Month: June 2023

JUNE, SOON GONE AGAIN

Summer, oh, summer. 2023

Another June is almost gone. Summer’s prelude, almost gone again. So fast. Florida, not New England. No special blooms here.

My June’s spent in the early times of this century at the conferences at Portsmouth Abbey — they were fine, blessed times, solitary times in which I was being the person I was meant to be, pursuing the kind of interests….spiritual….where, while wandering a beautiful campus at the edge of Narragansett Bay, I was called to contemplate the good, the true, the beautiful…where Our Lady was in her shrine before candles, where it was plain life was real, earnest, because to live is Christ, ( so they tell me) and I will reject and then again embrace that truth hour by hour as I approach the edge of the bay. The Great Bay. The temptations never relent, the sins, too, even as the opportunities to sin deminish. But there are always opportunities, pride being the temptation that never relents, and the greatest sin.

It rained often during those conferences, forcing us indoors. But it was a divine rain. Or so I chose to see a June rain.

If I leave you with one thing, my late mentor told me, it is –to pray!

Pray contantly. Never lose hope.

I will take to the road soon, planned trip, a month away. But still immersed in sin. July away. I’m always anxious, never totally happy.

Another late mentor told me always to remember the two most important questions: who am I, and what am I doing here?

I pray for the intercession of lost mentors, the fever of life long over for them. I pray they are happy and with God. (I am always teasingly tempted to think of death as ‘lights out’, oblivion, and therefore, all this human nonsense precisely that, absurd nonesense. All is permitted, if only we could shake off the ghosts of theological machinations being worked in our midst by hypocrits. And then I realize the constant unsatisfying groping after justice and love and peace by the very people who would earnestly tell us this is all an empty spectacle, sound and fury, signifying nothing. I heard the parents of a murder victim say the death penalty was too good for their son’s murderer. They plainly must conceive of divine justice beyond this life — and, therefore, a divinely just and good Judge. And a source, untapped, of consolation for their and remedy for their anger.)

I must embrace and enjoy what grace comes wrapped up — in the fever of life, and in my fellow mortals whom I must love endlessly as they love me, and love my enemies.
God is Perfect Love. Try getting your head around that. Don’t despair. Believe.

THAT RAINY DAY IS HERE….

German Catholic priest, philosopher and theologian Romano Guardini (1885-1968, born in Verona, Italy) wrote the following in the 1950s after the 20th Century’s dual cataclysms of world wars. It appears in his prescient 1955 short work called, The End of the Modern World (translator unknown):

Monstrosities of such conscious design do not emerge from the calculations of a few degenerate men or of small groups of men; they come from processes of agitation and poisoning which had been long at work. What we call moral standards – responsibility, honor, sensitivity of conscience – do not vanish from humanity at large if men have not already been long debilitated. These degradations could never have happened if its culture had been as supreme as the modern world thought.

Thus Guardini realized circa seventy years ago what he felt we all should realize: that the modern world is coming to an end.

He further believed that the non-God believer will cease to reap benefit from values and forces developed by the very Revelation he denies and that Loneliness in faith will be terrible. Love will disappear from the face of the public world, but the more precious will be that love which flows from one lonely person to another…

But, one what you might call ‘the bright side,’he believed the world to come will be filled with animosity and danger, but it will be a world open and clean.

I’m thinking Johnny Burke and Jimmy Van Heusen may have put it well when they put it another way — and put it to song:

Where is that worn out wish
That I threw aside
After it brought my love so near
Funny how love becomes
A cold rainy day
Funny
That rainy day is here

CATS ON A HOT TIN BEACH

Darkness in daylight.

Location: Treasure Island (I think)

Hello, Robert Louis Stevenson

The Chamber of Commerce probably came up with the name long ago during early Florida boom times — Treasure Island. After old R.L.S., of course. The Indians probably had a better name for it. No matter. It’s — The Beach. Every long, cluttered, hot mile of it. The Gulf Beach. Less of the Gulf. More of that hot, blacktopped abstraction called…The Beach.

I was waiting outside — Pirate’s Cove.

