Blow Ye Hurricanoes

Clarence Thomas has written a book in which he explains how his pappy supported him with a mixture of tough love, regular love, and religion. Is there any person in public life about which the same can't be said. If you are not yet famous, you can become so by publishing a book about how your junkie mother took your anal virginity with a strap-on in front of her meth dealer boyfriend and his trucker buddies when you were a mere lad of ten. And it willturn out you're a woman, or some shit. But if you're already famous, then the recipe is always the same. Tough love, regular love, and old-timey religion. Also, Anita Hill is a slut who masturbates with a plaster Jesus. Anyway.

Clarence Thomas is such a national apotheosis. Fantastically powerful and monomanicacally self-pitying, he is that uniquely American character who flatters himself as a self-made man and laments his own Job-like persecution at the hands of a series of indefatigable and largely imaginary enemies. If the man had daughters, he'd be well on his way to demanding accounts of the magnitude of their love.