Notorious RBG

 “To make life a little better for people less fortunate than you, that's what I think a meaningful life is. One lives not just for oneself but for one's community.”  Ruth Bader Ginsburg

Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg had hoped to survive cancer long enough for the winner of the 2020 election, hopefully Joe Biden, to nominate her successor.  One of her final wishes was for the Senate to hold off confirming a nominee until the electorate decided that contest in November.  In 2016 Senate Republicans held up confirmation hearings for almost a year, using that rationale.  Now with obscene haste they hope to confirm someone surely hostile to Obamacare and Roe v. Wade.  Ginsburg’s elevation to the Supreme Court over 25 years ago was one of the final noncontroversial selections, remarkable given her long career as a champion of women’s rights and battling for those, as she said, less fortunate than herself. She once noted, “My mother told me to be a lady.  And for her, that meant be your own person, be independent.”  And this: “Women will have achieved true equality when men share with them the responsibility of bringing up the next generation.”

 

Just the second woman to serve on the court, Ginsburg realized that judicial robes were designed for men, so she and Sandra Day O’Connor included collars on theirs, and over the years, admirers have sent her hundreds of different designs.  When Ginsburg was announcing a majority decision, she’d generally wear a gold crocheted one given to her by her clerks.  When announcing a dissent, for which she was famous, she’d wear a black one.  She once wrote that only an ostrich could fail to foresee the consequences of the majority’s ruling.  When in Shelby County V. Holder (2013) a 5-4 majority emasculated the 1965 Voting Rights Acts, allowing for all sorts of future mischief by Southern states, Ginsburg wrote:

    Throwing out preclearance when it has worked and is continuing to work to stop discriminatory changes is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.

 

The nickname “Notorious R.B.G. dates from 2013 when New York University law student Shana Knizhnik gave her that moniker as a take-off on Brooklyn-born rapper Biggie Smalls, who went by “Notorious B.I.G.”  Ginsburg gave this explanation in a 2017 NBC interview:

    [It was] a second-year student at NYU Law School who started the Notorious RBG as a Tumblr. This young woman was, to put it mildly, disappointed by the Supreme Court's decision in the Shelby County case — the decision that held a key part of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 no longer constitutional. She was angry, and then it came to her that anger is a useless emotion. It doesn't win any friends or make any changes. So, instead of being angry, she would do something positive. And the positive thing she did was to put on that blog the announcement of my dissenting opinion in the Shelby County case, and then it took off from there.The 2017 film “Marshall,” starring recently deceased Chadwick Boseman, is about another towering judicial pathbreaker, Thurgood Marshall. Rather than deal with his becoming the first African-American Supreme Court justice, it centers on a 1941 case in Bridgeport, Connecticut, involving a black chauffeur, Joseph Spell (Sterling K. Brown), accused of raping his employer, a white woman.  Sent to Bridgeport by the NAACP to defend Spell, Marshall was forbidden to speak in court but allowed counsel inexperienced white attorney Sam Friedman (Josh Gad). It turns out that the woman and the defendant had had consensual sex.  The most dramatic scene was when Spell, asked why he didn’t originally tell the truth about what happened, replied that where he came from, Louisiana, black men got tortured and lynched for having sex with white women.

I’ve been listening frequently to the Soundtrack of “Reality Bites” (1993), one of my favorite movies starring Winona Rider and Ethan Hawke (above), about young, Generation X adults trying to find meaning in life. It opens with the Seventies rocker “My Sharona” by The Knack, which Rider (as Lelaina, a film documentarian, and her friends dance to in a Seven Eleven store).  My favorite tracks are “Spinning Over You” by Lenny Kravitz, “Stay (I Miss You)" by Lisa Loeb, and “I’m Nuthin’" by Ethan Hawke.

 

Amitav Ghosh

IU Northwest “One Book.  One Campus … One Community selection is “The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable” by Amitav Ghosh. In view of the West Coast wildfires and Gulf Coast floods, it is especially relevant, especially since a global warming denier occupies the White House and is seeking re-election.  I loved last year’s choice, Hanif Abdurraqib’s “They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us.” Reviewer Alexandre Leskanich of the London School of Economics wrote:

  Climate change, as his title recognizes, only too clearly demonstrates the systemic lunacy inherent in our present world arrangements. We are compelled to become the wardens of our own prison, guardians of an empty future. Devoid of ethical purpose, the future is forfeited to the whims of the market, ceded to the nihilism of economic growth. Instead of exhibiting an unfolding sequence of delimited events that function in the service of a progressive ‘universal history’, the planet is the stage on which the spectacle of human incoherence is playing out.

