The Mudsill, Vol. 1, No. 2
January 15, 2021
We are very proud to bring you this number of The Mudsill. Each contributor to this issue brings a different perspective to bear upon the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol and on the U.S. Congress in joint session assembled—an attack, an event, a national trauma we have not yet named. We have “Pearl Harbor,” “D-Day,” “9-11”—and this. Perhaps it will always be simply “January 6,” our dark epiphany.
In Craft, we bring you five different creative works:
We are pleased to publish two poems about the Capitol by Rebecca Raphael. The first poem, “Archives,” written by Raphael after a 2018 research trip to Washington, D.C., evokes earlier protests, earlier signs of coming trouble. “Jeremiah,” written in the aftermath of the assault on America’s “temple to democracy,” channels the spirit of the weeping prophet.
We have featured two stunning photographs taken at the Capitol on January 6 by freelance photojournalist Noelle Cook. Her photograph of a lone insurrectionist overshadowed by the adamant dignity of Ulysses S. Grant is the cover image for this number of The Mudsill.
We bring you a short story by award-winning writer Carol Edelstein, a founding member of Gallery of Readers in Northampton, Massachusetts. “It’s Our House” refracts the pain, the injury, the sorrow of January 6 onto a plane somewhere between hope and resignation.
In Comment, we offer you a short personal essay by a descendant of Holocaust survivors:
“While Yahrzeit Candles Were Burning,” by Katherine Sarah Massoth, calls us to consider what the sight of the violent attack on the Capitol means for the Jewish community in the United States, long a target of violent white nationalist hate groups.
In Context, we present a historical essay connecting the symbols of the Confederacy to a particular type of masculinity that Donald Trump supposedly represents:
“Aspirational Patriarchs and Their Discontents,” by historian and librarian Kirk Johnson, argues that the “model of manhood” bestowed upon Trump connects to antebellum Southern notions of the ideal representative of the planter class.
In order to keep the focus of this issue on the events of January 6, we are not running a Critique piece in this number.
Thank you for reading. Please share this issue with your friends. This is fine and important work, and it deserves a wide audience.
-L.D. Burnett
Poetry
Archives
The pigeons swirl
in early sunlight,
around the emerging signs.
¡No pasarán!
Circuit the grid,
from Archives
to Lafayette to Tidal Basin
to the Mall.
Thousands call
the better angels down.
Never again.
The shofar sounds.
Under the riven
afternoon sky,
the pigeons murmur
around and back
and around.
—Rebecca Raphael, 2018
Jeremiah in January
Calling
it a temple
doesn't make it last
any longer than
other stones
but expect
to pay for every
fissure
we tried to caulk
with lies.
Build
instead in acts
of justice
in good trouble
that atones.
—Rebecca Raphael, 2021
Rebecca Raphael is a religious studies professor, poet, and cat lady who lives in Austin, Texas. Her poetry has appeared in The Literati Quarterly, Red Savina Review, Stirring, The Lyric, and several volumes of the Di-verse-city (the Austin International Poetry Festival juried anthology). "A Riddle" won an Editor's Choice Award in the anthology A Larger Geometry: Poems for Peace (2018).
Photography
Noelle Cook is a freelance photojournalist who covers protests in the Washington, D.C. area.
Fiction
It’s Our House
by Carol Edelstein
She’s watching the news, because about all she can do right now is sit on a couch, but she can’t care what’s going on in the Capitol. She just broke her wrist. Fosdick is a heavy dog, never been well-behaved, he’d pulled abruptly on the leash in response to a whiff of squirrel and down she went. She had already not been doing well. She had already agreed to up her antidepressants. Had agreed to dump out the bottle of gin. She had not mentioned to the good doctor the existence—next to the bottle of gin—the bottle of vodka, but it wasn’t relevant; she’s never gone for vodka. She doesn’t even remember why that bottle of vodka got to be here. Could it be left over from Celeste? The bright, short, long-ago, vodka-soaked Celeste Era?
