A Raisin at Dusk

One recent evening, my wife and I and our dog Argos are hanging out watching the news, playing with our phones, eating some organic trail mix.  I am mostly on my phone, trying to follow some outrage that my brother's twitter page has alerted me to that is competing to monopolize my attention despite the annoying handicap of being a non-user, when through the fog, I hear my wife observing out loud in a very amused tone of voice that Argos seems to love raisins.  Indeed, I look over in time to see him eagerly devouring a big juicy one from my wife's outstretched palm.  That's odd, I think.  Was she not around when my daughter warned me about grapes for dogs that time she saw me innocently feeding one to Argos' predecessor to the throne, Penelope?  The news was both counterintuitive and shocking.  Grapes?  The delicious little things you almost always have around are really bad for dogs? The creatures in your house that keep the floor and your lap clean of food debris? And no one knows about this?  I'd been feeding dogs grapes all my life by that point.  It bore further research but it stuck in my brain.  

I tell my wife that I've heard grapes are bad for dogs.  She shrugs the comment off as the typical kind of malarkey she's used to hearing from me, but something about the dread in my voice makes her instantly seal the trail mix container and set it on her end table like it's a bomb.  Between the two of us, the validity of the statement will not be confirmed because nothing in either of our long histories on earth with grapes and dogs seems to support this insane notion.  If this were a thing, wouldn't grapes come with a warning?  Wouldn't dogs come with a warning?  I take it to google.

"Dogs and grapes" 

The results come back instantly.  Grapes are very bad for dogs.  How bad?  One grape can kill your dog.  What??!  Well, what about raisins?  Raisins are probably worse.   How??!  No one knows for sure, but google seems to be as positive about this as about anything that while some dogs can survive a grape incident with no harm, some unspecified number will develop symptoms of toxicity within 12 to 24 hours-- vomiting,  prolific nasty diarrhea, unusual lethargy.  If this happens, you can kiss Rover good-bye.  The lucky ones will have severe kidney damage that will infirm them for the rest of their miserably short lives.  Most dogs will die within 3 to 4 days.  What??!!  How many dogs does this happen to?  50 to 75% of dogs that die of kidney failure have had a grape.  Okay!! Whatever that means!!  Can anything be done?  Induce vomiting with hydrogen peroxide.  On the other hand, don't induce vomiting.  If you see your dog eating a grape call your vet immediately!  On second thought probably best just to take the dog to the vet for several days' observation.  What do vets say?  What does the AKC say?  These are vets and the AKC!!  One site offers to diagnose your dog over the web for $75.

As I'm scouring page after page in search of some reasonableness, some ounce of pushback, some voice of sanity and calm and coming up empty, I'm sinking deeper and deeper into a rabbit hole of despair.  For my wife, who went across three states to get Argos just before COVID hit and for whom he has become a kind of totem of health and youth and entertainment sustaining her through a dark time, this is all too much.  She begs me to stop reading it.  My heart is breaking for her.  How many raisins did he eat?  A few.  The words almost choke on the way out of her mouth: Maybe ten.

Through all of this Argos is sitting on the couch observing us, looking particularly healthy, innocent,  adorable, puppyish. Probably wondering where the next raisin is.  

Could we be witnessing the end?  In my mind I'm trying out the notion of resisting my reluctance to believe that by allowing raisins into our house we have murdered our dog to get the oomph to rush the dog to the vet for a stomach pumping as google seems to be urging me to.  My wife just wants to go for a walk.  She does not want to yield to the panic that google is trying to enflame in us.  For me it's too late, but a part of me wants to rebel against this unprecedented unanimity in the google results.  We agree that we will not take the dog to the vet. We will not call the vet.  We will not induce vomiting.  We will go for a walk.  If Argos starts vomiting or squirting diarrhea everywhere or becomes catatonic over the next few days we will be chastened and take immediate action.  In the meantime, we will not speak of this again.

In spite of our resolve, a dark cloud hung over proceedings for the next couple of days.  What were those ten raisins doing to our baby in there?  There was no vomiting, no diarrhea, no lethargy.  In fact, there was no poop for 2 days.  A little alarming, but even through the dark lens of doom, Argos persisted in being Argos.  In 2 days, poop came.  It was normal.  

