Sumptions

     Remember that old mantra of "never assume?"  Corporate talks would later break down the word into "never assume" as it will make an "ass" of "u" and "me."  It's a good thing they didn't use "presume" or a lot if HR people would be struggling to find a catchy phrase.  What's the difference?  Well, I presume you already know (or should that be, I assume you already know?).  Then again, we can be conned into thinking we know, but then we're entering a world of con-sume.  Ah, those assumptions, and presumptions, and consumptions...so let's dive into the Supreme Court (wait, what??).

     Author Sarah Isgur wrote in her book, Last Branch Standing, that despite what it may seem in today's world --as she notes, what seems a slanted conservative court that wipes away voting rights and a few basic freedoms-- the Supreme Court is actually right in line with what it's always been.  More to the point, the court has been packed with liberal leaning justices a majority of its life.  Can it be true, you ask?  Here's some of her opening remarks: Let's run some numbers from the 2024-2025 term.  For starters 42 percent of the Court's cases were decided unanimously.  In 2013-14, that number got as high as 64 percent, but it usually hovers in the mid-40s.  When you think about the fact that the Court takes only around sixty of the legally trickiest cases a year that have usually divided lower courts around the country, deciding any of them unanimously is surprising, but 42 percent should shock and delight.  Next, ten decisions, or 15 percent of divided cases, were decided 6-3.  But as we just saw, not all 6-3 decisions are created equal.  The court divided 6-3 with Justices Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson dissenting 9 percent of the time and with Justices Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch dissenting 6 percent of the time.  If you include the 5-4 and the 6-3 opinions together, all three of the Court's liberal justices dissented together in 15 percent of the cases.  But if you look at the 5-4 and 6-3 cases that had only conservatives in dissent, that's 15 percent of the cases too  Most of those closely divided cases --70 percent-- were a mixed bag of conservatives and liberals on both sides.  Cats and dogs living together.  Mass hysteria!  In the last twenty years, just over 90 percent of the cases were decided with at least one liberal justice in the majority...Yet it's true that the Court now has six justices who were nominated by Republican presidents.  To many, that seems imbalanced and unfair.  For decades, the Court was 5-4, and now that balance has been disturbed.  But that's not quite true either.  Imbalanced is the rule, not the exception.  From 1938 to 1970 --three decades-- Democratic appointees made up a majority of the Court, including nearly a decade when all nine justices had been nominated by a Democratic president.  Hmm, throwing out a few of your assumptions yet?  So jump now to bump stocks.  Remember those, an attachment that allows repeated firing of an automatic weapon and one which was effectively used in the Las Vegas hotel shooting nearly 10 years ago? (a bump stock allows an AR-15 to fire 400-600 rounds per minute)  When Republicans blocked the ban back then (due to not wanting Obama's Affordable Care Act to pass), Obama passed the ban as an executive order, one which Trump immediately repealed once he got into office.  So back to Congress, who now controlled both houses and with Trimp in his 2nd term, again dealt with the issue and hesitated (fearing a backlash of 2nd Amendment voters) so Trump stepped in and cited an obscure ATF act and reinstated the bump stock ban (with an executive order, the one he had earlier repealed).  One problem: the executive branch cannot write (or re-write) criminal law.  But Congress didn't act, Trump did (and took credit), and the Supreme Court followed the rule of law and rejected his order.  Headlines came out and said: "Supreme Court Strikes Down Trump-Era Ban on Bump Stocks for Firearms."  Sounds just like the slanted Supreme Court we visualized, except it was the headline which was slanted.  The correct headline, noted the author, should have read: "Supreme Court Says Only Congress Can Ban Bump Stocks," or "Supreme Court Says President Can't Unilaterally Change Gun Control Law to Help Political Allies Avoid Tough Votes in Congress."  Now, do you view the Court's decisions any differently?  Pause at this point because I have to admit that I skimmed a lot of this 987-page book on the Supreme Court.*  As interesting and as captivating as her writing was, the author's diving into the background of each justice, how clerks work, and on and on, got me thinking that unless I was really into the legal minutia of this branch of government (which I wasn't), there were far better topics for me to explore...like the queer world.

