The following is an OpEd piece based on information published by mainstream media and publicly available. This blog article is not intended to be used against any individual or group of individuals. The purpose of this blog article is to give insight into the way many authors view real life events that may or may not provide background for fictional stories that may or may not be written at a later date.
Over the last few days, mainstream media, social media, and alternative media have been buzzing with the accusations one woman has leveled against one man. The allegations made by Christine Blasey Ford against Brett Kavanaugh.
And a large swath of the connected populous has divided itself into two camps with a few on the sidelines taking a hard look at the facts such as they are.
For me, the serious questioning began with this paragraph in a USA Today news article.
“[QUOTE] Ford can’t remember the year the incident happened, she can’t remember how she got to the house party, or how she got home. She told no one about it at the time and the issue came to the forefront during a couples therapy session six years ago. Her therapist’s notes never mention Kavanaugh and actually mention four boys involved, although she says there were only two [END QUOTE].”
Mark Judge, the other person Ms. Ford accused in her letter to Senator Feinstein, has no recollection of any such incident happening.
LINK: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/4901575-Letter-Counsel-for-Mark-Judge.html
But you know, there’s Cristina King Miranda who commented on social media that she heard about the incident shortly after it happened back in the day. She also admitted to having a crush on Mark Judge so who knows what’s going on with Ms. Miranda on that point.
Except that Ms. Ford told her couples therapist in 2012 she hadn’t spoken of the incident until 2012.
And so Ms. Miranda deleted her social media posts where she claimed to have heard about the assault back in the day after it allegedly happened.
Now, it’s a fact that Brett Kavanaugh has been thoroughly vetted by the FBI on several occasions — six between 1993 and 2018 to be exact — not just recently, with nothing suspicious or untoward coming up in their investigations. These investigations aren’t superficial or perfunctory. They are rigorous in nature.
LINK: http://time.com/5395687/senator-feinstein-fbi-kavanaugh
How is it that Ms. Ford had no recollection of where or when the attack supposedly happened when speaking with the couples therapist she was seeing in 2012?
According to Dr. James Hopper, PhD, and professor of psychology in the Department of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, studies have proven that the hippocampus goes into a super-encoding state briefly after fear kicks in, which creates a state where victims of violence remember in incredible detail what was happening, and had happened, up to the point where the fear in an incident kicks in.
This means that scientifically speaking, Ms. Ford should have a recollection of where the attack supposedly happened, if nothing else.
However, self-described filmmaker, columnist, and writer Mark Judge wrote a couple of books early in his career that include drinking, drunkenness, and immorality as interpreted by the main character’s perspective. In one of those books, he named a character Bart O’Kavanaugh who, according to the book, was known to drink until he passed out. He doesn’t do anything worse than that. He’s just an avid drunk. And neither book describes any incidents of sexual violence.
Many authors just starting out (and this happens in Mr. Judge’s first book) give their characters names similar to those of people they have known in their lives.
Mark Twain named Tom Sawyer after an acquaintance of his who lived in San Francisco.
Lucy Maud Montgomery (author of the Anne of Green Gables stories) fashioned Anne Shirley Blythe’s son William after John McCrae, the author of the poem “In Flanders Fields.”
Walt Disney ensured a friend of his diagnosed with Myasthenia Gravis would be immortalized when he decided to give one of the seven dwarfs many of the symptoms that are part of MG and then named him Sleepy.
In “The Fast and the Furious” films, fictional Korean Han Seoul-Oh is a nod to George Lucas’ “Star Wars” hero, Han Solo. For example, Han owned a 1970 Plymouth Road Runner which he lost to another character. Han Solo won the Millennium Falcon from Lando Calrissian. And just like Solo who is a pirate, so is Seoul-Oh. Actually, they are both more cowboy scoundrels than space pirates. But nonetheless they are cut from the same cloth.
So it’s not uncommon for fictional characters to have names that are oddly similar to other real or fictional characters.
So where does this put the situation in the grand scheme of things? Who knows?
LINK: https://spectator.org/christine-blasey-ford-wont-take-yes-for-an-answer/
We do know that Democrat Senator Dianne Feinstein seems to be distancing herself from Ms. Ford. Senator Feinstein admitted to mainstream media two days ago she “can’t say that everything [alleged by Ford] is truthful” and she backs that up by stating it’s because Ms. Feinstein just doesn’t know. Would this be because she doubts the veracity of Ms. Ford’s claims but sees the political leverage that can be gotten by supporting the accusation even though she has her own doubts about Ms. Ford’s allegations against Mr. Kavanaugh?
And what about Democrat Senator Cory Booker? He has no problem vilifying Mr. Kavanaugh based on Ms. Ford’s say so, and yet, he didn’t see anything wrong with his own inappropriate behavior when he wrote about it in a 1992 column for the Stanford Daily newspaper. In fact, he didn’t even apologize for what he did years earlier as a teen.
LINK: https://stanforddailyarchive.com/cgi-bin/stanford?a=d&d=stanford19920219-01.2.16
What it looks like right now is that we’ll have to wait for next Tuesday to know the answer to the question of whether there’s going to be a vote for Supreme Court Judge.
© Elyse Bruce, 2018
