Weird Deer

Travis might have convinced you that I’m really into politics, but don’t let him fool you. I’m not one of those Iowans.

Well, at least I wasn’t ’till this year. Maybe it’s because I’m older and more mature (18!), or maybe it’s because the candidates are more fascinating this year (Chris Dodd’s hair!). Whatever it was that triggered the political part of my brain, it now had me hooked. I wish I had been pulled in earlier while you two were visiting so I could have tagged along to hear the speeches, but whatever. By caucus time I was ready.

I didn’t know if it was cool or not to tag along with the oldies, but I wasn’t ready to try this on my own so I ended up going with my parents to the caucus at the high school. As you saw from our dueling yard signs, Mom is a crazy Hillary fan while Dad is all for Obama. I hoped to see someone I knew to hang out with, so I wouldn’t get caught in the middle.

Of course, it was freezing out once we got to the high school, and of course, we had to wait in line outside. The caucus was separated into two areas depending on where you lived. Even though the doorman was giving out what he probably thought were clear instructions, people were still confused and many were in the wrong line. When we got close enough, I saw that the doorman had a huge name tag on that said, “Hi, my name is Gary.” Gary kept telling unfunny Republican jokes. I could tell that he was trying to lighten the atmosphere, but the truth was, all everybody wanted was just to get inside where it was warm.

Anybody who looked elderly or frail, Gary let inside in front of everyone else (I figure next caucus, I’ll bring a cane). Finally, we inched up to the door, but when we got in, it was total chaos. All three of us had to go our separate ways to get registered. There were no pens, two pads of registration slips, three volunteers, and six hundred people. Democracy.

When I finally got my hands on a registration slip, I felt like I had made it to the promised land. But, of course, I didn’t have a pen. I noticed the girl in front of me was almost done filling out her slip, but everyone else was eying her also. When she went to put the pen down, I saw ten eyes glance at it and five hands dart for it. Thankfully, my reflexes worked fast enough, and I got the pen first. My second victory!

Now my last task was to wait in line to be tallied for my first choice for president. I didn’t realize that this was not my final vote, so I was nervous about whom to chose, but I had made my decision–Obama was my man!

Inside the commons area of the high school there was a little more breathing room. The first thing I did was get my Obama gear–stickers and pins. Then it was off to find a table in the Obama section. I found a table where my dad was sitting with four , uh, unique characters. One may have been a teacher where I go to school–I’d seen her around and she usually said hi to me, but tonight she ignored me. Drama! Then there was Wilderness Girl complete with fanny pack and a Nalgeen; a computer geek with a Mac t-shirt on; and a little red haired
leprechaun who seemed to be interested in Wilderness Girl, but not for her Nalgeen.

Fortunately, a friend of mine, Allison, came running up to me to relieve me from the awkwardness of the table. We two decided to find our own table. Even though we were both Obama fans, we went into alien territory and snagged the free cookies from the Edwards table, and sandwiches from the Hillary group. Obama’s fans had to go hungry, I guess.

After we ate, it was time to just observe the people. One lady in the Edwards section caught my eye and everyone else’s. She was a tall platinum blond in her 50’s with a “keep abortion legal” t-shirt and an American flag for a skirt. She was staring back at everyone with a “what are you lookin’ at” sneer. We were like, “your skirt and your hair, lady!’ We weren’t the youngest ones there because there seemed to be a lot of whiny little kids running around with their parents not paying any attention to them whatsoever. Gary and his sidekick Mary Lou stood on chairs shouting instructions but no one was really listening although everyone was nodding their heads as if they were.

By now, everyone had gone to their corners-separating themselves by candidate. There were so many of the Obama supporters we didn’t get a corner—they put us in a separate room! The Obama leaders were not happy about this at all and kept yelling that we shouldn’t be in here, that we should be out there so everyone can seen how strong we are. We were pretty strong. I admit it. I felt like lifting a car with my teeth.

Now it was time for the first head count. There was an old African-American lady who took over and I don’t know how she did it, but she got everyone to listen to her. Somehow we all got into a line and she started to count us, even Allison who had never even registered and was only 17. The old counting lady had to keep starting over because people would move into the line like in the middle, but when the votes finally came in in, Obama was in the lead, Hillary was close in second, and Biden, Edwards, Dodd, and Kucinich didn’t have enough people to be viable. You had to have at least 15% of the total to be viable, which was about eighty people. Edwards was short 1 vote.

Now the madness started.

People stood on tables using rolled up pieces of paper as megaphones, trying to recruit anybody and everyone to their candidates. For at least another half hour they were like, “Eat a sandwich, vote for Hillary!” “Cookie? Edwards!”