Thugs are storming the Senate chambers, and the pundits are taking turns making pronouncements, and the President-elect, lugubrious even at his best, is giving a decent speech, ornamented with hopeful sentences and ample space between words, but she really can’t care—she’s in a sling, eating a Lean Cuisine she’d prepared left-handed, removing the wrapping with her teeth. Shrimp Scampi. A mere 350 calories. So she might be able to have two. Hardship has always made her hungry. That hadn’t been true of Celeste—one of the many ways they differed. When trouble found Celeste, she lived on air and dropped pounds a day from her already thin frame. It’s possible that’s changed. Metabolisms change. And Celeste is now in Florida, taking care of her father. Last heard from a year ago via holiday card from before the pandemic, graced with flamingoes wearing Santa hats. Celeste had written, “The weather here is not nice. If you’ll take me back, I’ll be on the next flight North.” Really said that. After all that sturm und drang. It was water under the bridge. Water over the dam? Horses out of the barn? Switching horses in mid-stream? One of those. Ridiculous, and yet…
Her wrist is aching so bad it is kind of reverberating. She will need to go to a meeting if she takes a Percocet. But she is thinking she might take a Percocet. The ER people never ask you about your addiction history. You have to pretty much refuse, say you’re shut off from painkillers, period. But she didn’t have the energy. She’d taken a taxi home, and now her car was in the hospital lot.
They’re showing a woman on a stretcher. A woman had been shot in the neck. At least she hadn’t been shot in the neck. But if she’d been shot in the neck she’d be in a different life. She wouldn’t mind a different life. But with the same dog. Fosdick is so stupid. And she loves him so much. He can trip her up, he can have diarrhea all over the rug, he can chew up her power cord, he can have mange and have to wear that cone so he won’t lick the medicine off himself, he can run into the woods and stay hidden while she calls and calls and will have to be late for work, or would have been late back when she worked, back when there was a place to go to work outside of pajamas and piles of books and papers on every surface—she loves him that much. His fuckups just don’t hold a candle to the people fuckups she knows. Not that she lets many people past the first gate. She’d let Celeste. Which was poor judgment in every department. But now it’s tempting…to call her. To ask if the offer is still good. To say she could use a little help. For a little while. A place to be in exchange for some cooking and cleaning and help with getting her pants on. Her pants haven’t come off yet, but night is falling. Has fallen. Night has fallen.
Now they are repeating the videos of the mob seen from above, flag-wavers hollering, “It’s Our House!” Maybe it’s the Percocet, but she isn’t worried about the state of the country or even about her wrist. She’s thinking about Florida, and Celeste, and Celeste’s crazy coffee mug collection. Under no circumstance should she allow the coffee mugs back in. That would be giving the wrong message. One suitcase limit. She is drifting. Fosdick lolls on the sofa next to her, drooling. The pundit is saying this is unprecedented and unamerican. His eyes are blue. His tie is red. He’s saying something is a shame. That something is going to take a long time to heal.
Carol Edelstein is a founding member of Gallery of Readers (www.galleryofreaders.org) in Northampton, Massachusetts. Her newest book of poems is Past Repair, Simian Press, 2020.
While Yahrzeit Candles Were Burning
by Katherine Sarah Massoth
January 6 is my grandfather’s yahrzeit.
My grandfather came to the U.S. as a stateless refugee in 1951 with my grandmother. Before that, Nazis forced him and other men to report (and be humiliated) at Plateia Eleftheria in Thessaloniki before being marched to labor camps while his family waited at home, terrified. My grandfather and grandmother escaped while on the train to Auschwitz; the other family members on the train did not. When my grandparents hid in the woods and in Baron Hirsch, Nazis tortured my grandmother.
My grandparents finally were allowed to come to the U.S. as refugees. They hoped to create a life for their family that obscured the Nazi terror. However, their fear never ended and my family lives with the imprints of the inherited trauma of anti-Semitism to this day. Until the day she died, my grandmother had vivid nightmares of Nazis coming to find her and her family in the U.S. In addition to routine anti-Semitic microaggressions, anti-Semitism came for our family again on June 18, 1999 when overnight our synagogue in Sacramento was one of three firebombed in the city by white supremacists. My parents had to sit me down the next morning as I came home from a friend’s house and tell me what happened. Anti-Semitism was never a far-off specter. It was a lived experience.
The scenes from Wednesday brought up these imprints of inherited trauma for my family. On January 6, while yahrzeit candles were burning, my parents gathered their daughters on the phone and told them to plan for things to get worse and be ready to escape. During the Trump administration, this has been a constant conversation as my parents saw his actions. When we saw footage of children in cages and separated from their families, my family remembered their ancestors’ experiences as refugees in Thessaloniki. We continue to prepare for whatever comes next. This is not paranoia; this is the remnants of epigenetics. What we saw occurring in D.C. alerted our bodies to the horrors of our ancestors.
