Rapping with Justice Ginsburg

At 82, Ruth Bader Ginsburg who has found new celebrity as the Notorious RBG, a moniker she has adopted as the most liberal judge on the Supreme Court. Shana Knizhnik is the one who came up with the blog but didn't feel confident enough to write the book on her own, so she solicited the help of MSNBC journalist Irin Carmon.

Justice Ginsburg has stood out over the years for her sharp dissents of conservative majority opinions on everything from Citizens United to Shelby County v. Holder, which further eroded voting rights in America. It is the Shelby dissent that inspired Knizhnik, a law student at the time. You might say that Ginsburg is the "Bernie Sanders" of liberal law students.

I have great respect for Ginsburg but wonder how much longer she can hold up. Of course, the Senate would fight any Supreme Court nominee Obama would put up in her place, especially with Chief Justice Roberts no longer a reliable conservative vote on the bench. I would prefer it be his choice to replace her and not a potential Republican president down the line. However, the Notorious RBG appears to have no intention of stepping down soon.

The book is an "artisanal hagiography," which is an interesting way of saying a certain amount of artistic license was taken in presenting Judge Ginsburg. The authors focus on many of idiosyncrasies like her passion for lace collars, her early love for Nancy Drew and her morning workouts, which keep her a sprite looking octogenarian. The authors also probe into the sexual discrimination the young judge faced not only at Harvard but from renown Justice Felix Frankfurter. Through out, she kept her wits about herself even when Justice Blackmun graded her a C+ for her first case before the Surpreme Court.

All well and good. I suppose the book achieves its goals, as the aim here is to further reinforce her position as a "supersignifier of liberal idealism." It is necessary today, as for the most part liberalism and feminism get a bad rap in the press and we need a badass judge to remind us that women's rights are not something to be toyed with, and neither are voting rights.

Like anyone, the Judge has her conservative side, like decrying Roe v. Wade for being too dictatorial, stating that methodical steps rather than extreme measures should have been taken. Interesting that since then many states have methodically reinstated abortion laws that are every bit as severe as they were before Roe v. Wade. Maybe she thought the sweeping 1973 decision resulted in this backlash, but then one could argue that Brown v. Board of Education was just as dictatorial, and few would decry it today.

Anyway, it looks like a fun way to get to know our eldest Supreme Court Justice a little better.

Dylan in America

Whoever it was in 1969 who named the very first Bob Dylan bootleg album “Great White Wonder” may have had a mischievous streak. There are any number of ways you can interpret the title — most boringly, the cover was blank, like the Beatles’ “White Album” — but I like to see a sly allusion to “Moby-Dick.” In the seven years since the release of his first commercial record, Dylan had become the white whale of 20th-century popular song, a wild, unconquerable and often baffling force of musical nature who drove fans and critics Ahab-mad in their efforts to spear him, lash him to the hull and render him merely comprehensible. --- Bruce Handy, NYTimes ____________________________________________ I figured we can start fresh with Bob Dylan. Couldn't resist this photo of him striking a Woody Guthrie pose. Looks like only yesterday. Here is a link to the comments building up to this reading group.

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

Welcome to this month's reading group selection. David Von Drehle mentions The Melting Pot , a play by Israel Zangwill, that premiered on Broadway in 1908. At that time theater was accessible to a broad section of the public, not the exclusive domain it has become over the decades. Zangwill carried a hopeful message that America was a place where old hatreds and prejudices were pointless, and that in this new country immigrants would find a more open society. I suppose the reference was more an ironic one for Von Drehle, as he notes the racial and ethnic hatreds were on display everywhere, and at best Zangwill's play helped persons forget for a moment how deep these divides ran. Nevertheless, "the melting pot" made its way into the American lexicon, even if New York could best be describing as a boiling cauldron in the early twentieth century. Triangle: The Fire That Changed America takes a broad view of events that led up the notorious fire, noting the gro

Team of Rivals Reading Group

''Team of Rivals" is also an America ''coming-of-age" saga. Lincoln, Seward, Chase et al. are sketched as being part of a ''restless generation," born when Founding Fathers occupied the White House and the Louisiana Purchase netted nearly 530 million new acres to be explored. The Western Expansion motto of this burgeoning generation, in fact, was cleverly captured in two lines of Stephen Vincent Benet's verse: ''The stream uncrossed, the promise still untried / The metal sleeping in the mountainside." None of the protagonists in ''Team of Rivals" hailed from the Deep South or Great Plains. _______________________________ From a review by Douglas Brinkley, 2005

Rick DiguetteNovember 13, 2015 at 5:40 PM
Her record as a Jutice is pretty darn impressive, but then her competition on the court at this time is not exactly sterling. People say things about Scalia's legal intellect that most lawyers I know put in the category of "nice try, but no cigar."
James FergusonNovember 13, 2015 at 7:54 PM
Whatever legal intellect Scalia has is clouded by the cigar smoke of his radical ideology.
Rick DiguetteNovember 14, 2015 at 12:07 AM
I thought he was smoking weed.

Dispatches from Vilnius

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