The Thin Black Duke

Ironically, SF likes to define itself as a literary genre that boldly goes where no other genre has gone before. Still, it has a few malcontents who absolutely lose their collective shit whenever something new threatens to happen.

A specific tripwire that’s guaranteed to get the Grumpy Old Sci-Fi Fans yelling at those damned kids to get off their spaceship is suggesting that some “classic” novels and short stories haven’t aged too well.

But honestly, a lot of the science fiction of that era hasn’t.

Frank Herbert’s Dune, for example.

Dune is brilliant; it’s a majestic triumph of world building, no argument there. But the poisonous snake in Herbert’s masterpiece is Baron Vladimir Harkonnen, a homophobic and malignant stereotype.

It’s an absurd and offensive stereotype. As a character, the Baron stands out like a severed thumb, and contemporary readers definitely wouldn’t put up with it. (Thankfully, Villaneuve’s adaption avoids this problematic issue)

You wouldn’t use a fun house mirror’s reflection for your driver’s license photo because you’d be uncomfortable with that image of yourself. But that’s exactly what happens when someone is stereotyped as the Other.

If you’re on the wrong side of the Holy Status Quo, the people on the other side can interpret your existence however they like. It doesn’t matter if it’s a Lie and you don’t like it.

Furthermore, looking at the bigger picture, perpetuating these hateful myths got people fired, evicted, jailed, and killed.

You couldn’t get away with a hateful and preposterous boogeyman like Baron Harkonnen nowadays, and that’s a good thing. The trope of using homosexuality as an allegory for a decadent lifestyle is a museum relic.

The evidence of civilized behavior is when you see the Other as People. If empathy isn’t there, it’s sociopathy.

The depressing paradox here is Herbert should have known it was a Lie. But he needed the Lie more than he needed his son.

[Herbert] was unhappy when his son came out as gay, and even more upset when Bruce became a part of queer street theatre in the Bay Area. His father believed Bruce had chosen his sexual orientation, and wanted him to renounce it. Bruce died of AIDS in 1993, cared for at the end by an old college friend in San Rafael, California, with support from the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, a charitable group of gay performers, protesters, and caregivers.

Herbert’s decision to cast his son from his life was barbaric.

It brought to mind “New Moon Rising”, a classic Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode where Willow tells Buffy a big secret. It’s a humane counterpoint.

Buffy: I wanna hear about you and Oz. You saw him, right?

Willow: I was with him all night.

Buffy: All night? Oh my god. Wait. Last night was a wolf moon, right?

Willow: Yup.

Buffy: Either you’re about to tell me something incredibly kinky, or —

Willow [grinning] : No kink. He didn’t change, Buffy. He said he was gonna find a cure, and he did. In Tibet.

Buffy: Oh my god. I can’t believe it.

[a pause]

Buffy: Okay, I’m all with the woo-hoo here, and you’re not.

Willow: No, there’s “woo” and, and “hoo.” But there’s “uh-oh,” and… “why now?” And… it’s complicated.

Buffy: Why complicated?

Willow [sighs, takes the leap] : It’s complicated… because of Tara.

Buffy [confused] : You mean Tara has a crush on Oz?

Willow: No.

[Buffy finally understands]

Buffy: Oh.

[Willow smiles nervously]

[After a moment, Buffy abruptly stands up and backs away from Willow]

Buffy: Oh. Um… well… that’s great. You know, I mean, I think Tara’s a, a really great girl, Will.

Willow: She is. And… there’s something between us. It-it wasn’t something I was looking for. It’s just powerful. And it’s totally different from what Oz and I have.

Buffy [babbling] : Well, there you go, I mean, you know, you have to — you have to follow your heart, Will. And that’s what’s important, Will.

Willow [beginning to get scared]: Why do you keep saying my name like that?

Buffy [responding with a frozen smile] : Like what, Will?

Willow [panicking] : Are you freaked?

Buffy [shocked] : What? No, Will, d-

[Buffy stops, suddenly realizes what’s at stake in this moment, makes a decision]

Buffy: No.

[Buffy sits next to Willow]

Buffy [firmly] : No, absolutely “no” to that question.

[Willow stares back at Buffy, skeptical but hopeful]

Buffy: I’m glad you told me.

