Retrograde Cycle

Note to Readers, and Letter to a Chief Justice.

Just a note to apologize to my subscribers and readers for the long cæsura, and promise some new work soon. I’ve been laid low for the last two weeks by the surprisingly tenacious rhinovirus that’s apparently been circulating in the Northeast. I also seem to be in one of those cycles of ill fortune when your ruling planet is in retrograde or some malicious imp has decided to fuck with you in particular, in picayune but needling ways: in the last few days, my French press unaccountably burst, a first edition I’d bought as a retirement gift for a friend was stolen from my mailbox, and somehow I only just learned, a few years belatedly, that Meat Loaf is dead, and have entered a period of mourning involving repeat listenings to “Bat Out of Hell.” I am still writing, but it seems to take eighteen times longer than usual; thinking feels like trying to run underwater. I’m still at work on the long-promised piece about UFOs, which I’m hastening to finish because, as has been the case for the last fifty years, some major government disclosures on the subject are allegedly imminent.

In the meantime, I offer this token scrap of prose as a placeholder. Writing to your elected representatives post-Citizens United is about as effective as spray-painting slogans on underpasses, but since writing is one of my meager talents I still sporadically feel impelled, by one outrage or another, to send a letter to some politician or public official. These are generally messages of futile exhortation to my Democratic senators or futile abuse to my election-denier congressman, but this latest was to the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. I chose Roberts to write to because he at least used to present himself as a reasonable moderate, and, alone among the conservative justices—the rest of whom are ideological crackpots, religious dingbats, or unabashedly bought and paid for—seems like he might be capable of some vestigial form of shame.

More soon, and here’s hoping we’ll all emerge from this grim retrograde cycle sooner rather than later.

30 April 2026

John Roberts:

I used to live in Baltimore, where for a long time a statue of Justice Roger Taney sat in a public park in midtown. My friend Steve always used to pause, whenever we were on a night out, to climb the pedestal of this statue to spit on Taney’s face. It was always satisfying to watch spittle drip down the nose and lips of the author of the Dred Scott decision. That statue is gone now, toppled and hauled off, along with an equestrian monument in another Baltimore park celebrating the heroes of the Confederacy, during that brief interval of reason and decency when people felt that perhaps we ought not still publicly honor the champions of human slavery.

You’ve presided over the greatest repeal of individual rights in America since we razed the rotten slave nation of the South to shambles and ash. My partner lives in Arkansas, where—thanks to you—she’s now deprived of the basic human right to control her own body. Donald Trump now runs the executive branch as a moneymaking scam and its agencies as his own personal mafia, and has threatened to sic the military on America’s allies and its own citizens, but—again, thanks to you—the President is now above the law, assured of immunity to any consequences of his crimes against the constitution or humanity, even if he attacks Denmark or massacres Minnesotans. And, most recently, you’ve successfully dismantled one of the greatest pieces of legislation of the twentieth century, which righted the racial injustices and oppression that had festered in this country since the Civil War.

I doubt you’ll ever get a statue; you’ve probably irreparably tainted your reputation, and made your name and the court that bears it synonymous with racism, servility to tyranny, and contempt for the citizenry. (I suppose they might erect one, just to give the finger to civilized people, in one of the slave states, where I’m sure many applaud your turning the Supreme Court into a rubber stamp for their cult leader and putting the coloreds and women back in their place.) But even if you do, it’ll likely be discreetly taken down and put into storage the next time we have another era of enlightenment in America, which I hope will come sooner rather than later. I’m just writing you to let you know that I look forward, in whatever brief interval that statue is allowed to stand, to clambering up it to spit on your brazen face.

Tim Kreider

Photo © Baltimore Heritage