      Okay, I admit that I know next to nothing about any of "that" world, as stigmatized as even I make it sound.  Gay, lesbian, bi, trans: those are terms of which I have a basic idea of their meanings, although I still find the term "lesbian" misogynistic (why can the term "gay" represent both men and women, but calling two men "lesbian" is basically not accepted?).  But throw in gender-neutral, queer, or non-binary, and I am at a loss, as in all over the place, which may be the actual definition...who knows?  Is polygamy related to polyamory? (calling oneself poly is another commonly heard definition)   I do live in Utah, after all, and while the practice of polygamy is downplayed, there are still towns that accept and welcome polygamists, wrote The Royal Tour).  Back in my day, calling someone queer just meant that someone was different, whether that meant gay or handicapped or uncoordinated.  The generation before me was less mean-spirited and queer simply meant just odd or different (the Rogers & Hammerstein play Carousel had the hit song, You're a Queer One, Julie Jordan, sung twice in the play, both by the male and female leads, the male character sometimes played on Broadway by John Raitt, the father of Bonnie Raitt).  But those niceties appear to have vanished  as the pendulum continues it swing in the opposite direction (wrote USA Today..."nearly 800 anti-trans bills have been filed across 43 states").  But nature being queer is all around us, wrote Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian in her book, Forest Euphoria: The binary rules in our culture --male versus female, white versus Black, straight versus queer-- are used to make a hierarchy.  Within each of the categories, there is a set of traits that is seen as more desirable, more aspirational, and a set of traits that is seen as weaker, unseemly, disgusting, or degenerate.  The people with the "normal" traits are positioned as superior, dominant to the "deviant" groups.  By focusing on the ways in which one group differs from another, a distance is created between the superior group and the subjugated group, and within that space, domination and violence occur...Human exceptionalism --the myth that nature is there to be dominated, that the human species is superior-- has alienated humans from nature, literally paving the way for the destruction of our companions...I like blurring the line between human and nature because I believe we, as a species, have become profoundly lonely in our self-enforced isolation.  And it's because of this that the planet is spinning through a devastating loss in biodiversity...The binary rules that exist in human society are challenged by the ubiquity of queerness in nature.  From fungi with more than two sexes to same-sex partnerships between crows to the inter-sex bodies of snails and eels, we find an inspiring array of diversity in our fellow species.  Ultimately, queerness invites us all, regardless of our identities, to be more undefined, unclear, transitional, merging, interdependent, cooperative, and nonhierarchical -- a very fungal way of being.  With all  of that said, what usage of "queer" would you pick?

     Headlines and political media (and AI) can slant out views to directions which we never intended.  Take this from Jeremy Howard, a board trustee with the conservation site, Helping Rhinos: ...there is a tendency to assume that everyone knows that rhinos are an endangered species.  I had several conversations with people who were going on safari who had no idea that there was an issue!  And they were very shocked to hear about the threats through poaching.  Or how Trump and his family pitched his "memecoin" and quietly made $100 million in trading fees, while over 800,000 investors lost over $2 billion (the "coin" is now nearly worthless, according to graphs by Trading View).  It reminded me of the "influencers" paid by Polymarket to tell their video viewers that they had made over $900,000 in "easy money" when in fact they had actually lost $166,000 (the bets were simulated but this --as with the losses-- was not revealed to the viewers on TikTok, wrote the Wall Street Journal).  Or this from my local City Weekly: ...the proportion of Americans who read for pleasure has gone from 28% in 2004 to 16% in 2023, according to the National Endowment for the Arts.  These steep declines are true in all groups, young and old, regardless of education or gender.  But they are most stark among children and teens, the very population ostensibly affected by school book bans.  In 1994, 35% of 13-year-olds reported they read for fun every day.  By 2023, that number crashed to just 14%, according to federal data.  Before Bob Bijou closed his Two Neat store in Mill Valley, CA. (after 39 years in business), he wrote: It's a crazy, mixed up world.  What is up is down, what is down is up.  What is sweet is sour, what is sour is sweet.  What is left is right, what is right is wrong.  What's the saving grace?  What's going to get us through?  Humor, kindness, and good deeds.  And voting.

