SHE ENCOURAGED HER CULT FOLLOWING TO CONSIDER HER INVINCIBLE AND IMMORTAL
She assisted Carmon and Knizhnik with their book, appeared in the CNN documentary and makes a cameo in On the Basis of Sex, carried an RBG tote bag in public, distributed RBG T-shirts, and generally reveled in her celebrity.
Perhaps the saddest element of Ginsburg’s pushback against calls for her retirement was the promotion of her workout regime. Details of it appear in Notorious RBG, and Ginsburg arranged for the RBG documentary makers to film her doing pushups and tossing a medicine ball—proof, the film implied, that she was nowhere near death’s door.
Her personal trainer published The RBG Workout: How She Stays Strong and You Can Too, for which Ginsburg wrote the foreword. In March, Ginsburg helped promote the book by going on TV to work out with Stephen Colbert wearing one of the “Super Diva” shirts Thompson sells on his website.
Only the most die-hard superfan could call Ginsburg’s Colbert performance anything but cringe-worthy—those things she did with Johnson are most definitely not pushups.
The episode felt like a desperate attempt to convince the world, and maybe Ginsburg herself, that she didn’t grievously miscalculate in refusing to retire before 2014.
Yet her fans kept pointing to the piddly elbow bounces she called pushups as evidence of strength and vitality, despite all the evidence that Ginsburg was a frail old woman whose health had long been of concern.
In 1999, she underwent major surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation to treat colon cancer.
Ten years later, she was diagnosed with early stage pancreatic cancer, for which she also had surgery.
In 2014, she went to the hospital after suffering chest pains during one of her famous workouts and discovered she had a blocked artery—doctors put in a stent.
When she fell and broke her ribs in 2108, it was the third time since 2012.
Ginsburg’s turn as an unlikely pop culture heroine was facilitated by social media, but it could never have happened were cameras allowed in the Supreme Court.
If you paid attention to Ginsburg’s public appearances, it was pretty clear many were carefully stage managed; video of her was tactfully edited.
She was usually shown sitting graciously in a chair, or linking arms with someone as she walked, as though from affection and not from need.
But in the courtroom, away from the cameras, she projected a very different image—the one that probably inspired all those calls for her timely retirement years ago.
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2018/11/what-cult-ruth-bader-ginsburg-rbg-got-wrong-obama-trump/
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