And the cove, if it really were a cove, would be lovely, pirate or no pirate. Trees, blue water, piers, cottages….mirror smooth water. But that is not this place. This is the unnatural realm of commerce and its chambers. Hot and blacktopped.

Let me invoke, in an interlude, the spirit of a departed, double-hearted, long-suffering ghost of our time who gave himself the name of a state, and always seemed in a state of alcoholic angst, God love him….

Tennessee Williams, in the Notes For The Designer at the beginning of the print version of his play Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, writes of wanting a light for his drama like the light in a faded photograph he’d seen of the varanda of Robert Louis Stevenson’s home on a Samoan island where he spent his last years. “There was a quality of tender light,” Williams wrote, “on weathered wood, such as porch furniture made of bamboo and wicker, exposed to the tropical sun and tropical rains.” The playwright speaks of “the grace and comfort of light, the reassurance it gives, on a late and fair afernoon in summer, the way that, no matter what, even dread of death is gently touched and soothed by it.”

Grace. Dispelling the dread of death.

The Sacrament of Sunlight, that visible sign of invisible grace. The playwright knew of grace, wanted his characters to experience it, knew they stumbled about in darkness despite the bright footlights. Wanted grace for himself, died, I fear, longing for it. I pray he has it.

Williams wrote that — when, early fifties? Light is light. Darkness, darkness. Always and forever.

But this was early summer, June 12, 2023. There was dread in the burning humid air alright. Dread of death and all its dark companions, stalking us like that faux pirate in the doorway of Pirate’s Cove. There was boredom. There was anxiety in boredom, touched with despair.

Diane had gone into Pirate’s Cove to see her friend the clerk. I was left sitting in an idling car with Cricket, the little dog sitting morosely in the back seat. Bored. Anxious. Angry. At one point, I got out and sat in the back seat with her, petting and comforting her; comforting myself, my inveterate, unbroken, unnameable, ungrateful discontent smeared, it seemed, all over me like a lotion. We were both bored.

Williams was looking for light for a play about “human extremities of emotion.” (I wonder why the Samoan light would be the light he was looking for, since it bestowed, as far as he was concerned, peace?)

The light of this moment, this Beach moment — sun beating down on motor oil-stained concrete and heaped up plastic and rubber inflatables in front of Pirate’s Cove–suited the extremes of tawdry human malaise and amorality. Of boredom.

The light fell on the blacktop clutter that is called Beach though any beach and all nature (waves, water, sand, blue, distance, breezes) was two hundred yards away, beyond more tar, touched with traffic fumes (thinner now, paradoxically in Florida, now that summer’s here) and steel and mortar cliffs of high-rise real estate. You can’t see the Gulf of Mexico or the blue water. There is that iconic Pirate outside the cluttered storefront windows of Pirate’s Cove. The pirate stands by the door as noted, made of something like apoxy no doubt, or maybe clay, a kitchy memorial to all lawless mauraders “exposed to the (sub)tropical sun and (sub)tropical rain…” Unmoving, unflinching. Fake.

On either side of the entrance and all around our pirate were stacked plastic or rubber inflatable sea turtles, plastic or rubber inflatable birds, rubber or plastic inflatable ducks, rubber inflatable rafts all stacked across the front of the store. The Pirate has (of course): a three-cornered hat, a parrot on his shoulder, a patch over his eye, etc. etc. I guess this is Long John Silver. He stares all day. Would Robert Louis Stevenson be pleased that in 2023 outside a cheesy beach shop and in miniature golf courses throughout the nation his fictive pirate is evoked in effigy? He’d be amused, I suspect.

Anyway. I just wanted to capture this. I’m not doing a very good job of it…and will do no better when I tell you about the girl and boy who came idly wandering up to the Pirate’s Cove …Tourists, probably — those eternal wanderers.

They were maybe in their twenties, maybe late teens, idling in the heat, licking ice cream cones they’d bought at the little emprioum next door. She had a bathing suit top that barely, just barely, cupped her lilly white breasts. There was a tattoo across her chest. She had dark hair, an unpretty face that frequently moved between smirks and frowns and giggles. They strolled, stood, licked, strolled. (How can I describe it? Why do I feel the need to? )She and the boy seemed to align with some dry, empty emotions overtaking me, along with anger at being left in a car that needed to be cooled by a running engine with a sad, bored-looking little dog in the back seat.

