The Supreme Court's Game of Pretend: Naivete All Around

Let's pretend, okay?

Let's pretend that the way to stop shootings on the street, random as they may be, is to guarantee that people can arm themselves wherever they are. Let's hope that all Americans arm themselves, maybe with concealed carry, so the bad guys can get theirs whenever they lurch over the edge. We should arm ourselves, you know, wherever we go. 

The knowledge, totally widespread, that people will now have that right should stop the bad guys before they try anything. Even if they do, the good guys with guns will know it and draw first, will not have their backs turned, will be able to recover from the first few seconds of surprise. And now that we have the permission, so many more Americans will do so.

Let's pretend, too, that since abortion is a supposed moral wrong, that all women will suddenly come to their senses and bring their fetuses to term as real babies. The reasons they might consider abortion, medical issues notwithstanding, will at once be relegated to mere immaturity and panic, not careful consideration and nights and nights of lost sleep.

Let's pretend that pregnancy automatically means giving birth. Let's pretend, too, that women who don't want to raise this new living thing in their arms automatically have a place to which to give it so that that messiness, that massive change in lifestyle, can be avoided.

We have a Supreme Court--two-thirds of it, at least--that believes all that nonsense, that plays that game of pretend. They live in a world that, maybe, one-third of Americans actually inhabit. But one-third distributed in a way that allows them to grab hold of power and hold it for the rest of their lives is enough; enough to wreak all kinds of havoc, which these two decisions, piled atop one another, will cause.

Not only do they not get out enough, they insist that that doesn't much tatter. Their right-wing advocates have won the day: We now have a country in which there will surely be more guns on the streets, leading to more deaths, not fewer, and the end of abortion in at least 13 states--leading to more deaths of women, not fewer.

This is naïveté' writ large. But I would be remiss if I didn't note the naïveté' of the other side of the aisle. 

Joe Manchin is disappointed. You know, disappointed that Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch said, 

clearly and definitively, that Roe v. Wade, which they both voted to overturn today, was "settled law" in their confirmation hearings. To anyone not paying attention, that was supposed to mean that they wouldn't touch its basic tenet that a woman had a reasonable right to choose what to do with her pregnancy, though that room had lost its size since its original establishment in 1973.

But it wasn't. Words can mean whatever someone can make them mean if someone gets the power to change the meaning. All the two shysters had to do is said "settled law," and technically, they wouldn't be lying. But there were no follow-up questions, to the extent that they wouldn't touch it at all, ever, and certainly wouldn't ever reverse it. 

So did they lie? Not out loud. But what they could have meant, probably did mean, was that Roe was "settled law" for now (back then), the same way that decent campaign finance laws were "settled law" back then before a different, but just as twisted, Supreme Court dropped Citizens United on us. All that did was bring on ex- and his band of far more developed shysters, the results of which the 1/6 Committee is doing a great job of exposing.

So, Joe: They lied. Lied by omission, lied because they had a chance to be totally disingenuous. They never wanted to keep Roe from the start. It was never second-guessed. 

And you're walking about stunned, even though their lying was preceded by their appointment by the liar-in-chief, who will, and does, lie to anyone so often and so blatantly that I wonder if he accepts any kind of truth that he hasn't mouthed himself.

But you left the door open. You, and the liberals in the Senate who heard what they wanted to hear and didn't want to cause more trouble, even when Kavanaugh clearly lied about his involvement in a drunken collegiate frivolity which, if admitted, would have defused the event and might have allowed clearer thinking about drilling down a little farther about what was really important.

And so they told what they told themselves was a white lie which has become a dark rabbit hole the depths of which we will soon learn will be debilitating and even violent. Radical reactionaries will seek to prevent any kind of end of pregnancy, even chemically-induced ones. And they will try to stop women who still seek such procedures from leaving the state in which they live to enter another where they can get treatment. 

Based on the above new ruling on guns, this repression cannot be a good idea. Somebody's rights will be determined by good aim and vigilantism on both sides of the ledger. The destabilizing effects of the deterioration of common recognition of someone's rights will be rocked to its very core.

That's just another game of "pretend." Let's pretend that nothing radical will come of this extremely radical set of rulings. Let's pretend that we can all keep ourselves in civilized restraint.

Oh, wait: We already haven't? People have already shot up grocery stores, churches, movie theaters and of course schools? Oh. Well, sorry. We'll try harder next time. Except now they'll have an even darker reason.

Too late now. And too late for millions of women. They got caught in the clutches of naïveté before these disastrous rulings, and conservative-reactionaries will get caught in naïveté afterwards. They really think they can get away with this without too much societal disruption. We will all see how wrong they are.

Be well. Be careful. With some luck, I'll see you down the road.

Mister Mark

No, It Isn't Just the Guns. It's the Desperation.

