I Have Some Questions About Teen Brett's Banal, Chilling Calendar
Do you know what today is? According to the paper schedule that I will use until the end of December and then carefully place in a box for roughly 40 years unless something comes up, today is the day that all of America carefully pores over the entries on a teenager's calendar from the early 1980s. In a plot point cribbed from a highly unsatisfying mystery novel, Brett Kavanaugh produced his calendar from the summer of 1982 and turned it over to the Senate Judiciary Committee in an attempt to discredit Dr. Christine Blasey Ford's allegations of sexual assault during that period. The pages, five of which were released by the Senate, are earnest, awkward in a teenage way, and, above all, chillingly eerie.
First of all, Northwestern Mutual, the financial services company, probably did not consider that their 1982 Audubon calendar was going to have such staying power. So, bit of a day for them. Is it weird that I'd like to see the pictures that accompanied each calendar page? Just for the mise en scène.
Senate Republicans are going to use this calendar (sans photos of ducks or whatever) as evidence to support Kavanaugh. Senate Democrats (hopefully, but really who knows) are going to try to point out that the hand-written calendar of a teenage boy who was being groomed for this exact thing isn't exactly ironclad evidence. But no one is better prepared to analyze this calendar than me, someone who has somehow seen every episode of CSI even though I have never purposefully watched an episode of CSI.
Like anyone's calendar, Kavanaugh's pages feel like a weird mix of inscrutable breadcrumbs and oversharing. But, as I learned from winding up in bars and restaurants that are playing CSI with the closed captions on pretty much every time I leave the house, what's most important are the things that are left off the calendar. Kavanaugh would agree, I suppose. He's presenting this calendar as proof that he didn't go to the party Ford places him at because he didn't write the party on the calendar. Like Peter Brook, Kavanaugh wants us to focus on the power of the empty space. And we all know that no one, especially not teenagers, does anything without first writing it down to create a paper trail. It's the "glove don't fit" defense. A reliable arbiter of justice.
The paper trail does tell us he was grounded every weekend in May. That's super weird but obviously we'll never know why. Chuck Grassley get to the bottom of the grounding challenge.
He wrote down the results of a couple of Washington Bullets games. I thought this was weird but then I checked my high school calendar and it had the words "KATHY BATES IN PRIMARY COLORS DESERVED THE OSCAR!" in huge letters on every page in 1998. So, I guess this all checks out.
In June, Rocky III gets some unexpected promo and Kavanaugh's schedule is overtaken by social obligations. He ventures to St. Michael's, a Chesapeake Bay town in southern Maryland, goes to camp, and picks up pictures from a Photomat or something. In this month, he also goes to Beach Week, a notoriously debauched Eastern shore tradition and an event that is name-checked in the sworn statement of Julie Swetnick, Michael Avenatti's client, who also alleges Kavanaugh is lying about his behavior. As a former goody-goody from Maryland, I just have to say it's a little weird for a self-professed virgin who didn't drink to go to Beach Week, a bacchanal that plays out like a James Franco movie. Or so I've heard. Maybe he went to chaperone.
As an amateur hand-writing analyst, I can say that in July Kavanaugh's life really goes off the rails. As a human, I can also attest that the longer you look at this teenage boy's schedule with its frequent parties and its varying levels of details, the more unavoidable the questions of what was going on off the page become. Does every calendar suggest a pattern of sinister behavior? Of course not (unless this is CSI). But this calendar is being used to refute multiple claims about the past; as a piece of cultural ephemera it's gone from being a yellowing artifact to an emblem with an extraordinary weight.
August is just bizarre. It looks like a serial killer wrote this. Ted Cruz will be called in as an expert witness.
By the time you get to the fifth page of a document that should be benign and boring, every pencil stroke, every scratched out event, and every simple entry accumulates a host of meanings, all of them potentially sinister. I wanted Brett Kavanaugh's teenage calendar to be a weird thing I made fun of for penmanship and being grounded and age-appropriate taste in movies. But the only reason I'm seeing this thing, which should be sitting in a box in a basement somewhere, if not recycled and disintegrating, is because Republican leadership is hellbent on pushing one man's nomination through, despite serious allegations, grave concerns about his efficacy, and the will of the people. And they've infused this calendar with the power to do that.
Brett Kavanaugh's calendar will one day be a trivia answer but, looking at its pages in the present, I'm reminded how easy it is for the simplest items to wake a beast. It's a common occurrence in pop culture: OJ's gloves have become mythic items-a punchline with an unimaginably dark backstory. This isn't anything new, even for Senate confirmation hearings.
I was only 10 years old during Clarence Thomas' 1991 confirmation hearings but somehow the tiny, sinister details buried themselves into my mind. Even though I didn't watch the hearings, even though we didn't have a 24-hour news cycle, even though I wasn't even allowed to watch any television that wasn't on PBS. Somehow the debate about hair on a Coke can reached my mind and never left. Now, 26 years later, we're here again: another confirmation hearing that seems blithely unconcerned about the prevalence of sexual assault and harassment. Another failure on the part of our leaders to meet even the most basic of standards of human decency. And another set of small details, infused with malevolence, taking up residence in our minds.
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