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Back in the Middle Ages, every day when I walked to school, I would come across at least one 20-foot-tall pole with a wheel on top. The medieval landscape was cluttered with them. Fastened to the wheel would be a man or a woman, or someone else, groaning in agony or silently dead. And I would wonder, how did that poor soul get all the way up there? What’s so damn special about them?
Detail from some gruesome Pieter Bruegel the Elder shit, 1564
Most of the dead or dying people you’d see on the way to medieval school were down there on the ground with you. Especially kids. You didn’t see a lot of kids up on those wheels.
Death is a normal part of life. I know that’s not news to anyone, but back in the bad old days it was pretty blatant. Dead and dying people were everywhere. At the market, on the road, near a pond, at a fair, by a castle, at the smithy, in the park, at a masked ball. It was no big deal, and people didn’t freak out about it. Not like now.
Nowadays our whole day is ruined if someone dies in our line of sight. We’re used to hearing about people dying on the streets in other places, where the wars and genocides and famines and plagues happen. But that’s not us.
We did get a taste of it in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, when we saw the true debut of the government Reagan and Gingrich dreamed of: the worthless, useless government of their fondest desires. The government that left poor people to fend for themselves. The government that allowed packs of better-off folks to prevent the dispossessed from getting to the resources they were hoarding. By shooting at them. The government that warehoused refugees from the flooding in a stadium without adequate means of comfort or safety.
See, that’s what the conservative movement has been training us to understand. Cops killing Black people during routine stops, y’know: get used to it. Resisting it with protests and unrest? We can’t have that, and if we do, you’ll get more killing and police violence in response. We’ll even let chunky little white kids from out of state murder you.
It's the same reason they allow mass shootings and block any regulations of the machines that make them possible. We have to get used to seeing little kids’ bodies and heads ripped apart by automatic weapons fire. If we’re going to achieve the conservative paradise of the dwindling few amassing greater and greater wealth at the expense of the hopes, possibilities, and living standards of the increasingly poor many, the many will have to learn to accept seeing a lot of public death without throwing a hairy conniption every time.
The Texas abortion ban of 2021 is one of the pilot programs getting us acclimated to the new barbarity. Under the guise of “saving unborn lives,” they’ve actually achieved just the opposite. A study published a week and a half ago in JAMA Pediatrics Online found, since the ban went into effect, a 22.9% increase in infant mortality from congenital defects, such as being born without certain vital organs or with Trisomy 18, aka Edwards Syndrome. Babies with Trisomy 18 have three copies of chromosome 18 instead of two. They are likely to die in the womb, which endangers the mother, or within two weeks of being born, and rarely live past their first year.
A spokeswoman for the anti-abortion Texans For Life commiserated that, yes, she knew it was sad for a parent to watch their child die. But: “no disease, disability or disorder justifies abortion.”
About a 23% increase in those infant deaths in Texas, compared to about a 3% decrease in the rest of the USA during the same period. Don’t mess with Texas, indeed. Evidently, abortion is health care, and not just for the mother. But we all know how conservatives feel about health care. The same way the church felt about witchcraft back in the day. It was possible and fine to access it if you had enough wealth and power.
Still, never let it be said that conservatives don’t believe in equality. Although rather than bring the wretched of the Earth up to the standard of middleclass white Americans of the 1950s, they want to make everyone equally wretched. Even back in the wretched middle ages, the wretched weren’t all equally wretched. You had the hoi polloi down in the streets, being chopped up, trampled, or dying from fevers, but way up in the sky, on top of those poles, you had the high-profile deaths by Catherine wheel.
It got its name from Saint Catherine. In the fifth century they were going to put her on one of those wheels to die, but she did a miracle and broke it. That’s why it’s also called “the breaking wheel.” You probably thought it was for breaking people. Nope, it’s because Catherine broke it.
She was a saint, so she wasn’t going to stand for having a fancy death up atop some pole on some wheel in the sky. She broke that wheel and made them give her a regular person’s death, like being crushed alive under heavy rocks or something. Head chopped off, maybe. A good, down to Earth death. Like Thomas Jefferson would’ve wanted.
And that’s what conservatives are striving to deliver: a Jeffersonian barbarism. One in which everyone in need is equally denied the rights, possibilities, and material circumstances for living a decent life. We must refuse to allow the blessings of liberty, democracy, possibility, anywhere in the world, for anyone who doesn’t have a black titanium credit card.
Fair is fair, after all.
Don't mess with Texas. Texas is busy messing with itself.