Letter 154-B: On the Cultural Norms in a Time of Change

"Knowledge alone is not enough. It must be leavened by magnanimity before it becomes wisdom."

-- Governor and U.N. Ambassador Adlai Stevenson

"Judge not, that ye be not judged. / For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again. / And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?"

--Saint Matthew (Gospel of Matthew; King James Version; 7 : 1-3)

BLUF(Bottom-line, Up-front).  There is no doubt in my mind that Judge Kavanaugh committed the misdeeds alleged by Dr Christine Blasey-Ford when he was seventeen. That misdeed, in itself, should not disqualify him for future offices of power and prestige. That misdeed unaddressed and unacknowledged should. As discussed recently on Facebook, I can in no way judge Brett Kavanaugh for what he did; I can, however, note mournfully what he has simply failed to do.

My view of why Judge Kavanaugh should not be confirmed. Click here.

Neurotic Back-story.  In recent comments, I have opened up a little about the same world in which Brett Kavanaugh existed. No, it was not the Choate School; had I done what Judge Kavanaugh did, even while on vacation or off-campus, and the school had found out, I suspect I would have graduated from another place. This world, to which I refer in this essay, existed in college, during which I harmed at least one and as many as three women emotionally. Subsequently, I made my amends and finally, after I had gone too far, ceased the enabling of those behaviors.

Yes, I still feel the pain of knowing that I can not undo those events; no, the women involved had no part in them, nor were their feelings unfounded. Now the previous making of amends and then setting right my life going-forward confers no special status upon me. Not doing so would imprint a special status of an altogether different order. To make sure people understand that I am not minimizing my own behavior, I can assure the reader that my transgressions – and they were transgressions – did not reach the magnitude of Judge Kavanaugh. Enough said.

Welcome to my old world. At my college, all male when I went there, one heard about women – from ‘girls schools’ nearby – ‘pulling train’ perhaps once or twice a semester, perhaps as often as once a month. Since I never participated in these activities and since those who did never spoke about them to me, I can not be exact about what happened. (Truthfully, I was never aware of who worked these trains, though some women's names were mentioned, to be quickly forgotten by me.) First of all, there were two types of pulling train about which I heard. One was ‘pulling train’, which was one woman being penetrated by multiple men in rapid succession. The second was ‘pulling a blow-train’ in which a woman performed fellatio on multiple men, again in rapid succession.

Even at the time they occurred, I felt these incidents were tantamount to gang rapes, as one of the women who came forward in the case of Judge Kavanaugh has described. My suspicion was then, and remains today, that such ‘trains’ started out with a young woman, quite drunk and likely in a black-out, going upstairs with one man, thinking she would sleep with him, as her sole partner. Et voilà! Several buddies showed up for the fun.

Whether these women were drugged, I did not know and never heard gossip to that effect. There was little, if any, consent; even then, I knew deep down inside that a gal's being drunk and giving in was not consent, not really. There was at least one party, likely more, which I attended during which one of these incidents occurred upstairs and I did not find out about it until the grape-vine caught up with me two to three days later.

(As an aside, this issue did not become important to me until my sister started at the sister college; then, it occurred to me, that the names of girls who were mentioned could possibly include hers someday. Very early on, I was relieved to find that my sister did the three things women in that setting needed to do: limit the drinking when at a party alone or with one or two other women; party only as part of a pack of women looking out for each other; and, go to the marquee state university down the road that was co-ed where men would remain accountable for such behavior.)

So the actions described by these three women about Judge Kavanaugh are parallel to those I saw in college, including ‘whipping it out’ to ‘blow out a girl'. One of my frat-rush acquaintances and I, with one or two others, were teasing back and forth with a gal at one of the nearby women’s colleges, when he – a product of a fine New England prep school – whipped out his private member. Yes, I was drunk and standing behind him; I did not see the actual penis. What I did see was a woman’s facial expression that I shall never forget. This beautiful young lady had a look of simultaneous disgust and fear on her face; it was the visible reaction of sexual violation, albeit at a low level.

Senator Durbin (D-IL) on the new cultural norms inevitably ensuing from American women attaining power over the last forty years.Click here.

