A BUREAUCRATIC CONVERSATION

So I spent Wednesday sitting in the basement hallway of the Pondera County courthouse, waiting to get my driver's license renewed and obsessing over what unexpected requirement might pop up.  Would there were a test of laws?  Would someone demand a copy of a paper proving my old old pickup had passed a safety test? Would I have to produce a proof of current insurance when it had been cancelled until 2AM when my SSA check hit the bank and I paid online what was due with my bank debit card which doesn't give a person a receipt? (Actually, it did, but it went into the "junk" category and I only fished it out when I got home.)  I was pretty sure I didn't have to have an appointment for a license and that I had to pay in advance upstairs.  

There was a little red dispenser where a person had to get a number, and then there was a paper to complete, using a clipboard that was floating around the area.  (No tables.)  The other people waiting were very helpful and explained what to do.  There were two older ladies, one from Great Falls which had become overwhelmed so that the bureaucrats there sent her an hour north to Conrad and another who was local.  Others included a vaguely Irish older man in a camo vest, a couple of boys who were probably older than they seemed to me, and a very large Blackfeet man.

I thought I might know this last guy, so when he had to call his wife on his cell phone to find out the physical address of their house for the questionnaire, I asked if they lived out in the country.  No street names.  "On the two track to the so-and-so ranch, just two rez dumpsters past the main cow herd."  He laughed and agreed.  We chatted but then his number was called.

The LOL from Great Falls was reading a big fat book.  I asked whether it was a novel, but she explained that it was history about the Revolutionary War.  Then I got really brave and remarked that the fourth Kavanaugh accuser had showed up in the media today.  The rest of the conversation was fascinating.  

Everyone seemed to think they might be held responsible somehow.  They were indignant in a kind of push-the-button way -- rape, porn, pedo -- It was like a checklist of trigger words.  They were quick to explain how innocent they were personally.  The guy in camo turned out to have been a cop most of his life in small towns and vast counties, usually a matter of picking up pieces.  He assured us that he had attended murder investigation classes taught by the FBI and he therefore knew that this rape case wouldn't lead to a conviction that would hold up -- no evidence, you see.  He knew about the chain of evidence.  I commented that there was no trial -- that we were looking for someone of good character who would be fair on the highest court of the land.  We were all quiet for a few minutes.

The man said he was opening up a gun shop because of his law enforcement background.  (I didn't say that I would think it more reasonable to get guns out of people's hands.)  One of the old ladies told about what a good shot she had been and described shooting three raccoons who had invaded her place.  The other old lady wanted us to know she was descended from one of the suffering soldiers at Valley Forge with General Washington.  Everyone admired these intrepid old ladies.

I wondered what the Blackfeet man would have said.  I don't think the others would have said much when he was still here.  The young men were silent anyway.  In a while the talk dwindled.  In the end I think no one really knew what to say except that they were against bad things: rape, porn, pedo, and being unarmed and therefore vulnerable.

These folks only watched Fox or CNN so hadn't seen the clip of Trump's theatrical claims at the UN being met with laughter from the German delegation.  "Those Germans had better treat us respect!  We saved their country for them in the War."  Clearly she meant WWII.  I remarked that was 70 years ago.  The prospective gunshop owner said he had been stationed in Germany and actually saw the Wall that separated the half we "saved" from the half that Russia saved.  He was very pleased that the wall came down, but said he thought it was a drain on us to have so many soldiers there to protect them.  I suggested maybe the soldiers were there to guarantee their loyalty to us.  I didn't mention Trump's wall.

In the end everyone passed all requirements and left with their driver's licenses, which were curiously attached to identification, voter registration and organ donation.

The different effect on me of this search for a human being wise and respectable enough to be a Supreme Count Judge was marked.  I'll repeat what I said in a "tweet" earlier:  I thought I'd gotten cynical after finding out how many of my fellow clergy were screwing around.  I thought I'd gotten skeptical after my principal dropped dead of a heart attack just before going to court to defend himself for harassing the cute TA.  (He insisted she go for "rides" with him during the lunch break.)  I thought I'd recovered from the PDX mayor I worked for schtupping his babysitter. (She was 13.  After the incident he worked for the Feds at cabinet level until the public remembered who he was.)  So on and so on.  But I haven't.  I still get heartsick over this stuff.  Gutshot. Tired.  

There are many more examples.  My parishioners were part of the hook-up culture and hurt by it so they came to me for reassurance.  I don't get it.  There's no need.  They didn't really like each other.  It appeared to be a sort of sign of privilege and an upside-down virtue, being able to attract someone enough for one night.  Wouldn't it make more sense to pay for someone who was good at sex?  

Wouldn't it be better to look for someone other than a person from Georgetown elite society where there must have been many abortions due to "trains" at parties while drunk?  Aren't they more likely candidates for liver transplants than for being on the Supreme Court?

IT'S ABOUT PRIVILEGE

“It takes one rapist to commit a rape, but it takes a village to create an environment where it happens over and over.”  This quote is from the "tweet" of Rebecca Wind, who has credentials in international relations, religion, marketing, and social work.  It goes to one of the dynamics that give us headaches: the difference between the individual and the group, which means that sometimes what helps or hurts the individuals COMES FROM the group consensus so that sometimes the individual is deeply right but martyred and other times the individual is totally wrong and must be controlled.

