Tommy Tuberville Is Not the Problem

Tommy Tuberville and the only thing
he’s qualified to talk about.

Well, okay, Tommy Tuberville is unquestionably a problem, he’s just not the problem. Tuberville is utterly unqualified to serve in the US Senate. His credentials consist of a BS in Physical Education and a successful career as a football coach for some of the shadiest college programs in the country. 

He’s been credibly charged with fraud (he settled out of court), said some pretty racist things, and declared the three branches of the US government to be the “House, the Senate, and Executive.” In that same interview, he said that his father had fought to World War II “to free Europe of Socialism.” Sigh. 

He set up a foundation ostensibly to support veterans, but spent less than 18% of the money on actual charitable causes. Business Insider, hardly a Leninist publication, reported that he had violated the STOCK Act 132 times in a single year. 

In short, he’s every curmudgeon’s definition by example of a partisan hack legislator: proudly ignorant, gloriously unqualified, probably corrupt, and dumber than the proverbial box of rocks. Assigning these traits to him is independent of whether Curmie agrees with him on political issues, which happens extremely rarely (but it does happen). Tuberville came to the Senate because he had the good fortune to run in a deep red state that happened to have a Democratic senator because even Alabamans couldn’t bring themselves to elect a dirtbag like Roy Moore. 

Tuberville also benefited from the endorsement of Donald Trump in the primary run against Jeff Sessions, who had left the Senate to become Trump’s Attorney General, only to run afoul of his puerile and petulant boss for taking the ethical course of recusing himself from an investigation into allegations of Trump’s collusion with Russia. This is the last time you’re likely to see Curmie link ethics and Jeff Sessions in the same sentence, so enjoy it while you can, Gentle Reader. 

Tommy Tuberville is indeed part of the problem. He lowers the intelligence and integrity levels of virtually every room he enters (even the US Senate chamber!), and he’s got a lot more self-importance than competence. Now, of course, he’s single-handedly blocking the process of confirming some 184 military promotions, including the appointment of Shoshana Chatfield as vice admiral and the nation’s military representative to the NATO military committee because he doesn’t like the Pentagon’s new policy allowing leave and reimbursement of some expenses for servicewomen who need to travel to have access to abortions. 

Tuberville says the standoff is “not about abortion. It’s not about the Dobbs decision. This is about a tyrannical executive branch walking all over the United States Senate — and doing our jobs.” When a member of the general public whose strong feelings about X and Y have been widely trumpeted says that their objection to a proposal isn’t based on X or Y, but rather about Z, the chances are about 60% that they’re lying. When a politician does it, that number goes up to about 98%. Robert Byrd did exist, though, so there’s always that 2%. Curmie sincerely doubts that Tuberville occupies that space. 

But, as noted above, whereas Tuberville is certainly a problem, he isn’t the problem. For one thing, there is the seed, at least, to a legitimate objection in there. Curmie doesn’t necessarily disagree with the DoD’s policy, but one could make a case that unwanted pregnancies are the responsibility of the prospective mother, not of the US government and its tax-payers. Exceptions would have to be made for cases of rape, incest, or significant (in terms of severity and/or likelihood) risk to the mother, but Tuberville appears willing to grant those exemptions, at least in terms of recognizing the legal status quo. Whether allowing exceptions in certain circumstances rather than providing carte blanche availability is the best idea is debatable, but it’s not an outrageous position. 

Tuberville may also be right that the executive branch is over-reaching into the prerogatives of the legislature. Curmie is neither a lawyer nor a political scientist; he’s going to avoid taking sides on this one. Calling the Biden administration “tyrannical,” even if they are straying off their own turf, is a little hyperbolic, but that’s just partisan rhetoric, the sort of pol-speak that virtually everyone on both sides of the aisle will engage in when given half an opportunity to do so. 

As for whether delaying these promotions will affect the armed forces’ readiness, well, Curmie thinks that anyone paying attention would say, “probably a little, but not much.” Tuberville has said all along that he’d block all high-level nominees if the Pentagon didn’t back off from its position on abortions. Is he behaving like a bratty toddler? Yes. Is his position particularly ironic given his much-ballyhooed support for the military? Yes. But should the DoD and the Biden administration have seen this coming and made backup plans accordingly? Also yes. Interim appointments are a thing, after all. 

