These notes are for Dave Hickey, Paula Rego, and Annie Ross.

“Let me be clear about this:  I don’t have a drug problem, I have a police problem.”                                          Keith Richards — flyleaf quotation for Dave Hickey’s Air Guitar

Just a moment ago, I suddenly felt myself crumpling into tears thinking about the late great Dave Hickey, and what he would have made of the assault on democracy being replayed over broadcast and streaming media, to be further rehashed in print, later in the day and the morning after.  I wasn’t sure whether to feel gratified that Hickey had both lived to see Donald Trump and his sawdust-Caesar vision of personality cult authoritarianism go down to defeat but also die before the horrors of the January 6th rioting at the nation’s capitol in support of an attempted coup d’état by the thug and his minions, or to feel rekindled grief at what he—what all of us—had endured during the preceding 4—no—14, and more years.

And what would he have made of the on-going assault on democracy?  On truth and reason? (And more on that in a minute or so.) On the principles of ordered liberty, personal agency and autonomy, free expression? (And those last two are absolutely connected.)  Of the implosions and malignancies at the heart of our institutions of governance and authority?  Of the various assaults on and abdications from norms of ethics and justice?  Of the on-going assault on language and meaning—their manipulation and weaponization?

I was asked by my editor this past weekend if I had a few words to share about the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health decision and its overturn of the Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey precedents that had been handed down by the Supreme Court last Friday—just a bit disingenuously.  She knew I had a whole lot to say about it, having weighed in periodically regarding these issues from a number of different angles over the years, and having recently submitted an op-ed opinion piece regarding one specific (yet sweeping) aspect of the controversy and its treatment in the media and political discourse.  That op-ed was rejected by six mainstream outlets; and both my editors and several genius pals who looked over various drafts of it before submission had complaints about one aspect or another of its multi-pronged argument.  Between 300 and 500 words lighter, they had less to complain about, but more than one pal seemed to think I was just ranting, and that if I were going to rant, I should do so as vociferously as the medium would bear.

I don’t think I was ranting then and frankly abhor the thought of it.  Isn’t there enough noise and fury in the world already?  But there I was a few moments ago, alone with my tears of rage and pity at the spineless stupidity of such an overwhelming swath of humanity and their callous disregard for the values of democracy, personal choice, agency and autonomy, and—dare I say it?—life itself.

What strikes me over the last few days is how much they all seem to be part of the same sickness:  the assault on representative democratic republican government; the full frontal assault on women’s bodily autonomy and agency, alongside cynical lip service to ‘state’s interests’—I mean for fuck’s sake, why don’t they just come out and say they’re restoring patriarchal primacy? (as if it ever left us!); the distortion and willful disregard of facts and truth and the corruption of political discourse; the naked cowardice and sycophancy—is that all these ‘deplorables’ (and no—I will never ‘walk back’ that description!) aspire to?

I’d already read through Justice Alito’s draft opinion when it was leaked a couple of months ago; its cavalier (incomplete and inaccurate) historical contextualization of both the original Roe decision and this decision willfully overturning it, was part of what triggered my re-visitation of fallacy and the fallacious as applied to this sometime controversy, which at various points in history had clearly put some patriarch’s nose out of joint, but until the early to mid-19th century had never really been seriously codified into statutory law.

The opinion is readily eviscerated by anyone with even a cursory acquaintance with the law and the skein of related opinions that buttress the original 1973 precedent, both preceding and following in its wake.  It was no accident that the Chief Justice, while holding for the Petitioner, took pains to distance himself from the opinion’s reckless radicalism and brutality.  But, underscoring the radical dislocation of the majority opinion from the relevant body of Supreme Court jurisprudence, the dissenting Justices attached an Appendix discussing each of the 28 cases the Court majority cited in support of their opinion.

What struck me, however, was the direct, plain-spoken language of the dissenting Justices’ opinion.  They were explicit about the decision’s tectonic shift ramifications and the range of potential consequences for women—and dove straight into them, well aware that some of the most draconian (an adjective that to my astonishment actually appears in the dissent; they’re not mincing words—and why would they?) may be triggered by the Court’s own judgment.

