2021 - Opus Publicum

July 1, 2021 Autobiographical, Law

On Defending Debt Collection Lawsuits – Part 2

Note: Please read On Defending Debt Collection Lawsuits – Part 1 first. Otherwise, some of this post won’t make no sense.

A lot has been written on the debt-collection/buying industry over the past decade. John Oliver even did a hilarious monologue on it which culminated in him buying tens of thousands of dollars for medical debt for pennies on the dollar before discharging it. To be clear, I want to make a few clarifications.

“Debt collector” generally refers to any entity that collects another party’s debt, whether it owns the debt or not. Often people refer to them as “collection agencies.” These are the folks who send out collection (“dunning”) letters, call your cell phone at all hours, and offer preposterous “one-time deals” to resolve a debt. Some, such as myself, also classify law firms which primarily collect debts, either through the usual tactics or via lawsuits, under this header as well. While many of the attorneys who work for these firms see themselves as genuine lawyers who do real legal work, the reality is that they are low-paid paper pushers with limited litigation experience. Many of the ones with talent look to get out of these firms ASAP.

“Debt buyer” generally refers to any entity that buys up pools of debt from an original creditor. Synchrony and Comenity, for example, are banks that provide retail credit cards for, say, Best Buy. When people hit hard times and decide that their priority is food rather than paying off their 4K TV, the accounts the creditors hold go into default. Rather than expend too much time and energy on these accounts, many of which are for relatively low dollar amounts, these creditors sell off pools of these debts to a debt buyer like Midland Funding. The information that Midland or other buyers receive about the accounts ranges from “adequate” to “piss poor.” In some instances, a buyer receives nothing but a spreadsheet with names, addresses, perhaps a partial social security or account number, and an amount. While this may not seem like enough information to meaningfully collect on allegedly default accounts, think again. The limited information supplied to debt buyers, much of it containing errors galore, serves as the basis for almost all debt-collection lawsuits.

No matter who holds the debt, be it an original creditor or buyer, at some point these entities have to decide whether to let an account go or turn to their brethren, the debt-collection law firm, for assistance. All states have a statute of limitations on when debt-collection actions can be brought, regardless of the legal theory employed. The most basic cause of action for these suits is breach of contract since, supposedly, the creditor and debtor formed a contractual relationship at some point in the past. In Michigan, the statute of limitations for such suits is six years from the last transaction. For a credit card, that means either the last time the card was used or when the last payment was made. Given the poor record keeping and incomplete information that is transmitted from creditors to debt buyers to debt-collection lawyers, it should surprise nobody that lawsuits are filed after the statue of limitations has expired. That is a no-no, for which some remedies exist (more on that later).

Other legal theories are typically employed as well, such as unjust enrichment and account stated. The “benefit” of these theories, at least in the mind of collection attorneys, is that they typically have lower evidentiary standards than a contract action. Although I believe this view is contestable, it is widely presumed in Michigan that a creditor or debt collector sending a “statement of account” (whatever that means) to an alleged debtor is sufficient for establishing a cause of action against them unless they specifically object to the statement. By pleading this cause, a collection attorney can do an end-run around any contractual agreement between the original creditor and debtor. This may not seem like much at first blush, but more than a few credit contracts contain provisions that can assist a defendant in court. Certain agreements contain so-called notice provisions that state that if either party intends to bring an action against the other, prior written notice must be given. Unsurprisingly, such notice is often not given or there is no record of it. In that instance, the lawsuit itself is premature and ought to be dismissed. If dismissal is not an option, then the defendant has a valid defense, and potential counterclaim, against the creditor for breaching the credit agreement. These and other provision, many of which are unknown to collection lawyers, go by the wayside when account stated is pursued.

As for unjust enrichment and other theories that fall under the umbrella of “implied” rather than “express” contract, longstanding Michigan case law holds that they cannot stand if an express contract, that is a written contract, exists between the parties. That does not stop attorneys from pleading such causes nor courts from granting collectors victory based upon them. Account stated, which I mentioned above, is recognized by the Michigan Supreme Court as a form of implied contract, yet courts routinely ignore that as well.

