Dear Alito: You Are Not Cool
Justice Alito is a bloviating conservative windbag of questionable morality who has made a career out of marginalizing the rights of a staggering number of Americans.* We all already know that; there’s no story there. But what is noteworthy is the fact that, in a recent opinion, Judge Alito made several allusions to John Lennon’s Imagine, and at one point, even went so far as to quote all the lyrics of the song. This is funny because John Lennon would definitely have found Alito to be a horrible person and would probably have loudly contested his use of his lyrics, since he’s pretty much dedicated his life to everything John Lennon was against.
Brian E. Gray, a law professor at U.C. Hastings, also noticed the…um—let’s call it the “incongruity”—that exists between Alito’s decisions and his choice of Lennon’s words to describe them, and he has expressed his observations in a hilarious Morning News piece called, appropriately, You Are Not Cool. A quote from the article:
At this point, I began to imagine how John Lennon would have reacted both to Alito’s cooptation of his lyrics and the justice’s decision in [another] case to deny monetary compensation to Diana Levine, a professional musician. Levine’s right arm had to be amputated after she developed gangrene because of faulty labeling of the pharmaceutical company’s anti-nausea drug Phenergan, which she received by inadvertent intra-arterial injection. “[T]ragic facts make bad law,” was Alito’s only lament. It is a far cry from a world in which there is “no need for greed or hunger, a brotherhood of man.”
Justice Alito is a conservative whose views on government promotion of religion and corporate evasion of responsibility for violations of state health and safety laws may or may not comport with the intentions of the framers of the Constitution. But whatever Justice Alito’s legal philosophy, one thing he isn’t is cool.
Pretty awesome and very funny. To read the whole thing, go here.
* So is Scalia, but I don’t have all day here.