How did this day’s journey begin? As a diversion. That’s what life can be on a Sunday — a grand, hot diversion.

I had offered to go see a guy about donating our two gold fish to his Wet Pet Store that, upon arrival, was close and cleaned out and gone. I was sad to see this. The guy was an affable young Asian, knowledgeable and cheerful. Guess his tropical fish business failed — or moved. Whatever. And our gold fish will remain.

Also:

I’d offered to bring Diane to the little village of Gulfport for ice cream, but the ice cream shop was closed and the whole little village was pretty much hot and closed except for a somewhat busy open bar around the corner, and the old casino looked out on a little inlet and it was all hot and mostly empty and begged for the Hemingway in me to describe it like some Caribbean port, all as I’m describing the girl and boy now I encountered at our next and final Sunday destinaton, but I am failing. (Ernest, this needed you.)

Or it needs Kafka. Gulfport was like the silent little port where the long-dead Hunter Gracchus comes to shore. Where boys are sitting on the seawall, playing dice (or playing games on their Androids), and a man is sitting on the steps of a monument reading the newspaper (or scrolling through his iPhone). A girl is filling a bucket at the fountain…or, since there is no fountain at Gulfport, washing her sandy feet of at the beach shower nozzle.

Maybe you get the scene…

We went on wandering in my Subaru. Gracchus and his girl, I now just wishing to be here, quiet and cool in my room…and we wound up on either Treasure Island or St. Pete Beach looking for Diane’s ice cream — and found the open shop right next to Pirate’s Cove.

Back to the couple outside Pirate’s Cove…

She wore a skin-tight, dark, see-through pull-on gossimar covering to from ankle to waist –essentially a pair of pantyhose, studded, like as some hose are, with little decorations, that did not disguise her very brief thong underneath tucked in her rectum and her basically bare very large buttocks. The impression was of something ugly and unpleasant and of a soul unawares. The boy, by contrast, was dressed very conventionally — bermuda shorts, button-up, shortsleeve shirt. Don’t know if they were boy friend/ girlfriend. Doubt they were sister/brother. They stood and licked. They were both pale, as tourists often are, if not burned raw.

They worked the ice cream down, strolled back and forth in front of the shop, maybe waiting until they finished and then would go inside. They were among the colorful inflatables with their fake animal faces. Inside there would be bags of seashells, t-shirts, sweatshirts, bathing suits, postcards, costume jewelry, lotions.

So they were: the plain girl whose nakedness was barely concealed without evoking anything resembling the normal reaction of lust, the boy dressed in shorts and shirt, content, perhaps not to be alone and to have a companion, however she was clad, and an ice cream.

But some French word is needed to describe their…ennui? And mine. The English words would be — insousiance? Boredom.

Malaise. Yes. Malaise.

For me….Invisible, unreal, inflatable sunbright birds from a deceptively sunbright plastic ea of wretchedness –denatured and odious — seemed to have descend and roosted, filled with the air we craved, preying upon us, feeding on our souls and minds, even on my dog’s canine consciousness. Air conditioning didn’t help. Was it Henry Miller who wrote of the air conditioned nightmare?

And it was so hot. Almost indescribable. And humid. (And, come to think of it, I believe it was at that hour that a little titanium and fiber capsul was being crushed in the far depths of the Atlantic and five subaqueaous sightseers were vanising in darkness near the ruins of the greatest of sunken human aspirations and dreams of leisure, diversion, and travel, the HMS Titanic. )

Hear us, O Lord

And it was ice cold at that depth where they vanished like human bubbles. Cold and dark. And here on the beach, we were so cold, all of us, though it was hot. And I was so empty.

One good thing came of it: Diane had gone next door and gotten her ice cream. She had found it too sweet and too much. She gave it to me. I finished it.

Life after a the sweetes ice cream is still life.

This, outside the Pirate’s Cove, was Still Life. Tennessee Williams, I hope you have found that sunlit veranda and that you and Robert Louis are together and with God.

