[WHAT CAN WE LEARN FROM SOLOMON PEÑA?]

Solomon Peña’s story is instructive.

He’s the gent who idolizes Donald Trump, maintains similar illusions of election theft, and therefore shot up Albuquerque politicians’ homes. (No one was injured, though shots through a legislator’s daughter’s bedroom caused small fragments of the ceiling to fall on her.)

Peña’s “rigged election” claims are even sillier than Trump’s. In a largely Democratic district, Peña challenged a popular incumbent state representative.  (A judge’s ruling let Peña run despite having served seven years in prison for felonies. I doubt the publicity enhanced his stature as candidate.) Peña lost, 5,600-2,000. Amassed 26% of the vote. To create a story that would make a Republican felon competitive in such a race is beyond my imagination. His opponent needed no fraud.

A “passionate Trump supporter” who reportedly called himself “the MAGA King,” Peña illustrates the absurdity of Trump’s “stolen election” campaign.

Peña is also a poster child for Republicans’ apparent openness to political violence. It’s not just the Capitol invasion. It’s a national pattern, although the state Republican Party says Peña, if convicted, should be punished appropriately.

Ironically, U.S. Rep. Paul Gosar just regained committee assignments he’d lost for producing violent cartoon videos depicting him killing Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and attacking President Biden. Apparently Republicans find that acceptable.

Violence is facilitated by dehumanization of potential victims. That’s what certain Republican rhetoric does, including the state party’s many mailers accusing Democratic candidates of being chummy with child molesters. After a demented Republican broke in and hit U.S. House Speaker Pelosi’s 82-year-old husband with a hammer, prominent Republicans spread a false story that the “attacker” was actually a homosexual lover. Meanwhile George Santos proves that fellow Republicans will help you get elected even if they know your resume is a complete shuck.

That these folks lie is no huge surprise. Most politicians do. (As do most of us!) That they sometimes believe particularly absurd lies, and act violently based on those, is concerning. I wonder what Republicans and other conservatives think of all this, and how they plan to continue advocating their beliefs without supporting baboons as candidates. (Apologies to any actual baboons.)

. What’s less obvious is what Peña’s mad misconduct has to say about you, and me. We may not share his love of Mr. Trump, but we are fellow human beings.

Is it far-fetched to see shades of Peña in all the little ways we all misapprehend inconvenient aspects of reality and respond by lashing out, albeit nonviolently? Too often, the human reaction to anything uncomfortable (or ego-crushing) is: life didn’t go as we wished, so we’re victims, treated unfairly. Let’s spread lies about her, or sabotage his lab data.

Sorry if I sound preachy, but life is too short to waste it living in a sour mood or hating others. Things happen, sometimes terrible things; but sometimes we victimize ourselves. Some folks would start the day complaining even in a wonderful house overlooking beautiful mountains with a lover, while some wake up smiling and would greet even their prison guards with a cheerful joke.

That doesn’t excuse Mr. Peña or erase what his conduct says about Mr. Trump. Society should probably jail both.

Still, with my advancing age, it feels too easy to stop at judging others, and more helpful, given our common humanity, to contemplate what others’ stories tell me about my own failings.

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[The above column appeared Sunday, 22 January 2023, in the Las Cruces Sun-News, as well as on the newspaper's website and KRWG's website. A related radio commentary will air during the week on KRWG (90.7 FM) and on KTAL (101.5 FM / http://www.lccommunityradio.org/) and be available on both stations’ websites.]

[This column will seem odd to many readers: most will feel sufficiently different from Mr. Peña and Mr. Trump, and sufficiently comfortable that their perceptions are at least in the same Zip Code as reality, that they’ll agree Peña was a madman influenced by evil Republicans, but see the last paragraphs of the column as reaching; others may reject the whole suggestion that Trump is a dangerous con man and that Trump’s big fan, Peña, say anything about Trump, or that the Republican mailers mentioned were at all racist or beyond normal political jousting. To the former, I’d say, “So I’m flaky. Take it for what it’s worth.” To the latter, I’d suggest reading more fact-based material – or examining your own perceptions of what you’re reading.

But, yeah, there may be an implicit contradiction: watch out for rightwing political violence, and our embittered political dialogue; but also see Peña as sufficently like us that his conduct might teach us something. I don’t see it that way.]

[Political violence obviously endangers communities and usually proves counterproductive, too. I suspect I might assassinate Vladimir Putin if the opportunity arose. Otherwise, my moment of belief in political violence came in 1968, late at night in New York, listening to live radio reports from Chicago of the police riot that harmed protesters outside the Democratic Convention. To me, at that hour, the violence sounded so crazy, yet so typical of a nation that killed Vietnamese (and young U.S. soldiers) in a senseless war, while generally keeping Blacks to an inferior positions, that I said to Danny and Alice, “The only thing left to do is start assassinating U.S. political figures. Just each shoot as many as we can before they capture us.” I felt that . . . at the end of my rope. By morning, I felt no such impulse, though I still loathed much that our government was doing.]

[Comments on the newspaper’s website (a) advised me to correct my reference to the Democrat to whom Peña lost (Thank you!, which I’ve done here, and advised me that Pelosi’s attacker was arguably not a Republican. The latter may well be true, and I’ll readily say that, as with others on both parties, the attacker’s strongest motives likely were personal and pathological; but his blog posts were full of pro-Trump, proKanye West, anti-immigrant, anti-Semite, and other unfortunate material; and, oddly, a deeper examination of his case illustrates my point particularly vividly!

Pelosi was a highly effective speaker and party leader, for an unusually long time, and not particularly to the far left in the Democratic spectrum. National Republicans decided to (a) vilify her, as they’d done with Hillary Clinton, and (b) make her the face of the Democratic Party, particularly in more conservative or moderate regions. They had quite a campaign to make her demon-like in voters’ minds. Then the January 6^th mob sought to to her physical harm. (She’d particularly earned Trump’s ire, as a woman who stood up to him.) Then a demented fellow generally in sympathy with there madness made this lunatic attack on Paul Pelosi. The argument that he was not a pure Republican (he also reportedly liked Tulsi Gabbard and, at some earlier point in his life, Fidel Castro) is a pimple on the ass of this story. Political violence is dangerous; encouraging it, even through cartoons of congressmen committing it, or through racist mailers, is also somewhat dangerous, because some follower, or some stray lunatic, may listen more seriously to your words than is healthy.)]