Watching clips of Boris Johnson's antics, it struck me how much he belongs on the same TV set as Donald Trump, the Proud Boys, the Caravan Truckers and Buffalo Man and so Many of those who invaded the Capitol, who, as they stormed into the place, look so star struck and squealed with delight, "Hey! We're really HERE!"
So many of these man/child types live part of their time playing boy's games: role playing with foam swords in the park, shooting real AR-15's at the shooting range, imagining they are heroes thwarting some alien invasion. Many live in their parents' basements, I imagine, their real reality, but they escape to their fantasy worlds.
When I see men on the streets of Boston or Portsmouth, dressed like 8 year old boys, often walking with their sons who are dressed just like daddy, in pants which end mid calf, sports jerseys with the names of their heroes printed on the back, "Gronkowski" --"Hey, are you the real Gronk?"--baseball hats turned backwards, when I see these cases of arrested development around town, I think, "They are really pretty harmless."
Not so much the tatted Rebels Without A Cause tooling around town on their Harleys, revving their engines-"Hey, Look At ME!"--those guys with their big, now often flabby, arms, pot bellies, and their graying thinning hair blowing in the breeze, or tied into manly ponytails. Those guys look a little more "serious," if impotently serious.
But there is something about the overgrown kid version which is risible, not threatening.
The difference, of course, is violence. And the costumes, the get up.
Buffalo Man and his buddies simply looked so ridiculous, it was hard to take them seriously; Similarly, the Proud Boys, in their ridiculous yellow tartan skirts. They could not be serious. Even those guys who get themselves all dressed up in battle fatigues and camo--you know they're not REAL soldiers, no well regulated militia. Their guns might be real, even loaded, but they are not the real thing, surely.
Even the name, Proud Boys, you know, somewhere deep down, they are not proud because they know they are only boys.
The Proud Boys and groups like them have taken to Hawaiian shirts, which are actually fashion statements of informality, playfulness--The Dude in "The Big Lebowski" was harmless--and says, "I'm just standing here at the barbecue with my Margarita in one hand, very chill, playing Jimmy Buffet on the sound system.
The Buffalo Man's regalia, said, on one level, "I'm not really serious."
These are not the storm troopers of Berlin, 1923, who dressed for real and meant business, for real. They carried truncheons or guns and used them.
The visuals connected to Boris Johnson have always been that of the jester, the playful, jocular, never taking himself too seriously, so why should you, persona. Even the bird's nest hair, all part of that Court Jester hat.
And Trump's version of the jester's hat was a sort of Cloak of Unreality, not quite the Harry Potter cloak of invisibility, but still effective in protecting him.
This is just the opposite of Adolf Hilter's scowl, with which he attempted to fashion a soft, lumpish face into something more imposing.
Johnson is just the opposite game: Don't fear me; laugh with me.
Trump tried the Hitler scowl thing, but just could not carry it off.
The thing about the game of "take me seriously" is it means, believe I am capable of violence. As was said very early about Trump, "we don't take him literally, but we do take him seriously." And what part was the serious part: We are going to be cutting ourselves off from the rest of the world, particularly China and we are going to replace all those elitist snobs with ordinary hard working Americans! Trump, for many, if not most people seemed harmless.
The big thing which distinguishes today's American right wing from Hitler's boys is demonstrable violence. Hitler, after all, marched along in the crowd with the Beer Hall Putsch and many were shot and his storm trooper Brownshirts did in fact shoot and bludgeon and poke out eyes and crush skulls and blood ran on the streets. They were loud and violent.
But even during the worst of the Trump escapades, January 6, it all looked like play acting by "role players" and only one demonstrator was shot and the police who were dead afterward were either heart attacks or suicides. The January 6th Committee has been struggling mightily with the image of that attack, trying to make people believe, "Hey, they were serious. This was actually more than playing! They meant to hang Mike Pence, seize the ballots and take power!"
The big problem Adam Schiff and Adam Kinzinger and Liz Cheney have had is getting people to believe these children were really threats.
Had the National Guard been there, one has to wonder, would we even be having January 6th hearings? Would the armed goons in the attacking crowd, seeing they were outgunned, simply faded away? Would the Guard have turned into a Kent State firing squad? Would the violence have made Trump suddenly serious.
That story of Trump trying to grab the steering wheel away from his Secret Service agent was pivotal because among his supporters this was Robert E. Lee having to be restrained by his fellow generals as Lee tried to race onto the field to rally Pickett's crushed brigade; for the rest of us, this was just another phony attempt to look committed, but you know he was too much a coward to actually risk himself in a real melee. He knew full well his handlers would not have allowed him to march with the crowd the way Hitler did, because they knew as he knew, much as Trump has emulated Hitler and read Hitler's playbook, Trump has never and will never face a bullet fired in anger.
Had the Guard been there and shot some attackers dead, what result would have flowed from that?
Both sides, those armed revolutionaries and the Capitol Police seemed to understand that violence which caused deaths would possibly turn opinion against them.
This is the one thin purple line between America today and Berlin 1930.
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