Without getting too far into the weeds, Michigan has rules of pleading that are often ignored in debt-collection suits. While these rules are rather low level (Michigan is a “notice pleading” state, meaning a party only must be put on general notice of what is being alleged), debt collectors find ways to violate them all the time. Without variance, debt-collection firms will use internally generated forms that are nothing but fill-in-the-blank complaints where the basic information from the spreadsheets mentioned above are punched into the document by assistants or paralegals. These documents are rarely reviewed by an actual attorney. When I have pointed out manifest, even ridiculous, errors on these pleadings, such as not identifying how many parties there are; using correct pronouns; and getting the name of the court and judge wrong, the collection attorney’s response is to shove off blame on their assistants. Rarely have I seen judges admonish them for this.

This is only the tip of the iceberg for how debt-collection lawsuits run. In the next part, I will get into the process of a debt-collection suit, including the manner in which many alleged debtors are served. That is often where the real trouble starts.

June 19, 2021 Catholic Social Thought, Roman Catholic Church

“Clericalism” Part 1 – Catholicism’s “Rural Hangover”

Note: I will return to my series on on defending debt collection lawsuits shortly. I am going to mix them in with some thoughts on Eric Voegelin’s under-appreciated lecture, “Clericalism.”

Tucked away in the rear of the first volume of his collected correspondence lies Eric Voegelin’s 1946 lecture, “Clericalism.” Delivered after the close of the Second World War, this short talk, like many of Voegelin’s writings at the time, foreshadow his turn from chronicling the history of political ideas to developing a philosophy of consciousness, particularly in the final two volumes of his massive Order and History. Although Voegelin’s Christianity, to the extent that he was a Christian, could hardly be called “orthodox” by either Catholic or his native Lutheran lights, there is no doubt that he took Christianity seriously and was committed to the Christian intellectual tradition, often in an Augustinian key. Voegelin had also drunk deeply from the well of Aquinas, though there is scant evidence that he ever held Catholic neo-Thomism any closer than arm’s length. He expressed at points admiration for certain papal statements, but they carried no doctrinal weight for him; they could be criticized freely. Before saying more about Voegelin’s lecture, it is important to highlight what Voegelin means by “Christianity.”

Christianity is not a system of social ethics, but a religion. It is a faith concerned with the destiny of the soul; and this faith as such has no direct bearing on the formation of the social environment; it can have a bearing only indirectly insofar as the conduct required of the Christian is not compatible with the exigencies of every social order. Hence the Church cannot develop a positive social program; it can only deal with concrete social questions as they arise, and try, by counsel, to guide the conduct of individuals in such a manner that it will become Christian conduct.

When Voegelin speaks of “the Church,” he almost always has in mind the Roman Catholic Church, even when he touches on Protestant thinkers. Some, particularly contemporary integralists, may take umbrage with Voegelin’s dismissive attitude toward the Church “develop[ing] a positive social program” rather than “deal[ing] with concrete social questions as they arise.” That is fair, though throughout “Clericalism,” and indeed against the European backdrop that intellectually formed Voegelin, he witnessed the pitfalls of Catholics aligning with this-or-that political movement to resist what can broadly be called the de-Christianization of society. To the extent the Church ever articulated something like a social program, it came to the table too late. Revolutionary and counter-revolutionary forces were already at work; all the Church could do was react, and sometimes react poorly.

By way of illustration, Voegelin casts a glance toward Pope Leo XIII’s landmark encyclical Rerum Novarum (RN). His initial assessment is rather positive: “The Encyclical is in many respects a laudable document, particularly in its analysis of the ideology of class war, but it fails in the crucial point, that is in the discussion of private property. It restates the position of the Church with regard to the justness and necessity of private property for the building of an integral human existence, and insofar it is on safe ground.” What’s so bad about that? Voegelin continues:

