No one who watched the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings can forget the dignity and conviction with which Anita Hill answered crass questions involving Thomas's clumsy and childish--but monstrously insulting--sexual overtures to her.  Nor can anyone forget the stuffed, insincere look on Thomas's face as he denied the allegations.  Now, author David Brock, who led the pack in denigrating Ms. Hill's reputation, has repudiated his own accusations against her and branded them contrived lies to shove Thomas into the Supreme Court.  In his new book, "Blinded by the Right," Brock asserts his collusion with Thomas's representatives, to deny charges about Thomas that he knew at the time to be true but that Thomas swore under oath were not.  This development should not surprise anyone.  The whole matter of  Thomas's appointment was fraught with deception and contempt, from the time Bush Sr. appointed him to replace one of the giants of the Supreme Court, Thurgood Marshall.  The appointment of an idiot like Thomas was an effrontery not only to African Americans but to all Americans.  For years, there he has sat, Clarence Thomas, often dozing off with that enduring stuffed look, constantly following doggedly whatever the rabid Antonin Scalia (increasingly looking like a figure out of the Spanish Inquisition) upholds, never voicing an opinion of his own.  (What is between these two gentlemen?)  Now Thomas seems to have found a voice, a pitiful voice that now and then mouths right-wing platitudes.  Why emboldened?  He got the opportunity to thank Bush, Sr., for his dubious appointment to the Supreme Court by helping to elect the son of a Bush to the presidency.  No satirist--not Swift, not Bunuel--could outdo the reality of the present political situation:  a mealy-mouthed jester tripping over his own words in the White House, a man who has had three heart "procedures" as vice president claiming to be in excellent health, a silly justice who can't speak for himself, and several ranting right-wing ideologues in the Supreme Court, unmasked as politicians when they pushed Bush Jr. into the White House despite the fact he had not been elected--all backed up with a cast of clowns, like Ashworth, in powerful positions that allow them to jettison the very laws they're sworn to assert.  It is far from inconceivable that time will reveal that the Bush Sr. forces had an early assurance from one or another of the men on the Supreme Court (Rehnquist, Scalia seem likely candidates) that, whatever happened in the election, the matter MUST be maneuvered at all costs into the Supreme Court, where a coup was guaranteed.

John Rechy
Los Angeles, California
July 2001

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Original material by John Rechy appears frequently on these pages.