On The Necessity Of Being Socially Unacceptable, Uncomfortable And Icky

HAVING GONE OVER the transcriptions I made of Walter Brueggemann's lecture "Slow Wisdom As A Sub-Version of Reality" I mentioned the other day, almost every sentence in it could generate an entire post about some aspect of current politics and current life.  I'm going to give into that temptation to go back over some of it.

Day 7 of my previous posts contained this passage which I'll comment on inside of the text:

The force of Torah aims to resist autonomy wherein one imagines unfettered freedom without responsibility.  Freedom to seize what belongs to another because of more power or freedom to exploit the vulnerable neighbor.

In abbreviated form,  this lays out in total what is wrong with the ersatz virtues of liberal democracy, especially as those in my generation, educated far more in movie theaters and by TV entertainment than the university, learned things.  The theme of most of the movies I've ever seen imagine their male leading characters as autonomous, standing outside of or against a community or tradition, insistent on having their own way, pursuing their own unfettered freedom without responsibility to much of anyone except, perhaps, a few people who they have some interest in, as even the minimal limits of the production code gave way to the heady libertarianism of the 1950s, 60s and onward, even the cinematically presented consequences of even the most depraved of those movie heroes, the gangsters, were made to not impinge on them, they gave us Trumpian figures as heroes and we wonder why so many entertainment addled Americans still fall for him even now.  

In many cases, the hero was presented as standing against some obvious wrong of the greater society but what may have been presented as a bold, brave, sexy, manly stand against some moral wrong didn't require that societal wrong as a plot outline, as in the answer to what are you rebelling against, "what'd'ya got?"  And when writers, directors and producers found out that nothing more than the emotional outline of that plot worked, it worked for gangsters and outlaws just as much as it worked for Atticus Finch.  A related outline of boldness, autonomy, etc. worked for the most degenerate of figures of the establishment worked perfectly for Donald Trump in Celebrity Apprentice.   Apparently it even managed to sell the fat, short-fingered degenerate as a sex symbol on TV in his fat, phony haired, orange tinged obvious phony.   The thing he rode into the presidency.

The extent to which this is true of what the "news division" presents as Christianity, the TV hallelujah peddlers, billionaire-millionaire astro-turf "traditional Catholics" are no less a product of Hollywood-TV style entertainment production values than Trump is, than the Republican-fascist biggest mouths like Gaetz and Green, Cruz or Hawley or the particularly odious form of Republican-fascist politician who got their start in hate-talk radio and TV. Suckers for the phony history of the Revolutionary period or "the way-est" or "the South".  All of that started in what generally college-credentialed TV and radio and movie bosses and script scribblers figured would turn them the greatest profits and enhance their wealth.  

And the American People, no less trained in their thinking by TV and the movies than my generation of Boomers were, are largely suckers for it, especially when it was sold in the language of secular civic virtue, "bold," "independent " "liberty," "freedom," and, yes, "rights." The Easy-Rider style of counter-culture was just the same with long hair.  The use by Trumpian and related American fascists in 2020 of the same language as the "counter-culture" of the 1960s should lead at least some people to wonder if those basic concepts removed from the kind of moral responsibility Brueggemann is talking about might not be problematic. The language of liberal-democracy in the mouths of CPAC fascism, the miscalculation of George Soros who was one of Viktor Orban's early supporters, all of that is evidence that there are foundational and fatal problems with liberal democracy.  

Of course, while there was the media-presented "counter-culture" of secular indulgence, there was a real counter-culture which tended to be religious which was, in many cases, genuinely counter-cultural in the way that Brueggemann points out that Jeremiah was.  I often think of Jeremiah and Bob Dylan at the same time, after reading Brueggemann.  Or The Staple Singers.

In the end Torah is Israel's testimony to the covenantal shape of social existence. That the world is organized according to steadfast love, that the economy is to be engaged according to neighborly justice, that the political culture is to be shaped by righteousness that is the work of the common good. The entire purpose of liberal arts, I suggest, is to help students situate themselves in a summoning tradition that refuses the autonomy of enlightenment reason with its concomitant of consumer seduction.

That is true IF and only if the liberal arts start out with that orientation and that intention.  Under secularism, with its inevitable rejection of the language of the actual truth of that kind of morality, its reality, its consequential truth when made consequential in actions, under the sciency amorality of secularism, that itself is not only rejected but made to feel uncomfortable and socially unacceptable and icky.

The main stream of imaginative literature since the so-called "enlightenment" has been in the diminution of the validity and reality and consequential nature of the morality of the Torah.  Not a little of the commentary on Scripture has the same flavor if not intention as the secular culture of the "enlightenment" and the ideological depravities that flow from it, including those which grew up upon finding the 18th century enlightenment was not an adequate or satisfying framing of life and reality.  

Romanticism, especially as it declined into late 19th and 20th century decadence, wasn't much better. Some really great writing was produced during that entire time but there isn't really much to find that will produce the kinds of results that Brueggemann is talking about in it.  It's more of a distraction to those who find themselves depressed and distraught about the life that is produced by the kinds of "freedom" that has become the reality of most people.  The voyeurism of so much of the legitimately artistic literature of the period is only different in quality and range of imagination and not in kind from Hallmark made for TV movies.  I would propose that the oppressiveness of secularism and its byproducts are even worse than the imagined oppressiveness of 17th century established churches aligned to the political powers and the law, which were seldom any more governed by the kind of things Brueggemann finds in Jeremiah and the Prophetic tradition.  Our science-tech conducted wars are certainly more destructive and far more indiscriminate in who gets killed than the often anti-religiously cited 30-years-war was.  The modern genocides of the scientific regimes kill far more people, whether the most efficient of those genocides as conducted by the Nazis or the non-industrial, free-press driven one in Rwanda.

If you think I'm calling for any part of our history to be reproduced as our future, you are entirely wrong.  It is stunning how our free-press, entertainment glutted minds can't imagine more than the most inaccurate and base either-this-or-that alternatives.  I can't imagine what that better future will be with any great detail but I know if you try to reproduce the past you will a. fail because the past cannot be reproduced now, time doesn't work like that, b. likely reproduce some of the worst aspects of the past (look at the racist 1776 romantic bull shit of the Trumpians if you want a good example of where that would lead us), c. you will only turn that into the kinds of oppressive ideologies that the Jewish prophetic tradition is full to the top with warnings against.

I do know that with the power of human numbers, human technology, the pollution of the planet and atmosphere, nuclear and other powers, if we don't drastically turn around the world in the direction that Jeremiah and Brueggemann points to - which is not about any humanly made past epoch -  there will very likely not be a future, barring some more dramatic divine intervention of a kind which enlightenment ideology and social strictures forbid polite people from expecting and which the Republican-fascist use of The Book of Revelation most certainly is not anything like.

The triad of fidelity excuses the seduction of the reasoning of autonomy, it fends off the counter temptation of absolutism.

Autonomy, "every man thinks for himself," as opposed to the "counter temptation" of absolutism, no one thinks for themselves but are given what they are to think.  

The cheap limits of cinematic and dramatic and, ironically, "enlightenment" imagination doesn't allow for the imagination of other alternatives to those "opposites."  It is amazing, when you think of it, how many false dichotomies are the only habit of thought permitted or achieved in the modern world.

It refuses absolutism through the ongoing disputatious practice of interpretation. So that the old Torah cannot just be read.  

This reminds me of the advice of the atheist-materialist who didn't think like one, Richard Lewontin, to the conventional hero of popular atheist-materialism, Carl Sagan that if he wanted to hear lively disputation about the nature of the universe he should leave the elite university he taught science at and to to an Orthodox study hall in Brooklyn.  

And there can be no recourse to the original intention or what we call originalism, which is to misconstrue the tradition.

I believe that what Brueggeman means by "the old Torah cannot just be read" is that it has to be made real in the real lives of real People who live in history and the history of now can never be a mere reproduction of what was in even the period of the Prophets.  It will always be as new as good jazz is always new and never a reproduction of the past.  But you can go through the motions through habit and the results won't be good.  Creation, time, goes from the past to the future through the present.  That is the reason for it. Deny that as we might, it is how time which we all live in works. The prophetic tradition accounts for that.

Because it is the great work of the university to nurture competent hermeneutists who refuse the easy relativism of popular culture and who refuse the temptation to absolutism whether of God or sect or country. The tradition requires interpretive agility that knows that the memory is the beginning point but never the conclusion. The tradition is always being reformulated in radical contemporaneity with deep rootage that is not deleted by interpretation.

This passage is, of course, tied to the friction between the would be "originalists" the "fundamentalists" of religion but, especially useful to us right now, the Constitutional fundamentalists of the Supreme Court,  and those who by "interpretation" delete the moral center or meaning of Scripture, most certainly by the discrediting-debunking of the historical-critical methods that have gotten us a bit in the way of loosening some of the priestly purity codes in sexual behavior and gender roles but which, in the process, have diminished so much of what is true and of vital importance in every area of moral urgency in the material and mental well-being of the least among us and the vulnerable.  

I am very tempted to go into that and might this week if I have the time in terms of what it gave and what the results, good and catastrophic,  were for gay men, something I know and have witnessed first-hand as a gay man in the time I've lived.  Believe me, I've got some experience in the reformulations of radical contemporaneity and deep rootage in tradition, between the heady language of and life of libertarian freedom, the reaction of traditional LGBTQ hatred as "Christianity" and discrimination, the practice of unfettered freedom and the radical consequences of ignoring the most basic of moral considerations for the well-being of others in the context of sexual freedom on that basis.  Much of it personal experience, even more in intimate observation of the lives and consequences for other gay men and LGBTQ people. I have a feeling the experience was like a long, slow, rabbinical disputation, lived out over years, while looking backwards.  I think I'll give into temptation to talk about that later this week.  Though this piece from years back did some of it.

