No Amount of Darkness Will Ever Turn Him Into You

As much as I really, really, really don't want Brett Kavanaugh (or anyone who looks, sounds or smells* like him) on the Supreme Court, I half-way think we should go ahead and confirm him anyway. Not because he'd do anything approaching a decent job. It's clear he's headed to the court with a specifically shitty agenda to implement, bolster and defend. No, I think instead he simply represents the absolute Platonic form of present-day Trumpian Man. Where are we going to find a better example of an unimaginative, socially and physically dangerous white person with a struggle-free background, gliding through every "challenge" life presents with only the support of gratuitous disposable income, access to the best schools and the teachers employed therein and generations of political, social and economic support from class-peers who collectively constitute what amounts to an American nobility affording an embarrassing avalanche of access, opportunity and total legal and moral impunity, BUT who also somehow is able to cast themselves as a put-upon, scrappy hero in a life that harshly asks them sometimes to put forward a minimal effort? At what other point in time could a person so singularly coddled also burn so white-hot with indignant, sanctimonious rage? There's nobody more 2018 that Brett Fucking Kavanaugh.

The cry of the Charlottesville Dipshit Brigade wasn't anything as creative as "we hate black people" or "down with Jews." No, those would be both directly confrontational (a non-starter for a collection of cowards, a condition that can't be cured with any amount of tiki torches) and coherent. Awful, but coherent in the way that English-language sentences sometimes can be (much of this blog notwithstanding).  No, their position was "you will not replace us," an evident and specific fever-dream of persecution by a group representing the gendered, racial and socio-economic demographic subgroup that has literally run everything in this country from before it was a country. And they said it with the animus and conviction that can only be achieved with a willful and lifelong effort to not understand the basics of history, sociology, psychology and words. White men screaming about not the denial of something they have decided is theirs by right, but about the prospect of denial at some vague point in the indeterminate future run probably by the children all successfully recruited by the gays and liberal-indoctrinated by college.

Brett Kavanaugh should be sent to the Supreme Court not to serve as an impartial arbiter of justice at the highest levels of our government, no. That's obviously a task this person and his disheveled soul are unequal to. He should be sent there to be preserved, as a perfect encapsulation of this bonkers-ass moment in American political and social history. Trump is too much as it is, sure, but the presidency is a self-limiting job since the 22nd Amendment passed. As soon as he's gone, we'll almost immediately begin to doubt we could have done something quite so heinous to ourselves (see Bush, George W). What would make the most sense would be a lifetime appointment (the grand champion of all entitlements!) of one who can stand not as a man, but as a living relic, an archive, a breathing, spittle-inflected, red-faced, rape-attempting archive reflecting the tenor and volume of the moment. The stupid, stupid moment.

Obviously what you're slogging through here is an attempted pre-emptive rationalization. I'm almost certain he'll be on the court way sooner than later. A person like this is attempting to pass through a gross-ass Senate with the gross-ass white male senators who look at Brett Kavanaugh and see not only themselves, but what they aspire to be: someone who never has to run for re-election, but still will have the luxury of standing up for the multinational corporations and naked-power-for-its-own-sake. The arousal they must feel at the very idea is something I'm going to go ahead and skip contemplating further.

Kavanaugh is Trump because once he's on the court, he won't have to give a shit. Senators love and hate Trump because he decided he can do or say whatever he wants whenever he wants. He can indulge in his default settings of pettiness and rage, vindictiveness and punitive public cruelty. They recognize Trump is an injured, reactive, deeply stupid man with no capacity to do any of the things his job actually requires, but they still wish they could be that (all of it) if it meant no more measurement, catering, massage or spin for the donors they are obligated to fellate, I'm sure mostly metaphorically. They can't say what they want because that would turn off voters, which in turn makes the candidate smell dangerously of parfum de loser, and the donors aren't backing a non-winner.

They are obligated to pretend to be statesmen. But all the while, deep down, all of them desire nothing more than the absolute freedom to be a whiny little bitch** in public. With everyone watching. And still getting to win. At the expense of literally everyone, whether quite all of us realize it or not yet.

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*That sour old lager stink somewhere between spoiled milk and fresh piss.

**This is the non-gendered use of "bitch," if that's possible. And look, I've found a way to be problematic in my anti-Kavanaugh piece. Men are the worst. Even me.