continue. They are going to protest the cancellation of the president’s reality show.
But it goes even farther than that.
Yesterday, the fans were given the ultimate opportunity: the chance to star in the reality show’s final episode, where they might just end up saving the president at the last minute.
The president encouraged this fiction. He wanted his fans to make a grand gesture at the very end. What better way for the star of the show to bow out of the final season than have his own fans pretend to rescue him on national TV?
I was not surprised when Hannah Allam, a reporter for NPR who witnessed the incident, described the scene at the Capitol as “festive.” People were taking selfies and celebrating that they were present for “history” (story). Families showed up with children in strollers, according to Ms. Allam.
This was not a political event. This was not Black Lives Matters protestors calling for justice for George Floyd. This was not conservative Christians protesting to make abortion illegal. This was not about immigration reform or affordable college or any other legitimate issue that I can think of.
The incident was intended by the president to be an episode in a television show—and his fans obliged him.
In speaking to Ms. Allam, Steve Inskeep, a host of NPR’s Morning Edition, repeated a question that he said “a fifteen-year-old” asked him: “What did [the insurrectionists] think they were going to accomplish?”
Appear on “The President” before it went off the air.
Will the president’s reality show continue in some form after this?
With any luck, not likely.
The 1998 movie “The Truman Show” follows the life of Truman Burbank, played by Jim Carrey. He is the unsuspecting star of the ultimate reality show, providing intimate 24/7/365 coverage of his life.
When Truman finally realizes what has been happening, he cancels his own show.
And what do his diehard fans do? They go on to the next story.
“What else is on?” says a security guard we’ve gotten to know.
It is a bit simplistic to think that people will just change the channel once the former president is made to pay attention to the actual reality of, for example, his own legal troubles.
Another similar show might replace his.
But I think we will move on from this.
I think we are moving toward a stronger, more diverse, more inclusive, and more just society. The movement is glacial. But I don’t think it’s going backwards.
We are going to change the channel as a nation because the values of life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, justice for all, equality, and opportunity, are more resilient in the American consciousness than they seem.
More stories about these positive, transformative American values will continue to emerge. We will begin to live our values more and more.
That’s the reality show I’ll be working on.