News Notebook Friday 12.3.21
Supreme Courting Chaos, A Little Shadow Music... and Icing on the Cake(s)
Weekend newShrink greetings, and welcome to December — now only 18 nights until the Solstice pendulum-shift to longer bright days ahead! (That’s the kind of rationally optimistic six-month news outlook one might only wish for in light of this week’s developments at our nation’s highest Court…)
That news — the U.S. Supreme Court’s apparent inclinations at its Wednesday hearing of arguments in a pivotal Mississippi reproductive-rights case — came late in the writing process, adding an array of deep, hefty issues to the week’s roundup:
For now some headlines and key quotes on this follow a few other current stories and updates in part one here.
The second section of this week’s Notebook has been for me a must-do look at some of the soul-, psychological- and “eulogy-version” dimensions of a phenomenal life and body of work, from headlines like this one in The New York Times that we’ve been hearing a lot about since last Friday:
Stephen Sondheim, Titan of the American Musical, Is Dead at 91
He was the theater’s most revered and influential composer-lyricist of the last half of the 20th century and the driving force behind some of Broadway’s most beloved and celebrated shows.
And the brief closing section’s more playful take on some cultural subjects signals a possible, as-needed, seasonal newShrink shift over the next few weeks. That might mean more “tapas”- or “postcard”-style collections of self-contained vignettes, varied headlines and subjects more easily written — and read — on the fly during a hectic season. In addition to holidays, work and ongoing mom-priorities this month, this is due to some very good news happening in the household.
A note on the next several weeks: Next Thursday,12.9, after a two-year (largely COVID-driven) delay, John is finally scheduled for long-needed reverse shoulder-replacement surgery. (It’s to repair an old lacrosse injury from back in his grad school years, aggravated by decades of wear-and-tear arthritis to today’s bone-on-bone pain, movement-limitation and various compensatory effects. It’s on his right/dominant side, so in coming weeks I’ll be doing some double driving, cooking (and at times likely lassoing an independent and not-so-patient patient!) Luckily he can regulate his own work schedule and do most of it from home. PT is to start quickly, and supposedly pain-relief might come months before new baselines for mobility and strength are known. But the guy is active to a fault, so just carrying less constant pain would be huge improvement.) Meanwhile I’ll have ample time to occupy with reading-, listening/viewing and writing weekend posts. More of it will just be from the car or waiting rooms, and for shorter blocks of time. (And shorter posts are better for a busy holiday month, anyway.)
🦋💙
Links to stories mentioned today are listed in order of appearance at the bottom of this Notebook.
news in headlines and quotes
Latest COVID-Variant Omicron Makes Landfall in the U.S.
In writing time this week, these stories were hitting faster than I could open them.
The First Omicron Case Has Been Detected in the U.S. (NYT, Wednesday)
Much remains unknown about the new variant of the coronavirus. Experts had said it was only a matter of time before the variant showed up in the United States.
Two More Omicron Cases are Detected in the U.S. (NYT, Thursday)
Biden’s New Virus Plan Aims to Keep Economy Open as Omicron Spreads (NYT Thursday)
“‘We’re going to fight this variant with science and speed, not chaos and confusion,’ the President said in a speech.
President Biden’s strategy includes new testing requirements for international travelers and insurance reimbursement for at-home coronavirus tests.”
In New Lawsuit, UNCSA Alumni Say They Were Sexually Abused
Just before a key December deadline for victims to sue, this update dramatically expands the scope of a deeply disturbing case involving an internationally acclaimed institution over decades. (From The Charlotte Observer).
32 more alums sue UNC School of the Arts as list of faculty accused of sexual abuse grows
and in coverage of the U.S. Supreme Court:
Starting from abortion-rights author and analyst Mary Ziegler in The Atlantic:
The End of Roe?
Today’s oral argument signaled that the Court is poised to reverse Roe v. Wade outright.
“Anyone listening to today’s oral argument on abortion could not miss that something historic was happening. The case, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, involves a Mississippi law that bans abortion at 15 weeks. Such a ban is clearly unconstitutional under current law—Roe v. Wade and its successor case, Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey, recognize a right to choose abortion until fetal viability, which is at roughly 24 weeks. To uphold Mississippi’s law, the Supreme Court’s conservative justices have two options: They can ditch the viability line or get rid of Roe altogether.
Today’s oral argument signaled that the Court is poised to reverse Roe outright when it decides Dobbs, probably sometime in June or early July. That would be one of the most significant reversals of Supreme Court precedent in American history. Roe v. Wade has been the law for 50 years.”-
This story from The Washington Post summarizes the politicizing impacts that Trump-appointee Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett have had on the Supreme Court and its dramatic departure from their sworn statements at their Senate nomination hearings.
