Equity Regards Done What Ought to Be Done

"Mr. Chief Justice and may it please the court, your honor, this case is all about me." - Randy E. Barnett, libertarian legal mind

"Do I look like a redneck to you, counsel?"
"With all due respect, Justice Scalia, you don't really have a neck at all." - oral arguement, Mennonites v. Astral Crustacaean

"Birth control, just freaks me the fuck out, okay?!"
- Justice Samuel Alito

"I'm so high I can see my house from here." - Justice Clarence Thomas

"But your honor, the balls and the strikes!"
"'Balls and strikes, balls and strikes!' Grab a cricket bat counsel we're playing by my goddam rules!" - Chief Justice Roberts

"We are all terrorists now." - Justice Sotomayor, dissenting

"Ain't no such thing as justice. S'only procedure." - Antonin Scalia, gaucho

"General Verilli, I'm something of an activist. How 'bout I just come down there and slap the dick out of your mouth, so someone can make this argument stick!!!" - Justice 'Red Steve' Breyer

"My childless womb aches for the women of this land." - Justice Elena Kagan

"But if the young are forced to buy healthcare coverage they'll have to pay for it, and they won't be benefiting themselves they'll be helping those who get sick first—"
"Yeah, it's called insurance, popinjay."
- Justice "Hookah" Ginsburg to Justice Alito

"Make my body your body." - National Health Dictator Michelle Obama

"Sometimes terrorists drive with broken tail lights. Now everyone get naked!!!!" - Justice Kennedy

Great Turtlenecks in Culture

She asked him why the yacht was full of Branston Pickle. He handed her one of the jars and told her to open it, and then watched with evident gratification as the Italian starlet's disrobed body flexed in the lamplight, struggling with the jar. He did not tell her the lid was glued on.

Aux armes, etc.

Above, the stars reach out their arms –
I see guns in the sky, headlights of a car
driven through the rain – a rocket,
falling, red, arcing like a mouth through
the sky – which is now turning purple,
Batman-movie purple, and an anarchist boy
with his black hood up and black bandana over
his mouth leaps now, over the barricades, removes
one, I recognize him from his eyes, the only
part of him that is visible, the eyes I knew
when he slept out on the roof after a party
when none of us felt like cleaning – and he
is motioning now, for us to come through,
and we do, and the face of Trayvon Martin
comes too, it is printed in color on signs
and the text below his smile says
protect our children, and with that, already,
he has ceased to be a real boy
and he is now the ghost we are carrying
through the streets like a coffin draped
in a flag, or something less heavy,
less corporeal. An officer in a white shirt
grabs my arm and I twist out and away
and pull my hood up too in the crowd
it is more like we are the sea and his body
is floating on us, not weighing us down,
we exist to hold him because we are
no graveyard, we are a place for the not-real,
for the things that once existed and exist
no more, a child next to me climbs up
on her father’s shoulder and I wonder
what she can see from there, within
the bodies there is no sense of scale, only that
we fill the streets curb to curb, only
that we are heading south to Zuccotti
Park as though there will be something
when we get there, and when we get there
there are only cops guarding the
empty park its bare benches and concrete floor
and would could be there besides
memory, anyway.

- NYPD Chief of Department Joseph Esposito, Vice magazine

Midnight in America

"The United States is where country dominates town." - Karl Marx

"I think about AM radio, about night driving through moonlit plains, and all the people who spend their whole life being ignored. I think about the part that dedicate their entire overlooked lives to knowing a few things very well and the rest who dedicate theirs to drowning them out. And I think to myself, 'I'm a shriveled-up half person. I can't take life any more.'" - an academic

"America is Trayvon Martin, Ramarley Graham, and Staff Sgt. Robert Bales." - Rick Santorum

"There is no higher calling than to exterminate what is ugly in the name of what is beautiful." - Barack Obama

"You don't have to go abroad for long to realize that the worst thing about America is that it feels like home." - Susan Sontag

Absolute Horizon

“We fight not for our homes or our families but for Abstraction itself.”
- Cyber Deity Barack Obama Rex, the Nomad War

“Through Permanent War, Empire realizes itself as Time.”
- Gen. Stanley DarkChrystal, the Extinction Campaign

“A people who choose death over servility can never be conquered.”
- Emperor of Inner Asia Xi Jinping

“Al Qaeda as humans in Terminator who travel back in time to undo liberal technocapitalism. Arnold Schwarzennegar stars as machine-race traitor John Walker Lindh.” - Donald Rumsfeld, elevator pitch to James Cameron for a screen adaptation of Known and Unknown

“I saw miles of Martian desert lit up by white phosphorus under a dazzling indigo sky…” - Staff Sgt. Robert Bales

Great Turtlenecks in Culture

Davis told [photographer Lee] Friedlander that if he appeared in the photo with eyes closed he would "be on [his] ass like a fever."

