The baby RBG Halloween costumes are always cute

[bloodygranuaile]

 For the politics book club this month we voted to read Irin Carmon and Shana Knizhnik's Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a biography of the most memeable Supreme Court Justice. We haven't done any biographies in this book club, and also most of the books we've read have been very much not funny, so it was a little bit of a change of pace in more ways than one. 

 

The thing that sticks out in the first half of the biography is how not actually very long ago it was when women faced absolutely crushing de jure sexism in ways that I've never had to face. I've certainly put up with my fair amount of sexist bullshit, but I've never been legally banned from doing much of anything, especially everyday stuff like getting a credit card, because of my gender. Every now and again I have to be reminded that the idea of women going to law school being basically unheard-of was within living memory. 

 

Anyway, Ginsburg does seem like a pretty interesting person, and the book also features annotated excerpts of a number of her most famous opinions (particularly dissenting ones), which is very educational for the 99.9% of us who don't spend a lot of time reading court decisions. One thing that is very cool about Ginsburg's legal writing is that it is actually readable to normal humans, unlike most of the lawyer-authored material that I wind up coming into contact with. Scalia was known for "entertaining" opinions wherein he made up definitions of words at random while also portraying himself as a staunch prescriptivist, but that's actually terrible writing, whereas if RBG wrote a legal writing guide I'm sure it would be enormously useful to both lawyers and the poor saps who get stuck reading things lawyers write. 

 

Ginsburg really typifies the sort of behaviorally conservative, quiet, dogged, but absolutely iron-willed type of changemaking that sometimes gets short shrift when we talk about activism but which I do think deserves just as much respect as the people who make big disruptions and chain themselves to things. It takes all kinds to make change, and it's got to be much lonelier and less cathartic to suck up a ton of bullshit and quietly invade the boys' club institutions than it is to yell at people in the streets. Possibly I am just projecting that because I love a good yell in the streets but I hate being surrounded by Very Serious Dudes for any length of time, and things I can't imagine myself doing always seem more impressive and admirable than things I can. But anyway, it all paid off for RBG and now she gets to wear fancy collars and go to the theater while watching, albeit being personally insulated from, the increasingly right wing nutjob Supreme Court systematically set the last 100 years of U.S. social and legal progress on fire. 

 

The book also contains some stuff on her famous workout regiment, which at the very least inspired me to do 15 minutes of yoga this morning before my shower despite being injured. It's impossible not to read this book and just feel like a giant slacker of a human being, which I will admit is part of why I don't read too many biographies of our Highly Meritocratic Elites, even the ones who do good things, because I'm perfectly capable of feeling like a slacker already without help. I'm going to at least have to come up with some real discussion questions for this book instead of being like "Yah, so what'd you think of it?" or I will die of shame.