Notes on Current Events

The most recent mass emotional trauma to convulse the internet was the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation fiasco. I wasn't going to offer any commentary on it because I am not intensely invested in the political aspect of the matter on either side, and everyone has already weighed in on it at great length, though without saying anything that is novel or interesting to me at this time in my life. In addition, given my life experience, or lack thereof, and position in society, I wasn't able to regard the controversy and all of the feminine rage being expressed as having anything to do with me. However while the immediate fervor of the days during the process has died down, it engulfed so much of the professional/college graduate social media conversation for several weeks and continues to influence it, that I thought I should try to make some note of my impressions in the case.


I have written several times that the idea of a Supreme Court made up of partisans whose opinions on cases will be predictable 90% or more of the time based on political leaning does not make any sense to me. The point of having it is not supposed to be merely to produce desired outcomes for one party or another but to subject legal questions and disputes to wise and considered judgment producing at times unexpected insights and decisions. This seems obvious, but this is not how the more energetic partisans who drive political discourse think about it at all.


Now the mid-term elections are approaching and I am least am being bombarded at all hours of the day with dire warnings that the Republicans must be defeated at all costs or unimaginably terrible things, evidently far worse even than the hell most people are already living in, are going to befall the country. I don't disbelieve this, and I certainly wish that Donald Trump were not the president. I did not vote for him, and even if the Democratic candidate in 2020 were to make skinning straight white men alive one of the campaign planks my conscience as currently manipulated would still probably demand that I vote for a third party candidate so as not to be 100% complicit in the dreadful consequences for everyone else that will doubtless follow upon a Trump re-election. The problem with all this of course is that for all Trump's awfulness the result that defeating him and his party will bring at present is the ascension to power of a Democratic coalition that appears to be out of its mind, and so hell-bent on revenging and punishing anybody who might fit the profile of a Trump supporter, that this prospect is actually more disheartening to me than even Trump is. Trump is one person who supposedly is not very organized, does not know what he is doing, and is hated by everyone who is either competent or important. This is admittedly disturbing but he will likely be gone in ten years and I doubt given the massive amount of opposition to him among powerful interests that he will be able to abolish the constitution and establish some kind of dictatorship. If anything his enemies seem almost equally likely to do this in the name of preventing someone like Trump from ever being elected again.


Kavanaugh himself seems like somebody I would probably not like if I knew him. I am not sure if jealous would be the exact word to describe the real nature of the feelings I had towards him apart from whatever popularity he had with girls, which seems like it may not have been as high as what it would have appeared to be from such a vantage as I would have had as a youth. It would have been nice to have grown up with a little more wealth and with a somewhat clearer vision of how to successfully embark on a career more in keeping with my self-perception but I got to go to pretty good schools and I was probably even handsome enough to have achieved most of my fairly modest social dreams if I had had any personality at all. I have no idea whether he is "qualified" to sit on the Supreme Court or not. The only Supreme Court Justice I have any personal experience with is David Souter, who lives near me and whom I have run across a couple of times and had occasion to speak to and to hear speak just in passing. My fleeting impression in these instances was that even in the casual exchange he spoke a very clear, precise English, with excellent diction, "proper words in proper places" such as I at least have not heard in the past twenty years. My wife and her family speak in a clipped, direct 1920s-1940s-ish idiom that when they are on is delightful as well, but the polish and fineness of Souter's speech is quite striking to come upon in one's day to day life. This may well have nothing to do with qualifications either, but it informs my idea of what a Court justice ought to sound like. I have also known a number of people over the years who went to public high school with him, and there does not appear to have been so much as a hint of scandalous, Kavanaugh-esque behavior attaching to that part of his life. Indeed to make the suggestion among people who knew him at that age generally elicits a laugh, so far-fetched apparently is the mere idea of such a thing.


