Facebook and Other Censorious Asshats

Curmie is indebted to Ken White at Popehat for the term “censorious asshat” that serves as part of the title of this piece.

Here’s the deal. When Curmie awoke this morning he checked in with Facebook, as usual. One of Curmie’s posts on the Facebook page had been deemed “false” by “an independent fact-checker,” specifically by that paradigm of journalistic mediocrity, USA Today. The offending meme, riffing on the anti-maskers, shows a soldier carrying a donkey across a field. The cutline reads:

This picture is from World War II, a soldier carrying a donkey. It is not that the soldier loves donkeys or has some sort of perversion. What’s happening is that the field is mined and that if the donkey was allowed to wonder [sic.] as it pleased, it would likely detonate a charge and kill everyone. The moral of the story is that during difficult times the first ones you have to keep under control are the jackasses who don’t understand the danger and do as they please.

Ah, but the geniuses who have no understanding of humor decided to point out that the photo wasn’t really from World War II. [I know, the horror!] OK, first off, Curmie doubts that anyone looking at that meme, especially anyone seeing it on Curmie’s page (I attract a pretty intelligent clientele, if I do say so myself), unquestioningly believed that the details provided in the meme were literal fact. They existed not to be regarded as truth, but to set up a joke. No one cares that it was really the French in Algeria, or even that the field wasn’t actually mined. Seriously, if we were talking about a gag that starts “A priest walks into a bar,” these morons would feel compelled to point out that there’s no solid evidence of such an event, that all we know is that the man was dressed as a priest, that it’s true that he entered but we don’t know if he walked, and really, it was more of a pub than a bar. Curmie also awaits Facebook’s revelation that Abraham Lincoln didn’t really say not to believe everything you see on the Internet.

Curmie would be pleased to send them all a box of laxative and get on with his day, except that having the post labelled as “false” means that Curmie’s posts, already seldom seen by more than 10% of the people who like his page, will show up on the feeds of even fewer folks who don’t actively seek out his posts. Oh, by the way, the photo you see here: taken from someone else’s Facebook page; there’s no disclaimer on that page. Ah, equity…

This is, by the way, the third time Curmie’s posts have been questioned. In one of the other cases, Curmie did post something from a clearly partisan source that seemed at the time to be a little devoid of context. It was not intentionally misleading (on my part, at least), and indeed the “ruling” from the Grand Poobahs of fact-checking was only “partly false.” Still, it was a moment of intellectual laziness, and Curmie was rightly dinged for it.

The other time, Curmie posted something that looked interesting but a little suspicious: and he said so, specifically requesting his readers who knew more about the subject would help separate fact from fiction. Ah, but he posted something that turned out to be incompletely contextualized (fact-checkers care about context when it suits them to do so; otherwise, they’re the quintessence of literality). The fact that Curmie labelled it as questionable is irrelevant to the bot that enforces the “rulings” of PolitiFact (or whoever). [Note: Curmie has had his issues with PolitiFact in particular for some time. See here, here, and here, for example.]

Of course, there’s one category of posters who aren’t subject to Facebook’s faux interest in the truth: politicians and their minions. It’s right there on FB’s self-righteous ”Business Help Center” page:

Posts and ads from politicians are generally not subjected to fact-checking. In evaluating when this applies we ask our fact-checking partners to look at politicians at every level. This means candidates running for office, current office holders - and, by extension, many of their cabinet appointees - along with political parties and their leaders.

Why, you ask? Well, free speech, of course! A candidate for office is even allowed to post outright lies: “If a claim is made directly by a politician on their Page, in an ad or on their website, it is considered direct speech and ineligible for our third party fact checking program — even if the substance of that claim has been debunked elsewhere.” Riiiiiiiiiiight. Trump or Biden or their respective parties can repeat nonsense that was proven to be false months ago—and a). it’s actual mendacity rather than a misinterpretation or an unintentional omission of context, and b). the falseness of the statement is actually relevant—but the likes of Curmie will be censured because a joke meme misidentifies a soldier in a way that doesn’t change a thing.

Still, not to worry. Surely only three such instances (even if two of them shouldn’t count at all) over a period of several months shouldn’t make much difference, right? Well, this is Facebook, so who knows.

But the day’s saga doesn’t end there, Gentle Reader. It’s Thursday, and Curmie has taken to posting reminders on Wednesday or Thursday to remind Curmiphiles to vote for the Political Asshole of the Week. So I went to the Facebook page to re-post last Saturday’s link. Gone. Indeed, Sunday’s post had disappeared, as well. In fact, I can’t post anything from this blog, either to the Curmudgeon Central page or on my own personal page. Of course, I received literally no notification that (or when) the posts had been removed. When I went to post directly from the blog to either of my Facebook personae’s pages, I got a pop-up that said it was a violation of Facebook’s community standards. That’s it. Nothing more specific than that, and not just the inability to post a particular article, but to post literally anything from manjushri924.blogspot.com. I honestly have no idea what’s going on. Curmie has never advocated violence or criminality, and whereas there’s some adult language now and then, the blog itself is behind a warning that “This post may contain sensitive content.” You’ve got to say you’re OK with that to see the posts themselves.

