Tag: January 6th

Daniel Vollaro: “Robin Hood, Where Are You?”

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Robin Hood, Where Are You? 

A personal essay 

By Daniel Vollaro

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     On the first anniversary of the January 6 insurrection, Robin Hood appeared to me as if in a dream. There was no obvious reason I should have been thinking of him, no banners in his name from that awful day in 2021; no t-shirts proclaiming that “Robin Hood was Right,” or wrong; no clever Robin Hood memes, pro or anti insurrection. Nevertheless, he was suddenly there, as present in my imagination as he had been when I was a child. I had not seen him in a very long time.  

     I immediately understood why he had come. In my desire to escape from the one-year-anniversary news stories and think pieces and retrospectives, all forcing me to relive that terrible day, I had inadvertently summoned a being who is the antithesis of the MAGA-QAnon-Oath Keeper swamp that oozed into the Capitol Complex that day. That mob was the walking embodiment of cowardice and dishonorable conduct, from its leader promising ”I’ll be there with you” and then promptly retreating to the White House to the chorus of participants who now want to faux apologize or plead ignorance or blame others for deceiving them or deny that they were even there. Robin Hood, on the other hand, is a paragon of courage and chivalry, a righter of wrongs and solver of problems who always looks out for his fellow yeomen. An outlaw, yes, but an honorable one. Robin takes credit for his law breaking and looks his friends and enemies in the eye. Liars are especially likely to feel his wrath. 

     Robin would have been mystified by the insurrectionists. There was no one to champion or rescue and nothing of value to steal. No archery contest to win or good sport to be had. You tased a police officer in the neck, he would ask? What did he do to you?  You broke into the Capitol building to hunt down and possibly kill an elderly woman named Nancy Pelosi? Where is your chivalry? You rifled through some papers and took a shit in someone’s office. What does that accomplish? You built a gallows to hang a man because he refuses to say what you want him to say about an election? Really? Robin would not be opposed in principle to the idea of mischief or property destruction or even a little violence, but he would wonder, who actually benefits from this? What is the point? What injustice was crying out to be righted on that day? Was it really nothing more than the fact that one of the most pampered, silver spoon-fed men in America was thwarted from realizing his political ambitions?  

*** Continue reading “Daniel Vollaro: “Robin Hood, Where Are You?”” →

Daniel Vollaro: “Riot of the Fiftysomethings”

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Riot of the Fiftysomethings

By Daniel Vollaro

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When I watched the news footage of the Capitol insurrection in January, my first thought was “there are a lot of people around my age out there.”

I am 56 years old, born two weeks before the Baby Boom officially ended and Gen X began, right on the cusp of a new generation but unable to claim membership in either. Maybe because of this generational liminality, I could not help noticing that many of the insurrectionists who broke into the U.S. Capitol, stole stuff, took selfies, chased down and beat cops, built a noose outside, and trashed the place were white men “of a certain age,” in their late forties, fifties, and early sixties. Someday, researchers will pin down the demographics of that riotous mob, but for now, I will trust my powers of observation when I say that it was not a young crowd.

What were they doing out there, so many lost souls from my age cohort?

Full disclosure: I have never identified with Trumpism—not even a little, not even in jest. He sounded like a fascist when he descended those escalator steps in 2015 and he went out like a fascist five years later by summoning his brownshirts to sack the U.S. Capitol. I have always believed he was a con man and a person of low character, and I have never understood his appeal—the meanness, the trolling, the compulsive lying. I want to believe that my opinion of the man is shared by others who possess a rational perspective on the world, yet I have watched smart, well-educated people around my age tumble down the MAGA, QAnon, and “Plandemic” rabbit holes, descending into unfathomable depths of irrationality.

Like so many other Americans, I wonder how the insurrection could have happened. Some of the causes are obvious. The insurrectionists had been lied to and manipulated by powerful people in government, including President Trump. And there were the militias and hate groups and keyboard warriors who whipped up the crowd, in some cases organizing small groups to break into the building itself. Racism was another ingredient in the toxic mixture that day. Some white people, when the chips are down, fall backwards into believing that being white is a zero sum game, with winners and losers. Trump is a master manipulator of their sense of racial grievance.

But there is more to it. The anger, frustration, and alienation evidenced in that crowd is shared by many late middle-aged Americans who would never have gone near that demonstration. Despite the MAGA hats and the politically charged context, the Capitol riot felt to me more like the symptom of a spiritual crisis than a political one. And if a “spiritual” crisis sounds too fuzzy and granola for you, think of it instead as a crisis of meaning. A crisis of meaning revolves around existential questions: Where do I fit into this world order? Economy? Society? Culture? What is my life worth? My children’s lives? Like I said, I despise Trump and Trumpism, but I feel like I have lived inside of that kind of spiritual crisis for most of my life. Continue reading “Daniel Vollaro: “Riot of the Fiftysomethings”” →

David J. Frost: “The Dangers of Credulity”

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THE DANGERS OF CREDULITY

By David J. Frost

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On January 6th, we witnessed the extraordinary danger credulity poses to democracy. One wonders whether or not we possess the critical thinking skills required by our era.

I propose a test. Let’s see if our critical thinking skills are up to the challenge of interrogating the Golden Rule. Wait, you say, what? What could possibly be wrong with the Golden Rule? What critical thinking could we need to do there?

Because many people do bad things for reasons they falsely believed were good, the application of critical thinking is vital not just for ideas that strike us as bad. It is just as necessary for ideas that prima facie strike us as good. The same line of logical reasoning that shows under what circumstances critical thinking is required applies equally to ostensibly bad ideas as well as ostensibly good ideas.

After all, are the propositions we were taught moral because we were taught them or were we taught them because they’re moral? For my money, it has got to be the latter. When a Greek citizen of ancient Athens named Euthyphro defined “piety” under Socrates’ persistent questioning as “Piety is what the gods love,” Socrates applied the line of reasoning I’m talking about, which has come down to us as “the Euthyphro dilemma.” Socrates replied that even on the assumption that the gods love pious actions, an as-yet-unanswered question remains: Are the pious actions pious because the gods love them or do the gods love them because they are pious? If something is moral just because God says so, then murder could have been moral if God had chosen to sprinkle it with piety dust. We must resist that way of thinking, which goes under the label “Voluntarism” for the role of will in determining what is good. Rationalism, on the other hand, says that any true and good moral proposition in the Bible—for instance—is in the Bible because it’s true and good, not the other way around; it’s not true and good merely because it’s in the Bible.

But, then, what makes something good? At least Voluntarism tells us that bit clearly; what makes it good is God’s say-so. When we deny Voluntarism, we assert that whatever the standard of truth and goodness turns out to be, it will be independent of the Bible, tradition, and of authority in general.

If the Bible said jump off a bridge, wouldn’t we pause and think on our own if jumping off the bridge was a good idea? And wouldn’t this thinking we do be best characterized as “non-Bible dependent thinking,” since the Bible just told us to jump off a bridge and we are now thinking about whether or not to do that? If we decided to not jump off the bridge—my recommendation, by the way—then we would necessarily have come to that choice by a decision-making process independent of the Bible itself. Continue reading “David J. Frost: “The Dangers of Credulity”” →