This was the conversation Frank and Bruce Calvin Herbert needed to have but, didn’t because it was easier for Frank Herbert to envision giant sandworms on a desert planet in a make-believe universe than to see his son as a human being.

In spite of the stubborn denialists that don’t believe in the aliens who exist outside their White Heterosexual Christofascist Utopia, multiple variations of Buffy and Willow’s painful but necessary conversation have happened before, are happening right now, and will happen in the future.

Somewhere in the United States, someone is coming out to their parents and someone else is changing their name from “Danny” to “Danielle” and another someone is confessing to their priest they don’t believe in God.

How these conversations go depends if love is strong enough to open up closed minds and overcome old, deep-rooted societal biases.

It’s helpful to think of these perilous conversations as Herbert’s Gom Jabbar; not everyone can pass the test because they can’t think outside the box.

Buffy didn’t reject Willow because she didn’t see her friend as a stereotype. Buffy valued their friendship so much that she was able to leave those preconceptions in the trash where they belonged and move on.

It’s tragic that Frank Herbert was unable to extend grace to his dying son because of his inability to practice what he preached. Unfortunately, it was a bridge too far. As a reflection of our current political situation, Herbert chose to be JD Vance instead of Tim Walz. Herbert boxed himself in.

“How tempting it is to raise high walls and keep our change. Rot here in our own self-satisfied comfort. Enclosures of any kind are a fertile breeding ground for hatred of outsiders, that produces a bitter harvest.”

— Reverend Mother Superior Darwi Odrade

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Every family has a designated weirdo and that was me.

But no matter how much of a knucklehead I was during my difficult teenage years, my family always supported me even though I knew they didn’t always understand where I was coming from. They always had my back, and I loved them for that.

I was blessed. However, some people aren’t so lucky. If the appropriate boxes aren’t checked off, they won’t get a helping hand but a slap in the face, and it hurts more when it’s coming from someone who says they love you.

To contrast and compare, let’s look at Elon Musk, the techbro zillionaire who can’t buy a clue.

Elon Musk contains multitudes. Unfortunately, they’re all bad.

Musk is a monstrous human being. As a dysfunctional parental unit, he’s a monster. Musk sees his children either as disposable props or punching bags.

In a recent interview with fellow nutjob Jordan Peterson, Musk babbled (again) about the infamous “mind woke virus” and how it “stole my son from me”.

Vivian Jenna Wilson pushed back against Musk’s nonsense. Hard.

“I think he was under the assumption that I wasn’t going to say anything and I would just let this go unchallenged,” she told NBC News in an interview published July 25. “Which I’m not going to do, because if you’re going to lie about me, like, blatantly to an audience of millions, I’m not just gonna let that slide.” 

Wilson—whom Musk shares with ex-wife Justine Wilson—clapped back by saying she is entitled to make her own decisions when it comes to her identity and health. 

“I would like to emphasize one thing: I am an adult. I am 20 years old. I am not a child,” she said. “My life should be defined by my own choices.” 

Wilson—who filed to change her name when she was 18—also detailed her estranged relationship with Musk, which she said began long before she came out as trans at age 16.

Calling Musk “cold” and “quick to anger” during her childhood, Wilson alleged he was only present about 10 percent of the time. 

“He is uncaring and narcissistic,” she said, recalling one “cruel” incident in fourth grade during which he allegedly berated her vocal tone. “He was constantly yelling at me viciously because my voice was too high.”

It’s difficult, awkward, and confusing to transition from being a child to a young adult, and the arguments that erupted at home usually resulted from me trying to figure things out and my parents trying to figure me out. But despite all of the generational drama, I knew that they loved me, and the invaluable support of my family throughout the years was the solid bedrock that helped me navigate the turbulent waters of my teenage years.

And no matter how bad it got at times, my mother and father never acted like they were ashamed of me. My mother and father never did to me what Musk did to his daughter.

There’s a line from a Law and Order episode that spills the tea about men like Musk:

“He wasn’t a father,” Jack McCoy said. “He just happened to be in the room when the child was conceived.”

I bet Ms. Wilson wishes Tim Walz was her Dad.

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I’m a crazed, unrepentant, obsessive, incurable, doomed-beyond-all-hope-of-redemption movie junkie.

