The Years of Living Hysterically, Part VI

Reflections on Joe Biden, Tara Reade, #MeToo, and our Hysterical Culture

KURT BARDELLA RAPED ME

In a world bursting with sin, sorrow, and suffering, an adult American—one Brett Budowsky—has written this: “The vote on the nomination of Judge Brett Kavanaugh will be the most important vote ever cast and possibly the most important action ever taken by 100 members of the Senate.” 

He continues: “If the woman, Dr. Ford, can take and pass a polygraph test, the man, Judge Kavanaugh, can fairly be asked to do the same.” Please, God, please, can someone convince Americans that polygraphs are worthless? (What might fairly be asked of Brett Kavanaugh is if he agrees with the Supreme Court verdicts that have established their worthlessness as the law of the land.)

Spencer Kornhaber of the Atlantic: “What’s at issue right now is not only sexism, power, and the courts, but also adolescence itself—and whether it’s a sphere where boys can feel free to joke about hitting girls in the pages of their yearbook, or worse.” (Has he ever encountered an adolescent? Was he ever an adolescent? And what is with these men who are rising up to defend my honor? I sure didn’t ask for it.)

Kurt Bardella of NBC news defended Ford’s refusal to testify before the Senate thus:

Bear in mind, we are talking about a victim of sexual assault being asked to go before a committee controlled by an all-male Republican majority whose current sole objective is to deconstruct the traumatic events experienced by a teenage girl.

How does he know whether she was a victim of sexual assault, and how would he know based on what he’s heard? Was he under the bed? Is it now the case that all and any sexual assaults took place because any woman said they did?

Fine, then: Kurt Bardella raped me. I remember it vividly. No, Kurt, don’t question me: I am a woman and I am infallible. What I say is by definition true. Stay away from me with your disgusting, lying white penis and your feeble efforts to deny what you did.

Women are now trapped between social conservatives who think a drunken sexual exchange among teenagers is sinful (this accounts for Kavanaugh’s perjury, if that’s what it was) and a neo-puritan reactionary left that’s just as certain that a drunken sexual exchange among teenagers is sinful, using a lightly-disguised language, to be sure, but it amounts to the same claim.

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EVER WONDER WHY THEY CALL IT A WITCH HUNT?

Donald Trump told us, at some point during that lamentable ordeal, that he heard from mothers and wives who fear for their sons and husbands if due process is dead. 

Yes, well, I fear for the men I love, too, but first things first. If due process dies, women will ultimately bear the worst of it. Women have historically been both the instigators and the victims of witch hunts, which is why we use the word “witch hunt.” When people go nuts, they’re as apt to do it in a misogynist way as a misandrist way. Women don’t have to love men, like them, or be related to them to grasp the idea: Due process protects us all.

We’ve embedded these principles in our legal system because we know all too well that human beings are prone to witch hunts, lynchings, mob violence, and wild irrationality. The object of terror shifts. Right now it is upper-class white American men. But it will shift again, and if we are no longer a society that takes “due process” seriously, women will find out the hard way why that matters. 

If you sincerely believe you could never be on the receiving end of a mass panic because you’re a woman—or a nice person, or someone who’d never hurt a fly, or someone who gets along with everyone—well, you’re probably right. Odds are that you’re right. But there’s ample historic evidence to suggest the odds are not zero. Any woman who thinks she’s at no risk of unjust persecution because she’s a woman is not thinking this through. 

When the rule of law collapses, you’re next. Many of those daycare workers were women. Imagine the power to ruin your employment prospects, to take away your liberty, to take away your kids—these are already things the state can do easily, and does already—in the hands of the person who hates you most. Your crazy ex. Your jealous co-worker. Your lover’s wife. Someone you fired. If all it takes to find you guilty—in the court of public opinion or a court of law—is one person’s otherwise unsubstantiated allegation, you too will live your life in fear of being #MeTooed.

This this is not about men’s rights. It’s about human rights. It’s about fairness. It’s about civilization, which is rare and fragile as a Fabergé egg. If for some reason you really have to work at it to consider men fully human, imagine how easily the next wave of mass hysteria could involve, as it has very recently before, an irrational terror of child abuse. Consider a very poised, tearful, and sincere-sounding witness insisting she’d seen you molest your children—and voilà, not only are you a monster in the world’s eyes, but the state takes your children away and you never see them again. Even though it didn’t happen, you say it didn’t happen, and there’s no other evidence. Do you like the sound of that world? Then don’t bring it into being.

