Thurgood Marshall Jr. is Shitting the Bed

Thurgood Marshall Jr. sits on the board of directors of the most profitable private prison company in the U.S.

Irony is often like alcohol – deliciously fun, but poison. I get drunk off irony on the regular, but the amusement typically ends with me puking up some Margarita nightmare (why is irony margarita flavored? Because that’s what my fellow descendants of European colonizers drink on Cinco de Mayo).

The irony that I’m about to dish up for you is some top-shelf shit. No plastic handles here, though I swear to god this will give you a headache like you actually did polish off a pitcher of some sugary mistake last night.

I’m crossing my fingers that the name Thurgood Marshall rings a bell. For those who need a little U.S. history refresher course, he was an all-around MVP of the civil rights movement and the first black Supreme Court justice. Now, he could have pulled a Clarence Thomas (yet another nauseatingly ironic person) and gone all constitutional-originalist up in that bitch. But no. He was a consistently liberal judge, easily the most progressive during his time, and his voting reflected concern not just for racial equality, but for issues of gender and class equality as well. If I had an actual penis, my inevitable erection would throb red white and blue at the mere mention of his name, then shoot out stars and stripes with every rustle of one of those comely black robes.

Through some recent hate-stalking (hate stalking is that thing where you deliberately seek out and closely follow stuff on the internet that pisses you off, like misogynistic websites, or Donald Trump's hair piece) I discovered that Thurgood Marshall Jr. sits on the board of directors of the most profitable private prison company in the U.S.

The Corrections Corporation of America, like all for-profit prison companies, is a crusty, fetid, shit stain on the tattered period panties of the American justice system. But that's a subject for a different post. For right now, it's enough that the son of one of the greatest supreme court justices in American history is profiting off the incarceration of the very people his father spent his entire career trying to keep out of prisons.

Now, Junior, if by some unholy miracle of the internet you’re reading this, just hear me out. I know something about how hard it is to live up to the achievements of your parents, and that must be especially hard if they were as fucking incredible as your dad was. But you could, I don’t know, not be actively working against everything your father stood for. This is awful. This feels like one of Darwin’s kids coined the phrase “intelligent design”.

I understand that the particularly virulent strain of capitalism that led to the privatization of prisons is the most alluring of whores, trained at the hand of a madam who turned out to just be Ronald Reagan in a wig and some cheap lipstick. And maybe you have an especially bad case of the daddy-didn’t-love-mes, so you’re trying real hard to get back at the old man. But fuck. Whatever your reasons Junior, I gotta hand it to you, I did not see this one coming. I wouldn't have known you had shit the bed so fantastically had the smell of your treachery not been accompanied by such a distinctive name. Rest assured that whatever you do from here on out, you’ll always be the shitty Thurgood Marshall.