No, it doesn’t matter what type of movie it is. I’m usually not stuck in a specific genre, actor, or filmmaker.

It could be a superhero popcorn flick by Disney or a dour German soap opera filmed with an iPhone on the weekend, I don’t care. As long as the people who brought it to the screen are passionate about the story they’re telling and it’s done with artistry, I will find value in it.

And sometimes when I’m watching a movie, I think: Mom would’ve liked this.

No matter where I am, I can feel her next to me every time I watch a movie. And that’s appropriate because my mother gave me a precious gift a long time ago and I’ll carry it with me for the rest of my life.

My mother was my first movie buddy.

Loew’s Burland Theatre was once one of 14 theatres that the original Loew’s circuit operated concurrently in the Bronx.

Situated in the West Morrisania area, it first opened in 1896 as an open-air theatre that operated only in the summer months. In 1913, the site was excavated for a conventional movie theatre that opened as the Burland Theatre on November 1, 1913. Within a short time it was taken over by Loew’s Inc. and renamed Loew’s Burland Theatre.

In later years it was taken over by Cinema Circuit Corp. and the Burland Theatre closed in 1971. It presently houses a supermarket and a dry cleaners.

TV was my introduction to the movies.

Television was different when I was a kid; there was no streaming, no cable, no satellite dishes. People didn’t have to pay bloated subscription fees every month, so there were a lot of viewing options available. For free. When you don’t have a lot of money, that’s a big deal.

Besides the major TV networks (ABC, CBS, NBC), there were the local NY stations (WPIX, WOR, WNEW) too. So there were game shows, reruns of “classic” dramas, westerns and sitcoms, soap operas, and lots and lots of movies.

But I never saw a movie in its “natural habitat.” I never saw a movie with an audience in a theater before.

The first time I saw a movie in an honest-to-God movie theater was at the Burland Theater in the South Bronx, which was only about a fifteen-minute walk from where I lived.

One afternoon my Mom and I went to see a triple feature of James Bond movies: Dr. No,  Goldfinger, and Thunderball. I think I was eleven years old, and even though I didn’t realize it this was a big deal.

Before movie theaters were divided into little shoeboxes, they used to be the size of cathedrals. The screen was enormous, and the sound from the large speakers in the walls made the inside of the theater vibrate.

We got there late, but I got to see Dr. No fall into a nuclear reactor pool and die, so it was OK because I still believed that the good guys always won.

I enjoyed Thunderball, although I barely remember anything about it now. Oh sure, Bond using a jet pack was cool, but that’s it.

But it was Goldfinger that made a huge impact on me and changed the way I saw movies from that point on. It was a transformative experience.

First of all, it cemented in my head the conviction that only Sir Sean Connery was worthy of carrying his trustworthy .32 caliber Walther PPK.

Despite the heroic efforts of Lazenby, Moore, Dalton, Brosnan, and Craig, none of them said “Bond. James Bond”, with the same seductive resonance of menace and charm as Sean did.

(Mind you, my opinion is just a variation of the endless arguments about who’s the “best” Batman or Sherlock Holmes. I don’t care. You never forget your first Bond.)

Secondly, I think of Goldfinger as being the best of the Sean Connery era of James Bond movies.

Lovers of the superspy genre have cited Goldfinger as the film when the franchise found its identity (the gizmos, foreign locales, tongue-in-cheek humor) and it created the blueprint slavishly followed by espionage thrillers from Our Man Flint to The Kingsman. The bottom line is there’s no Jason Bourne without James Bond.

Auric Goldfinger, memorably portrayed by Gert Fröbe, was a superb adversary for Agent 007. The scene where Bond is strapped to a metal table as a laser beam is preparing to slice him in half has been permanently bookmarked in cinematic history:

“Do you want me to talk?”

“No, Mr. Bond, I want you to die!”

But I never expected a needle drop from Robert BrownJohn, the legendary American graphic designer:

“The title sequence for the James Bond film Goldfinger is BJ’s most famous and iconic work. The titles have been celebrated by both graphic designers and audiences universally. The sequence is a combination of conceptual brilliance and visual extravagance and is still the gold standard of film titles to this day.”

This wasn’t your grandma’s credit sequence, where the audience saw names on a placard. It felt like going from a horse and buggy to Warp Factor Five. It was a music video years before MTV.

