Disclose This
A quick study in moral negligence
“Inadvertently…”
-term repeated 12 times in Clarence Thomas’s disclosure of paid trips and vacations by Harlan Crow, Sept.1, 2023
Justices of the U.S. Supreme Court typically lecture their clerks on word choice when composing opinions on behalf of the Justices. So it is eyebrow raising that Thomas chose to repeat the word “inadvertently” in his public announcement of previous undisclosed paid for trips, hotel and resort stays and other perks at the behest of Republican mega-donor Harlan Crowe.
Consider a dive into the meaning of “inadvertent,” as qualifier.
Thomas’s word choice masks two aligned sub-texts. The first is “feigned ignorance.” Translation: “I didn’t see the cookie jar.”
The second interpretation of Thomas’s word choice is an admission: Thomas can’t control untoward, ignominious events, such as the expose — in this case — by ProPublica of Thomas’s immoral wanderings. (1) It’s an old ploy, used exhaustively by politicians to describe suddenly arriving at a scene not of their making, hence not of their choosing, and making sense of it all from the vantage of the “innocent observer.”
America is exhausted by this theme. Consider a third subtext to Thomas’ word choice: debase the evidence by reducing meaning to the everyday, the conventional, the tolerated. Criminal defense attorneys make of this practice an art. News headlines across America’s fraught political landscape hint at this debasement: the attempt to reduce the meaning of understanding past events to interpreting a “stipulated past.”
Translation: “See it my way or don’t see it at all.”
This is not normal. Yet it is everyday.
To ban Shakespeare and Morrison and 1619, to expunge African American studies from public school and college curricula, to sideline the American diaspora: this is not normal. Yet it seems from the news headlines to be occurring everyday.
A friend recently shared a graphic example of choosing “inadvertently.”
He and his partner were guests on a boat excursion into Lake Michigan. The skipper, a neighbor and acquaintance, had invited them onto his boat, a rental, for a 2 hour cruise. Upon leaving the dock, their boat smacked into the hull of a docked pontoon boat on which were standing several adults watching their kids swim nearby.
Despite the suddenness of the contact and the force of the impact, the skipper did not return to the docked boat to see if anyone needed assistance and to survey damage. Rather he throttled the engine and sped away.
Proclaiming from the pulpit of the accused Supreme Court nominee, Clarence Thomas, jurist citizen, described his ascendancy to privilege before the Senate Judiciary Committee. So “authentic” sounded his story, that Thomas insisted on rendering political motives to his accusers. Emphasis therefore resided not with the privilege of “feigned ignorance” but with “ascendancy.”
A “stipulated ascendancy.”
September 3
Notes
1-
https://www.axios.com/local/dallas/2023/04/06/clarence-thomas-harlan-crow-gop-donor
