Black and Sun

Today it was Spring. I drove to work with my sunroof open. I wore shoes without socks. I watched Spring unfold outside my window, stuck inside, hoping it would still be spring when the workday ended.

Today I got an editor at a big “chick book” interested in a high-end digital SLR camera. No small feat, I was on cloud 9 for an hour and a half. I then proceeded to call every single daily on the planet with non-newsworthy content for my other client, and got…zilch. Naturally. Today I loved my job and hated my job.

I drove home into a dusky sunset with my windows open and my heater on. Please let it be Spring through the weekend…

Today I did my political duty and spammed my friends with a plea to call their senators. I should add, I virtually never do this. I’m about as jaded and apathetic as they come. But last week I finally got off my apathetic ass and Den and I ventured out to a MoveOn.org house party. Admittedly my motivation was social more than political - I would never sign up to hand out flyers or knock on strangers’ doors, but I liked the sound of a house party. Plus, as I explained when I introduced myself and stated my purpose, I pitch consumerism for a living…I have to do something to redeem myself!

So anyway, the issue that I just spammed my friends about is this: our persistent ideologue pain-in-the-fucking-ass excuse for a president has just resubmitted 20 judicial nominees that the senate blocked last term. These kids have resumes 10 feet long filled with pandering to powerful special interests and good-deed-doing for extreme right-wing ideologues at the expense of ordinary Americans. The Dems are uniting to try to block them again, but this time they’re in the minority, albeit only just.

So how much do you know about how our government works? Myself, I don’t know much because my high school Civics and Free Enterprise class happened to be 6th hour and I always fell asleep with my head on my desk (causing ol’ Doc Laneau to rap a yard stick across my desk nearly every day, which had the effect of causing everyone in the class to jump except me… but that’s another story). Anyway, what I learned from my MoveOn party, that I didn’t learn from my high school Civics class, is that our system is designed such that, in order to avoid situations where a very slim majority (as we now have) might try to ram through extreme legislation or judges, the minority is given the right to filibuster to block nominations (and laws) that it feels are too extreme, thereby forcing compromise. Also known as the system of Checks And Balances (which I do vaguely remember from that boring Civics textbook of yore). Now, for what it’s worth, the filibuster tactic has been used almost exclusively by the conservative right over the past 100 years or so, and as a result we do not have such social niceties as universal health care and we do continue to have such debacles as an electorate system, which is to say, the filibuster has historically been a huge pain in the ass for the Democrats. But what comes around sometimes tends to go around, and now the conservative majority is finding itself on the other side of the filibustering game.

Oh, but no, the Reds, they don’t like this game so much now. Kind of a headache. Gums up the system. And in THESE TIMES OF TERRORISM yaddayaddayaddda. Nope, can’t have that. So Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist is threatening to use a legal loophole to abolish the right to filibuster a Presidential judicial nomination. This tactic is sufficiently drastic as to be affectionately known as the “nuclear option.” If Frist uses the nuclear option, this would mean that Dumbass, I mean Bush, would be able to appoint whomever he damnwell chooses to lifetime judicial positions with as little as a 1 vote majority (which, by trick of our asinine electoral process, could be as little as 17% of the popular vote).

There are likely to be 2-4 vacancies on the Supreme Court in the next four years. The freaks of the extreme right are demanding that Frist pull the nuclear trigger now to clear a path through the Senate for a series of nominees in the mold of our favorite drinking buddies Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas (who happen to also be the most aggressive right-wing ideologues on the Court). This would have the potential to overturn more than 100 Supreme Court precedents affecting civil rights, civil liberties, environmental protections, privacy and reproductive rights, separation of church and state, workers’ rights, etcetcetc. A Scalia-Thomas majority could also go so far as to reinterpret the Commerce Clause, the Spending Clause and the 14th Amendment, to dismantle the bipartisan social justice achievements of the past seven decades and to eliminate the entire constitutional basis for future progressive initiatives.

Wanna know who’s up for vote? Well, there’s a William Myers III, who has in fact never been a judge, but does have top notch cred from his career as a lobbyist for the cattle and mining industry, and who has written that all habitat conservation laws are unconstitutional because they interfere with potential profit. Then there’s Terrence Boyle, who was once a legal aide to that kind and gentle soul Jesse Helms. Unlike Myers, Boyle has been a judge, however his rulings have been overturned a whopping 120 times by the conservative 4th District Court of Appeals. Some might think this is due to gross errors in judgment or simple incompetence, but we think he’s just misunderstood. So we’ll give him a pity vote for being such a loser. And then we’ve got the infamous William Pryor Jr., who during his term as Attorney General of Alabama took money from Phillip Morris and, naturally, since corporate money isn’t given out for free, fought against the anti-tobacco lawsuit. Pryor calls Roe v. Wade “the worst abomination of constitutional law in our history” and has consistently argued against the federal protections for the civil rights of minorities, women, gays and lesbians, and the disabled.

So. If you didn’t get spammed by me today, do a good deed and give your Senator’s intern a call and tell him or her to log your opposition against use of the nuclear option and encourage your senator to support judges that aren’t assholes or fucking morons.

[Okay Annie, I’ll update my blog.]

