Credit Where It’s Due: President Trump

The convoy of released Israeli hostages
heads toward Jerusalem

To say that Curmie has been unimpressed with the Trump presidency is to err more on the side of understatement than of hyperbole.  47 has proven to be even worse than 45.  With the exception of a more robust stock market (where most of Curmie’s retirement nest egg resides) than was expected after the various silly tariffs were applied, removed, and re-applied willy-willy, Curmie can’t think of a single thing this administration has done that benefits the population at large.

There’s the authoritarianism; the reverse Robin Hood economic policies; the assaults on the 1^st, 4^th, 5^th, and 14^th Amendments; the appointments of incompetent (we hope they’re only that) loyalists to head government agencies; the multiple violations of US and international law; and of course the delirious ramblings of a POTUS who now claims that President Biden (who wasn’t in office yet) ordered 274 FBI agents to infiltrate the crowd on January 6.

Trump’s non-stop stream of commentary generally comes in one of three flavors: dementia, narcissism, and lies.  The idea that he would be telling the truth about anything he claimed to have accomplished was contrary to all expectations.  Curmie explicitly doubted Dear Leader’s claim that he had negotiated an agreement between Israel and Hamas that would lead to the release of the remaining Israeli hostages. 

But whether the appropriate analog is the boy who cried wolf or a stopped clock (Curmie leans towards the former), that boast turns out to have been true, as all living hostages have been released (Curmie wasn’t going to write about this until it actually happened), and there’s a plan in place to return the remains of those who perished in captivity.

This is all good news, of course, and President Trump deserves a healthy share of the credit, not least for convincing Hamas that he was sufficiently personally invested in the deal that he would be willing and able to force Prime Minister Netanyahu to adhere to his promises.  That’s a substantial risk for Hamas, especially since only a few weeks ago Trump was talking about pretty much annihilating the West Bank and rebuilding it as a high-end resort destination.

Of course, two things should be noted.  First, whereas Curmie meant (and still means) what he said in that earlier post linked above, that if Trump could “indeed get buy-in from both Likud and Hamas, that would be a major achievement,” what has happened today is little more than a cease-fire and a prisoner exchange, with vague promises about the future that deliberately avoid the thorniest issues—a two-state solution, for example.  There will be pressure for Hamas to disarm and perhaps even to relinquish control in Gaza.  The extent to which Hamas will be receptive to those demands remains to be seen.  There is, to be sure, a long and difficult road ahead.

And let Curmie emphasize the notion of prisoner exchange: as part of the agreement, Israel released nearly 2000 (!) Palestinians rounded up in Gaza, the overwhelming majority of whom were held without trial.  (That sounds to Curmie rather like being a hostage.)  One of those released, Kamal Abu Shanab, a member of Fatah (N.B., not Hamas), claims he underwent an “indescribable journey of suffering — hunger, unfair treatment, oppression, torture and curses — more than anything you could imagine,” and that he lost 139 pounds while in captivity.  Curmie isn’t naïve enough to believe everything he’s told, but he’s also not ready to dismiss those claims out of hand.  More to the point, Curmie was blissfully unaware of the sheer number of such detainees; perhaps you were, too, Gentle Reader.  It certainly says something about American journalism that we didn’t hear more about this part of the equation.

The other point to be made here is that President Trump was not alone in bringing about this agreement.  Leaders from Norway, Italy, Egypt, Türkiye, and Qatar were certainly involved; one suspects that others were, as well.  Nor should we forget that whereas recent events represent significant progress, the release of 20 living Israeli hostages pales in comparison to the vastly greater number released in deals brokered by President Biden and others.  This is the final but not largest chapter of this part of the tale.

Further pressure was no doubt applied by the flotilla of relief vessels which attempted to run the Israeli blockage and deliver food and medicine to Gaza.  The fact that Greta Thunberg was one of those detained (and, she says, abused) by Israeli forces moved the story into higher priority for the international press.

The prospects aren’t great for a lasting settlement.  There is too much animosity, too much destruction, too much history, to be overly optimistic.  More significantly, the remaining issues—the political future of the West Bank, the degree to which Hamas disarms, deciding who bears the cost of rebuilding Gaza into a habitable locale—are even more daunting than achieving what has come to pass in the last few days.

But there is, at least and at last, a little hope.  The resolve of all concerned will be tested, and to say there are a lot of bumps in the road ahead is self-evident.  But we’re in a better place than we were a fortnight ago, and—against Curmie’s expectations—Donald Trump is a major reason, if not the major reason, why that’s true.  If he’d stop whining about how he deserves a Nobel Prize for largely illusory accomplishments, he might even deserve one for an actual success. 

He’s still an awful President, but credit where it’s due.

The Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education Is, Unsurprisingly, the Exact Opposite of What It Pretends to Be

Baker Library at Dartmouth College

This one is long, even by Curmie’s standards, Gentle Reader.  Buckle up.

A few months ago, Curmie wrote a blog post criticizing the president of his alma mater, Dartmouth College, for declining to sign on to the “Call for Constructive Engagement” from the American Association of Colleges and Universities. 

Here’s a snippet of Curmie’s commentary: 

At the moment, Dartmouth is one of only two Ivy League schools not to have substantial cuts in federal funding based on little but the caprice of the most anti-intellectual administration in history.  Dartmouth’s time will come, no doubt.  Surely we’re not under the impression that craven silence is any kind of reasonable solution.

Sometimes Curmie hates being right.  When you’re dealing with an authoritarian bully like Donald Trump, the slightest capitulation, even if it’s manifested as inaction, will be seen as weakness, and further demands are both inevitable and imminent.  And so… here we are.  Dartmouth is one of nine colleges and universities currently being extorted into agreeing to asked for commentary about the Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education, which, of course, has literally nothing to do with academic excellence, but is instead an authoritarian wet dream of governmental control over some of the nation’s most reputable, I dare say prestigious, bastions of higher education.  Dartmouth’s response, alas, couldn’t be more wishy-washy.  Curmie detects just a little too much Susan Collins in President Sian Leah Beilock’s statement.