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THE WORLD IS WATCHING

It is horrible to watch. I’ve never before seen so many women conform to the most sexist of stereotypes. I’m aware that the media are training their cameras on the most histrionic and illogical of women because they make for such clickable images. I realize that for every woman I see behaving as if the ancient Egyptians were right about wandering wombs and mental illness, there could well be thousands more who think, “Shrieking at Jeff Flake in the Senate elevator about an incident unrelated to the alleged incident under investigation is both illogical and highly inappropriate.”

But those grotesque shrieking women are being presented to us, by once-respected and mainstream organs of our media, as representative of all women. What would any reasonable man conclude about women from that? If that’s generally representative of women, we’d logically have to conclude women are unfit to sit on juries, unfit to have any power over men, in any context, and—obviously—unfit for office. 

Why are so many women willingly participating in this exercise in infantilizing them and portraying them as the Ur-unhinged harpies of the collective unconscious? The world, not just the United States, is reposing its hopes in 2020 election that peacefully removes Trump from office and rebukes the GOP for going profoundly berserk, seeking any sign that the American people will not tolerate rule by politicians who have given leave of their senses or been possessed by Satan.

But the world’s shy hope that the American ship of shape might right itself have been dashed by the hysteria of #MeToo. Democrats seem as eager to inhabit the most stupendous caricatures of the American left as the GOP is to embody the most lurid stereotypes of the American right. We cannot afford this. The stakes are too high.

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THANKS, GENTLEMEN

And why are men going along with this? Why are they not protecting themselves, and why are they not protecting us from ourselves? Among other reasons, because this is a very useful tool for clearing out the corner offices. Let’s not forget that: The men here aren’t angels, either.

Less cynically, perhaps an excess of chivalry is making men dangerously irrational. It is natural and good that the thought of a defenseless woman inspires protective feelings in men. That’s a reflex any sane woman hopes men will have. But when that instinct comes into conflict with other principles that are even more foundational to civilization—for example, the principle that no matter how defenselessly she insists that two plus two equals five, it cannot be true—we’ve got a problem.

There is something to praise in men who rush to say, “We must protect Ford and women like Ford, even at the expense of all the research we have about the reliability of eyewitness testimony, the of corroborating evidence, the implausibility of the charges.” Women should never try to eradicate the impulse among men to protect women from pain, coercion, and fear. It’s essential to civilization.

But we have to hold up our end of the bargain. We can’t exploit that impulse, and we have to remember that men may display their emotions differently, but they too feel pain, coercion, and fear. Why, sometimes I look into their eyes and think, “Look at that—you’d almost think they’re human!” They deserve from us the same instinct to protect them that they feel toward us. They deserve our compassion. They deserve our gratitude. Our civilization, many of late have pointed out, was built by men. Indeed it was. Instead of complaining about this, maybe we could just say, “Thank you?”

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Epilogue: I am adding this today. It is Biden’s turn. Again. I wrote about it the last time, when Lucy Flores “came forward.”

It is a source of no small gratification to me that ever since former Vice President Joe Biden was accused of smelling Lucy Flores’s hair in a sexist way, his popularity has risen. I am allowing myself to hope that perhaps the fever has broken, and that #metoo has finally jumped the shark. If so, it won’t be for the media’s failure to impress upon us the gravity of Biden’s transgressions. They have given him a #metoo Royale with Cheese: Joe hugged a widow and held a young woman’s hands while pulling in close to her face! He rubbed noses with his colleague Amy Lappos à la Eskimo!

At a fundraiser in 2012, the New York Times tells us, Joe allowed his hand to rest upon one D.H. Hill’s shoulder. “Only he knows his intent,” intoned Hill, a 59-year-old writer. Indeed. Only Joe knows whether he intended to drag, ravish, bludgeon, and dismember her, puree her entrails with a dash of lime, then emerge from the kitchen with a platter of zesty fajitas. Only he knows. “If something makes you feel uncomfortable,” she added, “you have to feel able to say it.”

