The Last Nail
Someone To Watch Over Me fills the background here, a languid voice. Perhaps it is Ella Fitzgerald. I hear the piano notes with the singular melody caressing the patrons, myself included, here at Starbucks. This is a morning when I wish that I could talk with my mother. I can only imagine her presence, how comforting it would be to speak with her. The old song is of mom’s generation and mother’s been gone for some years now.
It seems certain that Bret Kavanaugh will be confirmed by the Senate later this morning. His confirmation has been propelled forward with an intensity of a military assault. Speed and concentration of force are the hallmarks of the Kavanaugh confirmation process. Several days of brief hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee followed by a cursory FBI investigation into the allegation that he attempted to rape a fellow student when in high school. What is an investigation without interviewing potential corroborating witnesses? The FBI even overlooked speaking with Kavanaugh and his accuser Blase-Ford. The Trump Party did what was necessary to present this man before the Senate for confirmation this morning.
This should be the last nail in our coffin. With one more Originalist-minded-Justice on the court anything that a future congress might attempt, or any measure advanced by a President can be reliably nullified in the name of fidelity to the sacred words of our Constitution. The Originalist majority on the court will find satisfaction in their role as keepers of the sacred flame. The court’s Originalist majority will not be unlike the Vestal Virgins of old Rome, cultivators of the sacred fire which must not be allowed to go out.
In past experience, I have found solace, an energizing spark in the poetry of Wendell Berry. A friend excerpted lines from two Berry poems, and connected these verses into two paragraphs of triumphant faith and aspiration.
Let me share those words with you.
The nation is a boat
as some have said, ourselves
as passengers, How troubling
now to ride it drifting
down the flow from the old
high vision of dignity, freedom,
holy writ of habeas corpus,
and the land’s abundance—down
to waste, want, fear, tyranny.
torture, caricature
of vision in a characterless time.
while the abyss whirls below.Out of charity let us pray
for the great ones of politics
and war, the intellectuals,
scientists, and advisors,
the golden industrialists,
the CEOs, that they too
may wake to a day without hope
that in their smallness they
may know the greatness of Earth
and Heaven by which they so far
live, that they may see
themselves in their enemies,
and from their great wants fallen
know the small immortal
joys of beasts and birds.
Excerpts from Leavings, II, III, -2007
by Wendell Berry
