Baby Face Nelson

When will the Supreme Court rule on whether showing pictures of infants constitutes free speech? And when will they rule that “sounds like a plan,” “we’re on the same page,” don’t fall under Oliver Wendell Holmes ruling in  Schenck about “falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic?" “Don’t litter, “ “No Expectorating.” Well, “thank you for sharing, but keep ‘em to yourself.” They're all nauseatingly the same and a reminder that birth and death however joyous and mysterious have something in common with ingestion and regurgitation. What comes in must come out and little agglomerations of cells all neatly spiked with DNA are the result in many cases of sexual congress. What’s the big deal? What’s worse is that the baby picture producers are spiking your computer with malware which allows other baby photo makers to ply you with mountains of monotonous looking cherubs who could turn into tomorrow’s Hitlers or Gaddafis. And what about original sin? The next time you hear some epigone ranting at the UN remember that he was once an adorable little child whose parents and grandparents probably carried pictures of him in their wallets. We shall bury you with baby pictures is what a whole new generation of baby boomer grandparents are saying. Not yet, nyet!

Employees of Southwestern Reserve vs. Estate of Pier Paolo Pasolini

The Supreme Court has agreed to review the case of male and female employees of the Southwestern Reserve Bank who claim their civil rights were being violated when they were forced to attend meetings with the bank’s president who was a Pasolini fan. In briefs filed with the court (“Southwestern Reserve Employees vs Estate of Pier Paolo Pasolini”) the class action suit alleges that for almost a decade the bank president  regularly played films like Salo on his laptop while meetings with his subordinates were in progress.  Salo, a particularly graphic film, based on de Sade’s  l20 Days of Sodom, takes places in a concentration camp where coprophilia is freely practiced. The president, Jim Baker, who now occupies a mostly figurehead position as chairman of the board, is still a Pasolini enthusiast though he no longer empowered to ask employees to attend meetings in his office while he is screening the Pasolini films. Though involving seemingly simple first amendment issues, the case, according to experts is mired in complex legal questions—in part due to a fine point in the law where the estate of the deceased film director rather than the bank president is named as the respondent in the action. One film critic was quoted in a friend of the court brief as saying “these employees were forced to watch people eating poo.” There had been several previous rulings on matters which could impact the Supreme Court’s decision in the Pasolini case. In Gander vs. State of Connecticut, the court ruled in favor of the plaintive, a convent which argued that the presence of a sewage disposal plant made it impossible for the nuns to mediate and perform their offices. In Shapiro vs. Cleveland, the court ruled in favor of the municipality saying that a sinkhole in the middle of a public park was not necessarily a danger to bicyclists if a warning sign had been temporarily removed. The details of the latter case would not appeal to those readers with weak stomachs.

Consciousness is Destiny

Freud said “anatomy is destiny”, but one wonders if consciousness hasn’t become the rogue player making  personality into a more labile affair. How can one talk about sexual identity without cracking a smile? Flaubert said “Madame Bovary,  c’est moi.” Aren’t we increasingly becoming our own creators. Is self invention our most viral secular heresy? Can for example a middle aged married supposedly “heterosexual male” have the sensibility of a woman who loves other women? Or more bluntly have you  ever looked at the person you are making love to and wondered what they are? Some marriage counselors have pointed out that we all marry our same sex parent. Therefore a woman making love with her husband is really making love to another woman. Our woman in question has simply married a man who reminds her of her mother. Objection! you will cry. The man has an appendage called a penis which the mother, unless she had reconstructive surgery following her pregnancy, did not. But isn’t too much being made of the penis in an age when sex change operations have become so sophisticated and readily available. Granted the Supreme Court is unlikely to include vaginoplasties with the issues it undertakes to rule on when it considers the constitutionality of Obama’s health plan. For good or bad sexuality has become an intellectual and even ideological affair. Yes biology is involved, but it’s the brain rather than the genitals that is calling the shots.

The Elements of Style

In a front page piece on the increasing prolixity and ambiguousness of Supreme Court decisions, Times reporter Adam Liptak found that the search for unanimity—an aim that Chief Justice Roberts has prioritized—has led to directionlessness, which may account for the increasing length of decisions. “Unanimous opinions are the most complex,” Liptak writes, citing a recent study (“Justices Are Long on Words but Short on Guidance,” NYT, 11/18/10). Interestingly, shortly after the lead-in, Liptak points to the fact that Brown v. Board of Education, a sweeping decision in the history of jurisprudence, took 4,700 words, while the recent Parents Involved v. Seattle, which only dealt with a part of the Brown case, racked up ten times the verbiage, “enough to rival a short novel.” (The same is true of “Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, coming in at a cool 48,000 words, “or about the length of The Great Gatsby.”) Brown, for all its brevity, improved human life. Liptak’s piece, however, also illustrates that consensus is not the only cause of opaqueness. “A decision in May,” writes Liptak, “striking down life-without-parole sentences for juvenile offenders who did not kill anyone said only that states must provide ‘some meaningful opportunity to obtain release.’” Here, a decision that the court was divided on also seemed to be infected with an equanimity that castrated the very basis of the ruling. Of the decision’s vague phraseology, Justice Thomas wondered, according to Liptak, “what that could possibly mean.” Strunk and White’s Elements of Style is a classic whose application has enormous impact both on syntax and, ultimately, thought. It was once de rigeur in our country’s finest institutions of higher learning. Simplicity was one of the underlying principals for composing pity, grammatically tight texts. Yet, “omit needless words,” one of Strunk and White’s prescriptions for concise writing, is not something that can always be applied when it comes to writing laws that appeal to all, or strive not to offend certain constituencies.