We all knew it was coming, and yet somehow it feels a lot worse now that it’s official.

The overturning of Roe v. Wade is a scourge — a cruel, hideous imposition upon all women, right now and for the foreseeable future. Don’t even talk about what will happen in bumblefuck territories over the coming weeks, months and possibly years — removing the right of women (poor women especially) to choose their own biological fates and futures is draconian, deplorable and fairly close to medieval.

I’ve been thinking about this decision for most of the day, and particularly during my journey back from Berkshires. The likely real-world impact is sinking into my head in stages, and the air seems to get a bit colder each time.

As emotionally conflicted as I am about mid-to-late-term abortion (I went through a Jack Nicholson-like change of heart** when the news of Sutton’s arrival was shared), the right of a woman to choose one way or the other is absolute.

I’m certainly consumed with loathing for the six Supreme Court justices who struck down this fair, necessary and former law of the land, and especially the three Trumpies — Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, all of whom blatantly misrepresented their views on Roe during their confirmation hearings and concurrent discussions with legislators.

Europe is almost entirely supportive of a woman’s’s right to choose, leaving aside the banning of abortions in Andorra, Liechtenstein, Malta, Monaco, Poland and San Marino. (I was surprised to learn yesterday, by the way, that German law states that abortions should happen no later than twelve weeks into a pregnancy.)

Putting it mildly, Lawrence O’Donnell’s reaction [above] to the trashing of Roe v. Wade closely reflects my own, and almost certainly the reactions of at least two-thirds if not three-quarters of the country.

Key quote: “The current Supreme Court is not a product of democracy. It is a product of minority rule…a product of the corruption of constitutional processes by Senate Republicans, who refused to even allow for a vote on President Obama‘s final choice for a Supreme Court justice” — i.e., Attorney General Merrick Garland, who has so far shown himself to be a wimp in the matter of a possible federal prosecution of Donald Trump.

“The Republican justices on the Supreme Court share a dangerous Trumpian characteristic — they are incapable of embarassment.”

“We all know what a haunted house looks like: Victorian, Gothic. The Addams Family pile, the Bates residence in Psycho. Mansard roofs, looming gables, bullseye windows, porches, verandas.

“The renowned art historian Sarah Burns of Indiana University has made an exhaustive study of how this late 19th century style became ‘the prime sinister locus’ of American culture, chiefly gathered in the marvellous essay Better for ‘Haunts: Victorian Houses and the Modern Imagination.’

“Late-Victorian architecture was anathematised in the 1920s as a way of passing moral judgement on the tawdriness and excess of the Gilded Age. This was, in turn, a way of condemning the flashiness and superficial opulence of the pre-Crash 1920s.

“When artists such as Edward Hopper and Charles Burchfield painted houses as empty and sinister, they were indirectly passing judgement on the corruption of the day.” — from “It’s Coming From Inside the House,” an Architects Journal articles by Will Miles, 8.21.15.

Video taken this morning inside Mount Washington House in Hillsdale, New York.