Yes, it’s been a while. It’s been winter and I’ve been down,  kinda. I’ve always liked winter, but lately it just seems to go on a little too long. November, December, January – those are the good winter months. Christmas with my family and Den’s was good (no major bickering broke out between my mom and I this year). We got a blizzard for my birthday (my landlord cursed my name – literally – as he shoveled two feet of snow out of the driveway), and I finally felt justified to go out and buy a pair of Sorel boots for clomping around in the snow. February we went skiing with friends in Maine and rented a chalet in New Hampshire where we cooked dinner, drank wine, watched a bad movie and played dominos and some weird bean game. But March…March seems to get me every year. Two, three…or was it <em>four?</em>…more dumpings of snow just sucks when you’re living in the city. The neighbors get surly, leaving lawn furniture and trashcans weighted with bricks in their “claimed” parking spots; cars get encrusted with salt; you run out of wiper fluid half-way to work… Past February I just can’t find it in myself to enjoy winter anymore.

So I’ve been grumpy lately. The world outside my window looks ugly and grey. I resume my mutterings about moving to a new city (which, really, I have no business doing after dragging Den back from warm, sunny Los Angeles), and today even began two new diatribes about how much I hate above-ground power lines and my latest plan to move to Canada since the US is clearly heading in the direction of right-wing facism and consumer glut. But really it’s just the weather, as Den pointed out this morning as I sulked on the couch.

And the remedy is to get out of the house and fill one’s brain with things external to oneself, with the hope that there will be that much less room to fill with sulking and concocting extreme plots to dismantle the stability of one’s life.

A couple weeks ago we went to The Philosophy Café, which is a monthly open-to-the-public gathering at McIntyre & Moore booksellers in Davis Square. This was just the medicine my flailing spirit needed - a good esoteric debate for me to sink my sharp little teeth into. The topic was “Who Counts Morally?” and the mission was to determine whether there is a line between the rights of humans and animals, and if so where and how is it drawn, asking: if humans have rights, why? and what distinguishes them from animals? The discourse fluttered around notions of religion and soul, capacity to reason, ability to relate, ability to create. But these explanations seemed flabby to me, full of holes and question-begging. At every pause in the discussion my hand shot up like the too-eager kid in fourth grade…but for some reason the moderator just kept looking past me.

This was a topic that’s been circling in my head for years. At the end of high school I became a vegetarian, because of something I’d seen on 20/20 about the unsanitary procedures at meat-packing plants, topped off when, just a couple days later, I found a hairball in my hamburger and my mother swore she hadn’t dropped it on the floor. Then in college I read an essay in which the central argument amounted to, “if you can’t kill your own pig – experiencing both the life and the taking-of-life of the animal – then you have no business eating meat. This became the force behind my argument for being vegetarian, which I sustained for eight years, until I started getting monthly headaches that laid me out flat. In New Zealand I began eating meat again and the headaches disappeared. And in New Zealand I could argue that the animals were at least treated humanely — and not shot full of growth hormones and antibiotics — but now back home in the US I can’t, and yet I still eat meat.

So. Where does that leave me? A hypocrite in my own mind.

I will not be placated with the argument that “animals were put on earth to serve humans” or that “humans have souls and animals don’t” - both of which I think are assinine – in fact, this is the very reason that I rejected Christianity at the tender age of eight. (You better believe my cat’s going to heaven! Because if I have a soul my cat damn well does too!) But I never could believe in heaven, and although I will always insist that my little familiars have every bit as much spirituality as I do, I’m not at all sure that I actually believe I have a soul. I’d like to believe I have something more than the body I live in – as does my cat, as did that creature that once was a cow that reluctantly parted with its flesh for me to eat for lunch – but I can’t be sure, so as far as I’m concerned it’s all just wishful thinking, and the best I can do is respect life, for that may be all there is.

And because the food chain is inherent to existence, and nature was not designed with the principle of live and let live, I cannot apply the logic that all living creatures are sacred, thus making it is as wrong and cruel to kill a fish as a cow as a human fetus as an 18-year-old boy as a 31-year-old woman as a 93-year-old coma patient as a mosquito.

So instead I argue – and argued when finally an hour and a half later the moderator gave me a chance to speak – that there is no inherent morality. We have no inherent rights. The notion of rights is inextricably tied to religion. In actuality you can only have “the right to” what cannot be taken away - and life is not one of those things. The notion of rights is a luxury of self-actualization, created by us, through our language and our self-reflection.

What we do have, I argue, is a will, or desire, such as the will to live or the desire not to suffer. But to ensure that this desire is respected, the burden must be on the “doer.” As rational, reasonable, empathetic creatures we have a responsibility to be kind to the best of our ability, and to do unto others as we would have done unto us. And I would argue that this extends to animals, and that we have a responsibility (which we are failing to uphold) to not cause animals to suffer, just as we have a responsibility not to cause our fellow humans to suffer.

Having had so much time to percolate in my head, this little argument of mine had the effect of turning the nicely moderated discussion on its head. The discourse got a little unruly towards the end…which made it a whole lot more interesting.

After the discussion wrapped up, a Globe reporter that was doing a story on the Philosophy Café came over to where Den and I were sitting and took down our names. The story ran today and I even got my own pull-quote