Do our lives matter?

In the Kavanaugh affair as with so many others, there are two issues: What happened, and what is its meaning if what she says happened did?

There are many evils like this. One side complains that it happened because it's a way for them to say that if this happened, it's deplorable. But it does happen at least to some people (and is done by some people), and that mens it can happen. From the actual, infer the possible. We worry about what can happen. Traumatic experience and memory themselves work partly that way.

Coincidentally, part of what Kavanaugh is accused of, and that it seems almost impossible to exculpate him from, is inscouciance. It is the inscouciance of the narcissist. The narcissism of privileged men who care too much about their own enjoyment to care very much about anyone else’s suffering while that enjoyment is being procured.

Holocaust denial has this character. The real issue is not did it happen (which everyone knows, those who say no being like those who disavow "castration"), but whether or not it must matter to us now. The deniers say no: Of course, they will admitted, it happened, but it's not such a big deal, and in any case does not concern us now. The declaration of Holocaust remembrance, "Never again," aims at this denial, because it has meaning and force to insist on this if in some sense it is a event that could be repeated, or even that is being repeated, doubtless differently but similarly enough to share in the condemnation. The question is what we need to understand and do to remain, or even become, truly human. Crimes against humanity threaten our humanity. The tolerance for them says that they are normal when they are not (because they must not be), that do threaten the rest of us the way they do, they we can go about our business as usual, untroubled. (Perhaps those are troubled can be given forcible treatments to make them calm and happy).

All the passion about the Kavanaugh-Blasey issue is not primarily about the empirical matter of whether he did to her as she says he did. That's a detail. The question that troubles so many people is what it means, and what consequences should we draw or follow, if this kind of thing has happened.

For if something is actual and did not happen, it is possible and can happen, and that is what is unsettling. The former can be addressed with legal proceedings or their analogues in hearings of committees of various kinds. But the former is proxy for the latter. People who want to see convicted and punished a Kavanaugh, a Weinstein, a Cosby, an Allen, a Polanski, a Ronnell, a priest....: they want to take the accused person as example, and prove something with it. What they so desperately want to prove is something we all know, but need to be reminded of. It has two components: This happens and is happening (somewhere) now, and this must not happen.

What is troubling is the thought that Blasey-Ford is telling the truth, that he did assault her sexually in that way, and that he did this in inscouciance, and that decades later, most Americans know that powerful men abuse powerless women and get by with it because people think it is not a big deal.

It is as if we are called upon to care, and to affirm that we do.

It is a big deal. That it is believable that he did this to her reveals that it is possible that someone will do something like this to someone, as indeed we know happens all too often.
and given the horror of that possibility, we all are called upon to judge whether this is or not a big deal. Whether we do or do not have to care about it. As, if her story is correct, he then and now did not, does not.

Black Lives Matter has raised what is in a way the same issue: Because what they say has often happened is something that can happen, it is an ongoing threat. We know that people are wrongly killed and imprisoned en masse. But does it matter? Does it concern you and me? Must it not concern you and me?

A tyranny will oppress or kill people and say, This does not concern you. Go back to work. Mind your own business. Leave injustice to the authorities. But it does concern us. It does matter. It is a big deal. It's worth being affected and upset.

In some kinds of tyrannies, cruelty is common and tolerated by most people, including those with some power to stop, limit, or prevent it. The Biblical story of Sodom comes to mind. “Here’s a stranger,” the men of that city seemed to say, “Let’s fuck with him. (What fun and laughter we will have).”

Both Blasey-Ford and Kavanaugh were deeply affected, one from terror and the other from rage. She thinks something happened that is a big deal; he says, like the person returning the broken pot in Freud's story: It didn't happen, and even if it did, it's not a big deal. It likely did happened, whether or not it did it is a big deal. And the fact that this kind of thing does and so can happen in America today is an even bigger deal.

At least to anyone who thinks that people and their lives matter at all.