Anything could happen. It already has.

What is three fifths of a person?  What does it mean for the values of a nation when the personhood of a corporate entity (Trustees of Dartmouth College v. Woodward , US Supreme Court 1818) is recognized before the personhood of black people, and then only up to 3/5ths of that black person (Missouri compromise, ratified 1820)?  

What does it mean when it takes constitutional amendments and a civil war to force acceptance of the full personhood of those defended from enslaved black African abductees?  The Dred Scott decision in 1857 in which Dred Scott and Harriet Robinson Scott sued for their freedom and lost at the Supreme Court, includes this language:  

A free negro of the African race, whose ancestors were brought to this country and sold as slaves, is not a "citizen" within the meaning of the Constitution of the United States.

The jurist who wrote the opinion bolstered his legal ruling using originalist reasoning:

When the Constitution was adopted, they were not regarded in any of the States as members of the community which constituted the State, and were nut numbered among its "people or citizen." Consequently, the special rights and immunities guarantied to citizens do not apply to them. And not being "citizens" within the meaning of the Constitution, they are not entitled to sue in that character in a court of the United States, and the Circuit Court has not jurisdiction in such a suit.

The only two clauses in the Constitution which point to this race, treat them as persons whom it was morally lawful to deal in as articles of property and to hold as slaves.

This case actually extinguished the minimal status afforded under the Missouri Compromise, status which merely resulted in greater representation for the white voting population of the effected territories.

Ultimately, the 13^th Amendment adopted in 1868 three years after the 4 year long Civil War resulted in the Scotts and their daughters escaping the status of enslaved persons, 22 years after the Scotts originally filed their suit in Missouri in 1846, although the Scotts were emancipated by a subsequent “owner” in 1857 and lived free from that time forward, apart from the not inconsiderable civil, commercial and personal consequences of being of African descent in the United States.

The Dred Scott decision is commonly held to be the worst case ever to come out of the United States Supreme Court. It’s craven logic was intended to put to rest the issue of enslavement in the country. Instead it stood as fodder for the incipient Civil War that followed four years later. 

It is interesting to consider that the Supreme Court has frequently sided with the worst of racism and bias in the US. Korematsu v. United States supported the forced internment citizens of Japanese descent and Japanese immigrants (never overturned) .  Plessy v. Ferguson advanced the separate but equal justification for segregation (overturned in Brown v Board of Education).  Forced sterilization of those perceived as intellectually disabled was endorsed in Buck v Bell, and presaged the popularity of eugenics in the United States and Nazi Germany (never explicitly overturned).

There are more examples of poorly reasoned Supreme Court cases throughout its history, some of which were overturned, some of which still stand. What is provocative about many of them is how the jurists stretched precedent, ignored it, or reached outside of the law altogether to justify a preferred result.  Bowers v Hardwick upholding an anti sodomy law was one such case, in which according to the dissent by Blackmun the majority opinion displayed an almost obsessive focus on homosexual activity. (overturned 17 years later in Lawrence v Texas).

Why am I thinking about these cases? Freud thought of nightmares as preparation for possible waking adversity. Maybe I am bracing for what may come out of the supreme court in for my remaining years.  Maybe taking comfort in what course corrections can occur.  

Although I imagine that followers of Roe v Wade and Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization; and Regents of California v Bakke and Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College and Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. University of North Carolina feel the same about those reversals as I do about the ones listed above. 

Anything could happen. It already has.

What are you doing tonight, Virgil Ortiz?

 I'm a little bit obsessed with a Cochiti Pueblo artist named Virgil Ortiz. There's a Vergil Ortiz out there too, but that's not my guy. He's a boxer. My guy spells his name differently, and he doesn't physically fight for a living.  My guy fights a battle using art.  His objectives are to illustrate and emphasize that his people are still present in modern times, not erased or subsumed in modernity, and also to preserve traditional Puebloan pottery techniques of shaping, ornamenting and processing clay.  Virgil is a sculptor, potter, film maker, photographer, textile designer and composer. He's written screenplays and  narratives for his many museum exhibitions. He has created masks, costumes, and weaponry. He works in clay, glass, plastic, metal, fabric and bytes of light.  He is a prolific creator and collaborator with other artists and artisans.