We are still here in this Still Life with rubber inflatables. Toys and capsuls and promises of diversion all around us.

And the fake pirate, as he has done for hours and days and years, stares with his one good but no less blind eye.

MUST A BRILIANT,BEAUTIFUL VIRTUOSO INSIST ON BEING EYE CANDY WHILE SERVING US FOOD FOR EAR AND SOUL?

Yuga Wang is a brilliant young pianist and artist, also a beautiful Asian woman. Why does she insist on taking to the concert stage dressed, very often, skimpily and thus distractingly and in ways that draw as much attention to her dresses as to her most flawlessly executed playing of the world’s most beautiful music? (How much do I feel like a puritanical, hopelessly square nudnick for even asking the question? And at this stage, I acknowledge that experienced music-lovers and concert-goers are probably quite inured to –and dismissive of –Yuga’s wardrobe and might even rush for tickets to see just how sexily and colorfully clad Yuga will emerge from back stage on her way to the piano bench, then forget all about it as she crashes down on the first chords of Beethovan.)

She has lovely legs, which I appreciate. Her short, revealing dresses often let us see a good deal of them well up on the thigh. But I, for one, want nothing to distract me from the appreciation of the beautiful music. Okay, the average cabaret chanteuse might be dressed provocatively while singing Cole Porter. And what female rock star doesn’t give us pounds of fleshly eye candy? But…can’t there be a sedate,”classical” distinction made for the concert hall?

Who cares anymore?I shouldn’t, I suppose. Perhaps it’s that I’m chagrined see the norms-smashing spirit of the age invading one of the last sanctuaries of classical culture, i.e., that same concert hall.

And in an age in which we all vye for attention and boldly shout our body image and in which people asking questions such as I just asked are shamed for “body shaming,” I guess I’d better take the hint and go back into my 17th Century cloister.

And who of us, male or female, is fortunate enough to know we could fall back on being a model if the piano thing doesn’t work out?

And I guess this is the Age of Marketing. Talent isn’t enough. You need to Stand Out.

Our age might also come to be known as an age of E.I. (Expressive Individualism) and (SEPS) Sartorially Excentric Public Statements , and most especially, TSOEIOFOA (The Sexualization Of Everything In One Form Or Another).

I don’t question Yuga’s artistry. I’m no prude, puritan or saint but rather see sanctity in the work –or artistry –of modest people (in every dictionary definition of that word) who go about their diurnal tasks conscientiously , calling attention, not to themselves, but to that artistry or other products — abstract or concrete — of their hands, be it an exquisitely well-made cake or a brilliantly played concerto.

If it’s not a ballet, opera or broadway show, why is a “costume” required?

But maybe I’m risking being cast into the outer darkness with all the other cultural rubes and cranks by failing to note the eternal tendency of artists to shatter norms. Perhaps the stodgy atmospherics of high culture were doomed to be dispersed by gusts of supposedly fresh air.

Maybe the banner over Yuga’s Steinway should read, T.E. (That’s Entertainment).

The banner over all our lives should read V.V.A.T.A.V(“Vanity, vanity, all things are vanity.”)

And let’s not forgot the words of the poet (T.S. Eliot, being that poet who never lived to see his Cats in costume under the bright lights): “With pungent sauces multiply variety/ In a wilderness of mirrors.”

Yuga herself just says with a thoroughly ingenuous shrug that she simply likes to wear certain kinds of stuff. She actually seems oblivious to the norm-shattering. And while they can mandate dress code at places like a golf course, who ever said venues of public performance should impose such a code? I guess someday someone will go out there naked. Expressive Individualism probably knows no limits. So be it — I guess.

And I guess I should go see what further things Yuga herself has had to say about those signature non-musical elements of performance and about her insistence on making bold fashion statements.

This is from her after a September, 2018 performance in Houston when asked about her choice of outfit:

“I don’t have anything to say, really. I like looking good. I love heels. I love a concert dress that matches the piece I’m playing.” ( I wish I knew what piece she was playing and how she dressed for it). “I thought in Houston,” she went on,” I just wanted to be sparkly.”