The ground becomes less safe, however, when the Encyclical proceeds to berate Marxism flatly for demanding the abolition of private property, without entering into the distinction between property of objects of consumption and long-range personal use on the one side, and property in the instruments of large-scale industrial production on the other side. …[W]e might at least expect of the Papal counsellors that they would offer a more palatable substitute of their own for the condemned solution. But what do we find instead? A concentration of the argument on the property in land. The idea of a Communist society is against natural law because it deprives the individual of the possibility to own his piece of land as the basis of his personal existence. Under a Communist society the industrial worker would not be able to invest his savings in land. Well, our attitudes towards the merits of a Communist society may differ, but, I think, we can all agree that it is not the primary sorrow of the industrial worker in our society to invest his savings in landed property and that a few other factors determine the drive towards a nationalization of industries and planned economy. The later Encyclicals, in particular the Quadragesimo Anno of 1931, have become more cautious in their formulations, but the position is not yet surrendered in principle. The Church is still today seriously handicapped in dealing with the burning problems of industrial society by what we may call its rural hangover.

The “burning problems of industrial society” continued to rage for most of the 20th century with the Church sending what Voegelin would likely call “mixed messages” about how not just Catholics, but all peoples, ought to relate to it. While I have never been shy about arguing that there is a consistent anti-capitalist thread running from RN to the social pronouncements of Pope Francis, the fact that well-funded organizations such as the Acton Institute can take the Church’s social magisterium and tilt it toward pro-market ideology may be a sign of the incomplete, reactive, and somewhat ambiguous nature of that teaching. A certain romanticism, the Church’s “rural hangover,” pointed to a concrete economic situation beyond capitalism because it consciously pointed backwards. After the 1960s, the Church purported to be more “forward facing,” though it seems Voegelin is correct that no comprehensive social program has emerged and there remains more questions than answers lurking about.

Catholics who take RN and the pre-Vatican II social magisterium seriously are few and far between. Even traditional Catholics, those purported champions of authenticity in Catholic doctrine, are routinely lured to embrace market-economy ideology under the guise of “freedom” (or, worse, “rights”). Pockets of “back to the land” Catholics, those eccentric few, still exist; God bless them. However, to say they exert any meaningful influence on contemporary Catholic thought stretches credulity. Although the decades just before and after World War II revealed examples of “Catholic Action” whereby the laity, with the direct or indirect guidance of the clergy, tried to develop on-the-ground responses to industrial society, they too have faded out of history. And now that we have arrived at, or are rather drowning in, post-industrial society, what is to be done?

To listen to Pope Francis, something akin to a socialist solution, understood broadly, may be required, though that is not a popular solution by any stretch of the imagination. Whether Francis and the curia understands the state of the world economy is an open question. What appears evident, though, is that the Sovereign Pontiff understands deeply that something is terribly wrong with it and no amount of misguided faith in the “Invisible Hand” is going to correct it. Integralists may have once had something valuable to add to the conversation if they hadn’t become preoccupied with genuflecting before the altar of raw power while developing their own brand of “QAnon Catholicism.” By casting so many aspersions on Marxism over a century ago, the Church, particularly Francis, will struggle mightily to suggest a socialist solution that can in any sense be called “Catholic.”

There is more to say on Voegelin’s “Clericalism,” but I will leave it there for now. By the close of the lecture, Voegelin expressed enthusiasm for the hope that certain thinkers would keep the light of Christianity burning. They were “the future” and on that score, he was correct. Of course, Voegelin had no idea what that future would look like in 1946.

June 17, 2021 Autobiographical, Law

On Defending Debt Collection Lawsuits – Part 1

Note: This is Part 1 of a series of posts on the nature of debt collection in court, specifically Michigan courts. This installment contains basic background information on the Michigan court system, which is not substantially different than the systems of other states. As someone who routinely defends people in debt-collection suits, I make no pretense to neutrality. Usury, which is at the heart of almost all debt-collection suits, is a sin; I am no friend of it. And for reasons which should become clear over these posts, I am no friend of deep problems in the legal system that have turned too many courts in handmaidens of the debt-collection industry.