Saturday Night Radio Drama - Bernard Farrell - Greta At The Gresham

 Greta at The Gresham

Boy meets girl in a brief encounter on an ancient island in an Irish lake, and they talk through the moonlit night of this and that and their two bespoken lives. They will meet again, they promise, at some future point. They will meet again, and by appointment, too. They will meet in the lobby of a Dublin hotel in six straightforward years, no more, no less, where they will compare their dealings and their disappointments in the unforeseen meantime.

With Dawn Bradfield as Greta and Bryan Murray as Jerry with a J, Bernard Farrell’s radio-play establishes the most poignant traditions of melodrama and romantic comedy – only to subvert their moonshine in the overcast conditions of ordinary life.

I haven't had much time to listen to new radio drama, this is another one I'm posting unheard - well, I'm listening as I post it.  Hope it's good. 

Cultured Despisers Got No Kulcha - Hate Mail

IT'S KIND OF FUNNY that I'm accused of holding up Stanley Hauerwas as an idol when he certainly would never want anyone to do that.  

I could have written that in the book I quoted from, not far into it, he made a huge whopper of a mistake, one typical of his and my generation of educationally credentialed people and which is probably most typical of the materialist-atheist devotees of scientism, such as yourself.

Christians, our theologians told us, are in the rather embarrassing position of having a faith rooted in ancient parochial, Near Eastern writings, which present life of an ancient, parochial, Near Eastern Jew named Jesus.  Modern Christians stare at the life, death and resurrection of Jesus across what the German philosopher Lessing called the "ugly wide ditch" of history.  Copernicus, despite the church's efforts to silence him, finally convinced us that the sun did not go around the earth, and everything changed.  The Copernican Revolution was the first, we were led to believe, seismic shift for the church.  Everyone's world view had shifted to something called "the modern world view."  The poor old church, however, was stuck with the legacy of a "pre-scientific (i.e., pre-modern) world view."

This explains why, at least for a century, the church's theology has been predominantly apologetic.  The church did not want to duplicate the mistake we made with Copernicus.  

First, since Hauerwas is a Methodist who is a communicant at an Episcopal Church,  he's taking on a big mistake of the Catholic hierarchy and SOME continental Protestants taking on that embarrassment for English Protestantism.  Some of the Protestant opposition was biblical though Luther thought that Copernican cosmology was horse-feathers because it overturned the science establishment of his day.   Science is no more of a progressive force than anything else that relies on the old guard dying off, eventually.   It's ruthlessness just makes it seem that way. 

He mentioned Copernicus one more time in the book at the start of the passage I posted (with my own typos), I was tempted to point out that what he said, though it fits in rather exactly with the common-received-wisdom on the Copernican cosmology got it pretty much wrong as none other than the man he probably meant when he talked about "the church's effort to silence him," would have known.  Galileo, certainly among the most important scientific figures in the early modern era noted that not only had Copernicus been a cleric, himself, the patrons and supporters of his scientific work on the calendar and, as a result, the conclusion that the Earth revolved around the sun  were none other than bishops, cardinals and even popes, who Copernicus thanked in the preface to his work, in fact, noting that it was they who had encouraged him to publish when he seems to have been reluctant to do that and one of whom he dedicated his major work to.  Copernicus and his followers lectured on his sun-centered universe in Rome and at the Vatican, itself and was championed and encouraged by bishops and Popes.*  Galileo certainly had read the book in the original and, so, he did what virtually no modern, self-asserted champion of Copernicus or Galileo has ever done with Copernicus or Galileo or, for that matter, Darwin READ WHAT THEY WROTE!

If there is an actual modern habit of thought it is to read the secondary, tertiary and even more remote junk and to totally ignore the primary documents, something certainly as true of Scripture as it is modern science.  Most typically, they don't even read those, they watch a movie that lies about history or just pick up the lore that pervades popular media.

Actually, "the church" didn't oppose Copernicus, even the Catholic hierarchy didn't until Galileo insulted a particularly touchy and scientifically ignorant Pope (the last of the humanist Popes) in one of his books.  Galileo had been teaching Copernican cosmology for a while before that and had previously been friendly with the rich guy who became pope.  The foremost opponents of his cosmology were the university men, the scientific establishment of his time, some of whom were clerics but many weren't.  They were the ones who Galileo bitterly complained to the very religious Johannes Kepler wouldn't even look in his telescope, the ones who in modern a-historical fiction and several often reproduced paintings (never trust a later artist to get it right, trust 20th century dramatists even less) are replaced with cardinals and bishops, a number of whom even championed Galileo within the Vatican while his long trial was being conducted.  

Also, it should be mentioned that not a single cosmologist or astronomer today is a Copernican.  Anyone who championed his model of the universe, or that of Galileo, for that fact, would be considered a wacky nut-ball because, of course, our sun isn't the center of much of anything, isn't static and revolves and moves through the universe as much as any of the things that can be said to move around it,  and the physics of today could as happily say that the sun revolves around the Earth as to say the Earth revolves around the sun as Arthur Stanley Eddington amusingly noted in one of his more popular lectures  more than ninety years ago**.   Odd how many of those who love to think they're up and with it haven't caught up to that.

While I get what Hauerwas was getting at, what he said was not only not true, it was very inaccurate in the typical modern manner which holds no falsehood is to go unsaid when you can use it to slam religion.  I still am finding enormous amounts of what he has said to be extremely useful and extremely interesting.  No one gets it all right but I find that theologians are usually better at getting more of it right than their "cultured despisers." They're more careful and, sometimes, seem to really believe it is a sin to bear false witness.  

I am not, by the way, a humanist because I reject that human beings are the measure of all things.  It is the limits of our mere humanity we are stuck with, humanism misidentifies that misfortune with the definition of reality which surpasses it.  It seems to me it exacerbates every parochialism attributed to ancient Near-Eastern religion with an even more radically presumptuous position deifying an often very particularly defined human point of view.    Modernism like scholasticism and all other previously dominant isms are things we should get over, not something we should rest on as so many lazy modern academics and those they credential insist on.  

* Twenty-five years after his university career, he had finished his great work, at least in his own mind, but hesitated a long time, whether to publish it or to imitate the Pythagoreans, who transmitted the mysteries of their philosophy only orally to their own disciples for fear of exposing them to the contempt of the multitude. His friends who had become interested in the new theory prevailed on him to write at least an abstract for them, manuscript copies of which have been discovered in Vienna (1873) and Stockholm (1878). In this commentary Copernicus stated his theory in the form of seven axioms, reserving the mathematical part for the Principal work. This was in 1531, or twelve years before his death. From this on the doctrine of the heliocentric system began to spread. In 1533 Albert Widmanstadt lectured before Pope Clement VII on the Copernican solar system. His reward consisted in a Greek codex which is preserved in the State library of Munich. Three years later Copernicus was urged by Cardinal Schonberg, then Archbishop of Capua, in a letter, dated at Rome, 1 November, 1536, to publish his discovery, or at least to have a copy made at the cardinal's expense. But all the urging of friends was in vain, until a younger man was providentially sent to his side.

It was George Joachim Rheticus who quitted his chair of mathematics in Wittenberg in order to spend two years at the feet of the new master (1539-41). Hardly ten weeks after his arrival in Frauenburg he sent a "First Narration" of the new solar system to his scientific friend Schöner in Nuremberg, in the form of a letter of sixty-six pages, which was soon after printed in Danzig (1540) and Basle (1541). Rheticus next obtained for publication the manuscript of a preliminary chapter of the great work on plane and spherical trigonometry. Finally Copernicus, feeling the weight of his sixty-eight years, yielded, as he writes to Paul III, to the entreaties of Cardinal Schonberg, of Bishop Giese of Culm, and of other learned men to surrender his manuscripts for publication. Bishop Giese charged Rheticus, as the ablest disciple of the great master, with the task of editing the work. The intention of the latter was to take the manuscript to Wittenberg and have it published at the university but owing to the hostility prevailing there against the Copernican system, only the chapter on trigonometry was printed (1542). The two copies of the "First Narration" and of the treatise on trigonometry, which Rheticus presented to his friend Dr. Gasser, then practising medicine in Feldkirch, may be seen in the Vatican Library (Palat. IV, 585) Rheticus then turned to Schöner in Nuremberg, who, together with Osiander, accepted the charge and engaged the printing-house of Petreius in the same city. In the meanwhile Rheticus tried to resume his chair in Wittenberg, but on account of his Copernican views had to resign (1542) and turned to Leipzig (1543). He was thus prevented from giving his personal attention to the edition, nor was the author himself able to superintend it. Copernicus became paralyzed on the right side and weakened in memory and mind many days before his death. The first copy of the "Six Books on the Revolutions of the Celestial Orbits" was handed to him the very day he died. Fortunately for him, he could not see what Osiander had done. This reformer, knowing the attitude of Luther and Melanchthon against the heliocentric system, introduced the word "Hypothesis" on the title page, and without adding his own name, replaced the preface of Copernicus by another strongly contrasting in spirit with that of Copernicus. The preface of Osiander warns the reader not to expect anything certain from astronomy, nor to accept its hypothesis as true, ne stultior ab hac disciplinâ discedat, quam accesserit. The dedication to Pope Paul III was, however, retained, and the text of the work remained intact, as was ascertained later when access was had to the original manuscript, now in the family library of the Counts Nostitz in Prague.