I bet Houston, hub of oil and aerospace, has never been more sparkly.

When she played the Hollywood Bowl in 2012, she said,

“I can wear long and black too. I like being versatile … I wanted to do the shock value.”

Ah, so she does like having shock value in her repertoire. (Did I seriously doubt it?) As she ages, her legs might begin to lose the taut shapely tone that she now believes compliments her Steinway’s tone but is far more likely to excite the likes of ZZTop who do a whole song about legs.

She was a prodigy and I’m told there’s video of her at the piano at age seven in pigtails and a sweet little white dress.

Ah! Perhaps that’s the purity for which I long.

Shock us with radical innocence, Yuga. Wrap yourself in flowing whiteness and modesty and let us concentrate on Mozart, not your yams.

REMEMBERING JUNE 9, 1953

First, the prelude: 

On June 7, 1953, an area of high pressure formed over most of the United States. This high-pressure air mass collided with a low-pressure mass that was centered over Nebraska, which created favorable conditions for severe thunderstorm development.

That from a historical meteorological account for that day found on-line.

No one in New England, not even meterologists, necessarily saw this far-off weather development as a threat to their region. But soon, the same historical account tells us knowledgeable people saw those meterological developments favorable to formation of a tornado. In Nebraska, that would not be unusual, especially in the summer.

But weather-watchers in Michigan might not have seen much to immediately fear in the forecast. The risk of tornadoes in Michigan is seen as minimal — not nearlyi so vulnerable as the prarie and the plains. But out of that weather system came a catergorized F5 tornado, the most severe, that slammed into Flint, Michigan the following day, June 8. It killed 116 and injured 844. It was the last tornado to date to end in more than 100 fatalities. It w as the worst natural disaster in 20th Century Michigan history. A total of eight tornadoes were reported in Michigan that day, the one in Flint being only the most deadlyi and devastating. There were other scattered tornadoes that day throughout Ohio as well.

I don’t know how much people in Massachusetts were paying attention to that disastrous weather news.

There was 90 degree weather in Worcester on June 7, 1953, then on June 8, the temperature dropped to 74 degrees. A warm air mass from the south moved up….The Flint, Michigan weather system was limping, apparently far from exhausted.

This whole combined weather system had severe characteristics known even to forecaster in 1953 to be dangerous. They lacked the kind of warning system we have today. But we now know that state meteorologists and other climate experts had put their heads together and considered issuing a a tornado warning. Apparently the decision was made not to overly alarm the public. After all, tornadoes in New England were extremely rare — sort of on the order of earthquakes.

It is 4:37 p.m., June 9, 2023. It’s estimated that at 4:25 p.m., seventy years ago from this very hour, winds began to swirl violently in an open field in Petersham, Mass out west of Worcester. They dug and left behind a visible trench. Those winds quickly comined into a giant roaring twister and began a deadly, destructive march through the towns of Barre and Holden, into Worcester, Shrewsbury, Southboro, Westboro. The cloud may have split apart at that point, one portion dipping south, but the remnant that continued east made it to the Fayville section of Framingham where air raid sirens were sounding and two people were killed in a post office along Route 9.

Then it was over. There had been light-bulb-sized hail, powerful winds, and now there was a trail of ruins.

In all 94 people were killed in the whole terrifying 84 minute episode.

I just recall, at age 6, being at the front door of my house many miles away in Boston’s Dorchester neighorhood as my brother Bill got out of a car, arriving home from his high school graduation outing. He was just feet away, the skies overhead were overcast and unstable and there was an ominous silence. The split second Bill briefly disappeared from view behind the thick trunk of a catalpa tree by our five-foot walkway, I was startled by something I was experiencing for the first time in my life — a crash of thunder unpreceded by any rumbling warning. Just –Bang!! Terrifyingly loud and close. Bill emerged from behind the tree having ducked slightly. My mother had reacted to the thunder with a little scream…

Then came the radio reports… Worcester, the city where my mother had lived and attended high school, had been struck by, of all things, tornado.