He has survived the 4 day death watch, but will Argos survive this episode indefinitely?  I have no idea.  His forbear, Penelope, lived to a ripe old age following her brush with a grape (and who knows how many other dozens of grapes, raisins and currants were fed to her or scavenged by her without being brought to anyone's attention).  But it has been several days and those ten raisins Argos ate are fading from prominence in our minds.  In the cooler light of day I've gone back to those results in search of some statistic, some fact, something real to hang this panic on, and my conclusion is that the search itself is the only thing real about it.  Apparently for some small percentage of dogs, it was only recently (some say 1989) discovered that grapes could be toxic.  As to why this is so or even if it is real, a case could be made that the scientific results are not yet conclusive.  The google results on the other hand are overwhelming.

From what I can tell, in spite of the unanimity in the google results, there is no way to use them to overcome any skepticism you may feel about the quality of information you can find on the topic on the internet; and to the shame of the veterinary profession, that is with plenty of input from vets.  The volume of sudden panic on this in spite of millennia of dogs and grapes coexisting peacefully is somewhat reminiscent of the emergence of peanut allergies and satanic daycare facilities as cause for national alarm within the same time frame.  For all of the internet's abundant power to answer a multitude of questions that cross our minds, there are some areas-- our dogs, our children, other people's fetuses-- that seem to invite hyperactive concern and a leaping to conclusions: 

If you are contemplating sharing a bowl of grapes or raisins with your dog, maybe don't.  But if your dog has had a grape and you'd like to know what to do, I'll make a case as a reformed inveterate grape pusher for taking your dog for a walk.

Mid-Summer Involuntary Dance Episode

DeeeLite - Good Beat

The Boyoyo Boys - Puleng

Otava Yo (Отава Ё) - Про Ивана Groove (русское готическое R'N'B) - (Groove for Ivan - Russian Gothic R&B)

Jarina de Marco - Give it to me Baby (Rick James cover extraordinaire)

Pyramidos (ピラミッドス) - τα καγκελια (The Railings)

L.A. Witch - I Wanna Lose

The Friends of Distinction - Grazing in the Grass (Hugh Masekela cover)
 

Iggy Pop - Five Foot One

Confidence Man - Holiday (Bruise Remix)

Red Nichols and His Five Pennies - The Peanut Vendor (animation by Len Lye from  1933)

M.D. Shirinda & Gaza Sisters - Pfuka N'wavulolo

TENDER - Belong

Bootsy Collins feat. Fantaazma with cameos by Victor Wooten and Patti Collins- Hip-Hop Lollipop

Rosalía - La Combi Versace

Stopsonic - Now and Here

The Dandy Warhols - Not if You Were the Last Junkie on Earth

BIN-JIP - Dinner with a Demon (Live at Planetarium with Glowing Bulbs)

Pere Ubu - Street Waves

Steve Reich - Violin Phase (choreographed and danced by Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker; Shem Guibbory, violin)

The soft elitism of low expectations

Have you been watching the January 6 hearings?  I haven't, at least not giving it my full attention.  It has been clear to me for some time that Trump actively encouraged the storming of the capital by a frenzy of angry and entitled (if misinformed) supporters prepared for mayhem that weird day in early 2021, and that he did not particularly care what violence might come out of it-- even suggesting that the lynching of his vice president might not be a bad thing.  But while I assumed that this was due to a misunderstanding on his part about how elections (or civil society) work, I have learned that by not tuning into the hearings fully (they were on in the background at different points of the evening but when it comes to the emissions of our media and our elite these days I was by force of habit tuning them out), I missed a pretty solid case being made for Trump's team acting, on Trump's orders, as though they believed he had really won the election while knowing based on the incontrovertible facts at their disposal that he had in fact lost.  I had to check my complete cynicism in order to grasp that this is pretty significant stuff.  It means that Trump on January 6 was apparently engaging in a coup, attempting to use the power of his office to subvert the will of the people through violence since the results of November were not muddled enough to permit him to go the Bush 2000 route of using his stacked Supreme Court to reverse his loss. 

What has become clearer to me as I have caught the snippets of January 6-ers explicitly acknowledging that they were taking orders from Trump (who in his speech before the attack I was reminded promised to be shoulder to shoulder with the stormers as they breeched the capitol whereas in actuality he merely skittered back to the white house to watch the proceedings on tv from the comfy remove of his la-z-boy), is what fascism looks like.  Brothers and sisters, it looks like you and me. 