**  If the kind of controversy which so often springs up between modernism and traditionalism in religion were applied to more commonplace affairs of life we might see some strange results. Would it be altogether unfair to imagine something liked the following series of letters in our correspondence columns? It arises, let us say, from a passage in an obituary notice which mentions that the deceased had loved to watch the sunsets from his peaceful country home. A. writes deploring that in this progressive age few of the younger generation ever notice a sunset; perhaps this is due to the pernicious influence of the teaching of Copernicus who maintains that the sun is really stationary. This rouses B* to reply that nowadays every reasonable person accepts Copernicus’s doctrine. C is positive that he has many times seen the sun set, and Copernicus must be wrong. D calls for a restatement of belief, so that we may know just how much modern science has left of the sunset, and appreciated the remnant without disloyalty to truth. E (perhaps significantly my own initial) in a misguided effort for peace points out that on the most modern scientific theory there is no absolute distinction between the heavens revolving around the earth and the earth revolving under the heavens; both parties are (relatively) right. F regards this as a most dangerous sophistry, which insinuates that there is no essential difference between truth and untruth. G thinks that we ought now to admit frankly that the revolution of the heavens is a myth; nevertheless such myths have still a practical teaching for us in the present day. H produces an obscure passage in the Almagest, which he interprets as showing that the philosophy of the ancients was not really opposed to the Copernican view. And so it goes on. And the simple reader feels himself in an age of disquiet, insecurity and dissension, all because it is forgotten that what the deceased man looked out for each evening was an experience and not a creed.

Of course, what those who endlessly go over the imagined wrongs they believe the Church did to Copernicus or the grotesquely exaggerated ones claimed as having been done to the, admittedly, wronged Galileo really looked out for wasn't the truth, it was just another experience of hatin' on religion and reaffirming their inness with the in-crowd who does such stuff more reliably than they can recite the 7's times table. 

 

There Are Rights and Then There Are "Rights" - Hate Mail

ONE OF THE MOST helpful things I've ever done here was to transcribe and go through a speech which Walter Brueggemann gave in which he contrasted the values of the Jewish prophetic tradition with the values of modern liberal democracy, though he didn't call it that, he identified it as a triad of might, wisdom, and wealth, which can certainly serve things other than republics or even liberal democracies and which he explicitly identifies with the ideology of modernism based in science which is in service to those things.  We are urged in the snobbish abstractions of modern academics to forget that science was wisdom founded in and has never been separable from the enhancement of might and wealth even when those serve the powerful, the elite and the wealthy as they did when figures such as Bacon and Descartes invented modernism through inventing modern science.  And other forms of academic erudition have, as well.

Brueggemann contrasts that with a Jewish prophetic triad of steadfast love, justice, and righteousness which he remarkably demonstrated in eight ways was in opposition to and in contrast to the "triad of control."  Since his starting point was the Prophet Jeremiah condemning the royal-religious establishment of his day and since the same triad has served many kings, despots, dictators, aristocratic and oligarchic regimes since then, the "triad of control" is not specific to modern liberal democracies but that it can so comfortably find support from it is a significant indication that its endpoint is not going to be egalitarian or long remain genuinely democratic.

The fifth day of that series I transcribed this passage from his lecture which gets to the heart of why I reject liberal democracy as being in any way adequate, I don't know how Brueggemann would transcribe it or how he originally wrote it but it's the ideas in it I want to go into.  I also don't know how he would feel about my use of his points.

The triad of fidelity first focuses on the body whereas the triad of control focuses characteristically on abstractions of power and possession. The couplet of justice and righteousness are concerned with the ways in which the resources of the community are mobilized for the bodily reality of persons and the healthy reality of the body politic. The materiality of the biblical tradition has to do with the quotidian dimension of the vulnerable, the widow, the orphan, the immigrant, the poor and the wherewithal for their dignity and well-being. Thus the indictment in the ancient city, they have grown fat and sleek, they know no limit in deeds of wickedness, they do not judge with justice the cause of the poor, they do not defend the right of the needy. And the same poet says if you truly amend your ways, if you truly act with justice, if you do not oppress the immigrant, the orphan and the widow or shed innocent blood and if you do not go after other gods, then . . . (W.B.'s hand gesture indicating continuation)

What aroused objections in what I posted the other day was my supposed diminution of the importance of "rights," as those are idolatrously propitiated today.  That as included in my rejection of unfettered "liberty," rejecting both the "liberalism" (really libertarianism) which either demands or permits a definition of rights which will allow their unequal distribution and, so, unequal exercise.  I really don't think you can anymore separate the reality of rights from how they are exercised BY PEOPLE  anymore than you can from the natural beings, People, animals, etc. which hold those rights as an inherent aspect of their being.  I think the creation of "rights" that courts and even legislatures assign to man-made entities that don't possess rights, corporations, "institutions" even political and judicial offices is to be expected when courts separate rights from natural beings and make them into abstractions.

Notice the right that is the only mention of "rights" in this passage "they do not defend the right of the needy."  In the context of the passage which focuses on "the materiality of the biblical tradition" "the quotidian dimensions of the vulnerable,"  certainly those include most of all a right to clean and sufficient air, water, food, shelter, clothing, dignity for the most vulnerable and forgotten - not least of which because they are the least economically profitable - People.  

In all of the "rights" enumerated in the Constitution, even those listed in the Declaration of Independence, it should be mind-boggling that NONE OF THESE MOST IMPORTANT RIGHTS a human being can have are mentioned, a right to clean water and food in a decent sufficiency, a right to clothing and shelter adequate for the maintenance of a decent standard of living, the right to healthcare.  We are even noticing, at least for half of the population, that there isn't even the most basic right of bodily ownership and autonomy as the "justices" of the Supreme Court negate the right of Women to determine the state of their own bodies, even allowing states under Republican-fascist control to give rapists and other men more control over the bodies of Women than they allow Women to exercise over their own bodies.

I would bet that to just about anyone who reads this, proposing the rights to those material needs on the same level of abstract "rights" to "free press-speech" "freedom of religious belief" even the most dangerous of all those popularly expounded "right to bear arms" will seem very strange and even incomprehensible.  Pointing out that that gap in our Constitution is an enormous chasm between important rights of all of us on an equal basis and those as imagined by the rich and powerful based on their own interests, and so are the ones they addressed and which later rich and powerful people maintained as of supreme importance will seem rather dangerous.  I am regularly told when I say things like that that I really shouldn't say them. Freedom of speech is a very sometimes thing.

It should astound us that the framers of the United States Constitution, living in their society with such an abundance of poverty, of  hard-scrabble farms, frequent failures of crops, frequent illness due to bad water, bad healthcare (though some of that may be due to the science of medicine at the time being quite likely to kill a patient who may have recovered on their own) and other absolute necessities of life just had those kinds of rights slip their lofty minds.   That the framers were all aristocrats from the higher and highest economic class of the time certainly accounts for their priorities and what they entirely ignored in listing of "rights" and those "liberties" they put in their documents instead.  Jefferson's one word mention of a right to "life" is the closest thing to that in the founding documents of what likes to think of itself as the premier "new order of the ages" the start of modern liberal democracy but what is required to maintain even a miserable life, water, food, housing, clothing, as a right to these citizens of their "new order" goes unmentioned .

And in the succeeding periods, those lacks in the specific wording of our supreme law, the Constitution, has hardly mattered much and when it was made to matter was attacked on the very basis of that framing of liberal democracy.  As the right of mega-corporate media to lie with impunity is defended exhaustively, food assistance, clean water and air, healthcare, etc. are successfully thwarted and, when a few steps forward are taken, successfully driven back, not least of which with lies in the freest press in our history.  

That they also neglected the right to the truth, instead of "freedom of speech" and "freedom of the press" is something that could be expanded on at length.  Which I have.  The Federalist Papers and other documents prove the founders, themselves, were quite experienced and manipulative managers of speech and press to mold public opinion to their own ends, not least of which with appeals made to the worst in us as well as some of our more abstractly idealistic aspirations, in that they often had very little desire for the truth to interfere with that.  They were, after all, mostly lawyers and politicians.  Compared to that Walter Brueggemann and Jeremiah are better than gold and sweeter than honey from the honeycomb. They are like a breath of fresh air and clear, cold water in a parching drought such as the one the world is suffering through, which the Supreme Court through its reading of the Constitution is furthering.

Jeremiah sees the bodily needs of the vulnerable that require a different ordering of the body politic. Righteousness is weighing in for the well-being of the community.  The poetic tradition always cares about food, clothing and housing. The materiality of this triad refuses the requirements of ideas, concepts, theories and ideologies that draw energy away from reality of those who stand in front of us. The flight to abstraction is an endless seduction for those in control so that social reality can be reduced to a program or a budget that depends always on a euphemism to hide the bodily reality next door.  

The items in the Bill of Rights that gets the most attention, the "rights" to "speech" of "religion" of "press" are all focused on abstractions that have certainly not gotten us to anything like a common wealth or close to equality.  They have been used, more often than not, to oppose, hinder and delay of the real rights to clean water and even clean air (you will never be able to separate the depravity of the Roberts-Alito Court from these issues), food (as a right for those who need it, not a marketing opportunity for corporations who sell it with government subsidies) housing, clothing, medical care - my friend whose biopsy is being put off under a very expensive insurance plan under the ACA was told he might have to wait another six months to find out if he has cancer - . . . I could go on.

