Those Who Rule Us

They are really foul creatures.

I've long maintained that Trump and his cabal of gangsters, thieves, white supremacists, and "disruptors" are representative of their class; they are not the highest of the mighty -- far from it -- but they ape them, admire them, want to be like them, and they have been able to seize many of the mechanisms of the government the High and the Mighty control, without more than token resistance from within.

Trump may be a gold-plated con man, but so are many of those of his status and  so are many of those above him.

It is an identity thing with those people.

They thrive on making life miserable for others, looting them, plundering their pelf, tricking them. It's a con, you see. In many ways, it always has been.

It's all well and good to say, "We are many; they are few," a truism if there ever was one. But damb, it's useless without employing the strength of those numbers. We don't do that; we can't, not yet.

Our rulers -- including the Trump cabal -- ensure we cannot unite in strength against their depredations. They are highly, highly skilled at the principle of Divide and Rule. Keeping us at one another's throats over some damb thing or other is a game to them, and we're seeing how effective social media is in maintaining those divisions. The Twitterverse and the rest of the media are ever-useful manipulators of public attention and opinion. Decoupling from it hasn't happened and likely won't.

Not in my (shortened) lifetime, anyway.

Those who rule us are monstrous. Some may once have had the inkling of a social conscience, but none do now. Some of their absence of conscience may have to do with the fact that they understand the consequences of global warming, and they have prepared to protect themselves, not us.

There you have it.

This One I'll Not Mourn

Scalia, he dead, dead, dead.

The damage that this man was allowed to do and did to the Republic cannot be over estimated. He was dead-set on extirpating and destroying the very idea  of "progress" as a function of governance a legitimate interest of government. Turning back the clock wasn't enough. He wanted to smash the clock itself.

The man was a monster, truly one of the most uncompromising and unblessed the Court has ever hosted -- and there have been many of his ilk over the centuries. Scalia took uncompromisingly destructive ideology and legal theories much further, however, in his overwhelming need and desire to end this experiment in constitutional self government once and for all.

He was not a constitutionalist. He was a theocratic monarchist. He played with the deeply flawed constitution under which we are supposedly governed, mocking it, mocking its provisions and rendering his decisions in the most harmful manner he could come up with.

Some legal scholars lionized him for it. They called him brilliant. No one of high rank on the bench had approached the questions of law the way he did.

A case can be made that by speaking, writing and ruling the way he did, he highlighted the many and often gross flaws in the constitution and left the door open for revision and amendment, but the man basically did not believe in the merit of constitutional self-government in the first place. So ultimately, any attempt to correct the flaw he so maliciously exploited would have been futile in his mind because the premise of the undertaking was in fundamental error at the outset. There was no way to "correct" it.

He's dead now, and there is a sense of foreboding and as well as relief. He can no longer directly influence the Court -- over which he appears to have had an outsized influence for decades, most appallingly in the case of the Court's lawless interference in Bush v Gore. The struggle to replace him is already turning into a constitutional crisis, however, one that may not be resolved short of coup.

I don't mourn Scalia's passing but I'm not looking forward to the next few months without his malevolent presence on the Court, either.