One down, eight to go

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Shown, Huck and Jim. Behind them, presumably, a Mitteleuropa headwaiter.

I say with shame that I never had a good enough sense of humor to enjoy Scalia. My first spontaneous response to the news of his death was, Well, that sack of shit will make a fine old fryup on the Devil’s gridiron. Perhaps I do still have a liberal bone left somewhere in my body, painfully trying to work its way out. Perhaps it’s the source of that annoying new ache in my left shoulder.

At any rate, though I have always said that anything which tends to bring the Supreme Court into disrepute is to that extent a good thing, Scalia always got under my skin. He seemed to me like a classic white-collar bully, the uncool goofy kid who finally got a chance to send people to the electric chair. Particularly the kinds of people he was always afraid of when he was young.

But he really did seem to enjoy himself on the Supreme Court bench, and though I hate to say it, he did seem to have a sense of fun, and even a certain inclination toward self-parody. These are attractive qualities. One has the uncomfortable sensation that one might have found him rather amiable and amusing in person.

So although I am not invited to the meetings where these things are decided, I would like to file an amicus brief in favor of commuting his damnation — well-deserved, of course, as whose is not? — to a good long stint in Purgatory. He was such a faithful Catholic that I’m sure he would have taken this plea. Even if it meant that all the people he pissed on in his life in the law got to piss molten lead on him.

Which I hope happens.

9 thoughts on “One down, eight to go

  1. a more humane mikado…nino makes one ponder justice & the after-life…

    A wise man once said of his day’s lawyers, you walk unwittingly over their graves & are defiled. so a new national holiday: piss on scalia’s grave day?

    who is the justice and who the thief?

    the SC is like a chummy law firm. i don’t know that anyone really wants to hang out w/clarence thomas, but all their families know each other, they all BBQ together & shit. what happens on the bench stays on the bench.

    if she loses (unlikely), obama should appoint her to the SC. 4 of ’em on the bench, one of them the Senator from Wal-Mart, HRC Libyaensis.

    btw MJS, hope you noticed the story about Dean Smith of UNC. some liberal brow-furrowing over Michael Jordan, w/a little encouragement from the Dean, skipping his Intro to Communications mid-term or whatever.

    • Very interesting thoughts, Jason. Apparently, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and him were literally best friends. It seems almost like they treated the issues they presided over with the same intensity of a heated political argument at the office, followed by a few drinks down at the bar where all is forgotten. Except, you know, their opinions have actual consequences.

  2. One of my (very few) values is that I try to not speak ill of the dead.

    To whatever extent people know me, they know I sometimes wear a conspiracy theorist hat. But what good is that if you can’t manufacture your own personal conspiracy theories?

    Here is one of my favorites: A small subset of the radical blogs I haunt actually allow people to complain that “They” use satellites to beam down messages to little capsules that have surreptitiously been implanted in their heads. And so on. In my electronics work, I was for a spell an actual member of some “society” or whatever that only satellite communications workers could join. I was an official Space Cadet. As a so-called frequency coordinator I told companies where to locate microwave antennas, some of which pointed at geosynchronous satellites. This is much more complicated than you might suppose; for example, you needed to know land surveying to calculate how much (signal) “blockage” (in dBs) a hill would provide to avoid interfering with other installations. This was a while ago, but I’m pretty damn sure that satellites cannot communicate with little “implants” that are no bigger than a kidney bean. But on the other hand, it does really seem that some of these people really were being stalked.

    Now these were generally nice, mostly ordinary people who never pulled the kinds of radical stunts that I have. So why would they be stalked? Why? Well suppose you wanted to create an army of sociopaths; people who have no qualms about stalking and ruining the lives of even nice, ordinary folks. Obviously you would “vet” them by trying to train them to do just that. But they would not waste their time getting them to harass obvious trouble-makers like me. Then, if they “passed”, they would be groomed and eventually find themselves serving as, for example, supreme court judges.

    I have known more than my share of sociopaths, and am convinced that they are simply not able to feel empathy for others; it’s hard-wired within them. So in a way, they are never guilty of anything in the normal sense. See how that could work?

  3. Even moar entertainment! Why stop? This is from when my mom drove me under the long scary tunnel to the Child Study Home. Cause I was so very far from neurotypical. They put me in with a bunch of child sociopaths. Just the fact I was accepted at all put me beyond criticism.

    I well remember well these songs. And the significance of the old wet leaves. And the natural poetry. Plus this one (I was free-range after 1965 anyhow. Friends were Gods and Thieves):

    Bill Withers ~ Lovely Day 1977 Disco Purrfection Version
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-7f05hBNfs

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