Tuesday, October 2, 2018

Kavanaugh Kapers, Kontinued

Mark Judge, the sole corroborating witness to Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh's alleged attack on Christine Blasey Ford more than three decades ago, has finished his interview with the FBI.

Due to Kavanaugh's growing notoriety, a long out-of-print digitized, bootleg version of Judge's memoir - "Wasted" - is now widely available for download on the Internet. While Judge's sworn insistence that he has no memory of the incident has been greeted with derision in some quarters, his literary confession itself is so chock full of alcohol-fueled memory lapses and terrifying blackouts that the likelihood of anyone forgetting such an egregious event as attempted rape actually starts to seem plausible.

The one episode in the book that hasn't been widely reported (if at all; I haven't seen it written about anywhere) is a caper involving a mob of about 50 Georgetown Prep seniors - at least half the graduating class - and an aborted vandalism attack on the home of the daughter ("Barbara Gordon") of a sitting US Senator, who is not named in the book. Judge had recently started an unauthorized newspaper poking fun at the school in general and the Vatican in particular, and writes that one day he was approached in a school bathroom by a boy he calls "Corey Joyce," the leader of the "Inquisitors" gang, who wanted some publicity while demanding anonymity, lest his future academic and career plans be jeopardized.

The Inquisitors normally acted in small groups of 10 or 12 Georgetown boys. They had gathered names of all their acquaintances from neighboring all-girl Catholic schools and then determined which families would be out of town on a given weekend. Then they'd draw eligible names from a hat to determine the lucky winner. Their vandalism spree had been going on for months, and had caused quite a bit of consternation among affluent families returning home to find their places mysteriously trashed and festooned with toilet paper, raw eggs and shaving cream.

The planned assault on the senator's home - "a mansion as big as a hotel" - would be the grand finale before graduation, and "Cory" wanted to go out in a blaze of glory. He boasted to Mark Judge that his "assault troops" only "do students from Washington's finer virgin vaults."

To help get as many recruits for the Ultimate Kaper as possible, Judge posted a notice in the paper, foolishly calling for all senior boys to gather for a Saturday night "hay ride." The school administrators, rattled by the recent four-month spate of vandalism affecting the affluent Catholic clientele in the area, got suspicious and alerted police. 

Meanwhile, a large group of Georgetown Preppies dressed as priests, nuns and brothers gathered on that final weekend to drink beer at a pre-vandalism get-together. Cory himself was dressed up as a bishop, complete with the telltale mitered hat and flowing "avocado green" vestments.

Bishop Cory addressed the revelers,
"My brothers and sisters," he said, nodding toward the nuns. "We are gathered here this evening for a very special reason, to destroy a young woman's home."

"The land is defiled with the scourge of sin... It is the sin of arrogance, and the guilty are rich Catholic schoolgirls. Under the lash of their tyranny, we are forced into compromising with Satan. We are forced to endure inane chatter with their fathers before taking them out... They must repent and be punished!"

A cheer went up.
Sadly, though, not only was the targeted senator's mansion heavily fortified, the lights were on, and the whole family was unexpectedly home. Undeterred, the drunken nuns and priests regrouped right out in front of the mansion to plot their next move. Then they saw the police cars and scattered. "Cory" himself was briefly arrested. Since he was too busy bloviating that night, he didn't have as much to drink as the others, and he passed his Breathalyzer. The cops didn't even check his car, he boasted at school on the following Monday. They didn't tie him to any of the vandalism raids. He was just another dumb rich punk out for a joyride.

Judge escaped the cops, but his own troubles were far from over. To punish the whole class, the school demanded that they immediately hand in the journals they were assigned to keep while doing public service in a soup kitchen, mandated in order to cut down on the students' partying and drinking and to give the school some positive press. Judge, like many of the others, had not bothered keeping a diary of his good works as diligently as the future Supreme Court nominee had so carefully kept his own diary as putative proof of his innocence 30 years down the road. Judge foolishly wrote up a quick slew of bogus entries, was caught, and was barred from participating in graduation ceremonies. His sin was not so much his involvement in the alcoholic crime spree, but his dishonesty about a homework assignment.

When he told his parents about his punishment, "My father silently made a drink and retreated into his den. He was so upset he didn't even want to look at me. My mother sat in the living room watching TV, too stunned and upset to speak."

But when Mom and Dad later found out that about a dozen other Georgetown prepsters - Mrs. Judge laughingly called the boys "the twelve disciples" - had been similarly barred from graduation, they didn't feel so bad, and even praised young Mark for his service work, while calling the diary "a dumb assignment." 

And the partying continued. In the book, Judge describes both his parents and many others in the conservative Catholic social set of Washington as high-functioning alcoholics who often turned a blind eye to their own children's drinking habits and occasional anti-social behavior. The atmosphere was strict authoritarianism in church and school on the one hand, and benign parental neglect on the other hand. Judge actually thought alcohol was an intellectual stimulant for many years, given how many of the drinking adults he knew were so rich, respected and successful. Even the Georgetown Jesuits had a well-stocked bar in their campus living quarters.

And Mark Judge, even in a book ostensibly atoning for and explaining his alcoholism and journey through recovery, didn't see the vandalism as a bad thing. These girls were all good friends of the Georgetown Preppies, Judge wrote, and it was just a matter of some good-natured ribbing of their "little sisters."

The rich are different from you and me. They have expensive insurance. And even if they didn't, everything is so easily replaceable whenever it's lost, stolen, vomited on, or hilariously destroyed just for the good harmless fun of it.

And that brings us forward more than 30 years, to his buddy Kav's own long- overdue accountability and the proven, breathtaking lack of honesty in his recent Senate testimony.

It'll be interesting to find out whether the FBI inquisitors questioned Mark Judge about the Inquisitors gang, and whether his memories of the names and faces involved are still as clear and fresh as they were when he wrote his confessional memoir.


Anna Radicalova said...

A letter written by Brett Kavanaugh about a beach house rental he arranged for the boys (and girls) has been revealed. He ends it with 'FFFFF, Bart'. The *FFFFF acronym is also found in his and his friends' yearbook, as in 'survived the FFFFFourth of July'. Brett claimed it referred to Squi's stutter (which only seemed to happen with the letter F).


*FFFFF - Find them, fool them, feel them, f**k them, forget them.


Anna Radicalova said...

Hot off the press: 'I Am an Independent, Impartial Judge'
by Brett Kavanaugh - Wall Street Journal (of course!)


Clueless It Seems said...

this is a great read. NIce job!

I lived in DC 41 years and certainly know Georgetown Prep (prep for what? Princeton? Stanford? Georgetown U.? Columbia? Harvard?)

It will be hilarious when Kavanaugh gets on the SC which he surely will despite all the bad press. Will he never speak to Clarence Thomas, who's definitely a black man? Job for life? It's way past time for a change. White supremacy? Give me a break...

I know expats who got out. They all say the same thing: this place (America) is crazy. It is.