Motus Mentis

Well, the FBI report is in. Unsurprisingly, it contains nothing new. (If it had contained any damaging evidence against Brett Kavanaugh, the Democrats would have leaked it. If, on the other hand, it had contained some exculpatory evidence — which, given the lack of any specifics in the Ford allegation as regards time and place, and the lack of any corroborating witnesses to provide such details, would have been almost impossible to produce, or even to imagine — I suppose the Republicans would have leaked it.)

Meanwhile all of my liberal friends are sticking to their guns. I was talking about the affair with one of my closest friends today, and pointed out that no matter what happens to the Kavanaugh confirmation, we will descend more deeply into total political war. He said that he thought the best hope for calming the waters would be for Kavanaugh to withdraw himself; to which I replied that, leaving aside that such a thing would be a wholly immoral capitulation to the vilest sort of character assassination, it would be total victory for the Democrats, and a humiliating defeat for the Republicans, and would hardly have a tranquilizing effect. (I, for one, would be furious, as would scores of millions of other Americans.)

He then went on to say that he thought Kavanaugh shouldn’t be confirmed because he had shown bad character by not owning up to all the creepy things he was tarred with in the Thursday hearing; that he thought Kavanaugh should have been honest about “boofing” and “Devil’s Triangle” and “FFFFFFF”. I (rather warmly by this point) began to demand that my friend explain how he knew what the truth was about any of those things, and he at that point suggested that we just stop, which I agreed to do. (I’m pretty good about stopping short of letting politics wreck friendships.)

Not long after, I had a similar conversation, over the telephone, with my 97-year-old mother-in-law, a woman of exceptional intelligence. Unfortunately she is now blind, and so gets all her news from the TV and radio; with only that to draw on, she thought it had been solidly established that Brett Kavanaugh was a cad and a belligerent drunkard at best, and quite plausibly a violent sexual predator. Such is the power of a coordinated and culturally ubiquitous propaganda machine.

What is most disturbing of all, however, is the extent to which women in particular (including some, if not most, of the women closest to me) have latched onto Mr. Kavanaugh as a proxy for every man who ever wronged a woman, and indeed for all the sins of the “patriarchy”, under whose iron boot-heel even modern-day American women still groan and suffer. (The fact that women in America in the 21st century have more freedom, better health, more power, more wealth, and more life options than women have ever had anywhere on Earth at any time in history makes not a dent in any of this.) Women having been crushed by men always and everywhere, finally they have one in the dock for it, and that’s all that matters — not the abandonment of due process and the presumption of innocence, not the merciless collateral destruction of a very-possibly-innocent man of spotless reputation and towering judiciary credentials in a naked struggle for power, not the complete breakdown of the civil and political norms that are the only thing that holds this nation, and this civilization, together. None of it.

When they look at Brett Kavanaugh, they don’t see a father of two girls, a devoted husband, a reliable friend, a benefactor of women and minorities trying to get ahead in law careers, a coach of a girl’s basketball team, a pre-eminent legal scholar who was first in his class throughout his long education and who has served with distinction at the highest levels of the judicial system, who has written over three hundred legal opinions from the bench and who has earned from his peers a shining and stainless reputation for brilliance, temperament, and for the keenness of his intellect. No, what they see, it seems, is nothing more than a Privileged White Male, and a chance to get their thumb in his eye. They are perfectly happy, it seems, to see him dragged though the mud, broken, humiliated, beggared and disgraced — just to get even with his sex, his race, and his class.

If they win, we all lose. Do these women really think that a collapsing society — which is exactly what they are going to get if they keep this up, and sooner rather than later — is really going to be a safer or better place for them? If they think men behave badly toward them now, what do they imagine it will be like when the rule of law decays into ruin, and, soon afterwards, all the fragile veneering of civilization — everything that holds our darkest urges in check — falls away?

We who came of age in the latter half of the twentieth century have lived our whole lives in such ease and peace and prosperity that we have mostly forgotten, I think, how rare, and how precarious, order and peace and safety are — how easily they are lost, and what sacrifices, and what sense of duty and gratitude, are necessary to sustain them. We just take it all for granted — this astonishing edifice of law and tradition and culture and trade and agriculture and innovation and justice and security — as if it was simply a pre-existing and eternal feature of the world. We imagine, lately, that we can just pick at it as we please, pull pieces out of it and burn them, hack away at its foundations, rip out its beams and joists, and crack its pillars without causing it, someday very soon, to come crashing down on our heads.

There may not be much we can do about any of this; dark clouds are gathering, and the hour is late. But I know that we can still, at least, do one honorable thing, one right thing: confirm Brett Kavanaugh.