    I threw in all those tidbits because I wanted to note yet another bad assumption of mine: that Stephen King wasn't funny.  After all, how funny can horror be?  The Shining, Carrie, Misery, It, The Shawshank Redemption. Wait, he wrote that last one? (yes)  So it was a pleasure, some 25 years later, discover that he was indeed as good at writing humor as he was at writing horror.  His book, On Writing, takes you on a whirlwind journey of unexpected success (Carrie got finished only after his wife uncrumpled all the pages he had thrown into the wastebasket, read them, and told him, "you've got something here; you should keep working at it.")  So he starts with his childhood, back when he was seven and he and his brother were too far from the house for him to do a proper #2.  Do it in the woods like cowboys did, said his brother.  Wrote King: ...I was enchanted by the idea of shitting like a cowboy.  I pretended I was Hopalong Cassidy, squatting in the underbrush with my gun drawn, not to be caught unawares even at such a personal moment.  I did my business, and took care of the cleanup as my older brother had suggested, carefully wiping my ass with big handfuls of shiny green leaves.  These turned out to be poison ivy.  Two days later I was bright red from the backs of my knees to my shoulder blades.  My penis was spared, but my testicles turned into stoplights.  My ass itched all the way up to my ribcage, it seemed.  Yet worst of all was the hand I had wiped with; it swelled to the size of Mickey Mouse's hand after Donald Duck had bopped it with a hammer.  King actually does talk about the craft of writing, even diving into grammar and vocabulary, all with the same sense of lightheartedness, as in this about active and passive voices (what the heck??): I won't say there's no place for the passive tense.  Suppose for instance, a fellow dies in the kitchen but ends up somewhere else.  The body was carried from the kitchen and placed on the parlor sofa is a fair way to put this, although "was carried" and "was placed" still irks the shit out of me.  I accept them but I don't embrace them.  What I would embrace is Freddy and Myra carried the body out of the kitchen and laid it on the parlor sofa.  Why does the body have to be the subject of the sentence, anyway?  It's dead, for Christ's sake!  Fuhgeddaboutit!

     So jump to another assumption about ourseves: that we're still able to do most things.  Maybe not as well, and maybe it takes a little longer; but who doesn't watch that sports game or that debate or that confrontation and silently tell ourselves that we would've done nearly as well when we were in our prime.  Okay, maybe not at the "pro" level, but you know, good enough to stay in the ring.  Those two phrases stay with us -- a) I could've been a contender; and b) it's never too late to learn.  Along those lines, that of tackling something new and seizing the day while you are still able, one challenge might be to venture over to Hong Kong to learn the art of using bamboo strips and poles to build scaffolding, an art that may be disappearing, but not for the reason you may think.  The photos show the intricate tying of those bamboo strips to secure each pole, piece after piece (these photos were featured long ago in National Geographic).  No real knots or ties, just wrapping bamboo strips in an intricate manner that holds weight without slipping.  Now imagine climbing and securing such pieces, story after story, higher and higher.  This centuries-old technique of scaffolding has survived hurricanes and remained standing while similar steel scaffolding collapsed and toppled (the bamboo scaffolding is generally secured to the structure for extra stability).  Better than a ladder, right?  And it looks fairly easy to learn (not).  But ask yourself as you glance at the latter picture, would you trust that bamboo that high up?  Did I mention that one grows more afraid of heights as one gets older?

Typical bamboo scaffolding throughout Hong Kong construction...

     Perhaps another assumption we all carry is that our life will go on, even as our presumption (which is based more on fact vs. a hope or a guess) tells us that the truth is that we, too, will die.  Just not yet, and not today (another assumption).  Let me highlight three people who may have had more reason to feel this way than either you or me.  First, Mary Elizabeth Banning, a dedicated studier of mushrooms and other fungi (to the point of cataloging and painting elaborate drawings of her discoveries), only to be shunned by the scientific community because she was a woman.  Even though most of her time was taken up by caring for her mother and older sister, she continued to try and get her work published, even approaching Charles Peck in 1868, he being NY's well-known state botanist at the time.  But as her health and money began to dwindle, she was forced to get rid of everything, even shipping all of her research and drawings to Peck --a "safe place--" asking that he confirm its receipt and if so, could he write her with any feedback.  He never responded.  Banning died homeless, and her life faded into disappointment (her extensive works and drawings remain unpublished).  Second comes George Forster, a polymath featured in the book, The Traveler, and one who traveled with Captain Cook and wrote not only about his travels but about the racism and sexism he witnessed during the voyage, all of which also went nowhere (he died at age 39).  And finally to Robert Thurman (father of Uma Thurman), who, at 24, became the first Westerner to be ordained as a monk by the Dalai Lama.  Four years earlier he was changing a tire on his car when the tire iron flew out of his grip and nearly killed him, causing him to question how quickly life could end.  That insight sent him to both Asia and India to study Buddhism, and he is credited by many scholars for introducing the faith to the US.  On his webpage he wrote: I invite you to awaken to the infinite life you already have, no matter what your worldview.  Thurman passed away at age 84...