Trump’s Supreme Court Nominees Show Why They are Pivotal to the Future of Abortion Rights
“Much of Wednesday’s hearing focused on the concept of “stare decisis,” the idea that courts should respect and follow past decisions. The right to abortion before fetal viability was established in 1973 and reaffirmed by the court in 1992.
During his contentious 2018 confirmation process, Kavanaugh won vital support from Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), an abortion rights supporter, in part because she said he had privately reassured her that Roe was ‘settled law.’
On Wednesday, Kavanaugh listed more than a half-dozen major decisions in which the court had reversed its previous positions. The list included groundbreaking decisions about gay rights and school desegregation.
‘If you think about some of the most important cases, the most consequential cases in this court’s history, there’s a string of them where the cases overruled precedent,’ Kavanaugh said in an exchange with Julie Rikelman, the lawyer representing Mississippi’s sole abortion clinic, Jackson Women’s Health.
‘If we think that the prior precedents are seriously wrong, he added, why isn’t the proper approach to ‘not stick with those precedents in the same way that all those other cases didn’t?
Some thoughts:
Gorsuch’s comments and questions at the hearing were consistent with apparent readiness either to limit or consider outright overturning of Roe, the latter an overt goal of the state of Mississippi’s case that’s been changed and added since the initial filing of the suit.
After a brief nod to the idea of stare decisis, Justice Coney Barrett — a devout conservative Catholic, full-time working mother of seven — presented comments and questions with an increasingly bizarre thrust. She suggested that a woman’s basic bodily autonomy and freedom to decide what is best for her own life and family would not be impaired or eliminated by a state’s withholding of her reproductive choices…
She goes on with the jaw-dropping logic that this is because of laws that now “allow” women with unplanned pregnancies to easily forfeit parental rights and responsibilities, and with “safe haven” laws they can just drop off babies at fire stations after being forced to carry and deliver them.
Neither Barrett nor other conservative-appointee justices mentioned, much less addressed, the obvious heavier, different, blatantly unequal-under-the-law burden that breezily cavalier “option” places on women who unlike Barrett are not politically powerful, economically privileged (or, in many cases, white.)
From my vantage point listening to audio of the hearing on TV news, Rikelman and U.S. Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar, representing the Biden administration, argued effectively that:
Unlike the precedent-reversals, like Brown vs Board of Education, cited by Kavanaugh that restored or granted individual rights that the precedents were determined to have wrongly blocked, a reversal of stare decisis on Roe v Wade and Casey would wrongly remove, revoke and withhold from American women the protected fundamental individual liberties they rightfully have under Section 1 of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution;
Restriction or banning of abortion was not any part of common law, practice or moral traditions of the United States dating back from colonial times until the 14th Amendment’s passage in the 1860’s.
Rikelman and Prelogar did not mention, although they might have, that from the times of Greek philosopher Aristotle, and affirmed centuries later by Catholic St. Thomas Aquinas and upheld by the Church up through the 1850s, the accepted moral, legal and practical definition of when human life begins was at a perceived viability point of “quickening.”
This was the case even for the Catholic Church so politically opposed today to both abortion and contraception. (And on the latter, at the Wednesday hearing conservative Catholic justices actually presented today’s better contraception practices and options, in Mississippi and elsewhere, to suggest women don’t need, much less have a right to, a choice of whether to terminate a pre-viability pregnancy.) We might hope these justices remember this when supporting bans on federal funding and support for contraception.
Given these overtly religious, deeply personal moral dimensions to these considerations of individual reproductive choices — which Justice Sonya Sotomayor articulated at the hearing — I believe in addition to the 14th Amendment basis, there is a First Amendment, religious-freedom, argument to be made for the rights of individual women to make conscience-based choices over our bodies and reproductive lives.
Finally, and to me most compelling, the pro-choice advocates argued that bodily autonomy is a fundamental element of the individual liberty guaranteed under the Constitution’s 14th Amendment to each woman, in the same sense as to former slaves and other Americans.
Here are some other of the headlines capturing elements of the case:
Supreme Court Seems Poised to Uphold Mississippi’s Abortion Law (From The New York Times.)
The Fate of Roe v Wade In the Hands of the Supreme Court After Spirited Arguments (From The Washington Post).
