Last night on 60 Minutes, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia sat down for an interview with Lesley Stahl. In addition to nervously laughing at Scalia’s jokes, Stahl brought Scalia back to the Queens neighborhood he grew up in and P.S. 13, where Scalia went to elementary school. And it was there that Scalia revealed the true key to understanding this mysterious, brilliant mind: Antonin Scalia is Severus Snape.
Like Snape, Scalia was a clever student, the top of his class, with top marks in every subject. Like Snape, he was driven and unpopular — “I was never cool,†Scalia said.
“Were you a bookworm?†Stahl asked.
“I was a greasy grind,†answered Scalia.
The parallels were there all along, even before we heard Scalia basically admit to the synchronicity between his life and “greasy git†Severus Snape’s. Each holds a position of almost unmatched power. Each is sharp-tongued and famously cruel to those who appear before him — Snape to his students, Scalia to the lawyers who argue in court. And each has publicly staked out a position in the defining battle of his age: Snape in the contest between Voldemort’s supporters and Dumbledore’s, Scalia in the ideological battles driving American jurisprudence.
Won’t conservatives be surprised, then, when Scalia’s true colors are revealed! It will happen soon after Nixon’s followers resurrect their fallen hero in a clandestine graveyard ceremony. Scalia will reveal himself to be a spy for John Paul Stevens and the enactor of a complicated plot against originalism. Though Scalia will die at the hands of the reborn Nixon — victim of a vicious bite to the neck from Nixon’s ageless pet, Checkers — in his last moments he will reveal to his bitter enemy, young Barack Obama, the truth, giving him the weapon he needs to defeat the textualists once and for all.
Photo illustration: Everett Bogue; Photos: Getty Images, Courtesy of Warner Bros.