The Power of We: A January 6 Story

We the People, "We the Animals"

Photo by Sean Thoman on Unsplash

“WE WANTED MORE. We knocked the butt ends of our forks against the table, tapped our spoons against our empty bowls; we were hungry. We wanted more volume, more riots. We turned up the knob on the TV until our ears ached with the shouts of angry men. We wanted more music on the radio; we wanted beats; we wanted rock. We wanted muscles on our skinny arms. We had bird bones, hollow and light, and we wanted more density, more weight. We were six snatching hands, six stomping feet; we were brothers, boys, three little kings locked in a feud for more.”

So begins Justin Torres’ luminous debut novel We the Animals. The “we” here is three brothers, born to teenage parents, a white mother and a Puerto Rican father, Brooklynites who have since moved their struggle somewhere upstate. The book is written in short, visceral scene-chapters. As readers, we understand the youngest brother is narrating on behalf of all three. For him, having siblings is critical to his ability to exist in a world where Paps is volatile and Ma is vacant and bruised. No one outside these three brothers knows how things really are; no one but them will ever know what it was like to grow up in this family.

In the first person plural, there is always an us and a them. That is the point.

***

January 6, 2021

White House Ellipse

Speech by President Donald J. Trump

“It would be really great if we could be covered fairly by the media. The media is the biggest problem we have as far as I'm concerned, single biggest problem. The fake news and the Big tech. Big tech is now coming into their own. We beat them four years ago. We surprised them. We took them by surprise and this year they rigged an election.” 

***

Witness is embedded in the “we.” It can be, as the writer John Gardner declared, the “town” point of view. This is what we believe happened. This is our judgment of it. This is what we did about it. 

From A Rose for Emily, by William Faulkner:

“So the next day we all said, “She will kill herself”; and we said it would be the best thing. When she had first begun to be seen with Homer Barron, we had said, “She will marry him.” Then we said, “She will persuade him yet,” because Homer himself had remarked — he liked men, and it was known that he drank with the younger men in the Elks’ Club — that he was not a marrying man. Later we said, “Poor Emily” behind the jalousies as they passed on Sunday afternoon in the glittering buggy, Miss Emily with her head high and Homer Barron with his hat cocked and a cigar in his teeth, reins and whip in a yellow glove.”

But witness is biased to its beholder. Here, the town sits at the center of the story’s conflict. It is not objective; it has values and hands down moral verdicts. The town is envious of Miss Emily’s aristocratic roots and privileged upbringing. First they sneer at her sheltered life, then her perceived slumming with a northerner, then her out-of-touch advanced age. As a group they take collective pleasure in her downfall:

“When her father died, it got about that the house was all that was left to her; and in a way, people were glad. At last they could pity Miss Emily. Being left alone, and a pauper, she had become humanized. Now she too would know the old thrill and the old despair of a penny more or less.”

***

“All of us here today do not want to see our election victory stolen by emboldened radical-left Democrats, which is what they're doing. And stolen by the fake news media. That's what they've done and what they're doing. We will never give up, we will never concede.”

***

In Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Virgin Suicides, the narrators are a group of boys, now grown, telling us the story of their neighbors, the doomed Lisbon girls.

“We’ve tried to arrange the photographs chronologically, though the passage of so many years has made it difficult. A few are fuzzy but revealing nonetheless. Exhibit #1 shows the Lisbon house shortly before Cecilia’s suicide attempt… In the photograph Mary is caught in the act of blow-drying her hair. Her head appears to be on fire but that is only a trick of the light. It was June 13, eighty-three degrees out, under sunny skies.”

This “we” is investigatory, a team of sleuths trying to explain or reconcile unwelcome events. The past, whether truth or invention, has a powerful pull. And when there is a group with whom to fixate on the past, people happy to reminisce and rehash – well, we might live there our whole lives if we could.

***

“Our country has had enough. We will not take it anymore and that's what this is all about. And to use a favorite term that all of you people really came up with: We will stop the steal. Today I will lay out just some of the evidence proving that we won this election and we won it by a landslide.”

***

The writer Quan Barry describes the “we” narrators of her novel We Ride Upon Sticks – the members of a 1980s girls field hockey team – as a sisterhood with a group thought mentality, a hive mind.

A hive mind, according to the OED: A large number of people who share their knowledge or opinions with one another, regarded as producing either collective intelligence or uncritical conformity.

***

(Audience chants: "We love Trump.")

***

In fiction, the “we” often breaks. Ultimately characters are individuals; the plural cannot be sustained forever. The youngest brother in We the Animals – the one speaking on behalf of the other three – begins the final, heart-breaking chapter not in “we” but in “they,” as finally he is ready to describe the chasm that bursts open between him and his brothers. 

“They grew up wiry, long-torsoed, and lean. Their kneecaps, their muscles, bulged like knots on a rope… They hunched and they skulked. They jittered. They scratched… Later, one of them will smash his face into the locker-room mirror over a girl, another will slice up his arms. They’ll flunk. They’ll roll one car after another into a ditch. Later they’ll truck in all manner of pornography. Soon they’ll drop out.”

And then our narrator turns inward. “And me now. Look at me. See me there with them, in the snow – both inside and outside their understanding. See how I made them uneasy. They smelled my difference – my sharp, sad, pansy scent. They believed I would know a world larger than their own. They hated me for my good grades, for my white ways. All at once they were disgusted, and jealous, and deeply protective, and deeply proud.”

***

“Now, it is up to Congress to confront this egregious assault on our democracy. And after this, we're going to walk down, and I'll be there with you, we're going to walk down, we're going to walk down.”

***

Donald Barthleme, 1976, “Some of Us Had Been Threatening Our Friend Colby”:

“Some of us had been threatening our friend Colby for a long time, because of the way he had been behaving. And now he'd gone too far, so we decided to hang him. Colby argued that just because he had gone too far (he did not deny that he had gone too far) did not mean that he should be subjected to hanging. Going too far, he said, was something everybody did sometimes. We didn't pay much attention to this argument. We asked him what sort of music he would like played at the hanging.”

The “we” reaches for us. It’s inclusive. It draws us in.

Sometimes we are complicit.

***

“So we're going to, we're going to walk down Pennsylvania Avenue. I love Pennsylvania Avenue. And we're going to the Capitol, and we're going to try and give.”

***

At least 978 people have been charged with crimes stemming from the events of January 6, 2021. In a historical first, the U.S. House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack recommended the former president, as instigator-in-chief, be charged as well – with obstruction of an official proceeding of Congress, conspiracy to defraud the United States, making false statements, and aiding or inciting an insurrection. Whether he will or will not face charges is ostensibly up to the Department of Justice.

How we the people pass our own judgment is up to us.

***

“So let's walk down Pennsylvania Avenue.”

---

This week we asked Jana Ramsey, senior advisor in the State Department’s Office of Global Criminal Justice, what’s on her nightstand.

“Picking up a recent Booker-prize winning novel feels like cheating, but the judges may have gotten it right with The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida. The novel is narrated by the ghost of a war photographer in Sri Lanka trying to figure out how he died and ensure that his life's work--photos of atrocities by government and rebel groups--doesn't disappear before seven moons pass. As a war crimes expert, I have ruined enough dinner parties and casual conversations to know that stories about conflict-related violence aren't a draw for everyone. But while unflinching in laying out the horrors of the Sri Lankan conflict, Seven Moons is also funny, vibrant, and tender, and ultimately affirms the value and dignity of all human life.