Bad Attitudes
As Justice Clarence Thomas flogs his million-dollar memoir, sound bites from his 1991 nomination hearings have been surfacing in the news fragrant bubbles from the swamps of George Herbert Walker Bushs administration.
The saddest of these golden oldies was the justices anguished cry that the hearings were a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks. Is it even remotely possible that Justice Thomas actually imagines himself to be an uppity black? Can he be unaware that he was the least uppity black that Poppy Bush had been able to find in all the land?
Of course its possible, and of course Thomas is unaware of it. All of us lie to ourselves, and most of us lie to others. But only a few of us get the chance to lie to the Senate Judiciary Committee under oath. Clarence Thomas is one of them. The Pubic Hair Test proves it.
Fans of political theater will recall that Professor Anita Hill had charged her former boss at the Department of Education with a pattern of sexual harassment which included showing her a Coke can with a pubic hair stuck to it.
But Judge Thomas swore, no doubt truthfully insofar as the truth is vouchsafed unto him, that he had never in his life done such an ungentlemanly thing.
How could we, the millions of spectators at this morality play, have known what to think? Was it the stern federal judge who was telling the truth, or was it the demure law professor?
Only the Pubic Hair Test could settle the question:
Could Professor Hill could have made up a story so peculiar? In other words, was there anything in the accusers much-investigated background to suggest that she was a pathological liar? Did she suffer from hallucinations? Was she creative? Perhaps even an aspiring novelist?
And if she were such a fabulist, as the Republicans pretended to think, would the Coke can invention do more damage to her enemy than any other lie she might have dreamed up?
No to the first question. Professor Hill seemed depressingly literal and humorless. It was hard to imagine her engaged in a flight of fancy. (The only suggestion to the contrary came from a young black man who seemed principally interested in reciting his resume on national TV.)
And no to the second question, too. The tale of the pubic hair and the Coke can was so meaningless and bizarre that it could not have been an invention. If Professor Hill wanted to destroy the nominee with lies, she was certainly smart enough to have stuck to such old standbys as indecent exposure, groping, and dirty pictures.
The Pubic Hair Test therefore indicated with zero probability of error that this particular woman could not and would not have invented this particular senseless, incomprehensible story.
God knows whose pubic hair that was, or how it got on that Coke can, or what message the future Supreme Court justice thought it conveyed, or what made him imagine that his weird brandishing of it might be seductive but the incident plainly happened pretty much the way Professor Hill said it did.
And Uncle Thomas had been lynched long, long before the Senate Judiciary Committee ever heard of him. He had slung the rope over a branch at an early age, poor man, and then hoisted himself all the way up to the Supreme Court.