More importantly, I think this was the first time (although I didn’t realize it until much, much later) that I began to process movies differently. I wasn’t just thinking about the characters and what the story was.

This was the first time I wanted to check underneath the hood in a movie and see what made it go.

The lens through which I experienced movies got bigger and things were never the same afterwards. That was the afternoon I became a film critic and it blew my eleven-year-old mind. I guess it was my Origin Story.

For whatever reason, that was the last time my Mom took me to a movie theater. But the damage was already done. As soon as I was old enough to go by myself, the Burland Theater was my crack house, my opium den, my shooting gallery. I was hooked for life.

This was the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

Sometimes it’s painful to take that long walk down Memory Lane because it means saying goodbye to the people and places that we valued.

On the other hand, it’s the remembrance of the joy we experienced that illuminates the path ahead of us.

Psychiatrist Dr. Colin Murray Parkes said, “The pain of grief is just as much part of life as the joy of love: it is perhaps the price we pay for love, the cost of commitment.”

I have left many bad habits behind me throughout the years, but the kick I get from movies still feels as good as the first time.

Whether at home or at the Cineplex, I can still feel the excitement blossom inside me whenever I sit in the dark and the opening credits appear on the screen.

Thanks, Mom.

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Although I’m a movie buff, watching horror movies is kinda difficult for me (excessive blood ‘n’ gore kicks me out, sorry), so I’m not as knowledgeable about the genre as I’d like to be.

Having said that, whenever I think I’m out, subversive auteurs like Sam Raimi, John Carpenter, Ti West, David Cronenberg and Jordan Peele pull me back in.

As it is with most genres, horror movies have very specific rules that must be followed. Blogger Leo Yu compiled a list of How To Survive If You’re In A Horror Movie:

• Never go anywhere by yourself, always tell people where you are going, and stay in large groups.
• Don’t explore creepy or abandoned places, you’re basically asking to be killed.
• Work on your cardio and coordination, so you can run really far and not trip and fall.
• If you’re in a building, don’t unlock the doors or go outside until help arrives.
• Never assume the monster is dead.
• Always ensure proper measures are taken so that the monster won’t come back to life.
• Try not to have sex, horror movie villains tend to strike when people are trying to get it on.
• If you encounter any strange things, events, or artifacts. Turn back, don’t touch anything.

(some of these rules are applicable in life as well, sad to say)

Unfortunately, outside of the reel world, there’s another rule that must be added to Leo Yu’s list:

• Don’t be Black or Brown in White America.

For obvious reasons, the last rule is hard to follow for People of the Excessive Melanin Community, so some unlucky brothers and sisters never make it to the end credits.

In this brutal reality, the monsters are real. Ask me how I know.

I used to work for the TSA at Logan Airport in Boston, MA. I usually did the PM shift from noon until 9 pm, but one afternoon I wasn’t feeling well, so I went home early.

I never wanted to deal with the hassle of driving to my job so I took the Blue Line to the airport. I could relax, drink my coffee, read the Boston Globe. Most of the time I would wear a nondescript jacket over my uniform so the other people riding on the train wouldn’t bother me with questions about the airport.

Usually, I got off at Revere Beach and walked home but my standard routine suddenly flew off the rails when a group of white men came out of nowhere and surrounded me. They weren’t friendly either.

Huh? What the fuck is going on?

I was scared, confused, and I realized I was in a lot of trouble.

“OK, buddy,” one of the white men growled at me, “You’re coming with us.” When I saw a badge hanging on a lanyard around his neck, I understood that these white men were plainclothes cops and they thought I was somebody else. I looked around frantically for help, but people just ignored what was going on, minded their business, and kept on walking.

When one of the cops grabbed me, I shook his hand off, which was the worst thing I could have done because I was “resisting arrest”, and legally that meant these white cops now had the authority to handcuff me, put me in a chokehold or shoot me, and get away with it.

But what I did next was the right thing to do. Whether it was dumb luck, instinct, or an angel whispering in my ear, what I did was quickly unzip my jacket, revealing my TSA uniform underneath.

And just like that, it was over. Maybe it was the thought of not wanting to do the extra paperwork, but the cops stopped, turned, and walked away. No apologies, no explanations.

