BRATTLEBORO — I am finding myself drawn deeply into the Kavanaugh controversy, especially Christine Blasey Ford's part, because of the disturbing memories it awakens, and their implications.
Although I have not lived in the Washington, D.C. area for over 30 years, I come from exactly the same community and setting as Kavanaugh and Ford.
My parents grew up in Chevy Chase, Md. I was baptized at Blessed Sacrament, where Kavanaugh is a parishioner. Relatives are members.
In my early childhood, I lived in the same cul-de-sac where Kavanaugh lived as a teen, three doors down; by then, we had moved up the street, three blocks away. My mother and brother still live in that neighborhood, as do old friends, and I visit regularly. I was there in August.
I attended Landon School, in the same class as Ford's brother, Ralph. One of our main rivals was and remains Georgetown Prep, which Kavanaugh attended. Holton-Arms, which Ford attended, was regarded as Landon's sister school.
I went to lots of social events with girls from Holton, along with the constellation of other Washington-area private girls' schools: Stone Ridge, Holy Child, Visitation, Immaculata, Madeira, National Cathedral School, etc., plus the big public schools in our part of Montgomery County: Whitman and Bethesda-Chevy Chase High.
My own mother worked as a teacher at Holton when she was young. My dad went to Landon, and my grandmother taught art there (long before my time). Kavanaugh's grandfather and my own were graduates of Yale.
My family did not belong to a country club - that must have been slightly more than my parents could afford or rationalize - but social life involved many visits to the area country clubs cited in the current ongoing testimony and reporting: Columbia CC, Chevy Chase CC, Congressional, Kenwood, and so on. My grandmother belonged to Congressional.
Private schools, certain neighborhoods, and country clubs were not the only arenas in which this affluent, privileged culture unfolded. There were also the dancing schools like Mrs. Shippen's and the Woodley School, certain summer camps, the National Debutante Cotillion, summer resorts where people tended to go (like Rehoboth and Bethany Beach, in Delaware), other social venues, and the Ivy League and other competitive schools that people were expected to go off to so they could return to the D.C. area later as well-compensated lawyers, lobbyists, consultants, or next-generation scions of often sizable businesses in real-estate development, construction, auto dealerships, and so on.
I imagine that every city, especially the richer ones, has the equivalent of this: a densely interlocked community of the rich and their families. The same thing probably exists in Westchester Co., N.Y.; Fairfield County, Conn.; Boston's suburbs; and pretty much anywhere.
Because I know D.C.'s and not the others, I may be making a mistake in seeing it as unique in some ways. But I left the D.C. area 30 years ago to live in Europe for a long time, and now in Vermont for just as long, so my perspective is not based on life in the Washington area alone.
And I still carry with me the sense that there's something about the social environment and massive increase in affluence among Washington's elite community - specifically, in Northwest D.C. and in Montgomery County, Maryland - from maybe the 1950s through the '80s, and even right up to today, that saw more extreme irresponsibility and assumptions of entitlement than you'll find most places: lots of money to spend, the freedom of early mobility due to abundant cars, general permissiveness, parents who were often not around, unsupervised parties, drugs and alcohol, a feeling of limitlessness and lack of consequences, and - for many - a high degree of competitiveness combined with an awareness of social status.
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Washington's privileged set had something else that its equivalents in other major U.S. cities did not: a direct connection to federal power, which acted as an amplifier or accelerant.
The decades we're talking about saw money simply pouring into the Washington area, due to both the massive expansion of the U.S. government - these were the heady days of Washington's ascendancy as an imperial capital - and all of the private-sector development and population growth surrounding it. And our community was perfectly poised to capitalize on it. (As a result, Maryland and the District of Columbia now have the highest median household income in the country.)
It was a fertile environment for budding sociopaths.
I think that's what we're witnessing here.
Kavanaugh has been very successful in his field and apparently thrived in the D.C. bubble of affluence and privilege.
He was never charged with a crime. But, by some flaw in his character, he allegedly crossed lines of what was appropriate and subjected female victims to humiliation, physical attacks, and trauma in connection with getting what he wanted, and - until now - escaped consequences.
