For two whole days, the managers from the House of Representatives shaped in meticulous and unavoidable detail exactly how the former president is responsible for the violent and lawless mob’s insurrection as they stormed the Capitol building on January 6th.  Each speaker was responsible for another facet of this monumental assemblage of facts, video both seen and previously unseen, direct quotations from the former president.  What impressed me as much as the content was the utter seriousness with which these women and men were taking their assignment.  I was sure that not only they themselves had devoted countless hours to finding just the right balance between outrage and reasoned argument, but each of their staffs had been instructed to spare no detail that might bolster the general argument.  

Watching the faces especially of some Republican Senators who listened attentively, especially on the first day, I felt sure that many of them would have voted to convict had the vote been secret.  But it was not secret, so in the end only seven of those Senators stood on principle, followed their oath to obey our Constitution, and risked serious backlash from many in their own party.  News in the days following the vote to acquit tell us that is precisely what is happening to the honorable seven–they are being censured by state party officials and may be subjected to more tangible rebuffs or even threats in coming weeks and months.

The managers from the House used every minute allotted to them because they felt the gravity of what they were being asked to do for our country as it veers dangerously off course and away from even the vestiges of democratic principles and behaviors.  Then day three dawned and it was time for the former president’s defense attorneys to have equal time to present their case for acquitting their client who refused to appear and give direct testimony about his claimed innocence.  Imagine my surprise when, driving in my car to the grocery store mid-afternoon after the defense had begun at noon, I heard that it was over!  They had spoken for less than three hours.

As I tried to take in this surprising brevity, two names kept entering my mind–Elizabeth Bennet, a main character in Jane Austen’s novel Pride and Prejudice and Hannah Arendt, author of The Banality of Evil, her reflections on attending the trial of a former Nazi.  Anyone who has read Austen’s novel or seen a movie version of the story will remember that Mrs. Bennet could trivialize the most serious subject matter or moment in her own life or that of her daughters.  Her only goal is to marry them off suitably, so she brushes facts away as insignificant pests that slow her down in reaching her goal.  She also favored garden parties or strolls along the seashore to a serious conversation about the complexities of human existence.  As for Arendt, she is frightened and appalled by her realization that the Nazi on trial was not a looming monstrous figure but rather a simple man who thought he was just doing his job.  To have to admit that evil could be purveyed by so banal an actor forced her to understand how a group of people could come to idolize a figure as evil as Adolph Hitler.

By refusing to engage seriously in the second impeachment trial of our make-believe president, those lawyers insulted all of us who were stunned by what we saw unfolding before our eyes on January 6th.  They completely brushed off the whole affair, speaking just a little while before resuming their everyday lives.  Maybe they had a late afternoon golf match with fellow lawyers or a dinner date for which they needed to hurry home and change into something appropriate to the occasion.  What their so short argument before our Senators told me was they knew the outcome before they said a single word, so why “waste” words on so insignificant a case.  Not only did their shameful behavior let them thumb their respective legal noses over something many of us consider one of the most serious political subjects–whether to impeach an elected president of the country–but it also confirmed a boast that person made while campaigning for the presidency.  Yes, I refer to his saying “I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody without losing any voters”–a comment worthy of Elizabeth Bennet and surely one that would strike fear in the heart of Hannah Arendt.

Sherlock Holmes was fond of saying to Doctor Watson that someone had “vanished without a trace.”  This phrase came to me about a week ago as I was walking my usual early morning route in my neighborhood.  That route takes me to a Mall that extends for about five blocks and is where a yearly art fair usually installs white tents inside which artists set up and hawk their creative wares in August.  Of course that event was cancelled this year because of the pandemic.  Instead, in late spring, one morning I noted four or five tents set up and knew instantly that they belonged to homeless people.  Within days, our park board had installed a Portapotty so people had a place to eliminate.,  Within a week or so, those initial tents grew into more than twenty, spread all down the narrow grassy area across from the Mall proper.  My walk had always included going up one side road to the “U” at the top of the area and then down on the other side that ran alongside several old brick apartment buildings.  As the homeless encampment grew, I shortened my walk and took it on the grassy Mall area, though I never felt in any danger.  Usually I was there before any of the tent dwellers was awake; if someone was already out in front of their quarters, we spoke but did not have conversations.  

As the size of the settlement increased, I noted that many were not living in “tents,” but had thrown together several large plastic sheets, often full of rips and holes, secured loosely to stakes or poles.  Some of these structures sagged on a good day and, in early October when we had a very unexpected heavy wet snow event, collapsed into themselves from the sheer weight of wet stuff.  That morning and for several more until sun melted the snow and dried the plastic sheeting, I wondered how those inside were managing since I felt pretty sure nothing so thrown together could be water-proof. Since I walked past the encampment five mornings a week, I noted the changing nature of each “tent” and had a range of feelings.  The longer each person or couple stayed there, the more odds and ends began to be outside the pretend sleeping/living area.  One spot had set up a dead chrysanthemum clearly retrieved from someone’s alley where it had been taken because it was no longer “fit” to adorn a front porch or patio.  Several sites came to include grocery store push carts full of clothes or papers or more pieces of plastic, perhaps waiting to be used when other strips played out..  Initially I thought how “messy” the various sites were becoming, wondering why anyone would retrieve a dead flower and carry it blocks to be put outside the flimsiest of shelters.  That privileged reaction morphed into one perhaps closer to reality:  I began to feel that if I were homeless and forced to try and make shelter outside, then middle-class ideas of “neatness” couldn’t be applied. to me  To such a person, a faded yellow plant might raise their frayed spirits more than I could possibly comprehend. So I began to let go of my judgmental reactions and just be glad the person or people inside that particular flimsy place had found anything to give color or life to their tiny bit of grassland that is all my super wealthy neighbor could offer or allow them.