Primary Affliction

"You can't polish a turd... Well, you can... and, God bless South Carolina, I can do it better than any of these fucking tourists." - Newt Ginginch

"It's not about money, Marissa. There's plenty of rich men who seek political power. No, the problem is that I'm just a smug asshole." - Willard Romney to Marissa Tompkins, BUNT-TV, Denver

"Win or lose, you're going to die." - Barack Obama to a stunned Jay Carney

"I am the conventional wisdom, perfected and purified into its highest form!" - Fareed Zakharia

"When peak oil comes you stay the fuck out of Harper's yard, you mongloid!" - Lewis Lapham

"You know, a sort of sexual mixed martial arts." - Karl Rove

"Huh, I guess I never have had a Korean women, their heads look too much like cardboard boxes." - the Ginch pandering to the Asian American Federation

“Love is an alien invasion coordinated with sleeper cell revolts. Someone penetrates you and leaves behind a colony that allows the monster inside them to ventriloquize your thoughts. It’s the opportunity that that part of us which cries out to be dominated and longs to be victimized has been waiting for ever since we were born. Everyone knows the best scene in The Manchurian Candidate is the one where Frank Sinatra and Janet Leigh meet on the train. It captures the indistinguishabilty of love from brainwashing, even and especially at its inception. Love is a cancer. You can’t just cut it out. You have to poison your whole body to beat it, kill yourself just enough to keep on living. Love is White Power. Love is Vichy France.” – Rick Santorum, National Association of Women Against Women, inaugural address

Hull Breach

Kris Kristofferson, A Wave Is A Moving Wall, 2011, installation

Look inside yourself
Race darkness to the bottom
Black, black, black, black, black
- Jimmy Carter, The Prison Notebooks

"A Spider is a Wall with eight legs." - Patrick Stewart, shackled to the mast, Delos

"I have no interest in happiness yet I lack the vital strength to do something heroic." - Bradley Cooper

"Man, I saw a glimpse of it. It's sort of like how good it'd be if ladies stopped all shavin'." - Capt. Rick Parry on almost surpassing the Wall while riding the Great Wave in his schooner, Asian Nigger

"It is so deeply satisfying to plant one's seed in one's enemy." - August Strindberg in an aside at his daughter's birthday party

Don't swallow the razorball
Razorball, razorball
Don't swallow the razorball
Or you'll never speak again
- Bruce Springsteen (to the tune of 'Pop Goes the Weasel')

"Maybe I could be like Kris Kristofferson." - Ryan Gosling

"I am both Wall and Super Wall." - lesbian John Roberts

"I'm not... going to make it home... for the Cherry Blossom festival... am I?" - John Boehner, murdered by bandits on Route 11 in Cormac McCarthy's adaptation of D.W. Griffith's Intolerance

"If you can no longer believe in truth, then become intimate with evil." - Steven Spielberg

"If, as we will all agree, people are essentially bad, then there must be something pathological about any act of good." - Sen. John McCain calling for intervention in Syria

"Just go on fucking with out me. " - the Editors, Dear John Letter to the World

"Sex is its own abstinence." - Vile Santorum

Chastity, honor, strength!
For Jerusalem and the Knights of Netanyahu!
For Islam!
For the mystics revelation of National Truth!
For the Cult of Personality!
For the Rappers!
Castro! Ice! Women! Trombones!
- Rubén Blades performing on the Costa Concordia in Hell

To Sleep Perchance To Dream

Dear Son Boy,

It has been too long for which I am deeply sorry, as sorry as I am for what I write and equally shamed.

As I have said, winter started early and then dissipated itself. The young say that is the way of today's world. Grampy, in his state of confusion, mutters that it's a stain on nature brought about by man's sin. Lonzo grumbles that the cat is a stain howsoever caused. "We must kill it and attack it," he claims. Ma asks me, "Why attack it after you kilt it." Her jokes now are an irritation.

But those debates amongst your kin are not why I write. I can bear those slight weights alone.

I write because of my fear of spiders. I loathe to look upon them and I cannot kill them, let alone touch them. And then last night I awoke in a dream with a woman. The Lord says I should not tell this to any man and clear as heaven not my own flesh and blood but my mind has gone wild on me.

I awoke in a dream with a woman and my eyes were closed. When I opened them I gazed on a face as beautiful as the sun, the moon, the mountains, the sea, and all the things I have no words to capture. And her arms were about me and grasping me and rubbing me everywhere. How could she? How was her touch so supple, so omni present? And then I seen. I seen she had the face of all humanity but she also had the body of a spider. Arms and fat backside-I will writhe in utter distress if I try to describe it further.

