Utopia at Last

The Supreme Court Justice’s favorite thing to do was write opinions on controversial cases.

She — because yeah, let’s make this a progressive story about a female Supreme Court Justice, that’ll rake in the clicks — liked to think of herself as a woman with a literary flair. During her time as a law student at Stanford she’d edited a small quarterly poetry journal called Black Eurydice — because yeah, let’s make a big deal about her race too — which she really hadn’t liked the name of because, “Well, wasn’t Orpheus the poet, and Eurydice was his wife?”

But little details like that couldn’t hold back the general thrust of the publication, and co-editor Janet Watson, who also went on to be a Supreme Court Justice — because what the hell, let’s go all out, let’s set this story in a world where all nine of the Supreme Court Justices are female, you know, like a real Utopia — but anyway, she compromised a bit with the Supreme Court Justice and they rewrote the original myth of Orpheus.

That was the whole inaugural issue of Black Eurydice, you see. Like, you know how they’ll always tell you that, “Well obviously Achilles and Patroclus were lovers, because… Greek things?”

(Oh, and that reminds me — the Supreme Court Justice and Janet Watson got married in 2017, because that’ll earn us a few more gravy points.)

Pretty much apply the same Achilles logic to the Orpheus story. In this version, it’s that Eurydice was secretly the one who produced all the poetry, and Orpheus was (say it with me) an abusive husband who stole the credit for her work. But then Eurydice dies, probably because Orpheus was ravenously objectifying her with his male gaze or something, and so Orpheus goes down into the underworld to try to save her, but not because he loves her or anything, it’s only because he needs her to keep making poetry so he can pretend he wrote it himself.

But of course Orpheus is really useless and has a fragile ego, so he gets trapped in the underworld too. So you don’t have the whole “flight from the underworld that ends tragically in Orpheus losing his wife forever” thing that you have in the original myth.

Instead there’s this long, drawn-out scene where Eurydice talks to Orpheus (who is by this time trapped in an enormous pile of bovine-produced fecal matter) and pretty much lists off every lousy thing he’d ever done to her in her life — which is supposed to be really triumphant but even Janet Watson thought it fell a little flat. And of course they would have taken more time to edit it, but considering the piece (which they humbly liked to consider a genuine modern epic, eclipsing if not outright replacing the Metamorphoses of Ovid) was co-written with the work of nine writers, all of whom were law students with very busy schedules, it was really a (secular) miracle that the work was ever completed in the first place.

Now some may argue that having nine writers collaborate on a single work degrades clarity of vision and reduces any artistic ambitions down to the — excuse the cliché — lowest common denominator.

Those people are obviously all fascists.

And to finish up the story of Black Eurydice’s inaugural issue, it ends with Eurydice literally capturing Cerberus the three-headed hellhound and riding him up into the light of day. At which time, of course, Eurydice journeys to the island of Lesbos, where she enjoys an idyllic existence totally devoid of masculine influence.

But yeah, the Supreme Court Justice really enjoyed writing opinions on controversial cases. She liked to sit and sip her organic coffee, daydreaming about the time to come. When she would be long-dead and bored law students would be forced to pore over her (audacious and daring) prose while studying to get a degree their Mommies and Daddies wanted them to get.

That was the kind of immortality she was interested in. The kind that would finally make somebody pay for all those countless hours she spent getting a law degree and practicing law when she hated every second of it.

Damn kids from future centuries. She wished they’d hurry up and get born so she could kill them or at least make their lives hell or something.

And making their lives hell was the first thing that partially made up for the ongoing nightmare of the Supreme Court Justice’s existence.

Anyway. Everyone admired the Supreme Court Justice’s glittering prose style. Even though her prose did not glitter. Even though she intentionally went out of her way to make it as turgid, messy, and obscure as she could manage without giving herself a stroke. Even though she deliberately used obscure foreign phrases, and not even ones in French or Latin that normal people use when they’re being pretentious.

Everyone loved her prose style. Because everyone who didn’t love her prose style got fired.

And being able to promote people who shamelessly flattered her and ruin the careers of people who said maybe she could write a bit clearer was the second thing that partially made up for the ongoing nightmare of the Supreme Court Justice’s existence.

Then there was the third thing. Which was, of course, writing opinions on controversial cases.

Like she’s doing tonight. Just finishing up, in fact.

“And that,” she wrote, “Is why I agree with the unanimous decision of the Supreme Court of the United States of America, that nobody but the federal government should be allowed to own anything. Like, at all. Period.”

Like I said. Utopia.