We Must Do Better

I'm totally partisan and not backing down, but it's still not fair to call Boy Kavanaugh a rapist.

The fairest, most reasonable, way to interpret the limited (and not 100% reliable evidence) is that two drunken 17-year-old boys took advantage of an opportunity to toss a 15-year-old girl onto a bed and roughhouse with her. They were, of course, testing to see what thrills might result, but mostly just uproariously amusing each other - at her expense. Things (and boys and girls) being what they are . . . it could have resulted in a rape or any number of various consequences, injuries, or humiliations. It did result in a terrifying and life impinging trauma for the girl who had every reason to believe Football Bret was trying to rape her and could have accidentally killed her.

To the boys it was all "good" fun. Or at least it was "not TOO bad" fun - as most anyone who has ever been a boy would probably recognize. Perhaps it even ended in some awkward regrets or momentary cringing concerns all too soon pushed out of memory. After all, it was only one of very many drunken escapades. It was only one of numerous incidents of larger boys tormenting someone smaller and weaker, and only a single grunting example of how teams of boys grant each other status by denigrating females sexually.

And this (the absence of weight in the grander scheme of things) is the real import of Dr. Ford's testimony. Late adolescence is a liminal period where the torments and outrages of human childhood start to take on a new cast. And early adulthood is when we try to incorporate the habits and attitudes of childhood into ways of life worthy of respect even as we struggle to balance the importance of the images we imagine we project compared against the fitful ways we tend to see ourselves.

The "MeToo" movement is making it more and more impossible for all of us to ignore how predatory behaviors rehearsed in childhood affect the ways we organize our adult working and family lives even as we struggle against and perpetuate grander systems of dominance, oppression, - and order.

No doubt there is a limit to what established adults should be held accountable for in times long past when they were green, dependent, and not fully formed (as if we ever are). But the child is the father to the man, and very few men or women have the wisdom, experience, and greatness of heart to sit on the highest court of the most majestically and destructively powerful empire yet to shake the earth.

Decency, not partisanship, is what whispers so urgently we can do better than Bret Kavanaugh.

The “Case of the Kavanaugh Boy” and it’s Frightful Ramifications

The issue is not primarily our conduct as teenagers - or as young adults. The issue is how and what we have learned from those experiences which invariably include transgressions. Of course, some transgressions are worse than merely “cringeworthy” but even the most heinous of these are not irredeemably shackled forever to only shame, pain, guilt, and punishment.


It’s obvious that unrepentant, unreformed liars, thieves, rapists and murderers are a threat to everyone. But under certain circumstances of “redemption” neither rape nor murder would “necessarily” disqualify someone from a successful career which might even include some degree of honor and prestige.


By this point, Bret Kavanaugh’s particulars have become secondary to much greater concerns. These include the character of any candidate for the high court as well as the process by which such “characters” are elevated - or cast down. But, even more important, are the structures of impunity which impinge upon the safety and dignity of men and woman (boys and girls) even as they cast some into the role of innocent oppressed and others into the role of callous (or callow) oppressors.


We can all worry about being upended by mistakes or habits forged in the past. We can also invest in finding (and offering) redemption — and in helping each other understand how this might work for everybody instead of only for certain individuals’ personal gains and advantages.  Such an effort is indeed both so daunting and perennial as to seem overwhelming, but it is the prerequisite for fulfilling what some might call our spirituality and others, our humanity.


For Bret Kavanaugh and his confirmation to a pivotal seat on the high court, the primary issue is his character today.  I don't know if Bret Stephens has children or whether they will attend an elite prep school.  But all parents and all perspective parents must now be worrying about issues connected to "The Case of the Kavanaugh Boy."  Unfortunately too many grown men (and women too) today still seem to be more worried about protecting miscreants from public consequences when their anxiety should really be for the hidden injuries suffered by both perpetrators and victims.  

The Question Now

Is Judge Kavanaugh telling the truth now?

This is the essential question when it comes to a lifelong position on the high court.

