Last week I went downtown to hear Anita Hill speak to a group of women lawyers. I was surprised in many ways. Most of the ways I was surprised have more to do with me than with her.
At the back of the ballroom where she spoke there were long tables covered in starchy white cloths. There were bowls of fruit and pyramids of coffee mugs and there were coffee urns and two varieties of cookies and, in bowls full of square ice cubes, there were little green glass bottles of Perrier. And cans of Coke. Without meaning to I sort of blurted out a little laugh and made split-second eye contact with a couple of the servers, a young man and a young woman, who looked at me with expressions of what I thought was concern but may have been mere curiosity. It occurred to me that the two servers were probably still in diapers the morning Anita Hill took the witness stand. I went back to my seat, quickly.
The talk itself was disappointing. Anita Hill was organized and informed, certainly, and she made her points more clearly than most who speak into microphones. The problem, for me, is that she spoke like a lawyer. She kept returning to the concept of empathy and how it was bandied about during the hearings for the two most recent supreme court nominee hearings. When people say empathy, do they mean this? Or do they mean that? What about the legal philosophy? What about the judicial underpinnings of one thing and another and its impact? Are they perhaps using the term empathy to talk about anything that falls outside the realm of their own specific perspective? What about so-and-so’s published response to this issue that wasn’t really, technically speaking, a response but that was, in fact, a response?
Here’s my question: What about announcing – without hiding behind the perversion of language known as legalese – the fact that Congress is run by a lot of misogynistic heterosexual white guys who were sulking 20 years ago and are sulking still because the girls are no longer there, allegedly, to put cream in their coffee and sharpen their pencils? A couple of years ago it was revealed that Sonya Sotomayor had used the words “wise” and “Latina” in the same sentence, and the uproar over that couldn’t have been more deafening had she arrived at the U.S. Capitol for her confirmation hearing on the back of a mule. And more recently I heard almost zero griping – except in the “alternative” press – about the fact that when a group of 10 lawmakers was assembled to come up with a plan to slash billions from the federal budget, a whopping 10 percent of that group – or one – was female.
I know this sounds anti-intellectual, but seriously, enough about philosophy and theory and approach and so on and so forth. Here’s what I’d like to hear someone with both a microphone and a place in history as a genuine hell raiser say: Vote the fuckers out.
I don’t necessarily fault Anita Hill, though. She was speaking to a group of people who, as women, are at best second-in-line to their male counterparts. But like Anita Hill herself, like many of those who sit on committees to grill supreme court nominees, in fact, almost everyone in the audience was a lawyer, and for me that’s a slippery slope. It’s a slope so slippery that I was appalled to sit in a room where most of the people who were not white were opening bottled water and clearing away cups and saucers and hear the word “struggle” used in reference to the difference in income between male attorneys and female attorneys when, as best I can tell, there are far too many attorneys in the first place and all of them I’ve ever met earn considerably more than people in professions I think are far more critical. It’s a slippery slope because of the sense of entitlement that goes along with earning a law degree, an accomplishment that apparently – based on the alarming percentage of elected and appointed officials who have one on their resume – qualifies a person to run things, to manage things, to interpret what should be clear as crystal in such a convoluted, confused and contrived manner that millions of dollars and immeasurable anguish are spent trying to straighten out the aftermath. Most of all, though, it’s a slippery slope for me because of the language, a language that at once says nothing at all and anything you need it to, a topsy-turvy language of procedure and process and precedent – or not – that leads to some truly weird shit, like Clarence Thomas holding a sanctioned gavel in his hand while I laugh at Coke cans in the ballroom of a hotel in downtown Portland, Oregon, waiting for a woman I heard on the radio when I was 25 years old take the stage and talk in circles about legal philosophy.