Moreover, Tuberville didn’t elect himself. His seat is very much the product of a puerile President and a doltish electorate. Georgia barely managed to avoid electing a completely unqualified ex-jock; Alabama did not. It has long been the case that name-recognition will too often prevail over all other factors—that’s how we got Trump vs. Clinton, after all—but we’re getting dangerously close to passing from likelihood into virtual certitude in this area. And that, Gentle Reader, is not a good thing. 

More to the point, though, Tuberville is indeed throwing a tantrum over an issue that is, or at least ought to be, irrelevant to the work at hand. Still, the problem isn’t that an ignorant and narcissistic buffoon like Tommy Tuberville is a US Senator: the people of Alabama deserve what they get, even if the rest of us are innocent of that particular transgression. (We Texans have Ted Cruz; we don’t have a lot of room to talk smack.) 

No, the problem is that the US Senate is constructed in such a way that a single yahoo from the Senate minority can grind everything to a halt because of a decision that was made by someone other than any of the 184 servicemen and -women whose lives, incomes, and careers are most directly affected. What the hell kind of system is this? Tuberville is a moron and probably a grifter, and he won election in a state that ranks 45th in percentage of college graduates and 47th in overall education. 

It’s bad enough when some committee chair or party bigwig decides that partisanship ought to trump (see what Curmie did there?) the national interest. Curmie is looking at you, Mitch McConnell. But Tuberville is a first-term senator from a middling-sized state that would elect a potato if it had an R after its name. His party is in the minority in the Senate. He is the quintessence of back-bencherness.  And yet the rest of us get stuck with this pompous jackass’s ability to thwart the stated needs of the military over a fit of pique irrelevant to the qualifications of the nominees. Jolly. 

But that’s the system. Curmie gets really pissed off at moments like this, when everyone just sort of shrugs and says “that’s the way it is.” No. The system is broken. Fucking fix it. 

Tommy Tuberville is an embarrassment to the Senate, to Alabama, and to the country. But he’s not the problem; he’s just the symptom.

Not a Good Week for Netflix

Before long, no one will know what this is.

When last we checked in on Netflix, about eleven months ago, the company had just experienced its first ever decline in subscriptions. 

Believing there to be at least some merit in the allegations from some on the right that they’d gone too Woke, corporation executives reaffirmed their intention to work with the likes of Dave Chapelle (whose special was the subject of no little discontent among employees) and actually chastised their workers who didn’t agree with the policy of “let[ting] viewers decide what’s appropriate for them, versus having Netflix censor specific artists or voices.” 

This week, Netflix is in the news again, and Curmie is unimpressed. On Tuesday afternoon, Curmie received an email from the company saying they would be suspending their DVD service about six months hence. They of course have the right to do whatever they want, but this is just dumb. Yes, “the DVD business continues to shrink,” but whereas Netflix faces competition in the streaming business from Amazon, Hulu, Disney+, HBO Max, and a host of others, they pretty much monopolize the DVD-by-mail business. 

They have a stock of millions of copies of tens of thousands of titles, and they’re going to just stop? One thing Netflix appeared to understand in those halcyon days of… well, a week ago was that there’s a lot of good (at least in someone’s mind) material that is available on disc but not to stream. As an example, on the date he received the email, Curmie had 258 separate titles (i.e., not counting, for example, later seasons for a television series) in his queue. Of these, precisely four are available to stream on Netflix. Curmie hasn’t checked the entire list yet, but it appears that a little over 20% of the titles are not available to stream anywhere. 

There’s a reason these items were in Curmie’s queue: they’re things he and/or Beloved Spouse want to see, but we don’t need it see them immediately. Some of these titles are available to watch either free (perhaps with ads) or as part of subscriptions we already have (basic Prime, Britbox, PBS, etc.). Most, however, would incur a fee per viewing (e.g., Prime Video) or would involve a substantial monthly fee (eg., HBO Max or Disney+) for a much narrower range of options than the status quo provides. Not to mention that there are more such companies than one might imagine: Curmie has already counted over a dozen different such vendors for films currently in his queue, each with their own monthly charges. Jolly. 

