After throwing a temper tantrum, Kavenaugh takes to the pages of Rupert’s Wall Street Journal to cry crocodile tears that he’s really a GOOD judge, yes he is, and NEVER goes off on partisan tangents or cries or weeps or engages in temper tantrums … on the court. But, understand, they were being MEAN to him. You see?
The maraschino cherry atop a cow flop sundae of unfair process, hidden documents, railroad timetables, arbitrary rulings, sudden adjournments, backroom deals and kangaroo courts, it all comes down to the next 24 hours. Just time enough for Kavanaugh to burnish his halo.
I Am an Independent, Impartial Judge
Brett M. Kavanaugh / Wall Street JournalYes, I was emotional last Thursday. I hope everyone can understand I was there as a son, husband and dad. — I was deeply honored to stand at the White House July 9 with my wife, Ashley, and my daughters, Margaret and Liza, to accept President Trump’s nomination …
Remember how he began this quest, shamelessly lying and flattering Trump with nonsense about “nobody has ever held more consultations,” etc. when everyone knows Trump simply picked from a Federalist Society pre-arranged list. But soft. This must be placed in context:
Let’s start macro and focus down to micro, shall we?
This is the third age of humankind.
The first age was Africa, weapons, tools, fire and probably dogs.
The second age was out of Africa and covering the entire world.
The third age begins, arbitrarily, on December 24th, 1968, when the crew of Apollo 8 beamed back pictures of our blue marble as it rounded the dark and hidden side of the moon, and read from a creation myth that fully half of the inhabitants on the blue marble subscribed to: Genesis.
We were forced in that moment to accept the unspeakable truth that we are one species living on one little blue island in the vastness of space.
There was no more Earthly frontier, to speak of, and we were just ONE species. This whole notion that “people are people wherever you go and think that people who aren’t like them aren’t really people at all” had to go. It became, in that moment, an inevitability.
But ancient tribal prejudices are etched into the DNA and don’t just fall away when no longer necessary for survival or understanding of the world. Ever since we touched the moon, we have looked back at the Earth, and explored the solar system. And, more and more it is inevitably traced into our days that we are all ONE species, and what we want to be doing is adopting the best practices of all cultures, because, for the first time, we are all meeting on one world.
For decades we progressed with the new spirit of that Christmas Eve. But the fear and backlash began, and the move to restrictive authoritarianism, to hyper nationalism and hyper-partisanship isn’t unique to this nation nor this continent nor this hemisphere. And, oddly, we seem to be pulling apart as a global community. That is the backlash we’re experiencing. It is deep, and it is profound, and it is real.
And, fifty years later, after globalization, after discovering just about every last lost member of the human family, and realizing that our actions ALTER the ecology and weather of that fragile blue marble, there is a sudden blowback:
Swaths of humankind, gripping their scriptures tightly claim that THEY cannot be responsible, but, in fact, Invisible Sky Beings are actually in charge of it all.
Let’s build some mountains over there.
The “White Race,” (or, if you like, “Melanin-Challenged Haplogroups”) as a whole, seemingly, have found themselves in a racist/nationalist spiral, rejecting the cries for diversity and multiculturalism that they themselves championed not many decades past — as their colonial former subjects attempt to share the “white homelands” of Europe — driven by war and famine from desertification — and, alas, the USA, and suddenly this “diversity nonsense” has created authoritarian regimes and backlash throughout the world. Similar “tribalism” has shown up across the planet.
Hutus and Tutsis, remember? It is entirely probable that virtually no one OUTSIDE those two ethnic groups can tell the difference between them, but the difference was enough between THEM that hundreds of thousands were hacked to death with machetes, rather than accept the slightest cultural compromise.
What does this have to do with the confirmation of Kavanaugh, you might ask?
Consider that Kavanaugh represents a long slog from 1973 when “evangelicals” made common cause with Catholics to wage an endless and unceasing jihad against abortion, steadily and stealthily working state laws, forcing clinics to close, harassing doctors, nurses, making a “pro life stance” a litmus test of the new GOP, steadily working to alter the makeup of the Supreme Court, so that abortion (“killing babies” as it is absurdly called, just as it is absurd to claim that I am destroying oak trees if I throw away or crush a few acorns: acorns are not oaks; zygotes are not babies) so that abortion can be outlawed.
No tactic has been too low. Firebombings, and actual bombings, assassinations, vandalism, riots and sit-ins and in-your-face clinic blockades, etc. etc. etc. have been the hallmark of “principled” religious protest since the ‘Seventies, and they can FEEL that they are on the verge of completion.
For some reason, however, this has always been covered by the media with kid gloves, ever fearful of upsetting the “pro-life” (i.e. you pays for your sin by becoming a brood mare for the Almighty/State — where the two cleave is too often unclear) crowd — a crowd most vocally led by, and increasingly dominated BY men. Another pullback.
They have been silently promised that Kavanaugh, good Catholic boy, is the Mythical Fifth Vote to overturn hated Roe, and in their haste to get the showhorse into the stables, little things like process, transparency and respect for law have been trampled to get their ‘just’ result.
I do not know of a time when lawless disregard for any semblance of fairness produced just and lasting law, and a sense of fairness and equanimity — without which and the belief of the people, the law is just dead words on paper, unread and gathering dust.
But this they believe shall happen, because, with 7.7 billion humans (as of October 2018) on the blue marble and devastating climate change underway, the notion that we don’t have enough babies seems entirely absurd.
But that is part of the backlash of this third age.
There is no vision of a “big picture” — only a lot of pearl-clutching over localized obsessions.
