Sorry Ms. Jackson
I’m sorry Ms. Jackson (oh), I am for real
Never meant to make your daughter cry
I apologize a trillion times
I’m sorry Ms. Jackson (oh), I am for real
Never meant to make your daughter cry
I apologize a trillion times
It was so ugly I wanted to reach through the TV, and fucking throttle them. At the same time, it was as pitiful and sad as it was maddening. Exacerbated in no small part by genuine heroics and uncontrived, raw masculinity we’ve witnessed lately embodied by Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson, composed and dignified, sat patiently without resorting to belligerent tantrums as Brett Kavanaugh did during his nomination hearing.
The split-screen contrast — Zelenskyy continuing to eschew the trappings of the Ukrainian presidency and safe harbor offers to help him escape Putin’s aggressive invasion to stay and fight for his country and lead by example — couldn’t have been starker. Against the shrill, histrionic, screeching by senators Lindsey Graham, Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, and Tom Cotton as they attempted to rattle the unflappable Judge Jackson.
Their attempts to smear Judge Jackson by ludicrously suggesting she was soft on child pornography, a cheerleader for Critical Race Theory, and a pro-abortion zealot failed miserably owing to their inability to mask their racism and misogyny. Not one of those senators would have dared to scream uncontrollably at the nominee had Judge Jackson been a man. Ted Cruz didn’t even have the guts to confront Donald Trump when Trump called his wife ugly and accused his father of being involved in the Kennedy assassination. Far easier for cowardly Cruz to lay into the Black woman with whom he went to Harvard at the same time.
Tom Cotton, who, despite his and Republican efforts to portray him as a tough fighter, sat there with his pencil-thin neck looking sickly pale and grim. Rattling off irrelevant crime statistics he found on Wikipedia. and as if his articulation of them made him look smart rather than an idiot way out of his depth.
Perpetually indignant and aggrieved, Josh Hawley initiated the child porn smear, forgetting that there isn’t an American to be found who doesn’t see him as the guy saluting the January 6th insurrectionists before they attacked the United States Capitol. Leaving him as much credibility as his child trafficking pal Matt Gaetz or underage sexual assault-enabling pal, Jim Jordan.
The most Oscar deserving high drama performance was the yellow-toothed Lindsey Graham channeling his inner Joan Collins playing Alexis Carrington Colby. Not once but twice, storming out of the chamber dramatically. Screeching as if her smelling salts were ruined by her spilling her mint julep over them in a flustered tizzy. Demonstrating how easy it is to be confused by Sens. Marsha Blackburn and Ted Cruz’s rabid demands that Judge Jackson define the word woman.
The once stereotypical traits used to describe women — over-emotional, hysterical, unstable, and incapable of making rational and reasoned decisions typically required of a judge, were laughably on full display in these supposed paragons of masculinity.
The Democrats — except for Sen. Cory Booker, who defended Judge Jackson and beautifully demonstrated the strength and power of non-performative emotion and genuine vulnerability — did little to protect Judge Jackson against the histrionic onslaught.
You didn’t need to see the memes that proliferated on social media following the hearings to latch on to Judge Jackson’s nonverbal communications. A side-eye here, a pursing of the lips there. Her fixed smile when the aptly named Sen. Martha Blackburn tried to butter her up before attempting to burn her with gosh-darn folksy references to her “momma” and cowardly inferences that Tennesseans from her church wanted the answers, not her.
Judge Jackson’s appropriate condescension and contempt for her and the likes of Sens. Harley, Graham, and Cotton — who were too caught up in their delusional White supremacy and self-importance even to notice anyway — was professionally veiled. Still, for those in her corner, she silently conveyed the extent to which she perceived the racist, misogynistic stink.
Judge Jackson has no doubt been to this rodeo. She’s all too familiar with having to expend labor, pro-bono, to try to teach racists antiracism rather than waiting — in infinitum — for them to do the fucking work themselves. She knows how to suffer fools so well she can goad them into proudly revealing the parts they’d be better off hiding — if they weren’t too self-absorbed and stupid to realize it.
These old, decaying White racists like Sens. Graham and Grassley and next-generation Klan 2.0 (without the robes) like Cotton, Hawley, and Cruz thought they could perform enough to create audiovisual clips for Fox News, OAN, and Newsmax without any collateral damage. And get tweeted by Donald Trump Jr. enough to impress their base and the MAGA right-wing media ecosystem. Like a desperate to fit in tween girl, Sen. Cruz was captured searching his name to see who liked his performance, forgetting he was at a confirmation hearing, not on a TikTok shoot.
Ironically, the former and first female Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, died amidst all of this. At a 2016 event for Hillary Clinton in New Hampshire, Albright introduced then-presidential candidate Clinton by saying: “There’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help each other!” As if by example, Sen. Blackburn, espousing every convenient patriarchic view on women’s autonomy, didn’t just fail to help but used everything her White privileged entitlement bestowed on her to tear Judge Jackson down.
But in the age of apparent gender panic and Zelenskyy masculinity — where men like Cory Booker demonstrate that kindness, compassion, and gentleness maketh the man — the stand-out leader, who didn’t need protection but for whom it would have been nice, was Judge Jackson.
I would say she was ballsy, but won’t, not because it plays into gender stereotypes that seem dated, but because it would confuse too many insecure people, especially the mean girls on the Senate Judiciary Committee.
