{"id":1854,"date":"2018-10-06T22:39:21","date_gmt":"2018-10-06T20:39:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.AVNER-FALK.NET\/?page_id=1854"},"modified":"2018-10-07T09:29:39","modified_gmt":"2018-10-07T07:29:39","slug":"brett-kavanaugh","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.AVNERFALK.NET\/?page_id=1854","title":{"rendered":"The Strange Case of Dr. Brett and Mr. Kavanaugh"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

On Monday, September 24, 2018, President Trump\u2019s Supreme Court nominee Brett Michael Kavanaugh sat for an interview with Martha MacCallum of Fox News<\/em> with his wife Ashley beside him. In response to the interviewer\u2019s question, Mrs. Kavanaugh told Ms. MacCallum, \u201cI know Brett. I\u2019ve know him for seventeen years. And this is not at all [his] character; it\u2019s really hard to believe. He\u2019s decent, he\u2019s kind, he\u2019s good. I know his heart. This is not consistent with \u2014 with Brett.\u201d Did the brief hesitation betray an inner doubt? Ashley Kavanaugh could not allow herself to conceive of her \u201cgood\u201d husband capable of any \u201cbad\u201d behavior. Even Dino Ewing, Kavanaugh\u2019s Yale classmate who had withdrawn his signed support from him, considered an act of sexual violence \u201cout of character\u201d for Kavanaugh. Yet Brett Kavanaugh stood accused by three different women of acts of sexual violence.<\/span><\/p>\n

Could one bridge the enormous gaps between Kavanaugh\u2019s indignant protestations of his innocence and the allegations of his numerous accusers?<\/span><\/p>\n

To understand the strange case of Brett Kavanaugh, who, as a teenager, did not remember the things he had done when he was drunk after he became sober, it is useful to take note of a poignant moment in his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee on September 27, 2018. \u201cI\u2019ve submitted to this committee detailed calendars recording my activities in the summer of 1982,\u201d Kavanaugh said. \u201cWhy did I keep calendars? My dad started keeping detailed calendars of his life in 1978.\u201d At this point he became visibly agitated and struggled for a long moment hard to keep back his tears. \u201cHe did so as both a calendar and a diary. He\u2019s a very organized guy, to put it mildly.\u201d<\/span>
\n\u00a0 <\/span>
\nWhy was Brett Kavanaugh so upset when talking about his father? <\/span>Everett Edward Kavanaugh was not only \u201cvery organized,\u201d he also seems to have been an obsessional and compulsive perfectionist. Brett\u2019s mother, Martha Gamble Murphy Kavanaugh, was a teacher who became a lawyer, like her husband, and even a judge. Brett was their only child. His Catholic parents raised him strictly, expected his to be perfect, and to be a devout Catholic, and criticized and punished his \u201csins,\u201d such as sexuality or drinking. His defense was to unconsciously split up his \u201cself\u201d into two separate ones: a \u201cgood,\u201c sober, asexual Brett, and a \u201cbad,\u201d drunk, sexual one. The two selves did not know one another. Brett, who was constantly judged as a child, became a judge himself, like his mother, but the objects of his judgment were other people.<\/span>
\n\u00a0 <\/span>
\nBrett Kavanaugh himself became every bit as obsessional, compulsive and perfectionist as his father. Not only did he keep meticulous, day-by-day diaries and calendars since he was fourteen, he also tried to get everything in his life \u201cjust right.\u201d He was thirty-six before he found the right wife. Before sitting down to testify at the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on September 27, 2018 he adjusted his name card at least three or four times to get it perfectly centered. His career as a judge was all about righting his wrong world.
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

Brett\u2019s parents sent him to an \u201casexual\u201d Jesuit all-male prep school, where they expected him neither to drink nor to engage in any sexual behavior. Nonetheless, like his fellow teenagers, he engaged in both. However, he could not engage in sexual acts when sober. Like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the \u201cgood\u201d Brett Kavanaugh did not know the \u201cbad\u201d one. Brett drank heavily in high school, mainly beer. As he told Senator Sheldon Whitehorse during the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on September 27, 2018,\u00a0 \u201cI like beer. I like beer. I don\u2019t know if you \u2015 do you like beer, Senator? What do you like to drink?\u201d <\/span><\/p>\n

One of my own high-school classmates, who emigrated from Israel to the U.S. as a young man, and whose daughter attended the same school as Christine Blasey Ford, has written me, \u201cWe had parties for her friends at our home, and always dreaded the Georgetown Prep crowd. They were a bunch of drunkards, hoodlums, violent and aggressive. Got so bad we had to hire off-duty cops to patrol the property and had an off duty cop check the arrivals against a list, and still they showed up through the back of the property with their 6 packs. […] They were driving home drunk\u00a0 […] we sent [our daughter] to a self-defense course […] so she never felt she had to put up with an aggressor like Kavanaugh.\u00a0 (Interestingly, she avoided the Georgetown Prep crowd, never dated any of them, and always ensured to not invite them to her parties.)\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

When Brett Kavanaugh became seriously drunk, he committed acts of sexual violence: when he sobered up, he forgot them. Brett Kavanaugh was like the little girl in the well-known poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, whose works he must have read in school:<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0There was a little girl,<\/em><\/span>
\n\u00a0 Who had a little curl,<\/em><\/span>
\n\u00a0 Right the middle of her forehead.<\/em><\/span>
\n\u00a0 When she was good,<\/em><\/span>
\n\u00a0 She was very good indeed<\/em><\/span>
\n\u00a0 But when she was bad she was horrid. <\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

