The Scourge of Henry

The man who - perhaps fittingly - made his last, and perhaps ultimate, appearance at Davos World Economic Forum this week, had only just escaped the clutches of the Nazi state in 1938, at a time when its territorial ambitions were as limited as its bloodlust was teetered (and limited to scions of its ruling party, its immature, unruly military wing, and thousands of Basque subjects of still-emerging Head of State general Franco) as Prime Minister Chamberlain - also just appointed - made a Faustian, or possibly Trumpian, "deal" with Chancellor Hitler over not only the disputed, and mainly German, Sudetenland but selling off Czechoslovakia as a whole in exchange for said Chancellor's autograph. Now, at the ripe age of ninety-eight and celebrating, presumably in Switzerland, a mighty riper ninety-nine tomorrow (thus entering his hundredth year) the old bastard and first European-born Secretary of State (preceding the pre-Munich-Czechoslovakian-born, and recently predeceased Madam Kunin) proposed to end the emerging security crisis-turned-disaster over Ukraine by a similar Faustian, or Munich-ian proposal of ceding Crimea, formerly Russian and more lately a claimant for independence, and its majority-Russian population, into the clutches of very-current and mighty active, for a near-septuagenarian and in age of being Henry's child, president Putin.  

In this, and in giving the Devil his due, I deem him right. Whereas the dilemma already postulated in his twenties, of a world where one - and then two - superpowers, armed with immensely destructive weapons well beyond the range of their own destructions, mankind (as it was then, and even 20 years later) must finally learn to behave. In light of this knowledge, matured into wisdom and praxis, the price of nuclear war over parts of Ukraine would seem a more ridiculous price than Korea, or Hungary, or even sweet Berlin. How such a handover, of undeniable Munich-esque proportions, is to occur - and not stretch beyond the Sudeten analogy into "Ukrainian Ukraine", for just as sure as Crimea may be just as, or decidedly more Russian, so Mr. Putin's speech is irredentist dogma in its denial of the Ukrainian nation undeniably, if regrettable to some, developing out of the eternities of geographical and topographical differences, centuries of linguistic, cultural, ethnic recompositions and realities of frontier life, and now decades of semi-self rule. His speech is as unlikely to vindicate a (self-assured) Russian spirit in independent Ukraine as he is to be elected its president, too, after a free multi-party election, or his stooges Pushilin, Pasechnik, Balitsky or Saldo, which itself would require the ejection of every Russian under arms from its space. Crimea is different, not only for security purposes but the popular sentiments "on the ground", so firmly expressed by the referendum of the rifle when green men overran it so effectively in 2014, and then pulled the trousers from the ostensible order of the past quarter century. While the efficiency, and subsequent slyly waged proxy wars, clearly concealed the Russian military might in its true glory, they also reflect a hard truth too substantial to be swallowed in tablet form, or resolved through calls for genocide. 

My ability to aptly finish biographies, long denied to reemerge with the Englishman Jackson's great De Gaulle biography last year, has been recently allured by Niall Ferguson's project to - with the statesman's ostensible cooperation, although we may wonder how far - 

Jackson's and Ferguson's countryman (still, in the latter case) Hitchens may have pointed out 

So, apart from that, what is he? 

Roe, and and the terrifying virtue of precedent

For the entire life of my great-grandfather, who I knew and remember quite well, up until him having aged into the second half a century of his existence, and for several years before his conception, the Supreme Court of the United States did uphold the now much disgraced notion of "separate but equal" for being, in fact, a thin veil over a reality of the most egregious inequality in American education. It has been said, by constitutional scholars across the proverbial but now ever-increasingly concrete aisle, to be a super-precedent. This term has been flung about not least in the now penultimate confirmation process, hurried and rushed over in much heat and fray, at the close of 2020 with an election already undergoing, with the question fluttered across news outlets 

The paradox, or reliance and innate flaw of legal reasoning, and the ability of a decision so wrongly decided to endure and flourish, is at the heart of the legal argument concerning Roe v. Wade and the actual, governing precedent currently subject to debate, Planned Parenthood v. Casey. The Casey so often, or sometimes, discussed being the much-dead (and long before without a heartbeat) Democratic Governor Casey of Pennsylvania, who mixed pro-union and workers' right policies with pro-gun and pro-life (or should I say anti-life and anti-choice) policies, represented nobody's actual belief - save, perhaps, the centrist Justices who crafted it out of the crumbling tower of Roe, but nonetheless is upheld as the shield safeguarding the most-spoken right of American women. Whereas the current senator Casey, of the body of voluntarily ejaculating Casey Sr:s body, has very much been touted in line with a new Democratic orthodoxy, whether of the neoliberal or of the extreme left (I think a little of both, in a ghastly mixture challenging the old left coherent with a more Democratic-governed, as well as more equitable America) the battle lines have been greatly redrawn, with the example of Governor Kennedy of Louisiana - one of few blue states in a red band of ostensible backwardness - being mostly ignored, when not condemned. In this realignment, casting the GOP as the now abominated party of cranks and puritanical extremists ostensibly  wishing to impose, by the point of a gun, a Calvinist autocracy (ostensibly welcoming the Papist likes of Casey, who argued the case of life before the Supreme Court by crafting the pitiful law then challenged) and the Democratic party as, well, "not Calvin, not Hitler, not the rape and destruction of the Earth within the next electoral cycle". In the context of abortion, this spells to the maintenance of a right either clearly spelled out in the constitutional ahadith issued throughout a period of the 1940s through 1970s or in the metaphysical realm of natural rights, versus the gradual disintegration of said constitutional (if not metaphysical or natural) jurisprudence. 

On the question of jurisprudence, in essence two camps have emerged, with a number of (symptomatically more intelligible) voices pressing the virtue and value of the precedent, whether it can be salvaged through the preserving mists of time, but in essence talking - or sputtering - their gall against the object allegedly worthy of the greatest scorn: The draft itself (this not being an opinion, and much less law, and even as the final majority opinion it would not redraw any existing law) or the leaker (whose hand thus, again ostensibly, could shape and twist the minds and hands of the supreme nine so as to change the governing majority) and the poor example set by unleashing, let alone regarding ulterior motives concerning the final result, this half-baked fetus or jurisprudential change, tantamount to revolution. 

It has also been said, very vitriolically and (it must be said) frivolously, that Brown v. Board of Education, Obergefell v. Hodges and possibly Lawrence v. Texas (in short, the great legacy of the ever-praised Justice Kennedy) would be evicted similarly, and very lately, in spite of - shall we say - substantial reliance interests. We know, 

This in effect 

On the question itself I suspect, as had also been said, if