Th1rteen R3asons Why kavaNaught.

Listening to the blase testimony of a broken-down Ford, I started to have a memory jog, a sense of familiarity with a story I had nonetheless never heard before, until that proverbial little bell went off in my head and I realized what, to me, was a striking similarity between Dr. Ford's account of her teenage trauma, and the teenage trauma of Hannah Baker, the protagonist in Th1rteen R3asons Why, who takes her own life because of circumstances resulting from the jock mentality of bullying and males' perception of girls as their playthings that existed at her high school.

 The striking similarities?

1) Rape culture: Kavanaught is not just a Catholic, he's a Catholic that believes ardently in the Church and the Rape Culture it maintains, and would still be maintaining, if it weren't for the fact that the priestly depredations included BOYS. So much so that everyone thinks pedophilia refers to the rape of boys, whereas it is a term that encompasses having sex underage children of either gender. So statutory rape is what it really is, it's pederasty that's between males. But because most of our allies in the middles east are not only advocates, but practitioners of, childhood rape of 12-year-old girls, and even Democratic India still uses female offspring as a source of wealth to be sold to 50-year-old lascivious ogres, the fact that the Catholic Church's priests were either raping girls or covering up for those who did, was never a problem ...  nor was it the well-kept secret the Kavanaughs of the world would have you believe. It was only when MALES started coming forward, males of the same age and nature of  Kavanaugh (I went to Catholic High School and Holy Cross College as a youth: Catholic drinking culture is overwhelming, aggressive, and every bit as misogynistic as Dr. Ford portrays it as at that time. (Whether it still is? well ...). So for him to portray himself as a good Catholic and choirboy,should NOT be taken as a sign of virtue, but for what it ostensibly is: a sign  of complicity in and acceptance of Rape Culture.

2) Jocks. At Liberty High, as in most high schools, they rule the roost and take what they want. They are the High School apprentices of the over-arching militarism and Bullying nature the USA has shown as its true face. Like the name of the school, America has debauched the concept of Liberty so thoroughly that it no longer means that you have personal freedom until it starts to impinge on that of others, but has perverted it to mean the Freedom of the Rich and Powerful, whether as countries or individuals, to bully, oppress, and, should it prove necessary, exterminate, those opposing their own ascendancy. Giving them a Liberty high indeed.

3) Frat Brat twits: the boys in neither case had become frat brats yet, but in both the series and the Ford saga, they went on to become such: engaging in privileged drinking, sexually-charged initiations usually involving the degradation, humiliation and dehumanization of a fellow human being as a source of great fun and ribald hilarity. Punked gone wild, as it were.

4) Although already mentioned tangentially, Drunkeness: the culture of BEER: One of the teenagers is in puppy-love with Hannah Baker, so a bunch of Jocks and Bullies (not always the same, many bullies are physical wrecks, and hang around the jocks to bask in their aura and do their dirty work, as the jocks could get kicked off the team) confront him and dare him to drink, under the threat of a thrashing from them ganging up on him (Bullies are generally, as we saw from Kavanuah's performance, cowards who get all girly-weepy when they don't get their own way or are confronted by superior force), an entire quart of beer while they cheer him on. Again, as a teenager, in a beer-swilling working class Lowell background, I can attest to the accuracy of this depiction: you don't drink? You're a pussy, a momma's boy, a nothing faggot ...  (not exactly the categories a 16-year-old wishes to be classified in). Perhaps you think this has changed: I would maintain it's only gotten worse. It is directly tied to the hyper-masculine, anti-feminine, competitive military culture we're all stewed in 'til we start firing guns because it's just so much goddam fun!

5) Kegs!

6) Choir boy image: The teens responsible for the rapes in Th1rteen R3asons Why, of which there are two, are squeaky clean jocks basking in the adoration of their classmates for bringing glory to Liberty High.

7) When confronted with his crime, the protagonist turns into a snarling junkyard dog right in front of our eyes. The transformation, was, as Kavanaugh's was, as startling as a werewolf, or Jeckyl/Hyde movie, and without special effects!