To be sure, Netflix has been pandering to a younger demographic, one which may not even have DVD players, for some time now. (This is perfectly fine, by the way.)  The algorithm that suggests how much we (as opposed to the average viewer) would like a particular DVD is actually rather good. Almost always the rating we’d give a film is within one or two tenths of a point on their 5-star scale of the algorithm’s projection: even when our taste differs significantly from that of the general population. But some marketing genius decided that for streaming content, a simple thumbs up/down system was just peachy. Curmie can’t figure out what the “percentage match” scale is even trying to tell us, but he does know that he’s seen stuff with a personal 97% match that’s absolute dreck. 

Of course, there are also the young’uns who at least pretend to have been unaware that Netflix still shipped DVDs. “You just might have assumed that era ended years ago” chirps one Michael Walsh, who is clearly one of those damned kids who needs to get off my lawn. (No shootings here, however; that’s the story Curmie hasn’t written about yet.) 

Ah, but there’s a financial angle. You see, Netflix brought in a mere $145.7 million in revenue in 2022 from DVD rentals. Curmie isn’t a corporate accountant, but that seems like a fair amount of money in this neighborhood. 

Don’t get me wrong, it’s probably not worth the expense of getting a gazillion copies of every hot new movie that comes out. So… don’t. Stop buying new stuff, but continue the DVD service for older films and for material that doesn’t stream anywhere for whatever reason. You’ll still make tens of millions of dollars for not much work. This also calms the anger of those folks who watched you put your competition out of business and then proceeded to abandon the customers you purport to value so much. This strikes Curmie as a no-brainer, which is, no doubt, why his degrees are in theatre instead of finance. 

Anyway, we move on to the other Netflix story of the week: the brouhaha over the casting of the Cleopatra episode(s) in a Netflix series called “African Queens.” The title character of this venture is played by Adele James, a mixed-race actress who presents as black. There is, of course, nothing wrong with this. Cleopatra was Macedonian and almost certainly not black, but the “almost” in this statement allows for some wiggle-room if indeed any was needed. Jack Marshall at Ethics Alarms points out that “no one cared” when Leslie Uggams played the role in Her First Roman, a musical that had a brief Broadway run in the autumn of 1968. Curmie doesn’t want to associate with anyone who objects to James playing the role. But… 

The problem is in the marketing. The Daily Mail reports that “The trailer released last week features claims that Cleopatra was black with ‘curly hair.’ One historian asserts in the preview: ‘I remember my grandmother saying to me: I don't care what they tell you in school, Cleopatra was black.’” This isn’t strictly accurate: the trailer does not identify those voices we hear as historians. If that’s what they are, one would imagine that the producers would make damned sure to identify them as such. They don’t. Next! 

Moreover, the opening sequence of the trailer describes this episode as part of a “Netflix Documentary Series.” Whatever this is, it isn’t a documentary. If you want to play around with history, Curmie doesn’t get terribly upset as long as the product—play, novel, film, whatever—stays in the realm of story-telling and doesn’t pretend to be a representation of fact. Both “this isn’t likely, but it’s plausible” and “wouldn’t it have been interesting if…” are reasonable places from which to start a story. 

Ay, there’s the rub (Curmie had to do something for Shakespeare’s birthday, after all…): this program asserts as true that which is extraordinarily unlikely, and does so while pretending to be grounded in fact. Jada Pinkett-Smith, the show’s producer, claims she was interested in this story because “we don't often get to see or hear stories about black queens.” Were he of cynical disposition, Curmie might wonder why she chose to tell, instead, the story of an almost-certainly white queen as if she were black. 

That, by the way, is precisely how the imdb page described this program at least through three days ago: “A fictional account of what the life of Cleopatra was imagined to have been like if she was a black woman.” Now they’ve changed it to read: “Fictionalized Netflix-story about Queen Cleopatra of Egypt of the Ptolemaic lineage from Macedonia, Greece, that ruled for 21 years, between the years 51 BC and 30 BC, ending with her suicide.” Interesting capitulation, don’t you think, Gentle Reader? They still list it as a documentary, however. Don’t try to figure that one out; it’ll only give you a headache. 

By way of contrast, here’s the imdb description of the first film in the series, “African Queens: Njinga”: “Expert interviews and other documentary content with premium scripted docudrama about different queens.” Holy 17th Century, Batman! That sounds like it might actually be a documentary! 

