A Poem on Ketanji Brown Jackson’s Inability to Define a Woman, by Susan Jarvis Bryant

Susan, we were giggling at your last two, we are now in full guffaw mode at this with, I think, a timely use of the p-word, and a belter of a punch line. Right up there in Victoria Wood territory. Love it to bits, thank you.

That’s awesome Susan, I love your poem! It’s about the funniest and most entertaining thing I’ve read this week, and that’s saying a lot, considering that I can’t tell the Babylon Bee Headlines apart from AP and Reuters anymore this year.
Senator Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee is the one who asked KB Jackson to define the word woman. I don’t know if she slipped up or said “word” on purpose (the purpose of plausible deniability or to let Jackson off the hook), but technically she should have asked Jackson to define the “term” woman, not the “word”. Judges don’t speak English in courts, they speak Legalese, which consists of terms which are defined in legal dictionaries. Legalese terms sound and look just like English words, but their definitions are often quite different from the ordinary English dictionary word definitions. I think KB Jackson simply acknowledged this fact with her refusal to “provide a definition” and she obviously understood what Marsha Blackburn was asking, even though Blackburn’s question sounded somewhat ambiguous. The fact that Jackson didn’t tell Blackburn to look it up in a dictionary tells me that Jackson knew exactly what and why Blackburn was asking her. Jackson’s refusal to give the definition portends that the legal term “woman” will be up for grabs at the SCOTUS soon, which your poem so wonderfully expresses.

Susan thanks for defending me. I truly appreciate it. But as Marcus Aurelius wrote, ‘people can insult us, but they can’t hurt our character’. I love discussions like I like some sports. But rudeness seems to me like kicking someone in a boxing ring, or a pitcher hitting a batter purposely in the head or putting banana peels on a racetrack. Yes, when I see what there is to learn out there in psychology, literature, languages, physics, philosophy, I am a dope and I like to think that way so that I don’t relax. For as Goethe put it, ‘strivng is all’. And when it comes to computers, I like to tell people I’m stupid. But to be called that would just be an expletive that says more about the person saying it, than the receiver. I think a lot is wrong with America these days regarding corporate giants, robots technology taking us back to the stone age in terms of communication, money buying into politics. What we need are serious debates and exchanges of ideas in a civil context. Yelling never helps. And bringing politics as I did into a poetry forum is never helpful. As for race prejudice; as a strict determinist, I take it that the apple never falls too far from the tree. AS to you Susan. your poetry is wonderfully well-crafted and reflects an incredible range of knowledge that surely dwarfs mine. Anyway, I just spent a good hour explaining myself which explains why I’m not on social media.

Actually, I guess I don’t need your permission to share, since this is what this amazing poetry site is all about. My brain is on slow-mode !!

Susan, Joe, et al, maybe I should stay out of his argument to be fair, since I wasn’t privy to the context. And it is a complicated situation we are in and I have neither wit nor way to deal with it. This much I can say: rape is forced sex with a woman and whether the culprit is a man or a woman or a man posing as a woman, it is rape and should punished in a manner that no one would ever think of doing it again. Seven years for rape because ‘after all the woman is still alive’ is what I heard lawmakers say. Let the punishment fit the crime. To be liberal to violent offenders is to be cruel to law-abiding citizens. That’s my take on liberalism. On the other hand, stealing a loaf of bread from a candy store, or passing a counterfeit bill, etc. non-violent crimes should merit remedial education. But since, I’m mostly headline intelligence when it comes to news I need to stay out of the fray. But I still think Susan’s poem (like all of what she writes) is well-crafted and not ad hominem. And as for cancel societies and gotcha politics. As long as speech is not overtly hateful and/or threatening in a commonsense manner, I’m with Voltaire. I may not agree with you, but defend to the death your right to say it. Just don’t mess with my Shamrock shakes at McDonald’s!

This is a fantastic poem Susan and you did well to tease out the full extent of the absurdity of the exchange in such a brief poem. I’m also impressed you could turn it out in such short order – I started a sonnet on death of Jeffrey Epstein and it still isn’t finished!