Wednesday night my family vacillated between discussing the historic and political nature of what occurred and discussing our fears about the anti-Semitic images we saw paraded on government property.
Believe Jewish people when we say anti-Semitism is alive and thriving from the highest levels of government to the common folk. Look out for veiled anti-Semitism around us and remember words, images, and actions matter. Believe Jewish people when we say we feel unsafe or unwelcome. When we feel that, we feel it in our bones.
Katherine Sarah Massoth is an assistant professor of history at the University of New Mexico. Her research focuses on the role of gender, race, and ethnic identity in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands.
Aspirational Patriarchs and Their Discontents
by Kirk Johnson
The Trump-led insurgency against the national Capitol on January 6, 2021—briefly putting at risk the entirety of Congress, the Vice President, and the Vice President-elect—was a wakeup call for many. Many Americans had accommodated themselves to Trumpism to some degree, or convinced themselves that there was more smoke than fire where his ugly rhetoric was concerned. Many others knew the man to be an authoritarian, but had hope that ultimately his movement would accept electoral defeat with more sound than fury. It is much more difficult to hold those positions now.
For many other Americans, the failed coup was a chilling confirmation of our worst fears—a reminder that, in the parable of the Little Boy Who Cried Wolf, the Wolf eventually does show up. Worst-case scenarios rarely play out, but ‘rarely’ is not ‘never.’
So even as we begin the work of restoring America’s imperfect democracy and bringing its internal enemies to justice, the task of trying to understand ‘how we got here’ continues. Systemic issues, the failure of our institutions, the indifference of our elites—we can look far and wide for explanations, but now that Trump supporters have made a habit of storming legislative buildings while brandishing weapons, perhaps they have waived the right to be treated as objects of curiosity rather than subjects of chaos. It may be time to take them at face value, and let them tell us what it is they want.
This is a daunting task, but if one pushes aside the incoherent tangle of grievances, conspiracies, and worse, then certain themes— ‘tells’, really—emerge. Not that they are always hard to find. One consistent theme which was impossible to miss on January 6, was the prevalence of Confederate flags in the crowd. This was nothing new, but images of one domestic terrorist carrying a full-sized CSA battle flag on a pole through the halls of the occupied capitol building were still jarring. What is even more unsettling, on reflection, is the realization that Trump supporters’ usage of Confederate flags is a feature, not a bug, of the MAGA movement.
Again—nothing new here, other than the stark reality that, when push comes to shove, these people know what they’re doing. But why? White racism is the obvious answer, and you wouldn’t be wrong to say so. But is that the story Trump supporters tell themselves? Are they fighting for white supremacy? “States’ Rights”? Are they merely drawing on American history for ready-made iconography of rebellion? Given how many of them deny that they are racist (however little credence one should give to such denials), how often they claim to speak in defense of the American Constitution and the man who is still, as of this writing, the sitting President, and that perhaps a majority of them do not have Confederate/Southern roots—why settle on that symbol of resistance? Why take on the baggage?
If this reads as if I’m searching for an excuse or justification for embracing the symbol of a reactionary herrenvolk slaveocracy, that is not my intent. I am arguing that while the MAGA cult is drenched in racism and misogyny, and has embraced violent rejection of electoral democracy and constitutional law as a way of holding power, their reasons for embracing an ersatz Confederacy-within-the-Republic are bound up in a bundle of attitudes and values which were, at one time, epitomized by the very people at the heart of the Confederate experiment—the slaveowners themselves. The Confederacy was about slavery, but not just in the abstract. The slave-owning white man epitomized a very particular notion of personal liberty that is at the heart of Trumpism.
The ‘tells’ for this aren’t always as obvious as armed white men forcing their way into the Capitol while unfurling the American swastika. But they are out there. One such tell came just under a week prior to the insurrection, in the aftermath of Trump’s then-latest assault on American democracy: the recording of his phone call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. The content of the call—during which Donald Trump by turns pleaded with, coerced, and even implicitly threatened an elected official in order to somehow overthrow the results of a fair and legal election—was shocking.
Well, shocking for most of us. For MAGA hardliners, however, the real issue wasn’t the abuse of power, nor the attempted undermining of the election. For many Trump supporters, the real issue was that Raffensperger had recorded the phone call without Trump’s knowledge; the contents of the call, once it was leaked to the Washington Post, were beside the point.
