Soreness

Growing up, I was never really an athletic kid.  The thing that I did learn from my misadventures in Little League was how important it was to be a "good sport."  The first lesson in good sportsmanship is how not to throw a tantrum when you lose, but at some point it is important to learn how to be a good winner as well.  As it turned out, the things that I tended to win in life were more mental than physical in nature, and in that arena it is even more important to learn how to win gracefully.  In the world of competing ideas, presentation and demeanor can be supremely important.  In my line of work, I have had to realize that being right is not even 50% of the job description.
"Winning isn't everything, it's the only thing," is the mantra of a sociopath.  It is the path to wickedness.  Thus, here in the wake of the Kavanaugh debacle, I feel like we are losers, all of us.  The gloating of the winners makes them appear to be insensitive to the plight of people who have experienced sexual assault. This is multi-faceted: they refuse to believe that it happened, the oldest and most familiar form of negation, they may call her a liar, they may simply say that she doesn't remember it correctly.  Worst of all they may, in fact, find her credible, but simply not care enough to delay or even halt their march to victory.  I feel like the responses to the whole scenario I have seen on social media, while they do not add any clarity to the truth of what happened so long ago, tell me an awful, awful lot about the people who double down on scoffing and self-righteous anger.
On the side that feels like they just lost, there is much weeping and gnashing of teeth.  Suspicions (perhaps even hopes) that the legitimacy of the Court is on the wane, vengeful fantasies about voting all the bastards out, and general vilification of those who have dug the bunker of white male privilege that much deeper, have been pretty common over the past few days.  I feel the sort of stomach turning futility of this whole affair.  I have felt it before. It is what Psalm 40 refers to as the miry clay, that sucking pit or bog that just will not let you move and threatens to drown you.  It is indeed hard to be a good loser when that involves explaining to my daughter that the highest level of our justice system may have two men who were credibly accused of treating women badly sitting on its bench.  I understand that accusations are not proof, I understand that we need to have protections against false allegations, this is true and important.  But any quest for the truth was beggared by the limitations of the investigation that eventually took place only because one Republican man grew a temporary spine.
It is unfortunate that the spine was not a permanent addition.  It is unfortunate that many Republicans (not just Susan Collins) had reservations that needed to be put to bed for real, and still decided to just plow ahead.  It strikes me that this decision was too important to be made as quickly as it was.  If I were Kavanaugh I would want every possible measure taken to verify my innocence before becoming a permanent public figure, who will, rightly or wrongly, become synonymous with sexual assault and frat bro misbehavior.
Time will tell what happens as a result of this. It may be that the last retrenchment of white male hegemony was simply the digging of a grave not a fortress, but I am not sanguine that the days of McConnell, Grassley and Trump are at an end. We may be on the verge of outing and holding the Harvey Weinsteins and Bill Cosbys of the world accountable, but the system that enables them and even protects them is not going to go quietly.  To think it will just fade away is naive and perhaps even dangerous to the cause of justice.  I know every time I see Clarence Thomas, I can't help but think about pubic hairs and "Long Dong Silver," I consider his judgment to be less than Supreme Court worthy.  Kavanaugh will be a similar case for me, even if I give him the benefit of the doubt that he actually didn't do what Dr. Ford said he did, and he was just a rowdy drunk frat bro doing rowdy drunk frat bro things, as many more corroborating witnesses attest, I still think he needs to own up to who he was. I doubt the veracity of his characterizations of himself, and while dishonesty with oneself is certainly not rare or disqualifying, it does not give me many good feelings about what has just happened in our country.
He is where he is, and we are where we are.  At this point nothing can change that.  My lingering angst right now is that the whole affair was so squalid and rancorous, how can we be proud of what we have wrought?  Win or lose, how can you be happy with how we got here?