Diatribes of Jay: How Important is Kavanaugh’s Alleged Attempted Rape?

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We hold these truths to be self-evident . . . That to secure [citizens’ inalienable] rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed . . .

Might makes right.

What are we to make of the allegation that the latest controversial right-wing nominee to the Supreme Court attempted rape when he was 17? Is it a political ploy? Is it just a matter of “he said, she said,” better left to the bedroom? Do we have a mere claim of possible drunken, youthful indiscretion? Or is it an allegation that goes to the heart of democracy and indeed of human civilization?

Let us reason.

Of course, if Judge Kavanaugh’s categorical denial is right factually, there is nothing to discuss. But Professor Christine Blasey Ford has alleged that he, while 17 and in an elite Catholic prep school, assaulted her at a drunken party. She claims he grabbed her, threw her down, groped her through her clothes and tried to take them off. She escaped, she said, only after Kavanaugh’s friend Mark Judge, also drunk, jumped upon the twosome. (Whether he did so to protect her or to join the “fun,” she had no way of knowing.)

Of course it matters who is telling the truth. But, again, to assess the seriousness of the charges we must assume they are true. So the rest of this essay will make that assumption, leaving out the words “allegation” and “claim” as defeating the force of the analysis (if the allegations are true).

We begin by viewing the attempted rape not from the perpetrator’s point of view, but from the victim’s. No doubt Ford was terrified. As a threat to her survival and her female role as procreator, this assault was tailor-made for the amygdala—the part of our human brains that prioritizes stimuli and engraves existential threats in mental stone. No doubt Ford would remember this event clearly her whole life, just as I still remember running in front of a car that might have killed me over sixty years ago.

From the viewpoint of human civilization and American law, Ford’s terror, lifetime memory, and narrow escape are only part of the story. What matters is Anglo-American law and tradition in particular, and human civilization in general. Shouldn’t any so-called “conservative” care about them?

Lawyers remember many things from law school decades later. One is repeated reference to the “inviolability” or “sanctity” of one’s person. What do these words mean? They mean that our law draws an invisible shield around everyone’s body. Penetrating that shield requires consent or “due process of law.”

The notion of bodily inviolability goes far beyond rape. Any unwanted or offensive touching can be a cause of civil or criminal liability for assault. If it results in serious injury—even in the case of an unusually delicate “eggshell skull”—it can justify aggravated charges, even of murder.

Why does our law go so far to protect the person of every individual? Because we are women and men, not apes.

In an ape clan, the alpha male rules by force, chasing away weaker rival males and dominating the females and babes in order of his preference. The other members of the clan are like his property. Human civilization began with the notion of personal “rights” that the group would enforce, even against a dominant male.

There can be no “democracy” or “freedom” for you if someone else can use your body as his plaything. After women got the right to vote and own property, there could be no “democracy” or “freedom” for them if a man—even their husbands—could treat their bodies as his property. That’s what’s at stake in Ford’s allegation.

We humans are highly evolved forms of apes, both biologically and socially. But sometimes we can’t help backsliding socially. This is one of those times.

For who is Donald Trump but our national alpha ape? He had no experience in office. He was and is totally unfit for his job in character, knowledge, intelligence and attention span, let alone diplomacy.

How did he get his job? He won a form of symbolic combat, in his rallies and his “debates.” He bested his rivals in insults and in lies—taunts that often seemed invitations to physical combat. He even “stalked” a much smaller female rival around the debate stage. If you doubt this, just read or view any of the innumerable (and shameful) press descriptions of this symbolic combat. Many called Trump a “street fighter” with palpable admiration.

Does the attempted rape matter beyond male-female relations? Of course it does. Does it matter more than abortion? Of course it does. If Roe v. Wade is overturned, there will still be states that provide access to abortion. All Planned Parenthood would have to do is provide information and transportation. Doing so might well be cheaper and less stressful than all the ceaseless, pitched political and legal battle that has been going on now for about half a century.

But a man who, deep in his subconscious, believes that following the alpha ape is the best and right course of action could forfeit our Republic. He could allow this president to burst constitutional bonds on his power, to turn law enforcers into his personal army, and to convert our democracy into his empire. It happened in ancient Rome, and it could happen here. Already we are more than part way there.

At a basic moral and psychological level, jumping a woman at a drunken party and letting the president lead us into war or financial panic all on his own are not really far apart. Neither is a “conservative” act. Both are radical reversions to our ape-like pre-evolutionary state.

Alcohol is no excuse. As we all learned in high school, alcohol is a sedative and a depressant, not a stimulant. It releases our inhibitions. It doesn’t make us do things that are not in our nature to do. An angry drunk has anger in his heart, and an aggressive one has trouble suppressing his inner ape.

We do not yet know how much a reversion to alpha-ape politics is genetic and how much is learned. But there is a direct progression from, and a logical connection between, a young male jumping a woman for fun and because he can (with drink as an excuse) and a mature male justifying or acquiescing in Dubya’s torture, secret renditions, secret prisons and a “Constitution free” zone at Guantánamo. Both are manifestations of the “might makes right” philosophy by which alpha males once ruled our clans, straw bosses once ran the South, and strongmen even now abound as “leaders” around the globe.

Our global evolutionary backsliding is worrying. So, yes, Ford’s charges are serious. They are as serious as they could be. They go directly to whether Kavanaugh has the innate understanding of human civilization and American democracy and values, let alone the wisdom, to merit a lifetime appointment to our Supreme Court. They go even more directly to whether we Americans will have a democracy or an empire several decades hence.

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Diatribes of Jay

21 September 2018

How Important is Kavanaugh’s Alleged Attempted Rape?

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