Side note: The other schools on this particular hit list are Arizona, Brown, MIT, Penn, USC, Texas, Vanderbilt, and Virginia.  Gentle Reader, if you are an alum of any of the nine institutions listed here, Curmie urges you to head to a webpage created by a group called Stand for Academic Freedom and sign on to a petition to your alma mater’s president and trustees urging them to refuse to submit to the Compact.  By the way, apparently these schools were chosen because the White House believes they “are, or could be, ‘good actors.’”  Curmie, a theatre director for a half century or so, hereby hopes for more bad actors.  The Compact is essentially a threat masquerading as an opportunity: about as close as a government can come to a protection racket.

We start with the threat at the end of the first paragraph of the document: “Institutions of higher education are free to develop models and values other than those below, if the institution elects to forego federal benefits.”  (Curmie can’t suppress a giggle here: the word the idiots who wrote and distributed this missive meant is “forgo.”  “Forego” means precede.  Oh, and they make the same mistake in the other direction in Section 9.  <Snort.>)  The “federal benefits” which might be jeopardized by failure to adhere to edicts from the Mad King of Trumpistan include access to federally-affiliated student financial aid, research grants, and student visas. 

OK, on to Section 1: “Equality in Admissions.”  There’s the predictable anti-DEI blather, but the really problematic paragraphs, to Curmie’s mind, come later: 

University admissions decisions shall be based upon and evaluated against objective criteria published on the University’s website and available to all prospective applicants and members of the public.

Institutions shall have all undergraduate applicants take a widely-used standardized test (i.e. SAT, ACT, or CLT) or program-specific measures of accomplishment in the case of music, art, and other specialized programs of study. Universities shall publicly report anonymized data for admitted and rejected students, including GPA, standardized test score, or other program-specific measures of accomplishments, by race, national origin, and sex.

What.  Utter.  Crap.  “Objective criteria”?  That would eliminate any thought process by admissions offices.  How do you reconcile, for example, excellent grades and a poor SAT score?  Could be the school has no standards; could be the student had test anxiety, or was ill or dealing with some other form of life issue the day of the test.  Curmie has been on both ends of alumni interviews: does this student have what it takes to succeed in this specific environment?  Recommendations from high school teachers really do matter; Curmie has read a few hundred of them, and not infrequently made recommendations about scholarships accordingly.

That student over there doesn’t have a very good grade point average overall, but look at how much better he did when he quit the football team and joined the marching band (or vice versa).  That other student went in the opposite direction.  Knowing why would be a good thing.  Yet another applicant is brilliant in one area but barely passable in another (Curmie saw a lot of that in theatre majors, a fair number of whom were not necessarily noted for their mathematical prowess.)  Do we celebrate the specialized excellence or go for the applicant who is very good (as opposed to outstanding) across the board.  Curmie once again reveals his inner Confucian: there is simply no way to factor all of the potential variables into an “objective” model… and if there were, it would be so complex that it could be parsed only by someone with an advanced degree in statistics and probability, not by high schooler looking at a website.

More importantly, the past matters, but it isn’t the sole determinant of future success.  Standardized tests measure test-taking ability more than knowledge.  Curmie has made this point more times than it’s practicable to link to all the examples here, but this one, with reference to his own experience as a test-taker, may be taken as illustrative.

Oh, one more thing: this administration sure does care about “objectivity” when it means rich white folks benefit (students really do perform better on the SAT if they’ve taken one of those often expensive prep courses).  And their quest for transparency inevitably means lawsuits, and that, too, benefits families that can afford lawyers.  The desire to break down the data by race, national origin, and sex—but not the economic status of the student—is sort of a tell, isn’t it?  But, more significantly, where was that reverence for objectivity when the nation was saddled with cabinet appointees like Kennedy, Hegseth, and McMahon, all of whom are objectively unqualified to be hired by their agency, let alone lead it?

The Compact, in other words, should be rejected based on its first section alone.  But (insert late-night infomercial voice here) wait!  That’s not all!  Moving on to Section 2: Marketplace of Ideas & Civil Discourse.  Here’s the money quote: 

A vibrant marketplace of ideas requires an intellectually open campus environment, with a broad spectrum of ideological viewpoints present and no single ideology dominant, both along political and other relevant lines. Signatories commit themselves to revising governance structures as necessary to create such an environment, including but not limited to transforming or abolishing institutional units that purposefully punish, belittle, and even spark violence against conservative ideas.  

That all sounds pretty innocuous: well, except for the paranoia about sparking violence (!) against conservative ideas.  (Curmie, who has spent considerable time on college campuses over a period of more than half a century, has literally never seen anything approaching violence against conservatives.)  Tellingly, the proposal is sufficiently vague that virtually any actual examination of an ideology could be seen as attacking it.  Racism is conservative.  Sexism is conservative.  Homophobia is conservative.  True, most 21^st-century conservatives reject, or at least purport to reject, these ideologies, but all have been standard conservative doctrine in Curmie’s lifetime.  (Curmie is old, but not that old.)  And transphobia and Islamophobia are still central to the right’s playbook.

Curmie belittled more than a few arguments from the right at some point in his career: not because they were from the right, but because they didn’t stand up to scrutiny.  He also got in trouble for saying that not all feminist arguments are good arguments, and that a proposal to enforce “anti-racism” (not being racist was insufficient) on all students in a program was “Stalinistic.”  That kind of criticism would no doubt be applauded by the Regime, not because it was well-reasoned, but because it furthered their point of view in an “enemy of my enemy” sort of way.

There’s a fair amount of argumentation in Section 2 that’s actually good policy, but rather ironic coming from this administration.  It’s fine to assert the importance of civility and to note that “Civility includes protections against institutional punishment or individual harassment for one’s views.”  But this administration was strangely quiet when tenured faculty were fired for being insufficiently obsequious in mourning the death of Charlie Kirk.  Free speech for me, but not for thee.