As fall extended itself, I began to wonder when the city would ask or force these homeless individuals–mostly black–to  “vacate the premises,” another often-used phrase when facing the realities of homelessness in this country.  At first, I noticed that the man who lived  at the end of the string of plastic houses was out one morning burning trash in front of his dwelling.  Next morning, he was gone, though lots of bits and pieces of his life accumulated over about three months were visible in the grass.  I wondered where he might have gone and hoped that perhaps some agency had found him better accommodations even as I suspected that were not the case.  In the course of the next week or so, about a third of those living between him and the original group of tents cleared out as well and I kept wondering where they might be on a given early morning as I walked by the mostly empty space where they’d made the best places to “live” as they could.  Then, after noting one morning that there were now only about seven or eight remaining tents, I came to the Mall, looked to my left to see how things were going, and found not a single sign that anyone had ever been there.   Not only were the actuall people gone but the park board had gotten trash trucks to scoop up every shard of their belonging.  Every large black or blue trash bin had been emptied, tidied on the outside, and replaced where it had “belonged” before the encampment happened.  Anyone who had not seen this make-shift community as I had done would have no idea it had ever existed.  To them, indeed, the women and men who had lived there had “vanished without a trace.”  But I had seen them, morning after morning, for about eight months.  They came to be part of my day in a strange and disconnected way.  And now, when I walk further up the green meridian and look at bare ground where they slept and ate and talked and maybe even made love or argued or hurt each other, questions linger:  Why didn’t I give them money or bring an old blanket as air got colder or leave food from the nearby grocery store where I shop often?  Why didn’t I ever say more than “Hello” or “Good morning” to someone just up from their hard “bed”?  And, most important of all, “Where are they now?”

Their “trace” is in my memory, nagging at me every time I walk past the Mall, haunting me until I find an action I can engage in that may help some other homeless person trying to make a life out of whatever fragments s/he can salvage from the largesse all around them.

Having just finished watching Season 4 of “The Crown,” I am once again struck by how powerful are the first few minutes of each episode.  Perhaps before the end of Season 1, I knew it was important for me to watch each time as the somber music began and golden, back-lighted shapes appeared slowly on my screen, gradually. forming first a cross and then a crown.  I even wrote a blog a couple of years ago, when “Victoria” also began to be shown in this country.  I felt the powerful difference between one series’ calling itself by the first name of the queen it wanted to portray while the other focused on the object with which the young Elizabeth was invested when she was told she would no longer be “Elizabeth Windsor” but rather “Regina.”

Lots has happened since that first season and my first blog.  We’ve seen people told they may not marry whom they love or pursue lives they are drawn to, that they must swallow or smother or outright deny and kill any thoughts or wishes that endanger that “crown” and the monarchy it represents.  I’ve watched Elizabeth enjoy her corgis and her horses even if she can’t play with or extend much love to her children.  Her sister Margaret has stumbled from alcohol to chain smoking to flamboyant and frequent sex even if she can’t be with the love of her life.  The young Diana has been caught in the headlights of royalty even as she becomes more and more isolated and dismissed.  And Charles has been driven into narrow lanes intended to end in marriage to some suitable young female instead of being allowed to make a serious proposal to the forbidden Camilla.

But not until I began seeing those first two minutes of shapes emerging onto my screen for these last ten episodes has their deep import become undeniable to me as someone fascinated by images and metaphors, verbal or visual.  So what have I seen this season?  Here is my clearest comprehension:

• As the music begins, golden tentacles at the far left of the screen grow, oozing out in beautiful\ albeit sinister fashion.  These initial reachings cause me unease.
• These on the left of the screen vanish as others emerge from the far right of the screen, a little thicker but still squirming like alluring fibers that take on greater force as they move into the empty space that will become inhabited by one of the actors. 
• As the music becomes a little more forceful, those tentacles become bars of gold that are brought into clashing contact, forming a collar that reminds me of similar iron ones fitted around the necks of enslaved Africans in the North American South where I grew up.  My initial unease is becoming something tighter, more constrictive and constricting.  I feel short of breath, like I want some people to get onto the screen and start talking, removing the images that pervade my consciousness.
• Solid gold bars become delicately carved squares that slowly become the vertical and horizontal arms of a giant cross,  I try to find this comforting, but the sounds and the force of the cross emerging from the backdrop of the screen offer dread more than comfort.  The “church” that houses this object holds out no forgiveness or protection or love.
• The cross metamorphoses slowly and amidst shrouded films that hide what is happening until we see, filtered through the haze, a golden metal circlet with a tiny Coptic cross at its top.  The CROWN has been born from the altered substance that began as the golden tentacles reaching ominously out toward whomever and whatever might enter or be attracted  into their aura.

It seems undeniable to me, looking back now upon the seasons preceding this one, that whomever designed these opening moments and wrote this opening music understood where this fictional story of Elizabeth’s long reign was headed.  S/he knew enough to enclose the action and actors inside the inescapable and gorgeous web or net or prison we have been asked to imagine.  I am so admiring of that person or those persons for providing me with this frame that keeps on making its way deeper into my consciousness, causing me to decide that the cost of being part of the British monarchy is high and harsh.  So I will continue, when watching the next season promised us late in 2021, NOT clicking on the little box at the bottom of my screen that says “Skip Opening,:”  That “opening:” is the gloss for how I am to enter what follows, no matter how oppressive it has become.