That we don't even begin to notice the most vital of rights for the destitute, the poor, the working poor, the middle class etc. in the framing of liberal democracy is, itself, an indictment of liberal democracy for whatever virtues are claimed for it.  I think those absolute failures of liberal democracy are both intentional and, since we've become accustomed to the habits of speech and thought about it, endemic to our thought, fixed in our habits.  And they are powerful no matter how dangerous the results are.  

Anyone who believes the United States Constitution and, really, much of any of the framing of liberal democracy as it is is sustainable is deluded.  We have to come down out of the clouds of idealistic abstraction to face the everyday material needs of life in order to have areal and important considerations of rights under a democratic government, we aren't anywhere near having that because the abstractions are what counts to those who count money.  We are distracted and deluded and conventional education is a part of that as much as anything, the dainty, scrupulously maintained habits of thought and speech surrounding these issues are the flying buttresses that hold up otherwise unsupportable walls.

The seduction of the university not unlike the government and the church and the corporation is to traffic in abstraction.  And the challenge of the university is to bring the energy back to that quotidian reality so that resources and passion may be mobilized differently .

Why I Dumped On Deism - Hate Mail

 "DEISM" WAS added to that list with agnosticism and atheism because I recently found a 2000 lecture about engineering given by Neil Armstrong I remembered hearing on the radio and admiring at the time.  I still like a lot of what he said in it but it led me to read more about him online and, of course, the topic of his religion figured into that.  He is one of the few people I could name who has professed his religious orientation was "deism."   I've always been skeptical about "deism" as anything from the new-atheist fad of the 00's when I regularly asked the atheists to point out to any actual deists who they claimed existed.   Deism in relation to  egalitarian democracy or morality may not be as actively undermining as materialistic, atheistic scientism which inevitably ends up hostile to it and denying their existence,  but it contains absolutely nothing more than MAS to positively motivate towards those.   I think Armstrong got too impressed with the achievements of science, mathematics and technology and he mistook them for the ultimate oracle of everything, as so many do.  Even those who may profess a belief in God.  

I'm sure there are dozens, hundreds and thousands of more than just worthwhile Protestant theologians who I should read and listen to,  Stanley Hauerwas is one whose subtle and radically challenging intersection of religion and politics is one I'm looking more at right now.   Though I said intersection, really, as I indicated, I am beginning to think that there can be no separation because every political issue is fraught with and saturated with moral considerations and problems.  I'm sure there will be many others I wish I had time for, as well. 

You Can Never Say Enough When You Start To Talk About The Jewish Monotheistic Tradition

THE EVER EXCELLENT RMJ has posted the excerpt that I used yesterday with many essential expansions, some of which, I confess, were included in the book I cribbed from but which I left out because I'm antsy about violating fair use.  Whatever "fair use" is. 

Here is a link to it. 

Instead of the often mocked intellectual inadequacies of theology, I find that there is never enough time or space to include all of what could and has been said about it.  Theology isn't an inadequate relic of the past, it is too hard for the facile, media stupefied and stupefying modern habits of thought I live in to deal with.  Always leaving to others to include more than you can.   It's an invitation, as the excerpt noted, one which is hard to accept.

And Now For Something Likely To Infuriate - Hate Mail

I AM NOT A LIBERAL DEMOCRAT, I am an egalitarian democrat.  The key differences in the two positions, as I define them, are in the modifying adjectives.  Liberal democracy may well stress "liberty" which is sloppily identified as "rights" but it has no real interest in what those rights result in as a common possession except as a legalistic abstraction. In its most dangerous form, the form that holds dominance in the United States in 2022, "rights" as defined by Republican-fascism are seen as limitless for those who have the resources to not be limited - the Supreme Court making money = speech, is a perfect example of that.

Egalitarian democracy holds that all People have equal rights and the right to exercise those but within a network of equally held rights which must, necessarily, define the limits of the rights held and the exercise of those rights.  Rights cannot be seen as abstract disembodied entities that can be dealt with on a theoretical basis but have to always be considered in the context of the People who have equal rights, really there is no such a thing as a "right" that is separable from the living being who possesses them as an inherent endowment.  The rights of any one person or group of People in reality instead of the irreality of abstraction are necessarily held in tension with and bounded by the rights of others and the necessity of the common good and the sustainable viability of their environment.  

Liberal democracy denies that reality or, really, ignores it and the consequences are that "rights" become a parody of something that is supposed to be a good in the world into something which is not infrequently extremely dangerous.  "Rights" to pollute, to use guns and possess them irresponsibly, "rights" to cheat and swindle People on the basis of conman tricks legalized by courts and corrupted legislatures on the pretense that those swindled have exercised a "right of contract" or some such other gangster-lawyer-judge-"justice" created meta-con job. "Rights" of husbands to tyrannize over wives, "rights" of white supremacists to oppress, terrorize and murder People of Color, "rights" of slavers to their "property" things which have loomed large over and still basically deform and distort America's liberal democracy are all examples of "rights" in the definition of liberal democracy but which could never stand under the holdings of egalitarian democracy. There is no such a thing as a right which is not sustained on a reciprocal basis, if you do unto others as you would have them do unto you, inequality, destitution, poverty, racial, ethnic, gender and sexual inequality would not be practiced.  

Abstracting "rights" from their only real manifestation as equal endowments as our law and Constitution and legal profession does is extremely dangerous.  It is only one of a number of such sloppy and dangerous word games that are the basis of modernism as it has been other similarly inadequate and, as they ripen and rot, dangerous ideological framings.  

To confuse things, as things are often confused by using labels and words, I am a liberal if you are talking about the traditional, American use of the word which is grounded in the moral obligation to liberally provide material, spiritual and cultural sustenance for the least among us and even the just not as well off or unfortunate.  And if you also include mutual respect and, yes, the "l" word, love. I am in no way a "liberal" as the word is commonly used in post-enlightenment, scientistic European and academic use which stresses "rights" as I've defined them having often malignant legal, political and cultural potency under "liberal democracy."  The habit of the physical sciences of abstracting particles and chemicals in order to come up with some general facts about them being extended far outside of science to apply them to far more complex entities is not only supremely nonsensical, it is extremely dangerous.

Those who are more comfortable with the formulation of liberal democracy because it seems more comfortably secular in an anti-religious or merely culturally "post-religious" cultural setting are fooling themselves if they believe it can result in a reliably good world because it is almost certainly guaranteed to devolve into the most wretched of inequality and, in time, despotism of the kind our liberal democracy is devolving into under the United States Constitution, a long and long failed experiment in 18th century conceptions of liberal democracy.  I think the choice we face is either to ride that into fascism or we will basically alter it and give it up for egalitarian democracy.

-------------------------

I was thinking about a passage from a book by Stanley Hauerwas and William Williomon, Resident Aliens which is worth thinking about both in context with the above and in the context of this week in August.

Christianity is more than a matter of a new understanding.  Christianity is an invitation to be part of an alien people who make a difference because they see something that cannot otherwise be seen without Christ.  Right living is more the challenge than right thinking.  The challenge is of a new people who have aligned themselves with the seismic shift that has occurred in the world since Christ.

Although our assertion is based, as was [Karl] Barth's, on a theological assessment of the world,  it is also based, as was Barth's on a particular experience.  For Barth, and for us, Nazi Germany was the supreme test for modern theology.  There we experienced the "modern world,"  which we had so labored to understand and to become credible to, as the world, not only of the Copernican world view, computers, and the dynamo, but also of the Nazis.  

I will break in here to note that despite the popular distortion of Nazism into some kind of entity alien to the ideological framing of modernism, it, like 20th century fascism was not only self-consciously modern ("National Socialism is nothing but applied biology") it was seen as progressive by many a modernist and many liberals, in the 18th century, modern usage of the word.

Barth was horrified that his church lacked the theological resources to stand against Hitler.  It was the theological liberals, those who had spent their theological careers translating the faith into terms that could be understood by modern people and used in the creation of modern civilization, who were unable to say no.  Some, like Emanuel Hirsh, even said yes to Hitler. (For a troubling account of Hirsh, see Robert P. Ericksen, Theologians under Hitler [New Haven:  Yale University Press, 1985]. What was so troubling about Ericksen's account is his demonstration that Tillich and Hirsh were not only close friends, but also that their theology was essentially the same.  They differed only on what political implications came from their theology.)

Liberal theology had spent decades reassuring us that we did not have to take the Jewishness of Jesus seriously.  The particulars of this faith, the limiting, historically contingent, narrative specifics of the faith, such as the Jewishness of Jesus or his messianic eschatology, were impediments for the credibility of modern people and could therefore be removed so that we could get down to the real substance of Christianity.  Jesus was not really a Jew, he was the pinnacle of the brightest and best in humanity, the teacher of noble ideals, civilization's very best.  It was a short step from the liberal Christ-the-highest-in-humanity to the Nazi Superman.

It's not only liberal Christianity(which must be pointed out is often to be distinguished from the Christianity of traditional liberals) that demands that denial of the radical egalitarianism at the center of the Mosaic Law, 18th century modernism and secularism also demand it. If Nazism had not defined itself biologically under the doctrine of natural selection, it may have not been genocidal* but it would have joined in secular modernism in demanding of Jews and Christians the same rejection of the heart of the Jewish religion as so many modern Jews have accommodated themselves to in order to fit in.  Christians have, of course, gone far farther than that, to the extent that Marjorie Taylor Greene can spout "Christianity" which is a thoroughly racist, inegalitarian, consumerist-modern- cargo-cult - paganism without the radical expression of the Mosaic law of Jesus.  Modern American "Christianity" is, by and large, a modernistic, materialistic paganism which is certainly not confined to Protestantism but which, with billionaire and millionaire loot, is a Catholic heresy waging war against Pope Francis and the Gospel.   The terms "conservative" and "liberal" can no more be used without extensive modification than "Christian" can.

