Coming to a Head?

Church Militant has a video out suggesting that, with the scandals in the Catholic Church and the Kavanaugh hearings, something apocalyptic seems about to happen: either some great new evil is being born, or some great current evil is about to explode in a cloud of debris.

That sounds overblown. Catholics are not supposed to worry about the End Times.

But I think it is basically right. Even if these current crises are both centred in America, the world culture is also centred in America.

Things are going mad in the US. Everything about the current Kavanaugh process is unprecedented. People are living in separate realities. This I believe is because the current Kavanaugh confirmation gets close to the fundamental issue causing the current evils and the culture wars that we have seen grow over the past few decades; initially in the US, but now elsewhere. For both the “left” and the “right,” this confirmation has become the hill to die on. And one of them may die on it.

The real issue has always been abortion. Everything else in American life and tradition has been warped, twisted, or outright sacrificed, bit by bit, for unrestricted abortion. This includes the integrity of the Catholic Church; general respect for the Catholic Church went decades ago. It all traces back to that scarlet letter A. It all traces back to Pope Paul VI standing up and loudly saying no to abortion.

The left now feels it must do anything and everything, fair, foul, or flatly mad, to keep Kavanaugh off the court. Because they calculate that, once a case inevitably comes up, he will be the swing vote to repeal Roe v. Wade, which declared any restrictions on abortion unconstitutional. This would not by itself make abortion illegal, but it would allow states to do so.

I do believe that, if this happened, the culture wars would indeed be over. It would not doubt take some time for shooting to stop; the battle would continue state by state. But the victory would not be in doubt, and the healing would begin. So long as half the population considers the other half guilty of ongoing mass murder, it is hard for folks to get along. Leaving aside the actual morality of abortion, for American life to continue, abortion needs therefore to be illegal. The issue is similar to slavery: the nation cannot long continue half-slave and half-free, but once slavery was abolished, there seemed suprisingly little acrimony left between North and South. Essential patriotism, at least, was no longer in doubt. There was never any second movement for secession.

If, on the other hand, Kavanaugh is not confirmed, it would indeed be the birth of a new and great evil: the end of due process. Any man could be destroyed at any time by any woman by a mere accusation. Another absolutely critical element of shared tradition destroyed, along with so many others now before it, for the sake of abortion. Any new nominee or hire for any prominent position would be vulnerable to the same attack, and many would simply refuse to put their names forward. It is hard to see how either government, industry, or civil society generally could survive. Let alone the chaos in individual lives. It simply would not pay anyone ever to be prominent. And even being obscure would be no real protection.

As an aside, everyone is blaming Senator Feinstein for releasing Blasey Ford's confidential letter to the judiciary committee claiming that Kavanaugh had assaulted her. After all, only three parties had the letter: Blasey Ford and her people, her congresswoman and hers, and Feinstein and her office. And Blasy Ford had demanded anonymity. So it must have been Feinstein's office who sent it to the papers.

If I am right that we are dealing, in Blasey Ford, with a narcissist, this logic is wrong. Yes, she seems to be sincere; but narcissists have a knack for convincing themselves at some level of any lie they tell. Their view of reality is clouded. Whatever they want to be true, they are able to convince themselves to be true.

It would be entirely typical of narcissism for Ford to publicly insist she wanted anonymity, while releasing the letter to the newspapers herself. That way, she gets the attention she craves, but deflects all blame. Which is a critical issue for a narcissist--the same issue that could motivate her to blame her own sexual awakening, however it happened, on Kavanaugh.

One day we will better understand such things. I do wish someone would take up Lindsay Graham's suggestion that this issue should be investigated, of who actually leaked the letter. A better understanding of narcissism could be the great new good this process helped to birth, a possibility Church Militant's video also sensed.

The Latest Claims on Blasey Ford

I seem to be too groggy just now to do productive work, so let's instead dish on the latest about the Kavanaugh nomination and hearings.

It seems a former boyfriend of Blasey Ford, of some six years' standing, has now made a sworn statement to the Senate panel that contradicts her on some of her testimony. She had testified that she never gave anyone advice on taking a polygraph test. He says he saw her give someone advice on taking a polygraph test.

Not only does this constitute, if true, her lying under oath, a felony; but if she gave someone such advice, it also implies she may well have known how to beat one. This cancels out any significance to her having taken one on her Kavanaugh claims. And it would not be suprising, after all, if she, a psychology prof, knew something about how to beat a polygraph. They are notoriously unreliable anyway.

When she was questioned on this in front of the senate panel, she oddly added the gratuitous observation that she was surprised at how long the polygraph test took. As if to give a tone of authenticity to her denial of knowing anything about them. This is odd, because apparently she was asked only two questions. It was uncommonly short, not uncommonly long. This sounds like a spontanous lie committed by someone who is lying and nervous about it, and so trying to throw the hounds off the scent. Once you start in lying, there is a strong natural instinct to spontaneously begin saying the opposite of the truth. It feels safer.

The same boyfriend's statement also accuses her of having committing credit card fraud; which does not speak well of her honesty. He also says as far as he ever knew over six years together, she had no claustrophobia, and was living in a small apartment with only one door when he knew her. This contradicts other parts of her testimony.