But one of the cops gave me a long hard look before he left.

Behind those pale blue whiteboy eyes, what he was saying was next time, and there’s always a ‘next time,’ because sooner or later, your luck runs out. We’ll make sure of that.

It was a promise. Every black person has felt the oppressive weight of that Cyclops eye. When they say, ‘To Protect and Serve’, they ain’t talking about us. Cops started out as slave catchers.

“I had certainly seen him before that particular afternoon, but he had been just another cop. After that afternoon,he had red hair and blue eyes. He was somewhere in his thirties.

“He walked the way John Wayne walks, striding out to clean up the universe, and he believed all that shit: a wicked, stupid, infantile motherfucker. Like his heroes, he was kind of pinheaded, heavy gutted, big assed, and his eyes were as blank as George Washington’s eyes.

“But I was beginning to learn something about the blankness of those eyes. What I was learning was beginning to frighten me to death.

“If you look steadily into that unblinking blue, into that pinpoint at the center of the eye, you discover a bottomless cruelty, a viciousness cold and icy. In that eye, you do not exist: if you are lucky.

If that eye, from its height, has been forced to notice you, if you do exist in the unbelievably frozen winter which lives behind that eye, you are marked, marked, marked, like a man in a black overcoat, crawling, fleeing, across the snow.

“The eye resents your presence in the landscape, cluttering up the view. Presently, the black overcoat will be still, turning red with blood, and the snow will be red, and the eye resents this, too, blinks once, and causes more snow to fall, covering it all.”

— If Beale Street Could Talk, by James Baldwin

Discussing the concept of “monsters” in literary fiction, author Jacqueline Lichtenberg theorized that SF is based on trying to understand what the monster is and what it wants, whereas in horror the monster usually “is a menace because it’s a menace.”
And it’s dangerous to give monsters the benefit of the doubt. Whenever I see the blue lights flashing in my rearview mirror, I hold my breath until I see them pass.

“I think the majority of police are really good people and really good at their jobs,” horror film director Jordan Peele said. “But that doesn’t change the fact that with any interaction I have with them, I’m viewed as a potential threat.”

White people invested in “copaganda” will never take James Baldwin’s manifestation of a homicidal policeman seriously, so instead they’ll dismiss it as an implausible literary exaggeration.

Black people know better. Experience is a harsh teacher.

Horror icons such as Freddy Krueger, Jason Voorhees, Michael Myers, Art the Clown, Sadako, Chucky, the Cenobites, and Jigsaw never leave their Hollywood slaughterhouses.

But Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd in public and didn’t care who saw it.

The only reason Chauvin didn’t get away with it was because an expendable scapegoat was needed so white people in denial could pretend that police brutality wasn’t a problem anymore. It’s another fantasy informed by privilege.

Police in the US killed at least 1,232 people last year, making 2023 the deadliest year for homicides committed by law enforcement in more than a decade, according to newly released data.

Mapping Police Violence, a non-profit research group, catalogs deaths at the hands of police and last year recorded the highest number of killings since its national tracking began in 2013. The data suggests a systemic crisis and a remarkably consistent pattern, with an average of roughly three people killed by officers each day, with slight upticks in recent years.

Here’s the new cops, same as the old cops.

But despite the lies they tell themselves, the white people who ignore killer cops are monsters too. The brutes with guns and badges are just tools these monsters use so they won’t get their hands dirty.

Unlike a horror movie, black and brown people can’t escape the monsters by walking out of the Cineplex or turning off the remote. I got to go home at the end of my encounter with the police, but there’s an awful feeling inside of me that won’t go away: next time.

Senior Airman Roger Fortson found out. Another name added to the never-ending list.

 

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“Ordinary,” said Aunt Lydia, “is what you are used to. This may not seem ordinary to you now, but after a time, it will. It will become ordinary.”  (Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale)

In 1984, George Orwell warned us about Big Brother, the three-minute hate, and why we were always at war with Eurasia.

Sinclair Lewis, who wrote It Can’t Happen Here, warned us ,“When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.”

Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 warned us about a bleak future where libraries were outlawed and the firemen burned books.

The Bible warned us about “false prophets”.

And in The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood warned about a brutal theocracy overthrowing the United States government. Atwood’s prophetic novel was marketed as “science-fiction,” but other people saw it as an instruction manual, proving once again that truth is scarier than fiction.