The next problem-producer is that these dynamics change, sometimes subtly and sometimes radically over the years.  The pressure for change might be political, or religious conversion, or a transformation in the religion, polis, or general circumstances.  Our ideas and standards about sex, for example, have been changed chemically with major consequences if you think about the reality of accessible and fairly undetectable contraception.  I watch old BBC murder mysteries in which many of the motives for murder come from illicit pregnancy (unwanted or from the wrong conjunction).  If those women had only been on the pill!

We are told that male fertility is sinking in the US, but not why.  This might be one way that pregnancy is on our minds and doesn't support contraception.  But also now we can "tell" what man was the father and require him to pay up for the child's needs.  This supports contraception as well as condoms to prevent DNA evidence.  And condoms protect from  disease so that's another vote for contraception.  (In the time I was a child, condoms were illegal, which meant one got them by mail order.  Illegality didn't stop sales.)

On the women's side the sentimentalization of motherhood opposes the risk of maternal death from pregnancy and birth  The yearning for making a family stands against the desire to have a career.  One can escape from both sides of these dynamics, but it might not be easy.

A Chinese film about injustice portrays the determination of a married woman to seek redress after the landlord of the peasant couple in a ruckus over rent kicks her husband in the genitals hard enough to have possibly made him sterile.  This would affect her value as a wife since it would mean no children, no protection in old age, and no help with crops all along.  She demands compensation, going up and up the bureaucracy to the top.  To her, reproduction is profit and success, not the result of a desire for sex.

In our culture sex stands for wealth in quite a different way: who can fuck whom is a marker of importance and status.  People are judged by their spouses, their lovers, the access to admired people.  Love and intimacy are private, not connected to sex.  In fact, I'm told by cops and sexworkers that esp. for men, sex is connected to violence, beating someone up is as satisfying as "cuming".  Sex is considered to motivate violence, to deflect attention from the real erotic sensation of entitlement to violence.  Certainly this is portrayed over and over in those BBC murder mysteries -- more violent in the American versions of those stories.

Sex is used for marketing -- in fact, sex promotes things that have nothing to do with sex, just by associating the items with flirting people.  But sex is rarely seen as anything but overwhelming drive to fuck to climax, and it is assumed to be everywhere, esp. in high culture, like working for an important firm in a big city where people do a lot of drinking.  Ironically, drinking is only relevant as a feature of seduction, breaking down resistance, but also prevents both intimacy and performance.  Drinking encourages violence.

Ironically again, the best article I've seen so far that addresses how our society betrays individuals in controversial cases is in VICE magazine.  https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/j54pa3/lifetime-supreme-court-appointments-are-a-total-disaster?utm_source=vicetwitterus

VICE is an interesting magazine, interesting because it is unpredictable.  Starting in Montreal, a tolerant and artistic city, it has veered around the English-speaking world, currently based in NYC.  It confronts sex frontally but gives it much less power than other sources who suppress sex.  Thus, their ability to get the big picture over time and around the planet.  Their ideas about how to reform the Supreme Court are reasonable and clearly related to the change in our culture through the centuries since the idea was framed.

We are a democracy based on capitalism and merchandizing.  At the time of founding, it was thought -- because of enlightenment and rationality -- that trade was the best source of peaceful relationships between nations and a valid measure of human value.  A strong, smart, profit-producing dark-skinned human being -- owned like a woman -- could make a plantation successful, an idea which turned out to be irrational, a devilish disregard for human beings, even if the law defined them as property.  Even so, the females were considered producers of more property and natural genetic families were of no importance for poor people, something like the children held in cages today.  It's remarkable how these rationalizations have clung to us after centuries of what we thought had been reformed.  They are ideas connected to agriculture, going back to feudalism, but still sneak into the thinking of single individuals living in cities with more desire for success than for families.

At one time and place a woman who denied intercourse was denying babies, which is still an obsession of old and ultra-right-wing men in our culture.  Then the issue was the ownership of the baby, which were also property.  (Abortion!!)  If she were sterile, she was useless, valueless.  Sex was not a matter of pleasure, but of productivity.  Raping a woman reduced her value to other men because her babies demonstrated the virility of the unpermitted man.  It was like breaking into a man's house and smashing his furniture.  A matter of power, violence, not pleasure or even productivity.  Among teens in low income places, boys with access to girls who "get her pregnant", will say, "I gave her a baby.  Therefore, she owes me."  He will show up for meals and demand money.  Babies mean money from the safety net of the government.  (This is not an argument against safety nets, but another time . . . )

If one takes all these observations together and turns them to the consideration of Kavanaugh, the consideration should not be about the emotion of sex and a young man's inability to control himself, but rather about his need to prove he is virile, productive, and stronger than anyone who denies him.  It is also a valuing of violence rather than seduction and the need for help from a fellow privileged human-being who also failed to value the life and respect of a person who happened to be female.  They knew it was wrong, even to peers, or why guard the door?

When you put it that way, this man's deepest convictions -- which he has continued to demonstrate and which have somehow earned him the convenient help of older and more important men -- disqualify him from judging any other human beings.  It's not just a matter of rape.