There were as many variations of this argument as there were disingenuous Trump supporters eager to change the subject, but one of the oddest was a tweet from former Republican congressional candidate, right-wing radio host, and professional provocateur Jesse Kelly. Kelly’s objection was that Raffensperger had violated the “man code” by revealing a private conversation. According to Kelly’s tweet, this was not a matter of partisan politics, but a simple matter of what a man should, or shouldn’t, do. Raffensperger had violated the “man code.”
Even if he was trolling, Kelly told a larger truth about the Trump movement. Kelly wasn’t ignoring the distinction between Trump, the President, and Trump, the man. He was arguing that such a distinction should not exist.
Scholars, journalists, pundits, and others continue to grapple with the ways in which racism and misogyny overlap and intertwine in American white supremacy, just as they try to understand the role of neo-Confederate ideology in 21stcentury American life. Kelly likely didn’t mean to crack the code, but by implying that a true “man” cannot be bound by the strictures and obligations of the very position which gives him power and authority, Kelly invites us to look for that model of manhood. Where did he find it?
He found it in the archetypal figure of the American slaveowner. No American masculine type epitomized the capacity for holding and exercising sovereign authority and extra-judicial power more than the slaveowner. American slavery has many children and its legacy is woven throughout the national fabric. A certain patriarchal, ‘independent’, type of manhood can be traced back to the idealized image of the successful planter—the “Master” in every sense of the word. This concept of masculine authority was ideally characterized by a sense of social autonomy coupled with a defensive independence, along with a very particular kind of zero-sum ‘liberty’ that presumes to wield power and authority over others in a way we might normally associate with the regulatory powers of the state.
During the nineteenth century, the rise of a market economy and the emergence of industrial capitalism was slowly reshaping the relationship between individuals, families, and the larger national economy. The traditional household had been an economic unit of production as well as a residence, and in the preindustrial economy, the household was, in its internal affairs, something of a semi-autonomous entity within the polity. The husband and father—the “head of the household”—spoke for the entire household, and as long as he performed his social duties outside of the household was, theoretically, left to tend ‘his’ own affairs.
That way of life was changing for many Americans—middle class men began working for salaries outside the home, while their “households” were ideally being transformed into feminized domestic spaces. Working-class white men found themselves losing autonomy as they increasingly began working for wages outside the home. Economic necessity often dictated that the working-class home continued to be a place of work, but the autonomy that had been associated with the old artisan system was gone.
But while American slavery was always intimately tied to the market—plantations, after all, were first and foremost places where enslaved labor was utilized to produce commodities for distant markets—the social, economic, and even legal pressures which imposed themselves on traditional domestic power arrangements were partially kept at bay from the slaveowner’s domain. The Southern plantation was a workplace where law and custom gave the ‘Master’ a level of control over other people’s lives and rights which were not quite near-total, but lightly regulated by law and custom. In ideology and popular understanding, if not always in practice, the plantation master exercised power and authority vested in his person. The thicket of laws and legal procedures within which a citizen’s rights and duties were vested did not intrude onto the plantation. The relationship between slaveowner and slave was a personal relationship even as it was a coercive and unjust one.
It’s likely that neither Kelly, nor the average Trump supporter, has made this connection explicitly. They don’t have to. Cultural memory is powerful, and is all the more powerful for lying quietly in the background. There are other iconic figures in American society which provide a similar model of a particular kind of masculinity—the cowboy of Western legend, the wealthy rancher, etc.—but the slaveowner exercised a level of hierarchical control over others that the ‘rugged individualists’ of the mythical Wild West never fully possessed.
And so we’re back to Jesse Kelly arguing that the Secretary of State of Georgia, acting in his role, was not acting manfully in his dealings with Donald Trump, the President of the United States. The latter is a man who, by virtue of holding his office, has a great deal of power and authority. He is, in many ways, at the top of the national hierarchy. For Kelly, and millions of others, Trump’s legitimacy as a leader is grounded in the notion that his power and authority inhere in his person, not his position. That is why they claim to believe the election was ‘stolen.’ To allow the electorate to impose limits on their leader’s power—to insist that Trump is bound by the same Constitution that buttresses political and legal equality—is to accept that the power was the office, not the man, all along. To accept a disempowered Trump means to acknowledge the limits of their own masculinity. Rather than do that, they would burn the country down.
Kirk Johnson is a public librarian and adjunct history instructor. He lives in northern Virginia.