Enough with the conspiracy theories about Justice Scalia’s death

I read this earlier today:

"As a former homicide commander, I am stunned that no autopsy was ordered for Justice Scalia," William O. Ritchie wrote in a Facebook post on Sunday, according to reports. After seeking to cast doubt on the conclusion of the deputy U.S. marshals who responded to a call from the ranch, he added, "My gut tells me there is something fishy going on in Texas."

My gut tells me there is some fishing for attention going on in the head of the former D.C. police officer who said that.

Why?

Let’s consider this:

1. Why?
2. Why??
3. Why???

Was it a Liberal conspiracy to get President Obama one more lasting decision about the future of United States legal policy?

Was it a “Conservative” conspiracy to give Congressional Republicans and presidential candidates something “meaningful” to “stand up” to Obama about?

Was it Ancient Aliens?

There was no autopsy, they say! There was a pillow above his head, they say! The President was told long before anyone else, they say (as if the President doesn’t get most of the news before everyone else…)!

Conspiracy theorists demand: “What is your proof Scalia wasn’t murdered?”

These stupid theories remind me of one of the frequent arguments levied against atheists: “What is your proof that there is no god??”

Who proved god exists in the first place?

Pillows

Many articles note the ranch owner who found Scalia said there was a pillow above his head, and many conspiracy theorists point to this as suspicious. I sleep with a pillow over my head every night, and another one underneath it, using the two to drown out the sounds of an increasingly conspiratorial world so I can maintain my slumber all night long.

No conspiracy. Just a light sleeper.

Politics aside

I disagreed with much of Justice Scalia’s Supreme Court jurisprudence but his presence on the Court was invaluable to the development of United States law and the debates from which it springs.

He articulated his positions in such a way that I (almost always) respected them, even when I found it hard to believe someone so intelligent was seriously asserting them. He was rarely conclusory, giving reasons for his views, and whether you agreed with those reasons or not, that’s more than most politicians (and lawyers) usually do.

His death is a loss, but there are few more certain paths to some sort of immortality than thirty years on the Supreme Court of the United States.

Photo: Then-nominee Antonin Scalia, right, with President Ronald Reagan in 1986, via Wikipedia

Look up here, I’m in heaven I’ve got scars that can’t be seen I’ve got drama, can’t be stolen Everybody knows me now

– David Bowie, Lazarus

David Bowie died surrounded by family at his New York home Sunday, January 10, 2016 eighteen months after being diagnosed with cancer. He released his final album, Blackstar, on Friday, January 8, 2016, his birthday. I’m listening to it as I write this article about how he inspired me.

Many have expressed their sorrow at our loss of Mr. Bowie on social media and it is hard to find a news story or obituary about him that is not composed at least partially of Twitter embeds. I’m writing this because while I never met the man, his music and personality played a major role in why I started playing music and how I approach songwriting, and just plain writing, to this day. In other words, I’m making this tragedy about me.

Then again, so are most other folks, I’m just admitting it at the outset.

I was in high school. I had only first picked up a guitar in the last year or so and quickly befriended a couple of other guitar-toting music nerds (Hey Jonny, hey Chris). We were already big fans of the Beatles and the more recent Brit-rock band Oasis. And we delved into Pink Floyd and David Bowie together, finding something like our own voice in that decidedly British amalgam of rock and roll.

But it was Bowie who, more than all of the other musicians who inspired me in the early days of my musical development, illustrated how far the synthesis of personality and art can be taken. There’s no need for me to explain his chameleonic permutations, they’re as iconic as his music.

Throughout high school and through college – even to this day – I remained a pedestrian-looking musician, just another white guy whose long hair got shorter and dyed-black as he entered his twenties and thought he, and he alone, was the saddest, most tortured soul at the party.

Womp womp.

Put simply, “chameleonic” is just not a word anyone would use for my appearance. But Bowie’s music was as dynamic as his makeup tray and he seemed to foresee rather than follow fashion and sonic trends. That’s the part of him that stuck with me, consciously, as in I’m not just writing about it today because he has died, but as in I think about it, about him, a lot.

I don’t talk about writing songs very often because it’s become sort of like a diary, a journal. Like most of what I write, songwriting for me is a would-be novelist’s first notebook of character sketches, equal parts selfish unflattering funhouse-mirror style portrayals of myself and people I know and cringe-inducing artistic growing pains.

But I’ve been writing songs since the seventh or eighth grade. They stopped sucking sometime at the beginning of college and I owe a lot of that to David Bowie. When I wrote a particularly shitty song in one style, I’d just switch to another style. Acoustic dream-pop, rollicking early rock, simple quiet ballads, weird jazzy oddities.

This sort of stylistic rotation prevented me from concluding that I absolutely should never, ever write another song in a given style. And as a result, I eventually became pretty good at writing songs in two or three of those styles.¹ I also developed my own original voice, both in music and in writing, by emulating the greats and selectively shedding bits and pieces of their approach in favor of my own.

So now that I’ve made it about myself, let’s bring it back to what’s important: there will never be another David Bowie and his loss is a cultural tragedy of a global scale, but he made one hell of a dent.² Nothing, not even death, can silence a force like David Bowie. So go listen and smile.

Israeli Supreme Court Rejects Family Petition To Bury Trans Woman As Their “Son"

Peleg, who was 31, had long been concerned about a battle with her ultra-orthodox family after her death. Their beliefs forbid cremation, and she worried they would attempt to have a religious burial under her male name. Peleg paid for her own cremation in March 2014 at the one funeral home in Jerusalem that performs the service, and filed a will with an attorney a day before her suicide and asked that he fight for her wishes if her family attempted to interfere.

This is heartening. No one should be driven to suicide by discrimination against who they are, but the ultimate insult is ignorance of one’s post-death wishes, because when are we more vulnerable than in death?