One might hope the results of a controversy over allegations regarding a 36 year old incident involving unsupervised minors would lead to more human understanding and a commitment from all of us to treat each other with both more justice and more mercy.

But such hope must take into account how we all struggle for decency and opportunity in a structure where a tiny few, very irresponsible elites, control too much “private” concentrated wealth.

Is Judge Kavanaugh telling the truth NOW?

The law is fabric, created, reinforced, undermined, and rewoven by power. Ultimately this power comes from human will, but the accomplishments and accumulations of past generations exercise tremendous pulls and insertions into the enveloping fabric of law.

This fabric, by force of history and the indeterminate nature of men and women, is cast over and stretched across all forms of injustice from war, genocide, expropriation of land, and brutal exploitation of human bodies and human labor.

In his Senate testimony Judge Kavanaugh spoke eloquently about the importance of judges dispassionately applying law as it was written in the past - despite the pressures of contemporary urgencies. He was speaking, of course, of the uncomfortable and inevitable distance between law and justice.

The law is a fabric, sometimes light as gossamer, sometimes more weighty than monstrous chains encrusted with biting rust. It is is woven between and around us to protect ourselves from ourselves. It is woven to protect rights (however they were defined) once they were won. And rights are always won, sometimes in the name of justice, sometimes as the result of might. Rights are never granted, especially not by law because law recognizes only rights that have been won, however that result came to be.

What kind of man is Judge Kavanaugh now? Is he now telling the truth?

Once they are won, law can protect rights. But law alone cannot guarantee rights.

The law is a fabric constantly being woven, reinforced, unwoven, and abraded by implacable forces of time and power. Rights, once won, can be scraped away by assertions and urgencies. Even the most treasured rights can be undone, leaving both the law and justice tattered with wide flapping gaps to be filled with the assertions and urgencies of power.

Some people believe we can, with the help of law, gradually improve the way we understand and deal with each other as humans with all our weaknesses, needs, and strengths. We hope in the possibility that our power is meaningful and worthwhile when measured against the highest standards which have emerged from our struggles to live and comprehend.

Power is simply not just the will of a majority, no matter how injured or angry or enthusiastic or organized - or hopeless. Power is also the accumulated force of traditions and legal rights which can protect a majority from its own folly - or allow an irresponsible few to control the disposition of concentrated productive wealth. The law bends to power as much (and sometimes more) than it shapes it.

Judges are men and women. They are not perfect. But we might hope judges are women and men who have learned from their own failures and weaknesses because they have developed the necessary courage and honesty to do that.

The question is whether or not Judge Kavanaugh is telling the truth now.

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We Have Met the Enemy and . . .

It really is not the people taunting us with NAZI salutes who should worry us. It's definitely not the creeps who wear sheets or the mutterers who subscribe to the Daily Stormer.

It's the ordinary "salt of the earth" normal folk who like what trimp says about elites and immigrants and who think what trimp says and does is "no big deal". These are the types that give consent to fascism.

And we have much to seriously worry about.

Some of these good people are only superficially resonant with gobbeldigook about "blood and soil" or "white nationalism". Some simply relish the chaos and the outrage. Then there is a large contingent of the religiously devout who see trimp as God's imperfect instrument to "restore" a lost order of decency and justice overrun by secularism, drugs, gays, the UN, and money power etc. etc. etc.

We know there are people like Steve Bannon, now cavorting with Vatican malcontents and authoritarian populists in Europe, while Breitbartlike media entwines itself with Russian (and homegrown) trollmasters throughout the soup of stupid we call "the social network". But his ilk is probably not as dangerous as the legions of opportunists seeking to profit from whatever is unearthed during the current disruptions.

Thank goodness for the naive, opportunistic, studious, and hard charging Democratic Socialists who seek to generate visions of realistic hope. We can overhaul our infrastructures of education, healthcare, transportation, and energy to relieve, reform and redistribute our way to a possible future.

https://www.streamlygredible.com/