All About Amy | Cassandra Voices

All About Amy

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“There are more tears shed over answered prayers than unanswered prayers.”
Saint Teresa of Avila

Can’t blame U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Barrett for being born Amy Coney. Nor would I fault my fellow New Orleans native for having Irish Catholic parents who, like mine, sent her to St. Mary’s Dominican High School. Back then it was cool. We were both in the same boat. And far as I know, we still are, that is if you’re in the habit of comparing educated middle class white females wielding our kinda funny Louisiana convent French accent. Women’s tuition is typically tubular. What I mean is, it’s wampum well spent.

Sod it, hatched on the same patch of swamp, Amy n’ me should be two peas in a pod. However, I’m not ashamed to say gun control and reproductive rights are where we part ways. These were fundamental freedoms guaranteed in the Seventies and Eighties, for girls, rich or poor, growing up in The Big Easy. Matters of… deep breath… life and death.

But in order to begin a coherent conversation on either issue, one must comprehend this. Paired like a couple of chromosomes, the right to bear arms or avail of an abortion are inexorably intertwined.

The Honorable Amy once penned a unanimous opinion affirming the summary judgement against a claimant in the case Smith vs. The Illinois Department of Transportation, finding while egregious, it was not racial discrimination when a supervisor dismissed an employee for what was later stipulated “poor performance” as, and I quote, being a “stupid ass nigger.” Because they were both black. Thus, perhaps she’ll pardon my French when, with Malthusian enthusiasm, I need point out that, unlike me, Barrett is a breeder.

The greedy GOP plucked this pro-lifer directly out of her indoctrination by a secretive charismatic Christian cult called People of Praise and would have you, me and Barrett herself believe the proceedings around Roe vs. Wade were about her unqualified opinion. One based on a bizarre Czar-like wish to not squish the least little fish. A sweeping generalization to keep inconsequential caviar in its crevice, no matter how marred things get. So, you see, as women we are now all set. In a bind. Because profoundly blinded by nothing more than good faith, the Sturgeon General’s brand of justice finds it sound.

This is not my first rodeo. I’ve a habit of being in the right place at the wrong time. Managing marketing and advising on regulations in several sovereign nations for a British boss at a bank based in Hong Kong during a currency crisis and the Handover of our S.A.R. to the P. R. C.. Watching an IPO window slam shut on a tech boom not sparing the white knuckles of a thousand plus entrepreneurs, including Connecticut fat cats, four Finns in Malaysia and more than a couple of Kiwis that like a Trojan camel we tried to pass through the eye of a needle. Not tired, I got hired to launch Tokyo ops for one of the U.S. firms which then perished in their entirety when the Twin Towers fell. Sometimes you might as well call it a day.

Only to sit spitting nails, like an old spy in from the cold, wearing a crusty trusty power suit at a hedge fund desk high up in the Empire State Building. Swearing my federal tax dollars were squandered by an incompetent Army Corps of Engineers, while Hurricane Katrina’s aftermath sinks New Orleans’ natural defenses into the drink. Five years on, an unfettered BP blast on the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig heaved 200 million gallons of oil in the Gulf of Mexico. Left every last bivalve bereft.

Thing is, for all the money in a world I can’t unsee as my oyster, I wouldn’t trade this front row seat watching Ireland’s Celtic Tiger tumble, jigging in The George the very night same sex marriage legalized. Seeing medical cannabis and safe abortion made less murky than a transubstantiation of the Magdalene Laundries into this tip top corporate tax haven. And learning how to ask for the Ban Jax.

Where me and homegirl differ, is before we had graduation under our Prince of Wales plaid chastity belts, God didn’t see fit to show Amy how it felt to be raped at gunpoint and escape.

Hence, the power of Christ has yet to compel the now anointed Coney concerning exceptionally unsexy circumstances. Those surrounding the sort of nonconsensual contortions likely to lead to a swelling belly aborted.

Maybe I don’t have a womb with a wide-angle view at high tide, but my bet is Barrett’s not tangled in a “long game” as Margaret Talbot’s New Yorker article subtly suggests. At best she’s a half-baked Trump tumor deposited on the Supreme Court, but what if she’s been groomed Brothers Grimm style? The Manchurian Candidate meets Invasion of the Body Snatchers? She’s one of seven who, come hell or Haitian high water is spawning seven more into a scenario not of her own making. Ingenue actress? Goodbye RBG and Hello All About Eve? Or anchor baby for the alt-right?

What I ask political strategists who bask in what few filthy cards they’ve slipped up their starched sleeve is a burning question. At what point did conservative Christians earn what they’d always yearned for? Carte blanche to pull up to the Republican bumper, and dive in like Flynn to the D.C. dumpster. When did The Religious Right become your Rumpelstiltskin?

Knowing the ropes on the lesser navigated, one could almost say, fallopian-like, canals of Venice, I’ll venture vetting Casanova’s confessions is yet an even better trip. I for one am not impervious to stumbling on stuff our nuns neglected having Amy, blessed vessel that she is, translate directly from the French. Simply for shits n’ giggles mightn’t they have wiggled something cunning like Sade in to Sophomore English Lit? Not the sublime Nigerian-born British chanteuse…but the felonious philosopher of freedom. An equally smooth operator. I’ll explain.

Couple hundred years before we were in high school, if memory serves, the year 1787 saw yes, a libertine, one of Fibonacci proportions, imprisoned in the Bastille. During his two-week incarceration, minus a lick of obscenity, the Marquis de Sade managed to nail a novella he named Justine or the Misfortunes of Virtue. Seems his fictitious femme fatale was willing to bend over. Take one for the team. Don’t know about Amy. Wouldn’t blame her for being game, but, as for me, I’m not. Not anymore. Are you?

There’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help other women.
Secretary of State Madeleine Albright

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About Author

Ilsa Carter studied cognitive behaviourism, training at Tulane University in her native New Orleans and the University of San Francisco to earn a Masters of Education in Psychotherapy. The skills Ilsa acquired have proved applicable to a broad spectrum of multicultural populations, notably counseling couples and kids at parochial schools in the Archdiocese of San Francisco, with expats and sex workers in Tokyo, Japan, or complex cross-border joint ventures with Indian corporate executives and Korean conglomerates. First in the States, later in Asia and finally Europe, Ilsa drove acquisition, integration and sales strategies for multinational financial services companies and marketing consultancies. After gathering experience on the ground in green tea and technology start-ups, Carter quit capitalist exploitation to write poetry, translate literature and edit fiction full-time in the Wicklow Mountains, south of Dublin. Her work also appears in The Gloss magazine.

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