Defending debtors or, rather, alleged debtors in court is a largely thankless job. This conclusion, though reached largely from my experience as an attorney in Michigan, seems to be shared by other lawyers I have spoken with across the country. The ones with the brightest outlooks tend to be legal-aid lawyers who have a modest salary to fall back on along with a cloak of legitimacy in the eyes of the judiciary. After all, they are “pro bono attorneys” trying to help “the little guy” on their way to “more legitimate” legal work in other fields. Whether this perception is accurate or not is neither here nor there; it tends to be the way of things. For the rest of us, of which there are relatively few scattered across America’s legal landscape, the perception is that we are pariahs, troublemakers, legal obscurantists, etc. because we have the temerity to provide what all persons ought to be entitled to, namely a proper defense under the law. Part of that defense, indeed a large part of it, entails holding debt-collecting plaintiffs accountable under procedural and substantive rules intended, at the very least, to prevent precisely what goes on in courts across the country: the bulk filing of under-researched, cookie-cutter complaints that are often unsupported by credible evidence.

In the Michigan legal system, there are effectively two trial courts: district and circuit. The latter, created by the state’s constitution, handle high-level matters such as felonies and civil suits above $25,000.00. District courts, which were created 50 years ago by statute, are adjunct tribunals charged with handling misdemeanors, landlord/tenant proceedings, and sub-$25k civil suits. They are sometimes characterized as “neighborhood courts” intended to be closer to the people than their beefier circuit brethren. Every Michigan county, save for some rural ones, has one circuit court and any number of district courts. My county, for instance, has four (or five—depending on how you want to count) district courts. There is sufficient evidence to support the conclusion that at least some of these district courts are underfunded, understaffed, and undermotivated to serve as anything more than a clearinghouse for unimportant cases.

Of course, any person who has been on the business end of a district court proceeding is unlikely to find their legal matter “unimportant.” A low-level misdemeanor, pled to under prosecutorial pressure, can blight a person’s record for years, leaving them unable to find gainful employment or subject to probationary conditions which, without further assistance, they may very well fail. Landlord/tenant proceedings, too, can have a traumatic impact. An eviction record is a surefire guarantee that future housing will be difficult to find, particularly if one is looking to live in a safe, clean, and stable complex. As for general civil suits, outside of the rare low-stakes business dispute or a jilted lover seeking to get back that “interest free loan” she gave to her cheating boyfriend, the overwhelming majority which clog Michigan district courts are filed by debt collectors.

Now, before getting any further, let me note that not all debt-collection suits are created equal. An initial line can be drawn between those brought by original creditors (say, for example, Bank of America) or debt buyers like Midland Funding, LVNV, or, in the case of student loans, unholy artifices like National Collegiate Student Loan Trust. Almost all of the debts in question are consumer debts: medical debt, credit card debt, student loan debt, and so forth. What these suits share in common is that they are almost universally brought by a handful of debt-collection mills (law firms) that file cookie-cutter complaints en masse in district courts with little to no evidentiary support. While an attorney’s name will appear on these documents, few if any were ever prepared or even reviewed by an attorney. And even if an attorney’s eyes saw them before they moved out the door, the chances are high that the reviewing lawyer is an entry-level associate with limited litigation experience.

Why, you may ask, would any law firm, even a debt mill, behave so recklessly as to file legal documents that likely cannot withstand modest scrutiny? Because they can. Although precise statistics for Michigan are lacking, national estimates point to approximately 75% of all debt-collection suits ending in default. What that means is that after a person is served (or not—more on that later) with a debt-collection suit, they have 21-28 days to file an answer and affirmative defenses. (The time to respond depends on the manner of service.) Answers in and of themselves are not very remarkable: a person either admits, denies, or states they do not have sufficient information to respond to each allegation made against them in the complaint. Defenses, on the other hand, are trickier since certain ones have to be raised immediately or they are deemed waived. For example, if a court lacks personal jurisdiction over a defendant, Michigan law requires that to be raised at the outset or it is waived. The same is true for the statute of limitations. Since most debt-collection suits are rooted, albeit loosely, in contract law, a plaintiff has six years to bring it. And no, just because a plaintiff has blown the limitations period does not mean they won’t try to use the courts to collect.

