What can one say about the US Judicial Committee’s spectacle last week? What new and pithy commentary can we bring to bear on the unabashed performance of patriarchal entitlement we witnessed in the so called “hearing,” wherein Dr. Christine Blasey Ford gave a sworn account of her experience of sexual assault under the inebriated force and weight of a young Brett Kavanaugh, whose violent sense of male entitlement was apparently well established at the age of 17?
What can we say about the power, grit and grace of Dr.
Ford, who has carried the memory of this drunken assault for almost forty years,
along with the visceral terror of him forcing her 15-year-old body down onto a bed against
her will? Sensory recollection being the historian that it is, it’s likely Dr. Ford
remembers the beer-laden stink of his breath in her nostrils, and the clammy pressure
of his palm against her lips, his hand jammed to her mouth as he muffled her screams. “I thought he might accidentally kill me,” she attests,
recounting how the memory of laughter remains with her still, lodged “in the
hippocampus” to this very day.
What can we surmise from the reaction in the room as
she presented the details of this violent encounter to a dried-out cabal of Republican
males, packing their wrinkled penises like wizards' wands, the gynophobic tools
of their patriarchal trade, wands with which to summon some twisted sexist magic
in order to nullify the painful, obvious truth?
What are we to make of men who still intend to elevate
this mendacious, pernicious fatally- flawed nominee, all while claiming to believe
that Dr. Ford was indeed assaulted, just not by their Brett Kavanaugh, of course.
Denial being the brewsky of choice
for this bunch, they justify their inscrutable view by insisting that she was attacked, not by Brett, but by someone else. Poor
thing… she’s confused. Sad thing… she’s mistaken.
What?!
Let’s be precise. It’s a lived reality here in the US that
not all suffering carries equal weight, any more than do the lives of which it
is a part. We’ve no apparent qualms about adding the proverbial insult to injury
when the targets are women, non-European immigrant children, people of color,
or anyone else we can “Other” in any way, shape or manner. So it’s easy to see
how for some, Kavanaugh’s vitriol and mottle-faced rudeness actually served to raise the
perception of his veracity. It’s maddening to see him cast as a victimized hero of
sorts in the myopic view of the dessicated senatorial Republican crowd.
Limited-scope FBI investigation notwithstanding, the
conclusion I draw is this, and it’s embarrassingly inescapable: it’s a priorities
game, sad and pure and simple. In a system like ours, that privileges a violent
gynophobe eager to carry tainted judicial waters for power-wielding men who also
share his views, some causes matter and others causes don’t, just as some bodies
matter and others, not so much.
And they’re salivating buckets for a supreme court judge
like Brett with his rabid disrespect for Roe v. Wade as settled law. They’re
itching in their short hairs for a stand-up guy like Brett, who has feathered
himself a fetid, linty corner of Trump’s pocket; a guy like boozy Brett who’s willing to foam at the mouth in public or contort his face like someone
possessed when weaponizing a lie.
Of course, it chills the innards to contemplate what they’d have said about Dr. Ford if her demeanor had been anything close to what this chosen son displayed.
Of course, it chills the innards to contemplate what they’d have said about Dr. Ford if her demeanor had been anything close to what this chosen son displayed.
Instead, like Anita Hill before her, she was a treatise
on self-control, knowing full well the expectations around female normative
behavior, yet transgressing them with eloquence and bedrock bravery all the
same. Her smallish voice in contrast with her warrior-scholar’s heart, we were
grateful for all she is. As she spoke, we were in synchrony. Like Professor
Hill before her, she was, and is, our own.
And so, with their array of poisonous goals within the
old misogynists’ grasp, it simply doesn’t matter that Dr. Ford is telling the
truth. It simply doesn’t matter that most of them believe her. The only thing
that matters is that they are willfully choosing
not to care, and as our experience with toxic masculinity has taught us all along, our
country, and the lives of women and girls, will be the worse for it. But old misogynous men will be old misogynous men, right?
Maybe we should all just go and get a beer.