Apparently, we’re going to take Tara Reade seriously. We’re going to waste precious thought, column inches, minutes of airtime, and actually take Tara Reade seriously.

Let us review: In the past hundred days, a virus previously unknown to mankind burst out of a bat near the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in China, spreading rapidly to at least 184 countries and territories the world around, swiftly killing a quarter of a million people, and bringing an end to life as we have known it. The global economy is in an induced coma; having nearly collapsed in the financial equivalent of a cytokine storm, it is now sustained by the ventilator of the Fed. No one knows when—or if—it will ever regain consciousness. Half the world’s population is under house arrest. The world’s borders have slammed shut. To prevent its citizens from starving, the United States government has passed a spending package larger than the GNP of the Soviet Union at its zenith. It’s all imaginary money, so we just better pray that no one notices.

The engines of trade and capitalism have shuddered to halt. Modern, developed countries have been forced to triage patients, choosing who will live and who will die as if their hospitals were wartime battlefields. All normal social intercourse has ceased. Global tourism has been eradicated. The aviation industry has been destroyed. The education of 1.5 billion schoolchildren has been suspended. Suspended, too, are bedrock civil liberties in liberal democracies. Illiberal democracies have become outright dictatorships. Outright dictatorships have become frank hellscapes.

America is exposed and naked before the world—we are the superpower that never made a plan (or made one we couldn’t find, or couldn’t figure out how to follow) for a pandemic. Russian and Chinese propagandists no longer have to wage a propaganda war against us. They just program their bots to follow the President of the United States on Twitter and retweet everything he says.

Clearly it will be many years before we understand the full effects of this catastrophe —we’re still arguing about the role of the Justinian plague in the collapse of the Roman Empire—but they will be vast, and they won’t be good. The risk of every species of second-order calamity is now astronomical. Famine. Even worse diseases. Covid-19 has thrown the world’s risk mitigation programs and personnel—including the world’s costliest and most consequential risk-mitigation program, the United States military—into absolute chaos. Our government is such a clown show that no one was surprised to learn a professional Labradoodle breeder has been coordinating our pandemic task force.

The Great Depression of the 21st century has begun. The Eurozone economy has suffered its sharpest contraction on record. Armed protesters have stormed the capitol in Michigan. China has rolled over Hong Kong. It is chasing us out of the Pacific. We’re down two aircraft carriers and Parris Island, at that. But oh, yes—we’re going to take Tara Reade seriously.

Mika Brzezinski: Mr. Vice President, thank you for coming on the show this morning. We have a lot of questions to ask you.

Joe Biden: Thank you for having me.

Brzezinski: We’ll ask you questions about how you would handle this pandemic, the campaign, and other news of the day. For the start, it is just you and me. I want to get right to the allegation made against you by Tara Reade. So the former Senate aide accuses you of sexual assault. To our viewers, please excuse the graphic nature of this, but we want to make sure there is no question about what we are talking about. She says in 1993, Mr. Vice President, you pinned her against a wall and reached under her clothing and penetrated her with your fingers.

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GOODBYE, DIGNITY

We now live in a world in which no mainstream American newspaper believes it beneath dignity—its own and the nation’s—to inspect the mind of the 16-year-old Brett Kavanaugh by counting and parsing allusions to “Renate Alumnius” in his high school yearbook. We now live in a world that is collapsing—yes, our civilization is collapsing, it is no exaggeration—and we think this is the most important question of the day:

Daily Caller @DailyCaller

"Do you regret what you said during the Kavanaugh hearing?" Joe Biden: "What I said during the Kavanaugh hearings was that she had a right to be heard. The fact that she came forward, the presumption would be that she was telling the truth unless she wasn't telling the truth."

A preposterous sex panic has taken precedence in the public mind over every issue of policy, foreign and domestic, that should occupy the minds of adults in the world’s only global superpower. One after another critical American institution has disgraced itself by treating this grotesque, prurient, and puritanical obsession as if it were urgent, as if it made perfect sense. 