Should a defendant not answer a suit within the requisite period of time, the debt-collecting plaintiff can file for a default judgment for the full amount it is seeking, plus costs, interest, and statutory attorney fees. It may come as no surprise that the math on these defaults can get a little fuzzy. With no meaningful opposition or oversight, it is not uncommon to find excessive interest tacked on to these judgments or costs inserted that have no basis in reality. Once that default judgment is acquired, the debt-collecting plaintiff is free to use a variety of mechanisms to collect, including garnishing a defendant’s wages, tax returns, and bank accounts or subpoenaing the defendant to appear in court and, under oath, provide all of their financial information to the collector’s attorney. Even if these default judgments are attained illicitly, inaccurately, or the individual subject to them has valid defenses at law, they are difficult to unwind.

If you have read this far, please note I will flesh a number of issues raised here in future installments. There is a lot to be said on how the debt-buying/collecting industry functions, particularly how pools of debt are sold (and resold) between entities for pennies on the dollar before winding up as the bases for most collection suits. When this business practice intersects with the legal realm, serious evidentiary issues are raised before they are, lamentably, ignored by far too many courts. All is not gloom and doom, however. I plan to highlight ways in which some judicial actors have pushed for reform and how a few judges have developed measured approaches to ensure that alleged debtors are not trampled over in their courtrooms.

May 31, 2021 Church, Eastern Orthodox Church

Unrequired Impressions on an Ecclesiastical Standoff

Nota Bene: What follows is off-the-cuff, unrefined, and unapologetically impressionistic. If you feel the need to get angry over anything below or tell me I am full of it, all I have to say is, “Tranquilo.”

I have, for the past few years, been effectively “retired” from web-logging. There is too much going on in my life to keep up with it and besides, “Catholic blogging” (for lack of a better term) has descended into grifterism. Gone are the halcyon days of the 00s-10s when both Catholic and Orthodox bloggers wrote serious pieces (and sometimes not-so-serious pieces) that both challenged each other’s particular stances while exhibiting genuine self-criticism. Sure, some folks were better at it than others, but almost all of them have moved on. Indeed, some have even left their previous confessions for new communions or, in one notable instance, abandoned Christianity altogether. Such is life. Although I am aware of several Catholic and Orthodox blogs that still exhibit a genuine desire to probe “things ecclesiastical” in a charitable, exacting, and critical manner or, in the alternative, present interesting tidbits of history, spirituality, and theology, I think the “glory days” are gone, or maybe just on hold.

All of that aside, the reason I have (temporarily) returned to this blog is because several people asked me to weigh-in on the recent “Mexican standoff” featuring Steve Skojec (1 Peter Five), Rod Dreher (American Conservative), and Edward Feser (academic and writer). I am not going to rehearse in depth their various arguments; you can find their writings easily enough. The short and the long of it is that Skojec, who has fancied himself a champion of traditional Catholicism for a number of years, has been undergoing a somewhat understandable, though sideways, “spiritual crisis” concerning the state of contemporary Catholicism. Having had a couple of those myself over the years, I cannot blame him. Nor do I blame Skojec for being public about it. It seems he is looking for reassurance, though it also seems he may be looking for it in all the wrong places. The online Catholic world of today is not the online Catholic (or, for that matter, Orthodox) world of a decade or two ago. Despite rabid disagreements, folks on both sides of the divide used to be fairly well-meaning, even if their advice failed to hit the mark. Today, online Catholicism in particularly is a terrain littered with hucksters, grifters, and triumphalists looking to advance various agendas to an unprecedented degree. Skojec seems to have left himself vulnerable to their machinations.

Of course, “agendaism” is not unique to Catholics. Consider Dreher: A former Catholic who went through a very public “spiritual crisis” that apparently brought him to Eastern Orthodoxy back in the mid-00s. Realizing that there was not enough public scandal in his own communion to keep-up the clicks, he has spent an inordinate amount of his post-Catholic career harping on Catholicism while also drawing from (plagiarizing?) Catholic thought in order to bolster his pop dystopian screeds. And so, it comes as little surprise that Dreher immediately piggybacked on Skojec’s crisis to retell, for the umpteenth time, his own. Concomitantly, Dreher has invited Skojec to look to Orthodoxy because, according to Dreher, it has all of these bells and whistles that Catholicism lacks. This is where Feser enters the fray. Regardless of what one thinks of Feser’s Thomas-heavy Catholic theology, he is correct that the Catholic tradition, broadly understood, is not lacking in the riches of the East. However, those riches are too often buried under the rubble of modernity, if not marginalized in favor of an attenuated Latinism that has become depressingly normative over the centuries.

