the Shackle Report

THE LAW

1. John Ashcoft — January 30,2001
2. Antonin Scalia — April 11,2000
3. Clarence Thomas — April 24, 2001

Kiss My Ashcroft

Women love a man who loves life. Maybe that explains why Dubya’s choice for Attorney General, John Ashcroft — who loves life even when that life is teenier than a Tic Tac — has gotten under my skin.

My dear husband has trudged off with his Digicam to the morgue (he is working on a documentary about how extreme sports kill young men, and it has made him so solemn he’s refusing to laugh even when I make my cross-eyed fish face). I take to the damn sofa, from whence I summon the controversial Mr. A. My objective is to determine whether I should
join his Senate colleagues in rubber-stamping his appointment over the objections of people like me.

John’s from Missouri, “The Show Me State,” so, to visibly demonstrate my friendliness, I consider greeting him in one of those “shoot Abe Lincoln” T-shirts that his favorite magazine, Southern Partisan, promotes, but since that’s what Oklahoma bomber Tim McVeigh was wearing when he was arrested, it feels way too last week. Besides, I have a hunch that, like many homophobes, John has a sweet spot for crinolines. So I greet him wearing nothing but a hoop skirt and an old curtain, like that greatest of southern partisans, Scarlett O’Hara. .

John himself is wearing one of his fat, pendulous neckties. Not, thank God, the baby-blue one that looks like a dead man’s leg, but a patterned mega-wedge of cheesy yellow that’s so anxiety-provoking it could sell insurance all by itself. I persuade him to let me use it as
a sash, but instead of tying it around my own waist, I flip it around his stolid hips and draw him towards me.

Since he doesn’t believe in drinking, dancing or extramarital sex play, I know he’s going to resist, but I’m touched by how gently he goes about it. As I fondle his long, Buddha-like earlobes, his hands, always slightly cupped as if dunking a child into a pond, lightly push mine
away. And he croons me a new gospel song he’s written to the awkward tune of his best known composition, “Be Still and Know.” This one’s a love ballad called “Your Womb Is Mine.” .

Putting his lips to my ear he whispers about how he wants to teach me to sublimate all of my erotic impulses into useful social activities, like giving alms to campaign contributors or putting blacks on chain gangs for taking drugs that middle-class white people have replaced with Prozac.

I know that most people’s “no” means no, but John’s “no” isn’t like the others’. Although he swears that he’s prepared to rigorously enforce laws like Roe v.Wade that he morally equates with the Holocaust, I just don’t believe that he’s that untrue to his principles. So when I learn that he thinks a woman should have to give birth after being raped by her Dad and all
her uncles, realize that when John says he’s “pro-life” it isn’t that he shares my husband’s anguish about defective bungee-jumping cables. No. When John says he’s “pro-life” he means, “I want to plant my teeming seed in your fertile loins,” period.

The question is: how to get such a skilled sublimator to admit to himself that he wants me. Disguise myself as a virgin? Forge orders to have sex with me and sign them “Jefferson Davis?” And then I get an inspiration: Oil! And not olive oil or the kind they’ve got in Alaska, but Crisco. Because, while Crisco may not be the sacred oil of the Bible, it is the sacred oil of the Bible Belt.

“John,” I lie, “I’ll stop trying to seduce you if you’ll let me anoint you Attorney General.” When he bites, I get out a big bottle of Crisco oil, the kind his father used when trying to replicate some biblical initiation rites after one of John’s successful electoral campaigns. I
explain to him that a dab or two won’t do the trick: he’s got to strip and slather.

Once I get him greased up, the rest of my lubricious project goes quite smoothly. I even get him to laugh by pointing to the tent he’s making in his pants and proposing that we hold a revival meeting under it.

Before long we’re rolling our eyes, flopping about and speaking in tongues, saying, “Yalla-wah ca-ca dadda-ro-foonie!” and “Pee-pee-go-uppa-ze-la-la!” like a couple of those holy-roly folks that the Fox News Channel keeps calling “conservatives.”

After his second coming, I tease him: “Uh oh! Our precious fertilized egg! It has failed to implant in the wall of God’s uterus! I can’t wait ’til I get to heaven and meet it on the other side,” etc.

John looks wounded. “You’re making fun of my religion,” he rebukes me in his flat, Midwestern twang.

“Yes, John,” I smile. “Get used to it.”

Late, late that night, I ask John the decisive question: if he and I slipped up and had actually managed to create a politically embarrassing love child, would he steal from his first family to
support it, like Reverend Jesse Jackson has been doing, or would he totally ignore me, like my husband has been doing? But I fall asleep before he comes up with a satisfactory answer.

Courting Scalia

The U.S. Supreme Court just decided that lawmakers in Erie, Pennsylvania have a constitutional right to make nude dancers wear pasties! How could they? This news deflates me totally because I learn it just as NASDAQ undergoes a correction, nearly taking me down with it.

Craving distraction, I end up in some chat room, pretending to be a topless dancer named Kittenesca who’s pissed about the decision because men don’t tip as much for pasties and a girl needs every cent she can get. To my amazement I get a response from “Nino,” which I happen to know is what his friends call Antonin Scalia, the Supreme Court’s wittiest, most desirable political reactionary. His message? If I prove to him that my nude nipples are a true form of self-expression as conceived by the Founding Fathers — exposing nuances that tassled ones can’t convey — he will consider reversing his position.

“I, Kittenesca, would be delighted to perform for your Supremeness,” I find myself answering. “Can I assume you will you be wearing your robes?”

“Ignorant slut, I would not be a Supreme Court Justice without them,” Nino replies. “And, BTW, First Amendment protection of the G-string is at issue as well.”

