Just More of This Sunday - Crazy People and Esoterica

 Siesta time is over. I want warm weather. Of course, it is Indiana and the weather does its own thing.

After listening to Crap from the Past this morning, I checked out another KFAI show, Pardon My Dust.

Want to expand your vocabulary? Check out Lapham Quarterly's Glossary: Freedom.

News from London, The Times. You have the world at your fingertips. And for you MAGA types, it is a Murdoch paper. You can see the headlines for free. 

Lapham's also connected me with Slate's Our Victorian Supreme Court. I saw Chris Sununu on today's Meet the Press, saying that the Republicans need to stop talking about abortion and let the people of the states do as they will. Frankly, I do not believe a single Republican on either issue - abortion or states rights. They have practices mendacity and sophistry for so long they cannot admit it was their catering to the most frenzied on this topic that got us to Trump and an insurrection staffed by fascists. Sununu could be what everyone thinks DeSantis is, without being an overt fascist and whiner.

The kicker, though, was the 5^th Circuit’s deployment of the Comstock Act, the 19^th-century anti-vice law that has quickly become a centerpiece of anti-abortion attacks. While the court didn’t reach a definitive conclusion, it hinted that the Comstock Act makes it a crime to mail every drug or device intended or adapted for abortion.

The mifepristone case will reveal the true commitments of the conservative Supreme Court justices who reversed Roe in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Services. In that decision, the conservative justices claimed to be returning the abortion issue to the people, but was their talk of democracy just an excuse for supporting abortion bans? Will they now go further than Dobbs’ cherry-picked history by reviving Victorian laws that women had no voice in enacting in order to continue restricting abortion access?

Last summer in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Services, the court claimed that overturning Roe and Planned Parenthood v. Casey would “heed the Constitution and return the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives.” But before the mifepristone litigation began, we already knew that Dobbs’ claimed commitment to democracy was merely a fig leaf barely concealing this court’s hostility to abortion.

Democracy requires more than voting. As the court’s conservatives explain in cases involving armed self-defense, religious liberty, and speech, constitutional democracies must protect the basic rights of those who participate in public debate in order to ensure that voting is free and fair. Few Americans would call a majority vote “democratic” if the government excluded disfavored groups of citizens from voting, imposed restrictions on speech, or denied citizens an equal opportunity to participate. Keeping this in mind, we can see that Roe and cases protecting liberties of intimate and family life are “democracy-reinforcing”: These constitutional rights supported the democratic participation of groups long excluded from public life by the traditional organization of the family.

In overturning Roe in the name of “democracy,” the Dobbs court was applying a constitutional double standard: reasoning about women’s rights as it would never reason about the rights that conservatives prefer. Dobbs’ commitment to democracy is thin at best—to take just one example, the Dobbs court talked about returning “abortion to the people’s elected representatives” without mention of women’s continuing underrepresentation in legislatures or the nation’s traditions of resistance to mothers and pregnant people serving as political leaders.

 While in prison, I did a lot of reading upon the Commerce Clause. A side effect of this research was to find the federal government does not repeal its statutes like a state does, but lets them linger on like the undead. Well, the Comstock Act is one of those laws.

That, for the anti-abortion movement, is the beauty of the Comstock Act: No one has to pass anything. Voters don’t need to agree. All that is needed is a group of federal judges willing to revive the interpretation of Comstock that prevailed during the era before women were granted the vote and constitutional rights of equal citizenship. All that is needed, in other words, is for them to ignore equality under the law and the will of Americans today.

Welcome to 1873.

Which is really what the conservatives have wanted, a return to the 19th Century.

Now it is The Sonic Bloom playing. 

The Paris Review opened its Philip Roth interview (1984) to the public. I will probably do that as a separate post for a later date.

The past few months I have been getting blog posts from UConn's  Long River Review, a student run affair, which has some often enough interesting material. I finally got around to the last epistle, A New Favorite: The Prophets by Robert Jones Jr. by Pascale Joachim. The review is enthusiastic approaching the heavy-breathing, but really caught my eye was the student used the audiobook version. I guess that is the modern age. I will let Pascale have the last word:

The Prophets left me speechless. Very few other novels so easily sucked me in and I doubt I’ll encounter anything like it in the near future. Robert Jones Jr. has made himself undeniable as an author worthy of inclusion in the Black Literary Canon and, in the process, gained a devoted admirer

Serendipity keeps finding ways to show me up.

While I have been hunting for a publisher among the lit mags, I have signed up for newsletters. Not all, but some. The Momentist is an Irish publication. I finally got a newsletter, and the stories are kind of whacked.

Well, I picked on Riot in the highlands to read. What I noticed was the writer, Megan Wildhood, was doing what I did with one of my "Dead and Dying" stories - tell two stories at the time. It is nice to know there is nothing new under the sun, it is a little less fun to see I was not as imaginative as I thought, and a whole less fun to read a better story. It uses the second-person in a spooky way.

***

The police cut down the body. It doesn’t end its ending. The officer who catches it grunts like it weighs something. But it is made of gauze.

***

The brusque tick of an old-timey movie projector on the pistoning crimson above the stomach made us twitch. Amanda, eight, rifles through boxes our parents labeled “storage.” No food in the boxes. Amanda tosses their contents onto the living room floor and cries too loudly not to get in trouble. Our arms and hands and stomach and butt tensed up as we struggled to stack them, hoping to avoid punishment ourself. Neither parent comes. We find a purple and gold photo album, blue and pink and yellow flowers drawn on it with chalk, maybe; A Girl and Her Vacations calligraphed across the top of the cover. The back half of the book is empty; the front half has us with Amanda, Mom, Dad and, at the very beginning, Beauty, our beloved black boxer. Cyan came with us to the beach that day. Hannelore finally got into a tent with us. Lisa captured it. Hannelore’s eyes were so green it’s a wonder everything she looked at wasn’t the same color. How we got a copy of that photo isn’t documented anywhere, internal or external. Several shots of the four of us at various ages, outside under a trellised lamentation of clouds. A shot of Amanda’s hand connected to Dad’s hand connected to Mom’s shoulders connected to strong arms connected to our left hand, which the juvenile RA had already started to colonize. The edges of the photos, of the album, of the room, are all beginning to melt like wax.

 ***

Six inches from our nose, stomach fibers twisted and tightened. There was no memory of this. “Don’t worry, many memories are stored in the brain, too,” the nurse said, hovering above us in immaculate heels that could aerate a crop field. “We can search there, too, when we get there.” Her voice was too gelatinous for her stringy body. Her three-point hat cast a chilling shadow of a human with an insufficient head.

Bloody brilliant, in my opinion.

Enough here. Two hours and a bit more since I resurrected myself. Onto Roth and then the work that was supposed to be done by now.

 

Esoterica just played a Velvet Underground song that I had forgotten about; should have put in the morning post. Here it is:

 

sch 4:31