Whether he realizes it or not, Trump's novel approach to winning an election is akin to Joe Biden's assertion on Charlemagne tha God's radio show two summers ago, in the course of a campaign in which his only promise was that if he were elected nothing would fundamentally change for his donors, that if you weren't for Joe Biden, "you ain't black."       

Does it ever occur to any of these people that in order to win elections, rather than taking it out of the people-- taking them for granted when they’re not taking advantage of them, lying to them when they’re not  abusing them, antagonizing them when they’re not disrespecting their intelligence, browbeating them when they're not manipulating their numbers-- maybe for a change they should try delivering for them instead? 

When no one is on the people's side, where do the people go?  In an age of conflict and rancor and confusion, they go to certainty-- even if in Trump's case that way lies Chaos.  Chaos got a bit of a holiday in the last election when voters by a substantial margin chose Boring in hopes that Boring would be a change they could believe in, but back to Chaos they will surely go if Boring stops working for them.  How is it working for you lately?

O beauty!

The elements of the spindle top to bottom:  (A) The body ; (B) the compression spring; (C) the pin 

Suffering will always be with us. Almost nothing good can be counted on to be here tomorrow.  However... 

I have lived at my current address for nearly 30 years, far longer than any other address in my life, approaching as long as all other places combined.  This house is five years older than me.  When it was put together at the birth of a new suburb in the environs of a large important city more than 60 years ago, it was equipped with some amenities that are still in use today.  A doorbell that still makes the heart stop when engaged by some unannounced visitor.  A Roper gas range still vented by the original NuTone hood and exhaust fan.  And perhaps most importantly of all, a recessed toilet paper holder with its original wooden spindle which still has its original spring. 

I cannot stress enough the importance of this feature. Just three parts to the spindle: the fixed body  (A) with its end pegged to fit into a niche on either side of the wall recess, and a chamber into which a coiled compression spring (B) is loaded, followed by a pin (C) with a head at one end designed to fit only one way into the chamber and then turned to prevent its retraction and at the other end a counterpart pegged end to fit into the opposite niche from the one that the body's pegged end will occupy.  

To change a roll, the spindle is compressed to clear one of its ends from its niche, the spindle is removed from the recess, the empty roll is replaced on the spindle with a new roll, one end of the spindle is fitted into its niche within the recess and then the spindle is compressed to fit the opposite pegged end into its counterpart niche .  The component which makes this miracle happen every few days is the spring--  0.04 inch gauge steel wire coiled 10 times to a length (a "free length" to use spring terminology as distinct from the length of wire used to make the spring) 1.5 inches around a quarter inch diameter--  the tension of which holds both ends of the spindle in place when a new roll is deployed yet which must be limber enough to permit the compression of the spindle twice every time a roll is replaced.    Who knows how many times a year for 60 years?  

Well the popular statistics site statista knows.  Per a 2018 consumer market study, being an American toilet paper dispenser  (top of the list natch), it is changed on average 141 times per year per person  divided by 2 bathrooms in my house which comes to something like 200 times a year.  At a rate of 1.8 days per roll per year I am certain that this is high, but I’ll go with it on the theory that my under average sized household is statistically on the low side compared to those who preceded me at the address.  Conservatively then, in its more than 65 years of use, the spring has been compressed and extended a minimum of 26,000 times.  

A spring can be expected to last somewhere between 10,000 and 15,000 cycles, so it is already at the high end of life, but based on my intimate experience of it every other day or so, it is not showing its age.  Rather amazing considering that it has spent most of its life compressed-- under stress between the end of the chamber it sits in and the head of the pin it shares its space with.  I frequently marvel at the quality of spring it still has left in it.  And it is older than me, and more used.  I cannot adequately express my appreciation for the quiet certitude I am free to have in the part it plays-- mostly unobserved-- in my daily life.  

Every now and then though (this morning for instance), in changing a roll, some misalignment of the notched head of the pin allows it to clear the shelf of the chamber that holds it in place, at which point the tension of the spring will project the pin and itself out of the chamber onto the dubious, generally poorly lit plane of the bathroom floor.  Whereas the pin is easily spotted, the delicate insubstantial spring, being immediately swallowed up by the darkness of this quadrant of the bathroom floor, risks being inadvertently crushed out of utility by an errant shod foot before it can be found.  Catastrophe in the making!  

