By John Hirschauer
Monday, May 4, 2020
The operative question for many in the press as they
assess Tara Reade’s assault allegation against Joe Biden is the correct one: Is
Tara Reade telling the truth? It does not matter what other senators may or may
not have done to other women in other places or at other times. It does not
matter — for purposes of establishing Joe Biden’s culpability — whether the
Long Arc of History Bends toward Justice, whether other women who look like
Tara Reade were assaulted by men who look like Joe Biden, or whether it would
facilitate a more equitable future if we jettisoned Joe Biden, guilt be damned.
What seems to matter to the media, for purposes of assessing Biden’s candidacy,
is whether then-senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. digitally penetrated Tara Reade in
1993.
But this, crucially, is not what mattered to these
same media players when then-judge Brett Kavanaugh was accused of assault, then
indecent exposure, then gang rape in a series of successively more lurid
allegations. What mattered then were not only the merits of Christine Blasey
Ford’s accusation — and that’s Dr. Ford, to you — but also the behavior
of parties completely unrelated to those allegedly involved in the assault,
parties who, by accident of birth, happened to look like Brett Kavanaugh, grow
up like Brett Kavanaugh, and inhabit the “world of privilege” that Kavanaugh
allegedly inhabited.
Joe Biden is being treated as an individual — a man being
accused of a specific crime that either did, or did not, occur. Brett Kavanaugh
was treated as a totem — an antihero, an anti-messianic stand-in for all of
History’s various Straight White Men who “got away with it,” who were cushioned
from the vagaries of life by their unthinkable “privilege,” lashing out against
the browning of America and the long-prophesied end of the Old Boys’ Club.
Hence why Kavanaugh was accused of exhibiting “white
male rage” as, before a national audience, he angrily disputed allegations
of gang rape and sexual assault. It was a specifically white rage, we
were told — Brett Kavanaugh was offered as a totem, as Richard Mosse wrote at The
New Yorker, for all “white men” who “fear losing their privilege in a
changing society.” Paul Krugman of the New York Times informed us that
it was not merely Brett Kavanaugh who was angered at these charges but all
white men with “privilege,” angered by an “increasingly diverse society” and
“the prospect of losing some of that privilege, especially if it comes with the
suggestion that people like him are subject to the same rules as the rest of
us.” (The Nobel laureate, apparently, numbered himself among “the rest of us.”)
Likewise, believing Christine Blasey Ford’s account of
events — one that her best friend and all of the eyewitnesses of the alleged
assault refused to corroborate — was treated as a moral imperative, not merely
for Ford’s sake but for the sake of all women everywhere. CNN blasted out video
of a protester heckling Senator Jeff Flake in an elevator after he indicated
that he would vote yes for Kavanaugh — “That’s what you’re telling all women in
America, that they don’t matter,” she yelped. “They should just keep it to
themselves, because if they have told the truth, you’re just going to help that
man to power anyway.” Time’s Haley Sweetland Edwards echoed the
protester:
The hopes and fears of women and
men who have lived with the trauma of sexual violence were riding on the
credibility of Ford’s testimony. Her treatment in the halls of power, and her
reception by an expectant public, would send a signal to countless survivors
wrestling with whether they should speak up.
Here, Ford was every abuse victim, and Kavanaugh every
abuser, two almost literary figures playing out a story bigger than themselves
in the Senate Judiciary Committee. By refusing to affirm the facts of Ford’s
story, Flake was effectively denying the truth of the broader story, the Larger
Truth, the Narrative truer in toto than the truth or falsehood of any
particular allegation. He refused to crush the egg that would complete a
long-overdue omelet that would at last sate a hunger wrought by centuries of unrectified
gender inequity.
Then there is Joe Biden.
Biden is fortunate, by comparison — he is fortunate that
the New York Times sat on Tara Reade’s sexual-assault accusation for
weeks, even as the slow-motion news cycle wrought by the coronavirus provided
the paper with a starved and captive audience. He is fortunate that his
presumptive general-election opponent has faced both more-numerous and
potentially more-serious allegations of sexual misconduct than he does. Biden
is most fortunate, however, that members of the mainstream press are vetting
the allegation against him on its merits, rather than condemning him as an
avatar of that most loathsome of creatures: The Straight White Male.
If only Brett Kavanaugh had been so lucky.
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