The other day, I had occasion to walk up Pennsylvania Avenue toward the Capitol and then down the Mall toward the Washington Monument, both walkways pretty much deserted. All the Smithsonian buildings were closed, at least until April.

I wasn’t sure if it was okay to walk up to the fence and talk to Guardsmen, but they were amiable, and I had short exchange with a couple of them. Explaining that I’d also been in the ARNG, I asked about their unit, how it was going, and how long they’d be there. These two were MPs from the Detroit area, and they were making do. As far as their term of service at the barricades, one simply said they’d be in place until told otherwise. It was open ended.

As a Guardsman during my Vanderbilt grad school days and my six years of teaching at Wheaton, I was never called up for riot duty. Of course, we trained for it, with “batons” and face shields, attentive to such protocols as “reading the riot act” a couple of times before moving to disperse a crowd. The closest I came was during a 1970s annual-training tour at Fort McCoy, Wisconsin, when they put us on alert for a run back to Joliet for prison duty, since the guards were threatening a walkout. (Yes, the prison with the panopticon buildings, following the design of British utilitarian philosopher, Jeremy Bentham; the building featured in Blues Brothers.) Fortunately, we weren’t needed.

Not so fortunate were “old guys” in my two units who found themselves in harm’s way back in 1968—men of the 3/117 Infantry (Mech), rushed to Nashville in the wake of MLK’s assassination, where stones were thrown, guns fired, and businesses looted and burned; troops of the 2/129 Infantry, deployed in and around Chicago’s Grant Park to quell the chaos surrounding the 1968 Democratic Convention. They had some wild stories to tell, of armored vehicles nicking cars in a rush up back streets, of debris thrown down on them from Michigan Avenue hotels.

Also, I’ve walked the once-mean streets of Detroit and Watts, where Guardsmen faced down rioters who did damage to the tune of (in today’s dollars), $293 million and $325 million, respectively. Though the thugs, knuckleheads, and useful (to Democrats) idiots invading the Capitol used no weapons, set no fires, and were out of there in three and a half hours, the government called up more Guardsmen than were deployed during six days of Watts rioting (15,000 vs. 14,000). And the fenced “safety ring” continues to be manned by thousands of Guardsmen two months after the afternoon incursion.

What gives! Is the threat so dire as to warrant this hysteria? One doesn’t have to rank it down to Jason Whitlock’s judgment (“If not for police shooting and killing an unarmed, female 14-year Air Force veteran, the protest staged by Trump supporters would have more in common with a 1950s fraternity panty raid than a political riot”) to sense that they’re overdoing it. But the Democrats (and other Never Trumpers) can’t get enough of it since it serves their narrative that Orange Bad Man and his supporters are an ever-present, simmering menace, liable to break out in mayhem at a moment’s notice, hair-trigger dangerous Americans, unlike those who fomented, enabled, and defended last year’s riotous and destructive “protests” in Minneapolis, Louisville, Philadelphia, Portland, Chicago, Kenosha, etc.—anarchic turbulence costing upwards of a billion dollars in damage.

Illinois Senator Dick Durbin scalded the Capitol insurgents for violating holy ground, a notion I addressed in an American Spectator piece, “The Capitol Riot and ‘Sacred Temples of Democracy’” (https://spectator.org/capitol-riot-sacred-temple-democracy). To Dick, I say, “Cool your jets.” But Dick and his cohort are determined to make a long-running stage production of their outrageous narrative. And so, on a March afternoon, I was able to attend the DC theater of the absurd, and talk with some good guys who’ve been commandeered for bit parts in the drama.