“And said to me, ‘Senator, we got to get out of here, you’re in danger.’” There was Chuck Schumer, the Senate majority leader, who had only been in the chamber for 45 minutes, watching the start of the counting of ballots, when an armed police officer in a big flak jacket grabbed him firmly by the collar. These details were recalled by senators speaking in the chamber that had been overrun by the rioters such as Jacob Chansley who, wearing a horned headdress and carrying a six-foot spear, scaled the dais and took the seat that Mike Pence had occupied an hour earlier, proclaiming, “Mike Pence is a fucking traitor” and writing, “It’s Only A Matter of Time. They were bulwarks against the attempts to rewrite history and supplant it with a false narrative. And I will allow no one to place a dagger at the throat of our democracy.”īut it was the details of that day – the sound of gunfire, the narrow escapes, the messages to loved ones – that struck a chord and stuck. “I did not seek this fight brought to this Capitol one year ago today, but I will not shrink from it either,” said Biden, unexpectedly at 79 discovering his inner Henry V and previewing his 2024 election campaign. It was an I-don’t-negotiate-with-terrorists epiphany for the president about the limits of bipartisanship. Harris was followed by Joe Biden, whose barnstorming speech offered his most vivid critique yet of his predecessor Donald Trump’s big lie about the 2020 election and incitement of the mob. Instead, the scars are psychological and institutional the bleeding is internal. Without a tangible reminder, it is easier to deny reality or forget.
ON THE ANNIVERSARY OF THE DAY YOU WENT AWAY IMAGES WINDOWS
Photograph: Rex/Shutterstockīut whereas the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor brought Americans together to fight the second world war, and the terrorist strikes on New York and Washington conjured rare solidarity, the deadly siege of the Capitol turns out to be just another wedge in the divided states of America.Īnd unlike those previous calamities, the more than 220-year-old Capitol bears few visible scars of the day that windows were smashed, congressional offices ransacked and faeces left on the floor. The vice-president, Kamala Harris, kicked it off just after 9am by pointing to “dates that occupy not only a place on our calendars, but a place in our collective memory”, citing 7 December 1941, 11 September 2001 – and 6 January 2021. It was clear that America could not decide whether this was a political scrap or a national tragedy, a moment for angry polarisation or unified mourning. Republicans were particularly hard to find, their absence illustrating the radically different interpretations of what happened on 6 January 2021, or as one headline put it, “a national day of infamy, half remembered”. Turn down a marbled corridor and you might spot a lone Capitol police officer – was he among those that fought and bled that day? Walk up a staircase and you might see a solitary reporter fetching coffee. The cathedral of American democracy was scarcely attended and hauntingly hushed for the anniversary, in part because the coronavirus is rampant in Washington. Walking the halls of the snowbound US Capitol on Thursday afternoon, a year to the hour since it was breached by a fascist impulse, it was hard to imagine the mob running riot – pummeling police, flaunting the Confederate flag and abusing a Black officer with the N-word. But so did many other nations before America.
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