All that said, the reason I was asked to comment on this is because it is something of a public record (though perhaps an increasingly obscure point of personal history) that I spent seven years in the Eastern Orthodox Church after returning to Christianity in my 20s before returning to the Catholic fold in 2011. Members of my extended family remain Eastern Orthodox and indeed my brother will likely be ordained to the diaconate in the coming year. I was married in the Orthodox Church and three of my four children received the sacraments of initiation there. Canonically, I have been and remain Greek Catholic, though I maintain strong ties to traditional Latin Catholicism. While I did experience some hostility toward Orthodoxy in the years after I left, all of that has abated. My “spiritual crisis,” if you will, did not become clear to me until years later. It was not a “crisis about Orthodoxy” so much as a crisis in myself, one that invited me to issue public condemnations of my prior confession in return for inordinate public support offered by Catholics who had been looking to get some digs in on their estranged Eastern brethren. I hope that is water under the bridge now. I have apologized for it. And if my apologies were not sufficient, please know I am issuing them again.

Returning to the main point, I cannot stress enough that the grass is not greener, regardless of where you sit on the East/West divide. (Oh, and before I continue, let me make note that “the East” is not monolithic, but since Oriental Orthodoxy is rarely contemplated as an escape route for Catholics and Orthodox, I am leaving it to the side here.) American Orthodoxy is a backwater. That is not an insult; it is empirical reality. Though most American Orthodox jurisdictions inflate their numbers, the truth is there are likely as many Orthodox in the United States as there are Catholics in the Archdiocese of Chicago. For some that is a bug, but for others it is a feature. American Orthodoxy does present itself as an enclave at times, historically ethnic but today increasingly ideological, that resists penetration from some unspecified horror known as “the West.” It often comes across as self-consciously exotic, even if many converts have infused it with bland, sometimes even pernicious, American religiosity. To put it another way, American Orthodoxy is a confederation of churches full of saints and sinners; devotion and destitution; liturgy and lies; holiness and hate; coherency and contradictions; etc. That is, it is not all that different from American Catholicism.

I would, of course, be remiss if I failed to mention that Orthodoxy does have certain advantages on average over Catholicism. The liturgy is pretty, if you are into that sort of thing. Most Orthodox clerics, though typically lacking the training and sophistication of Catholic priests, are disinclined to preach heresy on Sunday or put their own “spin” on the Gospel to make it “relevant.” At the same time, due to a certain insularity imposed by circumstance more than intent, Orthodox priests unwittingly perpetuate any number of harmful myths that only serve to exacerbate Catholic/Orthodox tensions. Even those “learned Orthodox” out there who have penned books claiming to “expose the errors” of Catholicism routinely miss the mark, and sometimes laughably so. As a Catholic turned Orthodox turned Catholic, I cannot tell you how mortifying it was for me to listen to Orthodox priests speak raw nonsense about the Catholic Church, including such disturbing delights as: Catholics believe everything the pope says is infallible; Catholics worship Mary; Transubstantiation is a scientific explanation of the Eucharist; Catholics can buy their way out of hell; Catholics reject theosis; Catholics reject icons; etc. Oh the list goes on and on and on…

None of this is to say that the Catholic Church is without its highs and lows. I doubt I need to repeat them here. As a Greek Catholic, I am painfully aware that in America especially, we are the redheaded stepchildren of Catholicism. (Hey, if we weren’t, there would be no Orthodox Church in America.) Because Catholicism is so much larger than Orthodoxy in America, its sins are magnified exponentially. Clergy sex abuse, financial scandals, doctrinal departures, politicization of the Faith, and so on and so forth, exist in both communions; it is typically the Catholic Church’s gross failures that draw widespread public attention. Nothing is more painful to a Catholic who has departed the “faith of his fathers” for Orthodoxy to come face to face with Orthodoxy’s moral failings. This is why, I suspect, individuals like Dreher have more than once turned a blind eye to them; it disrupts the narrative of “pure holiness” or “purer holiness” to find that sinners prowl about all of Christianity seeking the ruin of souls.

