By any means necessary
by Tom Sullivan
Botham Jean
Every July 4th, America celebrates its declaring independence from rule by hereditary royalty and landed gentry. These days it seems our problem wasn’t with being governed by hereditary royalty and landed gentry, so much as that our British overlords were so … foreign.
John Cassidy of The New Yorker observes that if Brett Kavanaugh takes a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court, it will be the second time in 18 months a scion of “the Washington governing class” from Georgetown Preparatory School has received a lifetime, taxpayer-funded job on the court. After obtaining a law degree from Harvard, it goes without saying. (Or Yale. Yale would do, too.) Kavanaugh faces allegations of sexual assault committed while attending Georgetown Prep:
The idea that members of the “law-and-order party” would appoint someone to the highest court in the land while he is facing an accusation of this nature, and before it has been fully investigated, is outrageous.
As is the the idea that a reprobate under investigation for financial crimes and conspiracy with a foreign government can nominate him before that has been fully investigated. Privilege has its privileges.
After noting the school’s $60,280 annual tuition for boarders and its graduates’ proclivity for landing “upper professional class” employment, Cassidy writes:
My point is a broader one about social class, privilege, and the intergenerational transmission of high status. It is bad enough in a country with hundreds of law schools that seven of the current Justices graduated from just two of them—Harvard and Yale—and that Kavanaugh would make it eight. (Ruth Bader Ginsburg transferred from Harvard to Columbia University’s law school.) If the United States is going to start reserving positions like Supreme Court Justice and chair of the Federal Reserve for folks who have attended the most exclusive private prep schools and the most prestigious Ivy League graduate schools, it might as well go the full hog and change its name to England. Olde England.
Donald J. Trump, the self-styled working-class hero born into wealth, nominated Kavanaugh. Trump fawns over “winners,” meaning those who, like himself, measure winning in stacks of hundreds, stock portfolios, and property deeds. The land of opportunity for America’s home-grown ruling class is one in which Americans not of their stature wear “sucker” written across their faces as in a Looney Tunes cartoon. The unpunished — that is, essentially state-sanctioned — pillaging of America by Wall Street that led to the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression and a grotesque widening of the wealth divide proved that beyond a shadow of a doubt. This is their country and they mean to keep it by any means necessary.
It is not that the concept of noblesse oblige is entirely dead, Adam Howard, a professor of education at Colby College, told NPR’s Here and Now. Elite schools pride themselves on instilling “courage, compassion, care, concern and all of that.” But that is not the main reason parents send children there. They send them to “make sure that they maintain and hopefully even advance their class position.” What students take away from their time in these elite settings is not always what the brochures advertise:
“But those same values, also there’s another side. They also encourage win-at-all-costs attitudes, unhealthy levels of stress, deception, materialism, competition and so forth, selfishness and greed. So there’s a different side to it.”
Just as the wealthy measure themselves against one another by their net worth, as measured against fellow Americans, their elite upbringing convinces some they are entitled to supplemental privileges. Such as being able to treat women like chattel and walk away protected by maleness and money. In a sense, the Tories never really went away. We just replaced one set for another.
It is a different America for others supposedly created equal: for women, for people of color, for the poor. Twenty-six year-old Botham Jean, black and unarmed like many before him, died from police gunfire in his Fort Worth apartment while watching football.
Republican U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz (another Harvard Law graduate) considers pointing out the wrongness of that something to hold up for ridicule:
In Beto O'Rourke's own words #TXSenateDebate pic.twitter.com/uUzW7DSqgo— Ted Cruz (@tedcruz) September 21, 2018
[h/t N.A.]
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