As the Snake Slithers: More Creepy Stories About the Sex-Offending ‘Justice’ Appointed by Our Sex-Offending President

What I find particularly galling in the grubby party-hack ascent of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court is the way that it cheapens my own youthful experience and explodes my no doubt foolishly cherished illusions about what college life should be like.

Those of us following this outrage read in last weekend’s New York Times story on Kavanaugh’s serial creep-at-the-party abusive treatment of women as a Yale undergraduate that the university was looking to create more ‘diversity’ on campus — by “integrating more minority students into its historically privileged white male population” — in the ‘80s.

And I want to scream, “Still?”

More “diversity” is precisely what the university said it was going for late in the ’60s when they accepted people like me into a freshman class that — the admission office openly boasted — would include as many public school grads as private school guys. Also, that something more than half the incoming class would be receiving financial aid of some sort. And that fewer students were being accepted as ‘legacies’ — a term in common use today, but which I never heard back then. Instead we simply called them ‘Old Blues.’ Old Blues (the term references the school colors) meant the dads and granddads off all the previous financially privileged white specimens filling the undergraduate ranks back to the college’s founding because they were ‘our kind of people.’ That would also mean, of course, Christians.

But in the middle ’60s Yale was openly boastful about the full range of demographic changes the institution was making to its student body make-up.

My freshman class — as the admissions department pointedly declared — also included more Jewish members than ever. I can’t recall the percentage, but it was impressive. That number (it seemed to me) would logically increase simply because the university was taking in more public school graduates and fewer descendants of Old Blues.

They even found a few Black students to accept in my year, though, as everyone including the university acknowledged, the number was nothing to brag about.

True — and rather astonishing to recall — they did not accept a single woman in my class. That sociological leap did not occur until the year after I graduated.

But Yale had been mixing members of both genders (back when there were only two) for more than a decade by the time they folded youthful creep and social climber Brett Kavanaugh into the mix in 1983. Could they not have maintained their generous percentage of preppie social-climbing brown-nosers — a species I naively assumed to be a dying breed back in my own day — without descending to the likes of creepy-weepy self-aggrandizing — and self-pitying — Brett Kavanaugh?

Yet, as we read in the Times story, the current Trump version of the FBI, despite the made-for-TV drama of right-wing apparatchik Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearing last year, paid no closer attention to the man’s past conduct than did the Yale admission office when they enabled this cornball serial liar to pollute the campus mix.

The failure of the FBI to truly investigate several claims of sexual assault — including a new one from a source who made repeated attempts to reach the agency’s so-called investigators — especially given the narrow window for investigations by the Enabler-in-Chief was obvious to anyone with sense at the time. So I’m glad the Times has finally followed this story up

Here’s a piece of what the story’s authors concluded, after looking into Deborah Ramirez’s account of Kavanaugh’s conduct when they were both Yale undergraduates:

“Ms. Ramirez’s legal team gave the F.B.I. a list of at least 25 individuals who may have had corroborating evidence. But the bureau — in its supplemental background investigation — interviewed none of them, though we learned many of these potential witnesses tried in vain to reach the F.B.I. on their own.

“Two F.B.I. agents interviewed Ms. Ramirez, telling her that they found her ‘credible.’ But the Republican-controlled Senate had imposed strict limits on the investigation. ‘We have to wait to get authorization to do anything else,’ Bill Pittard, one of Ms. Ramirez’s lawyers, recalled the agents saying. ‘It was almost a little apologetic.’”

One of the members of the Senate’s Judiciary Committee said Ramirez’s allegations were not “even remotely investigated.”

In addition to its failure to follow up Ramirez’s clearly “credible” claims, the FBI made no attempt to investigate, or even respond, to the new information offered them of a yet another incident of sexual abuse — a claim made by a different former Yale undergraduate, who was prepared to tell of behavior by Kavanaugh very similar to the creep’s self-exposure to Ramirez.

The Times reported that a classmate of Kavanaugh’s named Max Stier saw Mr. Kavanaugh with his pants down at a different drunken dorm party, “where friends pushed his penis into the hand of a female student.” Although Stier notified senators and the FBI about this account, the FBI failed to take any steps to investigate it.

