CommentsBELL VIEW-A recent NPR poll showed that 54% of Republicans believe Brett Kavanaugh should be seated on the Supreme Court even if he did things he’s accused of doing.
Think about that for a minute. A majority of Republicans think a man who held a fifteen-year-old girl down on a bed and clamped his hand over her mouth to stifle her screams of terror as he tried to rip her clothes off should sit on the United States Supreme Court.
But he was seventeen! they stammer. If he’s not finally safe, none of us are. Our sons and grandsons will be at risk of false accusations for the rest of their lives.
And now we come to the #MeToo moment in all of this. Because the people stammering about false accusations admit they don’t really care whether the allegations are true or false. True, my sons will be forever at risk if they sexually assault someone – even if they’re drunk and young and stupid. They will forever fear for their reputations if they sneak drugs into some’s drink in an attempt to incapacitate them. If they take part in drunken gang rapes during their salad days, they will be looking over their shoulders for the rest of their lives.
I can live with that. And my sons will have to live with that too. That’s the new reality, and it’s about time. #MeToo does not mean all accusers must be believed, but it does mean all must be taken seriously, all must be listened to. Every time. It’s that simple.
The essence of Trumpism – Make America Great Again – takes for granted a time when guys like Brett Kavanaugh could rely on their impeccable credentials and pedigrees to ride to the top of the heap. In the good old days, boys could be boys and still sit on the Supreme Court. This system derived from a culture built on the silence of its victims. So, when people ask why a fifteen-year-old girl didn’t tell her parents or why victims of groping and worse kept going back to the same parties, the answer becomes obvious if we only put ourselves in their shoes.
Picture yourself a fifteen-year-old girl in the 80s, the culture if rife with images celebrating adolescent boyhood: “Porky’s,” “Sixteen Candles,” “Risky Business,” “Bachelor Party” …. The Sexual Revolution of the 60s had devolved into a drunken frat party. What’s a teenage girl who’s been drugged and groped by a drunken frat boy to do? Shout her story from the rooftops to a world that simply doesn’t care? Step out of the culture, skip childhood, and sit in her room licking her wounds? Or toughen up, die a little inside, and get used to it – snowflake.
The MAGA crowd misses those days, misses them badly. Trump is their pied piper leading them back to the world they once either ruled or endured. And Brett Kavanaugh will be their crowning achievement – the ultimate affirmation that the culture that just doesn’t care will never die.
(David Bell is a writer, attorney, former president of the East Hollywood Neighborhood Council and writes for CityWatch.) Prepped at CityWatch by Linda Abrams.
