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The Cavity We Chose To Ignore

I don’t usually write two columns at once, but these topics seem closely related enough.

In the last few days, it’s become apparent that Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, currently the most senior member of SCOTUS, has a legal conflict of interest in virtually any case he might hear in the future.

It’s not that we didn’t know he had one, mind you. It’s just that now he’s trapped between two rather damning syllogisms:

1.) He knew his wife was deeply involved in an effort to invalidate the 2020 presidential election with no legal basis, and did nothing, making him both complicit to an illegal act and ethically bankrupt for not recusing himself from a directly related SCOTUS case;

2.) He did not know that his wife was deeply involved in an effort to invalidate the 2020 presidential election, and therefore he is an oblivious idiot not to be trusted with anything.

Whether 1) or 2) reflects the actual reality of the situation, I suspect, will remain mostly fodder for SCOTUS historians. Either one is bad. The first bookend of his SCOTUS career was his damning confirmation hearing; now we’re just picking out the decor of the second.

My intention here, though, is not to condemn or bury Thomas. My intention is rather to draw some attention to who is drawing attention to his dilemma. Rhetoric is an act, and art, of selection; we chose what we want to talk about, and choose what we do not talk about, for effect.

The news cycle has been dominated by Ukraine lately, and for good reason, as Vlad Putin has unwittingly managed to do something that hasn’t happened since the 90s – unify the West – and Zelensky and Ukraine have turned my go-to wear of nondescript green shirts (and among many other things, the surprising utility of the average Ukraine tractor’s torque in hauling abandoned tanks) into a statement of principled defiance. It helps, of course, if you have a shoulder-fired anti-tank missile handy when you make such statements, but when your opponent has both the symbol and the signified, I sense driving a T-72 tank that was obsolescent in 1989 into Ukraine is not a strong career or life investment.

But where is a corrupt (or oblivious) SCOTUS justice in the news? Page 2, if that. I read multiple newspapers like a starving wolf that hasn’t eaten in days, and I learned about this on Reddit, which is the internet equivalent of a slightly upscale back alley with well-spoken hoodlums too busy sharing cat videos to mug you. Surely the papers can take a day off from Ukraine updates to notice the rot? A slight shift in coverage is not going to stop a nuclear exchange.

The steady normalization of corruption would seem to be the answer. Of course Thomas is corrupt. Did anyone think he wasn’t corrupt, save perhaps Virginia Thomas, who once dialed up Anita Hill and demanded that she apologize? Corruption is the norm. Corruption is a feature.

Perhaps it’s only the absence of corruption that makes a story now, which is why the West has reacted so positively to Ukraine’s position. As corrupt as Ukraine has been over the years, the existential threat of invasion has given them (and the West) an interesting chance at a reset back to immediate post-WWII moral clarity. Yes, Russia, like many other autocrat-run countries, does not have our best interests in mind. Maybe it wasn’t a bad idea to keep a few armored divisions and a shitload of planes and submarines placed exactly where force can deter Soviet ambition.

But if America has a monoculture, it is one of weariness. We are all exhausted. If not from work, from Covid, corruption, racism, or rank stupidity. Surely yet another unqualified, powerful elite figure texting their wishes to other unqualified, powerful elite figures is not news. It is expected. And it is expected of us, too, to be corrupt.

As the astute political philosophers collectively known as Lynyrd Skynyrd once pointed out, “Does your conscience bother you? Tell the truth.” Why, fellow Southerners, you’ve probably also broken the law to smear your political opponents with the purpose of holding onto the Presidency of the United States! Haven’t you? Tell the truth.

I am not a particularly good or pleasant person, and there are some things I regret, but no. I have yet to do that or anything remotely similar, nothing that would land me in jail or prison via any twist of reasoning. I won’t even cheat in a board game. I am sensitive to false guilt-projection; just because a SCOTUS justice is corrupt (or oblivious) doesn’t meant that I am corrupt (or oblivious), or I would make a similar corrupt (or oblivious) choice in similar circumstances – or, for that matter, that anyone else would automatically descend into an oozy pile of sleaze, a position largely filled solo by Ted Cruz most days.

But that’s the trick. To get a SCOTUS seat, you have to accept a certain degree of corruption. It is a political position, Democrat or Republican. America largely accepts this. We call them “judges” and Chief Justice Roberts calls them “umpires” but they are closer to the political officers that the Soviets used to enforce correct thinking in military units – our big American innovation is to pit them against each other instead of the rank and file. They could only be “judges” if there was general agreement in America about most core values, and as there is not, they can’t be judges. They can only enforce this or that value and mask it with arbitrary “legal” reasoning.

Perhaps the only sin of Clarence Thomas, then, is that he got caught, and there is no possible coherent defense. But it is hard to defend, much less want to preserve, a society where the crime is not a sin, but being caught is the sin, and where the more elite you are, the less accountable you are. Perhaps his fan-base should dwell upon that, if they can stop wanting to be him long enough, but the Gingrich-Clinton-Trump era has largely deadened our national sensitivity to corruption. We can barely feel the ache that signals the cavity, and thus, we don’t bother to brush. But the absence of pain is not contentment. It is only a lack of signal.

Indeed, this notion is the going theory on why Putin miscalculated so badly in invading Ukraine; he literally didn’t know his armed forces were in piss-poor readiness, through a combination of rank corruption and relying on yes-men. The bulk numbers should have told him something, of course. Readers may recall that in the first real-time CNN-broadcast full-scale conventional war on the planet Earth, and in the first (and last) use of the Powell doctrine, a U.S.-led coalition put together a force of over a half-million personnel and nearly the full power of its air assets to retake tiny Kuwait in 1991, and Russia couldn’t muster half that for a huge county like Ukraine or enough aircraft to get air superiority on Day 1.

Throw in a total defeat on the public relations side and the implosion of the Russian economy, and the syllogism remains. If Putin knew the invasion was doomed, he’s quite complicit in not just its launch, but its failure; if he didn’t know the invasion was doomed, well, this column is turning into an Mad Libs exercise, isn’t it?