The controversy over the Cleopatra episodes is reminiscent in some ways of a similar casting decision a couple of years ago, when black actress Jodie Turner-Smith was cast in the title role of a BBC mini-series on Anne Boleyn. There are several differences, though. 

First is a fundamental difference in the way the casting of a major role was presented. The BBC would have us believe that race doesn’t matter, so long as it’s “surprising.” (Having the role played by a holographic image of Hervé Villechaize would also have worked, apparently.) The forthcoming Netflix series is at least honest that being black (or mixed race and appearing black, in this case) was a prerequisite for an actress being considered for the role of Cleopatra, who almost certainly was, shall we say, significantly lighter-complected. 

Thus, presenting “Queen Cleopatra” with a black or black-presenting title character isn’t inherently problematic. We know who Cleopatra’s father was, but her mother’s identity is unknown, so she could, hypothetically, have looked rather like Adele James. There’s no evidence of that, but neither can it be denied with absolute certainty. But whereas the BBC just wanted to be “surprising” (i.e. they wanted a gimmick), this project not merely presents Cleopatra as black, but hints at some sort of conspiracy among, well, actual historians and archaeologists to deny that “fact.” 

Of course, another difference is that no sentient adult would believe that Anne Boleyn was black, but there’s a tiny chance that Cleopatra was. Interestingly, this makes the current incident more problematic, since a black 16th century English noblewoman is, by definition, fictional, whereas a black Egyptian queen from the 1st century BCE is remotely possible, and cannot as easily be rejected outright. (It can, and should, be rejected as fact.) 

What actually is a fact is that at least some actual current-day Egyptians are incensed by the casting in a way that Brits were not a couple of years ago. There were, no doubt, a fair number of UK residents who were put off by the casting of Turner-Smith as perhaps the most famous English queen not named Elizabeth or Victoria. But there were, to the best of my knowledge, at least, no claims similar to Mahmoud al-Semary’s accusation that Netflix was trying to “promote the Afrocentric thinking … which includes slogans and writings aimed at distorting and erasing the Egyptian identity.” 

It’s difficult to say, of course, to what extent the reported outrage is representative of the feelings of the Egyptian public at large. The Daily Mail can be counted on to tell one side of that story at the expense of the other, and there is a good chance that some of the response is indeed motivated by anti-black racism, which certainly exists in Egypt. Still, whereas the attempt to shut down Netflix in Egypt is perhaps an over-reaction, these people are serious about the accurate portrayal of their history. In this country, of course, utterly specious claims (especially but hardly exclusively about race) from both the left and the right pop up faster than zits on prom night. 

Whatever ultimately happens in Egypt, Netflix and Pinkett-Smith have done considerable harm to their reputations. Well, they would have if they had one to begin with. 

It’s been a bad week for Netflix. But hey, the disc we got from them that we watched Friday night was really good. There’s that… 

(Note: a good share of the discussion of “Queen Cleopatra” was adapted from a comment I wrote on the Ethics Alarms blog linked above)

Race and College Basketball. Yes, Again.

There are a lot of important stories out there right now—Tennessee making their case to surpass Florida as the leading national embarrassment, the bizarre threat by Wisconsin Republicans to impeach a newly elected Supreme Court Justice before she even takes office, the Donald Trump trial (Curmie sincerely hopes the case is stronger than it appears to be, or the damage will be significant), the “revelation” of what anyone paying attention has known for decades: that Clarence Thomas is devoid of any moral or ethical sensibility. And plenty more… 

Still, Curmie’s going to concentrate for a moment on college basketball and race. He’s already discussed that with respect to Big 12 coaches on the men’s side; let’s talk about the women’s NCAA tournament. We can begin with the commentary from South Carolina coach Dawn Staley. Her team had entered the NCAA tournament undefeated on the season, but lost in the national semi-final to Iowa, who won behind the heroics of their star guard Caitlin Clark, who registered 41 points, 6 rebounds, and 8 assists. 

But there was a lot of commentary about South Carolina’s style of play. Iowa coach Lisa Bluder said prior to their game with the Gamecocks that going for a rebound against them was “like going to a bar fight.” Earlier in the season, Connecticut coach Geno Auriemma described what he perceived as the Gamecocks’ overly physical style and declared himself “sick of it.”

