The Covington Story Was a Collective American Nightmare
As the encounter in Washington between Black Hebrew Israelites, American Indians, and Catholic Trump boys recedes from Twitter and the opinion pages, it lingers on in a deeper place in my mind. At the level where argument loses its sharp contours and will unclenches, the encounter stops being a viral video, a proxy political fight, an avalanche of commentary, and it begins to resemble a dream sequence. The events, the landscape where they unfold, take on an incongruous and inevitable logic that has nothing to do with reason or morality. The wide plaza, leading away to famous stone monuments; the light slowly failing as the weak winter sun sets behind the Lincoln Memorial; the groups in different costumes wandering onto the landscape, disappearing, and then reappearing just in time to move the drama along to a crisis; the way key words—, , , —are repeated: It feels like a story generated by the unconscious.