Women have made fools of themselves. The Senate has disgraced itself. The Democratic Party has burnt its credibility in a fire of sexual hysterics. Ronan Farrow has become the Torquemada of the Panties, acting out his family romance on the global stage. 

Empiricism, the scientific revolution, and elementary principles of Roman and Anglo-American jurisprudence have been tossed aside as obstacles to ever-greater sexual purity leashed to ever-greater prurience. No one in the academy has had the courage to say what everyone with a college education should know: Our obsession with libidinal improprieties is a classic, hysterical mass panic, one we’re prepared to elevate even over such questions as, “How do we plan to save our own lives?”

It is destroying men’s lives, but in the long run, men will be fine—some of them will survive and rebuild the world. The damage to women, on the other hand, may be irrecoverable. American women have had, perhaps, only two generations of true liberty. We appear determined to extinguish it by infantilizing ourselves and proving correct everyone who insisted our nature was childlike and our place in the home. 

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WE ARE AMERICANS!

Oh, God, America! If we’re going to go out like this, let’s at least do it with style! Let’s do it consciously. Let’s give up the pretense that any of this is rational or has anything to do with the rule of law, or progress, or whatever it is we’re telling ourselves. Let’s go for the gusto! We are one step shy of becoming the most spectacularly entertaining and degenerate empire in history.

Let’s have ourselves a proper ludi circenses. We get ourselves some bears, some rhinos, some trapdoors, some seesaws, some trick platforms so we can drop them, screaming, into waiting packs of starved animals. We tie them to boxes, lash them to the stake, wheel them out on dollies, nail them to the cross—just like under Emperor Commodus!

THUMBS UP! THUMBS DOWN! We can broadcast it, too!—even the Romans couldn’t do that. Let the whole globe join us in our maddened, frenzied bloodlust!

Let the whole galaxy see it. We—We the Crowd—will be immortal. No one will ever doubt we excelled the Romans in every way—“You think that’s a Coliseum, you perished fools? That diddly-squat, miniature, antique old relic? Just you wait until you see what the Americans built!”

Oh, let’s do it! Enough fiddling already! Pandemic be damned! If the Empire must fall owing to our degeneracy, please, let’s not just be yet another third-rate Empire that fell owing to its degeneracy. WE ARE AMERICANS! Let’s go down in history as the greatest, most degenerate empire ever to bestride the galaxy—not some bunch of scolding prudes and sobbing pansies. Our emperor shall dine on the livers of charfish, the brains of pheasants and peacocks, the tongues of flamingos, the entrails of lampreys, two Big Macs and a Coke while We the Crowd build an American Coliseum so phenomenal that when, 1402 years from, now the exoplanetary cyborg historians of Kepler-452b read our Twitter feeds, they will be breathless (if they breathe) with wonder and horror: “How advanced they were! They recorded every minute of their last days on their planet—and sent it to us all the way across the galaxy! But … what a strange species? Why didn’t they save themselves, instead? With the technical acumen they had, they certainly could have. What could possibly have made them do this, instead?”

Let’s do it! Let’s make America great again—one last time! The election of Trump and our collective race into a lurid frenzy of Puritanical underwear-sniffing has already eclipsed whatever light of national dignity still remained to us. It’s too late, we’re in too deep, so let’s do it right! Give those historians on Kepler-452b thousands of years to argue about what the hell we were thinking—you think they’ll be asking that about the Romans? The Romans will vanish into total galactic insignificance when CSPAN and our Twitter feeds reach Kepler-452b. (They’re en route already.)

We are the only people in the history of our planet, of our solar system, who can transmit the who story of their decline and fall to the furthest reaches of the galaxy. Let’s make sure everyone understands that America—not Rome—was what our planet was all about. Let’s build the biggest, most beautiful, most amazing and phenomenal Coliseum the galaxy has ever seen. Then throw Graham, Biden, Kavanaugh, a passel of shrieking harpies and Ronan Farrow right in the middle of it! Cut to the chase!

Because face it. It’s our destiny. None of us can refrain. We have all been happy spectators to this degenerate circus, clicking away at the bait, tsk-tsking, all hopeful that in the end, the emperor might toss us some bread. And we seem determined to do it until every last light goes out.

Fin.

Paris, May 2, Year of the Pandemic