Virgil, a fervent science fiction fan, has created a world in which Cochiti Pueblo people from 2180 slip through time back to Cochiti Pueblo of 1680. In that year, in 1680, the Puebloan peoples united across many pueblos and with Navajo and Apache forces to expel the Spanish from their territories. It was a decisive and purgative revolt that returned those territories to the cultural, religious, military and political control of the original inhabitants.  

Virgil imagines an alliance through time of the 2180 and 1680 Puebloans both fighting to regain and secure their autonomy.  A character from his world named Tahu, the leader of a unit of blind archers most intrigues me. These women take part in Ortiz' reimagined 1680 Revolt, and ride the slipstream to 2180 to renew the battle in support of their descendants. 

So this early morning, call it tonight, I'm awake, holding my cat on my chest, listening to her purr, wheeze and ultimately fall asleep on my chest, and Ortiz floats up into my thoughts, as he does several times a year. He's like a classmate from long ago that I may wonder about from time to time, and times being what they are now, I go on-line to see what he's up to.  I land on a site for a Florida museum and learn he has had an exhibition there since October. It ends the day I fly into Fort Myers, Florida.  I begin to imagine changing my flight to one day earlier, landing 2.5 hours away from nowhere In a few weeks we will begin our winter vacation.  I want to spend hours immersed in his world, a world where colonialism has been beaten back, where the defeat weakens the colonial powers and they scurry back to their tiny European turfs, where they retract from their expansionist tendencies and humbly beg forgiveness of those in that hemisphere they have invaded and oppressed.  Fantasy.  

This is why we can't have nice things

 My poor mother.  Her kitchen knives doubled as tools for whatever mischief her husband and children would get into. I don't know how she turned out such feasts with paring knives taken from the kitchen to edge the flagstones, chefs' knives taken to slice wire and cardboard, cleavers used for attempts at taxidermy.  

She learned it was futile to object. Why she didn't hide a set, the nefarious and cabalistic way she would hide cookies and cakes, I'll never know. I just know that the first time I used new knives in my own kitchen, I could have wept for her.

I also deeply relate to her saving "good rags" for particular tasks, like washing windows and polishing silver. Otherwise, the tawdry scraps of our vain lives that had been promoted to useful cleaning rags would end up soaked with dried paint, motor oil or viscera.  

Wastepaper baskets were in every room in a mostly successful attempt to keep the creeping refuse at bay.  My brother's wives were once overheard exclaiming in wonder at how their husbands wanted a wastebasket in every room. If they eventually came around, I don't know, but we have multiple wastebaskets in our home. 

Furniture was victim to the rambunctious play of five young boys. Springs were sprung, fabric was ripped, and gouges appeared in exposed wood. Eventually, we adopted the bifurcated living space comprised of the pristine living room, and the family den where that modern hearth resided - the Motorola.  New furniture was purchased or reupholstered. Peace all around.

On the radio this morning, I heard a suite of short pieces by a composer who was inspired by the dream of world peace. I began skeptically thinking about the prospects for world peace. My mind went to the impoverished people toiling on landfills, mines and plantations, and to the collection of wealthy people who stood behind the recently inaugurated president of the USA.  The disparities between them, the wealthy and the poor are so incredibly vast that I wonder if at any point in human history there has been such a chasm in allocation of wealth and resources.  

The idea of world peace is alluring, but resources on this planet are finite, their distribution inconsistent with the needs of the human population, and the will to transition to alternative resources absent among those who could effect the change.  

On the other end of the continuum, is greed. Those who have more than enough resources, power and comfort wanting more.  The tension between the two appears to drive world conflict and deprivation.  I don't see a chance of that acquisitive part of human nature changing.  I don't see the conditions of the poor and those suffering from conflict improving.  The events of the past decades of industrialization, wars and exploitation cannot be remediated short of wiping the slate clean and starting over. Plague and infestation may do it for us, if history is any indication.

Or, maybe if the attention of the wealthy can be turned to the real needs of the poor, the balance could shift. If those rambunctious leaders playing with lives like toys, like sharp knives could stop for a moment and see us standing by, crestfallen, looking at the nice things in the world being spoiled, then maybe some shred of compassion and perspective may take them down another path.