Three years after its Congressionally-mandated installation date, the Capitol plaque honoring the police who honorably bore the brunt of the January 6 mob invasion, that plaque went up.
It happened at about 5 a.m. on a Sunday morning, with no one present but the night-shift workers installing it. In the dead of night. No announcement. No press. No dedication.
That secrecy speaks eloquently.
The plaque alone will not tell later generations how strange it feels to live now.
As an exercise, think of someone dead who once nurtured or educated you. Parent, grandparent, teacher, preferably gone before 2016.
Imagine relating that a mob illegally invaded the Capitol, threatened to hang the vice-president, sent Congress scurrying to safety, injured police officers, and damaged offices, and that a sitting president had urged them on, some of his minions having conspired with invaders, and that he watched quietly on TV, resisting pleas from advisors, cabinet-members, and family that he try to stop the violence. He just kept watching. Gratified by their passion for his re-election, which the national majority had just rejected. Perhaps ignorant enough to hope that they might intimidate Congress from formally approving the vote count, avoiding the consequences of defeat?
How else could he watch silently events that would have shocked any of his predecessors, even Richard Nixon? It wasn’t a football game. He wasn’t dozing. He was watching intently. Not thinking that he had to do his laundry. Not appalled, not troubled.
How does the person you are telling react? (Of course, telling some folks from my childhood that the U.S. ever would elect as President a Black man with a funny name would have landed you in the booby hatch.)
I will imagine telling my maternal Grandfather. (My paternal grandfather, a Jew and a teacher, whose parents had escaped pogroms, might have had a touch less trouble imagining such a thing, “but not in America!”)
Grandfather was a Republican who drove a Cadillac. He owned many of Fort Fairfield’s businesses, and much of the surrounding farmland in northern Aroostook County, Maine. In the old photo beside me, he and Grandmother are short and quite thick. He proudly holds up a fish, probably salmon, that stretches from above his waist to the ground. Even fishing, he is wearing the pants and vest of a three-piece suit. His other passions were bridge and golf.
When I visited that town in 1967, for the funeral of his son, formerly Majority Leader of the Maine State Senate, I was a bearded 21-year-old and early war resistor. I looked so sinister to those God-fearing citizens that when I walked through town and stopped at shops, they eyed me suspiciously until they recognized the dog I was walking with, and realized whom I must be visiting. When my mother and I visited an old family friend of Grandpa’s generation, she embraced my mother, wailing about how sad Perrin’s death was, then glanced at me and burst into hysterical laughter.
I imagine telling him that a sitting president behaved so. I have not yet dared to suggest that four years later we might elect such a person a second time. I imagine him saying, “Don’t talk such foolishness,” or “That’s a lot of bunk.”
He died when I was eight. If I’d said any such thing would happen, he’d likely have spanked me.
We need no kings, mad or not, George or Donald.
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[The above column appeared Sunday, 15 March 2026, in the Las Cruces Sun-News and on the newspaper's website and on KRWG’s website (under Local Viewpoints). A shortened and sharpened radio commentary version of this Sunday column will air during the week on KRWG (90.1 FM) and on KTAL-LP (101.5 FM / http://www.lccommunityradio.org/). ]
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