But, (apart from partisan politics generally), the question hovering over this whole controversy was,  how seriously do you take the problem of sexual misconduct/criminality, and how angry are you about it? the correct answers to which of course are, Extremely seriously, and, I am furious about it, so much so that I cannot tolerate that any plausible suggestion of an instance of its having taken place at any time in the past should not have some serious consequences. Naturally I lack the full intensity of rage and enthusiasm for retribution that the times call for. Given the disparity between the number of alleged rapes and sexual assaults (and the fury these arouse) and the official police statistics on these crimes (which indicate that perpetrators can get away with their villainy 99% or more of the time in some jurisdictions), it would seem that either the legal system as a whole needs to revamp the entire way that these offenses are defined and prosecuted to satisfy the activist left and, if not send men to prison in enormous numbers, at least bar them from holding any kinds of lucrative or influential employment (what other retribution can there be?), or eventually the rhetoric and hysteria are going to lose a lot of their power, if they aren't already. I, and doubtless many other men, have long passed the point where the most obvious means of self-preservation from this ongoing crisis, for college women at least is, "how about not going to these damn frat-type parties?" But given the response any time this is suggested, one must come to the conclusion that the men at these events who are getting girls to do shots with them and go to their bedrooms at 2 in the morning--something that the overwhelming majority of men never experience--where they proceed to behave too aggressively and take things too far, are comparatively just too desirable and high status for this to be realistically considered. The object I suppose is to train these highly sought after men to behave better, or more in line at least with what the women are looking for, but what incentive is there for these guys, the absolute pick of the litter in their social worlds, to change their behavior when it has given them everything most normal boys would like to have whether they admit it or not, has done so pretty much forever, and continues to do so even in these supposedly more enlightened times. People complain that they are entitled. Well of course they are entitled. What does anybody imagine these kinds of parties are for? Why do people think that young men endure the ridiculous rituals they endure, such as drinking other people's vomit and eating grapes out of  another guy's bunghole, to get admitted to exclusive fraternities and other social clubs, for the opportunity to perform community service at a higher level? Of course not, they want access to good career prospects and to the most desirable women, that other (usually lesser) men pointedly do not have, and will never have, which is, while not a violent matter, a pretty serious one to many in the latter group as far as certain of their ultimate life prospects are concerned.


None of this, I will be told, is to the point, but unfortunately I cannot see how this is not at all times a substantial part of the point. The bad behavior, though I believe (primarily based on reading novels and memoirs from the 1960s and 70s, mainly by morally oblivious men) it to be less prevalent overall in current society, continues generation after generation among a subset of the population because for the most part it is from the male point of view rewarded by young women as far as attaining its objects goes. The movement over the past few decades to put some restraint on heterosexual male entitlement, ego, conduct, and in much of the population their comparative power and wealth, has been quite successful but I have got to think it may be approaching its reasonable limits. I am, I think, in my behavior pretty much the model of an inoffensive person and causing anybody trauma is the last thing I would want to do but still, as I get older and can see the end of the active part of my life at least in increasingly clear sight, the main regrets that I have are not having been able to more aggressively (though not violently or criminally) go after things, experiences, relationships that I would have liked to pursue. It's a big hole in my life and to have done it would have required risk, which people ultimately demand of you before giving you any respect anyway, and likely would have involved being offensive in some way to somebody. There are built-in conflicts to life, and certainly to most forms of masculine ambition, which if you forego in youth has the tendency to wither you before your time. I don't know how many more generations full of men with no role or positive expectations to fulfill, and consequently no fire or talent for living we can seriously expect to endure.


Yes, I know, this still has nothing to do with the topic in question, the women that Kavanaugh allegedly sexually assaulted 35 years ago and whether this should have disqualified him from sitting on the court. If the accounts were true, given today's environment, and the circumstance that he does not appear to be regarded as such a superlative legal genius that there might be cause to overlook some (quibbles?--there is another word I am looking for here but I cannot think of it. I cannot remember words anymore), I would probably think it prudent to move on to someone else, though Donald Trump's own acknowledged behavior, to name but one example, seems to be considerably worse, and his followers don't care, or don't care very much, so why would he do that? But I don't have any cause to say whether they (the accounts) are true or not in the exact way and using the exact terminology which was used to recount them. So I wouldn't do it.

The Ricci Case, Souter, New England Liberals, etc, etc

I've been toiling on this post for a week now (7/6), it isn't coming together, and I don't even really care about the subject. It was in fact my distaste for the whole necessity and existence of the case that made me interested in writing about it at all. I will try to condense what I was trying to get at as succinctly as possible.

There is a certain faction of the internet Right that I confess to reading and being somewhat amused by; they are, briefly, white guys with high IQs but, one suspects, not the social status they feel they deserve, who are obsessed with IQs and social status. The reader might suspect that I identify with them, but as they only tend to respect mathematical/ science/technological intelligence or success in business and are dismissive of the abilities of anybody who studied the humanities in college--not to mention pretty much all women, blacks, non-100% European Hispanics, and anybody who isn't in the top 10-25 percentile of financial success--I feel pretty secure that they would not include me as one of their number either, and to be truthful they are rather too relentlessly Aspergery and judgemental for me to crave much of their society. Still their posts and comment boxes are kind of a guilty amusement. Anyway this crew hates affirmative action, and they were obsessed of late with the Ricci case in the Supreme Court, by which, even though the vote went their way, they were still agitated by the narrowness of the margin and the ridiculously complicated process necessary to resolve what they considered to be an obvious case to any intelligent person. I admit I did not find the case particularly exciting, as I do not find most court cases and decisions, as apparently many people do. With the Supreme Court it is pretty predictable how almost all the judges are going to rule beforehand, so there isn't in most instances much sense of any problem being identified and the truth of it worked out so much as seeing how each side of the argument justifies its pre-existing prejudices. The Right believes that it intellectually eviscerated the Left in the Ricci case, and that in general, they have a team of much more incisive and logically impregnable minds on their side in the Court, while the left's team is, with the evident exception of Breyer, soft of brain and largely confused about what their proper purpose as court justices is. The Right is at the same time resigned, or at least many of them are, to losing all similar cases in the future once Obama, or some inevitable left-leaning successor, is able to replace their guys with his guys. All of which indicates to me that 1) issues coming before the Court are essentially of a political nature rather than about seeking a dispassionate interpretation of the law under dispute, and 2) the justices are--and are seen as--mere tools of particular political ideologies and factions.