I would be dishonest if I said that I think any viable, sustainable egalitarian-democratic liberalism that could withstand something like Nazism is possible without a real belief in The real God.  I have become convinced that agnosticism, atheism and "deism" are bound to decay into what will corrode, erode and eventually collapse egalitarian democracy.  There is a reason that the First Commandment is the one it is and that the Second and Third ones follow on from it.  I am endlessly amazed at how well thought out much of the Scripture is as a logical presentation of things.  I believe many religious traditions believe in The real God and their moral holdings will TEND TO confirm that.  Of course no one is more responsible for carrying it out than the Abrahamic religions have often failed to do.

Barth's commentary on Romans countered with the insistence that passages like Romans 9-11 must set the tone for Christian thought.  There he noted how the liberals had asserted certain humanistic assumptions about human nature and the world that did not need a living god to make them credible.  "God is not 'man' said in a loud voice," was Barth's caustic remark to liberals.  

It might have all been explained away by asserting that Hitler as a maniac and the German people were infected with some sort of mass hysteria.  Then we North American Christians could say that, although the compromised German church failed, at least ours did not.  Unfortunately, the ethical results of our inadequate theology had global implications.

On August 6, 1945, the fist atomic bomb was dropped on a Japanese city.  Turning to a group of sailors with him on the battle cruiser Augusta,  President Truman said, "This is the greatest thing in history." Truman, once described as "an outstanding Baptist layman,"  was supported by the majority of American Christians, who expressed few misgivings about the bomb.  The bomb, however, was the sign of our moral incapacitation, an open admission that we had lost the will and the resources to resist vast evil.

The American church had come a long way to stand beside Harry Truman in 1945.  Just a few years earlier, in 1937, when Franco's forces bombed the Spanish town of Guernica, killing many civilians, the civilized world was shocked.  That same year, when the Japanese bombed the city of Nanking, the world felt it was now dealing with particularly insidious forces which had little intention of obeying historical prohibitions against killing civilians.  President Roosevelt issued an urgent appeal to all governments, at the beginning of World War II, saying "The bombing of helpless and unprotected civilians is a strategy which has aroused the horror of all mankind.  I recall with pride that the United States consistently has taken the lead in urging that this inhuman practice be prohibited."

Yet only several years later, in 1942, Churchill spoke of "beating the life out of Germany" through routine bombing of German cities (after the bombing of London by the Germans).  What had begun as the acts of ruthless Fascist dictators had become the accepted practice of democratic nations.  Few Christians probably even remember that there was a time when the church was the voice of condemnation for such wantonly immoral acts (George Hunsinger, "Where the Battle Rages:  Confessing Christ in America Today,"  Dialog, vol 26, no 4, pp. 264-74).  

The fact is that science and technology (as if those are separable) has a way of creating things that change everything, leaving moral considerations on a leaking life-raft, though we're all on that life-raft as a result.  I think the perhaps necessary clerical detail of leaving out questions of morality when doing science and technology, as well as financial accounting of money, etc. has real consequences when those practices of instrumental reasoning have real power and potency, creating a very real monster that can get us all killed.  The law does the same thing when it turns things such as "rights under (human made) law" into things divorced from the People whose lives are the only real embodiment of any rights and considers them in a pantomime of scientific reasoning.  As the present day Supreme Court of the United States proves, that legalistic pantomime has the ability to even break away from its scientific model and to deny the reality of even very good and desperately important science such as the science of human caused climate change.  The bomb, that "greatest thing in history" was only ever at the service of humans exercising political and legal power, the bomb of secularism is probably the stronger and more destructive force it will serve. 

*  I will insert this update because it occurred to me that a good model of that might be Stalinism before Stalin became paranoid in the typical way and turned against and started murdering even Marxist Jews.  Though, perhaps, what that shows is that eventually every gangster government will turn to the typical forms of murder of the expected groups.  You don't need a biological excuse for that.

democracy is my aesthetics and my ethics and more or less my religion - Hate Mail

I HAVE BEEN struggling to write a piece about a segment of one of Marilynne Robinson's essays for the past two days.  Then I saw this from RawStory.   The original intention was to answer an objection to me saying that anything that didn't base politics in the commandment that you are to do unto others as you would have them do unto you is not only not democracy but it is on the continuum of gangster government that is the only alternative to it, what fascism and its ilk are the inevitable end unless corrected.

The Conservative Political Action Conference in Dallas, Texas was a sign of a troubling fascist direction being chosen by American conservatives.

"Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban won over the crowd at CPAC Texas on Thursday, arguing that his nationalist agenda in Hungary aligns with the goals of the American conservative movement – and sounding a lot like the conference’s upcoming Saturday keynote speaker, former President Donald Trump," CNN reported Thursday. "The right-wing European leader hit guaranteed applause lines – including telling the Texas crowd that 'Hungary is the Lone Star State of Europe' – and criticizing liberals, the news media and the Democratic Party."

During his speech, Orban said he predicted tomorrow's headlines in America would declare, "Far-Right, European Racist and Anti-Semite, Strongman, Trojan Horse of Putin, Holds Speech at Conservative Conference.

MSNBC anchor Mehdi Hasan described it as fascism and displayed a list of ten Republican election deniers on the ballot.

"They do not believe in liberal democracy," Hasan said. "And so today, in 2022, I'm sorry to say the Republican playbook is Viktor Orban playbook, and you can call that what you want, but I'm going to continue to call it fascism.

Anne Applebaum, author of the 2003 book Gulag: A History and the 2020 book Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism, posted to Twitter four reasons that CPAC "admires" Orban.

"He bent the rules, changing his constitution and altering voting laws in order to remain in power, indefinitely," Applebaum wrote. "He destroyed the independent media; nothing remains but a few websites."

"He doesn't keep his homophobia, his anti-semitism or his racism a secret," Applebaum continued. "He moves, walks and talks like a Ruritanian dictator from a movie."

NYU Prof. Ruth Ben-Ghiat, the author of the book Strongmen: From Mussolini to the Present, noted that Fox News host Tucker Carlson traveled to Hungary in 2021 to hype Orban.

"Orban's appearance today at CPAC is the outcome of a carefully cultivated relationship," she said. "He can be the Big Man mentoring the GOP in how to wreck a democracy."

In May, after CPAC held a summit in Budapest, Ben-Ghiat wrote, "we can also see Orban's impact on things like the rollback of reproductive rights in the U.S. Former Vice President Mike Pence previewed the Supreme Court opinion in Budapest last fall as a speaker at Orban’s 'Summit for Democracy' where 'pro-family' agendas, meant to increase the 'right' kinds of births (white, Christian births) twinned with anti-immigrant and anti-LGBTQ platforms."

Stuart Stevens, the Lincoln Project strategist who has worked on five GOP presidential campaigns, posted, without attribution, “This is why we have always fought: we are willing to mix with one another, but we do not want to become peoples of mixed-race.”

"That’s not David Duke, it’s Viktor Orban, the star of CPAC, the new darling of American conservatism," Stevens noted. "Bathrooms, bedrooms & race. That’s who they are."

Reflecting on the embrace of Orban by the far-right, civil rights lawyer Sherrilyn Ifill noted, "over 400,000 Americans were killed in WWII-a war in which 88% of the soldiers were white. And yet we see so many Americans (mostly white) so readily defile the sacrifice of their grandparents and forbears who fought in WWII and defeated fascism, by embracing the rise of fascism here."

Here is the segment from the essay, unfortunately taken from an excerpt online, I can't find the book containing the original in my movings to and back this year:

Complexity is powerfully stripped away by half-informed or uninformed aversion. Why should people so often feel what amounts to contempt for figures, even entire populations, about whom they know nothing and will learn nothing on the grounds of this same aversion? The word Orwellian has been worked nearly to death because it is so very useful. Consensus really ought not to trump reason or preclude it, though it does, routinely. And reason always tells us that human beings and their societies and histories are mingled—that is, never only to be condemned, sometimes ingratiating or admirable. Decent mutual respect depends on an awareness of this fact, that is, on good history.

A conscious strategy currently favored for excluding complication, usually on the pretext of acknowledging complexity, is cynicism. The tsar had his own motives. True enough. People do. No doubt he had a number of them. This really does not neutralize the fact that the British and French had their motives, too. By the blunt measure of their potential impact on human lives, these were, at best, far inferior. We have brought home from our wars, cold and hot, this habit of impervious antagonism, antagonism as loyalty, which dovetails neatly with our version of cynicism, better called intellectual lassitude. We have allowed ourselves to become bitterly factionalized, and truth has lost its power to resolve or to persuade.