So what happens when the villains of The Handmaid’s Tale get appointed to the Supreme Court?

Bad things happen, that’s what. Every woman saw the iceberg straight ahead a month ago when Justice Alito’s opinion was leaked. It made no difference.

“The moment of betrayal is the worst, the moment when you know beyond any doubt that you have been betrayed: that some other human being has wished you that much evil.”

TV news host and political commentator Rachel Maddow understands the terrible implications of the Pandora’s Box the Supreme Court wants to open: Once it’s opened, it will be impossible to close it again.

Maddow on leaked SCOTUS opinion: ‘We’re on the precipice of becoming a very different country.’

After nearly 50 years of settled law, the Supreme Court has struck down the historic 1973 decision of Roe v. Wade. During her MSNBC show after the draft was leaked, a stunned Maddow shared her initial thoughts and concerns about the decision being overturned.

“It is shocking both in substance and it is also shocking in terms of what it means about the court, and what it means about the stakes here that someone is willing to do this,” Maddow said.

Roe v. Wade guaranteed constitutional protections of abortion rights. However, the majority opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito and obtained by Politico overturned the landmark case as well as the subsequent 1992 decision of Planned Parenthood v. Casey, which reaffirmed a woman’s right to choose.

“We hold that Roe and Casey must be overruled,” Alito wrote. “It is time to heed the Constitution and return the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives.”

With 21 states reportedly planning to ban abortion if Roe is in fact overturned, and 13 with “trigger laws” that go into effect immediately when that happens, women across the country may find they have lost the right to choose how or when they experience pregnancy.

“This draft opinion saying that the Supreme Court is about to clear the way just for that, means that we’re on the precipice of becoming a very different country,” Maddow said. “And our daughters and granddaughters are living in a very different world.”

I wish the loud-mouthed hypocrites who are having a public meltdown over the leak from the Supreme Court would stop pretending that they give a Goddamn about the women and children in America.

We know they don’t, because actions speak louder than words. As awful as the toxic rhetoric of the American Taliban has been, their actions have been much, much worse.

Religious extremism is a disease, and it’s a hate-fueled pandemic that’s spreading across the country. If Jesus came back waving a rainbow flag, they’d crucify him again. It was “pro-life” activists who murdered Dr. George Tiller while he was in church. Do you remember Eric Rudolph?

This is who they are, and this is what they do.

“Better never means better for everyone. It always means worse,  for some.”  (The Handmaid’s Tale)

In Texas, there is a $10,000 bounty available to anyone who reports a woman suspected of terminating her pregnancy.

At least 11 states — including Alabama, Oklahoma, Missouri and Arkansas — have passed laws that would ban abortions if the pregnancies were conceived by rape or incest.

Republican legislators in Louisiana are proposing a bill that would classify abortion as homicide.

In Tennessee, Governor Bill Lee signed a bill that increases criminal penalties for anyone distributing abortion medication through the mail.

And how long will it be before these lunatics create a new Fugitive Slave Act that specifically targets pregnant women? Red State America won’t be building walls to keep immigrants out. Walls will be erected to keep women in.

“Prosecutors really have no compunction about throwing people in jail for their reproductive outcomes,” said Farah Diaz-Tello, senior counsel and legal director of If/When/How: Lawyering for Reproductive Justice, a group that helps people who face criminal charges related to abortion. “Even though Roe has not been full protection, it is one of the things that sort of stands between people and a much more massive scale of criminalization.”

This is the Brave New World that every woman in the United States will be condemned to live in, once the Supreme Court finally strikes down Roe v. Wade. But they aren’t done yet; outlawing abortion in America is only the beginning.

“There is more than one kind of freedom,” said Aunt Lydia. “Freedom to and freedom from. In the days of anarchy, it was freedom to. Now you are being given freedom from. Don’t underrate it.”

Sifting through Justice Alito’s verbiage, we find his expressed concern that “the domestic supply of infants relinquished at birth or within the first month of life and available to be adopted has become virtually nonexistent.”

Maya Angelou warned us: when someone shows you who they are, believe them, and it was absolutely horrifying to see that Alito was unable to perceive women as nothing more than an odd species of livestock.

