The Thomas Affair, From Nomination to Abomination

You have a 20-inch newspaper column to fill up today, and you want to write something about the Clarence Thomas fiasco.

You try to decide between two approaches--some observations about the hypocrisy and numbing inanity surrounding the Senate hearings or a cheerier discourse on the societal benefits that may come from the whole affair.

Since you’re limited to 20 inches, the choice is easy.

Let’s consider the societal benefits.

Before that, however, I have to say the hearings left a rancid taste in my mouth, as if I’d dined on swill and hosed it down with sour milk. I don’t think the phase of Thomas’ confirmation dealing with Anita Hill’s charges should have been conducted in public. That it degenerated into the spectacle it became was, I think, almost guaranteed from the start.

Yeah, yeah, I know. . . . I’m looking for the positive.

Other than philosophically, I had no particular aversion to Thomas until he launched into his defense and ensuing attack on the committee and “the process.” By the end of his assault, I was frightened by the guy’s temperament and demeanor.

If Thomas knew it to be a false charge, I could understand his anger. But then, from a prospective Supreme Court justice, I would have hoped for an eloquent, maybe even poignant defense. He could have used the forum to talk about the insidiousness of workplace harassment versus the near-impossible task of the accused in defending himself against the spurious charge.

Instead, we got the angry, defiant-martyr speech from someone who didn’t even listen to the testimony against him.

Where was the majesty, Judge Thomas?

Right, you’re waiting for the positive . . . .

Can some of those Republican senators on the Judiciary Committee possibly be that isolated from the rest of America? They deplored workplace harassment and then showed how little they know about it.

Do they really believe that otherwise normal-acting supervisors can’t talk to some female employees like Thomas allegedly did to Hill? Do they really think only a Frankenstein could do it, thereby eliminating Thomas as a suspect? Did they really use as their basis for determining Hill’s credibility the absence of her keeping a journal of harassing comments, the non-filing of a charge or the avoidance of future contact with Thomas? If so, do they also think that women with blackened eyes and wired jaws haven’t really been beaten by their husbands because they later go back and live with them?

I had a boss who was a classic tyrant. I thought he was trying to hound me into quitting. In short, I thought he was harassing me. But I didn’t refuse to talk to him. I didn’t leave the room whenever he walked in. I didn’t quit out of principle. And when he eventually got a new job, I congratulated him and shook his hand, still knowing that he had the singular fatal flaw.

That’s how people act, senators. Are Sens. Orrin G. Hatch and Alan K. Simpson really that disbelieving that Anita Hill could have been telling the truth and still acted as she did around Thomas? If so, and if those two represent the mainstream belief about workplace harassment, you women might as well give up.

Oh, yeah, the good side of the hearings. I keep forgetting . . . .

One of my colleagues here says he likes this column more when I’m not politically correct. So, let me placate him with one final observation.

In many people’s eyes, Clarence Thomas was guilty the minute Anita Hill came forward. Her story “sounded just like” those of other women who had been harassed, so it had to be true.

You may remember a murder case in Boston a couple years ago when everyone was convinced a black man had killed a white man’s wife because the husband said so. The city was incredulous later when, lo and behold, the woman’s husband killed himself as police were preparing to arrest him for the crime.

We were supposed to have been reminded from that the accused have rights, that things are not always as they seem. The “grieving” husband’s story sounded so plausible and played into so many prejudices that it had to be right.

Despite his melodrama at the microphone, Clarence Thomas was right about one thing: To large segments of the viewing public, he was dead meat the minute the charges were aired. He could defend himself, but in a sense, he had no defense.

Lost in the furor of an alleged harassing incident of 10 years ago were Thomas’ fundamental rights as an accused person.

That’s about as much political incorrectness as I can muster, believing as I do that Anita Hill was telling the truth and that Clarence Thomas couldn’t own up to the truth because too much unrealistic pressure as a paragon of virtue had been put on him over the years. For lack of a better term, call it the Swaggart Syndrome.

And as for my intention to find something positive to say about the whole thing. . . . I must confess, I can’t find a thing.