What’s this got to do with race? Well, South Carolina coach Dawn Staley is black; so are most of her players. Indeed, the only two white players on the team totaled a mere 222 minutes for the entire season; that’s less than 3% of the team total. Bluder and the majority of her team, including their star, Clark, are white. 

Auriemma is also white; whereas his team is roughly evenly divided between white and black athletes, most of his complaints about South Carolina were about what he regarded as numerous missed calls involving Huskies forward Lou Lopez Sénéchal, who is Latina and appears white. (It should be noted here that Auriemma’s commentary was generalized to how teams, plural, played Lopez Sénéchal and how referees allowed them to do so; South Carolina was just the most recent example.) 

So, is race a factor? Well, as Curmie was fond of saying when he taught Asian theatre, yes and no. Staley’s defense of her coaching strategy seems to suggest a racial element to the criticism of her team’s physicality, saying among other things that “We're not thugs. We're not monkeys.” This is not only a straw man argument, it’s a craven one, implying without actually saying that her and her team’s critics are engaging in racial stereotypes. No one, at least no opposing coach or player, and no sports commentator of any stature has ever used those terms, at least in public. Over-reaction, then? At the very least. 

Ah, but Gentle Reader, we’re not done. Multiple LSU players accused Clark of “disrespect” when the Iowa star waved off South Carolina guard Raven Johnson rather than run out to guard her late in the first quarter of the national semi-final. That’s just game plan: South Carolina lives and dies in their interior game; it’s perfectly reasonable to leave a 24% three-point shooter open in order to sag inside to make it harder to feed the post. There’s one easy way for Johnson to put an end to that tactic, of course: shoot the wide open three-pointer and make it.

Caitlin Clark-- we can’t see her

Significantly, the media lapped up Clark’s brashness. Cory Woodroof of For the Win, for example, raved about Clark’s “absolutely hilarious disrespect.” Media types also thought Clark’s derision of Hailey Van Lith when the Iowa-Louisville Elite 8 game was clearly going to go the Hawkeyes’ way was absolutely peachy. She got special props for the waving the hand in front of the face gesture. Curmie is told that this frankly stupid-looking display is intended to mean “you can’t see me”; the originator of this taunt was the pseudo-wrestler/pseudo-actor Jon Cena. Cena himself joined in the celebration of Clark, exclaiming on Twitter, “Even if they could see you…they couldn’t guard you!”. 

Ah, but here is where the fun really begins. When LSU defeated Iowa in the national title game, LSU star Angel Reese, who is black, pointed to her ring finger, suggesting that she was about to get a championship ring. I mean… Curmie hadn’t seen that gesture in, hell, a few weeks, when Kansas forward Jalen Wilson made a similar gesture to celebrate clinching the Big 12 men’s regular season championship. (Curmie is certain there are other, even more recent, examples; this was one Curmie, as a Jayhawks fan, saw live on TV.) 

Angel Reese, echoing the sentiment

Not only that, she used precisely the same gesture to Clark that the Iowa star had used in the Louisville game. OMG, the unmitigated gall! Oh, the humanity! Think of the children! Keith Olbermann, for example, declared Reese a “fucking idiot”; five minutes later he added “Mindless, classless, and what kind of coach does this team have?” 

To be fair (sort of), Olbermann apologized (sort of) the next day, with the rather feeble excuse that he doesn’t follow hoops (yeah, right, the guy who spent two decades as a sports journalist and hosted SportsCenter for five years doesn’t follow hoops), so he didn’t know the backstory. As if the backstory really mattered. 

Olbermann, of course, took a lot of heat for his initial response, including from the likes of Samuel L. Jackson and Shaquille O’Neal, neither of whom were particularly kind in their criticism. Olbermann wasn’t alone in his hypocrisy, of course, but as the most famous of her detractors, he certainly works as an exemplar of the phenomenon. Curmie cringes at the thought of agreeing with a blowhard like Stephen A. Smith, but he was right in tweeting that “When Caitlin Clark did it...people were celebrating it and talking about nothing but her greatness. BUT the SECOND a sister stepped up and threw it back in her face, everyone is mad. Come on!”  

