Football can be harmful to the human mind, recent medical research is discovering.
Every time a lineman makes a tackle, as one veteran NFL player told a friend of mine, it’s an experience like being hit by a truck moving at 15 mph.
The game can also be mentally harmful to those who only sit and watch it on TV, according to my wife, a football widow, but that is the subject for another essay about human behavior.
Judge Kavanaugh listed football as his favorite activity in his formative years at prep school, next to his studies, community activities, and going to church on Sundays.
I am not blaming football and all its hits to the head and other bumps and bruises of the game for what may appear to be cognitive problems, such as memory lapses, in connection with the whodunit mystery regarding the allegations that passionate ex-football player Judge Kavanaugh may or may not have been the assailant of Dr. Ford, both of whom claim 100 percent memory certitude of the alleged event thirty-six years ago.
It could have been, the judge’s defenders argue, the alleged perp was a winner of a Brett Kavanaugh look-alike contest.
Some say the memory lapses may have been caused by an extracurricular fondness for an occasional beer in his teenage years, as he admitted in his precedent-breaking Fox News interview of a judge in the dock of TV cable news (September 24, 2018). It also could have been a six-pack or three of Schlitz, considered essential to enjoying a popular sport at Georgetown Prep, “100 Kegs–or Bust,” mentioned in the Judge’s official calendar/diary record, submitted in his defense.
Football teammates remember young Brett proudly holding aloft an empty keg in a 1983 social gathering. Three football team members who hosted parties, according to the failing New York Times, accounted for fourteen of the thirty-eight kegs the class of 1983 had finished at one point.
The slurred speech and staggering around the Yale campus in later years may not have been caused by the weight of his studies. Fighting his way through the watering holes of New Haven and ending mock trial hypotheticals by throwing glasses of ice cubes at disputants are among the recollections of classmates about the Rover Boy at Yale’s academic career, which fell down on the case like acid rain.
It is easy to blame alcohol for the SCOTUS candidate’s memory lapses or problems of veracity as he puked his way around campus, too drunk to remember this or that.
In the case of the president, a man who doesn’t touch the devil’s brew, it’s the hair spray that may have affected his mind. He has used enough of those aerosol cans, as previously credited to his record of achievement, to cause the hole in the ozone layer, even though global warming is a hoax.
Was the ex-footballer, a jock who was continually in training to become Saturday’s Hero in high school, now inches away from the goal line, scoring the Big TD in the Supreme Court Bowl, only to be tackled by a mere memory lapse or falsehood?
I suggest that fair-minded spectators usually can give a guy with a drinking, anger management, gambling addiction, and women problems a break, but memory lapses and veracity issues may be too much in picking a judge for the highest court in the land.
As I’ve already confessed in these amicus curiae on the Kavanaugh 4 SCOTUS case, I’m not a JD (Juris Doctor) but I am a graduate of the Perry Mason School of Law. A memory is just as important to a judge as fingers for typing are to a writer.
If he doesn’t remember staggering around the campus at Yale and getting into fights in New Haven bars, what else might be forgotten in the practice of being an associate justice in the Supreme Court?
For example, recusing himself in cases involving the pardoning of a president who has found him eminently “qualified” (quote marks included for irony). So what if his rabbi in the nominating process is such a judge of character, seven of his closest advisers already have been indicted or found guilty of lying to the FBI, and whose rap sheet includes fourteen current pending allegations of sexual misconduct?
As a friend of the court, I would further suggest the use of waterboarding as a memory-loss corrective. It is just another information-gathering device, as the nominee argued while a member of the Bush war cabinet legal team in the 1990s. No worse than taking a shower with one’s mouth open, according to Vice President Cheney.
Is Brett Kavanaugh, whose mom is a judge, guilty of nothing more than one stupid drunken thing as a teenager, or was he a serial committer so blitzed out in college he lost count? Is this a pattern of a character defect of telling less than the truth?
If Judge Kavanaugh is guilty of what some called “lying” under oath in the Dr. Ford case or any of the other current allegations of sexual misconduct, should he have been sitting as a judge in the United States Court of Appeals to the District of Columbia Circuit, let alone on the one-yard line of becoming an associate justice of the Supreme Court?
The nation waited with bated breath for the FBI to conclude its investigation. Is there anything on the market, some kind of mint or mouthwash for bated breath?
Meanwhile, what kind of message is being sent to the youth of America? Once you start not telling the truth in high school, who knows where it can lead? Why, you might even grow up to be president picking Supreme Court justices.