On the subject of this idea of the justices as properly beholden to a particular ideology, the obvious current example is David Souter, who when he was nominated was denounced by the left as a mediocrity and a threat to the rights of various people under that side's umbrella, and now is widely detested and denounced as a mediocrity among the right for being the nominee of a Republican president and not turning out to be very agreeable to what the Republicans perceive to be their agenda in the court. I admit I am not sure what constitutes brilliance and mediocrity in the legal world--commentators are very concerned about it, though they don't usually define it adequately enough for the general reader --though I have always thought Souter, as far as I can discern from such writing of his as I have seen, explains the reasons for his decisions as clearly and reasonably as anyone else does, if in a plainer style than is perhaps fashionable among professional intellectuals. Nonetheless many on the Republican side rack their brains trying to figure out how this rather bland pre-1960s New England Rhodes Scholar Harvard Wasp could have gone so horribly astray. Is he gay? Is he just another self-hating guilty white male liberal? Is he simply stupid?

I should interject here that I live in the smallish town (Concord, New Hampshire) where Souter went to high school and lived most of his adult life until he was named to the Supreme Court, so I know a lot of people who are personally familiar with him on one level or another, including my father-in-law. He was a legendarily brilliant student in the local public school system long before he made it to the Supreme Court, and he is by all appearances one of those very rare people who combine very high intelligence with the kind of work ethic that is almost instinctive, that is one that largely sees whatever its current work is as its proper activity, an end in itself, and as such its own reward. I don't say that he never had a calculated master plan in the back of his mind to win a Rhodes Scholarship or be named to the Supreme Court, though if he did he appears to have directed his energy towards into being worthy of attaining the goals whether they were actually attained or not rather than becoming fixated on the actual attainment of a specific goal, to the exclusion of other motivations and satisfactions, which I think is one of the unfortunate character traits that has really been gutting the soul of this country almost my entire lifetime. Souter is in a way a relic of an older attitude and approach to education and life that I find rather admirable. Concord of course is a somewhat out-of-the-way place, geographically, demographically, and culturally, even now, and was certainly so when Souter would have been growing up here in the 1950s. I am pretty sure that among all the people in Washington programmatically far more cutthroat and driven than he has ever had to be, he is one of the least likely to be out to stick it to anybody, and has a more benign view of people, their motivations, capabilities, and so on, than is generally found there...

I was going to try to go on to explain the nature of what is apparently called (disdainfully) in other parts of the country New England liberalism, beyond the fact that Republicans from Red-State America (which is now more than a day's drive from us) are just too cruel and macho and scary for most people in this emotionally sensitive region to be able to cope with anymore, and tie that into David Souter, but it would take too much time that I don't have right now.

Regarding the Ricci case, if you are going to do affirmative action it is simply stupid to have a test open to members of the group you don't want to hire where you cannot control the results. The city did blunder badly there. Affirmative action in general is one of those issues where it seems you adamantly have to take one side or the other or else everybody is calling you a milksop. I am going to take the position that I am angry at people on both sides. To the angry white men on the right using AA as a convenient scapecoat for some disappointment or failure in your life. Unless you have been blatantly and directly victimized in an area where you had an especial talent or passion that you could not pursue elsewhere or work in any other field at an approximate level--which is not most of you--realize that there are probably other forces as work, including personal inadequacy by the current, and admittedly harsh, standards of society, under which, however, minorities are still faring far worse on the whole. To the militant defenders on the left--realize that in society as it is currently constituted, where decent middle class jobs are fought over like principalities in the Holy Roman Empire, and access to the most desirable schools and professions is approaching lottery-like chances even for nominally flawless candidates, a policy that necessitates passing over thousands of candidates with far better qualifications that they are required to demonstrate to even be considered for a place or positions, to attain an AA quota, is going to be an increasingly hard policy to defend to everybody else the more time that goes on, regardless of the comparatively minor amount of harm you may, and not without reason, perhaps consider it to do.

In short, I don't think there is a workable solution to this problem until both sides grow a little more realistic about it.