Another early acquaintance had been the summer beau of a friend of mine in my hometown, a woman reputed to be ‘loose’. Who knows if she really was; all I know factually is that she was about as interested into jumping into anything with me as she was jumping into a live volcano. Yet, I had known this gal and her family for many years. Whatever her teenage habits, I knew that she came from good people. So, I introduced myself to this fellow, mentioning that I knew this gal. His response? “Yeah, I know her. And does she love to fuck.” I was so angry, though I too was drunk, that my buds had to shoo me away before I got into a fist-fight that I would have lost for sure.

In both those examples, within three weeks of starting college, all the other adjacent guys thought it was hilarious. In my case, I faked it; maybe others did, too. Later on, after I quit my drinking, I became friendly with many women, just as Bret Kavanaugh has. I got to know these women, largely by hanging out with my sister and in a fraternity where most men showed unerring respect for women. Some of the stories of what these women, who came to trust me, had endured horrified me. For example, one jilted boyfriend at my college sent one of these women – one who possessed the three-Bs: beauty, brains, breeding – a box of what looked like candy only to be human feces.

Again, I can guarantee the reader that, on the sending end of that scare-package, a bunch of guys thought it was hilarious.So, did Brett Kavanaugh exist in this world? One can bet his or her hiney he did. Did he do what Dr Blasey-Ford asserted? Admittedly, one can not be certain. In a world of subjective probabilities, however, I would assign at least a 90% likelihood that he did do these things. 

Judgement. Again, I must emphasize that I can not condemn this man for misdeeds while intoxicated as I committed the same transgressions, if not in degree at least in kind. But here is where my sympathy ends. Judge Kavanaugh, much as Justice Clarence Thomas did in 1991, showed little or no remorse for his behavior, at least publicly. Instead both tried to blame others through phrases like “a leftist political hit” or “high-tech lynching”.

Playing the race or poor-me political card was trite tripe in 1991 as it is again in 2018. As I do for Judge Kavanaugh today, I felt sympathy for Justice Thomas back then. The latter’s misbehavior appeared to have occurred at a low-point in his life when feelings and loneliness got the better of him. One can not speak for others, but neither of these nominees genuinely acknowledged the suffering of Ms Hill or Dr Blasey-Ford, let alone several other maleficiaries of their attention.

Nevertheless, blaming people by accusing others of racist or left-wing conspiracies, evaporated that sympathy fast in both cases. What makes my blood boil in these two cases is the resort to blaming the victims relied upon by Justice Thomas and Judge Kavanaugh. Neither Dr Christine Blasey-Ford nor Ms Anita Hill wanted to go public or testify; they are to be credited for doing both. 

One can not speak for others, but I can say that I am not sure I would have had the courage to do that. Their reception? Anita Hill was in love with Clarence Thomas and that love was unrequited…implication: she’s a scorned bitch striking back at an innocent man with an earthy sense of humor.

Senator Cruz (D-TX) with the best defense of Judge Kavanaugh. Click here.

Dr Blasey-Ford’s treatment has been worse. Judge Kavanaugh testified that he was sure “something terrible” happened to her but that she got it wrong in identifying him, implying that she was unstable or deranged by post-traumatic stress disorder. That begs the question: had someone – with no prior exposure to this fracas and no frame of reference – watched the manner of the two witnesses at the hearing on 27th September 2018, which person would that neutral onlooker deem the more stable? 

That answer is so self-evident as to make the question itself a rhetorical one.

Both lines, of Judge Kavanaugh and Justice Thomas, smack of bullshit; I do not like to use such argots in my pretentious and tendentious essays, outside of the direct quotations of others. Yet unfettered prose can emphasize the point. In these cases, the bullshit is that of blaming the victim. That excuse did not wash in 1991, nor should it in 2018. What remains most sobering, to me at least, is how little any Republicans contested this notion in 2018; perhaps less so than in 1991.

Though I am no fan of the Clintons, I feel badly [NOT] for Clarence Thomas for he didn’t have President and Secretary / Senator Clinton to hang his troubles on back then, as 'Brat' Kavanaugh did so loudly and pugnaciously now. Several Republican Senators are to be credited with acknowledging the power of Dr Blasey-Ford's testimony, only to swing into asserting that the witness's trauma had led her into a case of mistaken identity.

