SCALIA

ANITA HILL FOR THE SUPREME COURT !!

Anita Hill

Just at bedtime, checking for late messages, I ran my eye over the headings of this-and-that and saw “Scalia dies in his sleep.”  I went right on.  It didn’t hit me.  I couldn’t grasp it.  But when it did I was gob-smacked.  Backing up, it took another hour of reading stories to really understand what had happened.  I confess that my first reaction was what some are already labeling “racist,” that is, how will Clarence Thomas know how to vote?  Then, I thought, without his shield and guide, maybe he’ll just resign. At least I strongly suspect he went to bed drunk.

U of Chicago Law School

For a living in the school year of 1981-82 I typed out transcriptions of dictated-to-tape law professors’ papers.  This was at the U of Chicago Law School where Scalia was parked while he waited for the Supreme Court and Cass Sunstein was hurtling down hallways and into his office because a thought was nudging to be born.  I never typed anything for him because he went straight to the keyboard himself.  Sunstein was fifteen years younger than me, Scalia was three years older.  They were both very intense, but so were all the other professors, especially the three or four women who comported themselves like nuns.

My interaction with Scalia was of two sorts: accidentally riding the elevator with him (never alone) and delivering the mail to his office.  To him I was clearly furniture only.  He never smiled at me or said thanks, or gave any sign that I existed.  (I was middle-aged, white, and about the same percentage of overweight as he was.)  In the elevator the other men, some of them professors, loved to tease Scalia about his ambition and opinions, which he always parried cleverly, laughing.  It was assumed that he was going to be on the Supreme Court.  

It was a little as though they were teasing the Bishop of Boston.  That is, under the joking was pandering and under that was a consciousness of great power and secret understandings.  The whole place was like that, even the espresso bar where the young aspiring pre-law men created exquisite cappuccino, the first I’d ever consumed and very welcome to jet-propelled academia, fated to interfere with justice in America.  And elect conservative presidents.

Sara Benincasa

https://medium.com/@SaraJBenincasa/on-the-death-of-a-

brilliant-public-servant-fe2a7b6fcd5c#.ky0tuj2tx

Much is made of Scalia’s friendship to the Supreme Court women, whom he invited to his home on secular holidays (New Year’s) and took shooting.  I see it as the generosity of the father to his daughters, even if — like Cheney’s gay daughter — they don’t stick to Papa’s program.  

Someone should write a comic dialogue between Scalia and Thomas, sitting by a fireside with whatever elite alcohol they preferred, demonstrating the total cultural mismatch between them that made true communication impossible.  One of the principles of good narrative is dialogue in which two people talk past each other, each believing he is persuasive and on target.

publicity still from "Agnus Dei"

There is nothing in anything I’ve read since Scalia's death that mentions his rumored connection to Opus Dei.  But just now at Sundance there is a movie called “Agnus Dei.”  It is about Polish nuns who have been raped by soldiers and are about to give birth.  That is, cruelty to draped women who respond as human beings variously rather than dogmatically.  There is irony in the timing.

http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2016/january-web-only/dispatch-from-sundance-agnus-dei.html  

http://deadline.com/2016/01/agnus-dei-trailer-sundance-anne-fontaine-1201686737/

Quotes from Wikipedia, therefore anonymous:

Opus Dei is a clandestine Catholic organization based in Chicago, Ill. In size, it is insignificant, a mere 85,000 members (only 3,000 members in the US) compared to the one billion Catholics worldwide. But, its membership boasts of some of the most powerful and wealthy people in the country. The group catapulted to national attention when spymaster, Robert Hanson, was arrested and convicted.  . .    Navarro-Valls was particularly important as a press liaison during the last few years of the reign of Pope John Paul II (reigned 1978–2005). . . .With the election of Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger as Pope Benedict XVI — and with the new pope's approval — Navarro-Valls continued in his post for almost two years. . .Navarro-Valls was devoted to the Catholic prelature Opus Dei (The Work of God) as a secular member. His involvement with this organization dates back to 1970-75, when he lived in the central headquarters with Msgr. (later Saint) Josemaría Escrivá, the founder of Opus Dei.

