Deep DooDoo
Welcome to The Weekend Gene Pool, your main source of joyous optimism.
We have an interesting and horrifying situation. We are currently in control by, simultaneously, the worst president and the worst supreme court in American history. And Congress ain’t no polished gem either.
The cartoon above is about yesterday’s SCOTUS decision, decided as always on party lines, which essentially handcuffs judges and gives a president the right to do whatever the hell he wants without immediate judicial review. This is a free link to the NYT article about it.
Meanwhile, on the presidential tyrannical front, we have the president of the United States forcing the resignation of the president of a major university for daring to think. Uh, meaning in ways in which the president disapproves. And we have one of the worst photos I’ve seen in years, of the Capitol Police arresting this man, a paraplegic, on whom they have put zip-tie plastic handcuffs, for participating in a protest against cuts in Medicaid. Note the look of shame on the arresting officer’s face. He is, in the words of Eichmann, just following orders
Now I know what you are thinking. As a historian, you are thinking that I am overstating my case against SCOTUS. They cannot be the worst Supreme Court in history because of Roger Taney, whose court declared, in essence, that slavery was swell.
It’s a reasonable contention, but the thing is that other than that decision, which was obviously transcendently awful, Roger Taney, who looked like an elderly frog in a wig,
… was otherwise a good chief justice — ironically, it was he who correctly established the right of the courts to overrule presidential decisions. This current court has, collectively, done almost nothing good, beginning with Citizens United and progressing, in a fecal, leprous manner, to today.
So, today’s Gene Pool Gene Poll:
Good, then. Because this is The Weekend Gene Pool, I have to ask you a question in order to use your answers next week. But I don’t want to spread any more shitmist, which I hereby become the first person on Earth to contend it is one word despite Google dot-underlining it, so let’s make this one brief and trivial.
What is the silliest thing you have ever done? Be creative and funny.
And finally, I am going to beg for subscribers, as always, but using the soporific prescribed Substack language, which is, as you will see, why I never use it.
Good. See you next week.
Silliest looking thing I have ever done may be sitting in a canvas sling type chair at a cocktail party when holding a drink in one hand and a canape in the other while wearing a short dress, and landing on my rear end when the chair collapsed, with my legs hanging over the wood frame of the chair and holding both arms up so as not to spill or drop anything.
I was listening to NPR this morning on the 45-minute commute home from a 24-hour shift as an EMT in northeastern Vermont, and I started to feel, for perhaps the first time since this sh1tshow started that I can actually see on the horizon the dissolution of the democratic principles and set of shared beliefs that has basically kept this country together and fairly functional since probably the 1930s. I've been holding out hope that things would settle out at a level that was abysmal but acceptable and manageable until the pendulum swung back, whatever I thought *that* might look like. As of this morning, I'm not sure the pendulum is hanging from the same structure anymore. It might even be gone. We're in new territory.