This Week In American Dystopia #3
It's been a couple of weeks, sorry for the content blackout.
It’s tough writing in the Wasteland, especially when you also have to work your full-time job, tend the near-acre you live on, dispose of a dead raccoon under the deck…you get the picture. Now that I’m finally caught up on my life, I’ve got some room to write again, so let’s dive in.
Kristi Noem Is Auditioning For The Role of Seneca Crane In The Hunger Games
I mean, we could also turn to Dan Killian from The Running Man, which is sort of apropos. The Running Man takes place in 2025, where the United States has become a violent dystopia, and, well, we’re quickly closing in on the violent part. The dystopia is already here, sickeningly enough, especially for anyone that isn’t descended from the masters of apartheid.
DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, the repugnant dog-murdering former governor of South Dakota, wants to have a reality show where immigrants compete to win immediate citizenship. Supposedly, the “losers” would gain all sorts of prizes from retailers, but let’s be real: “ICE Barbie” would have them all deported to El Salvador. This idea is aimed squarely at winning further favor with the molting former host of The Apprentice sitting in the Oval Office, and is further proof of her unyielding ambition overriding any sense of morality.
There isn’t much I could say about this that would convey the disgusting feeling it gives me reading about this, so I’ll leave it to you to fill in those blanks in your head. It is, though, one more piece of evidence that in the effort to win Donald Trump’s favor, the wannabe successors are often meaner, shallower, and desperate than he is. This is not even close to the worst story of the week, though…
Georgia’s Abortion Ban Has Wrought New Horror
Does anybody remember Terri Schiavo? She was kept alive in a persistent vegetative state for fifteen years, a length of time that was needlessly doubled by her parents fighting her husband at every turn when, after eight years of seeing her in a zombie-like condition, he began the legal effort to allow Terri die with dignity. This legal war, in the second ascendant period of evangelicalist politics, ultimately led to then-Florida Governor Jeb Bush, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, and President George W. Bush all intervening to try and prevent the courts from allowing Michael Schiavo to remove the life support from his wife. It was a massive overreach of power that wrested away any dignity that Terri Schiavo may have possessed, and used her comatose body to push their “right to life” agenda to a bizarre new area. It was the height of “small government except when it comes to your body” hypocrisy, and I believed conservatives wouldn’t ever go back there.
I was sadly, tragically wrong.
I found myself thinking about Terri Schiavo when I read the story this week of Adriana Smith, a young woman who suffered a horrific cerebral hemorrhage from blood clots while in the first trimester of her pregnancy. Nine weeks in, to be precise. She is 30 years old, and was a nurse at Emory University Hospital. That same hospital has cared for her ever since—and by cared, I mean keeping her body alive while her brain function is nonexistent. The hospital says they have no choice because of Georgia’s abortion ban. Her family is appalled, angry, and lacking legal recourse because of the radical right-wing takeover of the courts.
In recent years, women have seen a radical, patriarchal movement take shape that demands they bear children, no matter the consequences. It views women as nothing more than incubators or breeders, whose lives are less valuable than those of the men who impose these demands by destroying legal protections for women. Georgia’s abortion ban, the downstream consequence of the Dobbs decision by the Supreme Court in 2022, has now brought us to this grotesque spectacle. Adriana Smith’s spirit, her soul, has long departed, but her living corpse is tied to machines so the fetus that was nothing more than unformed cells when she suffered the hemorrhage can be allowed to grow to maturity. Her family cannot grieve her death, cannot provide her any dignity, because they have to wait until late fall before the fetus, should it survive, is cut out of her, just one more indignity in a world that already puts women, especially Black women, though an Olympic Games amount of it.
A government and a movement that would do this to a woman in the name of “protecting life” could easily do this to anyone for other purposes. Organ harvesting, for example. It’s not a reach. I think we can look at everything that’s happened in the past few years and say quite safely that it’s not a reach to believe this would happen. It’s not a reach to believe that this tawdry spectacle will one day be used for surrogacy, either. In a world where the truth is being distorted more than ever by disinformation and technological warlords, where our rights and liberties are backsliding to the Middle Ages, and where the leaders of this country are panicked that not enough white babies are being born, turning comatose young women into unwilling incubators is the logical outcome of these fascistic thugs.
Jeremiah Wright wasn’t wrong in that infamous sermon.
Car Bomb Explodes Outside an IVF Center
I’m kind of glad I waited until Saturday to write this, because boy, does it ever tie in with the previous story. When the Alabama Supreme Court ruled over a year ago that abortion laws prevent in-vitro fertilization (IVF) from being used in that state, there was a massive uproar, big enough that then-candidate Donald Trump even said that IVF should continue to be legal and available everywhere. But in that decision, there was a pure distillation of the extreme beliefs that evangelicalist politics inculcates in its true believers. Unfertilized eggs, sperm, all of it is subject to their beliefs. It’s why the battle over the legality of birth control, or sexual behavior, is not even remotely close to cooling down.
And I strongly belief, based upon the reports of the police in Palm Springs, that today’s car bombing was a new shot being fired in this war by those holding these extremist beliefs. It is appalling that a majority of white women voted for a candidate who elevates extremists to power. It is akin to signing one’s own death warrant, because much like with the murderers of abortion providers, what is extremist now eventually becomes accepted by just enough people in evangelicalist politics to where those behind it have the opportunity to take power. Certain states are far more susceptible than others (looking at Oklahoma, fast turning into Gilead, or the aforementioned Alabama), but that’s where they get their start.
These extremists have their own legal pipeline now, starting in the Northern District of Texas, then the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, and from there to the Supreme Court. These lower courts have been taking cases they don’t have jurisdiction over and issuing rulings that baldly contradict the law and the Constitution, just to see how far they can successfully push the envelope.
“Slippery slope” arguments have always been fraught, with about five sides to them, but for those of us who have said for decades that it’s very real, take a look around. Established case law and legal precedent dating back decades or centuries have been overthrown by these hostile, politically-motivated judges who wish to establish some, or all, of the scenarios outlined above. We are a nation under perpetual minority rule because we no longer follow the actual guidelines provided by the Founders, who believed we would regularly update and amend our Constitution. They called it a living document, but instead of following that guidance, we are shackled to a system that insists on trying to interpret what they would have done instead of following their guidance to not rely on the past and create our own future. It’s absurd, and it’s just one part of many that brought us to this point, where the freedom they fought for may soon be extinguished.