Plus, of course, the kinds of policies proposed in this section about safeguarding free expression have already been adopted, generally long ago, by virtually every college or university in the country.  There may not have been universal enforcement, but these matters are often more complicated than the Trumpsters would have us believe.  Curmie is especially fond, though, of this sentence: “The university shall impartially and vigorously enforce all rights and restrictions it adopts with respect to free speech and expression.”  It follows shortly after the prohibition of “support for entities designated by the U.S. government as terrorist organizations.”  (“Support” is, of course, undefined.)  Oh, and there’s a prohibition against countenancing genocide (except when perpetrated by Israel, bien sûr).  We’ll just antiphrastically avoid noting that even supporting violence is protected speech unless there is a specific and imminent incitement.

By the way, Antifa, which is not an organization at all, but simply an anti-fascist (notice the first six letters) ideology, is now characterized by Dear Leader and his merry band of sycophants as a terrorist threat.  So much for free speech, a ”broad spectrum of viewpoints,” and similar sentiments. 

Section 3: Nondiscrimination in Faculty and Administrative Hiring.  Boy, that would be great.  Having, say, a university president not be selected by the politically appointed trustees here in Texas would be a big step in the right direction.  Oh.  Wait.  That’s probably not what this section means, even if that’s what it says.  There’s also the same bullshit about objectivity as for admissions.  I mean, hire the professor who has the best (perhaps padded) résumé, not the one students respond to, right?  These people neither know nor care about actual education.

Section 4: Institutional Neutrality.  This is actually reasonable, except, of course, that it is intended in this document (see above re Charlie Kirk aftermath) to extend past insisting on neutrality from employees in their “capacity as university representatives.”  It’s also interesting and ironic that President Beilock of Dartmouth is quoted approvingly in this section of a document that is being used to extort her college.

Section 5:  Student Learning.  This is a screed against grade inflation.  Curmie wishes them luck.  Really.  No irony intended here.

Section 6: Student Equality.  Mostly an attack on trans athletes, with some argument against, say, scholarships designated specifically for students of a particular sex, race, national origin, etc.  The section is simplistic and predictable.  (Curmie would be interested in seeing a discussion of donor’s rights in this regard.  So, he suspects, would Beloved Spouse, who works in Financial Aid.) 

Section 7: Financial Responsibility.  The GOP, which has been largely responsible for under-funding public universities (including some of the nine schools affected by the Compact), is suddenly concerned with students being “saddled with life-altering debt.”  It’s certainly true that there are a lot more administrative staff than necessary, especially in Student Affairs; it’s also true that upper-level administrators are almost universally overpaid relative to other staff and faculty.  (That part doesn’t get mentioned, of course.)

But the level of reporting demanded in this section (and others) actually increases administrative costs.  Curmie is so old that he remembers when it was the liberals who were all about administrivia.  Not so much, now…

There’s also a demand to freezing “effective tuition rates” (does that mean inflation-adjusted?) for five years.  Yawn.  More grandstanding than policy.  Next.  Oh, and universities should “refund tuition to students who drop out during the first academic term of their undergraduate studies.”  This has got to be a contender for stupidest fucking idea in the history of stupid fucking ideas.

And… there would no tuition charges for student in the hard sciences at schools with more that a $2 million endowment per student.  This one, apart from being profoundly stupid by de facto punishing universities for having good science programs, seems aimed at specific schools.  Curmie’s alma mater, for example, is certainly in good financial shape, but it comes in at $1.8 million or thereabouts in this metric.

This entire section, like Section 1, is enough to make any competent administrator reject the entire Compact, even if other parts of it make a fair amount of sense… which it sort of does in a couple places.

Section 8: Foreign Entanglements.  There’s a lot of nonsense about money laundering and such-like before we get to the real stuff about limiting enrollment by foreign students.  This is supported by predictable jingoistic argumentation about requiring “foreign students [to] exhibit extraordinary talent that promises to make America stronger and more economically productive, and the selected students are introduced to, and supportive of, American and Western values, ultimately increasing global understanding and appreciation for the United States and our way of life.”

Curmie speaks here from years of experience with an exchange program with a British conservatory.  The rationale wasn’t about making America more economically productive (the only thing this administration cares about); it was about enhancing American students’ education by exposing them to peers who had grown up in a different society and a political system and had been educated in a different manner.  It was about establishing relationships that would be beneficial to students from both sides of the Atlantic.  (For the record, there are at least a few of those British students who now live and work in this country.  This is neither a good thing nor a bad thing; it is simply a thing.)

Trump’s purported America First ideology in fact diminishes opportunities for American students to experience… wait for it… a “broad spectrum of ideas.”  It also wants to deny access to anyone who might not be willing to swear allegiance to “American and Western values.”  How would they know without being exposed to them except in the abstract?  And if those values are indeed superior, wouldn’t even a skeptical student smart enough to get into one of those universities end up being converted?

By the way, apparently those “objective” standards for admission apply only to American students.  Curmie speaks only for himself, but he’d rather have a better student who happens to be Chinese or Saudi than a lesser student who’s American.  If you’re an American student who can’t compete: get better.

Anyway… Section 9: Exceptions.  Nothing of substance here.

Section 10: Enforcement.  More busy-work; more threats.  Nothing to see here.  Move along.

The Compact, as expected, does exactly the opposite of what it purports to do.  It places the government as the de facto decision-maker for both public and private universities.  It restricts freedom of speech even as it pretends to support it.  It reveals a profound ignorance about the way higher education works and a contempt for scholarship, teaching, and learning.  Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln…

Orwell was an optimist.

It’s a Different World Out There Now, Dennis

Masked ICE agent sprays Pastor David Black directly in the face. Photo by Ashlee Rezin of the Chicago Sun-Times

There were, no doubt, several adult visitors to my classroom when I was a boy, but there were only two I remember with any clarity.  One was a friend of my 3^rd grade teacher, Mrs. Hamilton.  He was a very nice man who told funny stories and sang and played his banjo for us.  I remember the tale of defeating the mean giant Abiyoyo, the funny song about little boxes on a hillside, and that one beautiful tune that I didn’t understand because it was in Spanish (but he explained to us what it was about and even got us to join in on the chorus).

Mrs. Hamilton was my teacher again in 5^th grade, and her friend visited us again.  It wasn’t until a couple of years later that I learned that the nice man was kind of famous, and a few more years after that, that the “Holy shit, that was Pete Seeger!” revelation dawned.