 Philosophy professor Gianluca DiMuzio asked me to speak with his freshmen seminar students on the History of IUN. The course is required of Arts and Sciences students and designed to acclimate them to the campus and such skills as power points and essay writing. The first time I did so, in David Parnell’s class, I lectured too much, so the second time in Jon Becker’s seminar, I made sure to be interactive from the very beginning. I invited Chancellor Ken Iwama to attend, joking that he was also a freshman, having taken over for Bill Lowe just last month. Despite having to wear a mask and the room being quite large due to social distancing guidelines, I believe it went well.  The first day I gave students my latest Steel Shavings and earmarked a half-dozen pages where I discussed various pertinent things. I dropped a copy off with Chancellor Iwama’s secretary, along with the relevant pages, joking, “This is his assignment.”  The Wednesday class went great, with plenty of questions and discussion.  One student noticed a photo of singer Billie Eilish in the magazine and asked if I was into her music. Another asked what campus was like when I came 50 years ago, compared to today.  Someone couldn’t believe I had written the entire volume myself. I called it a labor of love. Professor Gianluca DiMuzio asked if I thought it were possible to write about current history with perspective.  I replied that I regarded my blog more as a first draft of history that future scholars could make use of as a primary source.  I also pointed out pitfalls of doing oral history in regarding to reliability and the tendency for narrators to view the past nostalgically. 

When I introduced Chancellor Iwama (above), who was an English major at the University of New Hampshire and has an MA in Labor Relations from Rutgers and a law degree from Seton Hall, he brought up his New Jersey background in Asbury Park, home of Bruce Springsteen and that he comes from an urban university similar to IUN, City University of New York in Staten Island.  I mentioned Jersey shore rockers Jon Bon Jovi and Southside Johnny, whom I saw on a Holiday Star Bill with the Asbury Jukes backing him and Steppenwolf with Bachman Turner Overdrive as opening acts. The Chancellor seemed particularly interested when I discussed IUN’s relationship with the mother campus in Bloomington.  In the 1960s faculty had to get syllabi approved by IU departments and go in person when their “betters” reviewed whether they deserved promotion and tenure.  After former Regional Campus Director John Ryan became president in 1971, he abolished his old bureaucracy and granted regional campuses home rule except – and this, of course, was a big if – in matters of budget. Current President Michael McRobbie has resurrected the regional campus post, and some fear Bloomington administrators will devalue faculty research and treat our campus like a glorified community college.

 

Because the freshmen seminar students have an upcoming assignment to interview someone on why they went to college, I interjected my own experience, that my parents expected it of me and started saving for my college tuition soon after I was born.  Growing to maturity during the Great depression, Midge had been able to attend Grove City teachers College in Erie, PA, only because an aunt was married to a dentist there, while Vic worked his way through Pitt in a steel mill. They were not happy when I dropped out of Virginia Law School to pursue an advanced degree in History.  Chancellor Iwama told the class that he had no choice because his parents, like mine, expected it.  They had emigrated from Japan shortly in the late 1940s after his father secured a grant at Berkeley. He added, however, that at one point he had wanted to drop out and be a guitarist in a rock band.  While his parents would not hear of it, he was able to get them to accept his getting a motorcycle. He offered to be interviewed by a student who needed a subject.

 

After class Chancellor Iwama was very complimentary and said that he has been meaning to interview his parents, now in their nineties, about their past experiences. His father was evidently a naïve teenager during the 1940s eager to fight for the Japanese emperor, even if the assignment was as a kamikaze pilot. The Chancellor’s grandfather arranged for the school headmaster to talk him out of it, saying that his potential as a great scholar war outweighed sacrificing his life.  As I was leaving, the Chancellor was questioning DiMuzio about the nature of the seminar, the last eight weeks are devoted to the professor’s field of study, in Gianluca’s case, Philosophy and in particular ethics.