John Paul II and Navarro-Valls

The secrecy, the pomp and circumstance of power, the rumors of self-mortification, and writers’ use of the group as a presumed cult with a secret near-magic agenda are easy to attach to Scalia.  This is a link to a sensational article.  http://www.counterpunch.org/2004/01/17/radicals-on-the-high-court/   One wonders what the autopsy will record in terms of scars: “CSI Vatican” or rather "CSI Washington,DC."  Scalia’s will asks for cremation.  Autopsy may be resisted by the family, but as a matter of national concern, assassination must be ruled out.  Shadows of S/M, spy torture, and the Spanish Inquisition lurk.

Besides Opus Dei, Scalia (like Cheney) loves shooting.  NRA owes him big-time.  He doesn’t exactly project John Wayne, but he certainly has protected the Second Amendment.

Some stories are noting that lately he has become more cruel in his joking, more impatient and intolerant in other ways.  As a fellow septuagenarian, I understand that one can become a little slip-shod in self-monitoring.  A little inclined to flare when irritated.  I will not be surprised if autopsy reveals organic deterioration and possibly a stroke as the cause of death.

Since I’ve been considering the impact of thinking that is produced and recorded as “writing” (not just ink on paper, but in all forms that are composed and valorized as law or religious precepts), I note that both our justice system in America and the international Roman Catholic system rest on written law, with the primary status of the Bible and the Constitution of major importance.  Scalia was right in enforcing the stability of these documents, but he was wrong in thinking there was any inviolable content that only he could recognize and that could accommodate such radical changes as our cultures are enduring.  He was another of the Old Testament Christians.

He forgets that Jesus didn’t arise from an elite in palaces, but rather from the village life of fishermen and craftsmen.  We don’t even know whether Jesus was literate.  It was Paul who was the scribbler.  (If he’d been in an elevator with a woman, he would have tried not to notice.)

Francis I

Now that Scalia’s death has changed the politics of deadlock and polarization into something much more practical and far-reaching, I hope it kindles a cleansing fiery discussion that can lift us to a much higher level of concern.  And I pray for the health of Francis I.  But I was already doing that.  

CHERISHMENT EMBRACED

There’s a true story about the UUA staff.  The denomination is halfway through its General Assembly and I’m sure they are all atwirl about coinciding with the Supreme Court’s rulings in favor of same-sex marriage and universal health insurance support.  They feel that their yellow t-shirts turned the tide.  For quite some time the denomination has publicly supported the progressive side of these issues.  In fact, back in the Eighties -- and let’s be cynical for a while -- they needed members.  Still do.  Welcoming gays and African Americans and whoever wants in is just smart. 

At a brain-storming meeting at 25 Beacon Street, officials said,  “We need to hire more gays.”  Along the lines of “we need to hire more Blacks.”  The dignified older “bachelor” who ran the bookstore said quietly, “No need.  I AM gay.”  No one had suspected.  They had accepted the right-wing definition of gay: flamboyant, reckless, defiant young men who couldn’t seem to keep their clothes on.

Among my high school teachers at Jefferson High in Portland, OR, one of them the national president of the NEA, were maybe half-a-dozen lesbian couples quietly living together.  They were among the most dedicated and brilliant people.  One of them, Jean Hill, triggered my interest in physiology and CSI -- dissecting cow eyes, bubbling oxygen through blood to make it change color.  No one said anything about her being gay.  The gray-haired, focused, women were “passing” in the sense of a person with African genes passing for white.  They were also contributing mightily.  Mostly born just before WWI, they had managed their lives in female partnership because so many men died in war -- now historians are telling us that many did not die in combat, but in crammed flu wards, maybe in numbers rivaling those of AIDS victims.  But we couldn't imagine these teachers having sex any more than we could imagine them cooking dinner or taking a bath.

When I look at the photos of same sex couples marrying en masse, my eye seeks those who have lived together amicably for twenty-five years, for fifty years.  I think the record is in the sixties.  People look at a photo of old men kissing and try to imagine their sex lives.  They are STUCK on the idea that marriage, that partnership, that love itself, is about SEX.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jP0q87leXzM   A demonstration of pig loading.

