Kavanaugh episode reveals America's departure from goodness

By Georgie Anne Geyer

One of the things that has occurred to me this last week - besides the idea of moving alone to a cabin in northern Siberia or offering myself as a sacrifice to some Amazonian tribe - is that it used to be the woman's "past" that was vilified, ogled over and deliciously relished, her evil "secrets" always grimly and accusingly revealed without mercy.

But an indication of how things are changing is that today it is the man's past that demands our attention in the Judge Brett Kavanaugh/Christine Blasey Ford saga. Days after the melodramatic confrontation last week in Congress, it goes on holding the nation by its throat, like some Transylvanian prince who will not let go.

It is not only Kavanaugh's sexual past that we're fascinated with. We're examining his high school yearbook, that most boring and juvenile of missives, and the hidden lives of schoolboys in "elitist" schools of the '80s (who must have thought by now that their infantile misjudgements were well forgotten)! The judge himself amazingly kept returning to that juvenile life, as he repeated how much he "liked beer" - and didn't everybody else?

This episode, aside from either his guilt or innocence, shows us the extent to which sex has taken over the America that we see in ourselves - and that the world is surely seeing in us.

For months, men at the top of America's cinema, television and theater worlds have been shamed as abusers of women; hundreds of Roman Catholic priests have been revealed as sexual predators of boys; and now, this lurid tale emerges, set in the innocence of boyhood, of a prominent judge. That's not to speak of the vulgarity in our public and civic space - think of the naked sensuality on cable TV shows - and so much more.

In my day - the 1950s, '60s and into the '70s and the anti-Vietnam youth revolution - sex may have been everywhere. But it was hidden, not blatant, and never in-your-face. If you need a counter-example of America today, think of Amsterdam, the most perfectly ordered of cities, where prostitutes sit in dimly lit windows on a beautiful canal. Which better represents sexual freedom, or at least control?

Kavanaugh's case illuminates for the American people the larger moral decline we see around us, for sex has always been at the center of our existential selves. The events of this week are likely to stand for a long, long time as a turning point - but turning exactly to what?

For the moment, there are no answers, but let's start with comments and warnings from some of our wiser people.

Former John McCain strategist Steve Schmidt, speaking on MSNBC about the hearings, almost angrily characterized the spectacle: "I think of kids playing with matches." Then he added, hitting the mark, "Americans were shocked to see the degeneracy in our institutions."

Yes, that is a great part of it. But institutions will not return to healthy function and morality without the regeneration of ties among Americans - ties that used to exist not only on a government and religious and military level, but on civic levels from the Masons to the VFW to the unions that gave working men and women pride as well as pay.

Far away, the former Brazilian president, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, mused about the problems plaguing his country - which also apply to the United States. Writing recently in the Financial Times, Cardoso coined a word for the restoration of character he seeks.

Brazil, he said, torn internally with corruption of financial life and its eternal sister, distrust, needs to go through a painful process of "re-moralizing" its public life. He did not pretend to know how to do this: He was simply issuing a warning signal for what is necessarily to come - and not only in Brazil.

But how do you do this? How do you inject morality into a society that seemingly has lost it? How do you make people grow up who have grown old without maturing? These are the real questions.

In the end, they are profoundly personal. They are questions rooted, formally or loosely, or not at all, in the moral structure of our individual selves.

Alexis de Tocqueville, one of the greatest writers on American life, wrote of the then-predominant American innocence in his travels in the 1830s: "America is great because she is good, and if America ever ceases to be good, America will cease to be great." Can we be good again?

Email Georgie Anne Geyer at gigi_geyer@juno.com.

© 2018, Universal