Were I of a cynical disposition, of course (perish the thought!), I’d suspect that some pol who got nominated as Political Asshole of the Week decided to throw his weight around. Oh, by the way, the fun folks at Opinion Stage shut down the poll because it’s been seen too many times? Yeah, right. The days when Blogspot had their own polling apparatus are missed. Or perhaps it’s time to migrate to another platform? We shall see…

Anyway, readership here will likely go down, as Facebook has been the principal means by which most readers find their way here. But Curmie writes mostly for himself, anyway, to keep his writing skills sharp and to clarify his own thinking on matters of the day. And who knows? Maybe someday Curmie will be told what exactly is so offensive about this blog, so he can either fix it or tell Zuckerberg to perform an action best suited to particularly limber hermaphrodites. In the meantime, Curmie will try to revive his dormant Twitter account to announce his blog posts, to continue to post to his Facebook page but list this page as manjushri924 dot blogspot dot com in doing so, and to urge you to follow this page directly. Oh, and to try to figure out how to do the Political Asshole of the Week poll without having to pay for it.

Free Will and the Craven (Ex-)Congresscritters

The Canadian rock group Rush was never one of Curmie’s favorites. He didn’t dislike them, but there are no Rush CDs on Curmie’s shelf, nor any of their songs on his Spotify “starred” list. Their stuff seems to be a favorite of the local classic rock station, however: enough so that it’s not unlikely that one of their songs will show up on the car radio during Curmie’s commute.

And so it is that one of the group’s better songs in Curmie’s opinion was fresh in his mind when he read about Republican Congresscritters who were so terrified of the Tangerine Tribble that they capitulated to his every perverse idea, lest (OMG, the horror!) they be faced with a primary challenge.  The song, as you may well have already surmised, is “Free Will.” It has a two-stanza chorus, the first of which follows:

You can choose a ready guide
In some celestial voice
If you choose not to decide
You still have made a choice

Yes, inaction is a choice, especially when it’s your job to act. Whereas Curmie has no doubt that the POTUS is a petty, vindictive, and (of course) powerful little fecal accretion, he can muster precisely zero sympathy for these sniveling toadies. They are sworn to preserve the Constitution, to place the welfare of the nation foremost in their list of priorities. They’re now admitting that they didn’t do that. 

Dave Trott: “retired" Congresscritter

Over seventy years ago, at the Nuremberg trials, some defendants argued that they were just following orders: “Befehl ist Befehl” (an order is an order). Many of these ex-military officers would literally have been risking their lives had they disobeyed an order… and yet the so-called Nuremberg Defense was rejected except as a mitigating factor in the punishment phase.

The fact that the fear is of a primary challenge rather than a general election loss is also telling: they come from safe, quite possibly gerrymandered, districts. They are the product of corruption, and they chose not to bite the hand that feeds… until that same iniquitous system might be used against them, of course.

This little posse of whiners could have actually done some good. They could have represented the ideals of the country and of their party. They could have prevented at least part of the Trumpster Fire of incompetence, cronyism, and venality we as a nation have suffered of late. But no. They were concerned about their “careers.” Dancing attendance on a petulant, mendacious and dim-witted wannabe dictator is a career? What would being an amoral drudge look like, then?

Maybe Curmie fails to understand because he’s publicly voted in the minority, often alone, more times than he can count. He was the sole “nay” in a roomful of over 200 “yeas” on one occasion… at least a dozen people told him that if “[they’d] known someone else was going to object, [they] would have, too.” Curmie doesn’t work that way. Compromise and consensus are good things, but they aren’t divine. If it’s the best we can do and it’s acceptable even if flawed, OK. But fatally flawed is fatally flawed… and as we can see in the coronavirus response, sometimes the word “fatally” is literal.

Curmie does understand, though, that sometimes it’s hard to stand up to authority, to speak truth to power. There are certainly moments when deciding a particular hill isn’t worth dying on is a function more of pragmatism than of cowardice. Curmie has been making a lot of those decisions lately, mostly as his white liberal friends indulge in orgies of self-flagellating virtue signaling. But most of the time another factor is that most of us never get any real say in how policy is decided. There’s “input,” which if it’s other than sycophancy, is promptly ignored, and which is likely to lead to ostracism and possibly exile from even the insignificant pockets of political power to which we’d previously had access. But these GOP pols had a vote. They could have at least been true to their own ideals. They chose instead to meekly bow to the schoolyard bully.

Moreover, presumably these are people who could be successful in other fields—in business and law, mostly, both of which professions pay better than the Congresscritter’s salary. There really are worse fates than not being in Congress. “Retiring,” of course, is the chicken’s way out. Um, “If I was still there and speaking out against the president, what would happen to me?” Seriously? Did you think you were going to be disappeared à la the KGB? Speak your truth. But, no. You don’t actually stand for anything. Just like your colleagues in the Senate who could have said “no” to the obviously unqualified Bret Kavanaugh, who could have examined the evidence in the McConnell-engineered farce that was the impeachment trial, who could have insisted on recognizing the threat posed by COVID-19 once it was manifest to all and sundry: you have no political philosophy other than your own short-term interest.

You are contemptible. Not as bad as Trump, but neither is Sauron.