The typical battle over real gun control over cosmetic gun control rages in Congress once again. Republicans are in control about the complete lack of gun control. Whatever they pass won't make a scintilla of difference. 

Mass shootings will continue. They are likely to get worse. Our sense of helplessness will grow. Count on it.

That's because the Republicans continue to be right about one thing: Mental health must become a priority. But they put it on their agenda to speak of it as a convenient bromide, not do anything about it. That's because that problem is far deeper instilled than just about any of us want to understand. Because nobody really wants to face what's wrong--and that's because of the role Republicans have had in establishing it. And if they did, nobody would know what to do about it. Nobody would know where to start.

Nobody's saying guns aren't the issue. Of course they are. But they are the vehicle. Mental illness starts the engine.

Why are young people picking up weapons of mass destruction and using them on the helpless? Because they have lost hope. Notice that most of them take their own lives after wreaking their carnage. That was the plan all along--go out blazing away so that someone notices you.

But how do they get to that thinking so early in their lives? Those lives should be filled with promise, with striving, with hope that tomorrow will be better. They have obviously concluded that that's nonsense. Genuflection to the altar of nihilism is what prompts the only thing left--total destruction of anything, but especially of something they can control for whatever few minutes they can control it.

That's what their lives are left being, a salute to the destruction of life. Easily, too, with a weapon that tears human flesh apart. Remember Pat Tillman, the pro football player who went to Afghanistan and got killed in that conflict? He was shot by his own people, with the same kind of gun that massacred little kids in Uvalde. His head was blown off. That's why the devastated parents of some of those kids had to submit to DNA swabbing to aid identification--because the children suffered the same fate. (Jake Tapper of CNN was on Stephen Colbert's late night show recently, wondering if we weren't being too antiseptic in our hiding the actual results of such weapons from the public. Though he himself doesn't know where the line should be drawn, he has a point.)

What causes such disasters? What drives this?

Neoliberalism, that's what. The idea that, fundamentally, you're on your own: Not just that you shouldn't count on anyone to help you, that's bad enough--it's the idea that it's practically guaranteed that no one will. So success, far from being guaranteed, becomes a desperation, because beneath it is a trap door to oblivion. You're a failure. No one cares, either. You're worthless. The strength it took to make the effort is irrelevant. You failed. You're weak. You turn around, and there's no one there. See? We told you.

That worthlessness is evident in the things other people have--nice homes, great cars, people waiting on them hand and foot, the life of luxury. You, you poor slob, are forced to work for them so they can have what you'll never be closer than a hundred miles to achieving. The world, the real world, doesn't enforce self-esteem. It's all measured.

But success isn't defined by you. It's defined by someone else you've never met. The goalposts are constantly being shifted. There's no relief. You're in a rabbit hole, deeper and deeper.

Nobody shows you that the world is, in fact, an interdependent place, that nobody, nobody at all, can rely on gaining anything sufficiently valuable by themselves. In short, we need each other. There are no "self-made" independent people, and there never have been. Barack Obama missed a chance to try to explain this the day he told corporate executives, at least in theory: "You didn't do this."

By "this," he meant making their massive wealth all by themselves. He just left it there. He didn't explain that they, too, needed to remember that they relied on many seen and unseen people to establish their wealth and the prestige that came with it. That wouldn't have changed a lot of mindsets, to be sure, but someone needs to keep harping at that point: We need each other.

Because that's the basis for this unrest: That everyone is in a cutthroat world where winners are celebrated and losers are discarded--and there are infinitesimally far more of the latter than the former. Radical reactionaries who are convinced of this are first of all, those who have won; and secondly, want this thought process to be enforced on the rest of us. They're the ones who think Social Security and Medicare are the salutes to socialism that are ruining America--that, instead, all of us should work ourselves to the bone until we die useless deaths. Aw, shucks, you didn't quite make it. Farewell.

The young assassins are merely cutting off all the suffering that they can foresee, intercepting years of pain and pointless effort. A mere career isn't enough. Self-regard has already been extinguished. It's all way too much.

It engenders a deep-set desperation. If what I do doesn't matter, do I? If my life doesn't matter, neither does anyone else's. I'll join and cling to some radical nonsense group that at least gives me value, however negative, and adapt a belief that I'm better than someone just because of something no one else can change or help--skin color, or race. Since I don't feel good about myself, I'll join others who think the same.

But in the end, it's the loneliness, the sense of utter isolation, that gives one the impetus to slaughter out of that desperation. Without a recognition of common humanity, that pleasure and pain can and should be shared, life loses its meaning rather quickly. You can be in that rabbit hole only so long. You become dangerously afflicted. You have to shoot your way out.

Frankly, I'm surprised there haven't been more mass shootings. There are certainly enough guns. There are certainly enough targets. And there is certainly enough desperation out there.

Be well. Be careful. With some luck, I'll see you down the road.

Mister Mark