How long is the line between James Comey and Elias Rodriguez, the 31-year-old Chicago man accused of murdering two young Israeli diplomats in Washington, DC last week? For a local perspective, one could of course ask Waterville High School English teacher JoAnna St. Germain who late last month directed Secret Service agents to “take out” President Donald Trump and his entourage.
Should St. Germain’s attorney be advising her not to answer such questions, here’s an educated guess: not all that long, really.
Former FBI Director Comey, who has lied about everything from not being a weasel to serendipitously discovering an array of seashells on a beach arranged to read: 86 47 (Urban dictionary translation: get rid of the current president), stirred controversy most recently by “innocently” posting a photo of said shell arrangement on social media and later saying it was his wife’s idea.
(Brief context: before playing a major role in the weaponization of law enforcement to undo the results of the 2016 presidential election, Comey was allegedly a lawman).
Whether he now chooses to blame his wife in the sort of sporting fashion befitting a DC swap creature or not, what he — kinda, not really, hee-hee — was advocating is the next set of extra-legal maneuvers to “get rid of” of the president he failed to indict eight years ago, and managed to get elected again despite it all last fall. Amazingly there are still people in America, many of whom draw their paychecks from the legacy media, who still see Comey as some mutated form of a hero.
From the embarrassing to the dead-serious, flash forward to the act of political terror in front of the Capital Jewish Museum last Wednesday night. While we don’t know much about Rodriguez yet, the fact that he shouted “Free Palestine” while being taken into custody strongly suggests he believes his action was justified. Someone, whether an individual or a broader movement, gave him permission to do it.
For another local perspective, consider the otherwise sad case of 70-year-old Portland woman Jamila Levasseur who, also on Wednesday, was arrested by Portland Police for obstructing traffic on Commercial Street as part of a pro-Palestinian protest.
While her actions were not directly connected to those of Rodriguez, of course, Levasseur happens to be the wife of former bank robber and domestic terrorist Raymond Luc Levasseur whose leftist activism in the 1970s excused his militant criminality in the minds of many. He was, to wit, kind of cool in that down with the man sort of way.
In a parallel tragic trajectory, Comey’s descent from being one of America’s top law enforcement officials to playing childish games with seashells on a beach seems to signal what happens when you can’t just rig the system through law-fare and smug DC complicity. You tie a bandana across your head and, like Raymond Luc Levasseur, you fight it. After all, in the span of American folk-lore, mob-buster Eliot Ness is less revered than the outlaw Jesse James or Bonnie and Clyde.
Romance aside, the violent edge that is now winning permission among those who lost an election is a troubling development. How did we get here?
“If you believe — and I think a lot of these people do sincerely believe — that Donald Trump was and is an existential threat to democracy, you can rationalize anything, including sometimes doing undemocratic things,” Axios reporter Alex Thompson said on Fox News Sunday.
Thompson was referring specifically to aides to former President Joe Biden who remain unrepentant for their roles in propping of the husk of a man as a foil to that existential threat known as Donald Trump. If you’re fighting Trump, it seems, anything is excusable. Because, you know, democracy. If you’re a Biden aide, you lie until it becomes fraud. If you’re Comey, you subvert justice (and lie about not being a weasel). And if you’re Rodriguez, you shoot people who work for a government whose policies you don’t like.
In documented cases of genocide the world over from Germany between 1933-45 to Rwanda in the early 1990s, atrocities begin with the same first step: dehumanizing “the other.” If your opponent in inhuman, immoral, and otherwise just bad, your actions — or those which you explicitly or implicitly condone — against them can all be excused.
For all the choreographed outrage about January 6th just a few short years ago, what’s happening in our midst today is all the more frightening. From the hopping mad schoolteacher to the sanctimonious ex-FBI director, we’d all be well served to cool off and think it through. When things don’t go your way, violence is not ok. Because, you know, the social contract and such.