If you want to load a pig into a place it doesn’t want to go, you put a bucket over its head and back it into the place.  That’s what I read when I was composing the Multnomah County training manual for animal control officers.  I put it in the course.  I never put a bucket over a pig’s head.  Some of them are the size of a baby elephant.  It’s clear that lot of stubborn Republicans have had buckets over their heads and never realized that the country was backing them into the future, since they were unwilling to go there.

Cass Sunstein says that the Supreme Court watches the country to see what they are ready for.  Once a tipping point arrives, they will put that into the law.  Clearly, as someone else remarked, when it comes to children we need as many good teachers and parents as we can find and no one cares -- nor is it relevant -- whether they are good in bed or who with, because that is not the purpose or function of teaching or parenting.

Maybe we have let love become a subcategory of sex instead of the other way around because you can sell sex but you can’t sell love.  On the other hand, we have scientifically proven that “pair-bonding” (which is love that not only includes sex but also is the emotional glue of “faithful” couples) has a genetic component.  One gene makes the difference between a devoted prairie vole and a free-spirit mountain vole.  Who knew?

Voles are not vulnerable to the culture.  If a prairie vole pair-bonds with a same sex partner, no one remarks on it, no one stigmatizes them, no one will refuse to bake their wedding cake.  A percentage of almost all mammals will same-sex pair-bond.

In the case of humans, faithfulness is often an illusion.  That valentine about how geese pair off for life turns out to be false: DNA reveals that maybe ten percent wander.  The same is true of humans, or at least DNA has revealed that about ten percent of babies don’t match the purported father’s DNA.  You get a government-issued birth certificate, marriage license, death certificate.  But as Ernest Hemingway tried to prove, a certificate is just a piece of paper.

In spite of everything, DNA included, people fall in love different ways and styles, probably in some way related to their own specific DNA and history.  It’s a physiological, measurable, molecular phenomenon that can be seen and measured on instruments.  BUT that’s only the first step.  It needs to be translated by the culture into practical arrangements that are supported because they fit, because everyone approves, because the economics are there and the workload is equitable.  If the emotional pair-bonding  (a function that is deep in the brain and autonomic nervous system) is supported by whatever rational pre-frontal cortex assumptions and choice of culture can negotiate and consciously choose, then they can think about a formal, public declaration like marriage.

Marriage is presented as some kind of divine and immutable thing, but it never has been and never will be.  Marriage is a legal contract having to do with economics and procreation.  It is not even the same from state to state, esp. at the back end when the contract is broken and severance arrangements must be made.  It is not the same on Native American reservations as it is off.  Circles of jurisdiction cause overlapping and gapping in the particulars of age, alimony, abuse, and allowances.

By now marriage is so confused that a lot of people just don’t bother.  It costs too much, people play too many games with it, it interferes with jobs and friendships, religions have all kinds of opinions about it.  If one or both of the partners operates outside the law, they will discover that prisons also have very different opinions about it.  In a review of the “Tom of Finland” exhibit by Jason Farago, published in the Guardian, he concludes, “Marriage makes you a citizen; desire makes you free.”  There’s enough truth in this epigram to “ring,” but it’s also true that desire can put you in chains and marriage or being denied marriage can make you a rebel, a heretic, and a legal cripple.

I’ve already pointed out that Thomas Jefferson, who dearly loved his wife, promised her he would never remarry.  He had a unique solution: he bought his wife’s slave half-sister, who is said to have looked much like his wife since they shared the same father and grew up together.  Sally continued on to have children who were slaves.  There’s no written record of how she felt about it, but the descendants have long since found and supported each other.  The relationship itself poses the uncomfortable question:  are legal slavery and legal marriage that different?  Can love dwell in either or both or neither?

It’s conventional now for this sort of essay to end with testimony about one’s own experience.  My slavery has been economic, but aren’t all slaveries?  My marriage didn’t kill love, but it was an uncomfortable and finally impossible match.  Our bodies interfered: we simply became so miserable that the only way we could cure depression was with rage.  Marriage and sex are both dangerous, but love is not safe either.  I don’t even consider the first two anymore.  They’re a nuisance and distraction, belonging to society -- not me.  And yet I still love.