On the other hand:

Saturday Morning Wonderland

 

Nothing's on TV

Yes friends, television was different back in my day.  You may have your singing dragons, your super quadruplets, your dysfunctional family-owned conglomerates.  Give me the cereal sponsored pablum of my childhood: shows with such titles as Magic Maude and her Wonder Flute, The Boy Who Ate Marbles, and the gentle western flavored heroics of Cactus Cal and the Jolly Tinker. When the sun rose after five hours of morning chores on another weekend, nothing beat that toasty feeling of sitting your tired ass down with a bowl of maple flavored millet for 5 more hours of Saturday morning tv.  It was a new medium with a lot of dead air to fill and a limited amount of time and money to fill it with.  They could have just turned the camera on a bucket of toads and we would have been entertained, but what they did instead was hire admen, retired vaudevilleans, has-been B movie stars and young out-of-work method actors and let the magic happen.  

And there was none of this politically correct stuff back then.  Just trust me.

We're talking limited animation classics like Zip Magruder,  the Chimp from Outer Space brought to you by Duvernois Filterless Cigarettes, and Betsy and Kimmy Meet the Mummy.  

But perhaps my favorite weekly serial featured the antics of that canine corpse, Dixie the Ghost Dog.  Follow the spooky pooch and her young master Terri as they traverse the globe in search of rights to wrong and wrongs to right!  Nothing today could quite hope to compare to the excitement and anticipation a young lad got each week hearing the melodic strains of the opening theme song:

Oh there's a late fox terrier;
No canine spook is scarier.
(The ghost of) Dixie Doodle! Dixie Doodle!
Hair like wire,
Breath of dog shit and Hell Fire.
(The ghost of) Dixie Doodle! (She ain't no fuckin' poodle!)
She used to stand around;
Now she's a real Hell hound!
Gents and Ladies, meet the bitch from Hades:
Dixie Doodle! 

We don't know what it was about, but did it kill us to watch?  No, it did not!  And we assume for that reason it might have made us stronger. 

The Fix is In

The Big Con is a book from 1940 by David Maurer, a professor of linguistics at the University of Louisville who made his career studying the culture and argots of the drug and criminal undergrounds and other subcultures.  A contributor to later editions of H.L.Mencken's The American Language, Maurer discovered his calling trying to penetrate the arcane conversations of fishermen on summers he spent as as a young man working as a hand on fishing boats off the coast of Newfoundland. The Big Con, his most celebrated work,  is a “linguistic study” of the subculture of the streets, taken from testimony of actual con men of the early 20th century.   Men with such colorful names as Larry the Lug, The Sanctimonious Kid,  Wildfire Bill, Limehouse Chappie, 102nd Street George and The High Ass Kid, describing the ins and outs of their métier in language like the following:

Never boast about your rags, but brag about your long cush. That will lead him along to brag about his long jack, and then you’re getting somewhere, brother. If he is a hard-shelled Babbitt, why you’re one too.

But the book is as much about the trade as about the language with which it is plied.  The professor sued the makers of The Sting in the 70’s for $10 million, alleging that David Ward's  Oscar winning screenplay copied his book without attribution or compensation.  Indeed, the plot of  the Sting bears a strong resemblance to a con referred to by Maurer as The Pay-Off and Paul Newman's character Shaw Gondorff is clearly a nod to brother grifters Fred and Charley Gondorff memorialized in Maurer's book.     

As Maurer describes it, there are short cons like 3 card monte and crooked faro games by which any two-bit grifter can separate a fool from his money in minutes, but then there are the elaborate Big Cons like "The Wire", "The Rag" and "The Payoff" that take knowledge, skill, technique, determination, props, sets, personnel and days or even months to come to fruition. All 3 involve an arc in which a "roper" trawls dining cars, poker games or hotel lobbies in search of a suitable "mark", perhaps a small town entrepreneur in the city for some business,  who he chats up in order to ferret out an openness to partnering in the procurement of easy money, often based on inside information say on the results of a race or the performance of a stock, information that due to the willingness of a disgruntled insider the roper has become wise to can be delayed long enough for a bet to be placed or stocks to be bought or sold.  

