Sex, Drugs, and Nominations

So there I was, at 17, newly ensconced in a dorm room in Caroline Hall on the southwest corner of the University of Maryland College Park campus, and all I could think was "good god, these people are immature." A bit over four years later, I was the recipient of a fresh diploma, having moved, for various reasons, to the opposite end of campus, where I had a room on the first floor of Cambridge Hall, where, with only four rooms, it was possible for us to control our roommates reasonably well, once we got rid of mine. Mark, whose last name I will elide, was, not too put to fine a point on it, a complete jerk. He had peed out the window at the end of the corridor, I seem to recall him puking on the floor of the room from drink (although this happened enough different places that they tend to blur together), and on his departure smashed an entire bottle of peppermint schnapps on the floor, which he did not clean up. His peak jackassitude came when, as a relief from dining hall food, the fellows in the next room prepared spaghetti and meat sauce over a hot plate. Mark had somehow managed to talk someone at the dining hall into giving him an institutional sized can of oregano, and as the sauce about to be complete, he abruptly poured about a cup of the herb into the sauce. We managed to choke down the bitter result, and yet.

But he was exceptional only in the effort he put into offensiveness. I mentioned drink: well, back in those days, when it was still legal to drink at college age, the amount of beer consumed was very frequently herculean, as if my dorm mates were to swallow a sea of beer, like the first of the five Chinese brothers. Unfortunately, like him, they apparently could not keep it down forever, leading to the aforementioned messes. Nonetheless the "40 Keg Beer Bash" was a regular, ordinary occurrence, and I recall one evening when there was a keg on the corridor, and one fellow put away three iced tea glasses of its contents, and then went across campus for the then-standard three beers for a dollar, and somehow managed to make it home and sleep it off without further event. Those events included the water fountain across from my room being torn off the wall twice, and a fire in the trash chute in another dorm, this latter event being common enough that they shortly thereafter sealed them all off. At the southeast corner of campus stood the Rendezvous Inn, a dive notorious as a supplier of campus drunkenness, so that regulars kept a pair of "'Vous shoes" which could be allowed to be ruined by the scum of spilled beer. Of course, marijuana was also everywhere, and while I could associate with my fellows without drinking myself insensate, it proved impossible not to avoid the occasional contact high.

And as to the sex: earlier in the year, I wrote of my experience sharing a room with my roommate's girlfriend, not that she lived there, but that the two of them coupled every night. I was chaste for a variety of reasons, ranging from the moral to the practical to the simple dearth of women with whom I wanted to go beyond simple friendship, but there were plenty of cautionary stories being acted out all around me. And around of all of this, the constant noise: in my first years I tended to spend a lot of time in the undergraduate library (which had an all-night study area) simply because it was quiet.

I say all this as a preface to an examination of Kavanaugh's testimony, for the contested event would have happened the year after I graduated from this carnival. I had arrived there from one of those high-end Protestant boarding schools whose prestige Georgetown Prep could only aspire to but not achieve, and where, for various reasons (chief among them its isolation), extracurricular drinking and the like were limited (and at the time dealt with harshly), though one of my 9^th grade classmates managed to get expelled by drinking himself into a coma. Said surroundings, in any case, apparently pushed me to a sort-of adulthood against which the antics of my fellow collegians were not cast in a favorable light. Rumors eventually reached me, though, of a huge drunken party held off campus the year after I graduated, and I am given to understand that the school has had to relax some of its rigidity. But I knew none of this at the time, and managed to muddle through without any significant disciplinary blots, or for that matter much temptation to risk getting them.

Thus, when I see "BEACH WEEK" heavily written in on an old calendar of the period, it takes no great imagination to work out what was involved: a drunken debauch accompanied by casual sexual interactions of all sorts, many of which could only be called consensual in the sense that two blotto youngsters in the same room allowed their uninhibited gonads to take the reins of the encounter. I was not invited to any such party back in the day. In the first place, I didn't travel in that kind of social circle, nor was I that terribly interested in spending time in such a disorderly crowd; also, my impression is that the institution of a week-long parent-free beach party was a few years in the future. Ironically, my best friend's family did have a beach house, to whose premises I venture every year for a weekend party whose riotousness cannot compare to those more youthful efforts; I did visit it a few times in my salad days, but even then we were a sedate, family-friendly crowd-- perhaps because the whole family was present.

