Professor Garbage - Issue #1
“Sup, Maggie. What’s gnawing at your soul today?”
OMG, I’m so glad you* asked.
Fuck everything
First, there’s the obvious. Funny how absolutely knowing in your heart of hearts that this was going to happen after years of watching Federalist Society goons collude to rob people of reproductive healthcare and bodily autonomy doesn’t make it hurt any less.
But there’s one facet of how we got here that’s been festering, nay, metastizing since I read about it in the March 1992 issue of Spy a year and change ago.**
The Lynda Edwards story titled “Gag Rule, How the Republicans and One Weak-Kneed Democrat—Joe Biden—Suppressed the Truth About Clarence Thomas and Saved His Nomination,” is about how women eager to testify about Thomas’ sex pest shenanigans were tossed around like political hot potatoes before being ghosted by the Senate Judiciary Committee during the confirmation hearings. I included one of the pull quotes:
Angela Wright tried to warn us
But she never got the chance.
As Edwards writes, “there was now a second woman who claimed Thomas harassed her at the EEOC … she was Black, conservative, Republican, and credible.” As you might imagine, she was also a massive inconvenience to a lot of powerful people, plenty of whom were Democrats displaying the same characteristic fecklessness we see today.
When a Biden aide got wind that Angela Wright was about to write a newspaper column on her own experience with Thomas’s inappropriate behavior, the then-senator’s office asked to interview her.
Given all the egregious Thomas behavior that had already come out via Anita Hill’s testimony, Wright’s account still managed to shock me all these years later.
Is there anything on God’s green Earth more terrifying than your perv boss bringing his Creep Show II vibes to your front door*** under the cover of night?
Also, it didn’t exactly surprise me to learn that after rebuffing Thomas’s advances enough times, Wright was fired by him.
As Edwards points out, the GOP felt confident it could effectively smear one accuser as an ambitious, spiteful, lying harpy****. But discrediting two woman, who prior to this matter had never heard of one another, was an unwelcome headache. Complicating the the prospect of Thomas’s confirmation further was Rose Jordain, a witness worked with Thomas and Wright at the EEOC and could corroborate Wright’s claims contemporaneously.
While being interviewed over the phone by members of the Senate Judiciary Committee and its staffers, Jordain’s gave a compelling reason for why she thought Wright spoke up:
The lie. Where is it?
Angela Wright’s experience is just as disturbing as Anita Hill’s, and her story should have been as widely as known as Hill’s. Instead, she’s merely a footnote in the annals of history. Just another canary in the coal mine.
Everything old is new again
For a full accounting of why we never heard Wright and Jordain testify, definitely read Edwards’ article*****. The tldr version is that Biden helped “run out the clock” on calling Wright and Jordain to testify, helped usher Thomas’ confirmation through, silenced women who tried to warn us, and effectively paved part of the road to this very moment.
This isn’t the only reason Biden’s grandiosity in positioning himself as the one person who can “restore the soul of America” following the Trump years is particularly appalling, but it’s up there.
I don’t know what else to say right now, except donate to an abortion fund.
XO,
Maggie
Footnotes:
*Not one goddamn soul asked, just let me have this.
** Since the pandemic hit, I’ve passed the time reading old back issues of magazines from the ‘80s and '90s. Anything I can’t read online, I order off eBay. It’s fun; you get to marvel at liquor ads based on the premise that people enjoy hanging out with Dennis Miller. If you did something better with your time during quarantine, I advise you to keep that shit to yourself.
*** Mad Men fans will recognize this at-home ambush as one of Pete Campbell’s go-to moves.
**** The Anita Hill hearings went down when I was in the 7th grade, so I can’t pretend I had a sophisticated understanding of what was going on. I can say that I knew my social studies teacher was full of shit when he told the class: “What probably happened is that the Democrats got together and told her what to say.” The good news is my 7th grade social studies teacher has probably been dead for a long time considering he was old as hell back then.
***** If you’re unfamiliar, the Spy archives are a great way to an afternoon. The late John Connolly’s investigation into Steve Seagal in the July-Aug 1993 issue is one of the most incredible and fearless pieces of reporting I’ve ever read.