Iowa Wrap-Up

As you've seen, The Work Desk had us in Iowa last week to do some field sampling for a national industrial client. The Music Desk resents that we missed two good shows (Mothers at Aisle 5 and St. Paul & The Broken Bones at the Fox) while we were away, although based on recent behavior, we might not have gone to the shows anyway. The cats, after we were gone for three consecutive nights, assumed that we were dead.

Most people our age don't do much field work anymore, and to be perfectly honest, we don't do all that much these days either.  We recently ran into some old colleagues of ours, people we used to direct in the field literally decades ago, and they told us that they all have managerial positions now and haven't done field work themselves in years.  We wondered what was wrong with us and where our career went off the tracks that we're still outside filling sample jars with soil at the age of 64, but then we remembered that it's pointless to compare ourselves to our perceptions of others, and that happiness is found in accepting ourselves for who we are and not by constantly benchmarking ourselves against others.  No matter how successful one is, there will always be someone doing even better, and focusing on that instead of what one actually has accomplished will always lead to inevitable disappointment,  Besides, we like getting out every once in a while and it's actually kind of a nice change of pace to be outdoors and working hard for a few days.  An adventure, if you will. 

The weather was favorable to us and the Iowa morning were cool (upper 40s), but it warmed up to the low 70s as the day progressed.  We finished the job around 3:00 p.m. on Thursday, and had some time left over to explore the Iowa countryside.

There really wasn't that much exploring to be done - not to be dismissive, but you've seen one cornfield, you've seen them all.  We flipped on the car radio as we drove around and heard some bitter talk-show host complain about the congressional hearing for Judge Brett Kavanaugh that was being held that day.

"This whole two-week effort has been a calculated and orchestrated political hit fueled with apparent pent-up anger about President Trump and the 2016 election," he snarled with typical partisan rancor over the radio.  "This is a circus," he added.  He dismissed the proceedings as "revenge on behalf of the Clintons" and he imagined that millions of dollars were pouring in from "outside left-wing opposition groups."

"The consequences will be with us for decades," he warned. "This grotesque and coordinated character assassination will dissuade competent and good people of all political persuasions from serving our country."

We were appalled by the bitterness in his voice and were  reminded why we don't listen to talk radio, and felt sorry for the Iowans who had to listen to this kind of drivel on a regular basis, and it took us several minutes to realize that the voice we were hearing was not some AM-radio, right-wing nut job, but actually Judge Kavanaugh himself.  We were hearing the live coverage from Washington, D.C., and to our shocked amazement, the angry, resentful voice we were hearing on the radio was not some midwestern pundit but an actual candidate for the Supreme Court of the United States.

Since there was nothing to see in Iowa anyway, we returned to our hotel room and watched the remainder of the testimony on television.  As an aside, our hotel room in Iowa was probably the shittiest we can remember staying in for at least 20 years.  The whole room smelled like stale cigarettes even though numerous "No Smoking" signs were posted everywhere, we ran the A.C. all night and don't think the room temperature dropped one degree or the air got any fresher, truck drivers at the adjacent diesel station kept waking us up by gunning their engines at night beneath our window, and the showerhead didn't work and we had to wash our self by squatting like a barbarian in front of the bathtub faucet and to wash our hair we had to kneel down on all fours to get our head into the flow of water.

But that's not the point.  That was part of "the adventure." The point has to do with Kavanaugh's testimony and is that if we're to be perfectly honest, we admit that we don't actually know for sure what happened at Georgetown Prep some 35 years ago, and although we have our own strong suspicions and our opinions about who is lying and who is telling the truth, we don't know with certainty exactly what happened. We also have our own personal opinions as to whether the actions of a teenager should preclude an adult from a career appointment decades later. 

(Our take is that she's telling the truth and that he's hiding something, and that the particular actions of which Kavanaugh stands accused should prohibit one from taking the particular job he's up for, but then again that's just our personal opinion.)

But we do know this with certainly: the bitter, snarling anger-bear on the stand that afternoon does not have the disposition or temperament to be a judge - Supreme Court, Circuit Court, or any level court.  I wouldn't want him sitting in Traffic Court.  We couldn't believe the sense of entitlement he showed, especially when he repeatedly answered questions about his character and honesty by stating "I was the captain of the basketball team!," as if that trivial accomplishment guaranteed him some licence to have his other, subsequent actions overlooked.  

We're older than Judge Kavanaugh, but we remember the kind of white-boy, prep-school, entitled jocks that he described in his testimony, with their fixation on "brewskis" and "ralphing" and "keggers" and their elitist disdain for those not in their little cliques. Theirs is the frat-boy culture of date rape and privileged entitlement, and when you hold a member of that self-perceived elite accountable for their own actions or deny them the rewards they perceive society owes them, you get the angry, bitter, accusatory testimony that Kavanaugh gave to Congress.

And if you're at all concerned about the safety of your daughters, you should prefer that she associate with the antisocial pot-head "losers" hanging around the convenience store rather than the toxic, male-dominated aristocracy of beer-guzzling, prep-school jocks - gang rapes are much, much more likely to occur at a keg party than between bong hits.  

It was clear that Kavanaugh had no interest in helping Congress get to the truth of the matter, and knowing that each Congressman had only 5 minutes each to ask questions, he filibustered his way through their allotted time by repeating his childhood accomplishments over and over, even when pointedly told not to, by pretending not to understand even the simplest question ("What do you mean, 'a bad drunk'? I'm not sure what you're talking about."), or by throwing the questions back to the Congresspersons to show how insulted he was by their audacity to even ask ("I don't know. Do YOU ever drink too much?  I'm curious to know").  Someone with nothing to hide would not try to stymie an inquiry into the activities. 

     

His performance was so ill-tempered, so unhinged, and so unrestrained, that at some level it doesn't even matter what happened at Georgetown Prep all those years ago, at least with regards to the nomination.  It doesn't matter whether or not it's "fair" to judge an adult by his or her worst adolescent excesses.  Brett Kavanaugh should not be nominated to the Supreme Court simply because he made it abundantly clear by his testimony that he lacks the very character, the moral fortitude, and the restraint needed to hold the highest office of our judiciary.  Not to mention that he made a sham of any prior claim to political impartiality.

In fact, The Politics Desk believes a very strong case could be made that based on his performance he should probably be impeached from his current position as a U.S. Circuit Judge.