Rememberers only
This weekend, Brits of all ages will light bonfires, eat sausages and sweets, and have tonnes o' fun burning effigies of this guy.
Or rather, this Guy. He's Guy Fawkes, and he's a coup plotter.
In the fall of 1605, a group of Catholic anti-monarchists in England hatched a plan to kill the Protestant King James. Thirteen conspirators plotted to murder the king, and most of Parliament with him. Incidentally, that's a considerably narrower conspiracy than the one Donald Trump is accused of leading in Georgia.
The conspiracy's aims were religious, but also procedural. King James had a plan to unite England, Scotland, and Wales into a kind of united kingdom, to be named later. November 5 was the day legislators were to meet to receive documents and certify the decision. Sound familiar?
But Mr. Fawkes was apprehended in the Parliament basement toying with about three dozen barrels of gunpowder and some fuses intended to stop the certification—but also to blow everyone up.
"This was an autonomous plot to create a coup," my friend Ed Luce, the very British and very entertaining U.S. columnist for the Financial Times told me.
Alas, England in 1605 had no RICO statute for conspirators, nor much of a desire to give them fair trials. The plotters wound up with their heads on pikes.
Every November 5 for a few hundred years afterward, Guy Fawkes Day was a truly scary affair "especially if you were Catholic," Luce says. Protestants would commemorate the holiday by insulting Fawkes for treason, but also by harassing Catholics.
These days, Guy Fawkes Day is a fun and family-oriented way to cozy up to a fire, or blow off steam. Sometimes the effigies deemed fit for burning are other, substitute hated figures.
"The last couple years it's been Boris Johnson in more than one location," Luce says.
But much more than the fun and games (and sausages), what got me thinking about Guy Fawkes is the national act of remembering events that shouldn't be forgotten. It dawned on me that America needs to begin the work of ingraining Jan. 6 in the national memory.
Mike Johnson became Speaker of the House in such a hurry that no one had time to remember how hard he'd strived in support of Trump's attempted coup. He'd worked on legislation, on legal efforts, and on propaganda, all to try to overturn a democratic election.
When a reporter tried to remind Johnson of some of these facts, Johnson's friends told her to shut up. There would be no remembering on MAGA's big day.
Meanwhile, the recasting of Jan. 6 as a tourist visit of peaceful, persecuted patriots, or a day of violence caused by the deep state, is one of Trump's central authoritarian projects.
For now, the prosecutions and sentencings of insurrectionists are still happening. The conspiracy trials at the top of the plot are still in discovery. You'd have to be a programming director at Fox News to forget.
Yet Kevin McCarthy, recently deposed, premised his speakership on the extremely active forgetting he did after condemning Trump for sending the mob to the Hill. More than half of Republicans believe Trump had nothing to do with trying to overturn the election, a dangerously toxic mix of forgetting and delusion.
And what about a generation from now?
In the UK, commemorating Guy Fawkes' treachery "was a political act, a renewal annually of a reminder of the threat of absolutism," says Luce. "It took a long time to get it onto the statute books."
Ed Luce and I agree that Insurrection Day—say, on the first Monday after Jan. 6?—would only be celebrated by about half the country and instantly derided by the other half. That's all the more reason to do it.
"Bonfire Night wasn't a unanimous event by any means. But it was an event that won. It wasn't uncontroversial when it won. There are many events we've never heard of that have been tried and didn't take hold. The fact that we were talking about this 420 years later shows that it symbolizes something that succeeded."
July 4 has always been observed in America, but it didn't take on its current, flag-proud form largely until after the Civil War, when half the country had real reason to celebrate union over tyranny and the other half didn't. Stars, stripes, fireworks, and union won out.
"Political events are no different to family secrets. You cannot sweep things under the carpet and assume they'll go away. That doesn't work. It comes back," Luce warns.
So how could America celebrate? I was squeamish about ritually burning Donald Trump in effigy. Resisting publicly fantasizing about harming presidents is a worthwhile norm. Maybe Jacob Chansley, the convicted dingus "Shaman" of Jan. 6 would be a good stand-in. Kids could throw miniature fire extinguishers at his likeness to commemorate MAGA rioters.
Ed Luce was more, well, British about the whole thing, and insisted that derision—and the symbolism of the insurrection—belongs only with one man.
"It has to be fun for all the family for this festival to take root. It has to be something the kids want to go and do. Charging at effigies with sharpened flag poles, that strikes me as something I would have wanted to do as a six-year-old boy."
Get creative, America. Enjoy the traditional extra-well-done steak smothered in ketchup, but save the last bite and fling it at the wall! Play "Beast," in which you pretend to lunge for the throat of the "disloyal" person in front of you. Encourage children to dress up as witches and hunt for eggs, all bright orange.
Just don't ever, ever let anyone convince you to forget.
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