     We can consume all the junk our screens throw at us, and assume that what it and others are "telling" us is true (i.e. AI).  But when it comes to the larger question of life itself, our assumptions can fall away with a simple trip on a stair that twists our ankle, or a small breeze that blows a speck of dust in our eye, or a wasp that stings you so fleetingly that all you see is its tiny yellow body flying away.  Said naturalist and author, Diane Ackerman, once said: I often marvel how something like hydrogen, the simplest atom, forge in some early chaos of the universe, could lead to us and the gorgeous force we call consciousness.. If a mind is just a few pounds of blood, dream, and electric, how does it manage to contemplate itself, worry about its soul, do time-and-motion studies, admire the shy hooves of a goat, know that it will die, enjoy all the grand an lesser mayhem of the heart?  What assumptions can we make to explain all that?  Magic?  A cosmic entity?  Religion?  Imagination?  As you can see by the pictures of old advertisements that dot this post, a quick glance may not explain what we are really seeing.  Is that what Ackerman is saying, that we should take our time and look deeper?   Or should I take solace in what a piece in The New Yorker had to say about keeping "a philosophy of hope in a darkening age": The seduction of despair can be intense, whether on the personal or the political level.  But the fact that most of our hopes remain unrealized should not revoke the reality of our fitful, painful progress.

     So back to Stephen King.  Dare I mention that you add to his extensive library of writing, The Life of Chuck?  If you haven't already seen the film version, take a peek.  It may give you more than a few things to think about regarding how much we take for granted and how we assume that little will change.  But I digress, for Stephen King did offer actual writing advice in his book which was titled, after all, On Writing: I am approaching the heart of this book with two themes, both simple.  The first is that good writing consists of mastering the fundamentals (vocabulary, grammar, the elements of style) and then filling the third level of the toolbox with the right instruments.  The second is that while it is impossible to make a competent writer out of a bad writer, and while it is equally impossible to make a great writer out of a good one, it is possible, with lots of hard work, dedication, and timely help, to make a good writer out of a merely competent one.  I'm afraid this idea is rejected by lots of critics and plenty of writing teachers, as well. Many of these are liberals in their politics but crustaceans in their chosen fields...So yes, I expect to be accused by some of promoting a brainless and happy Horatio Alger philosophy, defending my own less-than-spotless reputation while I'm at it, and of encouraging people who are " just not our sort, old chap" to apply for membership at the country club.  I guess I can live with that.  But before we go on, let me repeat my basic premise: if you're a bad writer, no one can help you become a good one, or even a competent one.  If you're good and want to be great...fuhgeddaboutit.  And there you have it: my hopes on what I could accomplish with writing this blog...fuhgeddaboutit.  Rats...I could've been a contender.

                           

       

*So the author does a great job of explaining how ordinary and extraordinary the Supreme Court works, although just that god-like term --supreme-- has me thinking about lifetime positions and results that are not to be questioned, even on Athenian shores by ancient gods.  Still, this not-so-trivial legal point caught my eye and knocked down another assumption I had made about the Court's decisions.(note the capital letter in "court" so as not to offend those offsprings of Zeus): A little understood fact is that the Supreme Court decides questions, not cases.  That means that oral arguments aren't really about the case at hand, which might seem odd.  I find barely anyone understands this -- even in the media.  So let me try to explain it here.  When the Supreme Court decides to grant a writ of certiorari to hear a case, it is actually only agreeing to decide a question the case presents -- literally called "the question presented," or the QP, to Court followers.  The Supreme Court doesn't decide whether Donald Trump has immunity from being indicted by Special Council Jack Smith for his role in the leadup to January 6.  The QP they agreed to decide was "whether and if so to what extent does a former President enjoy presidential immunity from criminal prosecution for conduct alleged to involve official acts during his tenure in office."  This questions-not-cases job description is why hypotheticals are common at oral argument.  The justices aren't trying to resolve the case before them --many if not most Supreme Court decisions will not resolve the case at hand-- they're trying to come up with a rule that can apply to all the cases yet to come.  She also noted that of the 1.3 million practicing lawyers, fewer than 200 will have the chance to present oral arguments before the Supreme Court.  And I should also add that the practical side of her book actually ended after 768 pages, with much of the rest of the book giving advice on if you should be a lawyer (for the most part, the answer is no, perhaps exemplified by the 10,000+ federal lawyers who have left their positions since Trump's 2nd term, wrote The New York Times).  987 pages of shattering assumptions...or was the QP presumptions?