By Steve Rhodes
A weekly look at the magazines laying around Beachwood HQ.
Uncle Thomas
The psychological stewpot that is Clarence Thomas is on display once again in Jeffrey Toobin’s review in The New Yorker of Thomas’s memoir, My Grandfather’s Son. Yet, what is lacking in Toobin’s otherwise fine work is what has been lacking in every review of Thomas’s memoir that I’ve seen: The fact that the case against Thomas has been proven; the meticulously reported facts are in and Thomas is, in fact, a lout.
Not only that, but Thomas is Exhibit A in the abuse of affirmative action as a political tool for window-dressing, which is not to be confused with an attack on affirmative action. Of all the fine legal minds in America who happen to be African American and could bring a badly needed vantage point to the Supreme Court, we get this guy? Ironies abound.
In short, I’m not sure there is a shoulder big enough to support the chip Clarence is carrying around. And it’s not just racial.
Thomas – like George W. Bush – appears to be a dry drunk who was emotionally and physically abused as a child. Left untreated, the psychological ramifications of each infect everyone around the victim – in this case, America.
Abandoned by a father he never had the chance to know, and by an impovershed mother unable to care for him and his brother, Thomas was raised by a stern grandfather who “imposed a life of grim discipline. Chores and schoolwork had priority over everything else in the Anderson household, and Myers never wanted to hear any excuses. ‘Old Man Can’t is dead – I helped bury him,’ he would tell his grandsons. Thomas notes, ‘He never praised us, just as he never hugged us.’ Beatings with belt or switch were frequent. Eventually, Thomas writes, Anderson bought a new truck for his business, but he took out the heater. ‘The warmth, he said, would only make us lazy.'”
This is textbook stuff, people. Psych 101. As we shall see.
“Throughout much of the book,” Toobin writes, “especially the first half, Thomas paints an unsparing portrait of the way he conducted his personal life. Well into adulthood, he was incapable of managing his financial affairs. In one excruciating scene, which takes place when he was the director of the EEOC, he stands at a rent-a-car counter at Logan Airport, in Boston, while the clerk, after running a check on Thomas’s credit card, is directed to cut it into pieces on the spot.
“Nor does Thomas make many claims for himself as a husband to his first wife, whom he met at Holy Cross before he started at the Department of Education.’
Conservatives are so predictable. They’re the ones whose personal lives are a mess and whose vices are out of control.
“Most notably, Thomas portrays himself as something close to an alcoholic,” Toobin continues. “From the Ripple wine he drank in his youth to the Scotch and Drambuie he abused as an adult, Thomas frankly admits to using alcohol to deaden the pain and anger that dominated his life.”
Later, Toobin writes that during the time when he was Anita Hill’s boss he was “by his own admission, drinking heavily, single and dating, and generally in despair about his personal life.”
Ironically, “Thomas’s portrait of the woman he calls his ‘most traitorous adversary’ is venomous and implausible. When she became a public figure, Hill was widely portrayed as demure, God-fearing, and politically moderate. According to Thomas, she was none of those things . . . By the time Thomas met his second wife, Virginia, in 1986, with whom he has clearly been very happy, Hill had left the agency to teach law at Oral Roberts University (an unlikely destination for someone who was, as Thomas has it, a godless, partisan Democrat).”
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At one point Toobin wonders whether Thomas is dishonest or delusional. Either, you would think, would be unacceptable on the Supreme Court.
“In 1989, he was hardly an obvious candidate for the court of appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, which is generally regarded as second in importance only to the Supreme Court. Just forty-one years old, Thomas had never tried a case, or argued an appeal, in any federal court, much less in the high-powered D.C. Circuit; the last time Thomas had appeared in any courtroom was when he was a junior attorney in Missouri; he had never produced any scholarly work; his tenure at the E.E.O.C., although respectable, did not mark him as a notable innovator in the federal bureaucracy. He was, in short, a black conservative in an Administration with very few of them. That’s why he got the job.
“And that’s also why, in 1991, after Thomas had been a judge for just sixteen months, Bush named him to replace Thurgood Marshall on the Supreme Court. At a press conference in Kennebunkport, when the President introduced Thomas to the nation, Bush said that the young judge was ‘the best qualified’ nominee for the Court – a self-evidently preposterous statement. Indeed, in his book Thomas says, ‘Even I had my doubts about so extravagant a claim,’ so he took it upon himself to ask C. Boyden Gray, Bush’s White House counsel, if he had been picked because he was black. According to Thomas, ‘Boyden replied that in fact my race had actually worked against me.'”
I’d say delusional, leading to dishonesty not only with the public but with himself.
Heroin Chic
“Khun Sa (Chang Chi-fu), master of the heroin trade, died on October 26th, aged 73,” The Economist notes in a fascinating obituary. “The Americans put $2m on Khun Sa’s head, for good reason. Over the two decades of his unrivaled hegemony in the Shan state, from 1974 to 1994, the share of New York street heroin coming from the Golden Triangle – the northern parts of Myanmar, Thailand, and Laos – rose from 5 percent to 80 percent. It was 90 percent pure, ‘the best in the business,’ according to the Drug Enforcement Administration. And Khun Sa, the DEA thought, had 45 percent of that trade.”
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“In 1977, he offered the Americans his entire opium crop: buy it, he challenged them, take it off the market, and give me the money for my people. The Americans, instead, indicted him for trafficking.”
Fallow Field
I blame the publication more than the candidates, but The Nation’s cover package in which each Democratic presidential candidate gets an endorsement column from a Nation contributor is wholly unpersuasive for each and every one of them. In fact, it’s dreadful.
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“In 2005 Scalia was asked at an appearance at a New York synagogue to compare his own judicial philosophy with that of Thomas,” Jon Weiner writes. “Jeffrey Toobin was in the audience, and in his new and fascinating book The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court, he reports Scalia’s answer: ‘I am an originalist, but I am not a nut.'”
Posted on November 15, 2007