Never Has Been Yet

America has never been a perfect place, which isn't saying a lot. I can't think of any actual perfect places that aren't on television, like maybe 1990s New York if you're a Friends friend, but even then it only works for everyone who is a white person and where the only minorities of any kind are Jewish white people and, for a little while, Aisha Tyler and the lady who played Julie.* At least Ross liked to drive people away inclusively.

It would be a great time for a shitty paraphrase of better thoughts by Langston Hughes, as we watch things get a little tougher in this country for a few key groups, like non-Christians, people who prefer not to be shot, anyone who votes, anyone with a uterus and people who like breathing. Leaning on people more good at word-doing than me is no crime, but I'm still at a loss when trying to reckon with the creaking sound of heavy shifting in total darkness; where you're pretty sure it's an iceberg and the question really becomes less "are we going to hit it?" and more just deciding if you prefer the hypothermia or the drowning, while you still have the choice.

After the Dobbs decision overturning Roe and the absolutely insane concurring opinion by vindictive revanchist carbuncle Clarence Thomas laying out the agenda to come for the gays next, I couldn't stop the reflex to shift into History Robot mode and just make a note of a simple and obvious profundity: the unprecedented era of individual human rights in this country is a thing that is behind us. It's over. It's an historical era I was living through without even knowing it because I, like a lot of other idiots, assumed "settled law" was an idea that existed.

We started down this path, failing in ways both hilarious and genocidally catastrophic, when we realized the Constitution we propped up to overthrow the Articles of Confederation left some important shit out, like whether or not people should go to jail for saying stuff. The Bill of Rights was a great idea, as long as you were a property-owning white male of qualifying age.

It took 80 years or so to get amendments in to set aside things like chattel slavery of American-born Americans and a further 60 or so just to let ladies vote, partially in exchange for sometimes not murdering dudes.** Through all that, Jim Crow persisted and whiteness was still whiteness and property meant wealth meant amplification of one's political voice above others, necessarily at their expense. Read your Plessy v. Ferguson in appropriate levels of revulsion, even if you didn't know what was to come.

It really wasn't until Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka in 1954 that this latest era really started to take shape. Miranda, Roe, Lawrence, Obergefell... But it only looks utopian in retrospect, now that it's over. The advancement to get there at all was won in blood by a vanguard of women and minorities braver than the rest of us nodding solemnly in approval from the comfortable sitting rooms of our split-level ranch-style single family homes a few freeway exits away from the abandoned inner cities.***

The result, though, was at least as much as the Bill of Rights was. Not a guarantee, but a chance. A validation on paper, at the very least, that there was such thing as a federal government and the weight of it could and would be used to defend the rights and civil liberties of the individual. It hardly ever worked that way, but at least lip service was paid.

Now where are we? We're back to "states' rights." I don't know if you guys remember, but we fucking tried "states' rights" once before, following which we were down bad for, like, a full century. The legal dickery that pretends the state is somehow a better guarantor of an individual's liberty than the individual is a novelty and an insanity all at once. The states are exactly whom the courts exist to protect us from. The absolute farcical dichotomy of federal power vs. state power is a lie cooked up by Heritage Foundation fan-fiction and Rupert Murdoch media frogs which, like everything else, is simply presented as accepted reality and reified into something resembling a status quo by a credulous and fearful New York Times, CNN, et al.

The idea that the base-level protections of the constitution should be devolved to states is confusing because it doesn't make the smallest bit of fucking sense. The Supreme Court said integration should happen. The school board in Little Rock agreed. And then Eisenhower sent in the fucking Army. Why? To protect nine Black students from the fucking state government of Arkansas. That's it. That's the model. That's what works.

So naturally, we get one Supreme Court seat denied a sitting Democratic president and then RBG dies at the wrong time and now... well, all that is gone. It's us vs. states, run by people with all the intellectual vigor and moral clarity of the Ron DeSantises of the world. When I write it out like that, it's even worse than I thought.

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*The joke was going to be that nobody cared about her so why get her name right, but I couldn't let it go and do that to Lauren Tom. Amy Wong for life, yo.

**Suffragettes do not get anywhere near the coverage they deserve, honestly. Those were some fucking gangsters.

***This was the time before urbanity was rescued temporarily by avocado toast as a concept. You'll have to imagine, young people.