Once hooked by the roper, the next step is to bring the mark into the orbit of the real master of the con, the "insideman" who can make it happen, a suave and charismatic moneyman who the mark believes must be convinced to overcome his reticence to bankroll the sure thing that the roper and the mark have brought to his attention.  Of course the insideman is in reality the engine of the scam who through his apparent earnestness and deft manipulation gains the trust of the mark, who is ultimately persuaded to raise funds of his own to front or facilitate what he believes is a much larger and more complicated transaction from the insideman that will guarantee that the dreamed of payoff will be enormous, yet which due to a glitch has been inconveniently tied up in a way that only the mark's earnest money can get unstuck.  

With the "trim" (the mark's money) in hand-- often tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars raised surreptitiously but dutifully by the mark from back home-- the sure thing is derailed, usually because of a misunderstanding -- say, a bet "placed" on a horse to win that should have been put on the horse to "place"; a stock that should have been sold rather than bought-- the deed is done.  All that's left is to set the mark on his heels.  Something that's usually not hard to do with the suggestion that the law might have become privy to a questionable, possibly larcenous transaction that the mark participated in with open eyes and full intent to profit from.  If further prompting is needed, perhaps a spectacularly violent murder of the roper whose misunderstanding blew the deal apart staged in front of the mark's eyes, followed up by a hint that the mark himself could now conceivably be convicted by any jury as an accessory to a murder he had surely already thought of committing himself.  If the mark on cooling his heels decides to raise a beef, additional personnel are needed in the form of "fixers"-- attorneys or other influencers free with cash for cops, judges and jurors on the take.  With the fix in, a con could set up permanent shop on Main Street, right next to the Western Auto.  All of it creating a sort of shadow economy co-existent and in many cases finely intermeshed with "respectable society" in many an American town. 

While a little grifter slang goes a long way, the book itself still goes down like the finest bourbon.  What’s especially interesting about it is that one gets the sense that Maurer’s interest in these chaps is more than academic.  There seems to be a good bit of admiration in his recounting of the scams, many of which are insanely elaborate—think of the Sting with its telegraph room and all those fake bettors and other “extras” in on the scam – all of them acting as though their ruse is real, and in a way that is meant to convince the rubes is real.  So elaborate as to invite the question, “who thought this would work, let alone turn a profit?”  But according to Maurer this kind of thing was extremely common, and extremely profitable in the early part of the 20th century.  Here he describes the nightmare of a mark with a beef with uncommon sensitivity to the jeopardy posed to the con:

If the insideman handles the blow-off properly, the mark hardly knows that he has been fleeced. No good insideman wants any trouble with a mark. He wants him to lose his money the “easy way” rather than the “hard way” and the secret to long immunity from arrest is a properly staged blow-off, with the mark blaming the roper and feeling that the insideman is the finest man he ever knew. It is the mark who is not cooled out properly or is mishandled by a clumsy or incompetent insideman who immediately beefs; furthermore, if he is sure that he has been swindled and if the local police do not act, he may go higher up, with revenge rather than recovery of his money as his object. Marks of this type can upset the whole corrupt political machine and even land not only the con men but perhaps some of the police and the fixer as well behind bars.

After his suit against the Sting's producers was settled for $300,000 (over the protests of  David Ward who claims-- plausibly-- to this day to have gotten nothing more than inspiration from The Big Con), Maurer retired from academia to his farm in Kentucky.  Injuries sustained in a car crash aged him before his time.  Hoping to avoid becoming a burden and financial drain on his wife (whom he referred to as The Countess), he took a walk to the cornfield in 1981 and killed himself with a shot gun.  

The Big Con endures.

A sample of grifter slang from the David Maurer's The Big Con:

Apple - A mark.  Any person.

Beef - complain to the police

Blute - fake newspaper clippings used as props in the big con

Bobble- to arouse a mark's suspicions

Boodle - A fake roll of large bills (large bills on the outside, small bills inside which can be flashed in front a mark for effect.

The Broads - 3 card monte.

Bumblebee - $1 bill

The cackle-bladder - Method of shaking off a mark with a beef involving the insideman shooting the roper with blanks in front of the mark, made more effective by blood splurting from a rubber bladder filled with blood held in the roper's mouth.

Cannon (also gun, whizz, dip, etc) - A pickpocket.

Chick or Chicane - Short of money

Cop a heel - Run away.