There are other physical similarities relating to the specifics of Dr. Ford's account:

8) Two attackers: both of whom were drunk and acquainted with each other in an intimacy above and beyond the usual high school friendships. Of which only one actually commits the offense that traumatizes his victim. Neither suggests any overt homosexual congress, but there is a decided tone to their fondness for each other that is suggestive of the current term, "Bromance". That soldiers love and care for each other in wartime and under conditions of war is not only accepted but lauded. But   civilian men in peacetime must hide affection for another male as carefully as the most homo-erotic must.

9) The girl is pushed into a bedroom, on the second floor, and the door locked behind her leaving her and her assailant inside.

10) The victim tells no one. It is this salient fact that brought me to think of 13 Reasons Why. When the press was asking why Dr.Ford didn't tell anyone, I thought of this Netflix series. I needn't however have done so. Two of my sisters were the victims of repeated rape as teenage girls, neither ever told a soul, certainly neither the authorities nor my parents, neither of whom would have done a thing, and the girls would have been accused of lying.

11) In both cases, both the assailants and the girls were drunk illegally, none of them being old enough to drink.

12) Social class was not exactly what you would call working class. In both the TV drama and the actual one recounted by Dr.Ford, the perpetrator and the victims were of an order of magnitude above the hoi polloi economic status of their contemporaries. 

13) Highly political milieu: In the series, although it is never mentioned by the series' writers,  producers, or critics, the bullying culture prevalent at the High School reflects the bullying culture of the Economic system as evidenced by the monopolistic practices of one War-Mart, a drugstore that used unfair business practices to push small business owners out of their home territory and then  actively worked to push them out of the area they had fled to to get away from them: but there's no escaping Monopoly on this scale. Not when, like Amazon, Apple, IBM, Microsoft, Westinghouse, on and on and on, it has the full faith and credit of America's Military Government behind it.

Simarlarly, in the current, political theater, more egregious problems with Kavanaugh are never explicitly stated either:

His, not only support for, but, as associate White House Counsel for then-President George W. Bush,  Brett Kavanaugh's participated in the passing of The PATRIOT Act, a bit of skullduggery that, contrary to Lindsey Graham's words,  " ... was the most unethical sham since I've been in politics". Not some committee hearing. SenaTory (sic) Graham is referring to the perceived railroading of one man, one completely replaceable Frat-Brat judge, whereas that particular frat Brat presided over the most despicable sham I'VE ever seen in politics, which is the Bush/Cheney's usage of the 9/11 disaster to hoodwink the American Public into not only illegal wars, but the trading away of their 4'th and 5'th amendment rights in exchange for a promised, but never delivered, "Security". This act greatly expanded the Deep State these same Republicans keep groaning on and on about, by creating two of the biggest boondoggles in the Federal hierarchy of Acronymic agencies: The much-vaunted, but mostly theatrical, TSA, and the Federal trough known as the Dept Of Homeland Security. SenaTory Graham, I suggest you take a flight like the regular people, and you will quickly see that, "This is hell", and not the hell of one lone Jock bully, entitled choirboy, but of an entire nation, so that the DHS can put on their act while for the most part, it is a provider of sinecures, rewards for payment of political debts for white, politically-attached untrained jocks. Usually the only job they can ever hope to qualify for.

Kavanaugh’s career as a Republican legal operative and judge supporting the power of corporations, the security state and abusive foreign policy as well as torture, leading up to and including his career as a federal judge, these betrayals of his office, however would not have cost him the nomination, anymnore than not doing the job he was being paid to do was what cost Scott Pruitt's his. So for the Democrats to stoop to this recourse, may in fact be as reprehensible as Graham, (who Trump himself has observed, is, "one of the dumbest human beings I’ve ever seen”) contends, can not only be understood, but from the future peril of the country and its pell-mell slide to Autarky, can perhaps be even sanctioned, should it work.

He also maintains that mass surveillance is “entirely consistent” with the US Constitution.