But it’s the other visitor I want to talk about today.  I think his name was Dennis something, but I might well be making that up.  Exactly why he showed up in our classroom, I don’t recall, if indeed I ever knew.  I don’t remember how old I was, although probably a tween.  Anyway, Dennis (we’ll call him that) was an FBI agent.  He was probably in his late 20s or early 30s, and he was dressed in the then-standard FBI get-up: a cheap and rather ill-fitting black suit, with highly polished black shoes, a white shirt, skinny black tie, and a crew-cut. 

Dennis was clearly very proud of being in the FBI, and went on for some time about that agency’s spotless record of integrity.  I’m pretty sure he believed his own testimony, as it wasn’t until a few years later that the atrocities of the J. Edgar Hoover era became known.  Indeed, Curmie, who even in junior high was a skeptical lad, later found it very difficult to process evidence of slander, intimidation, even assassination pointing to the agency as perpetrators rather than investigators.  The National Guard was, of course, a different story.

Dennis’s visit, that utter confidence in the rectitude, even the incorruptibility, of the FBI, still lingers in Curmie’s memory over a half century later, mostly because any such testimony now would be so risible that even kids wouldn’t buy that nonsense for a moment.  Not with every federal allegedly law enforcement agency—ATF, FBI, ICE, DHS, et al.—turned into a private army by a bullying POTUS incapable of any emotions other than rage and paranoia.  Rule of law?  What’s that?

Frighteningly enough, it may indeed be true that the FBI, even headed by a mendacious moron like Kash Patel, is still the most uncompromised of the federal agencies.  We need only look at the outrageous antics employed by ICE and their attendant lackeys in other departments (and SCOTUS) in places like Los Angeles, Chicago, and Portland, to think that the FBI, though rendered incompetent, partisan, and corrupt, may not be quite so bad in comparison. 

It might also be worth noting that none of those three cities appears on the US News and World Report list of the 25 Most Dangerous Places to Live.  Indeed, the top four cities, and eight of the top ten, in murder rate per capita, are in red states.  You know who checks in at #10?  Shreveport, the biggest city in Mike Johnson’s district.  Yet there seems to be no indication that federal troops will invade the Ratchet City.  Go figure, huh?  You know who doesn’t appear in the top 20?  Los Angeles, Chicago, or Portland. 

Over-zealous, violent, and often racist policing is, to be sure, not a new problem.  Yes, it has been aggravated by the recklessness (at best) of the First Felon, but police over-reach at all levels has been around for a long time.  This situation is not, of course, exclusively the result of the efforts of the authoritarian right, but it sure does seem like there’s a correlation.  More to the point, whereas the problems haven’t changed, the degree has.  Curmie has now reached the point at which he no longer implicitly trusts any member of law enforcement at any level even to refrain from brutality and to tell the truth, let alone to be competent at the job.  That’s not a good place to be.

It is difficult to determine the rationale for impassioned and utterly mendacious proclamations coming from ICE and DHS.  They can’t really believe that dozens of heavily armed, masked, and armor-protected agents are truly at risk in the presence of unarmed protesters who are <checks notes> chanting at them.  Can they?  It is certainly true that bullies, and anyone who would work for ICE either is one or wants to be, are, by definition, cowards.  And that particular variety of pusillanimity almost always manifests in bluster and, more often than not, in outright lies.

The other alternative is more chilling.  A number of left-leaning pundits suggest that all this activity is intended for the sole purpose of raising tensions.  If the authorities can plausibly claim they were threatened, then a show of even more authoritarian power can at least appear to be legitimized.  So far, it’s clear that the aggressors are nearly always the ones recently described by a federal judge (a Reagan appointee, by the way) as “cowardly desperados.”  Unfortunately, that may not last, which, goes the theory, is precisely what Trump and his minions wants: an excuse to pretend the 1^st, 4^th, and 5^th amendments don’t exist. 

Oh, and they’re not really big fans of the 2^nd amendment, either, unless the gun-toter is a white male who answers to “Bubba.”  Witness the desperate attempt by DHS to claim that Marimar Martinez was armed; she had a gun that never left her purse, and a valid concealed-carry license.  Martinez’s lawyer says there’s bodycam evidence that the federal agent, not Ms. Martinez, initiated the collision between their vehicles.  OK, Gentle Reader, he’s not the most objective source, but the easy way to prove him wrong is for the government to release the tape… guess what hasn’t happened.

The pressure still needs to be applied, and Ghandi-like non-violence is difficult, but it’s the only way.  Rising to the bait is the worst thing to do.  In the words of today’s birthday boy, John Lennon, “When it gets down to having to use violence, then you are playing the system’s game. The establishment will irritate you – pull your beard, flick your face – to make you fight. Because once they’ve got you violent, then they know how to handle you. The only thing they don’t know how to handle is non-violence and humor.”

Thoughts on Banned Books Week

It is currently Banned Books Week, during which time we are encouraged to read… wait for it… banned books, i.e., books that some censorial power somewhere in the country has pulled from libraries or bookstores or curricula.  Curmie, as you might have guessed, Gentle Reader, has read a fair number of such titles, but he admits to not having read anything on the American Library Association’s list of the Top Ten Most Challenged Books of 2024 or PEN America’s list of the Most Banned Books of the 2024-25 School Year.  He has, for what it’s worth, encountered a couple of the titles in a different form: as a play or film.

Curmie did get an email from Early Bird Books, listing about 40 books that have been banned somewhere at some point in time.  Curmie’s read about a half dozen of them, and encountered a couple others through film versions or extended excerpts.  A couple of those he has read leave him scratching his head about how anyone could possibly find anything in those books objectionable.  But however much Curmie likes to think of himself as creative or imaginative, he just can’t seem to settle into the censorial mentality.

There are, to be sure, a lot of bans: the ALA comes in with the smaller number, at 2,452 (!) unique titles; PEN America counts total challenges, so a book challenged by ten different libraries counts as one on the ALA list and ten on PEN America’s.  And, per the ALA website, “Because many book challenges are not reported to the ALA or covered by the press, the data compiled by ALA represent only a snapshot of censorship attempts in libraries.”  The two organizations also track the bans a little differently: PEN America concentrates exclusively on new bans, so a book that continues to be banned counts on the ALA list but not PEN America’s.