Curdle - Go wrong (as in a fix that doesn't work)

Cush - Money

Drop-In - Easy money

Ear-wigger - Eavesdropper

Fixer - One employed to buy cooperation of police, judge and jurors 

Get a hard-on - Reach for a pistol

Have smallpox - To be wanted on a warrant (since it might lead to others being sought for arrest)

Heavy-gee - A safeblower or other professional

Jacket - Something or someone liable to be trouble to a grifter in a trial - e.g.,  his criminal record or a witness who can testify against him.

Joe Hep or Hep - Smart or wise to the grift.

Jug or jay - A bank.

Lagged - Sent  to prison

Mudkicker - A prostitute

Peter - A safe

Plinger - A beggar

The quill - Genuine

Raggle - Attractive woman

Savage - A mark

Scat - Whisky

Scatter - Saloon

Shed - Rail or bus station

Sneezed - Arrested

Square paper - An honest person.

Taw - Bank roll

T.B. - Total Blank; No score

Tear off - Cheat one's partner of their share.

Tin Mittens - A fixer (from the sound of coin clinking in the hand)

Tip - A crowd of people

Touch - Money taken from a mark 

Trim - To take money from a mark; also, the amount taken  

Twist - Woman, often in the rackets or connected to crime

Whip -To walk

Winchell - A mark

Wrong - Not bought by a fixer as in a wrong cop or judge.