Political Asshole(s) of the Week: 3rd edition

Curmophiles have determined, by the narrowest of margins, that the new Political Assholes of the Week (candidates here) are that collection of governors who, through a literally fatal combination of arrogance, privilege, and political cowardice, refused to order the wearing of masks, social distancing, etc., in the face of a pandemic that is ravaging the country. Curmie wants to be sure each of these craven hacks gets due recognition, so here’s at least a short list of the worthy Political Asshole of the Week recipients: John Bel Edwards (D-LA), Steve Bullock (D-MT), Doug Ducey (R-AZ), Gary Herbert (R-UT), Asa Hutchinson (R-AR), Kay Ivey (R-AL), Jim Justice (R-WV), Bill Lee (R-TN), Henry McMaster (R-SC), Kristi Noem (R-SD). Please note that some of these folks are guiltier than others, and that some may have seen at least a glimmer of light in the last week.

It should be noted, too, that Senator Paul received more total votes than the governors did: combine his solo nomination with the one for the entire GOP Senate majority, and he’d have outdistanced the governors. So he gets a Special Dishonorable Mention.

Nino Vitale: stupid, insane, or just grandstanding?

And so we move on to this week’s candidates, remembering that the obvious choice—a certain corrupt asshole who commuted the already inadequate sentence of one of his gaggle of mendacious minions—is ineligible, because otherwise no one else would ever get a chance. So let us return to the subject of COVID-19. It’s difficult to imagine anyone who better fits the title of Political Asshole of the Week than Nino Vitale, a member of the Ohio House of Representatives. From this distance, it’s difficult to determine if Vitale is stupider than skunk shit, hearing voices from the planet Looneytunes, or he’s just another third-rate party hack trying to get his name in the paper, whatever the cost. Curmie guesses the answer is a little of all three with an emphasis on the last, but can’t be sure.

Vitale asks, “Are you tired of living in a dictatorship yet?”. Well, actually, yes, Curmie would prefer to live in country in which someone convicted of multiple felonies can’t have his sentence commuted by the guy he was trying to protect by that perjury and obstruction. Such an event bears a little more resemblance to dictatorship than does the slight inconvenience caused by making you wear a mask so as not to inadvertently kill your friends and neighbors.

Vitale also demands, in junior high level hysterical all capital letters no less, that people not get tested. No rationale offered.  He continues: “Have you noticed they never talk about deaths anymore, just cases? And they never talk about recoveries. They just keep adding to numbers they have been feeding us from over 3 months ago!” Gee, do you suppose that the numbers are going up because that’s what numbers do when you’re counting things? “Recoveries”? Yes, there are over a million Americans who have “recovered”; that’s in part because recoveries include people who have been released from the hospital, but who may have lingering health issues, including permanent damage to lungs and other vital organs. Curmie has a couple of friends in that category, and is a little loath to consider them truly “recovered.” As for not talking about deaths—well, here Curmie can help you out, you duplicitous little turd: over 4000 Americans died from COVID-19 in the last week. Indeed, literally every week since late March has had a death toll from this virus that exceeded that of 9/11. Over 3000 of your fellow Ohioans have died from the virus; 47 of those fatalities were reported on the day you made your moronic Facebook post.

Whether or not Representative Vitale becomes Political Asshole of the Week, he does make Curmie embarrassed for the species.

Texas GOP: they don't really care even about their own.

Next up: the Texas Republican Party, which sued the mayor of Houston for protecting its rank and file delegates to the state convention. This is outrageous enough on its own, but it’s important to take it in context. Earlier in the week the state GOP decided to move forward with an in-person conference despite the state’s surging infection and death tolls and Houston’s being a hotspot for the virus, with demand for ICU units outstripping supply. Ah, but the actual politicians—Governor Greg Abbott, Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, and similar people of privilege—would be addressing the crowd of 6000 or so virtually. The rationale: “to focus all the attention on the business of the meeting and to get everybody in and out of here as quickly and as safely as possible.” Curmie need hardly tell you, Gentle Reader, that this is politics-speak for “we’re willing to risk the health and safety of other people, even our loyal supporters… but not ourselves.”

So now they think they can make some cheap political points for saying that Houston’s Democratic mayor is somehow discriminating against them because we wants to keep them and their families (and yes, Houstonians working in the hotels, bars, and restaurants they’d frequent) safe and well by disallowing an in-person convention. The key point here is that the top brass, whose mendacity is matched only by their cravenness, weren’t going to be there anyway, because they recognized the danger. Few events in recent history have so encapsulated the hubris of Republicans in power as this act of raging hypocrisy.

Speaking of hypocritical Texas Republicans (there’s another kind?), we turn now to our third nominee, Senator Ted Cruz. In a different week, Sen. Cruz might have had to struggle for the nomination against his colleague John Cornyn, whose completely inane comments about not knowing whether children can get and transmit the coronavirus even though over 1700 children have been diagnosed just in Texas marks him as either an idiot or a liar (psssssst: he’s both). But we’re trying to keep one slot open for non-COVID-related stories, so ol’ Rafael sneaks in, barely ahead of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, whose “People will do what they do” reply to a question about toppling a statue of Christopher Columbus at least had the mitigating factors of being impromptu and decontextualized. (Still pretty bad, though.)

Ted Cruz, hypocrite.  Some things don’t change.