Reese herself was, to say the least, unapologetic, and certainly didn’t shy away from the racial dimension: “All year, I was critiqued about who I was…. I don’t fit in the box that y’all want me to be in. I’m too hood, I’m too ghetto. You told me that all year. But when other people do it, y’all don't say nothing. So this is for the girls that look like me, that want to speak up on what they believe in. It’s unapologetically you…. It was bigger than me tonight.” Of course, 16 of the previous 17 tournament Most Outstanding Players in the tournament were black, so Reese wasn’t exactly breaking new ground. 

Clark, to her credit, downplayed the entire incident, claiming she didn’t see Reese’s gestures, an unlikely proposition… but maybe Reese actually became invisible with the “you can’t see me” gesture? More importantly, she defended Reese: “I don't think Angel should be criticized at all. No matter which way it goes, she should never be criticized for what she did. I'm just one that competes — and she competed…. LSU deserved it; they played so well, and like I said, I’m a big fan of hers.” 

Irrespective of the factors leading to his perspective (age? class? race? something else altogether?), Curmie has never been a fan of trash talk, but accepts it as a fact of life in today’s sporting world. One supposes there are unspoken boundaries, but exactly where they are is difficult to determine. But those limitations, whatever and wherever they are, need to be the same across the board: age, gender, race, etc. cannot be a factor. And, of course, the racial (and perhaps gender-based) overtones to all this are impossible to ignore. But, as they say on the late-night infomercials, Wait! That’s not all! 

First Lady Jill Biden was at the game, and apparently enjoyed it. After the contest, she uttered remarks that were no doubt well-intentioned but rather stupid: “I know we’ll have the champions come to the White House, we always do. So, we hope LSU will come. But, you know, I’m going to tell Joe I think Iowa should come, too, because they played such a good game.” 

The suggestion that any losing team ought to be able to share the spotlight with the winners not only goes against tradition, it’s just dumb. But the implication that inviting LSU is more a matter of custom rather than appropriateness, coupled with the race of the majority of the players on those teams… well, the optics are less than optimal. 

Iowa’s Clark and Bluder both, by the way, said that the White House visit ought to be reserved for LSU. Biden’s minions were quick to “clarify” Dr. Biden’s remarks, but the inevitable damage was done. 

Reese promptly tweeted “A JOKE,” and rejected the (inevitable) apology. Her teammate Alexis Morris tried to wangle an invite from Michelle Obama instead (yeah, like that’s going to happen), and Reese proclaimed that the team was not going to visit the White House, but that “we’ll go to the Obamas. We’ll see Michelle. We’ll see Barack.” 

To be fair, she said that last part apparently in jest. The part that seemed to be serious, though, was that LSU would not accept the White House invitation. Apparently Reese believes she sets policy for the team, now. Curiously enough, the LSU athletics department had other ideas. Go figure. 

Jill Biden, by the way, was apparently to visit both locker rooms before the championship game, but LSU didn’t want her, for the oh-so-very-mature reason that Joe (not Jill) had not included them on his bracket. Sigh. 

OK. So who looks good in all this? If we forgive the trash talk and the narcissistic showmanship, Clark looks pretty good. The same could be said for Reese. On the other hand, she blew everything out of proportion by acting like a pampered 12-year-old. Olbermann should indeed shut up. Jill Biden should apologize in person rather than have her press secretary issue a walk-back. The tournament featured record-breaking performances, shattered attendance records, and some really good basketball. It kinda sucks that it will be remembered primarily for other things. 

Oh, and just because nobody else has mentioned this: much has been made of the black and gold tiger-striped outfit LSU coach Kim Mulkey wore to the final. No one seems to notice that black and gold are Iowa’s colors—Curmie isn’t sure what the visual equivalent of tone-deaf is, but this was it. Sigh.

It's Déjà Vu All Over Again. Again.

Strains of Pete Seeger’s song “Where Have All the Flowers Gone” waft through Curmie’s consciousness. Well, not the whole song, but the key line of the chorus: “When will they ever learn?” 

You will perhaps recall, Gentle Reader, the brouhaha at Hamline University a few months ago, when adjunct professor Erika López Prater was de facto fired for showing two images of the prophet Muhammad in her art history class, despite the fact that she had warned students both in the course syllabus and on the day of the class in question, giving them the option to opt out of that viewing. 

A few weeks later, Macalester College faced a similar challenge when an art exhibition by Iranian-American artist Taravat Talepasand was deemed offensive by a Muslim student. Macalester handled the situation a lot better than Hamline did, but they did take some pretty extreme short-term censorial actions. Curmie wrote about this story, too, under the headline “It’s Déjà Vu All Over Again.” 

