Posted on by Californiacontrarian

The Memory Games

For the past week I have refrained from commenting on the accusations by Christine Blasey Ford against Judge Brett Kavanaugh. Whether her allegations are true, mostly true, mostly false, or completely fabricated is something that no one will ever know for sure. While I am not implying that Ms. Ford could be intentionally lying, no reasonable person can argue that one’s memory is 100% accurate after a long period of time, and the alleged incident that Ms. Ford is describing supposedly occurred thirty-six years ago!

As an aside, about ten years ago a woman in my writing class said that she had spoken to her brother on the phone, and asked him to write a few paragraphs describing a particular incident that happened about forty years prior when they were teenagers. He e-mailed his recollection to her, and she likewise wrote a few paragraphs describing her memory of the same incident before she had read his. She then compared her descriptive paragraphs with that of her brother’s, and said that no one would be able to read these two reports, and conclude that they were about the same incident.
Now was either of the two siblings making stuff up or lying about the incident in question? Hardly! Were their separate memories of the same event accurate? Obviously not.
Although at this point I am extremely skeptical that her recollection is on the money,  let’s assume for a second that Christine Blasey Ford’s recollection of the incident in question is accurate. If this alleged incident did happen, it that a reason to besmirch someone’s reputation and character thirty-six years later? As I questioned in a prior piece on November 18, 2017, “Should there be a statute of limitations on character?”
Like I pointed out back then, if the answer is “no,” then one can argue to the point of ridiculousness, and something that supposedly occurred when someone was seventeen is probably beyond that point.
To conclude, thus far I have avoided any political or quasi-political commentary on this subject, but I will close by saying that I don’t blame the ultra liberal faction of the Democratic Party for using innuendo and “testimony” of questionable veracity for their political gain, as it worked in the case of Roy Moore in 2017!

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