Anyway, back to Ted Cruz. Here’s the thing. Boycotting major corporations is largely ineffective. Curmie used to buy three or four chicken sandwiches a month from Chik-fil-A; he hasn’t had any Hate Chicken in several years. He’s probably withheld between maybe $150 from them in gross sales any given year of late. And… let’s see… they bring in a little over $10 billion a year, so Curmie has punished them to the tune of (assuming Curmie didn’t misplace a decimal point somewhere) about 15 ten-millionths of 1% of their revenue. Take that, billionaire Cathy family!

But it’s certainly Curmie’s right to make that decision, which, after all, is far more to make him feel better about himself than to punish the corporation. And it’s equally fine for other groups of people not to support Nike, or Target, or Hobby Lobby, or Starbucks, or whatever. We can agree or disagree with each other’s motives, but we cannot deny each other’s right to buy or not buy Product X or Service Y even for idiosyncratic reasons. You understand that, Gentle Reader, as does Curmie. Ted Cruz does not.

When, a year ago, Cruz himself made a big show of boycotting Nike, that, you see, was exercising free speech. (It was.) But now, when the Goya Foods CEO made some fawning comments about President Trump and the Twittersphere erupted with calls to boycott the company, that response is an attempt to “silence free speech.” Senator Cruz has an understanding of the Constitution that would be embarrassing in a junior high kid. Free speech isn’t defined by whether Senator Cruz (or Curmie, or anyone else) agrees with it. Nor does it guarantee freedom from repercussions. It’s simply a protection against governmental interference. If you proffer a stupid opinion, you can’t go to jail for it. That doesn’t mean I have to keep buying your garbanzo beans. (Of course, for Curmie to stop doing so, he’d first have to start…)

Of course, the idea that Ted Cruz is a hypocritical asshole has been obvious for years to anyone paying attention. But is he the Political Asshole of the Week? That, Gentle Readers, is for you to decide.

EDIT: Something went wonky with the poll. I'm calling it off early this time.

International Students and Breaking the ICE

I know; I know. Curmie said he wouldn’t write about the Trump administration, but this is my blog, my rules, and I can break ‘em if I want to. And not only is higher education my turf, but I’m the unofficial coordinator for my department’s international programs. So when the Sphincter Posse at ICE announced that they’d be hunting down international students and trying to deport them if their university decides to go all-online, Curmie turned Mama Bear. Coming after my cubs is explicitly contra-indicated.

The policy change is a familiar one to Curmie, whose life in academia is peopled with a fair number of mid-level administrators whose principal raison d’être is to justify their own existence. So it appears to be with ICE, who are pretty much admitting one of three things: that they don’t really have anything to do, they haven’t a clue how to do their jobs, or they just like throwing their weight around and couldn’t care less about justice. Any way you slice it, patrolling the area anywhere near the southern border and harassing anyone with a “z” or a tilde in their surname just isn’t enough to keep these little weasels occupied. (As usual, Curmie means no disrespect in this nomenclature to actual fauna of the genus Mustela.)

We can expect little else than than petty xenophobia from this administration, and to the feeble minds of the policy-makers the only thing worse than a “foreigner” is a smart one. Curmie gets that. He understands, too, in the words of a Friend of Curmie, “the cruelty is the point.” After all, why else would anyone want to join a notoriously brutal, racist, self-important organization if not to be, well, brutal, racist, and self-important? And we can guess that the students who’ll be the first to be harassed won’t have surnames like Smith or Saunders, but rather Yang, Muhammad, or Lopez. 

It’s asking a bit much of an administration founded on jingoism and testosterone poisoning to show any evidence of ethics, but at least some recognition of the pragmatics of the situation wouldn’t come amiss. Students have no say, none, in whether their university holds face-to-face classes or goes exclusively online, yet they’re the ones left hanging if the university makes a decision which, while not necessarily an obvious choice, is certainly a reasonable one.

In many cases, the students are already in the country and literally can’t go home, as a number of countries are closing their borders to people coming from the US, so incompetent is our handling of the crisis. We’ve already talked about some of the numbers in previous posts here, for instance; no need to repeat them. Let’s just say: they’re bad. Other students aren’t here yet, but have non-refundable plane tickets and apartment deposits. Still others, if they leave under threat of deportation, might not be able to return. Plus, of course, if there’s no face-to-face instruction, the majority of international students won’t want to be here anyway, unless they effectively have no choice. And we mustn’t forget the mountain of red tape to cut through for universities and students alike—and Curmie thought it was the Dems who liked governmental paperwork for its own sake. Guess not.

Of course, Harvard and M.I.T. promptly sued the government to stop the rule from going into effect. This is good news from two points of view. First, someone is standing up to governmental bullying and grandstanding. Harvard President Lawrence Bacow sums up the basis for the suit:

The order came down without notice—its cruelty surpassed only by its recklessness. It appears that it was designed purposefully to place pressure on colleges and universities to open their on-campus classrooms for in-person instruction this fall, without regard to concerns for the health and safety of students, instructors, and others.

The University of California at Berkeley announced plans for their own suit, with outgoing President Janet Napolitano describing the Trump administration’s action as “mean-spirited, arbitrary and damaging to America.” She further describes the policy as “illegal, unnecessary and callous.” Of course, she’s right: outrageousness, interference in university operations, and cruelty for its own sake were the obvious goals of this initiative. They’re not collateral damage; they’re the goal.