I find it hard to believe that anyone with sense or decency accepts that people, however young and crude, can be permitted to get away with behaving as Kavanaugh credibly did on at least three occasions. Not only should this narcissistic creep never have been considered for a responsible position in the US government, much less a seat on the Supreme Court — he should have been kicked out of college.

But perhaps I am out of touch with the liberties that young, white, privileged male undergraduates have arrogated unto themselves since my brief span of days among the privileged Ivies many years ago. I suspect I have lived a sheltered life, abetted perhaps by the experience of having attended what was then a single-sex college.

Doubtless I am naive. Back in the day, we male Yalies, however more ‘diverse’ in our backgrounds than previous classes, contented ourselves to gathering in our dorm rooms and smoking weed to all hours of the night. Sometimes we took pills that the pharmacologists classified as “hallucinogens,” though in my experience we all remained in our right mind when it came to behaving charitably toward one another, and appropriately to members of the opposite sex when, as ‘guests,’ they happened to be among us. To the best of my memory, in the ‘radical’ late ’60s humane and considerate conduct was in fashion.

And when in mixed company young men somehow managed to keep their clothes on and their privates private.

Nor did I hear of any accounts, or even rumors, of a sexual encounter that was not consensual.

In those days undergraduates expressed their wilder urges in different ways, perhaps by running away from cops and their tear gas during anti-war demonstrations in Washington and the police riot of the 1968 Chicago Convention

The disturbing accounts of sexually abusive behavior by men we continually read about these days seem to me to be the acts of another species, one I would not choose to be part of.

And while Yale and other ‘prestige’ institutions appeared to find another sort of young male to fold into a wider undergraduate mix — one that included women — by the time they got around to Creeper Brett in the 1980s, I am aware that I am guilty of living firmly in the past and seeking to protect my own illusions. Illusions of a gentler world, built more on community than economic competition and social climbing: Let’s call it Woodstock Fever (though I missed that mythic gathering). A world governed by gentler conduct by folks of all ages, and all genders (howsoever many they prove to be), who spend their free hours sitting around and talking, singing, laughing, smoking a little weed perhaps, sharing equably in life’s daily chores. Men cooking and cleaning the kitchen. Women preparing the latest petition to right the remaining wrongs perpetuated by the ruling class.

Did things turn out the way I hoped they would?

Hell, no.

Those generalized peace and love vibes have long been overwhelmed by the getting and spending of a world that is ever more with us.

But on a more personal level, I remain resentful of Kavanaugh’s mawkish and self-serving notion of what a saintly drudge he was in order to be rewarded by a place in Yale.

Smells like white-privilege BS to me.

Personally, I did not ‘work so hard’ studying ‘night after night’ to get into Yale. I did not prep for my SAT’s — a pathetic piece of grade-grubbing that was unheard of back in my day.

In fact I did not spend a minute thinking about how to weasel my way into a ‘prestige’ college by “standing out,” or discovering what a desired college was ‘really’ looking for and turning myself into that product. I confess to spending a few moments thinking about how I or my family could possibly afford any college — and concluding, ‘Hell, if some place really wants me they’ll make it happen.’

I understand that for ambitious (and fortunate) young people today, “choosing a college” is a two or three-year obsession (or longer), but I prefer to retain the ideals and illusions of a more laidback day.

I applied to Yale, late in the game, on the advice of another student whom I didn’t know very well. And I can’t say why — aside from the desire to grab more public school grads who came from families with truly modest incomes — Yale folded me into their mix. The only thing I did that might cause me to stand out (though I didn’t do it for that reason) was to write editorials for my high school paper “challenging authority” — from principals to presidents — on various grounds.

And the only thing I remember about the college application process was a brief debate with an alumni interviewer — an old blue in a law office — who questioned my support for King’s civil rights tactics. Yes, I argued, people have a right to disobey the law in a just cause.

A principle I still believe in, and suggest we put into practice today.

Any court decision that the illegitimately chosen and nakedly partisan party-hack Kavanaugh takes part in is no just law, and no legitimate decision, at all.

Let’s kick his butt off the bench, where he never deserved to sit, and revisit any official actions he has taken.

And by the way, creep-o, stop soiling the reputation of my alma mater.