“The Mississippi law at issue here bars abortions after the 15th week of pregnancy. Under the majority’s ruling, though, another State’s law could do so after ten weeks, or five or three or one—or, again, from the moment of fertilization. States have already passed such laws, in anticipation of today’s ruling. More will follow. Some States have enacted laws extending to all forms of abortion procedure, including taking medication in one’s own home. They have passed laws without any exceptions for when the woman is the victim of rape or incest. Under those laws, a woman will have to bear her rapist’s child or a young girl her father’s—no matter if doing so will destroy her life. So too, after today’s ruling, some States may compel women to carry to term a fetus with severe physical anomalies—for example, one afflicted with Tay-Sachs disease, sure to die within a few years of birth. States may even argue that a prohibition on abortion need make no provision for protecting a woman from risk of death or physical harm. Across a vast array of circumstances, a State will be able to impose its moral choice on a woman and coerce her to give birth to a child.

“Enforcement of all these draconian restrictions will also be left largely to the States’ devices. A State can of course impose criminal penalties on abortion providers, including lengthy prison sentences. But some States will not stop there.”

We can get into the insanity and blatant 14th Amendment evasions of this country’s carceral justice system on another occasion, but as the dissenting Justices document and underscore with almost every paragraph, this is something much more foundational.

“Perhaps, in the wake of today’s decision, a state law will criminalize the woman’s conduct too, incarcerating or fining her for daring to seek or obtain an abortion. And as Texas has recently shown, a State can turn neighbor against neighbor, enlisting fellow citizens in the effort to root out anyone who tries to get an abortion, or to assist another in doing so.”

The Texas law was deliberately designed to substantially evade scrutiny at the federal level—from the district and appellate levels all the way to the Supreme Court—which, no small coincidence, the ruling majority on this decision, allowed to proceed.  (We’ll see how long they let that go on. These so-called “Federalists” have a funny/not-funny way of letting the federal level dominate if the effect is a weakening of protections or public safety, and stepping aside if the effect is to allow states to intimidate their residents or curtail their rights to participate at the (of course) federal level.)  It remains deeply shocking:  a blatant scheme of vigilante justice that would “turn neighbor against neighbor”—a veritable prescription for a police state; but beyond that, explicitly divisive in an already politically (and socially and economically) polarized society.  As with the Court’s shocking post-Heller Second Amendment jurisprudence, it’s as if the Court’s “Federalist” majority would pour gasoline on an already tinder-dry forest, going entirely against its own mandate to “insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, and promote the general Welfare.”  As Linda Greenhouse, among others, has pointed out, Chief Justice Roberts has lost control of this Court.  Still more importantly, as the dissenting Justices declare in their dissent to the Court’s opinion here, the—let’s just call them the “Fucked-Up Five”—are compromising the Court’s institutional legitimacy.

But let’s just get into this issue for a moment.   I loved the Dissent’s reference to the “States’ devices.”  Yeah—that’s about what they amount to.  Trumpist-Republicans (I’m really not sure what to call them anymore—they’re not our dads’ Republicans and they sure the fuck aren’t our grand-dads’. Are they their own thing now? Trumpists?—I guess that essentially means fascist or authoritarian; or, the “Putin-wing,” as I’ve occasionally seen it referred to here and there.) are big fans of delegating various rights and powers—generically, administrative and implementation powers and responsibilities, but really so much more—to the individual States, or as they will occasionally gussy it up with a vaguely Constitutional gloss, ‘the People’.  What they usually mean is their people—they may appeal to their constituents’ latent (or not-so-much) populism, but these are not the kind of political operators to leave anything to chance.  They have some specific interests (their financial backers and contributors) to take care of.

Whether these are actual constitutional rights, liberties, or discretionary powers to implement a legislative mandate or distribute federal funds, an individual state’s administrative apparatus is the ‘middle management’ charged with making it happen, accompanied (as always) by their own police powers to enforce.  How is it that reservations of rights or delegations of various powers or authorities devolving down to individual states seem to continually end up oppressing the people of those states?  It’s not hard to figure out.  Here’s Alito, exhorting us to “heed the Constitution,” while he sidesteps its clear intent:

“It is time to heed the Constitution and return the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives. ‘The permissibility of abortion, and the limitations, upon it, are to be resolved like most important questions in our democracy: by citizens trying to persuade one another and then voting.’”

