La Scalia

For some symbolic reason I always pictured Antonin Scalia in a frumpy, older wool sweater with some pilling and with his hair somewhat unkempt and staticky and with a little crustiness at the corners of his mouth, and with floating dust and smoke visible around him in soft, streaming light--a vision of fuzz and scuzz in dicey resolution contrasting with the sharpness of his mind. That latter is acknowledged by everyone. Now in the vision he is dead on a wooden floor. Everything else is the same.

I can't see him differently. The guy had a problem. The mental acuity was not counterbalanced but made possible by moral and scholarly frumpiness--an imperative to see things as they weren't--because his kind of consistency and exactitude can only exist in an abstract and imaginary world. He had to believe in certainty where it wasn't, in clarity where it isn't and in definitive answers where they aren't. I guess it was out of fear and a Manichean mindset, that it's authority or chaos. 

It's a bit right-brain and creative and more traditionally feminine, in the way that Catholicism is all of these, and less strictly scientific and analytical. His analyses were Jesuitical and Socratic. He could defend anything, and did, because his reason was in the service of the greater glory of something else and not independent and accountable. This is all well enough but it's un-American. It's rationalization. It's validity depends wholly on the initial insight. It depends on the man himself.

And he was wrong.