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