The NSA's habitual spying on unsuspecting citizens who have committed no crime nor engaged in any suspicious behavior of any kind, for which revealing the extent of Snowden is still hiding out in Russia, Kavanaugh fully supported and wrote judicial arguments upholding, yet did you hear one single reference to it in all the hours upon hours of reporting on this confirmation hearing? The prohibitive cost alone, in both energy usage and personnel, is enormous, and, as we've seen time and again during the many shootings that have occurred while DJ's making America Grate Again (like it ever stopped) the vast ocean of data is so completely unmanageable that suspects who should be under surveillance are, even after being interrogated, are set free, enabled thereby to go on and commit mass murder.

Senator Dick Durbin: “It is clear now that not only did Judge Kavanaugh mislead me when it came to his involvement in the Bush Administration’s detention and interrogation policies, but also regarding his role in the controversial Haynes nomination.”

Who nominated him? President, “I'll not only bring back waterboarding  … I'd do a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding”, Trump.

Hear any of the members of the SenaTory judicial committee ask any questions about that?

Nope.

As Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers ask in their great piece in Counterpunch,  Kavanaugh is the Wrong Nominee:

"Shouldn’t  the risk of having a torture facilitator on the Supreme Court be enough to stop this nomination?"

You'd think so, huh? But no, Graham screams at the committee,

 "I would never do to them what you've done to this guy!"

But "this guy" he is referring to is an apologist for torture, a man who would do to you FAR worse than anything perpetrated on poor little picked-on him, merely because of the suspicion of wrong-doing! 

 Graham further fulminates,

 "I cannot imagine what you and your family have gone through."

This from a member of Congress. The Congress that eagerly approved the Bush Wars; Wars that ended up tearing American families apart while sending more than 4000 of our countrymen to early graves; causing PTSD to thousands and thousands more; crippling tens of thousands more for life, limbs blown off, faces permanently disfigured, ability to work gravely impaired, burdening the rest of the public with the onus of supporting an ever-growing population of militarily-destroyed human beings used as fodder for wars no one has any idea to this day why we're fighting, yet you can't imagine what KAVANUGH's family has gone through!? It's only the momentary ordeal of a self-serving, torture-apologist, surveillance-(by the Deep State)-supporting, unitary-executive-defending judge that finally stirs your empathy? Why has no one asked SenaTory Graham,

"What the Hell's the matter with you?!"

Those people, those soldiers, don't matter; Their families torn apart for a generation now, and reduced to penury, just don't matter. Their astronomical suicide rate, because of policies Graham has as a member of Congress, inflicted on them, are of no concern. Just keep sending more. The damage done to their families is a trivial matter, not to even be compared with the trauma poor Brat Kavanaugh has undergone. Apparently only the $200,000-and-higher salaried civilian government employees of the Republican Party, one immersed in a self-described swamp, government employees for whom the scariest words in the English language are, "I'm a government employee and I'm here to help", matter.

But They're the ones from the government and THEY'RE the ones insisting that the fact that they're there to help is the scariest thing imaginable to contemplate. We should take them at their word: It is of them we should all be deeply scared. Yet here we sit night after night as they argue with one another over Nothing. A Kavanaught caught being Kavanaughty and snarling like a junkyard dog because some uppity bitch thinks she has the right to do anything other than submissively bare her throat to his snarling advances.

Okay, I get it, it's wrong. But unlike the other actually unconstitutional, yet ignored, aspects of Kavanaugh's career, it neither was, nor sadly, probably still isn't, against the law. Law he has no respect for, but has vowed to uphold. If this is the kind of citizen the GOP, their Champion, Ronald Reagan, being the one who called those words, "I'm from the government and I'm here to help" the scariest nine words in the English language, chooses to nominate for the Supreme Court, it shows Reagan's words to be prophetic, as they are all from the government and are all sooooo eager to help ... themselves. To do so they turn around and give that same government they claim to despise the untrammeled ability to spy on you, waterboard you, and "disappear" you, all of which suggests we really should try and use this bizarre media event as yet another mirror, one of many the Trumpelstiltskin has held up to us, to admit it is carnival-like distortions we see reflected back at us, and hope we can thereby wrest some sort of sanity from this otherwise insane spectacle we're broadcasting to the world.