I wrestled to free myself, to escape. But I could not. I could not and as I tried to push her or it away, her gruesome grip grew tighter. I could not breath. I could not move. And only as I exhausted myself did I awake in a bath of anxiety sweat. I staggered up off the bed as your Ma snored.

I reeled outside for cold, clean air. But the air is not cold and it is not clear. Where is winter I asked. The world is awry.

And, then I heard the cat growl, followed by a shriek. Boy, who will save us?

Trusting all is well with you,
Your querulous, trembling,
Father

More Praise for The New Inquiry!

We've done it again, please don't hit us! Subscribe to The New Inquiry Magazine. Read our contribution. Enjoy the quotes that were too hot for TNI!

***

“Even as I read it, I feel the youth in me again...” - Sting

“Young people are best appreciated in quiet rooms.” - Willard Romney

“If you're looking for uncontroversial opinions on obvious topics, look no further!” - The New York Review of Books

“I just want to fuck the shit out of these kids.” - Dan Savage

"You wanna talk about youth? I've seen Grease like fifty times, man." - Rick Parry

"Youth is a curse." - Karl Rove

"We should unionize."
"But what about the kids?!"
- two employees of the Princeton Review

"Whip me again!" - Rob Horning on Capitalism

“Well, I don’t know about an endorsement, but I’ll give this Rachel Rosenfelt whatever she wants.” - Michel Houellebecq

"Youth? Name your damn price." - Sky Briggs

"Chief Justice John Roberts of Mars" by Edgar Rice Burroughs

Justice Roberts and a Martian Jurist entering their Dissent into the Record

In the final days of the Second Civil War, Conservatism and its partisans fear they have seen their last gasp with the Burning of Colorado Springs by Sky Admiral Mike Mullen. At this same moment, Calvary Man and Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, John Roberts is lost in the wastes of a forgotten oasis, about to shoot his wheezing horse Ginsburg. Before the old nag can be put out of her misery, Roberts is set upon by a roving band of UC-Boulder undergrads and acting quickly takes shelter in a nearby cave, but losing his footing he slips and appears to die. But the appearance of cruel death is only an apparition, and while Roberts lies inanimate in the cave on Earth, strange Cosmic operations take effect. By means of astral projection, he awakes in a new land, Mars!

"By Federalism! The lesser gravity of Mars makes me more than a mere Harvard Man, I am a man of legend and greater strength, truly my jurisdiction on this strange planet is unlimited." - Roberts leaping twenty feet into the air, naked but for a copy of Black's Law Dictionary.

"Stranger, how can you lead us? We do not doubt your strength, but rather your impartiality to judge."
"Hear this, you green-faced, four-armed people of the Wastes, the job of a good judge is not to make law, but rather to serve as an umpire, calling balls and strikes. While I may have just beheaded thirty-five of your War Lords, I assure you I am no activist." - Roberts subdues the Green Men of Barsoom

"The chariots themselves were large, commodious, and gorgeously decorated but later, when I had become acquainted with their customs, I learned that I had won what they seldom accord, a manifestation of approbation, and after they completed the work I went about garbed in all the panoply of war......Earth men, almost without exception, cover their bodies with strange, unsightly pieces of cloth, and their heads with hideous contraptions the purpose of which we have been unable to conceive..." -Dicta from Roberts' concurring opinion in The Endless Yellow Moss Vegetation v. The Giant Purple Two-Headed Centipede, 121 Mars App. 4th 231.

"She was indeed, as her fellow Martian had said of her, an atavism, a dear and precious reversion to a former type of loved and loving ancestor. I would much rather not have told her anything of my antecedents, but no man could look into the depth of those eyes and refuse her slightest behest." - Justice Roberts on meeting Princess of Mars, Whitney Houston

"His manners were perfect, and his courtliness was that of a typical Southern gentleman of the highest type." - Princess Whitney Houston

“I was always kind and humane in my dealings with the lower orders. I could take a human life, if necessary, with far less compunction than that of a poor, unreasoning, irresponsible brute.” - Justice Roberts' Majority Opinion in Mastery of the Portal v. Freedom for All Creatures, 320 Mars 12 (finding for reasons of public policy in favor of 'Eternal Slavery').

"Sure, I miss the robes and the Secret Service detail, but where else do you get the kick of the law while also being able to go around naked except for a red cape and a sword and just kill everything you come across? Plus I've got Whitney and things are going great. Okay, Tars Tarkas and the Yellow People think we need more Red Men on the Court, and I can accept that, but I'll be damned if we put cameras in the Chamber of Brass during oral argument." - the Legend Himself before mysteriously awakening in Buffalo with a terrible headache

The Chief Justice courts Princess Houston of Mars