Rich, huh?  Some may be persuaded.  Others, in thrall to intractable religious doctrines, may be less open to argument.  More consequentially—in the post-Trump/’post-truth’ environment—such “citizens” may be unable to agree upon the facts underlying the controversy in the first place.  And then there’s the matter of “voting” rights—to which this Court has exhibited stunning indifference.  Oh—just in case you’re wondering, he’s quoting Antonin Scalia there.  The apple doesn’t rot too far from the tree, does it?

Can I just interject here that I really don’t like the sound of this voice?  I’ve never met Justice Alito—and as I said I already have issues with his chronology, his understanding of history, the obvious fault-finding, grievance-collecting baggage he seems to swing from his shoulder, the bitter resentments that he’s probably carried around with him since Princeton.  (He speaks Italian—a point in his favor; but he’s no Zadie Smith.)  But I mean – this prim schoolmarm-ish prescriptive voice:  “It is time to heed…”  “The permissibility … and the limitations….”  But … not unlike a lot of freaks out there (the bad kind), he’s not kidding around.  ‘Women will die’, the voice behind this voice is telling us.  ‘And you’ll just have to deal with it.’  Well, he’s not an ‘originalist’, he’s a sadist; and American women aren’t going to crawl back into their burkas.  We’re going to fight back and fight hard and he just better watch his jurisprudential back.

I mean that quite literally, but we can get back to all that Federalist “originalism” horseshit in a minute.

We were talking about voting.  It doesn’t help that state legislative bodies may be as unrepresentative of their constituents and their priorities as their federal counterparts—particularly the Senate, further hampered by rules exaggerating their de facto minoritarian rule (e.g., the filibuster).  And—wait for it—the Court is poised to rule on a North Carolina case involving the Constitution’s Elections Clause (which delegates regulation of federal elections to the individual states), with respect to state court review of legislative re-districting (gerrymandering) in the next term.  Needless to say, the North Carolina legislature would prefer to exempt its partisan redistricting from state judicial scrutiny.  And what next—as other state legislatures in hot pursuit of ‘voter fraud’ hobgoblins amend their state constitutions to enable their legislatures to overturn popular vote results?  So much for ‘returning the issue to the people’s elected [state] representatives’.

Here’s another thing about Alito’s ‘heeding’ heedlessness.  He uses this superficial, notional “Constitution” to suppress what is actually essential to its framework, and more specifically its core Amendments.  These are the aspects of the Constitution intended to protect us from the potential intimidation and oppressions of democratic majorities.  The dissenting Justices touch on this point in a number of places in the Dissent; e.g., “To repeat: The point of a right is to shield individual actions and decisions ‘from the vicissitudes of political controversy, to place them beyond the reach of majorities and officials and to establish them as legal principles to be applied by the courts.’” (the Justices citing to a 1943 Supreme Court precedent, West Virginia Board of Education v. Barnette, 319 U.S. 624).  Consider the protections of the First Amendment—of speech and expression, religious practices, etc.  A legislative body—or incensed electorate of any composition—can’t just legislate censorship.  (Which doesn’t stop them from trying, of course.)

And can you imagine how much sexual mischief and harassment Congressional aides would be dealing with if their bosses couldn’t access their porn, couldn’t schedule their next ‘service’ appointments?  (I’m sure I’m not the only one hearing speculation about what Mark Meadows was scrolling through on his phone while Casey Hutchinson tried to make him “snap out of it.”  Was it text messages?  Or was it PornHub?  Please don’t let us down, Verizon!)

There are the legislatures, and there are the lynch mobs—and they’re never too far away—from us or each other.

To be honest I had problems with various usages in both opinions.  (I skimmed through part of Kavanaugh’s concurrence, but really thought the only point of it was to shore up Alito’s evasions and protect himself in a kind of cover-your-ass lawyer-opinion sort of way.  I couldn’t bring myself to even look at most of Thomas’s—let’s face it—rant.  Speaking of porn—his entire career on the high Court has been one long campaign of vengeance for a woman calling him out on his harassment; and I have no doubt he had some awareness of his insane “best” friend’s complicity in the January 6, 2021 attempted coup.  No—he’s not going to stop at Roe and Casey.  He’s not going to stop until he’s burned the entire apparatus of constitutional democratic government down.