Roberts Searches for Middle Ground in Abortion Case (NYT)
Fetal Viability, Long an Abortion Dividing Line, Faces a Supreme Court Test (NYT)
And here is a late-arriving column from David Brooks of The New York Times:
Abortion: The Voice of the Ambivalent Majority
As you may recall from many newShrink references — including one in today’s piece on Stephen Sondheim below — Brooks is a journalist and author whose columns and books I value and quote from time to time. And with deeply personal impacts of these matters of reproductive choice, bodily autonomy and the history of Roe v Wade pretty much defining my entire adult life as a woman in America, I readily admit that I’m about as rabidly reactive and emotionally aroused on this issue as I am likely to get about most anything. That said, on first reads this Brooks column makes my teeth hurt as it carries his unfortunate occasional penchant for utterly tone-deaf arrogance. Those multiple “voices of the ambivalent majority” can be better heard if Brooks isn’t effectively silencing them in the process of promoting his own views.
“…To me the crucial question is when does a living organism become a human soul. My intuition is that it’s not a moment, but a process — a process shrouded in divine mystery.
This leaves me in a humdrum political position, I’m afraid — with the roughly half of Americans who want to restrict abortion in some circumstances, but — perhaps because they feel it would be unworkable or wrong — don’t want to ban it totally. Third- and some second-trimester abortions seem increasingly wrong to me, except in extraordinary circumstances. But the first trimester? I don’t know, and therefore I’d defer to each woman’s conscience.”
Brooks presents viable and important points. But they are points that are not his to grant, deny, or “defer to” but rather are inherent, indeed essence, in the word and very concept of choice. That “each woman’s conscience” and its voice has grounded the moral life-choices of us American women for nearly 50 years since Roe.
In my view that very ambivalence Brooks is lamenting, as though it were something new and sudden with the post-Trump political climate, is the blessing and curse of individual choice originally defined in Roe in 1973 and further articulated some 20 years later in Casey.
This very complex, messy thicket of moral, spiritual, intellectual, scientific, medical, societal, political, relational — and for women embodied — considerations is exactly what individual, adult moral choice is. It is breathtakingly patronizing to presume to speak for them, and to preempt those difficult judgments, however “empathetically.”
For time and space considerations that’s all I’m going to say on Brooks, and this enormous issue before the Supreme Court, for now. By all accounts with such an important decision, it will likely be several months of private weighing and consideration process before the Court hands down a decision about next June or July.
In other words,
… well, maybe next year?
If you haven’t already, I highly recommend reading and watching on You Tube some of the many stories, interviews and tributes to complex and legendary talent Stephen Sondheim since his sudden death last week at 91. The New York Times’ obituary linked below is thorough and informative. (And as for so many others, his body of work as soundtrack through much of adult lifetime feels profoundly personal. He’s certainly there in some of those musical ear-worms the psyche regularly serves up for me!)
Here I add my comment on just two additional themes of Sondheim’s life and death, from perspectives of the old journalist and the psychologist in me:
First from the journalist, as two particularly well-written and moving tributes illustrate vividly, Sondheim embodied living-out an intensely awake, soul-engaged, not merely ego-defined, version of our life and life story. (In his book on character David Brooks aptly calls this living in touch with our “eulogy,” not just our “resume,” versions of ourselves.)
In the complexities of both his work and life, from the depth psychological/soul perspective Sondheim demonstrates the conscious, complicated, often paradoxical embrace and dance of both shadow and light. Even now there remains from him an immense awareness, aliveness, and most of all a rare level of psychological maturity and depth.
You might listen for those themes in the quotes I share here — as many as time and space-limitations allow, from two New Yorker pieces so well-done I wish I had written them. (Knowing The New Yorker can be too limited or pricey, both links below are good if you can open them.)
A Farewell to Stephen Sondheim
His legacy is one that will be debated and argued over as long as people care about musical theatre.
(Postscript from Adam Gopnik)
“What most distinguished Mr. Sondheim’s lyrics… was that they were by and large character-driven, often probing explorations into a psyche that expressed emotional ambivalence, anguish or deeply felt conflict…
… Wits who remain famed for wit, from Oscar Wilde to Dorothy Parker, are rarely cynical; just the opposite, they come to us shining with faith and hope, but are too smart to pretend that it’s been rewarded. Sondheim, similarly, was never really sour. He was, instead, consistently bittersweet, like the best, and darkest, dark chocolate.
[Paradoxically]… for all that Sondheim spoke only of character and scene and story, when we listen to his music what we hear is not characters, not scenes, but a long, unwinding, timeless soliloquy, charting a psyche at once unimaginably large-souled and thwarted, with sensitivity and guardedness combined—a wounded talent reaching out beyond itself for love and meaning and, above all, for connection…
…When, on this first sad Saturday morning after his passing, we listen again (and again) to Sondheim’s music, we do not hear his craft or his characters. We hear Steve Sondheim, and we sing, and mourn, the missing man. From American poet-singers, Walt Whitman insisted, we want a song that belongs to the poet and to no one else. Sondheim’s is and does and always will.”