Love is physical, its shapes are kaleidoscopic -- both gorgeous and shifting.  Marriage is a chalice.  Love is neither wine nor fire -- maybe it’s wine aflame.

DO YOU COUNT?

This is actually my younger brother's class.  

Since I’m 75, my elementary education preceded television.  My BS was library- and practicum-based.  (My degree was in speech/theatre.)  It was the last of the Fifties and we were seeing the very beginnings of the third-wave psych theories as well as the very beginnings of what turned into post-modern thought.  (Hayakawa’s semantics)  The Peace Corps was barely invented and I was ahead of the curve by taking a job teaching on the Blackfeet Reservation.

By the time I “retired” and came back here, I was out-of-step with everyone in many ways, a hybrid person.  Fifteen years after returning, I sit at my computer all day pretty much as I did before, but I’m more profoundly out of step.  Techies do not believe I exist and if they did, they wouldn’t care.  My demographic has no money.  

“Outlier,” “long tail,” are both statistical terms meaning that I’m in the part of a bell curve that’s at the far end where the numbers are very low.  Our society at present is based on commerce  and believes that profit comes from making a little money from a lot of people.  Even in the arts the newspapers don’t report the qualities of content anymore.  Instead they talk numbers of people who attended, money it cost, profit it made, scores, market shares.

Sunstein had hair in those days.

In 1981 I was a transcriber at the U of Chicago Law School while finishing up my degrees at the University of Chicago Divinity School.  The Law School was cutting edge technically -- had to be -- but the Div School was all about content.  At the Law School about the only profs who typed directly into their computers were Jim White and  Cass Sunstein.  Everyone else, including Scalia, I think, did some kind of workaround, like dictating. We were all connected to a massive mainframe somewhere, but everyone worked independently.  Still, we transcribers smiled when we heard the muted sounds of “Asteroids” coming from offices with closed doors.

For six years in the nineties I worked for the City of Portland doing data entry, sitting at the computer all day.  I still sit at my computer, a free-standing desktop with internet access.  It’s a “mini” Apple a little larger than a sandwich.  I keep a second one that is NEVER attached to the Internet.  I mean, there is NO physical connection.  My last computer (eMac), even when it was turned off, was connected to the Apple techies, who turned it on by remote control in the night and rummaged around making “improvements.”   Even on my connected mini, which is on all day so I can get email and do research, can be accessed by my provider, so I cut the power at night.  I shut off Blue Tooth when I began to see my neighbor's computer content.

Social sites do not interest me.  I’m connected to only a few and only so I can follow the people who are halfway between being friends and being co-workers.  I dumped Facebook when they cut off those people without notice, destroying a whole backlog of videos they had made.  Also, we have all begun to realize that social sites, including Wikipedia, are ways of building mailing lists and “hit” records that are valuable to marketers, the government, and covert operators.  No longer do we have to depend upon self-reporting to see what people care about -- we can call up the bell-curves and the bar charts to find out which porn they watch, what medicines they take, who they talk to and what about.  Even where they were at the time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8KYugpMDXAE   This is a vid discussion.

Marketing departments love connection.  Buy one thing from Dr. Leonard and you will never get them back out of your life without some kind of confrontation.  (I ended up screaming on the phone.)  My Medicare contractor (Silverscript) is owned by a drug store chain (CVS) which began with a soft sell, a discount card, and escalated until I get regular phone calls and mailings saying that they’ve noticed that I’m not ordering my meds on time and demanding to know why not.  I write across the letter in red fibertip,  “STOP NAGGING ME!” and send it back. It does no good.  They own my butt.  Or at least my oral intake.  They assume I’m demented or I'd be compliant.

The techies of the world, the ones who grew up on game theory and have brains that know everything about systems and whatever technical terms they use, have almost no humanities background, no understanding of content or even metaphor except math.  They have no canon of shared reading, no valuing of the past.  Their morality is success-based, their empathy is for their pets.  All is innovation, more bells and whistles, more automatic spelling since they can’t do it alone.  All is templates assuming you want everyone to be your buddy so you can sell them something.  (If you don't mind piggy-backing.) I find my writing sometimes wrenched out from under my hands because it doesn’t agree with what the computer “thinks” I should do in terms of spelling or even sentence construction.  It is anti-creative with its little red and green lines.  