Any way you look at it, Gentle Reader, the censors are out there, and they’re organized.  According to the ALA, 

The 2024 data reported to ALA’s Office for Intellectual Freedom (OIF) shows that the majority of book censorship attempts are now originating from organized movements. Pressure groups and government entities that include elected officials, board members and administrators initiated 72% of demands to censor books in school and public libraries. Parents only accounted for 16% of demands to censor books, while 5% of challenges were brought by individual library users. [emphasis in original]

Given all this, it’s certainly understandable to see various forms of persuasion employed to get us all to read (specifically) banned books this week.  And whether it’s a metaphorical monodigital salute to the censors or simply a little smug naughtiness, there are some positive vibes associated with joining the parade to read a banned book this week.

But for all the fact that Curmie appreciates symbolic action as much as the next fella, there’s still something a little disquieting about the process.  Some of the books on the list are there for totally bogus reasons, but for others, we can at least see a rationale: “think of the children” is a catch-all rallying cry for anything the Puritans don’t like, but it isn’t necessarily a bad idea to keep explicitly sexual content, for example, out of the hands of elementary school kids… or, the internet being the internet, at least not contributing to placing it there.

Of course, a good share of the brouhaha generated by the right has to do with the LGBTQ+ community, and the fact that kids start wondering about their own identities in this regard long before they reach maturity in either legal or developmental terms.  A disproportionate share of the banned books feature young characters asking those questions about themselves: and their target audience is at least two generations younger than Curmie. 

Similarly, some people would have us forget that racism, sexism, and other forms of xenophobia exist.  And, of course, one person’s heroic lone wolf standing up against an oppressive regime is someone else’s anti-American insurgent.  Those of us who remember the Civil Rights campaign and Vietnam era don’t need a reminder, or at least not as much of one, but today’s university freshmen weren’t even alive for 9/11, let alone remember it.  We have different life experiences and different expectations.

The point here is that adults, at the very least, should have ready access to what they want to read.  But isn’t that the point?  Pressure to read this book or that book because it’s been banned somewhere runs counter to this idea.  Yes, you’re taking a stand or whatever, but no one notices and no one cares, least of all the censors. 

If there’s a book on the list somewhere that interests you, then by all means buy it, read it, post about it if you want to.  But, as Curmie wrote last time, “especially since retirement, he’s been more tempted to concentrate on things he likes rather than things he should know.”  The same applies to things that serve some purpose other than one’s own satisfaction.  If that’s you, too, Gentle Reader, go ahead and make your next book that horror story by someone other than Stephen King (the most banned author in the country), or that cozy mystery, or the biography of someone you just find interesting.  Or what you will.

Don’t get me wrong.  As Isaac Asimov famously said, a book worth banning is a book worth reading.  And there is something to be said for reading acclaimed books as an exercise in cultural literacy.  Curmie makes an effort to move such a book to the top of the reading list about every third or fourth book.  (The last such book he read was Love in the Time of Cholera, which has the added benefit of having been banned by some town in Maryland.)  But even as a theatre historian, Curmie has neither read nor seen about a half dozen Shakespeare plays, and isn’t the slightest bit ashamed of that fact.  King John?  Really?

If you want to read a banned book, go for it.  Don’t do so just because it was banned.  But if that makes it just a little more intriguing, so be it.  Enjoy, Gentle Reader.

On the (ahem) Acting Career of Tilly Norwood

To say that Curmie is rather ignorant of popular culture is to err more on the side of understatement than of hyperbole.  That wasn’t always true, or at least as true, but especially since retirement, he’s been more tempted to concentrate on things he likes rather than things he should know.  Yeah, he’s that crusty old fart who shouts “WHO?” a lot when watching a parade or a televised holiday celebration featuring “stars.”

But he’s definitely following the… ahem… career of Tilly Norwood, the attractive young woman pictured above.  She’s featured in a newly released two-minute film titled “AI Commissioner.”  She also, of course, doesn’t exist in any unmediated, three-dimensional, sense.  “She” (“it”?) is completely AI generated, and the folks at Particle6 seem pretty damned proud of their creation.

There has been a huge uproar from actors, SAG/AFTRA, and other predictable sources, and of course an equally predictable defense by Particle6 founder Eline Van der Velden.  In fact, about every media outlet you can name has covered the story, and several have published opinion pieces.  The British newspaper The Guardian has already published five different articles about Tilly and the attendant ramifications. 

Curmie finds himself agreeing with Stuart Heritage (why isn’t this guy a historian of the Jacobean period?) that “Sure, it should also be pointed out that her existence alone is enough to fill the pit of your stomach with a sense of untameable dread for the entire future of humanity, but that’s Hollywood for you,” but also that “even if it means that the market will soon be flooded by absolute slop, the betting is that she’s here to stay.”  Heritage also points out that other new ideas that were expected to revolutionize the industry—3D, for instance—turned out to be duds, so perhaps the degree of weeping and wailing is unwarranted. 

The Guardian article that interested Curmie the most, though, was a collection of comments by readers of the first couple of articles to appear.  Virtually all the commenters have a point: no, the threat, such as it is, isn’t immediate; yes, one can presume that “ostlers and bridlemakers were furious with Gottlieb Daimler and Henry Ford.”  But Curmie wants to highlight the commentary of AshMordant:

It’s too late to be scared.

Hollywood is not about making art, it’s about making money.

Give us one good reason why studios should pay for cameramen, makeup artists, set designers, lighting, catering and of course actors when AI can do the job and make money.

Films made with real people – actors as well as all the other innumerable people listed in the end credits – will soon be something like ballet or opera: enjoyed by a few cinéastes who are willing to pay all the money for this art form.

But why would a fan of the, say, Fast and Furious franchise or the Marvel universe or whatever it is called do that? All they care about are visual and aural stimuli, and AI can deliver that perfectly. 

