Total Forfeiture of Shares
Biden and the Supreme Court, "Alien", weed cuisine, and more
I, the Supreme
Here is a story from ancient history:
At the 1984 Democratic National Convention in San Francisco – probably the last one where the Democrats still held on to the idea of being an opposition party to the Republicans – Governor Mario Cuomo gave an electrifying keynote speech. (At one point, Cuomo was considered a liberal firebrand.) Among many other noteworthy things about the address, it featured him denouncing the political appointment of do-nothing political timeservers like that of one Anne McGill Gorsuch to head the Environmental Protection Agency. Gorsuch proved to be a disaster, presiding, as did many members of the cabinet of Ronald Reagan, over massive corruption and deregulation and handing corporate polluters a license to spill. Cuomo immediately went on to ask his audience to consider that, if Gorsuch was the kind of person Reagan considered well-suited to head the EPA, who he might then think qualified to sit on the Supreme Court; he warned viewers to contemplate a court fashioned by “the man that believes that the laws against discrimination against people goes too far, a man who threatens Social Security and Medicaid” and pointed out that Reagan believed in “having government mandate people’s religion and morality”. (At one point, legislating morality was felt to be the purview of Republicans, not Democrats.). This was a big deal at the time, because the Democratic Party was usually too skittish to bring up the Supreme Court as something in the realm of partisan politics.
Two years later, Joe Biden would vote to confirm the reactionary ‘originalist’ Antonin Scalia to the Supreme Court seat vacated by the almost-as-odious William Rehnquist. Two years after that, Biden had a brain aneurysm following his humiliating withdrawal from the 1988 presidential race after copious evidence surfaced of his wholesale plagiarism of other politicians’ speeches and tendency to tell lots of self-aggrandizing falsehoods, so he wasn’t around to vote for or against Reagan’s final Supreme Court nominee, Anthony Kennedy. Three years after that, Biden – at the time merely a corporate-friendly senator from Delaware, not yet vice-president to America’s first black commander-in-chief, and not yet the ‘most progressive president in history’ – voted against the confirmation of sexual harasser/Scalia ventriloquist dummy Clarence Thomas, but his frankly craven handling of Thomas’ hearings, in which his accuser, Anita Hill, was dragged over the coals for days, did nothing to impede Thomas’ ascension to the highest court in the land.
From that point forward, Biden would vote along party lines when it came to Supreme Court nominees. However, when the monstrous Scalia died, Biden found no reason not to call him a “mentor”, a “good friend”, “effective”, and “one of our most influential justices” because of his “deep respect for…our democracy”, while also insisting that he regretted voting for the man. Scalia’s death would set the stage for a judicial showdown for the next nominee; the Republicans – citing a 1992 speech in which a procedural ‘rule’ was invented out of whole cloth in order to deny the Bush administration an election-year SCOTUS nomination – mounted an offensive against then-President Barack Obama’s proposed replacement, Merrick Garland. In a reaction typical of the drift that has characterized the Democratic Party for the last forty years or so, Obama was too cowed to push through the nomination and made what turned out to be a bad bet that his party would win the White House in 2016 and confirm Garland anyway. The speech the Republicans used as justification for this nonsensical objection had been made by Obama’s sitting vice-president, one Joseph Robinette Biden Jr.; the man who President Donald Trump would name to replace Scalia was Neil Gorsuch, the son of Anne McGill Gorsuch. While Biden was out of government by the time Gorsuch’s ascension to the court was voted on, he had found the man unobjectionable enough to confirm for a circuit court judgeship in 2006 without comment.