Yellow - A telegram, especially a fake telegram used in a grift.

~~~~~~~~~

* As a pre-formed youth I was huge fan of the movie when it first came out in 1973-- it was one of the few I paid good money to see several more times than once.  I rewatched it with my family a few years ago.  The fam was utterly unimpressed and I cringed at it from start to finish, mostly at the wooden near 40-year old Robert Redford’s casting as a 20-something street kid.  But the time might be ripe to set the peepers on it for one more go.

The 800-pound gorilla

Reading the reasoning of a lawyer, Norman Finkelstein, on Roe v Wade, which half a century ago established federal protection of a woman's right to choose abortion for an unwanted pregnancy, and on the leaked Alito decision that could end it, I was struck by the bloodless sacrality at the heart of it.

The landmark US Supreme Court decision upholding a woman’s (qualified) right to abortion, Roe v. Wade (1973), pretended to avoid the enigma of when life begins: “We need not resolve the difficult question of when life begins. When those trained in the respective disciplines of medicine, philosophy, and theology are unable to arrive at any consensus, the judiciary, at this point in the development of man’s knowledge, is not in a position to speculate as to the answer.” But the Court was being disingenuous. First, except by artifice, it seems impossible to decide the legality of abortion without engaging this irreducible question. Second, even if only by indirection, the Court did stake out a position on when life begins. The problem, alas, was that its position was wholly unpersuasive and wholly political.

... However much the Court denied it, viability was ... the point at which it determined life began. It made sense politically as the Court reached for the broad center in public opinion. But its own determination was as capricious (or rational) as the others. It grounded the right to abortion during the first stage of pregnancy in the Fourteenth Amendment right to liberty, and it grounded the State’s right to intervene during the later stage of pregnancy in its obligation to protect prenatal life. The Court presents this resolution of the abortion enigma as a compromise between the extreme pro-choice and pro-life positions. But it’s only a balanced decision if life begins at viability. If, however, life begins at conception, then, by the Court’s own reasoning, a woman’s right to liberty would in general be trumped by the fetus’s right to life, while if life begins at birth, then State intervention prior to birth would in general violate the woman’s right to liberty. 

Truth be told, the whole of the Court’s jurisprudence is absurd as it is premised on the belief that an insoluble moral enigma—when does life begin?—can be resolved by a clever turn of phrase or, less charitably, verbal subterfuge. The intractable fact is that, for all anyone knows, the so-called rigid pro-life position might be vindicated by History. Indeed, if the jury is still out, and it’s human life that’s at stake, then isn’t the categorical imperative to err on the side of caution: if it might be life, then act as if it is life?

Are we just raising questions with this approach, or are we begging them?  Finkelstein's reading of the decision seems to be fixated (perhaps appropriately for all I know) on how closely it adheres to the matter of what is legally correct in this instance.  His admonition in light of what he appears to acknowledge is the present unsettleablility of the question of when life begins and should be protected is to err on the side of caution for the fetus which cannot speak for itself.  On the matter of whether a fetus has life that the state is bound to protect, Finkelstein acknowledges the unanswerability; but on the question of whether a fetus declared to have life has the right to be born, this controversy Finkelstein appears to take as a given.*  In light of the insolubility of both questions, as I read the reasoning behind Justice Blackmun's majority opinion on Roe v. Wade, I am impressed by the pragmatic judiciousness of it.

Speaking as a person with perhaps the least legal, least reverential mind that anyone ought to dare to bring to bear upon such a topic, I find the notion in this day and age, when an intrauterine device can silently, unobtrusively and definitively intervene as intended in a way that merely certifies the futility of a sperm's already doomed mission of fertilizing an egg, when a pill can artificially induce infertility or reverse a fertilization within hours of it happening, when the termination of an unplanned, unwanted or forced pregnancy can be done in a way that does not add to whatever trauma occasioned it, I can outdo Finkelstein's bloodlessness.  If a fetus might be life: what's it to you?  Abortion exists in nature.  It will always be with us.  A fetus cannot have an opinion. The woman carrying it is alive and among us.  Her fetus is none of your business.   The opinion of the man, who frequently is not even around afterward to be polled on the matter, is only relevant it seems to me when it supports the reality the woman is faced with. 

Life doesn't happen every day, even for the living.  "Potential" life is thwarted at every turn-- by abortion, by miscarriage, by contraception, by abstention, by menstruation, by infertility, by mood, by alcohol, by having a work deadline pop into your head just when it was getting good.  My wife and I were recently contemplating how differently our lives would have gone if we had not been rejected as a young impoverished couple for a mortgage on a beautiful old house we had let ourselves unrealistically dream about owning in the small provincial city in the nation's heartland we were living in at the time. Of all the differences it would have made in the trajectory of our lives to have gotten that mortgage instead, the most devastating was the absence from it of our daughter-- because surely the sperm and the egg that made her could only have met that particular moment in the very different circumstances of the lives we were then able to make for ourselves many miles, many changes and many years later.

This is not a case for the sanctity of life, but for the virtual impossibility of any single life, even against the inexorable onslaught of life constantly trying to happen.  The minutely infinitely particular circumstances in which any one life must have started-- especially compared to the overwhelming finality of those uncountable multitudes that fail to happen-- to my mind weakens the notion that human life could be considered sacred before it is born into this world.  If the fertilization of a single egg by an individual sperm is so unlikely that it could have been easily undone without any intention, how could it be sacred?  If every life that makes it to birth is pre-determined in its quality and its duration, do choice, will and sacredness have any meaning?  If every pregnancy must by statute be brought to term, that's not holiness, that's an algorithm.  Who is anyone to decide that a woman must not take advantage of readily available technology to improve the circumstances under which she might bring forth a child into the world?   Birth is demonstrably not a right for every fetus even by cosmic justice.  How differently might we treat it if we recognized it as a privilege?

It seems to me that Alito's decision on the undecidable question at the heart of the Mississippi case that apparently will undo Roe v Wade nearly 50 years after it became established law, and that potentially threatens to undo protections of so many other intimate individual choices and behaviors that required nearly 200 years of social development for the all-male until 1981 Supreme Court to recognize is, just as you would imagine it to be, just as arbitrary as Blackmun's but on the side of the meddling state of Mississippi and against the women whose lives and autonomy it interferes with.  

In pinpointing the state's interest in the sacredness of a human life at viability, Blackmun might have been overplaying the government's hand, but his argument strikes me as a genuinely valid compromise that in any case has proven for nearly 50 years to adequately protect the right of a woman to choose for herself whether to continue or to terminate the circumstance of an actual pregnancy actually confronting her.  The rescinding of this rare instance of governmental decency in a matter of individual freedom would be not merely tragic but barbaric.

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* If I am following Finkelstein's legal argument, judicial protection of a woman's choice at the Federal level is overreach, but local legislative or democratically chosen protection of the right of a fetus to be born should bind the woman pregnant with it. 

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Postscript: Several years later, I realize I might have misread Finkelstein's argument about Casey, the 1992 decision that introduced viability as the arbitrary point at which the court determined life begins as a way of limiting the freedom of a woman to choose abortion to terminate an unwanted pregnancy.  As Finkelstein says, by arbitrarily and unconvincingly setting viability as the boundary between legality and illegality of abortion, it was the court that created the vulnerability in Roe.  In that event my argument is with Casey and Dobbs, not necessarily with Finkelstein on this point.