A surfeit of Babbitts

 Make no mistake, I do have a background in theology. But I've

had a longer history and more specific training in literature. When the name of the insurgent killed while trying to illegally enter the chamber of the Senate while people were hiding in it was released, I was struck by the coincidence--and that's all it is--of her last name Babbitt being the same as one of the seminal novels of the early American 20th century. Babbitt, written by Sinclair Lewis, is one of his series of satires of American life whose title, like Main Street, Elmer Gantry, and to a lesser extent Arrowsmith, have lived on in depicting a certain situation or kind of person long after Lewis's death.

It's been several decades since I read Babbitt or even had a copy of the novel, so for my purpose here I'm relying on a summary.

This wouldn't pass an undergraduate 200 level class, I hasten to say. I'm simply putting out something I think deserves a closer look with competent exegesis.

We know very little about Ashli Babbitt's life beyond her chosen career--the Air Force--and the circumstances of her death--trying to enter the Speaker's Lobby in the Capitol where members had taken shelter. We know she idolized trump, placing on him all her hopes for a better America.

Sinclair Lewis's George Babbitt also placed all his hopes in something larger than himself, the Booster Club of Zenith, his hometown. Ashli, having served in the service and voting twice for Barack Obama, had by the 2016 election transferred her allegiance to trump and his cult of personality. George, on the other hand, has traveled in the opposite direction, moving from a conservative mindset to a looser Bohemian way of seeing the world. We don't know what caused Ashli's psychological move from Obama's centrist Democratic principles to the hard-core delusions of QAnon, but they may have been similar to George's: His best friend Paul finally has enough dissatisfaction with his life and kills his wife. That's enough for George to reconsider his own issues with complacency. It's the recognition that, without his confidante Paul, life may not be worth living.

No one has suggested, as yet, that Ashli lost someone, but there's definitely something in her makeup that makes her not only vulnerable but it seems eager for someone to provide answers, even if lies, for her. This is, after all, the way so many people join the ranks of a would be savior. 

In Ashli's case it seems much of her inner resources were channeled into anger as her world constricted around her: She retired from the Air Force at a demoted rank. Her pool business, which was supposed to salvage her sense of self-worth, ran into financing problems and was hit with a 71K judgment for failing to repay a loan.

George finds solace in drinking, an affair, and radical politics, all of which put him at odds not only with the Booster Club and his friends, but with everything he's ever believed about life and the way it's lived. In his instance, because it is fiction and Babbitt is a satire of American boosterism, his wife becomes ill, and while George has an epiphany that leads him back to family and safety, he's learned enough to know that for his son, there's still an opportunity to be someone different. For Ashli, because it's real life and there aren't always second chances, what she might have learned in her last minutes is unknown.

I ask myself if George is the more acceptable Babbitt and my initial answer is yes. Largely it's because he's fiction and didactic. But while it's something inside George that dies, Ashli actually died. It was avoidable, not only because she had received riot training in the military and knew the response her act would receive, but because the politician for whom she would die did not have a right to demand of her that she fight a battle he could not win, legally or morally, and then hide in his tent listening to 80s one hit wonders, wearing boxing gloves and chanting "fight", wondering why no one outside his family, who like him had never sacrificed or put their lives in danger, was boosting the insurgents with him.