There are still people alive who remember. They’d have been children, like me, or teenagers, and be very old. I’ve spoken with many of them in many states, including North Carolina and Florida. They remember the destrucition. Like my memory of the mere turbulance at the far edge of the system, they could never forget the terror or the sudden altaration of their lives and the long aftermath. It swamped their memories as no violent weather event, thank God, has ever engulfed me.

It happened today. I’m remembering the dead. I’m always watching the skies.

PAT ROBERTSON DIES…AND THE PUNDITS GO ON ENDLESSLY PUZZLING OVER HIS LEGACY

The two italicized paragraphs below were written twenty-two years ago after Pat Robertson stepped down as chairman (yeah, sorry: chair man) of the political/evangelical empire he’d founded. Michael Lind, commenting in the New York Times wrote, at that time, the following sourly begrudging commentary about Robertson’s phenomenal political influence over the American Republican Party. This is merely an excerpt: two paragraphs that come near the end. I believe they capture the spirit of Lind’s remarks. I don’t deny his broad claim that Robertson had an outsized and lingering influence over the G.O.P., but take sharp exception to the notion that “hot button” cultural/moral/ scientific issues enumerated in the first line of the first paragraph would not have enjoyed an urgent life of their own even in the secularized universe of American politics — even had Robertson never entered the political arena.

Abortion and homosexuality in particular are defining civilizational (not merely Republican) issues, and our civilization will go on struggling with them and all their multifarous manfestations for the century to come. Robertson and the Religious Right did something of a disservice to cultural conservatives for making them seem solely fundamentalist religious issues, and therefore easily dismissed.

(I interviewed Pat Robertson during the 1988 Presidential Primary season. I recall being greeted by his pleasant traveling handlers in the middle of one of Boston’s Logan International terminals and being told Pat — who was either coming or going or just on a layover in Boston — had just escaped briefly to the men’s room (guess he was ‘going’). He soon came smiling across the bright, broad ticketing area toward us. Can’t recall what I asked him — the usual, no doubt. (Think you can win?) Then I recall arriving to cover the Iowa Caucuses and entering the Hyatt well out into the cold, rolling yellow hills around DesMoines and seeing him — smiling, as usual- making his way across the lobby surrounded by a gaggle of reporters and cameras.

Now, Mr. Lind, wherever he is, has the floor. He wrote:

The obsessions of Christian fundamentalists, like abortion, homosexuality, pornography and evolution, still define today’s Robertsonized Right. And conservative intellectual journals like Commentary, National Review and The Weekly Standard now join Kansas and Tennessee fundamentalists in attacking Darwinian biology….

Pat Robertson enjoyed a remarkable winning streak, despite playing an extremely weak hand. By exploiting the ambition, fear and ignorance of America’s out-of-touch political class, this spokesman for a marginal subculture reshaped American politics and became a kingmaker in one of the two major parties.

—Michael Lind, New York Times, December, 2001, linked to Roberto’n’s NYT obituary of June 8, 2023.

Ambition, fear and ignorance? Well, sounds like Lind, the modern “mainstream” print and broadcast media and the leadership of the modern American Democratic Party might have been looking in the mirror as they diagnosed Robertson, et al., while being unawares of enumerating their own sui generis obsessions.

R.I.P. Pat Robertson (Oh, you should see the commentary thread of the Times! Thirty clay jugs could not contain the gallons the vitriol.)

MY NAME IS CHANCE

So begins a glossy little note inside the latest mailing for someone named Charles Harrison who must have lived at this address once upon a time. He apparently gave money to many causes (as I’ve noted before, though in the past, choosing not to give his name, and now thinking, ‘what harm could it do?’ Perhaps someday he’ll stumble on my blog and see that I’ve been receiving mail for him, all of it solicitations from charities far and wide. This one is from Navajo Nation, of which Chance is a member.

What a great name! Who of us, from time to time, doesn’t feel like our name is Chance?

Chance is a recent college graduate with a degree in Kinesiologya and is an apsiring Doctor of Physiotherapy and a first generation college student. There’s nice color picture of him, smiling, with a beautiful Navajo blanket slung over his shoulder. He looks like a great person.

The appeal is from the American Indian College Fund.

Maybe I should send them a few bucks.