Each time I heard that, I had to ask myself, "What if your wife or daughter told you this story? Would you believe her? Or would you dismiss her recollection as compelling but somehow invalid?"

Senator Whitehouse (D-RI) picks apart Judge Kavanaugh's case. Click here.

Why it matters now as it did in 1991. Now, I suspect anyone patient enough to have read this far may have the question: ¿so, why does this matter? Good question. Constitutional law is a cerebral exercise and past misdeeds, especially those of long ago, don’t really factor into that exercise. Both Judge Kavanaugh and Justice Thomas are brilliant legal minds and that is all that really matters. Their private lives – recent or distant – are independent of their crafted thinking and written opinions.

Right?

Well, not quite.

What a Supreme Court Justice should be. The Supreme Court functions as the supreme judicial body; as such, its lifetime members function with limited transparency, less accountability and maximum latitude. That makes the Supreme Court, at least informally, a Council of Elders and not an array of talking heads. That additional burden requires men and women who have more than good minds. They must have wisdom, too.

Wisdom requires empathy, an ability to have, at least, some idea of how the other feels, no matter how ‘other’ that other really is. Empathy requires moral agency, knowing what the right thing is and when to atone for crossing that invisible line of ethics when one knows better. That self-destruction – that ‘dark night of the soul' – imposed by radical integrity makes radical empathy possible. That ego-deflation requires setting aside ‘might’ in favor of the ‘right’, as one can see the right (as an archetypal Republican once said).

Such an inward process is a harrowing one. Ultimately, if one believes thinkers over the last three or four millennia, that harrowing time becomes a redemptive one. One earns that redemption through direct amends and opening him-or-herself to change to set things right. As a case in point on the Supreme Court, I submit seven Justices who showed this wisdom accumulated not only through great achievements but through a discernible and unceasing growth of character: two liberal, two moderate and three conservatives.

Senator Jeff Flake (R-AZ) proposes a week's delay for an F.B.I. follow-through investigation. Click here.

Those ‘fluid’ jurists were Justice Hugo Black, Justice Felix Frankfurter, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, Justice David Souter, Justice John Paul Stevens, Justice Byron White and Chief Justice Earl Warren. Judge Kavanaugh seems yet to do just that: own up to his past and make amends publicly. His subsequent life has, by all accounts, set those actions right. He is a good man. Humility would make him a great Justice, as humility – true and deep humility – is an ingredient of greatness for a great many of history's greatest.

FOR THOSE WHO CAN NOT VISUALIZE WHAT A SEXUAL ASSAULT WOULD FEEL LIKE, THE BEST DESCRIPTION I HAVE ENCOUNTERED WAS THIS RECALL BY SYLVIA PLATH, IF THE BELL JAR WAS COMPLETELY AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL, TEN YEARS AFTER THE FACT THAT OCCURRED ON A NIGHT DURING WHICH SHE WAS AT LEAST TIPSY. If one wants to go directly to the incident and skip the back-story, scroll down to the words, "Marco dashed his cigar underfoot."

------ Excerpt from The Bell Jar (Harper & Row, 1971) -----

Doreen knocked on the green door with the gold knob.

Scuffing and a man's laugh, cut short, sounded from inside. Then a tall boy in shirtsleeves and a blond crewcut inched the door open and peered out.

 "Baby!" he roared.

Doreen disappeared in his arms. I thought it must be the person Lenny knew. I stood quietly in the doorway in my black sheath and my black stole with the fringe, yellower than ever, but expecting less.

"I am an observer," I told myself, as I watched Doreen being handed into the room by the blond boy to another man, who was also tall, but dark, with slightly longer hair. This man was wearing an immaculate white suit, a pale blue shirt and a yellow satin tie with a bright stickpin.

I couldn't take my eyes off that stickpin.

A great white light seemed to shoot out of it, illuminating the room. Then the light withdrew into itself, leaving a dewdrop on a field of gold.

I put one foot in front of the other.

"That's a diamond," somebody said, and a lot of people burst out laughing.

My nail tapped a glassy facet.

"Her first diamond."