The days when the Democrats were too wimpy to push the Supreme Court as an ideological battleground under the absurd pretense that it is a non-ideological entity are long gone; nowadays, it’s routinely forwarded as one of the primary reasons that we simply have to vote for the Democrat, even if it’s someone as conservative and inert as Joe Biden. If we don’t rubber-stamp whatever tame corporate Democrat falls ass-backward into the presidential nomination, then the Republican will win, thus ensuring between one and nine free bench positions for what we are assured are basically judicial Visigoths who will immediately strip every American of their civil rights in a D.C. microsecond. Of course, nobody really likes the Supreme Court, placing as it does an ungainly amount of power in the hands of a nonet of decaying senior citizens and pinning the entire hopes for a just future on who happens to be in office when their entry in the Supreme Court dead pool pays off. It is a shameful relic of the past, we are told, just like the electoral college and gerrymandering, two other irregularities of American democracy that the Democrats profess to hate but never seem to do anything about when they’re in power because then they work to their advantage.
And so it is that here, in the fourth year of the Trump Administration, with a conservative majority on the SCOTUS thanks just as much to the Democrats’ inaction and cowardice as the Republicans’ ideological intransigence, Joe Biden finds himself the Democratic nominee for president, and if we find anything to object to about him (his likely status as a perpetrator of sexual assault, say, or his history of obvious and repeated lies, his dismal voting record, his unflagging support of the financial and insurance industries, his love of cops, his horrendous foreign policy positions, his utter lack of personal magnetism, his opposition to entire slates of progressive legislation, his Reaganesque willingness to put Social Security and Medicare on the chopping block in quixotic pursuit of a balanced budget), then we are told that, if for no other reason, we’d best like it or lump it, because of the Supreme Court.
Never mind the fact that court doesn’t often rule predictably, as this last week’s votes demonstrated, and that if it wanted to rework the essentials of American civil rights, it has had four years but a curious lack of will to do so. Never mind Biden’s own record of voting on members of the court, or his complicity in caving in to the G.O.P. over the Garland nomination, or of the history of his rhetoric as contrasted to the history of his actions, especially in light of his hazy relationship with the truth. It is simply a matter of faith now that the Democrats will do good things with the SCOTUS and Republicans will do bad ones, and this is to be believed despite the evidence of our lying eyes. We are mocked and scorned for suggesting the two parties are awfully similar in their class constitution and general sympathies, and we are assured instead that the Democrats are literally the opposite of the Republicans and, by extension, will govern in the exact opposite way the Republicans would. To bother checking this claim against the facts is the act of a faithless person who does not deserve the benign protection of the rule of law.
Ash in His Mouth
The recent death of the superlative British actor Ian Holm at age 88, after a career that saw him play Frodo Baggins on a BBC radio production of Lord of the Rings in 1981 and Bilbo Baggins in Peter Jackson’s film trilogy of the same books thirty years later, put me in mind once again to the critical consensus over the Alien franchise. Holm memorably played Ash, the implacable science officer of the mining vessel Nostromo, in the first film of the series in 1979. It would be a role he would not repeat for reasons it would spoil a 40-year-old movie to explain, though the nature of the character made it possible for him to do so. Instead, he went on to become a reliably entertaining and always engaging actor both in prestige cinema and popcorn blockbusters.
It is in those two contexts that discussion of the Alien franchise must take place. While its origins lie in Dark Star, a truly bizarre and surreal student film directed by John Carpenter and penned by Alien screenwriter Dan O’Bannon, it transcended its conception, its genre, and its production to become one of the greatest films of all time. While I don’t hold the rest of the series – which had highs and lows in every installment – in any kind of contempt, none of them can truly stand alongside their common ancestor at head height. This cannot be credited merely to over-commercialization or franchise drift, nor can it easily be assigned to a lack of talent or continuity, as excellent actors and directors are in plentiful supply in the eight films that make up the franchise, let alone the innumerable tie-in novels, plays, video and tabletop games, and comic books.
