The Notorious RBG

[Guno צְבִי]

[Legion]

A DODDERING OLD FOOL IN LOVE WITH HER OWN MYTH

Fans defended her choice not to retire under President Obama. Now it's too late.


On the Basis of Sex, a feature film on Ruth Bader Ginsburg, rolled out in theaters nationwide last Christmas Day.

With Felicity Jones’ portrayal of Ginsburg as a hot, young ACLU lawyer, the canonization of “Notorious RGB” was officially complete.

The 85-year-old justice’s celebrity status as a badass feminist was never higher.

CNN, which earlier this year produced a Ginsburg documentary titled RBG, has declared her the “face of the resistance” against President Donald Trump, and a new Ginsburg biography was published in October to coincide with the 25th anniversary of her confirmation.

A retail store opened recently in Washington, DC, stocked almost exclusively with RBG merch: yoga mats, water bottles, T-shirts, action figures, magnets, and pins designed to look like Ginsburg’s lace “dissent collar.”

But no amount of swag or hagiography can obscure the fact that her legacy was sorely tarnished by refusing to retire when President Barack Obama could have named her replacement.

Irin Carmon, a co-author of Ginsburg fan-book The Notorious RBG who is as responsible as anyone else for the Cult of Ginsburg, encouraged devotees: Their heroine is resilient, indestructible even, Carmon insisted. Ginsburg survived cancer—twice! “I am not RBG’s doctor, but I am one of her biographers, here to testify to her resilience,” Carmon wrote.

To reinforce her point, Carmon interviewed Bryant Johnson, Ginsburg’s longtime personal trainer, who said, “To all the stressed-out people in America, remember that the justice is TAN. Now, I always use that acronym: TAN. She’s tough as nails".

But Carmon and others who’ve helped turn Ginsburg into a pop-culture icon deluded themselves. Ginsburg was a mere mortal.

The actuarial table was not in her favor.

Ginsburg did not outlast the Trump administration or live long enough for a DEMOCRAT to replace her. The situation today is one many feared years ago and worked hard to avert. But the justice rebuffed them all, a decision that makes all the hero worship hard to stomach.

The calls for Ginsburg to step down began in 2011 when Randall Kennedy, a Harvard law professor and former clerk to the late Thurgood Marshall, wrote a piece in The New Republic gently urging Ginsburg, then 78, to retire while Obama was in office. (He had suggested the same of Justice Stephen Breyer.)

Kennedy was publicly airing private concerns among DEMOCRATS that it could be Ginsburg’s last chance to be replaced by a DEMOCRAT.

He wrote, “Service comes in many forms, including making way for others.”

Ginsburg declined the advice.

After Obama’s 2012 reelection, the Ginsburg retirement calls came with a new urgency.

In December 2013, the National Journal ran a piece titled, Justice Ginsburg: Resign Already!, in which writer James Oliphant observed that the passage of Obamacare would likely hand Senate control to the Republicans in 2014, thus preventing Obama from naming a Ginsburg successor.

His concerns were echoed by prominent left-wing legal scholars, notably Erwin Chemerinsky, now dean of the University of California-Berkeley law school, who wrote in early 2014 in the Los Angeles Times, “I do not minimize how hard it will be for Justice Ginsburg to step down from a job that she loves. But the best way for her to advance all the things she has spent her life working for is to ensure that a DEMOCRAT president picks her successor.”

In response to the retirement calls, Ginsburg gave an interview to the New York Times’ Adam Liptak laying out the reasons she planned to ignore them.

“There will be a president after this one,” she said. Ginsburg added that she planned to keep working. The only evidence she could see that she’d slowed down by her age, she said, was that she’d given up water-skiing and horseback riding.

In retrospect, it doesn’t seem like a coincidence that the making of Notorious RBG happened at a time when many were begging her to step down.

The canonization began in 2013, after Ginsburg issued a dissent in Shelby County v. Holder.

Inspired, New York University law student Shana Knizhnik launched a “Notorious R.B.G” Tumblr. The meme took off and ultimately led to a 2015 book, Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, which Knizhnik co-authored with fellow fangirl Carmon, then an MSNBC reporter.

Ginsburg has since been tattooed on women’s bodies, immortalized in song and a children’s book, and featured on SNL.

She had her face plastered on everything from tote bags to water bottles.

This merchandising could not have happened without the justice’s blessing; the law gave her a fair amount of control over the use of her image, as she well knew.






https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2018/11/what-cult-ruth-bader-ginsburg-rbg-got-wrong-obama-trump/

[Guno צְבִי]

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[Legion]

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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