Hard to get over those three in particular.  (Well Coney Barrett is quite a piece of work in her own right.)  The resentment and rage that just seem to pour out of them.  You’d know you couldn’t smoke around them simply because it might set off a fire.  They should be subject to fire warnings in western States:  No, you’re not welcome here! There’s an extreme fire hazard here.

And so some of us are already on fire.

As I said, I keep going back to very fundamental terms:  equality, integrity, autonomy, agency, control, reason (and rationale), life, time, viability, person (and personhood), fetal (as opposed to embryo, as opposed to infant or child).  Time—as in there’s never enough.

The gravity of this insane overturn of precedent (and really wholesale insult to the rule of law) cannot be overstated; and as I said, the dissenting Justices got right into it.  “Roe held, and Casey reaffirmed, that…. The government could not control a woman’s life:  It could not determine what the woman’s future would be.”

This is something that should resonate for any and everyone.  If it’s felt more acutely by women, and particularly around sexual and reproductive health and other personal decisions, it’s something everyone knows, contemplates, confronts.  Does my or anyone’s life have any purpose or meaning?  Is there a point to anyone’s ambitions or desires?  Do we have any say over our futures?

But the legacy carried here by women alone and well beyond this controversy—the crushing indictment of millennia of patriarchy—is what continues to resonate.

The majority opinion (and fuck you Gorsuch and Coney Barrett, too) makes much of the meaning and intent of (English) language as understood by the ratifying legislators (uh … that would be men) at the time of ratification.  (That means 1868 for the 14th (“Equal Protection”) Amendment to the Constitution.)  And so, speaking of women and—when do our lives begin?—a few other passages ripped my throat right out of me.

“To be sure, most women in 1868 also had a foreshortened view of their rights: If most men could not then imagine giving women control over their bodies, most women could not imagine having that kind of autonomy.”

Well it takes us back to the Dark Ages or antiquity, doesn’t it?—and how women coped with anything at all—imagination, consciousness itself all but beside the point.  Of course we had our thoughts, our imaginations—there are letters and diaries.  We have the Lais of Marie de France.  Come the Enlightenment, we have the letters of the Marquise de Staël, the Marquise de Sevigné, and the great salonières of Paris.  It takes us back to Mary Wollstonecraft, Austen, Eliot, Virginia Woolf’s modest request for 50 pounds and “a room of one’s own.”  But these are women of rank, privilege, and wealth.  What of the other 99 percent, dealing with who-knows-what-horrors, day in, day out?

I have a fascination for some of these dashing figures from the French Enlightenment and their counterparts in the British Isles (the main difference between the two sets being that the English were compelled to do quite a bit more dashing about than their French counterparts, whose strategy more often was to play it down-low (sometimes in Paris)—at some remove from their aristocratic peers at the royal court).  I’m always struck by how exhausting their lives were—and these were the privileged ones!

But my imagination goes to that girl in the less soigné banlieues, in the villages and countryside, opening her eyes somewhere between childhood and puberty and wondering about the place she held in it—or that held her in place—and what she had to say about it, or indeed whether she had any say in it at all; to her first encounters with other girls, possibly boys (possibly considering their advantaged situation); and still later with slightly older boys—and all the dangers that would entail.  The closest I can come to it is probably something close to the reality Jean-Dominique Bauby pieces together in Le Scaphandre et le Papillon (which Julian Schnabel made into a great film):  a kind of locked-in syndrome.

So that’s where we effectively were, ‘blinking’ our way between the alphabet and our imaginations, until some of us made one kind of dash or another for one kind of exit or another—until when?

There were exceptions (and interestingly they begin to be seen around the time abortion restrictions begin to make their way into statutory law—alongside pharmaceutical abortifacients in the commercial domain).  Men did not settle the western United States on their own.  But that’s something for another rant.  And I’m not done with this one.