Or to put it another way: I was, by and large, the sort of person that Kavanaugh has tried to paint himself as having been at the time. I was temperate and chaste and apt to be something of a wallflower at parties, and certainly not a threat to the women around me, which perhaps explains why I retain so many among my closest friends. On campus I eventually settled in with the medievalists and avoided the frats, whose reputation has not changed one whit over the decades. Every document of his youthful life puts him as a perfect candidate for their "lifestyle", if you will pardon the euphemism, just as it emphasizes how out of step he was with the way I lived. And it puts a certain color on his presumed vote should Roe v. Wade or its ilk come up for consideration. I was a co-op student in college, working as a programmer at a local navy lab, and one of my various office mates was a Catholic fellow, old enough to be my father; and when we discussed the subject at one point, he opined that the typical American RC position was "I am absolutely opposed to abortion, and if my daughter needs one, she's damn well going to get one." If Kavanaugh did not hold to that position, having not yet been presented with the moral dilemma, he certainly lived in a wealthy suburban milieu in which knocked-up daughters damn well did get their abortions, and I have to imagine that the sort of restrictions that will try to get the court's approval would not have much an impact on wealthy suburbanites today, and that when his daughters are old enough, their unlucky classmates will have their lapses dealt with discretely and without difficulty.

All this is to say that it isn't so much that I do not believe Kavanaugh's denials, but that everything about him argues that he was the sort of guy who could have done such a thing, and that he hung around the the kind of guys that did do such things, and that he comes across not such as reformed as in denial, at best. His is the world of Risky Business (which was released one year after the alleged incident), and if he was not the Joel Goodsen of that paean to adolescent probity, well, his friends were Goodsen's friends. And if the promiscuity of the age has been dampened by AIDS if nothing else, society of all sorts is not about to try to put the randy genie back into the bottle of pre-1960's dating rituals, and never mind Dad with the shotgun. With Trump as its flag bearer, the Republican Party of the present is, increasingly, the party of flagrant amorality, and the concerns which supposedly drove the selection of Kavanaugh are not in the least convincing.

Sex and the Single Encounter

Internet thinkers have been chattering about the tale from an anonymous woman about her unpleasantly sexual evening with a reasonably well-known comedian, starting with wine and dinner and ending with sexual acts which she apparently did not desire to perform, all on the first, um, date. At The Atlantic, Caitlin Flanagan basically got things right and James Hamblin largely missed the point, and it seems to me that the fact that he is twenty years younger than her (and she is only a year younger than I) explains a lot of the difference in perspective: Flanagan, and I, were raised in the old mores, and got to see everything come apart as teenagers and young adults, just before Hamblin was born.

The details of the encounter do not need to be repeated, but suffice it to say, "Grace" sought the comedian, and after some arranging that had an evening in which she went to his pad for a glass of wine, they went out to dinner, and then they returned to his apartment, and shortly thereafter were engaged in a sex act which she, apparently, wasn't really hot on, and it went on from there until she broke down in tears and left. Finally, she got to shame him by getting someone to recount her tale, naming him but not her. He, by old-school standards, comes across as a cad; her participation is more complex, not only because we hear her emotional side, but because of the obvious emotional conflict within her. As Flanagan says, what they did was "was hardly the first move in the 'one-night stands' of yesteryear," which itself reduces the prolapsed morality of my early adulthood to antique propriety. But then, the point after all is that there are no longer any rules. The whole talk of consent one hears among the liberated righteous comes across, in the scenario of this "date" and for that matter of dating in the large, as wholly inadequate to the matter of real male-to-female interaction. In the story, she consents, and consents, and feels bad about consenting, but she keeps at it until, apparently, he asks for something she is unwilling to give, and then her "no" really comes as a teary abrogation of every "OK" said heretofore. Conversely, "consent" is simply not up to the task of justifying the assertion that he shouldn't have been asking in the first place. After all, she could have been a sexually aggressive and adventurous woman, or even a prostitute who was up for anything he was willing to pay for outright. But in this case the negotiations broke down in mid-encounter.

Meanwhile various women writing on the matter talk about how men are conditioned by society to chase after sex, and how women are conditioned to yield. This fails to deal with human difference in both respects: on the one hand it attributes too much to culture, and on the other whitewashes over the extreme range of human temperament. The woman in this comes across with a neediness that certainly no woman I ever dated expressed; the man's drive is is less clear, because we do not hear his side, but it's not hard to interpret him as having a sexual drive which she (from his perspective) volunteered over and over to satisfy, but which one may not assert of every man. And while she says that she offered lots of nonverbal cues, anyone reading on the history of this had surely heard the male side: that women send out signals that men are meant not the catch, so they can be docked points for missing them.