People like Donald Trump and Brett Kavanaugh see other people (and even themselves) as either \u201cgood\u201d or \u201cbad,\u201d unable to realize, or accept, that the \u201cgood\u201d people they know can also act \u201cbadly,\u201d or the reverse. This is called \u201csplitting\u201d in psychoanalytic parlance and black-and-white thinking in plain English.\u00a0 Robert Louis Stevenson\u2019s Dr. Jekyll does not know or own up to the hideous acts of his other self, Mr. Hyde.<\/span><\/p>\n

Despite his seemingly-illustrious career, Brett Kavanaugh had his failures as well. For instance, as a Yale freshman, highly competitive and more interested in sports than in law or in politics, he unsuccessfully tried out for the Yale Bulldogs men\u2019s basketball varsity team and had to settle for the junior-varsity team, where Dino Ewing was his teammate. <\/span><\/p>\n

In his Fox News<\/em> interview with Martha MacCallum, Brett Kavanaugh claimed not to have had any sexual intercourse or even \u201canything close to it\u201d until he met his wife Ashley Estes in 2001, when he was thirty-six and she twenty-seven. This was highly unusual and incredible, even for a \u201cgood\u201d man like Brett Kavanaugh. What kind of American male in the late twentieth century would have avoided sexual intercourse until he was thirty-six? The interviewer pressed him on this point, asking, \u201cAnd through what years in college, since we\u2019re probing into your personal life here?\u201dBrett Kavanaugh replied, \u201cMany years after. I\u2019ll leave it at that.\u201d He obviously did not wish to discuss this painful point in public.<\/span><\/p>\n

Kavanaugh\u2019s bizarre and aggressive performance before the Senate Judiciary Committee on September 27, 2018, stood in stark contrast to the subdued, vulnerable, straightforward, honest and moving one of his accuser, Christine Blasey Ford. He was very tense and had a weird facial tick that resembled sniffing. Kavanaugh broke down in tears while discussing the calendars he kept in high school, he rattled off the names of several female friends as proof he never sexually assaulted anyone, he claimed the sexual assault allegations brought against him were part of a pro\u2013Hillary Clinton plot, he dodged questions from committee Democrats about why he hasn\u2019t asked Trump to open an FBI investigation into the allegations against him, he sassily threw questions he didn\u2019t like back at the senators who asked them, and he falsely explained the inside jokes written in his high-school yearbook page. <\/span><\/p>\n

Kavanaugh denied the sexual meaning of \u201cthe Devil\u2019s Triangle\u201d in his prep-school yearbook entry, saying that it meant three people having beers together, when it really meant two men having sex with on woman, as well as that of the phrase \u201cthe FFFFFFFourth of July,\u201d saying that it was just a spoof on one of his classmate having trouble uttering \u201cthe F word,\u201d when in reality it meant Find them, French them, Feel them, Finger them, Fuck them, Forget them. And the man who called himself a \u201cRenate alumnius\u201d [sic] in his prep-school yearbook page became very angry with a senator for mentioning the full name of the woman named Renate, whom Kavanaugh himself had humiliated as having had indiscriminate sexual relations with numerous other boys.<\/span><\/p>\n

The most striking similarity between the allegations of Christine Blasey Ford, Deborah Ramirez, and Julie Swetnick against Brett Kavanaugh were their clear memories of his heavy drinking and of his performing his acts of sexual violence when he was drunk. Indeed, the strange case of the \u201cRenate Alumnius\u201d resembles Robert Louis Stevenson\u2019s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde<\/em>. And, like the little girl in Longfellow\u2019s poem, he was \u201cvery good indeed\u201dwhen sober and \u201chorrid\u201d when inebriated. When he had sobered up, he forgot (or even denied to himself) his \u201chorrid\u201d acts of sexual violence during those drunken house parties, which were too painful for him to own up to and remember. Dr. Jekyll had to take a special potion to become Mr. Hyde; Brett Kavanaugh only had to drink enough beer.
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

On Saturday, October 6, 2018 Brett Kavanaugh was confirmed by the U.S. Senate as a Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. Having put his previous nominee, Neil Gorsuch, on the Court already, Donald Trump was jubilant. He was short-sighted, however. His victory was Pyrrhic. He had won the battle, but could lose the war. Trump was one of the most destructive and divisive leader in U.S. history, and ultimately self-destructive as well. Like his own election to the U.S. Presidency two years earlier, Kavanaugh\u2019s confirmation to the Supreme Court made the Democrats angrier and more vengeful. Millions of American Republicans were expected to vote for the Democrats in the midterm election the following month. The Republicans were expected to lose the House of Representatives, opening the door <\/span>to a new Congressional investigation of Justice Kavanaugh., as well as <\/span>Trump\u2019s impeachment. And Kavanaugh himself, who had guilt feelings, however unconscious, about what he had done in his youth, and about the crooked way he had become Justice of the Supreme Court, could well do something self-destructive in unconscious self-punishment, which would end his career.
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

Like that of Stevenson\u2019s Dr. Jekyll, Brett Kavanaugh\u2019s life \u2014 and that of his president \u2014 could end in tragedy.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u00a0 On Monday, September 24, 2018, President Trump\u2019s Supreme Court nominee Brett Michael Kavanaugh sat for an interview with Martha MacCallum of Fox News with his wife Ashley beside him. In response to the interviewer\u2019s question, Mrs. Kavanaugh told Ms. MacCallum, \u201cI know Brett. I\u2019ve know him for seventeen years. And this is not at […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-1854","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.AVNERFALK.NET\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1854","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.AVNERFALK.NET\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.AVNERFALK.NET\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.AVNERFALK.NET\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.AVNERFALK.NET\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1854"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.AVNERFALK.NET\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1854\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.AVNERFALK.NET\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1854"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}