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Tomgram: Ariel Dorfman, Clarence and Ginni Thomas Finally Get Their Due

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Tom Engelhardt
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This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.

For just a moment imagine Clarence Thomas -- yes, Clarence T! -- as the president of the United States. It's a mad thought, right? Or is it? One thing is clear: the present Trumpian Supreme Court -- and no, The Donald didn't appoint Clarence Thomas, but he might as well have along with the three (in)justices he did put there -- is taking ever more power from Congress. In decision after decision, it's making itself into something like the true ruling body in America, even as recently it also managed to turn future presidents into, according to dissenting justice Sonia Sotomayor, a "king above the law." In the process, it may also be sending the rest of us into a future environmental hell. As Justice Elena Kagan wrote in a striking recent dissent from a decision of the six right-wing justices to overturn what was known as the Chevron doctrine, long a cornerstone of federal regulation, and essentially put such regulation in their own hands, they are transforming that court into -- this was her term -- "the country's administrative czar." Yes, "czar." And that word wasn't, I suspect, chosen idly.

Clarence Thomas, in other words, is one of six (in)justices intent on transforming the Supreme Court into" well, the ultimate law of the land and, in a fashion, potentially the ruler of the land as well.

And if that isn't the path to hell, tell me what is. Oh, and speaking of whatever comes after this life of ours, let TomDispatch regular Ariel Dorfman, author of the remarkable novel The Suicide Museum, take you into, if not hell, then an all-too-grim afterlife for one of those potential czars, Clarence Thomas, and his wife Ginni (famed for her urge to reject the results of election 2020, claiming "Biden and the Left is attempting the greatest Heist of our History"). Dorfman has some experience with the afterlife, having already sent Donald Trump to hell with the aid of famed Italian poet Dante Alighieri. This time, however, he's asked for a hand from Shakespeare and, in particular, Lady Macbeth. But let me not keep you here any longer, not when you can travel with Clarence and Ginni into a world that normally would be beyond imagining. Tom

Judgment Day for America's Worst Supreme Court Justice
Lady Macbeth Has Words for Clarence Thomas and His Wife Ginni from the Other Side of Death

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At least I had the courage to do the deed myself. That counts for something here on the other side of death, where I wait for you, Clarence Thomas, and your sharp-toothed wife Ginni, and someday the others whose decrees and rulings from afar have aided and abetted the mayhem and the massacres. Cowards all of you, and boring and petty to boot, at such a safe distance from the volleys, the salvos, the gunfire. Oh, the names I have had to learn -- Sandy Hook and Columbine and Uvalde and so many hundreds more and even more after that, while you were careful to stay at a safe distance from the children as they fell.

Not me, not me.

In his play about treachery and murder in medieval Scotland, Shakespeare made sure that I would never be able to shirk facing my own ambition and malevolence. He never thought to spare me, just as I did not spare the lives of others -- or, in the end, my own life for that matter.

When I egged on my husband to kill the king, the kinsman we were hosting at our castle, I was the one who had to clean up afterwards, smearing the guards who slept by their liege so they would be blamed, I was the one who covered up the crime and made my man Macbeth supreme in our land.

Is this a dagger which I see before me, the handle toward my hand?

And yes, the blood flowed onto me, too -- out damned spot! Out, I say! -- each gripping finger knowing that the red of that blood was staining more than the surface and the flesh, that it was staining what the soul would never forget. At least I owned the deed, the deaths, the dead. Who would have thought the old king had so much blood in him?

At least I was never petty or boring. And, of course, what's done is done. I risked the haunting and the madness and the blotches that would never come out. Something dire in me must have known that I was risking damnation, too.

That counts in this place where I have been tasked with dealing, night after thick night -- there is no day here, only night that never finds the light -- without a glimmer to brighten our way, save for red. It is always dripping red for those like me, as it will be for you, Clarence Thomas, and you, too, Ginni, year after grisly year. Years here are no more than infinite stretches of redness in the dark of infinite night, trickling second by second from each of the smoking wounds we inflicted. I have been tasked here, I who was once a queen, with waiting for you and your wife to join me on this journey.

Ginni Thomas, Lobbyist for Donald Trump and Extreme Election Denier, Gets What's Coming to Her

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Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute's Tomdispatch.com ("a regular antidote to the mainstream media"), is the co-founder of the American Empire Project and, most recently, the author of Mission Unaccomplished: Tomdispatch (more...)
 

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