Countless peoples have been taught that there is ONE TRUE GOD (and many still believe in several, although that is a misconception: the monotheistic religions find ways to differentiate saints and intercessors, while the pantheistic religions all silently point to a single unifying principle underlying their weltanschauung).
And now they all look at the others and conclude that THEY have the “good” God and everybody else is crazy.
This problem has been bubbling under the surface for a long time. (Oddly, no one seems to remember that Rome was successful from the get-go because of their strict policy of religious tolerance.)
For a long time, we’ve been able to sort of ignore the issue. Pakistanis against Indians. Buddhists against Muslims. Muslims against Christians. And so forth. We have ecumenical councils, etc. but none of our religions can really cope with that reading of Genesis on Christmas eve, 1968 just yet.
Here in America, we have to accept and take responsibility for the current crisis as a grand failure of our ability to administer a secular society with a formerly homogeneous religious base. But there was never anything homogeneous about American “Christianity.” A history of religious movements wanting to keep the hell away from other movements is the history of America. Without an understanding of the Mormon movement to create a Western Empire for Mormons, no understanding of Western history (US West, that is) is possible.
The Quakers, the Puritans, the Catholics of Maryland, and the strange groups that still survive: the Amish, the Dunkers, the cloistered Nuns, and the extinct colonies: Amana, Oneida, the Shakers.
But in the seventies, certain “evangelical” sects made common cause with the Catholic Church (which had only come upon the doctrine that all abortion was always wrong all the time in 1886 at the behest of a cocaine-swigging pope) to engage in secular action to enforce their religious BELIEFS.
For some reason, media and politicians decided that THIS was Christianity, and, for the past three decades, at least, all of Christianity, seemingly, has become this unholy alliance.
There HAS been a religious test for Supreme Court justices ever since around Reagan: they want hard-core, originalist justices who are GOOD CATHOLIC BOYS and adhere to the Church’s teachings on abortion … and contraception.
Thomas Nast cartoon with anti-Catholic and anti-Irish bigotry
We have seen spontaneous outbursts (when religious/Republican forces gain supermajorities, as in 2010) of attempting to outlaw ALL contraception, along with pharmacists refusal to fill prescriptions for “day after” pills (understandably, save that if police officers don’t get to choose which laws they like and don’t like, pharmacists ought not be able to choose which pills they like and don’t).
It has been an obsession, like a dog with a funnel collar to keep them from chewing on their haunches, but they still try anyway, constantly in futile motion awaiting the moment that the motion is no longer futile: this obsession produced its own junk science, its own politicians and religious/political movements, like “Operation Rescue” and transformed the Republican party of Lincoln into the Dixiecrat party of Strom Thurmond.
But this is part of that backlash. Part of what is seldom mentioned in this movement is the need of many of its participants to stop abortion so that MORE WHITE BABIES will be born to counteract those who, according to the bigot and the neighborhood, STILL end up “breeding like rabbits.”
This is the pullback from 1968: we MUST recognize that we are a global species and community, and, therefore, the backlash is to create MORE otherness, MORE segregation, MORE Brexit (remember, the reason for the yes Brexiters was to keep “those” people out of the country) just as we have seen the same segregationist instincts playing out in Sweden, France, Italy, the Netherlands, France, Hungary, etcetera.
We are outbreeding the capacity of the planet to support us, and now, as desertification moves populations in search of basic survival, we want to close our borders, our cultures, our minds and our eyes, and Brett Kavanaugh and Donald Trump are the poster boys for that excrescence.
So yes, we’re looking at this in the next 24 hours:
There will always be an asterisk next to Kavanaugh’s name.
And we shall resume our polarization for the election now a month away.
But recognize that this isn’t an isolated incident. It is the culmination of decades and marks an alteration in the consciousness of a species that will take centuries to complete. The life of one human is just a fly on the windshield of history. But the generations pile up and we progress, whether we realize it or not.
Still, one wonders whether earthworms debate their place in the world even as they fulfill their vital role in it.
Nothing about this process has been fair or just or even much of a pretense of same.
If there’s any overarching takeaway from Mitch McConnell’s campaign to install Kavanagh, it is this: controlling the Supreme Court is FAR too important to engage in fair or even transparent process.
And this is understandable from his point of view.
The engine that drives this mayhem is the engine of resentment. The ones who haven’t gotten a square deal but the WELFARE MOM IN HER CADILLAC, driving down to buy lobster with her food stamps, THAT’s who’s to blame.
BTW: that was the image Reagan invoked to come to power, and that woman … NEVER EXISTED.
If you read their literature (and can get past the misspellings) they STILL believe in a welfare state and “food stamps” that haven’t existed since the seventies. Most of those they resent are the disabled, young children, the elderly and DISABLED VETERANS.
And yet the cruelty of resentfulness is visited upon them whenever the GOPs take power and can actually figure out how to wield it. Thus far, the Trump Maladministration has looked a lot like a band of baboons, who have found a working locomotive, but have zero idea how it works, so they spend most of their time flinging feces at it.
I’ll warrant that Mr. Kavanaugh’s tenure on SCOTUS, should he get there, will be of whole cloth, just as this process has been.
Still, miracles do happen. The British were driven out of Washington D.C. by a sudden, freak hurricane.
Perhaps the Sky Beings DO look down on our little experiment in self-governance with charity.
Courage.
cross-posted from his vorpal sword
A writer, published author, novelist, literary critic and political observer for a quarter of a quarter-century more than a quarter-century, Hart Williams has lived in the American West for his entire life. Having grown up in Wyoming, Kansas and New Mexico, a survivor of Texas and a veteran of Hollywood, Mr. Williams currently lives in Oregon, along with an astonishing amount of pollen. He has a lively blog, His Vorpal Sword (no spaces) dot com.