At a particularly fraught transgressive moment in Shakespeare’s Richard III, a minor character muses, “Here’s a good world the while! Who is so gross / That cannot see this palpable device? / Yet who’s so bold but says he sees it not?”
Not three weeks had passed since an armed mob of insurrectionists was summoned, whipped into a frenzy, then sent by Donald J. Trump up Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol. Yet in that short span 45 Republican senators have now decided “nothing to see here, move along.” They mean to let treason off (yet again) without consequence. Are they, unlike Mitt Romney, that afraid, that devoid of integrity?
What would it take for them to hold the ex-president accountable? Running for their lives wasn’t enough. If one of the five dead on Jan. 6 had been a member of Congress, would that make a difference? Would it depend on whether it was a Democrat or a Republican? Had it been House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, would they just smile a little smile hidden by a hand feigning shock? If the mob had hanged Mike Pence in accord with their chant, would that be enough?
Shakespeare also wrote, “Cowards die many times before their deaths,” but more pertinent here are the succeeding lines from Richard III: “Bad is the world, and all will come to naught / When such ill-dealing must be seen in thought.” Meaning, if you don’t speak out, nothing lies ahead for us but Mitch McConnell’s “death spiral.”
Michele Margetts, Salt Lake City