"Give it to her, Marco."

Marco bowed and deposited the stickpin in my palm.

It dazzled and danced with light like a heavenly ice cube. I slipped it quickly into my imitation jet bead evening bag and looked around. The faces were empty as plates, and nobody seemed to be breathing.

"Fortunately," a dry, hard hand encircled my upper arm, "I am escorting the lady for the rest of the evening. Perhaps," the spark in Marco's eyes extinguished, and they went black, "I shall perform some small service. . ."

Somebody laughed.

". . .worthy of a diamond."

The hand round my arm tightened.

"Ouch!"

Marco removed his hand. I looked down at my arm. A thumbprint purpled into view. Marco watched me. Then he pointed to the underside of my arm. "Look there."

I looked, and saw four, faint matching prints.  "You see, I am quite serious."

Marco's small, flickering smile reminded me of a snake I'd teased in the Bronx Zoo. When I tapped my finger on the stout cage glass the snake had opened its clockwork jaws and seemed to smile. Then it struck and struck and struck at the invisible pane till I moved off.

I had never met a woman-hater before.

I could tell Marco was a woman-hater, because in spite of all the models and TV starlets in the room that night he paid attention to nobody but me. Not out of kindness or even curiosity, but because I'd happened to be dealt to him, like a playing card in a pack of identical cards.

A man in the country club band stepped up to the mike and started shaking those seedpod rattles that mean South American music.

Marco reached for my hand, but I hung on to my fourth daiquiri and stayed put.

I'd never had a daiquiri before. The reason I had a daiquiri was because Marco ordered it for me, and I felt so grateful he hadn't asked what sort of drink I wanted that I didn't say a word, I just drank one daiquiri after another.

Marco looked at me.

"No," I said.

"What do you mean, no?"

"I can't dance to that kind of music."

"Don't be stupid."

"I want to sit here and finish my drink."

Marco bent toward me with a tight smile, and in one swoop my drink took wing and landed in a potted palm. Then Marco gripped my hand in such a way I had to choose between following him on to the floor or having my arm torn off.

"It's a tango." Marco maneuvered me out among the dancers. "I love tangos."

"I can't dance."

"You don't have to dance. I'll do the dancing."

Marco hooked an arm around my waist and jerked me up against his dazzling white suit. Then he said,

"Pretend you are drowning."

I shut my eyes, and the music broke over me like a rainstorm. Marco's leg slid forward against mine and my leg slid back and I seemed to be riveted to him, limb for limb, moving as he moved, without any will or knowledge of my own, and after a while I thought, "It doesn't take two to dance, it only takes one," and I let myself blow and bend like a tree in the wind.

"What did I tell you?" Marco's breath scorched my ear. "You're a perfectly respectable dancer."

I began to see why woman-haters could make such fools of women. Womanhaters were like gods: invulnerable and chock-full of power. They descended, and then they disappeared. You could never catch one.

After the South American music there was an interval. Marco led me through the French doors into the garden. Lights and voices spilled from the ballroom window, but a few yards beyond the darkness drew up its barricade and sealed them off. In the infinitesimal glow of the stars, the trees and flowers were strewing their cool odors. There was no moon.

The box hedges shut behind us. A deserted golf course stretched away toward a few hilly clumps of trees, and I felt the whole desolate familiarity of the scene -- the country club and the dance and the lawn with its single cricket.

I didn't know where I was, but it was somewhere in the wealthy suburbs of New York.

Marco produced a slim cigar and a silver lighter in the shape of a bullet. He set the cigar between his lips and bent over the small flare. His face, with its exaggerated shadows and planes of light, looked alien and pained, like a refugee's.

I watched him.

"Who are you in love with?" I said then.

For a minute Marco didn't say anything, he simply opened his mouth and breathed out a blue, vaporous ring.

"Perfect!" he laughed.

The ring widened and blurred, ghost-pale on the dark air.

Then he said, "I am in love with my cousin."

I felt no surprise. "Why don't you marry her?"

"Impossible."

"Why?"

Marco shrugged. "She's my first cousin. She's going to be a nun."

"Is she beautiful?"

"There's no one to touch her."

"Does she know you love her?"

"Of course."

