Playing dress-up for the insurrection

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I spent a good portion of my life living in the South, so I’m used to walking into a Walmart and feeling like I’m in an Infantry battalion orderly room – so many guys in camo pants and camo shirts and camo boots – hell, we didn’t even have those in the army – and camo hats and “tactical” gloves and olive drab kaffiyehs around their necks…your average Walmart in Mississippi looks like the Green Zone in Baghdad.

As Army brats, we used to dress up in our father’s military gear.  I can remember running around in a field behind our duplex at Fort Benning wearing my dad’s helmet liner and gas mask bag with his web belt wrapped double around my five-year-old waist playing “war.”  That’s what we called it: “war.”  Because our fathers were in the ugly business of fighting wars.  That’s why there was a helmet liner and web gear lying around the house.  It was actually used for its intended purpose.  When we got our hands on it, we knew it was for play.

But the lunatics and looters you saw inside the United States Capitol on the 6th of January weren’t playing.  They were trying to wage war against our democracy.  They wanted to overthrow the system that has given them the freedom to walk into a military surplus store and buy all that shit they were dressed up in.  They may have been acting violently, breaking windows, tearing through doors, trashing offices, waving the Confederate “battle flag,” but they were playing dress up.  All that crap they were wearing, the Kevlar helmets and vests, the camo jackets and military style boots and those ridiculous black “tactical” gloves – all of it was pure, unadulterated costumery, because almost none of them had actually served their country in uniform.  The “uniforms” they cobbled together from macho websites and surplus stores were all make-believe.  They were pretend patriots dressed up as pretend soldiers, as fake as the orange color of their idol’s facial make-up. 

Fitting, isn’t it, that the insurrection incited by the pretender-in-chief was as fake as he is?  They pretend to love America, they pretend to defend freedom, they pretend that they believe in liberty and justice for all, but what they really believe in is their avatar of white supremacy, Donald Trump.  That’s why they have to dress up.  As forceful as their devotion to Trump appears to be, it isn’t any more real than the Viking helmet worn by the “Qanon Shaman.

It wasn’t even cosplay, because people who like to dress up as their favorite superheroes and anime characters or Star Wars androids are doing it because they admire the characters and the design of their costumes.  They actually mean what they’re doing.  Their intention is the celebration of the genius of the creation behind the characters and what they stand for in their fictional universes.

The madhouse “warriors” you saw on display at the sacking of the Capitol weren’t misguided in what they wore.  There was a meaning attached to the way they looked; it's just that it wasn’t the meaning they wanted it to be.  It was creepy and juvenile and pathetic, because what they stand for is creepy and juvenile and pathetic: Donald Trump is more fake than all of their fakery combined.  But I guess there’s a kind of poetic justice at work after all.  When you believe you have to get into costume to overthrow the government, your revolution is as silly and ineffectual as you look.

The last time I checked, the Capitol is still standing, and Donald Trump is still on his way out of the presidency. Dressing up didn’t work.