Allison and I went back to our first table because we needed some breathing room. First it was just us, but then people started drifting over to join us. There was an older African-American man with a huge gray afro eating graham crackers and reading the newspaper. One of the men at the table had a camera and asked Allison if she wanted to be in the Tribune. That caught the graham cracker eater’s attention, and while Allison was posing for the camera, he looked up and said to me,” if you join the Edwards group, I’ll get you in the paper, too.” I politely declined, but he was VERY persistent. I almost had to dropkick the graham cracker out of his mouth.

It was time for another count and the race came down to three candidates—Obama, Hillary, and Edwards. No one went back into the separate Obama room. Now everyone was back in the commons area. This was the final count to decide how many delegates each candidate would get. The people doing the counting were sitting at a table in their area and the caucus goers just marched around the table to be counted. I think some of the people marched around more than once, but no one was really keeping track.

Twenty minutes later the final counts were in and it suddenly got deathly silent. This time everyone listened to Gary and Mary Lou as they announced the results. She said Edwards came in third place and there wasn’t much of a cheer, but you could tell everyone in the Hillary and Obama camp had fingers crossed and prayers on their lips. When Mary Lou announced those results —Hillary second and Obama first—the place erupted. Everyone around me was ecstatic. People jumped up and down and hugged total strangers while shouting, “we did it, we did it!” I tried to get a wave going but it just ended up with just me, Allison, and the Tribune guy.

The cheering went on for about five minutes, and the next thing I knew the place had cleared out gone except me and my parents and Gary and Mary Lou.

That was it. I came home and spread the good news to a couple friends via text-message—Obama wins! Heck yes! One down, forty nine to go.

XOXO
Love,

Caity

Instead of looking back on the glory days of 2007 like a couple of sad old pillars of salt, Weird Deer Correspondents Eric Baus and F.J. Bergmann share their hopes and dreams for 2008.

Eric Baus:

As of December 31st, 6:44 PM Denver time, I’m excited about reading
all of these 11 books and chapbooks in 2008.

Tisa Bryant, Unexplained Presence (Leon Works)

Renee Gladman, Newcomer Can’t Swim (Kelsey St. Press)

Bhanu Kapil, Humanimal (Kelsey St. Press)

Matthew Goulish, Small Acts of Repair: Performance, Ecology, and Goat
Island (Routledge)

Sara Veglahn, Closed Histories (Noemi Press)

J’Lyn Chapman, Bear Stories (Calamari Press)

Lesley Yalen, This Elizabeth (Minus House)

George Kalamaras, Gold Carp Jack Fruit Mirrors (Bitter Oleander)

Andrew Joron, Sound Mirror (Flood Editions)

Sueyeun Juliette Lee, That Gorgeous Feeling (Coconut)

C.S. Carrier, After Dayton (Four Way Books)

A non-book-oriented list would of my most anticipated things of 2008
would include: walking in Denver when it is neither 5 degrees or 110
degrees, trying every kind of Herdez brand salsa, getting better at
ice skating, and for more people to realize that Noah Eli Gordon
looks and acts alarmingly like Count Chocula.

F.J. Bergmann:

The impeachment and subsequent public self-immolation of the entire
Bush cabinet.

Giuliani spontaneously combusts.

Gore runs for President with Nader as VP; they win by a landslide.

Halliburton nationalized and dismantled.

Blackwater board of directors convicted of murders, sentenced to life
in prison.

Immediate total withdrawal from Iraq, which unites under a secular,
tolerant female leader.

Patriot Act repealed. Homeland Security terminated. Peace Corps takes
over global anti-terrorism initiative.

Marijuana decriminalized.

Borders opened: free access from/to Canada and Mexico. Citizenship
offered to anyone still interested.

Bill Gates opens Food for Guns exchange programs throughout central
Africa; starts local cottage industry to use recycled gun metal to
make structural frameworks for coral reefs.

U.S. citizens voluntarily repay whatever tax rebate they got from
Bush to offset the national debt.

Government funding of alternative energy research is immensely
successful.

Discovery of new reliable, cheap, safe contraceptive, effective in
both genders, that also prevents STDs, including AIDS.

Apple invents iPortal: personal teleport devices that are safe and
can be easily set up at home by anyone. Airlines go belly-up, but
nobody cares.

Ivorybill sightings confirmed.

I have a crush on the Ninth Amendment. I lay awake at night dreaming of its open embrace, agonizing over what I could possibly say to it, feeling wonderful and awful at the same time. Why? Just listen:

“The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.”

