Wetoo? Good luck with that
Truth and justice, it appears, are no longer the American way. They are merely actors on a stage; pieces to move in a larger game of chess whose winner and agenda remain unclear; weapons to wield in a grubby, takeno-prisoners cultural war.
As Brett Kavanaugh and Christine Blasey Ford took their places on that stage, a young, optimistic, ‘‘pragmatic’’ world leader was making her own groundbreaking debut a little further north. In Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s address to the United Nations – a rallying cry for collectivism to combat climate change and promote global trade – she spoke of an ‘‘erosion of hope’’.
She went on to lament the world’s ‘‘retreat into greater levels of isolationism’’. The language and climate of the Senate judiciary committee hearing in Washington suggests not a retreat but a headstrong march into that isolationism and the extremes that increasingly define it.
Both truth and justice appear to be playthings for those assembled to vet a nominee who, if successful, will be asked to defend those principles in the highest court in the land. On the one hand, a woman tearfully recounting a horrifying experience that still clearly affects her; on the other a man defending an otherwise exemplary life against accusations of sexual assault and gang rape.
Both have received death threats. And at what cost? Neither truth nor justice will be served; they are the last things sought by those sitting in judgment.
It was thus more than a decade earlier, when OJ Simpson got away with murder. African-americans were willing to ignore the truth of a violent, sickening slaughter to extract their own form of judicial revenge for decades of perceived wrongs. Truth and justice delivered as a bloody, two-fingered salute, and in the white man’s own house.
Thirteen years later, the end appears to justify the means once more. This time they are being wielded in a cultural and political war, where men and women, and politicians of different hues, are again willing to trash the pillars of democracy and civilisation in order to snatch back the keys to the house.
We have retreated to our private echo chambers; we have begun to shout at and over each other. We have allowed, and often wallowed in, the advance of a toxic culture that denigrates fact and elevates demagogues. Donald Trump is merely its latest purveyor.
That disconnect was evident when Dame Judi Dench criticised the removal of Kevin Spacey from the movie All the Money in the World. She was concerned that others might be similarly discarded by revisionist thinking. ‘‘Are we to go back throughout history now and anyone who has misbehaved in any way . . . are they always going to be cut out?’’ she asked.
Metoo activist Rose Mcgowan chose to ignore the wider issue and decry an older woman’s support for a person accused of sexual misconduct.
Ardern touched on the wider struggle during her speech. She called on those before her to put aside their various differences in order to face bigger, existential challenges, especially climate change.
‘‘Metoo,’’ she said, ‘‘must become Wetoo’’.