Too little, too late
Dear Justice Sandra Day O'Connor,
In an interview with the Chicago Tribune, you stated that you now believe the Supreme Court may have made a mistake in agreeing to hear the infamous case which became known as Bush v. Gore, effectively throwing out the 2000 election results and appointing the Bush regime. You may not realize it, but you have placed yourself in the company of J. Robert Oppenheimer and Andrei Sakharov, men who changed the world in monstrous ways and then tried to make amends.
As I said to Oppie and Andrei, the time to grow a conscience is no later than your undergraduate years. Then it will be firmly rooted and flourishing when, in later life, you are bullied by someone like Edward Teller, or Leonid Brezhnev, or Antonin Scalia. (It suddenly occurs to me that all of them could have been played by Eugene Pallette. It's how my mind works.) Oppenheimer tried to stem the proliferation of nuclear weapons and lost his security clearance; Sakharov and his wife, Elena Bonner, had a worse time when they stood up for human rights in the Soviet Union. What are you prepared to do?
What can you do? You can't resurrect the thousands of dead in Bush's needless wars, nor make whole the maimed. You can't restore the trillions of dollars wasted on bloody folly, nor heal the mangled economy. You can't even give us back the eight years of stem cell research lost to fundamentalist superstition. It would have been more decent to say nothing.
I think I can hear a train of thought leaving the station. You saw the crowds lining the streets of London to make sure the Thatcher woman was really dead. You read about the opening of the Texas Bullshit Depository, a/k/a the "George W. Bush Presidential Library," still making the case for war with sweaty desperation. You began to wonder about your own legacy, didn't you? Well, you needn't. You will be celebrated by the people who celebrate the first woman to do anything, no matter what it is or how badly she does it.
By a curious twist of fate, the worst storm since Galveston 1900 bears your name. SANDY AFFECTED THE LIVES OF COUNTLESS AMERICANS, NONE FOR THE BETTER. There's your epitaph. And now back to the lucrative speech circuit, and having it both ways.
In an interview with the Chicago Tribune, you stated that you now believe the Supreme Court may have made a mistake in agreeing to hear the infamous case which became known as Bush v. Gore, effectively throwing out the 2000 election results and appointing the Bush regime. You may not realize it, but you have placed yourself in the company of J. Robert Oppenheimer and Andrei Sakharov, men who changed the world in monstrous ways and then tried to make amends.
As I said to Oppie and Andrei, the time to grow a conscience is no later than your undergraduate years. Then it will be firmly rooted and flourishing when, in later life, you are bullied by someone like Edward Teller, or Leonid Brezhnev, or Antonin Scalia. (It suddenly occurs to me that all of them could have been played by Eugene Pallette. It's how my mind works.) Oppenheimer tried to stem the proliferation of nuclear weapons and lost his security clearance; Sakharov and his wife, Elena Bonner, had a worse time when they stood up for human rights in the Soviet Union. What are you prepared to do?
What can you do? You can't resurrect the thousands of dead in Bush's needless wars, nor make whole the maimed. You can't restore the trillions of dollars wasted on bloody folly, nor heal the mangled economy. You can't even give us back the eight years of stem cell research lost to fundamentalist superstition. It would have been more decent to say nothing.
I think I can hear a train of thought leaving the station. You saw the crowds lining the streets of London to make sure the Thatcher woman was really dead. You read about the opening of the Texas Bullshit Depository, a/k/a the "George W. Bush Presidential Library," still making the case for war with sweaty desperation. You began to wonder about your own legacy, didn't you? Well, you needn't. You will be celebrated by the people who celebrate the first woman to do anything, no matter what it is or how badly she does it.
By a curious twist of fate, the worst storm since Galveston 1900 bears your name. SANDY AFFECTED THE LIVES OF COUNTLESS AMERICANS, NONE FOR THE BETTER. There's your epitaph. And now back to the lucrative speech circuit, and having it both ways.
posted by Buttermilk Sky at 11:23 PM
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