That dulcet nugget comes near the end of the Bill of Rights, and it boldly pronounces that while the Constitution just finished laying out a lot of specific rights (free speech, jury trial, etc.), we still have other rights. And those other rights are just as important as the ones specifically mentioned by the big bad Constitution.

It’s like using your third wish to get as many wishes as you want, or saying “rights times infinity.”

I love it.

In his book Democracy and Distrust, John Hart Ely talks about how the Ninth Amendment casts a funny shadow by implying that we the people have rights we don’t even know we have–unenumerated rights.

Like what?

How about the right to marry, to housing, to education, to abortion, to engage in homosexual sodomy without the threat of criminal prosecution?

None of these are specifically mentioned by the Constitution. The last two are recognized as rights, but the other three aren’t, so they live in a sort of constitutional waiting room. The weird thing is that no one buys the argument that the Ninth Amendment protects any of these rights, mainly because there’s no telling where that argument would stop–what rights can’t the Ninth Amendment include? How about the right to have heroin for breakfast, to flick lit cigarettes at kittens, or to carry around your baby in a small leather briefcase?

Are those Ninth Amendment rights? We don’t know, because the amendment doesn’t say. That’s the problem with unenumerated rights.

This predicament has estranged the Ninth Amendment from mainstream constitutionalism and made it a go-to prop for harebrained arguments. (“I’m sorry, Mr. IRS, but I guess you didn’t realize that I have a Ninth Amendment right not to pay taxes that support welfare programs.”)

Here’s how Ely sums up most lawyers’ feelings about the Ninth Amendment:

“In sophisticated legal circles mentioning the Ninth Amendment is a surefire way to get a laugh. (‘What are you planning to rely on to support that argument, Lester, the Ninth Amendment?’)”

“Lester” is a nice touch. Is there a better name for a misguided soul needing a good patrionizing? Cletus, perhaps, but Lester will do just fine.

Ely goes on to say that while there’s no logical stopping-point to the rights that the Ninth Amendment might include, figuring out what the Ninth Amendment actually means makes a lot more sense than what we currently do with unenumerated rights (like the right to abortion), which is to rest them on the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment:

“[N]or shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.”

As conservatives are fond of pointing out, you can stare at those words for as long as you like and you still won’t find the word “abortion,” or even “schmishmortion.”

Probably the closest we could get is to say that the clause protects a general liberty interest that includes the right to choose an abortion. Or we can get more creative and say that we have a general property interest in our own bodies that includes the right to have an abortion performed upon it. Or, even more creatively, we can say that our interest in our lives includes a right to make such profound and life-altering decisions as whether to have a child. But even if the Due Process Clause protected those rights, it wouldn’t do so directly. All it says is that the state, if it wants to take our rights away, has to engage in “due process.”

In other words, as countless commentators have noted, the Due Process Clause only gives us process, not rights.

No one has an airtight explanation for how we squeeze the right to abortion out of the Due Process Clause. The way we do it goes under a telling heading–substantive due process–which, as Ely notes, is a “contradiction in terms–sort of like ‘green pastel redness.’”

The best explanation for substantive due process that I’ve been able to come up with is this: the Due Process Clause says that government can’t take away your rights without going through whatever process might be due. Exactly what kind of process is due depends on the life, liberty, or property interest at stake.

If the government wants to deprive you of $40 for parking illegally, it doesn’t make sense to give you a full-blown, time-consuming, and expensive trial because your interest–$40–is relatively trivial. But if the government wants to deprive you of ten years of your life by imprisoning you, a full-blown trial makes a lot more sense. Now imagine that you have certain interests that are so important and so fundamental to your status as a human being that no procedure, no matter how extensive, could justify their deprivation. The Due Process Clause would, by implication, protect these rights.

But that still leaves us with the tricky problem of figuring out exactly which rights reach this high threshold of importance. You might say abortion, I might say heroin for breakfast, and five lawyers on the Supreme Court might say none of the above. And that’s where the law on unenumerated rights ever-so-precariously stands right now.

Ely’s point is that when we’re trying to figure out which unenumerated rights to file under the heading “substantive due process,” we’re not really doing anything different than what we could be doing under the Ninth Amendment. And if it’s really the same exercise, why are we doing it through the lens of language that would only seem to guarantee process rather than the far more obvious language of the Ninth Amendment, which actually countenances unenumerated rights?

Ely doesn’t answer this question, but I have an idea. Sometimes people express their discomfort with their circumstances in weird ways. I hate this job, but instead of quitting I’ll be half an hour late every day. This task is stupid, so I’m not going to laugh at my boss’s jokes. The people at this party are boring, so I’m going to drink too much and take my pants off.