To weigh in on the political debate: while it might seem to some that it’s simply a manufactured controversy, I think it was actually an excellent question and the response highly disturbing. Jurisprudence, particularly at the supreme court level, is largely about the interpretation of language and appointing a deconstructionist to such a role is a dangerous move. A prospective justice who refuses to define a simple word for reasons of political ideology cannot be expected to interpret the constitution in an honest manner.

Susan, your efforts to corral the definition of “woman” must leave you feeling, at times, like King Canute trying the repel the waves encroaching on your native Britain.
Paul and Frank above are right to question the relevance of the term to the Supreme Court hearings, unless you are of the same intellectual inclination as the Texan politician whose beachside reading in Cancun is not Shakespeare, Joyce or Proust but Doctor Seuss and kindergarten books. Sadly, like many in his party he has not progressed from the children’s section of the library to the adult section.
Mention of Shakespeare prompts me to recommend you watch a film he scripted for Amanda Byrnes with the apt title, “She’s the Man”, about a woman who transitions temporarily for her own reasons. It even has a locker room scene – woman in men’s space – that would shock the socks off sports-loving Joseph Salemi. Billy Shakespeare was far wilder than Billy Wilder. In many of his scripts he has men and women interchanging roles and identities. Heck, his Lady Macbeth has more genitalia than her husband. Yet even I was shocked by her desire to poison her breasts and treat her infant’s head like an American football.
By the by, an eminent scholar once told me (in private, mind you) that the dark lady of the most famous sonnet sequence in literature was actually a man. Imagine. Shakespeare as the laureate of the transgender movement.

Conor Kelly would be well advised to omit the Celtic facetiousness, and recognize that political debates are serious, since they involve real-world policy and life-changing consequences. If Ketanji Brown Jackson is a left-wing “woke” liberal, we don’t want her on the Supreme Court, and it is absurd of Kelly to think that quotes from Shakespeare or lectures on the fluidity of language will have any effect on that commitment.

His entire approach (from the evidence of his postings) is the postmodernist one: “Things are in flux, language is fluid, meanings shift, uncertainty is all.” That’s a very convenient position to take in forensic debate, as it allows you to wriggle like an oiled pig if anyone tries to pin you down to definitional specifics. The word “woman” is “contentious”? Really? I wonder if Kelly felt that way when he picked his wife.

He seems to know quite well what the word “racist” means, since he frantically jumped to reassure us that his pot-and-kettle proverb was certainly NOT THAT, with appended explanations about Irish cookware. The word “black” may be fluid for him, but “racist” certainly isn’t — it’s one of those sacralized terms before which even the bravest of left-liberals quake.

He uses the tu quoque fallacy to accuse us of being just as politically contentious as Icarus, claiming that it is therefore indecorous of us to laugh at that magazine’s discomfiture. But I wonder — he comes here to berate us for our politics and poetry, but has he written any letter of protest to the left-wing jackasses at Icarus about their “woke” editorial policy? Is Icarus “a toxic mix of politics and bluster”? If so, why isn’t he attacking them? After all, they’re much closer to home. But then again, maybe he feels safer lobbing mortars at us.

What the hell the Congressional Friends of Ireland Caucus has to do with anything escapes me. If the Irish are stupid enough to stay in the E.U. their pals in the American Congress can’t do much to help them. As for the “sexual rapaciousness” of some Supreme Court members (notice that Kelly won’t name any names), how about specifics? Do you mean the exploded charges of that leftist bitch who tries to torpedo Clarence Thomas?

Plain, glaring, open-and-shut fact of contemporary life Number One: WE ARE IN A MAJOR CULTURAL WAR. If we are to have a chance, everything has to be directed to that reality. All that Conor Kelly is trying to do is to confuse us with misdirection, chop-logic, quibbling, irrelevant quotations, and the same old postmodernist camouflage of gaseous uncertainty.