The Company You Keep

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/14/opinion/editorials/clarence-thomas-trips-supreme-court.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/14/opinion/harlan-crow-clarence-thomas-gifts-collections.html

("Harlan Crow, Clarence Thomas's Benefactor, Is Not Just Another Billionaire" and "The Ethics of Nine of the Most Powerful People in America")

It is in the company you keep that defines you. 

It is not so much that Harlan Crow is so rich (ok, maybe it is) but that he is both so overtly conservative and also so disturbing in his fascinations (on the board of American Enterprises Institute and a lover of collecting not baseball cards but memorabilia of many of the worst offenders of the human race).

It is well understood that those who have spouses or partners may not always be deemed to have chosen their political doppelganger but Ginni's excessive, aggressive embrace of right wing rhetoric and causes does not appear to keep Clarence up late at night.

It is the ease with which the not so good Justice finds no apparent ethical concern, no thought of constraint in accepting the largesse from one such as Mr. Crow that causes our discomfort. And that he finds no reason to recuse himself from determinations on matters in which his wife's voice can be heard not only in their bedroom but in the boardrooms and conference rooms where positions that come before the Court have been formulated and refined.

It is in his allowing these warning signs to appear without  consternation or fear of how the same is being perceived where we find a shocking lack of perception, or, more accurately,  an indifference to it. The message being that he is bought, paid for and literally in bed with the people and ideology that shape this country in such a right facing, downward trajectory. The hint of impropriety, of a conflict of interest, not a trickle of smoke but a five alarm fire.

It is in the company you keep, and how you keep it, that defines you.

It is just that it shouldn't define our nation.