Equally important is who is taking up the fight. Harvard, M.I.T., and Berkeley are three of the most prestigious universities not merely in the country, but in the world. More to the point, they have deep pockets and high-powered legal teams. Less than 48 hours after the announcement of the policy change, the two Boston area institutions had filed a 24-page lawsuit. Curmie can’t write that fast even when he’s already done the research. That means either that these guys (those would be non-gender specific “guys”) are really good, or they anticipated that the Xenophobe-in-Chief might do something this irrational. Or both. 

Curmie’s university and scores if not hundreds of others would also take a major hit if this absurd policy were to go into effect, but we’re not really in much of a position to fight it. So, strange as it seems for this loyal son of Dartmouth, he’s cheering on Harvard with all his might. Strange bedfellows, and all that.

The other good news is that a lot of colleges are looking for ways to circumvent the Stupid. Curmie hereby volunteers to teach an in-person course as a voluntary overload to any and all international students. Much as Curmie would cheerfully teach Fuck ICE 101 and 102, as suggested by the internet meme, we’d need outside permission to develop such a course. But Curmie sees no problem in requiring a Chinese grad student in Chemistry to take a course in Global Theatre. We’d meet face-to-face, but of course Curmie can be as lenient as he chooses in excusing absences. He wouldn’t allow more than 45 per semester, of course. And the academic standards would be at least as high as the University of North Carolina demanded of its athletes all those years. Curmie was thinking of a final exam with a single question: “Have you ever seen a play?” “Yes,” “no,” and “I don’t know” would receive full credit. All other answers would get a B. But shhhhhhh, Gentle Reader, don’t go noising that question around. If students find out what’s going to be on the exam, Curmie would have to think of another question. And that would take more thought than the entirety of the ICE has ever expended.

“...but it can be.” A 4th of July musing.

Curmie and Beloved Spouse don’t have HBO, so it’s only now we’re getting around to watching the Aaron Sorkin series “The Newsroom,” which we enjoy a lot (one suspects this would be considerably less true if we disagreed with its obvious political slant). We’ve only just finished Season 1, so no spoilers, please.

But watching the concluding episode to that premier season, complete with the reminder that the US is not the greatest country in the world, but it can be, on Independence Eve makes for the sort of interesting juxtaposition of ideas that regular readers of this blog will know Curmie loves to examine. Because, hokey and sanctimonious as that line (and indeed the entire series) is, it’s true. 

We’re not in a good place right now. There are charlatans and buffoons at every level of government. There is literally not a single elected official “representing” Curmie who is even average at all three of three basic criteria: integrity, intelligence, and sanity. POTUS fails miserably at all three (well, to be fair, he might not actually be as stupid as he seems). There’s a pandemic of a deadly virus that has been spectacularly mishandled by those in charge; they’ve managed not only to ignore the people who actually have expertise, but have attempted to denigrate them, as well. Literally millions of Americans have shown themselves to be a toxic blend of ignorance, arrogance, and recklessness in their own personal responses to COVID-19.

Curmie’s twin professions of education and the performing arts are under serious threat, yet he’s luckier than most. The national debt currently stands at over $75,000 per capita, and will undoubtedly soar higher in the months ahead. At a time when they know they’re under increased scrutiny, police forces across the country have responded with even more arrogance, even more brutality, than they’d hitherto exhibited; their response to charges of racism has been not to take measures to eliminate that behavior, but to brutalize some white people, too. The Democratic Party and its flagbearer offer little in the way of actual ideas; “we’re not as big assholes as those guys” is a difficult slogan to rally behind.

And yet… and yet…

Five years ago Curmie wrote that he feared another Kent State couldn’t happen:

I fear that, because such a declaration betrays a profound and disturbing apathy among today’s post-adolescents. This isn’t true of all late-teens and 20-somethings, but a terrifying percentage of my students can’t be bothered to fulfill their responsibility (yes, responsibility) as citizens and even vote, let alone write letters to Congresscritters or actively engage in political campaigns…. The overwhelming majority of people under 30 are liberal on social issues, but that doesn’t matter if making their voices heard isn’t worth a few minutes of their time.

The killing of George Floyd—or, rather, the release of the video showing that horrible event—changed that. Citizens of all ages are literally taking to the streets, asserting what should be the indisputable fact that Black Lives Matter. More to the point, they’re willing to do so in the face of rubber bullets and tear gas, and, as someone (Curmie regrets that he can’t remember who) said a few weeks back, if they’re willing to do that, they’ll get themselves to the polls in November, whatever it takes. 

The initial surge of engagement has died down, but Curmie senses something different this time than in all the other flashpoints since the Reagan administration. Curmie’s own students—would that they were representative of their generation!—are more politically engaged than any collection of undergrads since Curmie himself was in college and US soldiers were still dying in the rice paddies of Vietnam.

We are, in short, at a crossroads. Curmie truly believes that another four years of a Trump administration and a GOP-led Senate will signal the end of American democracy. There is much to suggest that all is already lost, that “liberty and justice for all” was never more than sloganeering, that the greed of the capitalist class and the immorality of their political symbiotic partners in perfidy will crush us all. But, like all true cynics (and like all educators worthy of the name), Curmie is a romantic at heart. He sees what could be, and his snark is deeply rooted not in negativity per se, but in the profound faith that we not only should, but can do better.