This all makes her sound very much, just as I thought, like a narcissist. Narcissists can lie and sound sincere, because they are able to at least half convince themselves that whatever they want to believe is the truth.

In other related news, Ford said at the hearing that the issue of putting a second door in their home led to marital conselling in 2012. Yet it turns out, someone discovered by looking at the building permit, the door was put in in 2008, four years earlier. She claimed it was because of her claustrophobia; yet it appears rather to have had the effect of creating a second apartment in their home.

We already know that her claims of fear of flying were false; but this is less relevant, because she did not make those claims under oath.

Others have remarked that her voice while testifying sounded artificial, a “vulnerable little girl” voice. Again, this suggests someone acting a part, and perhaps someone who habitually does so.

To me at least, it all fits.

I Boof in Your General Direction

Georgetown Prep.

The attack on Brett Kavanaugh now seems to have shifted focus to his entry in his high school yearbook. My leftist friend Xerxes writes, “Kavanaugh denies all allegations. The pages of his high school annual suggest he has a malleable memory.” 

The fact that this is stated as innuendo suggests how weak this new argument is: if stated plainly, it would be pretty convoluted, and unconvincing.

As it is innuendo, I am required to assume. I must.

Kavanaugh's yearbook entry suggests, one might say, a juvenile fascination with drinking, partying, and sex. In the senate questioning, Kavanaugh gave relatively innocent interpretations of these yearbook references. Xerxes and others are apparently convinced they really mean something more salacious and scandalous.

So, if I guess the rest of the argument correctly, he was really a bad guy when he was seventeen, and he is not remembering properly now. And so, being a bad guy, he probably molested someone too.

That is hardly a provable case of anything, based on a series of pure assumptions. so irrelevant anyway. But for the sake of optics, let's look at the balance of probabilities on the yearbook entrty.

One item is the word “boof.” He asks in his entry if “Judge has boofed yet.” Under questioning, he said this meant farting. Those who doubt him say, no, it means to take drugs through your anus, or something. Urban Dictionary online includes the term, and that meaning, but lists several slang meanings. In the Washington DC area, where Kavanaugh grew up, it apparently means a woman's vagina emitting a bad smell. I can see how this might also, then, be used for male flatulence.

The seventeen-year-old Kavanaugh refers to the FFFFFFFourth of July (party?). He claims this was a reference to someone's stuttering. Those who doubt this insist there is a recognized sexual meaning to “FFFFFFF.”

Not sure what it is, and if there is such a recognized sexual meaning, it does not come up in my Google search. Must not be all that well recognized.

He refers to himself, as do several other students, as a “Renate alumnius.” Renate was a girl in a nearby school. Kavanaugh says it meant they dated or kissed. His critics insist it means they had sex.

Renate denies they even kissed. Which surely suggests the more innocent meaning. When I was in high school, there was one girl whom everyone thought a great beauty. I went with her, briefly, and among the guys, it was considered an accomplishment, a matter of permanent distinction. I was now a member of a select group. I see no reason to assume this reference was anything different. Flattering, to the girl.

What else? There's a reference to “the Devil's triangle.” Kavanaugh says this was a drinking game involving three beers. Critics insist it means something else that is insidious.

Frankly, all of these secret meanings of these words and phrases are new to me. Since they are clearly not widely known, how can we assume the students who used them knew and meant these particular references?

What was it someone said? If you keep hearing dog whistles, odds are, you are the dog.

But let's even accept that Kavanaugh and his jock friends did know just what those slang terms meant to some, and it is the same thing the critics think. That does not mean they referred to actual events; more likely using them was a schoolboy prank.

Here's what I mean. I went to a public high school. Probably much more casual about what students did in their own time than was Georgetown Prep, a private boarding school. Georgetown Prep was exclusive, expensive, and religious. Its raison d'etre, being a religious school, was character formation. And parents paid big money to send their children there; it was nobody's default option.

Even at my high school, as I bet everywhere else, the yearbook committee had a faculty advisor, who had to vet everything that went in. No school, even a public school, wants scandal, or the parents thinking their kids are getting into such things as anally taking drugs. I assume that some alert Jesuit went over all these comments, and was satisfied at the time that they had relatively innocent explanations. And the kids like Kavanaugh, who put them in, must have been ready with some innocuous meaning if questioned. They must have agreed on it all in advance among themselves, so their stories would tally.

Thus, accordingly, on the strictly literal level, this innocuous meaning was what they indeed meant, as agreed to by those actually using the terms. It is not as if a slang definition is ever authoritative.

Now, the kids might have known they also meant something else to some. That was the joke; they had gotten away with something, then. Great schoolboy gag. Lots o laughs.

But then, in the real world, which meaning do you think was more plausibly literally true? The more salacious and scandalous meaning, or the more innocuous one? If these kids were anything like the kids I knew at seventeen, it was more likely a case of talking big and doing little. Especially at some exlusive prep school, among kids expected by their parents to make it in to some highly competitive Ivy League university, and in their last year of high school.

The salacious interpretation is just not very plausible.