Title : What's that stench in the courtroom?
link : What's that stench in the courtroom?
What's that stench in the courtroom?
Whatever happened to dead baby jokes? I thought, when I saw the headline for Jonathan Turley's column at The Hill: "What's that you smell in the Supreme Court?"She said many abortion opponents, including the sponsors of the Mississippi abortion law at issue, hoped her three new colleagues would allow for the reversal or reduction of Roe v. Wade. With Justices Brett Kavanaugh, Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett listening, she asked, “Will this institution survive the stench” created from such political machinations — and then answered: “I don’t see how it is possible."
Of course, when justices begin to declare their disgust at the very thought of overturning precedent, there is another detectable scent in the courtroom. Indeed, it felt like a scene from Tennessee Williams's play, “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.” The only thing missing was the play’s central character, “Big Daddy” Pollitt, asking: “What's that smell in this room? … Didn’t you notice a powerful and obnoxious odor of mendacity in this room? There ain’t nothin’ more powerful than the odor of mendacity.”
Of course, when people detect bad odors, there's another famous line that comes to mind: "He who smelt it dealt it."
If we're going to detect lies, and characterize lies as smells, there are lies all around, possibly lies all the way down. If you think the other side's lies — however you define lies, perhaps broadly — smell bad, what about your own lies? Does your shit not stink?
Here's a famous dead baby joke from the 1960s:
What's harder to unload, a truck full of bowling balls or a truck full of dead babies?
A truck full of bowling balls because you can't use a pitchfork.
That's quoted in the scholarly article "The Dead Baby Joke Cycle" by Alan Dundes (Western Folklore). One of the follow-on jokes to that one is:
What's worse to be buried under: bowling balls or dead babies?
Bowling balls — you can't eat your way out.
Why were we telling jokes like that in the 1960s and into the 1970s? Why was this overt callousness attractive, and why did it fade out? Jokes play off of anxiety, but maybe after you've laughed enough, you've overcome the anxiety, so there's nothing to cause laughter. What's that smell in this room? If you've been in that room long enough, you can't smell it at all.
Sotomayor predicted a stench that would arise from the new decision — the overruling of Roe. Sotomayor seems to be saying that her new colleagues are disgusting — deplorable — they stink. Or they will stink, if they use their current majority to rewrite the work of an earlier majority that she doesn't find disgusting.
Another clue about what's that smell came from Justice Breyer, who said:
"[T]he problem with a super case like this, the rare case, the watershed case, where people are really opposed on both sides and they really fight each other, is they're going to be ready to say, no, you're just political, you're just politicians. And that's what kills us as an American institution.... and that they say is a reason why... when you get a case like that, you better be damn sure that the normal stare considerations, stare decisis overrulings are really there in spades, double, triple, quadruple, and then they go through and show they're not."
That is, by the way, the only point in the transcript where anyone uses the verb "to kill." There's no truckload of dead babies on the premises. It's all about the reputation of the Supreme Court as an institution. If it's ever discovered that it's "just political" — key word, "just" — then it is killed! And the stench is the rotting corpse of the dead Supreme Court. Dead, presumably, because even though everyone already knew that the Court was political — is there an older accusation against it? — it had some element that was not political, making it not just political.
She said many abortion opponents, including the sponsors of the Mississippi abortion law at issue, hoped her three new colleagues would allow for the reversal or reduction of Roe v. Wade. With Justices Brett Kavanaugh, Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett listening, she asked, “Will this institution survive the stench” created from such political machinations — and then answered: “I don’t see how it is possible."
Of course, when justices begin to declare their disgust at the very thought of overturning precedent, there is another detectable scent in the courtroom. Indeed, it felt like a scene from Tennessee Williams's play, “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.” The only thing missing was the play’s central character, “Big Daddy” Pollitt, asking: “What's that smell in this room? … Didn’t you notice a powerful and obnoxious odor of mendacity in this room? There ain’t nothin’ more powerful than the odor of mendacity.”
Of course, when people detect bad odors, there's another famous line that comes to mind: "He who smelt it dealt it."
If we're going to detect lies, and characterize lies as smells, there are lies all around, possibly lies all the way down. If you think the other side's lies — however you define lies, perhaps broadly — smell bad, what about your own lies? Does your shit not stink?
Here's a famous dead baby joke from the 1960s:
What's harder to unload, a truck full of bowling balls or a truck full of dead babies?
A truck full of bowling balls because you can't use a pitchfork.
That's quoted in the scholarly article "The Dead Baby Joke Cycle" by Alan Dundes (Western Folklore). One of the follow-on jokes to that one is:
What's worse to be buried under: bowling balls or dead babies?
Bowling balls — you can't eat your way out.
Why were we telling jokes like that in the 1960s and into the 1970s? Why was this overt callousness attractive, and why did it fade out? Jokes play off of anxiety, but maybe after you've laughed enough, you've overcome the anxiety, so there's nothing to cause laughter. What's that smell in this room? If you've been in that room long enough, you can't smell it at all.
Sotomayor predicted a stench that would arise from the new decision — the overruling of Roe. Sotomayor seems to be saying that her new colleagues are disgusting — deplorable — they stink. Or they will stink, if they use their current majority to rewrite the work of an earlier majority that she doesn't find disgusting.
Another clue about what's that smell came from Justice Breyer, who said:
"[T]he problem with a super case like this, the rare case, the watershed case, where people are really opposed on both sides and they really fight each other, is they're going to be ready to say, no, you're just political, you're just politicians. And that's what kills us as an American institution.... and that they say is a reason why... when you get a case like that, you better be damn sure that the normal stare considerations, stare decisis overrulings are really there in spades, double, triple, quadruple, and then they go through and show they're not."
That is, by the way, the only point in the transcript where anyone uses the verb "to kill." There's no truckload of dead babies on the premises. It's all about the reputation of the Supreme Court as an institution. If it's ever discovered that it's "just political" — key word, "just" — then it is killed! And the stench is the rotting corpse of the dead Supreme Court. Dead, presumably, because even though everyone already knew that the Court was political — is there an older accusation against it? — it had some element that was not political, making it not just political.
Thus articles What's that stench in the courtroom?
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