As most readers of this blog know, Curmie is a theatre director. Not every first rehearsal looks the same, but there’s one element always present: a hortatory message that if we set clear goals, work together, trust each other, and believe in those who believe in us, we can do great things. Sometimes, of course, it doesn’t work out; Curmie takes responsibility for some pretty mediocre (or worse) productions. But sometimes… sometimes we achieve more than anyone thought possible. We need that magic now. It will take work, dedication, faith, focus, and possibly even courage. But “a more perfect union” is within reach. We can do this.

Ours is not the nation of liberty, freedom, and righteousness we claim it to be.

But it can be.

A New Political Asshole(s) of the Week Poll

Curmie may be trying out a new feature: a weekly poll of Political Asshole(s) of the Week. No guarantees how long this will last, but the idea is that Curmie will nominate three pols (or collections of pols) each weekend. The only stipulation is that no member of the Trump administration or campaign staff (or Trump lapdog Moscow Mitch) are eligible, as the award would never go to anyone else. And then you, Gentle Readers, will choose the… erm… winner.

To this end, Curmie is pleased to announce that for the voting period immediately past, the winner of the 1st Political Asshole of the Week balloting is St. Louis mayor Lyda Krewson, a Democrat, who won a plurality over Republicans Texas Governor Greg Abbott and Louisiana Congresscritter Mike Johnson, both of whom got votes. Mayor Krewson, you may recall, decided it was a good idea to respond to a question in a Facebook Live briefing by doxxing the citizens who had advocated for defunding the police. Congratulations, Mayor: richly deserved.

(And it should be mentioned here that Governor Abbott actually did the right thing this week: too little, too late, but the right thing.)

Onward to this week’s nominees. Curmie is trying to keep all the nominations from clustering around a single topic. So although there are several worthy candidates under the heading of coronavirus response, he’s limiting the nominations to only two. That leaves out Curmie’s own Congresscritter Louie Gohmert, whose puerile grandstanding this week took the form of refusing to wear a mask until he actually tests positive; the Texas Republican Party, which forges ahead with its state convention in Houston—where ICUs are already past capacity—without even requirements for mask-wearing; and even Texas’s Idiot Brat Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, who proclaimed that Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, “doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”  Remind me, Dan... where did you go to med school?

Senator Rand Paul: Doesn't like people who know things.

But that still leaves two excellent nominees in the COVID-19 response category. The first is Senator Rand Paul, whose signature line of the week was “It’s important to realize that if society meekly submits to an expert and that expert is wrong, a great deal of harm may occur. We shouldn’t presume that a group of experts somehow knows what's best for everyone.” A lot of people would regard this statement as inherently worthy of derision; Curmie, ever the skeptic, is not among them. It is true: we shouldn’t trust “experts” unquestioningly. But Paul doesn’t want to trust them at all unless, of course, they adhere to his preconceptions. 

The senator, of course, flaunts his MD especially in matters of public health. He’s an ophthalmologist, which means that he knows as much about epidemiology as Curmie, who has a PhD in theatre, knows about Australian theatre: it exists. But what is especially problematic in Paul’s reluctance to listen to actual experts is his alternative: listen instead to the anti-intellectual self-contradictory ravings of POTUS, who seeks to curtail testing because more tests mean more diagnoses, and that means further evidence of what an incompetent buffoon is at the wheel of the ship of state. Oh, and one more thing: optimism. Yes, really. Did anyone else out there just think of a Monty Python routine? Curmie is all in favor of contrarian views… but there has to be some argument, some evidence, some thought process at play. Senator Paul has provided nothing but petulance.

Alabama Governor Kay Ivey: one of many cowards

The second coronavirus-related nominee goes to a host of governors, mostly but not exclusively Republicans, who, to put it bluntly, refuse to do their jobs and protect their citizens. These are the folks who are pushing to open businesses, schools, colleges, etc.; who are unwilling to take the politically unpopular but necessary step of enforcing—not just encouraging, but actually enforcing—safety precautions: masks, social distancing, limitations on the size of gatherings, etc.

Evasions, double-speak, and evocations of “personal responsibility” are the order of the day for these craven hacks. Hell, if Greg Freaking Abbott can finally get it right… OK, here’s the thing: as Mac Parsons is quoted in an excellent editorial by Kyle Whitmore, “government exists to do shitty things to people.” Who, after all, would pay taxes, or pay child support, or drive at a safe speed all the time if all these things were optional? “Personal responsibility” exists, but it has limits. And, sadly, it has been proven in this pandemic to be insufficient at best. There are too many ignorant, stupid, and egoistic folks out there. “It’s my life; I’ll take my chances” is the mating call of the American Asswipe, a species of fauna known for moronic decisions defended by bellowing platitudes. Listen up, you cretinous yahoo, it’s not your health your faux-heroic antics are endangering: it’s mine. And if I die because you’re an arrogant buffoon, I promise you that my ghost will haunt you until the end of time.