Really, anyone should have the sense to see that this business of male-to-female interaction is actually difficult, which is perhaps one reason why all prior societies mediated them with rituals and norms, often of great elaboration. Just sixty years ago, there's no way a nice girl like her would have been in the man's kitchen in the first place, and never mind the sex. None of this was perfect, of course, and a lot of it functioned to the disadvantage of women, no doubt. But having no structures at all hasn't fixed the problems; it has simply meant that the thing is a complete crapshoot for anyone who isn't either a complete prude or utterly promiscuous.

I lived at the prudish end, not that I was stupid enough to make an issue of it in the licentious late '70s and early '80s. To illustrate: I spent part of one summer school at UMCP with a roommate in the dorms who had sex with his girlfriend every night. I simply arranged, on my own, to delay my return to the room until I expected them to be completed, and walked in on them in mid-coitus twice. The breaking point was when he expected me to vacate my bed for a weekend so that she could occupy the room with him for several days of fun: I put up with his inconvenient fornicating, but depriving me of the bed I had paid for. When I took the matter to the resident director, she essentially backed him up, and I was fortunate to find someone else who grudgingly let me move in with them for the remaining days of the term. For my own part, I found chastity much less complicated and fraught. I did not join my flesh to another, and thus avoided all the attachments spoken of by Paul; and in an earlier generation, I would have found my choice buttressed by a social order that at least paid lip service to Christian mores.

But not any longer. Blessed are they, it appears, who are not driven by sexual desire; but the rest play upon an uncertain field, torn between play and battle.

Appomattox in the Cathedral

So the word has come down that the Lee and Jackson windows are being removed, consigned to some undetermined fate. Those who have read my earlier responses here and here may anticipate, correctly, that I am not terribly happy about this, but the events in Charlottesville surely sealed their doom.

Mark Tooley's article in First Things is a bit of a mess, and the comments of course are mostly a cesspool of posturing, but he manages to convey some of the rather mixed message of the cathedral fabric. This report produced by the task force set up to advise the cathedral on the windows is not particularly illuminating in its own right and especially as to the motivations of anyone other than a UDC member (you knew the Daughters were going to figure in this), and her offering is a classic in Lost Cause thinking, but when it comes down to it either Bishop Freeman (who was an upper crust New Yorker from birth) was misrepresented in his stated desire for a Lee memorial, or there were a number of Yankees who helped push this thing along. My impression was that they found Lee and then Jackson, who was added fairly late in the development of the memorial, honorable and even admirable figures; they were also plainly having Westminster Abbey delusions, into which certain prominent southern figures dovetailed nicely. And at least it was Jackson, and not Leonidas Polk. But while the cathedral has managed to maintain its claim to national religious ceremony (as witnessed most recently by its dogged participation in the Trump inaugural in defiance of progressive pressure), its memorials are scattered and unsystematic. Nowhere is this more evident than in the windows, which, except for Rowan leCompte's clerestory series, vary widely in style and subject, with the only pattern dictated by age and taste, and, well, by donors.

Those images form part of a fabric that is at once anamnetic and forward-looking in hope. "A house of prayer for all people" was an objective from the start, and while one can of course feel a certain hubris in the Episcopal assumption that they were ordained to do the uniting, the cathedral as a building stands as a monument to the idea of a nation gathered together in prayer. But the Episcopal Church itself has abandoned any such vision. Our leadership still suffers from the notion that they, by virtue of their positions, ought to be heeded, but they in reality have come to speak for a narrowed position that is still caught in the old boomer progressive contradiction of being simultaneously rebellious against authorities and utterly captured by leftist academia's elitist notions.

