The Supreme Court

It is now a collection of dunces shilling for their masters

When white settlers came to the deep south they encountered the Creek Indians, who considered it rude to say something without putting in a touch of humor. This produced in them an abstract sense of humor generations before Ross introduced it to popular appeal in the New Yorker. When Creeks were brought to court, where the judge was on a high bench, and wearing a black gown, of course they saw the humor in it. I am told that depositions of Creeks, in Florida depositories, are often hilarious reading.

What does authority do when people stop taking it seriously?

There are times in the course of human events when you see an institution that has been hollowed out, so that there’s just a facade remaining. It is an artifact of a time when it had energy and purpose. That’s what our Supreme Court is now. It’s an artifact that once had energy and purpose toward elevation of justice for all. Now, as faithfully as a dog bringing the bird back to the hunter, it drags us into the epistemological box where it is confined.

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, is moving its slow thighs, while all about it reel shadows of the indignant desert birds. The darkness drops again; but now I know that twenty centuries of stony sleep were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, and what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born? (Yeats, The Second Coming)

For most of my life I’ve seen the Supreme Court as a neutral arbiter because it was composed of lawyers who were presented to society as the intellectual and esthetic flowering of their profession, cultivated as leaders because their colleagues recognized their superior quality. The American Bar Association governed ethical behavior. Now the court has been packed by The Federalist Society, which in its principles proclaims the role of law in the United States is to say what the law is, not what it should be.

This is, of course, the exact opposite of its intent.

By accusing somebody else of what you plan to do, you proclaim your own innocence in advance, like a murderer who mounts a defense seemingly out of nowhere when questioned. But it’s not out of nowhere. It’s guilt, bleeding like an open wound.

The breakdown of the court began with the Civil Rights Act and the Nixon’s southern strategy. Trump’s accelerating a Russian propaganda supported strategy in 2016, by aligning the right wing with Putin’s authoritarianism, was simply a continuation of this strategy. It is a way to take power by siding with those who have lost a war, hot or cold, who are eager to salve humiliation with vengeance. The end game is not taking away rights from everyone, only from those being disempowered.

The elders of the Republic of Gilead still know how to party.

There is a spirit of law in the light of constitutional principles, and there is narrow interpretation to empower one balkanized group of belief systems over the others. As Terrance McKenna pointed out, you can have one group which uses quantum physics as bedrock, and another who uses an oracle of some kind, like, Q, for example. That wasn’t his example it is mine. I forgot his. Another group might align around control over women, and by extension, hostility to the feminine, which would subdivide into separating women and gay people from the rest of society so as to target them. You can’t very well target a group if you can’t identify them and separate them out.

Part of Nixon’s southern strategy was getting William Hubbs Rehnquist on the high court, though he was partisan and racist. The southern strategy depended on dog whistles for what could not be said aloud, and the main one at that time was state’s rights. If it is the right of the state to make laws about race, then the federal government under Eisenhower was wrong to force integration in the south. This must be reversed, no matter how long it takes, and vengeance taken on those who were responsible.

Racism is the heart of the southern strategy and it has been central to the Republican Party’s rise to power, which is based on subverting the spirit of the law through manipulation of it through gerrymandering and the electoral college, so that the leaders are chosen by a few people in a couple of states, despite the popular vote. Now we can do it directly, from our phones, but we find our representatives are not ever going to give back the entrusted power. It’s like asking Gollum to give back the ring.

Now, the court’s chief justice is John Roberts, who clerked for Rehnquist during his 1980 term. Roberts looks moderate compared to real radicals like Clarence Thomas, who lives in a particularly weird little Balkan state with a great white (woman) who is actively trying to overturn democracy and replace it with authoritarian rule. But why is this a surprise? Amy Coney Barrett was in a conservative Catholic cult, and the rest of the Federalist society stuffed shirts have in common that they believe in one all powerful sky god. Why would they not shape society with one all powerful cult leader in charge? People gravitate to what is familiar.

The Republican party wants government shaped like a corporation, with all the power at the top and absolute authority over everything from marketing to image.

Our founding fathers were far more attuned to Greek polytheism than to the Jewish prophet religions, where worship is the order of the day. When Jefferson or others referred to the one god it was nature’s god, just like they put it in the Constitution, and their education was based in the Greek classics of science and literature.

Now we have a Supreme Court composed of six right wing Catholics, plus Gorsuch, who was raised Catholic but identifies as Episcopalian. That leaves Kagan and Jackson. So it is a Conservative Catholic court, which is to say, authoritarian. Republicans loaded it that way ostensibly to outlaw abortion, which, along with rape, gives men control over women’s bodies.

The Federalist Society packed the court by excluding anyone who wasn’t on their list so that they could legislate from the bench.

The American Bar Association is supposed to elevate those who are not on one side or the other of an issue, not by some sophistry of their making a vigilant effort, but because their thought process is not polarized. Religion polarizes the thought process into dualities where the good is obvious because it is included and the bad is obvious because it is excluded. McKenna pointed out that the yin yang symbol is not about the black and the white, it is about the line which is between them, like the shoreline shifts between the sea and the land.

A brilliant legal mind requires a high tolerance for ambiguity. If there is a gleam in the eye that lights up one side of an argument, the other will be correspondingly devalued and rendered unconscious. The defining characteristic of justice is balance, and our Supreme Court by that standard is an idiot. It has been hollowed out from within until, finally, the facade has collapsed to reveal an awful emptiness underneath it. In the end we pretend to obey the facade to not have to deal with the power remaining, which is punitive and violent.

The Supreme Court will still meet and exercise authority over lower courts, and over our legal structures, but the Supreme Court is now dead to me, because it has no guiding spirit leading to the future. It is an extension of some very rich families, who used wedge issues to get their toadies in black robes, so that they look the part. I am not fooled.

There is an easy way to see who controls the society, and that is to look at who has the tallest buildings. When government buildings got taller than churches religion had to accept the loss of power, but, as with the South, a humiliation requires vengeance. Conservative religion has never accepted democracy. It likes authoritarianism because that’s what conservative religion teaches. All the power is at the top. And the way they keep it there is selected evidence to push apparent truth. People throw up their hands and abdicate.

“Who knows what’s true or not? They’re all alike and they do the same things.”

To which I would say, like McKenna, truth is the least reliable of the three ways to navigate, because it is so easily faked with selection and repression of evidence. The good is better, because even if we know there is evidence that a behavior is true, is it good? This moves us to the body’s intelligence. The Bible might provide evidence to justify your murdering the florist, but some sense of proportion warns it would not be good. But let’s say the concept of the good and the true being one thing is too confusing to wrap your head around, there remains the beautiful, or as McKenna put it, you are left with your taste. We have a sense of what is of higher esthetic quality, and this sense of beauty is the first mover. Everything else follows on.

This court is butt ugly. There is no taste, no beauty, no grace, no wit, no intellectual fire, no emotional intelligence, no consciousness, there is duty to an epistemology, which is a kind of box, and the intention is to pull everybody else inside the box. They won’t go voluntarily, so measures will have to be taken.

And so it began, and begins again.