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The Year of Living Helplessly
The viral imagery from January 6 reveals the deepest 2020 feeling we tried to deny
So much video poured out of the Capitol last Wednesday, but I couldn’t stop watching two: the shaky film of a lone police officer running up the stairs ahead of pro-Trump rioters and the clip, also shot on a cellphone camera, of a man alone on his D.C. porch raging into the street while a woman in her car responds. Americans shared “Porch Guy” on Facebook, Twitter, and TikTok over a million times. Unable to sleep, I’ve gotten up and watched the Porch Guy clip on repeat, his motionless fury reloading automatically. A friend told me she’d watched it more than 50 times.
Every contemporary crisis yields a deluge of imagery. There are always a few that rise to the top as they seem to capture something essential about the moment. With Porch Guy, I think that thing was helplessness. That video — and the one of the solitary officer — tied the riot to the pandemic, which was barely mentioned either by Donald Trump, almost ever, or in the news last Wednesday. Yet the feel of it was so sharply evoked in the image of two people trying to communicate across a distance, one of them locked in her car, and in the loneliness of the companionless officer, his mask askew, pursued by a mob of the maskless.
Helplessness is a feeling we hate in America and one we deny. Even in tragedies, we focus on the active, the heroes. The first responders or the men who rush a cockpit. We focus on what we can do: We donate supplies. We march. We call Congress members. We knit pussy hats. Even the 1986 Challenger space shuttle disaster was reframed by President Ronald Reagan as an ascent — not the death of seven astronauts trapped in a defective machine but their final, victorious sprint over a finish line, a vanquishing of the “surly bonds of Earth.” This reframing wasn’t criticized as a degradation of their deaths, which it was; it was lauded as beautifully American, even by Reagan’s own enemies.
It’s that positive mindset, the doer mentality. Fake it ’til you make it. You are the author of your destiny, all our American parables tell us. “American democracy,” one scholar of American history told me, “is premised on the idea even idiots have the right to determine what kind of world they want…
