(Links to items mentioned or discussed in this post are collected at the end of it.)
I got distracted yesterday by Joe Biden’s open musing about whether the country would be better off dying slowly from the plague or all at once from war with China. Who can say? That’s why we need presidents—to make those big decisions.1
Perhaps you’ll recall the Supreme Court case involving an assistant football coach who was fired for praying silently by himself on the field after games.
The defense in that case insisted that the Court had their information wrong: he wasn’t alone and he wasn’t silent. Sonia Sotomayor’s dissent included a photograph of the coach leading a prayer after a game, surrounded by players and other adults.
Yesterday I learned that not only was he vocal in prayer, and in company, but he wasn’t even fired, despite his lawyer’s and Sam Alito’s insistence that he had been.
It’s an increasingly surreal situation for the Bremerton schools. They were ordered to “reinstate Coach Kennedy to a football coaching position,” according to court documents. But the now-famous coach is out on the conservative celebrity circuit, continuing to tell a story about “the prayer that got me fired” — even though Bremerton never actually fired him.
In 2015, he was put on paid leave near the end of the season after holding a series of prayer sessions on the field with students and state legislators. He still got paid for his full assistant coach contract, about $5,000. High school assistants often work on yearly deals, and Kennedy, at odds with the head coach and aggrieved by what had happened, never reapplied to work the 2016 season.2
So the only thing the court majority got right was the coach’s name and that he had prayed. They accepted, tried, and decided a case in which everything upon which they putatively based their actions was not so. They simply made it all up to get the result they wanted.
And now the beneficiary of their work is pulling down wingnut welfare and further embedding his tale into right-wing legend. The school district offered a new contract every season, but he never responded. Why would he, when the position pays a lousy five grand and he’s probably making at least that every month now.
And these are the justices complaining that the proles see the court as politicized, when we’re not seeing it as attempting to establish a state religion.
Somebody’s in the holodeck all the time. It’s booked solid. You don’t often see it so explicitly exposed as with the court, but somebody’s always there. Biden is, with respect to the pandemic3 4 — and he has a lot of high-powered company there5 — and to his inability to understand that economic conditions are grave for millions of people even discounting inflation.6
Poor people and comfortable people live wholly different lives, and only one class is congenitally unable to see and feel the lives the other lives. Even people who have some empathy for the unfortunate among us are not able to feel the consequences of the grotesque inequality7 rampant in this country.
Rare individuals can imagine it, sympathize and empathize, but absorbing it is all but impossible without living it, or having lived it. You can tell by the paltry number of comfortable people enraged by the plight of the perpetually distressed.
Some people recognize the issue as an issue but don’t care about it. And some percentage of everybody else is in the holodeck.
The rich in the US are exceptionally rich — the top 10 per cent have the highest top-decile disposable incomes in the world, 50 per cent above their British counterparts. But the bottom decile struggle by with a standard of living that is worse than the poorest in 14 European countries including Slovenia.
To be clear, the US data show that both broad-based growth and the equal distribution of its proceeds matter for wellbeing. Five years of healthy pre-pandemic growth in US living standards across the distribution lifted all boats, a trend that was conspicuously absent in the UK.
But transpose Norway’s inequality gradient on to the US, and the poorest decile of Americans would be a further 40 per cent better off while the top decile would remain richer than the top of almost every other country on the planet.
That’s from the Financial Times story linked at the end of this post. One who isn’t experiencing the disparity looking up from the bottom can see it in print and say “My god, that’s horrible,” but although the story conveys the degree of the problem — worse than Slovenia? Fuck’s sake, people — it can’t convey the sensation of it.
Off we go. Our ‘deck time is up.
(Got music? Leave music. Musical contributors to this post include Cactus World News, “No Shelter;” Deltron 3030, “Deltron 3030;” Girl Band, “Evergreen;” and Girl Band, “Girl Band.”)
Yesterday’s Bad Crow digression.
A Seattle Times story about the Supremes hitting all the wrong notes.
Brookings Institution on the economic impact of long Covid.
The Financial Times on economic inequality.