J. B. Thompson

“Ferrets,” I cried on the phone to Titmarsh.

“Don’t go there,” he replied.

But we must.

Ferrets to rabbits are like dachshunds to rats. Before enclosure of the common pastures in England in the 18th century and surely after, rabbits hunters used ferrets to chase my kind (the Authorial Rabbit) out of holes. Jills (female ferrets) were the most deadly serving the hunter. Hobs (the males) just liked to settle back and eat the rabbits.

Bloody in tooth and claw. In my burrow I harbour dark fears. The insurrectionist assault on the Capitol by bigots, storm troopers and nihilists, elected and unelected, brings to mind the worst atrocities of the human species.

Why? What has gone so terribly wrong in the USA? Why has its decline accelerated? It is not that evil has not existed there always: aboriginal genocide, slavery, bigotry, lynchings and the KKK, home-grown Nazis at Madison Square Gardens in 1939, grifters and swindlers, organized crime, police homicides, misogyny, punishment for sexual identity, for political identity. The children in cages in 2020 and 2021.

On Jan. 6, 2021, the horror film’s sewer lid opened completely and the monsters crawled out, rising up to kill and maim and destroy.

And as in Nazi Germany and Russia and China, Iran, North Korea, Cambodia, there is no dearth of intellectuals willing and able to support murder. Ever so eager to overturn democracy, they pretend they are victims, they with their Stanford, Yale and Harvard degrees, they attack the “elites” they are the twisted representatives of.

Timothy Snyder in the New York Times, as usual, provides excellent analysis and the historical long view of the intellectuals’ motives and machinations. The gamesters and the breakers.

It is no surprise too to find religious devils masterminding horror under the guise of a loving god. The Spanish Inquisition, Queen Mary and her 280 protestants burned at the stake, popes and cardinals and their eviscerations and poisons, the Crusades, the conquistadors and their murderous monkish minions, the mad monks in Myanmar, the televangelists in their mansions and private planes, extracting the last $10 from impoverished pensioners with a smile.

One of the most egregious insurrectionist ringleaders in the Senate this time around is motivated by a virulent anti-heretic form of Christian religion, as was the former Attorney General, both following a devil incarnate of a leader.

It should be noted not all religionists and not all Republicans are lost to the beast. Good for Arnold Schwarzenegger (son of a nazi, as he learned later in life), who has not been afraid to name the slouching creature. Good for Mitt Romney, good for many others, however late in the day.

Searching for how the American situation came to be, it is not so hard as a first step to figure out why leaders and aspiring leaders perform their devilish duty. We remember those academic studies a few decades back about psychopaths on the corporate and political career path. Greed and lust for power, home territory for that mental condition.

An excellent recent article by forensic psychiatrist Bandy X. Lee in Scientific American describes the mental state of leader and follower and advises on how the abuse can be undone.

Why do followers believe the lies so avidly, rush to murder? Why? Why the marching lemmings now? Why the rabid rabbits?

The AR humbly offers another thought.

Think sex.

“Don’t,” says Titmarsh.

The Authorial Rabbit quivers.

Romantic love has ever sung its poetry, whether human or other: birdies in the trees, the howler monkey, whose lustful roaring keeps a kind of peace in the tropical forest. Even the grunts and honks of the mild lepus in their dancing circles are not without their metre.

In oestrus, we rabbits and humans (read Nature working through us) project upon the love object our dream of the perfect partner. The projection breaks barriers, achieves togetherness, a degree of closeness we usually shun. For a little while, we long to be one with the love object forever.

Our projection can do no wrong — until it does. The projection, for its time, tidily erases all reasoning power from our intoxicated minds, before it inevitably fades into the light of common day — or mutates into other emotions: depression, fear, envy, hatred. Or at its best, into friendship, compassion.

Is it not a madness Nature practices upon us to continue our proliferation on a troubled planet?

Sex, as so described, is a generator of meaning, of narratives to motivate and inspire us. After childhood and the illusion of our god-like parents, romantic love is our most common engine for meaning.

The search for meaning is one clue to the American dilemma. America is a story, one of liberation from old stories, old love affairs, old political systems. The elements of this love projection are freedom, individual liberty, the journey from an old world to a new, from rags to riches.

But as in any love affair the projection can falter. Inherent in the freedom narrative is a fault line, which runs along the obsession with individualism, the narrative in every Western movie, in the NRA, in the celebration and abuse of freedom of speech and the media.

Ford Maddox Ford’s The Good Soldier is one example of the misplaced search for meaning, where romantic love steps in again and again to fill a vacuum of meaning in a grown man’s life. The eponymous, apparently upright representative of the British Empire abroad is shown to be a hollow man, a man without meaning as the myth of the British Empire crumbles. When womanly temptation and its romantic projection story comes along as substitute for meaning, the good soldier falls again and again, shaming his profession and his country, almost destroying his estate, his wife, his responsibilities. In the end, he is the suicide acknowledging unrepairable emptiness.

Nearly all literature is about the love stricken. It is a primer on the search for meaning in terms we regular rabbits can understand. The Illiad, its Helen. Dido and Aeneas. Romeo and Juliet. Dickens: the schoolmaster in Our Mutual Friend, whose duty to teach is overtaken by mad unrequited love. Great Expectations. David Copperfield. Anna Karenina. Marianne in Sense and Sensibility. Wuthering Heights.

Often literature tells us too of wicked deceivers ready to exploit our need for meaning, whether in the area of love or elsewhere. Proust, Balzac, Hardy — a long list. The Guardian offers more examples of the love variety.

In politics, love is activated most consciously by the most cruel. Autocratic leaders must be loved, not just respected. They create cults of romance. They are at once the lovers, the beloved and the wicked deceivers. Visit the Ilham Aliyev’s museum in Baku. Fainting women in Hitler’s path. Stalin’s. Mussolini’s. Mao’s. Examine the architecture and sculpture of imperial Rome. And how they punish love unrequited.

Love rushes in where fools fear to tread. Since WW II, meaning has drained from the USA’s narrative, as greed has replaced idealism. There is an infantile or teenage quality to the American character, its protracted innocence denying its and the world’s darkness. Its heroic service, as in WW II, can never be denied. Neither can its ignorance. Blindness to the cruelty and faulty logic often carried in its single-minded pursuit of individualism — as if every successful man (and woman) arises through his own strength only, not the contribution of family and community, his mother and father and extended family, the community’s health care, education, transportation, energy, water, building codes, environmental protection.

When individualism as a concept fails, as it has in the USA most recently, the infantile believer seeks the father figure to make it all right, turns again to the family he rejected, the prodigal son, but in a distorted form, Heaven help him/her if the father is his own abuser, the recently twice-impeached, aided by the cynical and the nihilist. Caligula elevated his horse to the Senate. The House and Senate today are stables for those in still too large a number.

The array of costumes at the Capitol tells their story. So many cartoonishly-attired hollow, infantile middle-aged men (and women) searching for identity, for meaning, in lives their country’s celebration of individualism to the extreme of greed has emptied out. One is a Confederate. Another is a Nazi. Another is a horned minotaur still in the maze. All searching for the scapegoat to blame, galvanized by a sociopath whose endgame is the same bunker and the same total destruction of 1945.

The esteemed James Fallows of The Atlantic lays out a clear plan for the way forward. This rabbit prays for that safe, sane way — he prays for the projection, as it fades, as it must from time to time, to settle into friendship and compassion.