But worse, these sources have no intention of providing content.  They have convinced the public to do that for them.  “Send us your photos,” say the newspapers.  “Post your best writing here,” they direct.  “Twitter the news,” say the reporters, even though they know better than anyone else that their editors (who are from a different generation) will censor and reframe the reports anyway to make them appealing to the advertising bell curve.  To get news that isn’t mainstream vanilla, one must go to a foreign country.  I like The Guardian, but Al Jazeera is always interesting.

Demonized stuff is always interesting.

First Netflix just provided movies.  Then they began to want us to rate them.  Then they began to recommend movies they think I will like.  (I don’t find it useful since I respond to quality instead of genre.  They think the awards are indicators of quality, but remember that my original degree was earned with a bunch of theatre people -- I know better.)  Netflix and Amazon want us to write reviews.  We figured out how to game that in a hurry so all the reviews disappeared.  Now we have “author platforms.”  You can’t sell without confining yourself to something with edges.  

You can’t read some websites or join some orgs without allowing cookies.  If you clean off your cookies now and then, which I do, you lose function.  For a while we were assured that if we stored things in the Cloud, a massive computer warehouse someplace, they would be safe.  Now it turns out they can be searched, and if the website goes down -- maybe because of power loss or maybe because of a legal directive -- you’re down, too.  In spite of claimed redundancy.

Some "free" websites are demanding your VISA number "just in case."

Num num num num.

Automatic ads like those on blogspot respond to algorithms developed by people with no worldly knowledge, so that one's profound reflection on Buddhism gets followed by some crass ad for fundy Xianity.  One's careful essay on the forming of ministers is followed by an ad for instant ordination by mail.  It's all part of that religion blob.

But the providers give us metrics so we know exactly who, where, and how many people are reading us.  Just not their names.  (Do you watch the little maps in the right hand column?  I do.)  Best if they start comment “wars,” politely called discussions.  Whatever drives up traffic.  Now, after I've watched a movie, Netflix wants me to send recommendations to my friends.  I used to do that via email anyway, but they were paragraphs of analysis.  I resent being TOLD to do it.  It turns out that most of my friends don’t like the movies I like anyway.  We don’t watch the same way because I care about technical stuff far more than they do.  They want immersion; I want enlightenment.

Nurses want to be needed.

Very few of the people I know are as willing as I am to venture into the youth fascination with muck, darkness, sex, loud unintelligible noises.  Most adults prefer their SM with the romantic veneer of a movie like “Outlander” which they fancy to be true history of their own people.  They assume that if I watch XXX content, I must be a XXX person.  Because they don’t watch it, they assume it’s somehow corrupting, that there is nothing technical to think about.  There is no "real" content.

I have no laptop, no smart phone, no tablet, no iPod.  (Well, I think there's a little green iPod somewhere.) An occasional sign-up will DEMAND my cell phone number or prevent me from going farther.  There's no way to check "ain't got one."  In fact, some online mail order retailers will prevent me from going further if I don’t provide a physical address for mail delivery, though there is no home delivery here.  In the even smaller village thirty miles away, the streets have no names which REALLY upsets those Manhattan-based people.  At the moment you cannot use a Verizon-based cell phone in town -- only ATandT.  

On the highway the only places where a person can get cell reception are marked by turnouts and signs.  Not a lot of them around here.  GPS is not dependable.  The whole area is at the end of the bell curve.  We don’t even have fiber-optic service to our houses.  Our streets may not be paved.  The electricity surges and fades and sometimes is just missing.  We are invisible in many ways.  That’s why I like it here.  Sometimes.

One more thing, since this will mostly be read on a Sunday.  Religion is being forced into the same context of institutions and numbers: church as business, paying members, butts in the pews, number of self-identified believers, number of clergy -- all handy for designing bell curves.  Nothing about spirituality.  If you can’t number it, it doesn’t exist.  Cookies in the religious world will get you appeals for donations.  You don't have to pay for sunsets.

Light a candle?