ROGER SIMON: ‘Hell, No, We Won’t Go!’ — to the Inauguration.
Sorry to recapitulate my column of the other day—“Suppose They Held an Inauguration and Nobody Came?”—but recent events have made it even more necessary.
On the level of opéra bouffe farce, leading those events was a panic set off in the Capitol Jan. 18 that turned out to have been caused by a small fire at a homeless encampment outside a Whole Foods.
What more perfect symbolic image for America 2021!
How could Congress have missed it when they had as their speaker one of the great resident experts on the subject, Ms. Pelosi, whose own district probably has more homeless per capita than anywhere in the nation?
But this is only one small reason we should ignore the inauguration or, as we used to say in the sixties, “Hell, no, we won’t go!”
When I say ignore, I mean totally shut the event out. Pay no attention to it. Do not watch it or listen to it. Not a single word.
Pretend it’s not happening and do almost anything else. It’s a work day anyway. Do your work. And if you’re retired, read a book. Brush up on your Shakespeare.
When images appear, let them show no one there but thousands of National Guard troops—put there as a charade in the first place—with bored expressions on their faces, wondering when they will finally be able to go home and watch football reruns.
Resist the temptation to view the tedious rehashes of the banal speeches that will appear that night. You won’t have missed a thing.
When the ratings are published, let them be lower than an infomercial for the latest egg slicer.
This, of course, means no demonstrations of any kind, not in Washington and not in the state capitals.
Do not be like those gulled nincompoops that allowed themselves to be led by Antifa and BLM into the Capitol, only to become the subject of endless propaganda.
In other words, if you’re tempted, grow up. Remember the old saw: Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.