But the drift can be accounted for rather simply. Alien is, essentially, a perfect film, a clockwork machine that generated wonder and fright in perfect balance; it is small and tight and curled up like a peripheral set of jaws, waiting to draw in the unsuspecting for a savage bite. No other installment kept its story so focused and yet so perfectly realized; no other spin-off product so well captured the terrifying mélange of hard science fiction and body horror, of class-conscious realism and workplace drama, of myth-deep space adventure with prosaic but powerful thriller elements. James Cameron, as he did with his own Terminator franchise, took the series in a direction that allowed it to go bigger – with more world-building, more characters, more aliens, more victims, more dialogue, more backstory, more effects, more everything – in the manner that has become so familiar in the blockbuster franchise era. But bigger isn’t always better; in the case of the Alien franchise, it didn’t so much suffer from drift as it did sprawl. It got wider, but not really deeper, and it gave up the laser-like concentration that made every second of the original seem so intense and clear. Alien felt lived-in. Sprawls may be nice places to visit, but you wouldn’t want to live there.
Elevated Standards
Given my affinities for cannabis, fine dining, preparing meals, and cooking shows (not to mention wasting my time on frivolity), you would think I would positively hypnotized by the sudden explosion of weed haute cuisine, as reflected in a growingly awkward number of cookbooks, TV reality shows, and pop-up dining experience in states such as mine where recreational marijuana has been legalized. But my house has many mansions, and if you opened the door to one of them in hopes of finding me inside, fat and happy and baked and happily tuned in to Cooked with Cannabis or some similar Netflix junk, you’d be as disappointed as I used to be back when you had to buy shitty ditchweed from rando dealers.
First of all, I suspect a lot of these people are fronting. Cannabis cuisine is more like baking than cooking, which is to say that it’s more of an art than a science; too much weed and the food tastes bad, and too little and it doesn’t get you high. And because fine dining is so much about propriety, and presentation, and following a set of what are essentially class rituals, no one’s going to jeopardize that by getting too zooted, either during the preparation phase (while many chefs famously indulge, no one in a competition show is going to risk losing because they got too high and fucked up something simple) or the consumption phase, which seems to lend itself better to making corny puns than actually getting fucked up.
Which leads me to my greatest objection. When you’re stoned – and I mean really stoned, not the kind of one-hit bullshit that’s no different than grabbing a beer – haute cuisine is the last thing you want, whether you’re preparing or consuming. Nobody who’s high enough to deserve to be called high wants to fuck around preparing some elaborate, multi-ingredient fare that takes hours to prepare and serve; and likewise, nobody who’s genuinely ripped wants to fuck around with waiting to eat such a dish. There’s a reason that dispensaries sell edibles in simple, easy-to-eat forms like chocolates, candies, and cookies; there’s a reason that if you make edibles at home, you stick with simple stuff like brownies or honey sticks; and there’s a reason that it’s chips, cookies, ice cream, and White Castle are the go-to snacks of stoners, not hot pot or chicken muamba. When you’re really flying, you want food that is intensely tasty, but also extremely easy: fast, cheap, and easily acquired with a minimum of preparation, acquisition, and chit-chat. Save the fine dining stuff for the drunks, who can sit patiently with cocktails waiting for a meal whose raison d’etre is the food itself and not being a frilly delivery vector for additional intoxicants; leave my people, the stoners, to raid the 7-Elevens as God intended.
This Week in the Eschaton
Links for today are about books, and what they have to say to us, more or less, as our knowledge of history and understanding of culture slowly circle the drain of eternity: Neglected Books discusses Jean Dutuord’s unique, bizarre, and nearly forgotten novel The Horrors of Love; the Public Domain Review presents a 1909 treatise purporting to teach homemakers “400 ways to make a sandwich”; the L.A. Review of Books discusses Tom Lutz’s sly anticapitalist satire Born Slippy; my pal Costa Koutsoutis at The Means At Hand talks about the responsibility of crime fiction to meet the present (and past) realities of police brutality and misconduct; and the indispensable Westlake Review talks about The Man with the Getaway Face, the second novel featuring my all-time favorite fictional character, the brutally efficient master thief Parker.