There is a mystery in the fact that by means of these truth-excluding encapsulations, besides making our society foolish and vulnerable, and in some ways ineducable, we do preserve, very effectively, negative beliefs about ourselves. My earliest memories take up after World War II, when movie theaters still ran ads about the need to relieve hunger and poverty in war-torn Europe. The camera dwelt on a little boy in short pants and bare legs alone in a dark, narrow street. I remember a German immigrant neighbor, an older woman who scolded my mother as if from a moral height for the inadequacies of her knitting, for her buying soap when she ought to have been making it. Her houseplants, she said, were a disgrace. My mother was impressed, even deferential, though not to the point of making soap. The neighbor was a product of her moment, a priestess in the cult of Heimat, but we would not have known. There were a number of freshly arrived Europeans then. I remember an old man who practically lived at the mayor’s office, and who scolded whomever was polite and could spare a minute with the fact that democracy was wasted on Americans. More generally, I was educated to the belief that this country was an awkward attempt at a civilization, a crude imitation of something profound and elegant and intrinsically elsewhere. Objectively speaking, this is remarkable, considering what was then the very recent history of Europe. Be that as it may, the admiration for things European, whether in any instance it was justified or not, came paired with the implication that nothing so excellent or so profound would be possible here. I’ve read a good deal of Fascist literature over the years, and I know it was believed and taught and spun into philosophy and philology all over the Continent that mingled and rootless people who spoke an adopted language could never even know how utterly they fell short—of profundity, of authenticity, both important terms of the time. By these lights such people were a corruption, a threat to the organic integrity of any true culture. A splinter in the flesh, Hitler said. In our deference to European thought we applied this thinking to our hapless selves and kind, never reflecting on the uses that had been made of it in Europe or the biases it legitimized here.
 

I have never admired deference. I was dosed with Sartre and Artaud, as any college girl then would have been. I felt their nausea. It made an Americanist of me.
 

But for those whose tolerances were different from mine, figures like these defined the future. It was not a very interesting or habitable future, but in the short term it opened the way to study abroad. Juniors returned knowing better how to hold a fork or a cigarette. They had heightened social confidence—they had checked an important box. None of this ends with adolescence. Or this adolescence never ends. It seems to be true now that there is no Europe of the kind to potentially unleash new literary trends or to make us line up around the block for a new French or Italian movie. Without any particular object of emulation to measure our deficiencies by, the sense of deficiency is at least as strong as ever.
 

It is absurd that the products of a civilization as old and solid as this one should forever be such colonials, feeling sophisticated in the fact that they have and confess such deeply internalized prejudices against themselves. A few years ago I was seated near an American couple at one of those dinners they have at Oxford before a lecture. The Americans were doing something I see very often. They were saying that in the States there were no such events as these, that intellectualism was held in contempt there, and so on. They were earnest and insistent, even a little bit loud. I said, That might be an overstatement. They reacted, again predictably, as if the fact were plain and must be faced. When they were told that I was the lecturer, they were irritated. Not only had they been interrupted mid-kowtow. They had come out for an evening of stimulation among their betters and they had found me instead. Why do so many otherwise presentable people think they can ingratiate themselves with foreigners by talking this way? I take ingratiation to be part of the motive behind it, or the hope. A small thing in the great scheme, granted. But it enacts as much as it expresses that internalized prejudice. Put aside the notion of country and imagine 320 million souls who happen to be passing their mortal time on this continent. Why should we discourage them from major aspiration? Say 15 percent are black, 51 percent are women. Is it at all consistent with their aspirations to be told that whatever their gifts, an ultimate mediocrity awaits them? I don’t know how damaging this really is. I certainly felt the weight of it when I was young. I see students who seem to think they are excused from the kind of effort they might make by the belief that there is no audience in this country for serious literary work, for ideas. Some first-rate writing is being done here now, and finding a readership. Still, I hear again and again that Americans hate books and ideas, that demanding novels don’t find publishers. This gloom, which is mutual condescension, is unshakably in love with its certitudes.

 Then there is the matter of our press, our public discourse, which looks more and more like self-parody. The purport of all the jeering and slurring and scaring seems to be that democracy is indeed wasted on Americans.

 Well, democracy is my aesthetics and my ethics and more or less my religion. I am very grateful that my life has passed in a society where the influence of a democratic ideal is sometimes great, sometimes decisive. A thing I have long regretted, though, is that I have been significantly distracted from this privilege, and from the experience of my life and the lives around me, by generalizations about us all that are meager and belittling at best. When I was still vulnerable to those unanchored comparisons that are always made of us and that we seem always to welcome as truth, I thought we as a culture might be especially materialistic, especially intolerant, especially violence-prone, especially indifferent to the finer things. Now as I watch this supposed populism that invites some part of the public to identify with all these things as indeed American, as the voice that really is great within us, a sort of utterly corrupted Whitmanism, I fall to wondering how the grand experiment has been brought to such a pass. And this brings me back to history.

I will have more to say on this after I find the book but I needed to post this right away.

What rustypickup

 and RMJ Said

 

They don't care about the fetus either. None of the states that are pushing these extreme anti-abortion positions are moving to spend a dime for pre-natal or post-natal care. They are engaging in cheap posturing. This is performance art with victims. If they actually cared they would be accepting Medicaid expansion, increasing medical spending pre and post birth and more, but of course this is not happening. This about feeling good at the expense of someone else, the the most cynical form of morality.

To paraphrase,

Something which I doubt would much bother the Republican-fascists of the Roberts-Alito Court or the Bush v. Gore five who already showed us a little preview of what we can expect in the future going forward as we are headed

In finishing his discussion of Supreme Court decisions that illustrate the irrational danger of government by judiciary, right after going into the Supreme Court contradicting its own reasoning in the Lochner case and Holden v. Hardy, Louis Boudin said:

We are not now concerned with the question whether their conclusion was correct or erroneous.  What concerns us is the fact that the court assumed the distinctively legislative function of deciding whether circumstances existed which required remedial legislation.  This position is opposed to that which the court took in Munn v. Illinois.  Even in that comparatively late case the Supreme Court still held that such an inquiry was part of the functions of the legislature, and none of the court's business.  It said:  "For our purposes we must assume that if a state of facts could exist that would justify such legislation, it actually did exist when the statute under consideration was passed."  In other words;  if the legislature has the power to limit the hours of labor when the health of the employees demands it, the court must presume that the health of the employees in the particular industry which the legislature has undertaken so to regulate does in fact demand such a limitation of hours.  Neither Judge Lurton, nor anybody else, will contend that if this rule had been allowed in Locnher v. New York the bakery law would have been declared unconstitutional.  It was declared unconstitutional because the rull still recognized in Munn v. Illinois was repudiated.

I will point out that since the Court is not supposed to be a legislative body and it does not function as one - I doubt any of the Supreme Court members would ever want to go through the work of fact finding, listening to constituents and the public, etc. that good legislating requires and the consequences of ignoring that-  it is not equipped either by law nor by its own choice to make the kinds of distinctions that responsible legislators equip themselves to make.  Of course, there is nothing to protect We The People from legislators who act like the worst of the Supreme Court members have and do EXCEPT TO VOTE IN BETTER ONES.  That is assuming that the legislators of a malignant party have not gerrymandered and vote-rigged and otherwise made sure that there will be no actual expression of a majority of voters so as to prevent better ones taking office, something which Republicans and now Republican-fascist members of the Rehnquist and Roberts-Alito Courts have worked hand-in-glove with their party and oligarch funded efforts to make sure happens.

A Supreme Court such as ours, under its usurpation of legislative and executive functions,is free to apply rules on its mere whim and when it will not apply them, also on its mere whim.   The governing Supreme Court  recreates in itself a number of the accusations made in the Declaration of Independence against George III and the British government in ignoring the legislatures of the States.

He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.

He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.

He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only. . . 

Reading the Declaration of Independence, in view of the self-created, usurped powers of the Supreme Court and considering how that reads in view of that is an exercise I would highly recommend.   IN BOTH CASES THE WRONG BEING PROTESTED AND ACTED ON WAS THE NULLIFICATION AND VETO AGAINST THE COLONIAL LEGISLATURES ON A WHIMSICAL OR MORE HONESTLY STATED, OLIGARCHY PROFITING BASIS. There is no representation of the Voters on the Supreme Court any more than there was in the American colonies in the British Government under George III, they don't have to represent anyone but those they choose to serve. They won't be voted out if they don't.

Boudin continued:

Another glaring instance of the open assumption of legislative discretion by the judiciary is furnished by the recent decision of the United States Supreme Court in the case of Muller v. Oregon.  In that case the Oregon statute under consideration limited the hours of work for women in "mechanical establishments, factories and laundries," to ten hours a day.  This law was declared constitutional "as to laundries."  The Supreme Court conceded the power of the state legislature to limit the hours of work for women, on the ground that "as healthy mothers are necessary for healthy offspring" the health of women is a matter of special concern to the state.  And yet the court limited its approval of the exercise of that power to the case of laundries, reserving to itself the right to declare the law unconstitutional as to "mechanical establishments" and "factories" if it should conclude on future investigation that the state legislature had made an unwise use of its conceded powers as regards such establishments.