But if I responded and contributed to every solicitation received in absentia (or, sadly maybe even posthumously) by Charles Harrison, I’d go broke.

So be it. Congratulations, Chance. Peace to you, Charles Harrison, wherever you are. I may only be able to stand in for you with prayers – for you and Chance, whose appeal I received — by chance.

PREACHING TO THE CONVERTED

In his volume called Tremendous Trifles, G.K. Chesterton writes, “I believe in preaching to the converted; for I have generally found that the converted do not understand their own religion. Thus I have always urged in this paper (the publication for which Chesterson was writing) that democracy has a deeper meaning than democrats understand; that is, that common and popular things, proverbs and ordinary saying always have something in them unrealised by most who repeat them.

That Trifle will have to be continu ed until I have a Tremendous amount of time….

RUINING THE SUPREME COURT

The Left has been used to getting what it wanted by judicial fiat. That no longer happens for them. So, they’ve decided to ruin the Supreme Court — and, by extension, our whole judicial system — by trying to scuttle it, pack it, or somehow make it a rubber stamp for their political objectives.

Writing in the Wall Street Journal last year, democratic-socialist historian David J. Garrow candidly and, I think, admirably observed that “you don’t have to be a Federalist Society member to see that the analytical prowess today’s justices demonstrate in opinion after opinion far eclipses the quality of the Warren or Burger Courts’ work product.”

Yes! Now you have justices who are actually engaged in analysis.

The majority of the current high court justices can be defined as originalists. An originalist reading of the Constitution has its drawbacks and limitations. The same approach taken by different judges can deliver conflicting results. There is not always a clear analogy between the legal challenges and cases of one era and those of another as one weighs precedent. But analyses undertaken according to the scientific method have the same limitations. The Left will tell you that that’s cold-hearted and fails to take “people” and their varied circumstances into account. Right!

But you can only go so far in taking individual grievances and circumstances into account in shaping law suitable for an entire nation. There have to be principles and standards and tests involved. An individual’s grievances belong before a state court or a legislature. State legislatures, under our Constitition, have a right to establish their own standards, if not their own radically different principles, and state courts can ratify them. The Supreme Court gets to referee questions of principle, but states continue to have considerable legal and political latitude. The Dobbs decision has underscored that symbiosis (speaking of science and the the scientific method) in the case of abortion.

Charles C.W. Cooke’s analysis of the Left’s legal program in the current National Review — I admit — prompted this essay and borrows heavily from his urgent and critical analysis. This is simply because I agree with his reasoning and because Cooke’s conclusions bears out what I’ve been saying for years, especially during the era the court was hamstrung by Roe v. Wade. I had said repeatedly that the liberal justices were obviously being required to retool and repurpose that decision in an effort to get it to work for the political sector and, in turn, the general public. It was a case of fashioning and re-framing or simply substituting “princples” in order to achieve a forordained desired result. The Dobbs decision pierced that balloon.

The Left and its legal apologists have been scrambling in terror ever since. They have watched their brand of jurisprudence and “critical studies” analysis go crashing to the ground — like that aforementioned deflating and tumbling balloon.

Cooke concludes that Left/Progressive legal activists no longer have anything to offer. Their creative approach to the text of the Constitution has been exposed as being without basis other than the ever-fluctuating whims of a political/judicial establishment that has been making it up as they went along.

I have a friend who is a fine and reputable legal scholar and law school professor. Some years ago he was challenged by a student who described the U.S. Constitution as a contract, suggesting that that student viewed our foundational document as containing fixed rules subject only to strictly and narrow interpretation or amendment. My professor friend’s retort was, “I didn’t sign it (i.e., the contract or social covanant that is the U.S. Constitution.)

No, he didn’t sign it. Neither did I. That’s why, in agreeing to be bound by it, we have far less leeway than we might imagine. For that kind of leeway, one needs, once again, to go to the legislature. That’s where Constitutional amendments are born.

Of course, should the Left’s political program ever fully succeed, we will be a very different nation. I submit that for such a nation, one no longer needs a high court, or, for that matter, ANY court. We would have a dictatorship of the masses.

God save the Court!