These craven governors also try to deflect reasonable criticism by claiming that “enforcement would be too hard.” Alabama’s health officer, Scott Harris, even reports that some members of “law enforcement… had stated publicly they were not going to enforce the order.” Well, that’s easily fixed. Put every single one of those assholes on suspension without pay, and without access to unemployment compensation, until they decide to do their fucking jobs. Sure, there will be a lot of resistance at first, as there was for, say, mandatory seat belts… but have Skip and Buffy spend a night in jail and pay a $250 fine for a first violation and increase the punishment for each subsequent offense. Grumbling won’t go away, but compliance will increase PDQ.

And if it’s the ubiquity of the offenses that’s the problem, then Curmie awaits the announcement that Alabama will cease enforcing laws against underage drinking, possession of small quantities of marijuana, and driving too fast.

These governors are either imbeciles, cowards, or assholes… often more than one of the above.

Senator Rubio: leader of a hypocritical pack

Finally, our third nomination goes to the Republicans in the US Senate. We’ll make Senator Rubio our poster-child, but he has lots of accomplices. A bill that passed the Senate Intelligence Committee because Susan Collins isn’t always a party hack (or because she knew she could flaunt her phony independence because her colleagues in the GOP would prevent obviously useful legislation from actually becoming law) has been stripped of language requiring that presidential campaigns notify the FBI of any offers by foreign agents to influence US elections.

The proposal was clearly a response to the Mueller investigation, which found insufficient evidence to charge anyone on the Trump campaign with criminal conspiracy, but which also concluded that “The Russian government interfered in our election in sweeping and systematic fashion.” In other words, the measure sought to protect the integrity of the nation’s elections.

Nope, can’t have that. The GOP is all about “fair elections” if what that means is that it’s harder for poor people, minorities, or even people concerned about the risk of contracting COVID-19, to vote. To Republican pols, he fact that absentee ballots have been around a long time, and indeed have been employed recently by one Donald J. Trump, or that the verification process for mail-in ballots and absentee ballots is identical, doesn’t mean that we ought to allow everyone to vote that way. But they’ll do backflips to protect the right of foreign governments or their agents to continue their “sweeping and systematic” interference. Hypocrisy and hubris are in a death struggle to see which is the dominant descriptor of the behavior.

So there you have it, Gentle Reader. Cast your vote. Curmie fears we may have to run the risk of foreign interference, however.

[Poll has been removed.]

Real Irish History, BLM Protests, and COVID-19

One of Curmie’s friends recently posted on his Facebook page a link to a New York Times article entitled “Debunking a Myth: The Irish Were Not Slaves, Too.” Exactly what prompted him to do so, I can’t say. The article is over three years old, after all (it was published in 2017 on St. Patrick’s Day—isn’t that cute?). Perhaps its contents were news to Curmie’s friend. Perhaps he was responding to a recent spate of false claims about Irish slavery that eluded Curmie’s attention. Perhaps someone else posted it and Curmie’s friend thought it was interesting. Doesn’t matter.

A depiction of an 18th century Irish wake.

Here’s what does matter. No legitimate scholar of Irish history believes that the Irish were ever slaves. Not one. This is important. Minority opinions are the essence of scholarship. Virtually any seasoned scholar has written a book, an article, a chapter, or a conference paper that challenges accepted beliefs. That’s what scholars do. Curmie may believe that William Shakespeare really did write those plays attributed to him, but there are some very smart and well-educated people who think otherwise; some are Curmie’s personal friends, whom he respects as both scholars and as people. And Curmie has his own minority beliefs—about the impetus for the Dionysian Festival, the demographics of Shakespeare’s audience, and the dramatic strategies of some early 20th century female playwrights, for example. But in the real world of scholarship, what motivates every argument against Conventional Wisdom is founded on the search for truth. Not so in this case. 

This is not to say that the Irish were not mistreated—more on that below. But the two sides of this story—what the Irish endured and what they did not—both resonate in terms of the two major stories of 2020: the BLM-associated anti-racism demonstrations inspired by the killing of George Floyd, and the pitiful US response to the looming (and now pandemic) spread of COVID-19.  As of this writing, the US accounts for over 25% of the worldwide deaths from the virus despite our many economic advantages and having only barely over 4% of the world's population.  India, for example, has over four times the US population and less than 1/7 of our COVID-19 deaths.

The conflation of Irish indentured servitude (which did indeed exist) and slavery is overwhelmingly discredited, and much of the so-called “evidence” is readily disproven. The Times article, for example, points out that:

Many of the memes use photographs, including of Jewish Holocaust victims or 20th century child laborers, to illustrate events they claim happened in the 17th century, long before the invention of photography. Many reference a nonexistent 1625 proclamation by King James II, who was not born until 1633. 

In 2016, group of actual scholars denounced in an open letter the “disinformation” published by a range of journals and websites: “The intent… is thus patently clear; to insidiously equate indentured servitude or penal servitude with racialised perpetual hereditary chattel slavery.” Irish historian Liam Hogan is even more blunt, describing the “Irish slavery” argument as “racist ahistorical propaganda,” and the claim that Irish women were forced to procreate with African slaves not merely as lacking any evidence, but “part racialised sadomasochistic fantasy and part old white supremacist myth.” 