I will bet you anything that not a single member of that Supreme Court had ever done any kind of laundry and probably had never seen where their clothes were cleaned, I'm sure they had some kind of affluent male notion about the job that had no real knowledge of how hard it was then to work in a laundry for the long hours in question.  Considering how many of the laundries in many places were staffed by Asian and other immigrants in that period, it would probably be safe to expect there was also a racial component to the imaginations of the affluent, white men who made the decision probably on nothing but the products of their imaginations and their more reliable knowledge of who stood to benefit from their ruling.  I can also assure you that in the United States any kind of reform legislation of that sort would have succeed only on the basis of the kind of constituent information and fact finding that would probably have had to sway a majority of white, male legislators who were more inclined to ignore or diminish the crisis in the lives of the women who worked dangerously long hours in laundries.  I will also point out that Oregon was hardly a bastion of racial equality then, probably even in that period.  In the coming decades it would see a great deal of support for the Ku Klux Klan.  It already had a history of vandalism, attacks on and burning down Asian owned laundries.  I expect that only very strong supporting evidence could get such legislation passed there as it would have taken in most states A STEEP UP HILL THAT ALL REAL REFORM STILL HAS TO CLIMB.  The Court certainly brushed aside a lot of evidence supporting the reform legislation when they did what they did. Just as today's Roberts-Alito Court does in everything from Women's ownership and control of their own bodies (in case you believe we've really gotten past that) to climate change as the world dries out, roasts and burns around them, safe in their alabaster chambers untouched by morning and untouched by noon. Though there is nothing meek about the members of the Supreme Court, nor are they indifferent to politics as in Emily Dickenson's poem.  The Supremes should be required to get out more and find out how the hoi polloi really live and the world really is.  Not that even that would move those hard hearts.  But the law is not a power unto itself, it cannot perpetually ignore reality though Supreme Court and others pretend they can, a consequence of their not having to win another term though the example of states with elected judiciaries is no great advertisement for an elected judiciary, either.  The safest practice is to regulate them and term limit them and prevent the kind of scheme Lewis Powell hatched and Mitch McConnell consummated.

Approval of the decision in Muller v. Oregon is a matter of legislative policy, because of its effect upon the condition of the working class of this country, should not blind us to its significance as regards the distribution of political power in our governmental system.  In the latter respect it openly, I may say almost defiantly, maintains the position that to the judiciary belongs the supreme control of all legislation and that it means to use it.

To say, in the face of these decisions and the many more that could be cited but for lack of space, that our courts do not exercise any legislative power, seems like adding insult to injury.  And it is certainly a strange commentary on Judge Lurton's declaration, that the judicial power insures to us "a government of laws and not a government of men," that with  three months after the publication of these words the new York court of appeals rendered a decision which led the editors of two important magazines to the doleful conclusions that nothing can help us - not even an amendment to the Constitution - except the election to the judiciary of proper men, not men learned in the law and the Constitution, but men with a knowledge of life and plenty of common sense.  These editors meekly accepted the political situation created by the latest phase of the development of the judicial power and merely suggest a remedy for our social and economic ills on the basis of that political situation.  But the great question before the people of the United States is:  Shall we permit this political situation to become firmly and irrevocably established?  Shall we permit this great revolution in our political institutions to take place undisputed?  And the question before our leaders of thought is:  Shall we permit this revolution to take place without even calling the attention of the people of the United States to its momentous character?

The answer to those last questions is that other than President Franklin Roosevelt's attempt to expand the court so he could save the Country from the Great Depression, in the hagiographic nonsense that was raised about the Court and this or that member of it - often a complete falsification of the member of the court as popular entertainment, these dangerous things were not fixed then and they have gotten far worse than during Louis Boudin's time.  The brief and atypical periods on the court when Earl Warren and Warren Burger were the chief justices are imagined to represent the history of that Court when it has probably been, in total, the most corrupt branch of it.  It is certainly that, today.

The United States Constitutional system has long showed the defects and weaknesses built into it, many of them intentionally such as the slavery-enabling features not all of which went with the Civil War amendments and other such things, some intentionally such as the anti-democratic constitution of the Senate and what we now know with no possible doubt the extremely dangerous Electoral College based in the anti-democratic inequality built in through apportionment of extra power to smaller population states.  On top of that a whole slew of Supreme Court and lower court contradictions, vulnerabilities, overt and covert corruptions and just plain stupid or, it turns out, badly thought out though well intended innovations allegedly based in the normal exercise of its designated powers.  Corporate person-hood, one of the worst of those, not even the insertion of a Supreme Court "justice" but a clerk of the court who was obviously corrupt during one of the more corrupt periods of our political life.  

I don't favor an elected judiciary, the example of states that elect their Supreme Court and other judges shows how open that is to corruption.  I favor more stringent tests for nominations, even taking the sole decision in that away from the executive and sharing it between the elected branches.  I favor making all of them, all of the members of Congress, the President and the members of the Supreme Court vulnerable to removal and prosecution for the kind of corruption, obvious, covert, petty and flagrant that are practiced by all of them today but for none of them more openly and brazenly than the Supreme Court which is now staffed by the recipients of slush-funded appointments and approvals through an overtly oligarchic clique pushing overtly fascist theories of government on American Democracy. The stability allegedly provided for our governance by the Constitution has, like I suspect all constitutions are vulnerable to, been thoroughly altered and gamed by lawyers, law professors, sleazy judicial clerks, sleazy and sometimes less than perfectly foresighted judges and "justices" and through the accumulation of professional and cultural acculturation and habituation to that gradual and, at times, sudden shift from the original document.  As Boudin shows, that change was often warned against, condemned and openly defied by some of the greatest lawyer-politicians and statesmen of their time, only to have the machine of the legal and judicial system move on in that direction through the steering or just momentum that it had built up.  The crises of my lifetime, the criminal regime of Nixon, the corrupt pardoning of him by Ford, the once all-time crime spree presidency of Ronald Reagan - the actual number of indictments and convictions of members of it once breathing in its record setting - the corrupt Bush I who had to pardon some of the senior members of his administration to avoid them throwing him under the bus, so vulnerable to conviction as he was - the outrageous decades long hunting of the Clintons by the Gingrich era Congress with the collusion of Republican Special Prosecutors who found no crime but created, with the help of the media,  the effectively universal belief that they were criminals, something so important in creating the culmination of this march to fascism.  Then there was the Supreme Court-Jeb Bush installation of the loser of the 2000 election in the Bush v. Gore outrage, the Bush II-Cheney regime, 9-11, the longest war in US history which Joe Biden is blamed for finally ending, the trumped up-lie sold and totally disastrous invasion of Iraq, the reverberations of which are still killing tens and hundreds of thousands, and then the Trump regime which was the most dangerous and criminal of them all in terms of domestic politics, though nothing in our history trumps the Supreme Court created Bush II regime for all time death tole and disaster.  

The Supreme Court, whether through their ill-fated and quite stupidly unrealistic idealism in the Warren era that allowed the media to lie with impunity against Democratic politicians - something vitally important in producing Nixon and the rest of the Republican holders of power just cited,especially the media creation, Trump - to the Bush v. Gore Rehnquist court which did something that no Supreme Court ever should have been considered empowered to do, has been at the center of all of that anti-egalitarian, anti-democratic shift to despotism.  That cannot go unchanged forever.  The warnings that started with Jefferson, continued through Lincoln and joined in by even some of the most informed and foresighted judges in our history cannot go unacted on forever because either we change it now, or the really empowered despots of the future will and they will not change it to favor egalitarian democracy.  Something which I doubt would much bother the Republican-fascists of the Roberts-Alito Court or the Bush v. Gore five who already showed us a little preview of what we can expect in the future going forward as we are headed.

I will have a post-script to this series which I will post separately.

There is now no such "plain and simple" rules of interpretation as Judge Lurton claims; on the contrary, there are now practically no rules at all.

The rule that the violation of the Constitution must be "clear, palpable, and free from all doubt" had to disappear with the other restraining rules when the express provisions of the Constitution were disregarded as a test of constitutionality of legislation and the vague "spirit of our institutions" was substituted therefore. . .

I will break in here to consider what was lost when the Supreme Court gave itself these powers to "legislate from the bench" something I remember Republicans of the 1960s till about 1981, the year of Reagan's ascendancy, lamenting and despising but which they now not only favor but have ratfucked the membership of the Court to practice.  And, considering the dishonest claims of "originalism" of "textualism" which are the MO of the likes of Alito and Gorsuch and Coney Barrett, how their very practice is a later introduction, not through amendment of the document they pretend to use to impose their will on the United States, not by the only prescribed methods of amending that document found inside it, but through the mere whim of the members of the Court.  

Anyone who pretends to not see the danger in that practice, whether by their side doing it or by their side, thereby, facilitating a future Supreme Court majority that they may not like, is as big a liar as the members of the present court were when, under oath, they claimed to believe Roe v. Wade was long established law so as to give the likes of Susan Collins covering for voting in favor of them.  

As Louis Boudin proves, those lies we have grown so habituated to were basic, serious and obvious as they were proclaimed in Supreme Court decisions that had the force of legitimately adopted legislation.

. . . The "spirit of the Constitution,"  the "spirit of our institutions" and the "principles of our government," which are now used as criteria of constitutionality, are in themselves empty phrases, in to which not only each generation but each individual puts a different content, according go his own philosophical, political and social principles.  What Justice Iredell said of "the principles of natural justice" is equally true of these newer principles:  "The ablest and purest men have differed on the subject."  In this realm nothing can be said to be "free from doubt."  Uniformity of opinion, except among close political associates and kindred philosophical spirits, is here extremely unlikely.  And so we have lived to see the power which was originally supposed to be used only in cases "clear, palpable and free from all doubt," used almost regularly by divided courts, often by bare majorities.  And the uninitiated wonder; how is that a provision, of which one judge emphatically asserts that he is able to find no trace whatever in the Constitution, is asserted by another, and with equal emphasis, to be clearly and plainly written therein?

The reading of a few important recent decisions, such as Lochner v. New York, Adair v. United States,  People v. Williams and Ives v South Buffalo Railway Company, will sufficiently illustrate the points just made.