The people we’ve had on the Supreme Court have been uncomfortable with the idea of identifying unenumerated rights, maybe because they’ve been skittish about the underlying rights themselves, or more likely because they can’t get totally in bed with the idea that five lawyers, most of whom will probably be straight white men from ultra-refined backgrounds, can set national policy on big, important issues like abortion. And one way we can tell that they’re uncomfortable with this arrangement is by the weird textual hook on which they’ve hung our unenumerated rights–the Due Process Clause. This is the equivalent of being half an hour late in unenumerated rights analysis. If the Supreme Court really felt okay about what it was doing, it would take the much more direct route of the Ninth Amendment. But that would be going whole-hog for judicially identified unenumerated rights, and that’s a level of commitment that the Supreme Court–or at least five members of it–hasn’t ever had. One of the unfortunate consequences of pinning our unenumerated rights to the Due Process Clause is that it leaves them subject to attack not only on their own terms, but also on the grounds that they are so thinly tied to the Constitution’s text.

So while the Ninth Amendment is a loser in any argument, it’s a principled loser, like Walter Mondale, Barry Goldwater, the Oakland A’s, the Black Panthers, or Dennis Kucinich, the kind that leaves you thinking that it might have been right all along.

Love,
Paul

The artist Lee Lozano wrote in her notebook on December 20, 1969: “Confinement is the near root of all my rage.”

Recently, I’ve been trying to imagine her name as a verb. Lee Lozano. Do you know her work? I think you would like it. She’s mostly known for her tool drawings and paintings—big graphic sucker punch hammers and silvered screw drivers with dicks and cunts (I know I’m being crude, but it’s fitting).

One drawing is of a cross necklace hanging between two breasts. The cross at the end is morphing into the head of a penis. Next to this image Lozano scrawled “A tits man he was not.”

She exhibited in New York from 1965 to 1971. She was kind of a big deal, which is amazing since most people never know who I’m talking about when I mention her name. She had a one-woman exhibition at the Whitney in 1970—huge Wave paintings that were mathematically planned and loosely based on electromagnetic wave theory.

Lozano would work on one canvas for days, non-stop, applying flat waves of paint after flat waves of paint. A reviewer for Artforum described the works as “off-putting” and ”oppressively decorative.” Lozano wrote to a friend: “Turns out the Artforum critic is a Bennington girl!” Bennington is a college in Vermont that was known in the 1960s for its interest in formalism. Rosalind Krauss, for instance, is a Bennington girl.

Lozano was tough, but I think this review hurt her. She moved to Dallas and quit making work the next year. She “dropped out.” The act of leaving was her last definitive piece.

I think the art world missed her. Sometimes I think I miss her, even though I know she could never miss me. She quit speaking to women in 1972.

Carl Andre missed her. In 1983, Andre wrote that Lee Lozano, born Lenore Knaster, now wanted to be known as “E” for energy. In a notebook page dated 1964/67 Lozano created a list titled All Verbs: “ream, spin, veer, span, cross, ram, peel, charge, pitch, verge, switch, shoot, slide, cram, goad, clash, cleave, fetch, clamp, lean, swap, butt, crook, split, jut, hack, break, stroke, stop.“

What happens when someone leaves? Are they forgotten forever? Does dropping out mean leaving the people you love? Can agency exist in absence?

She wrote in her notebook on May 9, 1968 “Once and for all, the sum of myself to date is in terms of the verb.”

As “E” she left the world of pronouns forever. Andre wrote, “To me matter must stand on its own, not be an image, not disappear when the lights go out. Lee could and did make pigment matter. I thought that unholy. We argued. Her paintings were and are right. “

And then,

“I was wrong, Lee Lozano’s notebooks of the 1960s contain some of the most beautiful depictions of matter I have ever seen. Then, mattering pigment was no longer enough. Matter outside of the mind became unimportant. It became necessary to dye the canvas of the brain. Lost were four vowels and four consonants. Literally. “

What Andre isn’t saying here, although I think it is felt, is that Lozano was mad. It is rumored that she went crazy and in 1999 died homeless and alone. This is a familiar story, but you can hear Andre’s regret.

She was a shifting yet truly honest character, Lee Lozano. No paper tiger for her. She wrote on May 9, 1968: “Art does not need to be monumental, but movement (change) does.”

Love,
Katie

F.J. Bergmann

 Cento Canto by F.J. Bergmann [9:51m]: Play Now | Play in Popup

Dorothea Lasky

 Love Poem by Dorothea Lasky [1:22m]: Play Now | Play in Popup