Professor Behmooz

And now… another one, necessitating the title you see above. Like the proverbial bad penny, these incidents keep re-appearing. There are, to be sure, a few notable differences between what’s currently happening at San Francisco State University and what happened at Hamline. 

Dr. Maziar Behrooz teaches history (as opposed to art history). He’s an associate professor (presumably tenured), not an adjunct. He is Iranian-born, so his knowledge of Islamic culture is that of long-term direct contact. He did not provide an opt-out for students who objected to seeing the image. At present, there’s only an investigation as opposed to dismissal or any other sanctions. 

But the basic story is (cue Stevie Nicks: it’s a songfest today!) hauntingly familiar. Behrooz has been teaching the course in the history of the Islamic world from 500-1700, and using an image of Muhammad as part of that course, for years. That means that scores, probably hundreds, of students have taken the class without incident. Indeed, if there were so much as a complaint on an anonymous course evaluation form, it’s the responsibility of the department chair and/or dean to find out what happened and to pursue the matter with Professor Behrooz if that seemed appropriate. 

No such action appears to have ever been taken, but a complaint from a single (currently anonymous) student has led to an investigation by the university’s Office of Equity Programs & Compliance: definition by example of the heckler’s veto… not to mention that the investigation started in March, long after the alleged infraction in the fall semester. 

Behrooz says that he “was not prepared for somebody to be offended, in a secular university, talking about history rather than religion.” Perhaps he should have been, but remember that the incident at Hamline hadn’t yet made headlines. He also speaks from first-hand experience that the type of drawing he shows in class can be bought at markets in Tehran (where he grew up!) near holy shrines, and that many Shiite Muslims have such drawings in their homes. Clearly, the prohibition against images of the prophet are not universal in the Islamic world. Curmie thinks we can pretty much take it for granted that if it’s permissible in Tehran, it’s probably okay for a lot of Muslims. 

Predictably, FIRE (the Federation for Individual Rights and Expression) has gotten into the act, noting that “SFSU administrators haven’t learned anything from Hamline’s mistakes.” Well, duh.  Hit it, Pete: “when will they ever learn”? 

Side note: SFSU earned the dubious distinction of drawing the Ire of FIRE (great band name, yes?) twice in a single day. The other case was the shouting down of former NCAA swimmer Riley Gaines, who was invited to campus by the local chapter of Turning Point USA to speak about gender and sports, presumably concentrating on the Gaines’s opposition to allowing trans women to compete in women’s competitions. 

This is part of a particularly disturbing trend on university campuses, which ought to be a haven for the interplay of opposing ideas, but have often lapsed into sites for ideological shouting matches which actively suppress free expression. To be blunt: Curmie doesn’t give a rat’s ass if you’re “offended” by the ideas of someone whose views you find abhorrent, and he’s pretty damned certain that you weren’t “harmed.” (News flash: they’re not real thrilled with your positions, either.) No one is forcing you to agree. You’re even welcome to protest, provided you don’t disrupt the event per se. That’s not really a very difficult concept to understand. But the heckler’s veto, even if invoked by the majority in a room, has no place in a democratic society. 

Anyway, revenons à nos moutons. In a lengthy letter to SFSU President Lynn Mahoney, Sabrina Conza of FIRE writes that:

As a public institution bound by the First Amendment, SFSU’s actions and decisions—including the pursuit of disciplinary sanctions—must not violate faculty expressive freedoms, including academic freedom to determine whether and how to introduce or approach material that may be challenging, upsetting, or even deeply offensive to some students. As such, SFSU cannot take adverse action against faculty, including initiating an investigation, with the implication of potential punishment, for exercising the pedagogical autonomy to display instructionally relevant material in the classroom, regardless of whether that material offends any students.

Clearly, the 1st amendment/academic freedom argument is paramount here, but it’s important to note something else, too: that the mere fact of launching an investigation is itself a punishment. Professor Behrooz, like Dr. López Prater before him, faces unwarranted scrutiny by the academic community. Damage to his reputation has already been done. 