Well, as Curmie used to say a lot in his Asian Theatre class, yes and no.  Certainly there is little interest in Hollywood in making art; mediocrity sells, after all.  Whether films featuring human actors will go the way of ballet and opera is speculative.  But the idea that movies that rely on “visual and aural stimuli” would not be seriously affected by replacing a couple of humans with AI-generated versions is, well, simply a statement of fact.

Regular readers here know that Curmie and Beloved Spouse are fans of TV whodunnits.  Not infrequently, the stars of such shows clearly got their jobs more for being conventionally attractive than for their acting ability.  Almost always, they’re fine most of the time: no one will confuse them with Ian McKellen or Emma Thompson, but they can handle the vast majority of what they’re required to do.  Inevitably, however, they’re called upon to show a spontaneous reaction or display a real emotion… and Curmie finds himself shouting at the TV, “don’t make [insert gender-appropriate pronoun here] act!”  AI is all about processing the past, which makes it a paean to conventionality and mediocrity.  But if what it replaces is already, well, conventional and mediocre, then the loss is negligible.

Well, sort of.  A number of ultimately excellent actors weren’t necessarily brilliant from the get-go.  Whether they were learning their trade in full view of millions of people, or whether they were relegated to eye-candy roles that didn’t allow for actual acting doesn’t matter.  Talent can’t be taught; skill can.  And AI poses a threat in that it stands to short-circuit the career of those with the former but not yet the latter.

Moreover, the actors who will be affected by this aren’t the ones making eight figures for every film or seven figures for every TV episode.  Rather, it will be the ones whose names are unfamiliar to everyone but their family and friends.  As of two years ago, only about one in seven members of SAG/AFTRA earned even the $26,470 in film and TV work required to receive insurance through the union.  It may be easy to scoff at the not-really-so-hard lives of the millionaires and billionaires, but the overwhelming majority of actors in the trenches are struggling to make ends meet while living in the extremely expensive area around Los Angeles.  These, not the stars, are the folks whose jobs Tilly and her manipulators want to put out of work.

“AI Commissioner” is remarkably unfunny for what is advertised as a comedy.  Tilly is not required to do much, and what she does do requires neither significant talent nor skill.  But, just as other variations on the theme of AI have improved significantly over even the last few months, we can reasonably expect that future Tilly clones will be qualitatively better than what we’ve seen so far.  And we can reasonably suspect that some future project might actually hire some decent writers.

It strikes Curmie that there are three areas of contestation here: the technological, the ethical, and the pragmatic.  Let’s tease those out a little.

We start with the technological.  Clearly, Tilly isn’t ready to play a major role yet, and probably won’t be by the time the current SAG/AFTRA contract expires roughly nine months from now.  But progress will be made, and everyone concerned had better be ready for the negotiations.  Actors, the real ones, still have enough clout that the threat of another strike will mean something.  But the studios and producers aren’t without power, either.

One of the principal disputes that led to the SAG/AFTRA strike two years ago was what Curmie called an “obscene” proposal by producers that background actors be paid a single day’s wage for the rights to use their image in perpetuity without consent or remuneration.  Obviously, variations on the theme of CGI were intended to replace background actors, whose images could be manipulated to fill in for a presumably slightly different group of actual humans. 

We know, of course, that CGI has been employed in manifold ways both before and after the latest SAG/AFTRA contract was finalized.  But, and here’s the transition to ethical consideration, CGI is different to the extent that a CGI-generated is generally employed to make a character do something a human actor can’t do (think superhero movies, for example) or to create a character that isn’t, in fact, human (e.g., Gollum, or Thing in the Addams Family franchise).  Curmie isn’t sure how the negotiations ended up on replacing background actors, so there may be an exception there, but some of the commentary he’s reading suggests that there is at least some protection for human background actors.

The unions’ claim that AI is “trained on the work of countless professional performers — without permission or compensation” is both true and ethically ambivalent.  Where is the line between studying and de facto plagiarism?  When Curmie was 17, he did a show with an experienced comic actor who consistently got laughs by separating line and gesture.  Curmie adopted a similar strategy in future shows, and indeed taught it to younger actors when he began his teaching and directing career.  Was that stealing?  Or just learning?

Still, there is a line there that should not be crossed, especially when we’re talking about an AI “actor” doing literally the same thing as the source rather than simply employing a general concept.  In scholarly writing, even a two- or three-word description (something like “farcical tragedy”) sometimes shouldn’t be repeated without attribution, but at other times a much longer passage, even word-for-word (significant person X was born on this date in this place to this couple, whose occupations were… etc.), won’t cause much concern.  (Curmie, being Curmie, still wanted students to cite sources, even for that generic stuff.)  One supposes that some rules could be put in place to allow some uses of AI but nor others, but it’s difficult to imagine how. 

So now we turn to the pragmatic.  This is a genie that isn’t going back into the bottle, at least until everyone is satisfied that there neither are nor will be further advances in the technology (unlikely), or studios start thinking of rewarding actual artists instead of corporate suits (even more unlikely).  Hollywood is the very crystallization of late-stage capitalism, uninterested in anything but making more money for those in power. 

Tilly Norwood is being touted as the next Scarlett Johansson.  That’s not gonna happen, at least as long as the real one draws movie-goers in large numbers.  Tilly won’t do that, except perhaps very briefly as a variation on the theme of a freak show.  But she is a helluva lot cheaper, even after you figure in the salaries of the geeks who manipulate her, and we can expect studio heads to start circling around Tilly and her successors like sharks around a wounded seal if given half a chance.

Curmie isn’t seeing much of an upside here.  Perhaps, though, the citizenry is more interested in good work than in profits for overpaid capitalist hacks.  Or they’ll just get bored with the gimmick.  ‘Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished.  On the other hand, theatre, fiction, and film have all warned us of the dangers of allowing any form of artificial intelligence too much scope: think R.U.R. (which is over a century old!), 2001: A Space Odyssey, or the first Star Trek movie, for example.  That doesn’t mean the prospects are necessarily dire; they are just extremely unlikely to be positive unless, Gentle Reader, you own stock in Netflix or Amazon or Disney or whoever.

We shall see.