The torch-bearing mob in Charlottesville tipped the balance, of course: with Lee and Jackson being shrouded and indeed any figure on the wrong side of modern judgement about the war being taken away in the night, it was inevitable that the windows would be secularized and taken away to ignominy. But with their removal comes another moment of national irreconciliation. The national battle is not between alt-right fascists and righteous leftists, for the vast bulk of the nation would have neither in control in the end, contrary to the alarmists who serve the major political interests. Too many people have defended taking down the statues by making anachronistic attacks on Lee's character; he was no saint, nor were any of the other generals on either side, but to reduce him to a mere traitor is to apply a judgement out of time and in denial of a genuine conflict of loyalty. This is rewriting history, and while I have laughed at the romanticism of the Southern cause ever since I was old enough to understand the antics of the North Carolinians who populate my father's family, the current angry certainty of the left trivializes the issues faced by southerners when the war began. And my sense is that we have still further into a national ethos where the constraining civic virtues-- honor, loyalty, duty, respect-- shrink further from public life and become merely weapons: increasingly ineffectual, as the last presidential election showed. It is often said on the left that these were always honored more in the breach than the observance, but I do not believe that; and at any rate, if we do not aspire to them, the alternative is, well, the increasing nastiness we have now instead.

I'm not writing nasty or sorrowful letters to the cathedral, if only because I do not believe they will value my opinion. I have to hope that Dean Hollerith and Bishop Budde, unlike their immediate predecessors, will be able to deal with the empty tracery with some sensitivity instead of a display of triumphalist self-righteousness. And I pray that they can find a way to include those outside the progressive circle in the future of our national cathedral.

On Naming the President in Prayer

Let it be said first of all that a quick glance through the BCP shows there is little expectation that the president be payed for by name. Of the seven forms for the prayers in the eucharist, only two (Rite I and Form V) even offer an option for naming him; neither does Prayer 19 ("For the President of the United States and all in Civil Authority") among the miscellany in the back. (A correspondent informs me that the Great Litany does expect the name to be used.)

And yet. Consider the following miscellaneous prayers:

• 6. For our Enemies
• 26. For those who suffer for the sake of Conscience
• 28. In Times of Conflict

And consider what we pray for concerning our president: "Grant [him] and to all in authority, wisdom and strength to know and to do thy will. Fill them with the love of truth and righteousness, and make them ever mindful of their calling to serve this people in thy fear." If we pray so for a president whose policies we support, how much more so for one whose views we deplore?

In the midst of the upcoming elevation of the despicable Donald Trump, we thus have the following missive from the rector of that bastion of liberal churchmanship, All Saints Pasadena: "I have made the change to remove the president’s name (while continuing to pray for him by title) and beginning to pray for the president-elect (though not by name)." The excuse he gives for this is that "[his] name is literally a trauma trigger to some people – particularly women and people who, because of his words and actions, he represents an active danger to health and safety." OK, well, that is nonsense. First of all, I don't think it is really true; I have too many overly dramatic (which is to say perfectly normal) elderly southern female relatives to take that seriously. Again, I say, I join with those who oppose him, most of his platform, and the culture of greed, amorality, and self-service which he represents. But just upon hearing his name? Take some Buck-u-uppo, for crying out loud. Or perhaps our clergy should follow the example of the priest who slaps his gibbering fellow passenger in Airport. Catering to such drama-mongering is just bad all around.

But in any case, this concern provides a convenient excuse for a political snub of the president-elect. All Saints has dabbled in politics quite a bit over the years, to the point of attracting some federal interest back in 2004. And I suppose, on one level, that casuistry obligates them to do so, even though they are very often wrong. But this simply comes across as petty.

Prescient Screwtape

Or at least his amanuensis: Tom Nichols on how C. S. Lewis anticipated our culture of treason. And it goes beyond that. I was pleased to see that public pressure (or at least the president-elect's ability to read the public) caused congress to recant its evisceration of its ethic review processes. But consider this passage:

Angry people, confused by not enough education and too much information, or unwilling to face their own poor choices in life, or bearing vague grudges about the forces that always seem to deprive them of the right job, or mate, or status among their peers, cheer on a Snowden or a Manning as a kind of self-actualizing exercise.

They’re happy that someone’s finally sticking it to the Man, or the system, or the Coca-Cola Corporation, or whomever they resent for not giving them a round of applause every morning just for getting dressed without help.

I can’t say I’m certain why this is happening. Some of it, I think, is from years of marination in an American culture that once celebrated excellence, self-reliance, and success, and now demands more “democratic” values like “equality” (meaning mediocrity), “community” (meaning conformity), and “education” (meaning pissing away a few years studying the deep works of Jay-Z at Georgetown). Add to this a therapeutic obsession with never “demeaning” others, and you have the alchemic makings of an explosion of insecurity and anger.

And is this not how the presidential election was decided?