Justice Alito envisions a utopia where these unruly mobs of uppity women would be prettier if they just smiled more often, went back into the kitchen, and stayed pregnant.

He isn’t the only man who shares this hallucination.

On the May 11 edition of Fox News’ The Big Story, host John Gibson warned his viewers about the growing demographic crisis facing white people in the United States: “By far, the greatest number [of children under five] are Hispanic. You know what that means? Twenty-five years and the majority of the population is Hispanic. To put it bluntly, we need more babies.”

J.D. Vance, campaigning for a Senate seat in Ohio, said, “When you go to the polls in this country as a parent, you should have more power, you should have more of an ability to speak your voice in our democratic republic, than people who don’t have kids.” Vance added, “Let’s face the consequences and the reality; if you don’t have as much of an investment in the future of this country, maybe you shouldn’t get nearly the same voice.”

What’s even more depressing is seeing conservative white women joining the chorus and becoming enthusiastic Aunt Lydias who are enabling this madness. On Tucker Carlson’s talk show, Rebeccah Heinrichs of the Hudson Institute said the growing “Fertility Crisis” in America is the Left’s “cultural dogma” that brainwashes young women to “monetize their talents and abilities.”

Heinrichs then advised young women to “Get married and have children, to continue to do good, continue to work, continue work — monetized or not — but to the extent it works for your family. And that’s where you going to find great happiness and you’re going to have a healthier society if you do that.”

Ms. Heinrichs is either deluded or a liar. How in hell are you going to have a “healthier society” for young women when the Christofascists are dismantling the guardrails?

Priscilla Smith, lecturer on law and reproductive justice at Yale Law School can see the bloody handwriting on the wall:

“If the draft becomes the real opinion, all of those issues — contraception, consensual sex and marriage — certainly are all at risk,” said Smith. “They have definitely left the door wide open.”

“There is a whole wing of this group that is opposed to abortion who only support sexual intercourse when it is within the context of marriage and when it is designed to procreate. The use of contraception gets in the way of that.”

Nationally, anti-abortion advocates are “setting the stage not just for a reversal of protections for abortion, but also for protection for the right to fetal life — the fetus being a person with a right to life guaranteed under the constitution,” Smith said.

“That’s where we’re going if things don’t change.”

And if things don’t change, every woman in America will inevitably be backed into a corner where the only choices available will either be having babies for the rest of their lives, going to jail for the “crime” of having a miscarriage, or dying alone in a motel room because of a self-induced abortion.

For women, it will be a never-ending nightmare. For men, it will be a return to the Good Old Days; women are acceptable collateral damage.  These men don’t care,  and going backwards is who they are and what they do.

The end of safe, legal and accessible abortions is only the beginning. It Can’t Happen Here, until it does. And when it does, it’s too late.

In an essay in The Atlantic, Margaret Atwood recognizes Justice Alito’s endgame:

The Alito opinion purports to be based on America’s Constitution. But it relies on English jurisprudence from the 17th century, a time when a belief in witchcraft caused the death of many innocent people. The Salem witchcraft trials were trials — they had judges and juries — but they accepted “spectral evidence,” in the belief that a witch could send her double, or specter, out into the world to do mischief. Thus, if you were sound asleep in bed, with many witnesses, but someone reported you supposedly doing sinister things to a cow several miles away, you were guilty of witchcraft. You had no way of proving otherwise.

Similarly, it will be very difficult to disprove a false accusation of abortion. The mere fact of a miscarriage, or a claim by a disgruntled former partner, will easily brand you a murderer. Revenge and spite charges will proliferate, as did arraignments for witchcraft 500 years ago.

In The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood tried to warn us. It’s not Atwood’s fault that nobody listened.

“You are a transitional generation,” said Aunt Lydia. “It is the hardest for you. We know the sacrifices you are being expected to make. It is hard when men revile you. For the ones who come after you, it will be easier. They will accept their duties with willing hearts.” She did not say: Because they will have no memories, of any other way. She said: Because they won’t want things they can’t have.

Over a month ago, everybody knew what the Supreme Court was going to do. They made it official yesterday.

Welcome to the new Republic of Gilead, everybody. God Bless America.

The Day “The Handmaid’s Tale” Happened In AmericaPost + Comments (147)