The Other UN Story

 

The chances are, Gentle Reader, that you’re well aware of the recent visit of President Trump to the United Nations.  You’ve read about his whining about the escalator, the teleprompter, and the sound system (“triple sabotage”), and about his speech, which was rambling, narcissistic, xenophobic, condescending, and mendacious—exactly as expected, in other words.  Of course, the UN says that Trump staffers were responsible for both l’affaire d’escalator mécanique and for the teleprompter problem.  Curmie doesn’t necessarily believe them, but when the choice is between someone you’re not sure about and someone any sane person would actively distrust…

But that’s not the UN story Curmie wants to talk about.  Rather, it’s about the walkout, pictured above, prior to a speech by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.  There’s more coverage of the imaginary slights to Trump, or rather his obsession with them, than about what should have been the top UN-related story of the week.  As noted above, Trump neither said nor did anything unexpected.  Neither did Netanyahu, whose fiery speech dismissed accusations of genocide in Gaza; condemned the recent recognition of a Palestinian state by nations like the UK, Canada, and Australia; and promised to “finish the job” of eliminating Hamas.

The suggestion in a New York Times article that what Netanyahu didn’t say—there was no mention of annexing the West Bank, for example—may be the true story here is intriguing, especially in light of the peace proposal drafted by the Trump administration.  Curmie is anything but a fan of 47, but if he can indeed get buy-in from both Likud and Hamas, that would be a major achievement.  This will, of course, be believed when seen, and past experience suggests that Trump is seeking a distraction from the Epstein files touting an agreement negotiated with only one side, and to which the other side has precisely zero chance of agreeing.

This essay isn’t about what Netanyahu said or didn’t say, however.  It’s about that walkout.  The first thing to notice is that there was no similar display two days earlier when Donald Trump addressed the delegates.  Trump, after all, is a primary reason, if not the primary reason, that Netanyahu can behave the way he does.  Trump has also interfered in the domestic affairs of other nations (Brazil, Argentina…); ordered the killing of the crew of a Venezuelan fishing boat in international waters because of mere suspicion that it might have been carrying drugs; threatened to annex Greenland (from an ally!) and Canada (!); made a sport of insulting foreign leaders (e.g., Zelenskyy) and reneged on promises made in the name of this country; and, since neither Congress nor SCOTUS are interested in doing their jobs, single-handedly enacted and retracted tariffs with less self-control than a two-year-old on a sugar high.

Even if you take issue with one or more of the items in the last paragraph, Gentle Reader, you must grant that there are a fair number of UN delegates who would rather be doing virtually anything else than listen to Trump ramble incoherently for an hour.  But there they sat, or at least we saw no news stories to the contrary, and one suspects that we would have.  So, why did they stay?  Out of respect?  Fear?  Sense of responsibility?  Masochism?  Curmie declines to speculate further.  But it does throw some light on the motivation for the walkout before Netanyahu’s speech.

Let us take as given that the situation in the Middle East, especially as regards Palestine, is complex and contradictory, and that one’s attitude towards that part of the world is likely to tell us at least as much about the spectator as about the spectated.  The Hamas attack just short of two years ago was horrific, and the refusal to release the remaining hostages is unconscionable.  Israel’s response is nevertheless disproportionate, and the only question is whether intentionally starving innocent children is nonetheless ethical, given that there are different rules at play in war than in peace.

Curmie first wrote about the area on his old blog (yes, on LiveJournal) in the immediate aftermath of Hamas winning the election in Palestine over 19 years ago.  He described the moment as “it's put up or shut up time for them, unless they are truly stupid enough to try to subvert the democratic movement that brought them to power.”  Alas, they did prove to be that stupid, although as Curmie wrote in a 2010 piece on attempts by relief organizations to run an Israeli blockade and deliver food, medicine, and other items to Gaza, Curmie had “overlooked the possibility of an Israeli initiative which would allow Hamas to pass the blame—legitimately, or with at least a claim to legitimacy—to the very government they so vehemently oppose.”

If Curmie had to pick his favorite essay on Palestine, it would be this one from 2014, invoking the story of the six blind men and the elephant.  In the fable, each of the blind men engages with a different part of the pachyderm, declaring with certainty that he has encountered a rope (the tail), a pillar (a leg), a solid pipe (a tusk) and so on.  Notice that each of them is completely honest and fundamentally logical in his assessment, which, of course, is at best incomplete.

Curmie wrote:

Curmie has three real-life Jewish friends (at least two of whom have commented on the CC Facebook page) who have threatened to unfriend anyone who publicly supports Hamas. Curmie also has friends, especially in the UK and Ireland, who are not only supporting but organizing boycotts of Israeli goods. None of these folks are bad people, or even particularly narrow-minded. They are just grabbing a tail and can’t imagine how someone could possibly describe the elephant as being wall-like.

Moreover, not only can good, compassionate, people disagree about how to proceed, but we must reject false dichotomies.  As Curmie has mentioned several times (here and here, for example) it is perfectly possible to support humanitarian aid in Gaza for suffering people without supporting Hamas.  It is possible to argue against the Israeli government without being antisemitic, just as it is possible to condemn the policies of Kamala Harris without being sexist or racist. 

It is also possible, without sanctioning a governmental policy that could legitimately be described as a war crime, to understand the disquiet, even thousands of miles away from the Middle East, of American (British, French, etc.) Jews, who not without reason regard the October 7 attack of two years ago as a symptom of a global assault on their culture that has been going on for millennia. 

All of the above is a long-winded introduction to a basic point.  The way out of this morass is through argumentation, which is, of course, the very purpose of the UN to begin with: better a war of words than a war of missiles.  A week and a half ago, Curmie wrote about the attempt by a collection of student groups to disinvite an Israeli actor/director who was scheduled to give a lecture at Michigan State University: “In particular, students’ unwillingness to even listen to opposing viewpoints is deeply disturbing.”

But those are college kids.  Curmie spent half a century in which the majority of the people with whom he came in contact were post-adolescents.  Those folks are trying to find their way in a world they’re only beginning to understand.  They’re exposed to people and ideas the like of which they’ve never encountered before.  It’s unfortunate, even “disturbing,” that they are so tempted to exclude The Other, but openness to the hitherto unknown, at least to the point of allowing alternate points of view to be expressed, is part of the maturing process, and is, in Curmie’s opinion, one of the principal benefits of college. 