At the close of business, it is not for me to say where Skojec or any other Catholic experiencing some sort of crisis should go. I was admonished by a good friend yesterday for reading the whole affair cynically, and so I’ll try not to. Feser has given Skojec (and others) some fine advice and Dreher, ever the opportunist, is just doing what he does to make money (click, click, click). It makes little sense to me that a Catholic distressed over decentralization (synodality), birth control, divorce-and-remarriage, doctrinal imprecision, and the erosion of legality would embrace a communion that has no problem with any of those things. To accept Orthodoxy is to accept a very messy ecclesiology, at least by idealized Latin lights. Spiritually speaking, solace can be found with a prayer rope just as easily as it can be had with a rosary. St. Seraphim of Sarov taught many beautiful things, but so, too, did St. Francis of Assisi. As the Orthodox priest Alexander Schmemann observed, for the duration of the Church, there have always been more lukewarm Christians than otherwise. Fervency is fleeting, no matter which church doorstep one darkens.

January 8, 2021 Politics

The Stupidest Day

Many folks of mixed will are still busy opining on what transpired at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. I, only half-jokingly, referred to that entire 24-hour period as “the stupidest day in American history.” A friend of mine, Kevin, replied, “The stupidest day so far.”

I have not, admittedly, digested the full range of photos, videos, and first-hand accounts of what transpired in Washington, D.C. two days ago. No matter how convincing (or damning) a particular clip or anecdote may be, there are always those who will say that the entire debacle needs to be placed in its “proper context.” For instance, there are more than a few voices on social media saying what occurred “wasn’t that bad” compared to, say, the French Revolution or the storming of this-or-that government/royal building in the Middle East. Maybe, just maybe, what happened wasn’t “that bad” when compared to the wave of protests that rocked most of the United States during the summer months of 2020. Certainly, those protests, which are commonly (though perhaps not accurately) referred to in the collective as “Black Lives Matter protests,” resulted in more property damage than what occurred in D.C. The human toll was higher, too. Still, I am unconvinced that even those out-of-control escapades carried the same symbolic purchase that storming the Capitol and interrupting an active session of Congress did.

When flipping through the news channels on Wednesday, I heard words like “insurrection,” “sedition,” and “rebellion” spewed casually by a range of anchors, pundits, and everyday folks on the street. The two learned hosts of a law podcast I listen to ran through a host of U.S. statutes criminalizing such behavior while speculating which could be applied to not only those who breached the Capitol building, but President Donald Trump and his cohorts as well. At the same time, there were other voices, mainly from what might broadly be called the Right, which downplayed the whole affair. These were not, I should say, the voices of pure hacks who labeled the intrusion, violence, and destruction as a “false flag” operation staged by a consortium of “deep state” agents and Antifa. These voices were of those who, despite all the evidence, believe they cannot wholly abandon the spectacle of the last four years without sacrificing a piece of their political souls. These voices admit that something disruptive was afoot the other day, but at the close of business it really did not matter. The United States is still standing! The transition of power will occur! What is there to worry about, really?

Then there are those such as me who are left to wonder what this all means not just for the future of any particular political ideology in America, but the ways and means of the country itself. It is raw silliness to presume that Trump’s exit from the White House will reset the political field to where it was 10-20 years ago. “Trumpism,” meaning simply an admixture of the politics of resentment with fear mongering, posturing, and buffoonery, is here to stay for the immediate future. It could, I suppose, fade away in the coming years just as the so-called “Tea Party” movement faded. I doubt it. Already there are those at the local and national level looking to repeat what Trump did, namely turn politics into a pretty plaything for their own personal service while heaping the hopeless masses with unfulfillable promises. Why certain types of persons, specifically certain types of Catholics, find these promises so personally warming when the good Lord Jesus Christ has promised eternal life is a question worth considering, but I will leave that for another day.