These same cases will also show that we have very effectually disposed of the last safeguard against the establishment of a judicial veto upon any and all acts of our legislative assemblies by discarding the rules that the courts must limit their inquiry to the question of the existence of the power which the legislature has undertaken to exercise, and that where the power exists its exercise is open to the judicial sphere of influence.  The courts now openly review the use made by the legislature of its conceded powers, thus arrogating to themselves a distinctly legislative function.

The result of all these changes must be summed up in a sentence.  There is now no such "plain and simple" rules of interpretation as Judge Lurton claims;  on the contrary, there are now practically no rules at all.  Each case is supposed to stand "on its own merits,"  which, translated into ordinary English, simply means that each law is declared "constitutional" or "unconstitutional" according to the opinion the judges entertain as to its wisdom. . .

I will break in here to say that Louis Boudin even then and much, much more so now, is attributing motives that are far too high to most the members of the Court.  I doubt many of them much care as to the "wisdom" of their rulings or the results, what they care about is a. favoring their wealthy families, friends, colleagues and patrons, b. favoring the Republican Party and its empowerment even against the will of the majority of qualified American voters, c. having their own way - which accounts for a. and b. as well as other things.  I doubt their recent rulings favoring dirty air and global warming were considered in terms of its short or long term wisdom.  They were thinking of the money of those who favored that ruling, either in their own families investments, those of their patrons and donors to Republican-fascist candidates and the propaganda campaigns for the appointment of future Republican-fascists to the Supreme Court to perpetuate oligarchic government by the judiciary.

. . . This is another reason for the fact that almost all important constitutional cases are now decided by divided courts.  Since there are no longer any set rules by which the judges can be guided, since they are left to determine the propriety and wisdom of laws according to the canons of politics and statesmanship, they naturally exhibit those differences of opinion which we expect to find in legislative bodies.

This leads our Supreme Court as well as our other courts, into the position - anomalous and absurd for a court, though perfectly proper for a legislature - of deciding in different  ways cases similar in principle.  Thus in the case of Holden v. Hardy the Supreme Court decided, by a vote of six to three, that a law limiting the hours of labor in mines was constitutional;  but in Lochner v. New York it decided, by a vote of five to four, that a law limiting the hours of labor in bakeries was unconstitutional.  In principle the two cases are of course identical.

Under the old rules of interpretation, which limited judicial inquiry to the matter of legislative competence, these two cases must have been decided in the same way.  Either both laws were constitutional or they were both unconstitutional.  In the earlier case, Holden v. Hardy, the Supreme Court decided that the state legislature had the power to pass a law limiting the hours of work in any industry when it - the legislature - came to the conclusion that longer hours would endanger the health of those employed in that industry.  It followed as an irresistible conclusion that the bakery law was constitutional, the legislature enacting it having come to the conclusion that it was necessary for the protection of the health of those working in bakeries.  The decision in Lochner v. New York, declaring that law unconstitutional, startled the legal profession and evoked vigorous protest from many constitutional lawyers.  They could not understand it.  They accused the Supreme Court of inconsistency.  But the truth is that the court had discarded the old rules of constitutional interpretation and had adopted an entirely different theory.  An examination of the dissenting opinion in the case, when it was before the New York Court of Appeals, and of the prevailing opinion in the United States Supreme Court, clearly shows this shifting of ground.  Under the new rule of interpretation, it is no longer a question whether the legislature had the power to limit the hours of labor, when it determines that such a limitation is necessary for the health of those engaged in a particular industry;  the question is whether that power has been wisely used.  The power of the legislature is conceded, but its discretion is reviewed and is determined to have been improperly exercised.  The legislature has found that work in a bakery beyond a certain number of hours is dangerous to health.  But, says the court, we don't consider it so.  And it was their judgment on the matter of the healthfulness of work in a bakery, not their judgment on the constitutional power of the legislature, that led five out of the nine judges to declare the law unconstitutional.  

I believe the substance, the result of that old case, Lochner, is about to be the next wrecking ball the Roberts-Alito court heaves at more than a century and a quarter of progress in many areas of rights, not only against workers and others held in wage slavery, it is certainly something that the six Republican-fascist appointees to that court would have as an important goal, their goal is to destroy the entire framework of decent life for the many in favor of the filthy profits of the few.  That was the way of courts for most of our history, the Supreme Court as much as any. With some golden exceptions, the higher the judge in the hierarchy, the less likely they will have any more democratic motives, and often the ones who do really don't have much of a realistic grasp of the consequences of their rulings. I have a feeling that judges with a realistic grasp of the lives of most Americans don't get elevated as often as the ones with monied buddies and customers.

That to achieve their results they had to do what it is so impossible to do in the anti-democratic Senate, drastically change the rules, and that they did it by fiat of five "justices" who were not even elected to the extent that  a minority of Senators "representing" a tiny fraction of the countries residents can be said to be, is a demonstration as to allowing unelected, lifetime-appointed, for all realistic purposes impossible to remove despots to have the kind of power we have, as a country, stupidly allowed the Supreme Court to create for itself and for them to exercise and have retained it out of benefiting the rich and powerful and those of them in control of the media through the ignorant habits of thought gradually imposed on the rest of us.  

As touched on yesterday, incomprehensible legal language and mysterious jargon-filled judicial mock-theology aided that effort.   Especially the adoption of words and phrases in show biz, TV, movies, alleged news shows and popular novels which carry on that trade in constitutional and Supreme Court piety. I won't go into Jimmy Carter's efforts to make lawyers and bureaucrats to write in comprehensible English, among the earliest things overturned by Reagan as evidence of the importance of incomprehensible language to the conning of America other than to mention it here. "Due process?"  

I noted that was just part of their pseudo-religious apparatus in the legal profession. The Supreme Court is regularly in the same position as the old and more recent adventest millennialist cults, in changing the hard and fast claims to suit themselves.  Only, unlike when those cults' end-times don't arrive on schedule,  we, as right-thinking Americans are supposed to pretend the sanctified Supremes haven't done what they have repeatedly done as they do it, changing the meanings of words to change goal posts.  We're supposed to pretend nothing's wrong as they use their self-created, self-expanded, rule-shifting powers to drive us into disasters, catastrophes and death.  Look at their recent rulings on climate change and guns and Women's bodies if you think that's hyperbole.

When I first started going into this, someone came up with an interesting idea that legislation should only be overturned by Supreme Court fiat on the basis of a unanimous court holding it was unconstitutional on the same ground. That would, perhaps, go some distance in correcting the absurd situation Boudin described in the disparity in judgement over Lochner and Holden v. Hardy.  That might, usually, be an improvement on the present situation but given the Federalist-fascist, billionaire financed, Lewis Powell schemed, Mitch McConnell packing of the Supreme Court, I don't think even that is a very safe situation.  Packing a court with nine rigged, Federalist-fascist picked, advertisement peddled despots isn't that much harder than getting five or seven or even eight of them.  Look at how shameless the court-packing of the current Roberts-Alito court was in its clear and corrupt intent, Susan Collins as much a part of that as Ted Cruz or Rand Paul even as she lies about how surprised and disappointed she was in Kavanaugh's blatant lying that everyone knew was a lie even as she posed behind it to disguise her naked shame to explain voting for him.

I don't think anything but a complete refusal of Democrats in the Congress and Presidency to continue to go along with government by judiciary will do it. And they should choose one of the most unpopular of their decisions to make that declaration over.  Roe would be such a one, there are many others. That course of action is certainly not without its dangers, what Democratic Congresses and Presidents do, Republicans will.  Even when Republicans do it the media and pundits will declare Democrats doing far less is taken as a forbidden scandal even as they will accept Republicans doing it.  The media is well over ninety-percent in on it.  But the present status quo is certainly a known danger as opposed to those theoretical ones.  

I don't think doing anything short of overturning the Dred Scott precedent of the Court vetoing duly enacted Federal legislation and state legislation which is within the powers of state legislatures - WHEN THOSE DON'T NEGATE FEDERAL CONSTITUTIONALLY RECOGNIZED RIGHTS - from the bench will protect us from these long ingrained and expanded on habits.  

I don't trust the Court or any unelected, lifetime appointees who will never be removed by impeachment to have much of any power of that kind.  I certainly don't trust them when the perennially corrupt, anti-democratic Senate is the confirming body.  Since it is legislation of both houses which they feel free to veto, taking on the role of the president, I think both of the houses of the Congress should be required to confirm or reject them.  Perhaps Congress should be empowered with the ability to overturn Supreme Court vetoes as they can overturn presidential vetoes. Which will cause new problems, perhaps but that's already the case.  The Senate is incompetent and, as the anti-democratic branch should never have had that sole discretion, it should certainly not be entrusted with it when the slave-power invented filibuster is among its unchangeable rules.  And removing incompetent, corrupt, unethical or criminal Supreme Court members should be far easier than it is to remove a president, there are nine of them and they aren't required for national emergencies.  They should be removable for violations of ethics rules and laws, they should be subject to both as they clearly are not now, they are laws unto themselves which is intolerable for any kind of real democracy.

And we should end, now and forever, the lie that they are "justices" when they are so reliable in producing injustice.  They should from now on be "members of the Supreme Court" or "Supreme Court members."  I almost felt restrained to forego the vulgar pun on that which can be counted on being said considering how most of them are and have been real dicks.  But like many a vulgar pun, there's some justice in calling them that because such they are. Gorsuch and Coney Barrett as much as Kavanaugh, Thomas and Alito. Roberts is more a schmuck.  Kick them off the plinth.