🦋💙
Stephen Sondheim Taught Me How to Be a Person
(From Michael Schulman of The New Yorker Culture Desk.)
I borrowed his cast albums from my school library so many times that the librarians finally let me keep them.
“My family was watching old home movies, in a post-Thanksgiving time warp, when I found out that Stephen Sondheim had died, at ninety-one. In the jump from one VHS tape to another, I had just seen myself go from seven to fourteen: the years in which Sondheim taught me how to be a person. First, it was ‘Into the Woods,’ the gateway Sondheim musical for most people born after 1980—a gateway to adulthood, really, just as its characters Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood, and Jack (of the beanstalk) go into the woods as wishful storybook characters and come out understanding disappointment, regret, compromise, loss. ‘Isn’t it nice to know a lot?’ Little Red Riding Hood sings, having survived ingestion by a wolf. ‘And a little bit not.’
It was the apple from the tree of knowledge, that show. You couldn’t unbite it…
…In his great, long life, Sondheim did for the Broadway musical what he did for me: brought the art form from adolescence into maturity, infusing it with complicated, sometimes curdled emotions that Broadway hadn’t dared to sing about before. This was, in large part, his way of honoring and overthrowing his mentor, Oscar Hammerstein II, whom Sondheim met as a child, around when his parents divorced. ‘If he’d been a geologist,’ Sondheim liked to say, ‘I would have been a geologist.’…
That time jump, [between Sondheim and the famed, rosy hued musicals of his mentor] not coincidentally, spans America’s loss of innocence, from the postwar era to Vietnam: Hammerstein’s bright golden haze on the meadow [lyric from Oklahoma!] had become a miasma.
….’Company,’ which opened in 1970, was his break from linear plot, tidy resolutions, and romantic platitudes: it’s about a man who wants to be single and in love at the same time.
… He was a geologist who dug deeper into the psychic soil.
…Words were the way he got there, and his mastery of them put “show tunes” on the level of any literary genre. His characters were imbued with panoramic intelligence, a self-awareness that played out in dazzling internal rhymes that landed like triple axels…
Uncertainty, self-delusion, disillusionment: Sondheim knew that they could be as deeply felt as the primary-color emotions.
His characters sang to think and to feel at the same time…”
… One of Sondheim’s defining gifts was that he could set ambivalence to song…” [Hmmm, maybe David Brooks could practice on some song lyrics!]
🦋💙
now about that cake-icing…
I’ll leave you with a brief call for your input or comments on a fun and somewhat seasonal cultural trend I’m examining and will explain further in posts coming up this holiday season. For now:
If you are, or have ever been, a fan, skeptical observer, rabid enthusiast or vehement hater of The Great British Baking Show, please email or otherwise let me know! Think I’m about the last person on the planet even to see the show, and it’s in many ways an odd fit for me. But psychologically I’m finding the show’s cultural phenomenon, language, imagery, personalities and group dynamics fun and fascinating.
Which might account for this dream-snippet image and song-lyric of a few mornings ago: A guy is serving me one of those elaborate “show-stopper” designed cakes that have intricate colored patterns somehow etched into the cake batter like encasing walls, then all kinds of edible sculpture finishing touches on top. I wake up giggling as he bursts into song, which is “…everything’s coming up rosettes…”!
Not until coffee and reading a local newspaper tribute piece on Sondheim do I realize or remember that he of, course, wrote words and music for “Gypsy,” including the real version of this well known song so often belted out as though simply robust and happy. Everything’s Coming Up Roses, and the play itself, are actually one of theatre’s most complex and darkly ironic, deeply psychological takes on both robust and shadow sides, the good-bad-ugly of the universal, archetypal mother… and motherhood itself.
(See? The guy shows up everywhere!)
And, that is all I have! Talk to you next week.
🦋💙tish
… it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
the signals we give — yes or no, or maybe —
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.
— William Stafford, “A Ritual to Read to Each Other”
Post Notes:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/26/theater/stephen-sondheim-dead.amp.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/01/health/omicron-first-us-case-california.html?smid=em-share
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/02/us/minnesota-omicron-case.html?referringSource=articleShare
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/12/01/supreme-court-mississippi-abortion-live-updates/
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/postscript/farewell-to-stephen-sondheim
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/stephen-sondheim-taught-me-how-to-be-a-person