At this moment I feel like my own portfolio: my values are leaping and falling all over the place. Having sex with the powerful is a dance I’ve always performed for myself alone. Except for that one time when I had Max pretend to be a skirt-chasing, money-mad Donald Trump (which I’m afraid gave him Ideas), my fantasies have not been under anyone’s control but
my own.

“Okay,” I bite, “I’m going to start expressing myself freely, slowly and with my red dress on. It has a plunging back, like an Oscar winner’s, and I look like Angelina Jolie in Girl, Interrupted, only I’m wearing black mascara, like her brother, to indicate that I have a dark secret.”

Nino admits to having, “on behalf of the state, a compelling interest in the above.”

I tell him I’m going to dance to Malcom McLaren’s R&B version of “Carmen,” followed by his “Madame Butterfly,” because I once read that the justice is an opera fan — Scalia no doubt loves the sound of a passionate, sinful woman swooning herself to death.

Then I explain to him that I’m standing over his ample, lap, shimmying my shoulders in his meaty, well-groomed face. He asks what I’m expressing.

“The desire to be passionately and sinfully desired by an Italian-American who rose from Queens to Harvard Law and from there to the very top,” I explain. “Plus, a belief that animal appetites, properly channeled, degrade neither sex, and that lust has been known to
emotionally equalize people of different social classes.”

“I’m responding to your testimony,” says cyber-Nino, “in my notoriously originalist and hypothetical manner, as follows: If you had an organ that resembled a pen and it suddenly turned into a cucumber, would Alexander Hamilton have held you legally responsible for its behavior, and would you not be constitutionally justified in feeling confused and degraded if some trollop’s naked breast had the power to produce the aforementioned transmogrification entirely against your well-educated will?”

“Not if my cucumberic transformation was produced by a trollop as divinely beautiful as Kittenesca,” I assure him, adding that now my dress has slithered off my body like water and I’m wearing a G-string made of fluffy feathers that I am plucking out one by one as I rotate
and undulate slowly before him while wetting my lips with my pointy little tongue.

“Expressing?” he reminds me, sticking to the juridical point.

“I’m expressing the wooziness inside me,” I explain, “the fear that certain men feel just before the sleaziness of shame, concealment and commerce give way to the terrifying beauty of naked being. And I am expressing that I am hot as a bottle rocket.”

“Oh, Kitten!” types my Nino, “I have just handed down my decision. Clearly there is nothing more a person can express through dance than what you have managed to communicate, feathered pasties and all! Anything more would cause me to commit the sort of unspecified crimes that the state must trample every right to prevent.”

“Wait!” I beg, distressed that he has reached his verdict before I have completed my closing argument. “Please Nino — it’s only by revealing myself fully as a physical object that I can properly imply the utter privacy and mystery of my true spirit!”

But Nino won’t hear my case. “Because I am sworn to uphold the proposition that the rigor of constitutional law is more important than any of the silly, subjective, inconsistent people it governs,” he replies, “I must leave you high and dry. But the next time we meet, most fabulous Kittenesca, I intend to be an entirely different man.”

Before running off to my sofa to finish the dirty job that this mystery person started, I must admit I bookmarked the page.

Court and Spark

I catch my husband fibbing about how late he stayed at the editing room, and it makes me nostalgic for some real honest-to-goodness perjury. Curling up on my red velvet couch, I imagine that I’ve wandered behind the red velvet curtain, the one Supreme Court justices
emerge from to throw elections. I push open a massive door and who should I find but Clarence Thomas, deep in a fantasy about what Florida’s voters intended.

His back is to me. I see his plump hand on the chair’s arm, and I’m exciting myself by imagining it running up my thigh when he spins around. To my amazement, he is dressed as a nun.

I mean, I’m really amazed, because this is supposed to be my sex fantasy. I had planned an Anita Hill scenario — Coke can, Long Dong video, all building to the perjury-esque scene in which he swears to the Senate Confirmation Committee that he has never discussed Roe v. Wade with anyone ever. But now that I see Clarence in his wimple, I realize that I’m going to have to improvise.

“Why a nun?” I ask edgily. He’s been doing so much tongue-holding lately, I figure maybe he went and joined a silent order.

But today he’s feeling chatty. After his dirt-poor parents dumped him, he explains, the kindly sisters in Catholic school gave him the discipline he needed to escape squalor. He now has warm feelings about the brides of Christ.

Okay, I get it, C.T.: I vaguely remember that you once told a journalist that you and your wife “ride around together like a couple of nuns.” You like nuns. Love them. But what’s in this for little Kitty, I ask, besides an abortion ban and tort reform?

At the mention of abortion, Clarence starts muttering about “feminazis.” He tears off his wimple, robes and briefs and to my delight starts stomping the starch out of them. “O corpus delectable,” I growl, doffing my flimsy excuse for a dress.

At the sight of my irresistibleness, desire and dread have their way with Clarence. Rigid with ambivalence, he slips into me much as he slipped into the high court — on a slick of bad faith. “If this is judicial activism,” I whimper, “I’m all for it.” Then our thoughts break up like fifty states under Anti-Federalist attack. I shout that I hate men, the liars. And I want them all. He shouts that I’m a white angel, or one of those be-deviled black activists who only “bitch,
bitch, bitch, moan and whine and whine.”

It’s true that I’m moaning.

Later, he tries to cover himself: “I didn’t mean,” he explains, “that race politics are without merit; it’s just that neither Sharpton nor Jackson can get the president on the phone. But I can.”

Ah Clarence! Bare to the bone, you’re so like me: Doesn’t your heart, like mine, go wherever the power flows, and don’t you take what you need from the powerful, reality be damned? Sweaty and sated, I blush at the absolute truth of it: Clarence Thomas and I are sisters under the
skin.

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