Yesterday I watched  the House of Representatives select committee investigation of the Insurrection of Jan. 6, 2001.  Four police officers who were on the front line in defense of the the Capitol and our Congress that day offered graphic testimony augmented by terrifying videos of the event.  Yet this assault on our country has been dismissed my many members of the Republican Party, one of them even arguing that the Democrats are exaggerating a simple group of tourists touring the White House on that day in early January. This hearing graphically portraye  the grave threat that our country faced on that day…and is still facing as the Trumpian voice on display that day is still being defended by many Republicans.

Yet, even with this display of the evidence, Trumpian diehards in Congress and in our nation are not and will not be moved by what they are witnessing  This brings to mind sermon fodder of my youth, “hearts seared with a hot iron” (2 Timothy) describing people whose hearts were refusing the wisdom and Grace of God.  Hearts that are “seared” with this hot iron are endungeoned by the preconceptions and biases they have gleaned from a life experience which they found very painful and terrifying. The infantile anguish that we all harbor will tyrannize people like that and not allow them to permit the “pauser reason” to intervene and restrain themselves from acting out, emotionally and behaviorally; they are then merely the “toy of some great pain.” (Auden) Then this morning I learned the the Senate Minority leader, Mitch McConnel and his lieutenant Keven McCarthy said they had not even watched the hearings.  And conservative media has dismissed the capital policemen as mere “crisis actors” and insisting still that the violence of that day was being exaggerated. Several months ago through my blogging life I discovered a young Pakistani woman, Hibah Shabkez, who graphically and poignantly captured this “searing” and the resulting obstinate defiance with a brilliant perspective on its origin:

When you touch the edge of something hot—a frying-pan, a clothes-iron—you gasp and flinch away, before the knowledge, before the shock and the hurt and the searing of flesh. Locked in the thumping of your heart then, there is the secret triumph of assault successfully withstood, the inexpressible comfort of knowing it could not and cannot hurt you because you did and can again make it stop. But the drenching heat of liquid cannot be flung off, only sponged and coaxed away from the skin. And so they say doodh ka jala, chhaachh bhi phook phook kar peeta hai. (Urdu translation, “Once bitten, twice shy.”) It doesn’t take all men, you see, it takes only one; and just so, it takes only one vile lie to break a language’s heart.

When first you write a lie, a real lie and not simply a truth incognito, whether it be falsehood or treacherous half-truth, language recoils from you in pain, vowing never to trust you with words again. But if you must go on writing lies, for money or grundy-respect, seize the language and let it feel the sting and the trickling fear of the skin parting company with the flesh, over and over and over again, as you hold it unscreaming under the current. You must let body and mind and heart and soul be quite maimed then, until there is no difference left for any of them between truth and lie, between the coldness of lassi (urdu–”buttermilk”) and the heat of milk-tides rising from the saucepan. Thereafter you may plunder with impunity all of language and force it to house your lies. And if you will never again find words to tell a truth in, it will not matter, for you will have no truths left to tell. (https://nightingaleandsparrow.com/scarzone/)