Of Baseball, Yachts, Electric Cars, and Second Class Citizens
By David Steffen
Most summers, between ages 12 and 14, I played baseball on a team in the local church league. It was there I learned to play fast-pitch softball, and I wasn’t a bad pitcher. In time I was able to read the opposing pitcher when I was at bat. I’d pay close attention to his body language but, to be honest, it was less about identifying a good pitch to hit, and more about avoiding getting hit in the head accidentally or on purpose. So here I was this week, working on my column for the Peddler, and about 3/4 finished, when I found myself on the receiving end of an unexpected pitch. It wasn’t about baseball. The “pitcher” was the Washington Post filled with stories that were reminiscent of an HBO TV series from the late 1980s: “Tales from the Crypt”.
Let me start with something lighter, although it is not to be confused with humor. With its small population, Alaska has two senate seats but just one house seat. Sarah Palin is one of three runoff candidates vying for the house seat in the off-year elections taking place in November. Whoever wins the runoff will, almost certainly, win the seat since Democrats are not allowed—or so it seems—to hold elective office in the 49th state. At first blush we might be thinking, “hey, could be fun watching her in Congress.” Reality, though, almost assures that Palin will compete with Lauren Boebert, Marjorie Taylor Green, Matt Gaetz and Louis Gohmert for leader of the idiocracy caucus. Stupid, but not fun.
Then there’s the GOP/Republican lawmaker who spoke at a Trump rally this weekend. Representative Mary E. Miller called Friday’s Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe V Wade, the nationwide right to abortion, a “victory for white life”. Huh? Hello? Once again the party of the orange guy said the quiet part out loud. The crowd who heard the Illinois state GOP representative declare the SCOTUS decision as a “victory for white life” seemed to agree and began to applaud. Later in the day Miller, her staff, and her party began to spin the tale as a ‘mix-up of words. Yup. Just a mix up.
My list of notorious people I choose to dislike is now up to about two dozen. This isn’t a hit list and, actually, it isn’t even a list. Following trends in our fast-paced society, many of us find that our lists, like Moore’s Law, seem to grow exponentially as the media keeps their names in front of us longer than we’d like. Near the top of my “list” are Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk. Obviously, they are—as the old saying goes—filthy rich. Both “filthy” and “rich” are always in the eye of the beholder. Pigpen from the Peanuts comic strip was always filthy, painted with dirt on almost every exposed body part. Cartoonist Charles Schulz described Pigpen as “a human soil bank who raises a cloud of dust on a perfectly clean street.” As for the other label, “rich” always brings to my mind the Monopoly board game’s “Uncle Milburn Pennybags”. You know, the guy with the mustache, top hat, tuxedo and bags full of money.
Bezos, the founder of Amazon, will reportedly soon be the owner of two yachts. One for cruising, and the other to follow the cruising yacht while Bezos is, well, cruising. The big one will be more than 400 feet long (130 meters, or so). The “little” one—reportedly a mere 200 feet long—will be not so much an expensive lifeboat but transportation for his helicopter, just in case he needs to fly somewhere while at sea on his primary yacht. Got that? I’m reminded of the sensible character Otto Ludwig Piffl in the film “One, Two’ Three”, who said “Darling, no woman in the world should have two mink coats until every woman has one mink coat.” Bezos isn’t waiting for us to catch up. He also started a company that can take you to outer space, but caveat emptor: his rocket ship looks like a flying penis. (Note: Bezos also owns the Washington Post, but the paper continues to operate independently without interference from the guy with two yachts, a helicopter and a metallic flying penis.)
Musk gained fame by borrowing money from his wealthy South African father, and being a part of the startup that created PayPal. Lately he’s known for being on the board of Tesla, and famously opting to move to Texas, the state has no income tax and the elected state government has all the morals and intelligence of a kumquat. [note: A kumquat is an edible fruit resembling an orange yet only the size of a large olive.] Any physical resemblance between a kumquat and Mr. Musk is purely coincidental. His mission, these days, is to take control of Twitter and then let Donald Trump start sending Tweets again. For the record, I didn’t like Twitter when the typed message was limited to 140 characters. Frankly, I thought that was too much. I liked Twitter even less with Tweets expanded to 280 characters. (280 characters is about the size of the above two sentences, counting from “Musk” to “kumquat”). FYI, in June, the Ottawa Citizen newspaper reported that Musk’s daughter, “Vivian Jenna Wilson filed [the] petition in Los Angeles County Superior Court the day after turning 18 in April. She listed gender identity and an apparent dislike of her father, as the reason for the change. ‘I no longer live with or wish to be related to my biological father in any way, shape or form’, she wrote on the petition.”
Moving on, Friday morning I received a flash notice on my iPhone that the Supreme Court had confirmed its expected ruling on Roe v Wade. This is just another example of a court that marches (or goose steps) to a different drummer. Different, that is, from 2/3 of America.
Ruth Marcus wrote in the Washington Post that,
“Will [the court] stop at abortion? The majority forswears any interest in going after other rights similarly grounded in the right to privacy. ‘Nothing in this opinion should be understood to cast doubt on precedents that do not concern abortion,’ it insists, arguing that abortion presents a distinct case because of the ‘destruction’ of ‘potential life.’
This would be more convincing if [Justice Samuel] Alito, the author of the opinion, hadn’t joined [Justice Clarence] Thomas in a statement just two years ago lamenting that the same-sex marriage ruling, Obergefell v. Hodges, had supplanted states’ ability to address the issue, much as he says about abortion. And the court’s insistence that the Constitution only protects rights that are ‘deeply rooted in history’ would apply with equal force to contraception or same-sex marriage. “Either the mass of the majority’s opinion is hypocrisy or additional constitutional rights are under threat,” the dissent says. ‘It is one or the other.’”
If you are a woman in America, pay attention. If you are a man in America, pay attention. This is not the end of the line, but rather, the beginning of an agenda.
In “Obergefell v. Hodges”, the Supreme Court ruled that “the fundamental right to marry is guaranteed to same-sex couples by both the Due Process Clause and the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. The ruling was 5-4. A close ruling, to be sure, but it ruled that same-sex couples could not be prohibited from marrying anywhere in the United States. Prior to this ruling, and like abortion now, the marriage of same sex couples were a state-to-state decision.
Throughout American history (and well into the twentieth century) interracial marriages were prohibited by law in much of the United States. In fact, 31 states prohibited interracial marriages. But the U.S. was not alone. Similar bans had been enacted by Nazi Germany and apartheid-era South Africa. It was the Earl Warren Court which, in 1967 (in the case “Loving v. Virginia,”) determined that race-based restrictions on marriages violated the U. S. Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause.
As I said, we must pay attention. These are not errant pitches in a teenager’s softball game. This is real. And Clarence, Sam, Brett and Amy are just getting started. Did I mention how happy I am that I live in California?
