8/5/23

 Saturday, August 5, 2023

In bed before 10, up at 6:56, but spent perhaps half the night on the BR recliner with/ back pain,   Let Lilly out.  68℉, high 78, AQI=58, Moderate from particulates.  Wind ENE at 8 mph, 6-10/16 mph.  DPs 61-64.  Sunrose at 5:47, sets at 8:08, 14+22.

Summer soul salving.  I took a drive up to Plymouth at the intersection of Highways 57 and 23.  I was of a mind to drive to Mount Calvary in what is nicknamed 'Wisconsin's Holy Land' to drive into St. Laurence's Seminary and High School and visit the Capuchin graveyard there where Brother Booker Ashe is buried and perhaps my friend from the House of Peace Father Matthew Gottschalk., but I feared my plumbing wouldn't hold out so I turned around in Plymouth and headed home. (Why "the Holy Land?  Other towns in the area include de Calvary, Jericho, Marytown, St. Anna, St. Cloud, St. Joe, and St. Peter, all originally settled by Roman Catholic Germans.)  It wasn't an ideal drive for me because I never got onto back country roads but rather stayed on Hy. 57 except for the drive through portion on Plymouth.  Nonetheless, I enjoyed seeing many fields in mid-summer lushness, the corn stalks deep green with their golden brown tassels, soybeans green and healthy looking, and fields of alfalfa already harvested into large hay ricks.  Also saw many beautiful residences, including two notable ones in little Waldo.  As always on my drives into non-urban Wisconsin, I think about how far removed the residents are from life in the big cities and all the problems associated with urban life, urban populations, most notably minorities and more notably yet, Blacks.  Such different worlds and different perceptions of "real America."

I listened to Sinead O'Connor's entire "I Do Not Want What I Do Not Have" album on the drive north, thinking that she had an artist's heart and soul, reminding me of Basquiat.  Each unique.  I almost felt tear glands acting up as she sang "I Am Stretched on Your Grave', thinking of her and of Kitty.   I'm stretched on your grave /And will lie there forever / If your hands were in mine / I'd be sure we'd not sever / My apple tree, my brightness / It's time we were together / For I smell of the earth / And am worn by the weather.  And "Black Boys on Mopeds" which she wrote and sang.  Young mother down at Smithfield / 5 am, looking for food for her kids / In her arms she holds three cold babies / And the first word that they learned was "please" / These are dangerous days /  To say what you feel is to dig your own grave / Remember what I told you: / If you were of the world they would love you.  She was a rebel from the get-go and never stopped.

The Rule of Law and Judicial Tyranny.  In the current issue of the New York Review of Books, there is a very lengthy article by Laurence Tribe, a compendium of book reviews dealing with the U. S. Supreme Court followed by his call for changes.  He reminds us readers that the romantic view of the Court as a great defender of personal freedoms and of the rights of minorities is nonsense:  "[M]issing from [Joan] Biskupic’s book is any sense of how much of the Supreme Court’s history has been marked by what today appears to be shockingly reactionary and even repressive decisions. There is nothing about its infamous rulings in cases like Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857), holding that Black Americans could never become citizens and had no rights that whites were bound to respect; or Giles v. Harris (1903), holding that the Court lacked any authority even to entertain a challenge to a state’s complete disenfranchisement of Black citizens despite the Fifteenth Amendment; or Lochner v. New York (1905), stripping states of the capacity to regulate sweatshop working conditions; or Hammer v. Dagenhart (1918), depriving Congress of the authority to forbid the interstate sale of the products of child labor; or Buck v. Bell (1927), sustaining the compulsory surgical sterilization of women of supposedly substandard intelligence; or Korematsu v. United States (1944), upholding the forced removal of loyal Japanese Americans from their homes after Pearl Harbor. . . The downside of Biskupic’s examination of the Trump years with microscopic intensity is the potential for glossing over the Court’s troubling history of undermining political equality and human rights, which long predates the Trump administration. In Waldman’s better-balanced and more factually grounded telling, that history serves to illustrate how judicial supremacy—the idea that, beyond being responsible for reviewing and resolving the competing legal claims of the parties before it in any particular controversy, the federal judiciary in general and the Supreme Court in particular bear ultimate responsibility for authoritatively interpreting the Constitution and laws of the United States—has been incompatible with the advancement of individual rights. [emphasis added by me.]  He cites his fellow Harvard Law Professor Nikolas Bowie "“As a matter of historical practice, the Court has wielded an antidemocratic influence on American law, one that has undermined federal attempts to eliminate hierarchies of d federal attempts to eliminate hierarchies of race, wealth, and status."

Tribe calls a spade a spade and doesn't shy away from warning about Republican-led fascism:  "[T]to put it bluntly, it is alarming how confidently, and often angrily, the justices in the current Republican majority—and we mustn’t mince words here: the justices I’m talking about have all been appointed by Republican presidents—have acted in pursuing their anti-democratic ends. The arrogance dates back over two centuries and cuts across the ideological spectrum, but its weaponization in support of an antidemocratic project is strictly right-wing [i.e., Republican] and distinctly novel."  He concludes the article with a warning that fascism is what we are facing:  "The looming possibility that a tyrannical executive will seize authority in the coming years and that such an executive’s violent followers will not soon relinquish their hold on power—coupled with the ironic reality that an overconfident Supreme Court will prove so weakened by its own excesses that it will be unable to contain the forces of fascism—leave those of us who are unwilling to give up hope with our hands more than full. The work ahead cannot be left to judges alone, even with a Supreme Court enlarged and rebalanced so as to overcome its current waning legitimacy. It is, as always, work that belongs to us all." (Emphasis mine.)

Tribe's article is what one would expect from one of his stature - superb, both in his thoughts on the books he reviewed and on what might be done to 'fix the Court.'  And it drives home again how we are living in an era not unlike the 1850s when the federal Union was coming apart at the seams and how the Supreme Court helps and/or hinders the disintegration.