On cable news they called Thursday night's first hearing of the House Jan. 6 committee "somber," and "powerful." I listened instead of watched, driving through the darkening early summer evening on the first day of a cross-country drive with my 13-year-old. An elegant old road, Route 20 across upstate New York. Farms and fields and haunted Victorians, broken silos and dead motels, their doors banged open amidst a pale tide of Queen Anne's lace and purple lupine and the ghost yellow false bloom of wild parsnip, which stings before it burns. So maybe it was the fact that via satellite radio I could hear but not see the presentation, or maybe it was the setting, but to my ear the tone of the first hearing was elegiac. A lament, an expression of longing, a wish that it had been and will be otherwise, threaded with the knowledge that it likely will not. There's little chance the hearings will result in even some small justice, much less bind the nation back into the functioning democracy that in truth it never has quite been.
"An audience of one," said CNN's Anderson Cooper, an echo of the phrase applied so often to the former president that New York Times critic James Poniewozik titled his book on the 45th president "Audience of One: Donald Trump, Television, and the Fracturing of America." But according to Cooper the "one" on Thursday was Merrick Garland. Who, it was reported, would watch "as much as he was able." Perhaps he had another obligation. Or maybe he just wanted to catch up on "Stranger Things."