And that, Gentle Reader, is the key. Curmie likes to think of himself as having at least average imagination, and he cannot construct any scenario for the perpetration and perpetuation of the myth of Irish slavery other than racism in its most insidious form. The argument, you see, is that the Irish were slaves, too—indeed, according to some of the more fallacious memes, they were treated even worse than African slaves (!)—and Irish-Americans “got over it,” so Black folks should, too. This calculated mendacity is nothing more or less than an attempt to discredit the notion that African-Americans have suffered disproportionately in America for four centuries. 

What is true, of course, is that the history of Ireland reveals centuries-long subjugation by the English. This short essay doesn’t pretend to be a complete course in Irish history, but if you’re interested, Gentle Reader, hie thee to the Google machine and check out Poyning’s Law, or the Penal Laws, or the siege of Drogheda, or even the origins of the term “beyond the Pale.” One of the great lines in Irish history was delivered by nationalist hero Michael Collins, who was chastised for arriving seven minutes late to the ceremony formally handing over Dublin Castle to the new Irish Free State: “We've been waiting over 700 years, you can have the extra seven minutes.”

But there’s one moment in the harrowing history of Ireland that resonates particularly today: the so-called “famine” of the 1840s. Curmie puts scare-quotes around the word famine because there was in fact a lot of food produced in Ireland at the time. In “Black ’47,” the worst year of what many of Curmie’s Irish friends rightly call instead the “Great Hunger,” Ireland produced nearly 700 pounds of grain, mostly oats and wheat, per capita. Yes, really. (Curmie’s source is an article by Thomas P. O’Neill in The Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland. It’s behind a paywall; you’ll have to trust Curmie on this one.) True, both oats and winter wheat were regarded as primarily fodder for animals, but the grass eaten in desperation by many peasant farmers in the west wasn’t exactly designated as the centerpiece of a healthy diet for humans, either.

Curmie’s real point is this: England was perfectly capable of relieving at least some of the starvation in Ireland. They simply chose not to do so. No one suggests that the English intentionally initiated the potato blight, although their economic structures certainly contributed heavily to Irish over-reliance on the potato crop. And there is little if any evidence that England actively sought to deny food to the Irish even as millions starved, although pressure from England did lead to the closing of some soup kitchens. Rather, Britain did nothing when they could have helped, thereby passively signing death warrants for their own subjects.

If, Gentle Reader, you are now drawing parallels to the Trump administration’s slothful laissez-faire response to the COVID-19 pandemic, you’re following Curmie’s line of reasoning. The parallel becomes clearer when we understand that Charles Trevelyan, the British baronet charged with administering the crisis, truly believed the Irish brought the crisis on themselves, arguing that “the judgment of God on an indolent and unself-reliant people, and as God had sent the calamity to teach the Irish a lesson, that calamity must not be too much mitigated: the selfish and indolent must learn their lesson so that a new and improved state of affairs must arise.” 

He took the laissez-faire attitude to extremes, arguing in a letter to Lord Monteagle that the famine provided an “effective mechanism for reducing surplus population.”  There’s a good deal of debate in Irish history circles as to whether Trevelyan was truly the monster he’s often portrayed as being. His defenders suggest that he really did do what he thought was best in prioritizing the stability of the English economy over the lives of millions of Irish men, women, and children. Curmie, however, finds his actions an ideal example of the “depraved indifference to human life” definition often associated with murder in the second degree. About a million counts. And a lot of people, including Curmie, would say the callous disrespect for science, the emphasis on economic over health concerns, the months-long delay in doing literally anything in response to news about COVID-19, and the refusal to accept responsibility for either their own actions or non-actions by the Trump administration seem a pretty good parallel.

There’s one more resemblance. Who died in Ireland in the 1840s? Mostly poor people. Who today are being disproportionately exposed to the virus? “Essential workers”: delivery drivers, Amazon workers, waitstaff and bartenders, Walmart clerks… and, again disproportionately, people of color. Not the rich, or even the upper middle class. Certainly not the folks who really consider themselves and their buddies “essential,” as evidenced by their outrageous salaries and benefit packages. (You have to pay for talent, after all...)  Rather, those most risking exposure fall into two categories: health care workers (and other emergency personnel including, yes, cops) who are being exploited for their skills, and a veritable army of those doing low-paying jobs for no extra remuneration and often a lack of even base-level safety precautions: the people regarded as expendable by the economic elite, in other words. Ironically, the social Darwinists who believe the poor are poor because they deserve to be are the same folks who regard actual Darwinism (you know, science) as a liberal myth because… Jesus.

Curmie is lucky. The pandemic will cost him several thousand dollars in lost salary, but it’s a financial hit he can sustain. The people who are truly living paycheck to paycheck aren’t able to turn down a risky or under-paying job. Plus, of course, it’s the airlines, the banks, and the cruise ships that are getting government support. A pittance is being handed out to actual workers, and some industries—like the one Curmie has spent his entire adult life training people to enter—are crippled to the point that they may never return, at least in the forms we know.  Workers in the performing arts, like the 19th century Irish, are to be valued only to the extent that their labor can be exploited for the gain of someone else.

The Blacks and the Irish have much in common, in other words. Chattel slavery isn’t among those intersections, but there are plenty of others. And facts—what the Irish did and did not endure, for example—all tend to fit together into larger narrative, which is why we should know about the parts: so we can better understand the whole.