Imagine the day-to-day life of the Q Shaman

Sunday, January 10, 2021

2310

COMMENTARY

This might be a lukewarm take at this point, but what the country and world witnessed on Wednesday at the U.S. Capitol was simply terrible. Also by this point, you’ve probably heard every perspective and opinion there can be on this event, so I’m not going to be treading any new ground here.

What I do have, though, are many questions about how it could happen, and how it will be remembered far into the future. Perhaps those questions can’t be answered just yet because the story has yet to be completely told, but the images that stick out to me — and the images that could potentially be in a history book — are of a man known as the “QAnon Shaman” or “Q Shaman.” (As an aside, I was tempted to make a joke about this guy meeting former Sooner kicker Uwe von Schamann for a local tie in, but I figured the reference is a bit dated and the joke doesn’t go beyond their names sounding alike.)

I assume this man, who has since been arrested for his actions, has a real day-to-day life, but what is that like? How can a person fall that far down the rabbit hole and then probably go eat at McDonald’s or something? I think back to a few years ago when I first learned about QAnon and made comics about it then, and how the people caught up in it acted almost as if they were playing a game, or some kind of LARP. They knew what was really going on. They looked for clues, and had a special knowledge of the world. I saw a bit of that on Wednesday at the Capitol building, only this time it had been permeating a larger group over the course of three years — a group who wasn’t wise to the wild and completely false information being created in the dark corners of the internet, but was primed to believe all of it. Then, when you have the president lighting a match and tossing it on the situation… boom.

Where do we go from here? How will we talk about this to future generations? All of these things are so very “now,” and it’s comforting to think of a time when we don’t have to live with a Q Shaman leading an army to take over the U.S. Capitol.