I paused. The obstacle seemed unreal to me. "If you love her," I said, "you'll love somebody else someday."

Marco dashed his cigar underfoot.

The ground soared and struck me with a soft shock. Mud squirmed through my fingers. Marco waited until I half rose. Then he put both hands on my shoulders and flung me back.

"My dress. . ."

"Your dress!" The mud oozed and adjusted itself to my shoulder blades. "Your dress!" Marco's face lowered cloudily over mine. A few drops of spit struck my lips.

"Your dress is black and the dirt is black as well."

Then he threw himself face down as if he would grind his body through me and into the mud.

"It's happening," I thought. "It's happening. If I just lie here and do nothing it will happen."

Marco set his teeth to the strap at my shoulder and tore my sheath to the waist. I saw the glimmer of bare skin, like a pale veil separating two bloody-minded adversaries.

"Slut!"

The words hissed by my ear.

"Slut!"

The dust cleared, and I had a full view of the battle.

I began to writhe and bite.

Marco weighed me to the earth.

"Slut!"

I gouged at his leg with the sharp heel of my shoe. He turned, fumbling for the hurt.

Then I fisted my fingers together and smashed them at his nose. It was like hitting the steel plate of a battleship. Marco sat up. I began to cry.

Marco pulled out a white handkerchief and dabbed his nose. Blackness, like ink, spread over the pale cloth.

I sucked at my salty knuckles.

"I want Doreen."

Marco stared off across the golf links.

"I want Doreen. I want to go home."

"Sluts, all sluts." Marco seemed to be talking to himself. "Yes or no, it is all the same."

I poked Marco's shoulder. "Where's Doreen?"

Marco snorted. "Go to the parking lot. Look in the backs of all the cars."

Then he spun around.

"My diamond."

I got up and retrieved my stole from the darkness. I started to walk off. Marco sprang to his feet and blocked my path. Then, deliberately, he wiped his finger under his bloody nose and with two strokes stained my cheeks. "I have earned my diamond with this blood. Give it to me."

"I don't know where it is."

Now I knew perfectly well that the diamond was in my evening bag and that when Marco knocked me down my evening bag had soared, like a night bird, into the enveloping darkness. I began to think I would lead him away and then return on my own and hunt for it.

I had no idea what a diamond that size would buy, but whatever it was, I knew it would be a lot. Marco took my shoulders in both hands.

"Tell me," he said, giving each word equal emphasis. "Tell me, or I'll break your neck." Suddenly I didn't care.

"It's in my imitation jet bead evening bag," I said. "Somewhere in the muck."

I left Marco on his hands and knees, scrabbling in the darkness for another, smaller darkness that hid the light of his diamond from his furious eyes.

Doreen was not in the ballroom nor in the parking lot. I kept to the fringe of the shadows so nobody would notice the grass plastered to my dress and shoes, and with my black stole I covered my shoulders and bare breasts.

Luckily for me, the dance was nearly over, and groups of people were leaving and coming out to the parked cars. I asked at one car after another until finally I found a car that had room and would drop me in the middle of Manhattan.

At that vague hour between dark and dawn, the sunroof of the Amazon was deserted.

Quiet as a burglar in my cornflower-sprigged bathrobe, I crept to the edge of the parapet. The parapet reached almost to my shoulders, so I dragged a folding chair from the stack against the wall, opened it, and climbed onto the precarious seat. A stiff breeze lifted the hair from my head. At my feet, the city doused its lights in sleep, its buildings blackened, as if for a funeral.

It was my last night.

I grasped the bundle I carried and pulled at a pale tail. A strapless elasticized slip which, in the course of wear, had lost its elasticity, slumped into my hand. I waved it, like a flag of truce, once, twice. . . The breeze caught it, and I let go.

A white flake floated out into the night, and began its slow descent. I wondered on what street or rooftop it would come to rest. I tugged at the bundle again.

The wind made an effort, but failed, and a batlike shadow sank toward the roof garden of the penthouse opposite.

Piece by piece, I fed my wardrobe to the night wind, and flutteringly, like a loved one's ashes, the gray scraps were ferried off, to settle here, there, exactly where I would never know, in the dark heart of New York.