After his 20s, as he matured and became a better judge of potential consequences, he may have stopped this kind of behavior. But has his character, nurtured in this environment, really changed? If not, there is no way he should receive a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court bench.
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I was a shy, geeky, academic teenager. My friends and I were not the jocks, not the womanizers. We lusted after girls and desperately wanted girlfriends, but all that had to wait until college days.
I, lacking the perspective I now have, constantly worried that there was something wrong with me: that I was not enjoying the sexual exploits that the more-aggressive or reckless boys enjoyed, that I was not groping girls at will, that I was not making out behind the bleachers, that my friends and I were not “driving trains,” etc.
We heard about these sorts of things through the rumor mill, but we were not where the action was, apparently. In my confusion, I guess my level of worry was not high enough to overcome my personal aversion to doing anything to another human being, against their will, that I would be ashamed of.
Of course, I could never discuss this stuff with my parents or another adult - not even in a coherent fashion with my friends. But, somehow, I muddled through, saved by a combination of morals, fear, confusion, and luck. My friends and I had fun, supported one another in goofy, stupid ways, and had fairly innocent relationships with the girls we did interact with - not always easy to accomplish from single-sex schools.
But the darker side was always there, somewhere - the side of raw power, brutal entitlement, exploitation, and the will (or lack of restraint) to cross lines, along with the worry that this behavior was actually normal and that you weren't really cool if you weren't indulging.
This is what the Kavanaugh case has brought back to me. Christine Ford had real guts to take it on.
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I remain stunned by Kavanaugh's manner during his Sept. 27 hearing. I've been asking myself how I would behave in the same situation. I don't think I would adopt his indignation, his bluster, his counter-attacking tone. He has been accused of a serious crime, and you would think that he would assume an attitude that was sober, restrained, respectful, and objective, especially in view of the position he is being considered for.
I've been struggling to grasp why he chose this approach. On one level, maybe it was because he was told behind the scenes that he was a shoo-in, that this was a slam-dunk, that his appointment was assured based purely on the numbers.
Maybe he was told that wounded innocence and moral indignation would be an asset and play well with the Republican base, with Trump, on Fox News - and it probably did. It's hard to believe for me, personally, but I don't partake of that particular brand of Kool-Aid.
However, I think it went beyond that.
Along with the tears, bluster, and outrage was an odd familiarity, an inappropriate, folksy tone when Kavanaugh referred to coaching basketball, drinking beer, going to church and football camp, having a summer lawn-mowing business, the nicknames of high school friends, various private parochial schools in the Washington area, and weekends away at what sounds like a country house in St. Michael's, Md. (a sailing-oriented resort village about 90 minutes away across the Chesapeake Bay).
I asked myself why he would reveal and dwell on such details to the Judiciary Committee and, via TV and the Internet, the vast jury of public opinion out there around the country and world who neither knew or cared about such things.
Here's my theory.
In the stress of this crisis, he forgot where he was. He acted as if he was among buddies who shared the same context and culture - hanging out at Burning Tree Country Club or the Old Ebbitt Grill or some similar scene of mutual affirmation, running into a colleague in Wagshal's or in the Friendship Heights Metro station.
Buds. “Hey, I'm one of you, so you better treat me that way.”
In the powerful, privileged cocoon of northwest Washington and Montgomery County, he could maintain the illusion he was a normal guy with normal concerns, surrounded by equally ambitious, powerful people who entertained the same illusions, and he was appealing to that shared illusion and we-sense when suddenly placed under scrutiny.
And maybe it worked for Lindsey Graham and some of the other senators. But it did not seem to go over well with the likes of Patrick Leahy, Amy Klobuchar, Dick Durbin, or, eventually, Jeff Flake.
And I'll bet it fell entirely flat with the vast majority of viewers, who live in a world far apart from the affluence, power, and security of the enclave that Kavanaugh inhabits.
His slip was showing. A little discretion and humility would have gone a long way - all the way out to the 99 percent of America that does not inhabit that enclave.
To me, this attitude illustrates how disconnected Kavanaugh is, culpable or not. For this reason alone, he is not what the nation needs in a Supreme Court justice.