The overwhelming solemnity and suffocating protocol exhibited by the current funeral for a former Supreme Court Justice serve to point out how our current leadership and group of high officeholders have worked to reduce the status of any such “great men” who serve so long and whose utterances are so hallowed. I am sure that cheapening did not begin with Clarence Thomas, but it does in this writer’s memory. When GHW Bush nominated Thomas to a seat on the highest court after only 3 months tenure on any federal bench, after having served as a corporate lawyer for one of the planet’s least environmentally friendly global, multinational corporations, I thought at the time that the nomination showed the least respect in history of the solemnity and the elevated status of such court. Never mind the theatrically raucous media circus of his pre- MeToo accuser’s testimony that was book-ended by two appearances before the senate by the questionably qualified candidate. His second appearance ranks as one of the most petulant and resentful of any such nominee. His approval despite starkly party-defined divisions served to cheapen the entire institution. Last year’s equally shameful hearings by a justice-to-be who publicly castigated the “left wing”, continued the downhill slide. I am not a snow skier, but I hear that downhill slides are among the favorite pastimes of the rich and famous. What I have trouble with is the overdone requiems like the current one to honor such “great men” when such greatness might only have been attained by cynical political calculation and deeply rooted division of ideas. Jim Baird Comer. GA