The delegates who so ostentatiously walked out before Netanyahu’s speech aren’t college kids.  They’re adults, and representatives of their nations.  It might not be asking too much to expect them to act like it.  Curmie wouldn’t walk across the street to hear Benjamin Netanyahu speak, but that isn’t Curmie’s damned job.  It is theirs.  Their entire raison d’être is to listen to someone with whom they disagree, search for points of accord, and try to make the world a better place for everyone.

They couldn’t be bothered, opting instead for what they undoubtedly believed was virtue-signaling but was really simply an abdication of responsibility.  But, just as that law student at Cal-Berkeley back in the spring of ’24 did her cause more harm than good by being an entitled ass, so did these yahoos hurt their cause by seeking attention rather than solutions.

As noted above, disagreeing with the Israeli government doesn’t mean you’re antisemitic.  But if you claim to be a diplomat, refusing to listen to the Israeli PM when you endured a harangue by Donald Trump pretty much means that you are.  

 

Two Scams Involving Cars and Driving

 

Curmie is trying desperately to think about something other than politics and variations on the theme: the Idiot-in-Chief, urged on by Secretary Brainworm, trying to link Tylenol (by brand name!) to autism; the absurdity of “Escalatorgate” and Little Donny’s obsession with it; plus lots of other diversions so we won’t be talking about the EPSTEIN FILES.  Curmie might come back to some of this, but not today.  So he’s going to talk about a different gaggle of charlatans… well, OK, two gaggles thereof.

After driving the same vehicle for seventeen years, Curmie finally got a new car a little over a month ago.  It happens to be a Nissan, which is relevant here only to the extent of identifying who is not responsible for the slimy tactics described below.

A couple of weeks after buying the new car, Curmie got a letter, pretty much purporting to be from Nissan, proclaiming that they’d been trying to contact me to tell me that my warranty was going to be cancelled unless I called them to confirm.  N.B., “cancelled,” implying this was coverage I already had was in danger of losing.  Curmie got another such letter a couple of days later.  And then there were even more…

Luckily, the stench of scam was pretty obvious.  No, they hadn’t been trying to contact me, or they would have done so.  Nissan has not only my home address, but my email address and cell phone number.  They also, of course, have my VIN number, which two of the letters wanted me to be prepared to tell them.  These epistles stopped just short of claiming to be from Nissan per se; it was implied but never outright stated.  There was, of course, a general “you must act now” feel, and the obligatory ”this is the FINAL ATTEMPT TO CONTACT YOU” bullshit.

Ultimately, Curmie has (so far!) received seven (!) such letters, apparently from at least four different fraudsters (or at least four different numbers to call), all claiming to be the FINAL ATTEMPT to contact me.  (Curmie says “at least four” because the last one was pitched, unopened.)  Only one admitted they wanted to sell me new coverage rather than have me “confirm” an allegedly already existing account.  One version was completely identical to the first one except for a change of deadline date.  Perhaps that first one wasn’t really the final attempt, after all, huh?  Luckily, the villains are as stupid as they are corrupt. 

Exactly how all of these creatures got Curmie’s home address and found out about his purchase is unclear.  The salesman at the local dealership said perhaps they hacked into the DMV, but it’s more likely the DMV cheerfully sold the information: the state has got to make money somehow, and they’re unwilling to make billionaires and oil companies pay taxes at an appropriate rate, so allowing their citizens to be swindled seems an appropriate way to make a few bucks.

The problem is neither new nor limited to one brand of vehicle or one location.  Beloved Spouse is still occasionally getting this crap for a Honda she bought two years ago.  Incidentally, the Honda dealership, the Nissan dealership, and Curmie’s house are in three different counties, so it’s got to be a state-wide (at least) phenomenon.

But here’s the thing: Curmie is a skeptical lad by nature, and even he was almost tempted to call one of those numbers just to find out what was going on.  Partly, that impulse was driven by the perhaps naïve belief that scam artists would have nothing to gain if he was sufficiently cautious on the phone.  Indeed, it wasn’t until he got the second letter—from an apparently different source—that Curmie’s suspicions went from “preponderance of the evidence” to “beyond reasonable doubt.”  Even then, a quick call to the dealership seemed in order. 

It’s unclear how this little exercise in deceit works to the scammers’ benefit if the car owner is cautious.  Still, we can suspect that this kind of shadiness must have the potential to be lucrative or there wouldn’t be so many people trying it, and whereas the victims might not be the sharpest knives in the proverbial drawer, they don’t deserve to be swindled.

Even more instantly identifiable as deceit is the advertising for the UpSide app.  Back when the app was relatively new, Curmie pointed out that you could have a full-time job driving 65 mph with no breaks and still not get the savings the ad promises.  They’ve changed the details of their strategy a little, but the bullshit remains.  The most recent commercial Curmie heard opens with an ominous voice proclaiming that the average American spends $5000 a year on gas.  “That’s crazy,” quoth the narrator.  That’s true, it is crazy: in the sense that you’d be crazy to believe such an outright lie.

Let’s see: the average car gets about 24.4 mpg, and the average person drives about 12,200 miles a year.  That means they’d need almost exactly 500 gallons of gas a year.  The average price of gas nationally is about $3.17 a gallon, but let’s go with the most expensive state, California, where the average cost is $4.65 (these figures are apparently updated daily, so they might not be exact if/when you check, Gentle Reader).  That would mean that even in California you’d be spending about $2325 on gas annually: less than half what the UpSide ad claims.  In Mississippi, the cheapest state for gas, the cost would be about $1350: roughly a third of UpSide’s stat.

The app itself may actually be a good thing: Curmie can find nothing to suggest that it doesn’t, in fact, save the user some money, nor is there evidence of hidden charges or even hassles.  If it’s a scam, it’s difficult to see how the operation works.  But if you’re not trying to fleece someone, why would you go out of your way to act like you are?

Curmie shrugs and moves on.