Friday
When Donald Trump contended that his response to Hurricane Maria was a success, ignoring the 3000 people who died, I compared the coverup to the banana massacre coverup described in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude–which incidentally was based on an actual cover-up . Now that the current GOP, taking its cues from its dear leader, is striving to do the same with the January 6 insurrection, I return to Garcia Marquez’s masterpiece.
In the novel, the government massacres striking workers at an American-run banana plantation and then claims that no one died. Trump started the ball rolling on the GOP’s own erasure attempts when he contended that the insurrection had posed “zero threat”:
“Right from the start, it was zero threat,” he said. “Look, they went in — they shouldn’t have done it — some of them went in, and they’re hugging and kissing the police and the guards, you know? They had great relationships. A lot of the people were waved in, and then they walked in, and they walked out.”
Sen. Ron Johnson, the ranking Republican on the Senate Homeland Security Committee, has also downplayed the insurrection, saying,
I knew those are people that love this country, that truly respect law enforcement, would never do anything to break the law, so I wasn’t concerned,
Had the protesters been Black, he added, that would have been a different matter.
Most recently we have Republican Congressman Clyde saying,
Watching the TV footage of those who entered the Capitol and walked through Statuary Hall showed people in an orderly fashion staying between the stanchions and ropes, taking videos, pictures. You know, if you didn’t know the TV footage was a video from January the 6th, you would actually think it was a normal tourist visit.”
Meanwhile, House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy refuses to meet with DC Metopolitan police officer Michael Fanone, who had a heart attack and concussion during the attack and who wants the GOP to stop averting its eyes. Rep. Liz Cheney, the third ranking Republican in the house, has just been ousted from her leadership position in the party for having the same wish. To draw a parallel from the novel, Fanone and Cheney resemble Jose Arcadio Secondo, the one survivor of the massacre who, upon returning to the village, discovers that the massacre has vanished into thin air:
The official version, repeated a thousand times and mangled out all over the country by every means of communication the government found at hand, was finally accepted: there were no dead, the satisfied workers had gone back to their families, and the banana company was suspending all activity until the rains stopped. Martial law continued with an eye to the necessity of taking emergency measures for the public disaster of the endless downpour, but the troops were confined to quarters. During the day the soldiers walked through the torrents in the streets with their pant legs rolled up, playing with boats with the children. At night, after taps, they knocked doors down with their rifle butts, hauled suspects out of their beds, and took them off on trips from which there was no return. The search for and extermination of the hoodlums, murders, arsonists, and rebels of Decree No 4 was still going on, but the military denied it even to the relatives of the victims who crowded the commandants’ offices in search of news. “You must have been dreaming,” the officers insisted. Nothing has happened in Macondo, nothing has ever happened, and nothing ever will happen. This is a happy town.” In that way they were finally able to wipe out the union leaders.
The erasure is so complete that, when the military find their way to Jose Arcadio’s house, in magical realist style they literally cannot see him, even though he is sitting there before them. He, meanwhile, becomes a hermit, obsessed with proving that the massacre actually took place.
I wonder if the same thing will happen to Liz Cheney. Will her Republican colleagues render her essentially invisible, ignoring her as she walks through the halls of Congress. If any of them has any sense of shame—a big if, I know—she will function as a painful reminder. I also wonder if she will suffer Jose Arcadio’s fate, dreaming of a return to sanity that never comes. In the novel, years later Jose Arcadio’s brother stumbles upon him still doing research after everyone has forgotten about him:
Jose Arcadio Segundo, devoured by baldness, indifferent to the air that had been sharpened by the nauseating vapors, was still reading and rereading the unintelligible parchments. He was illuminated by a seraphic glow. He scarcely raised his eyes when he heard the door open…
“There were more than three thousand of them,” was all that Jose Arcadio Segundo said. “I’m sure now that they were everybody who had been at the station.”
Of course, downplaying or denying the insurrection is part and parcel of an even bigger lie, that the election was stolen. Publicly, Republican leaders Kevin McCarthy and Mitch McConnell put on a reasonable face, contending that of course Joe Biden won the election and why would people ever think Republicans thought differently. At such moments, they are the soldiers rolling up their pants legs and playing with children in the rain.
At night, however, they push voter suppression measures, fire responsible election officials, claim non-existent voter fraud, and do all they can to rig the game. The January 6 insurrection may have just been a dress rehearsal for the 2022 and 2024 elections.
Does truth stand a chance in all of this? Garcia Marquez is not optimistic.