FIRE, by the way, received an almost immediate response from Robert King, the Director of Communications in the SFSU President’s office. First off, a Director of Communications who, in a business email, addresses a correspondent he presumably doesn’t know by her first name? Not cool, dude. 

But the claim that “once an investigation is initiated, the University has limited ability to dismiss it” is a particularly laughable exercise in circular reasoning. They shouldn’t have opened the investigation to begin with, of course—the case against Professor Bermooz is a nothingburger if ever there was one—but you can’t claim to be incapable of fixing a problem of your own creation because you yourselves created a stupid policy (note: not a law or anything like that, a university policy) that forbids you from dismissing a case that obviously has no merit. 

Perhaps, as King hints in his letter, the university is actually trying to amend their policy to prioritize the 1st amendment and academic freedom. Three responses:

1). Curmie will believe it when he sees it, and it’s already too little, too late.

2). Where the hell is the university counsel? It’s understandable, albeit problematic, that the president might not know that what she’s doing (or at least condoning) is a violation not merely of academic freedom, but of constitutional rights. But Curmie is willing to bet that the head legal beagle at SFSU is pulling down a salary several times what Curmie ever made as a professor; it’s not exactly unreasonable to expect this person to do their damned job and keep the university from making all the wrong kind of headlines.

3). It’s not like the Hamline case failed to get any traction in the national media, especially in places like the Chronicle of Higher Education and Inside Higher Education, which every college administrator in the country ought to be reading assiduously. Hamline didn’t come out unscathed; San Francisco State won’t, either.

OK, one note of advice for Professor Behmooz: Don’t just “consider” the “compromise” of telling students you’re going to show an image that may offend a small handful of them; do it. This, of course, should have been the beginning and the end of the investigation: “hey, Professor, none of us wants to go through this again, so just give a little warning next time… if you do, we’ll absolutely have your back.” 

That said, however, the university looks a lot worse in this than the professor does. When will they ever learn?

Florida Out-Floridas Florida: On the Imminent Demise of Education in the Sunshine State

Four somewhat related stories appeared over the last few days. Curmie has already written about one of them, the saga of a marble statue’s dangly bits causing a Florida principal to be fired. Two other incidents—we’ll get to them in a moment—also in Florida (go figure), of capitulation to heckler vetoes further indicate that legislation like the “Parental Bill of Rights,” which passed the US House a few days ago, is aptly named. 

That’s the good news and the bad news. Curmie is going to assume that the good part is self-evident: that in general terms parents ought to be more aware than they have been of late about school curricula, safety concerns, etc. There are deeply problematic parts, too, of course. Demanding that teachers tell parents if students use different pronouns than they were born with, for example, is creepy at best. 

If those kids can’t be their true selves as they perceive themselves to be at home, then demanding that school officials nark them out has a legitimate chance of placing them in danger. The current law even in Florida (!) allows a school to withhold information if there is a legitimate fear for a child’s safety; the proposed national legislation does not. Having more of a 1950s mindset than Florida is not a good look. 

Curmie stipulates that the urge to use different pronouns than biology would dictate might be a “phase.” So be it; let it play out. But a truly loving home would never demand that children deny their nature. (The trans and gender fluid people Curmie knows have been, by and large, supported by their families, albeit sometimes after a period of confusion and dismay; that doesn’t mean that all such folks are.) 

Ultimately, though, however qualitatively damaging such incidents are, they’re likely to be rare. So it’s really the “parents’ rights” part that has the greatest chance to cause quantitative problems. As Curmie wrote a few days ago, “’Parental rights trump everything else’ is not merely problematic, but chilling. No, they don’t, or at least they damned well shouldn’t. Education is not, cannot be, about serving up whatever pabulum the most insular and doctrinaire parents want. It’s about students, and what is best for them must be the primary objective.” 

If we look at these bills in purely political terms, devoid of ethical or philosophical elements, the situation becomes clearer. Schoolchildren don’t vote and they don’t make campaign contributions. Parents do. And True Believers of every description are going to be more forthcoming with those political contributions than the average citizen will be. Thus, the wackadoodle base has outsized influence. 

The seemingly innocuous provisions of the Parental Bill of Rights actually provide a de facto open invitation for every homophobe, Christian nationalist, racist, or garden variety anti-intellectual within hailing distance to remove any topics of discussion, course materials, library books, or whatever else that might disrupt their myopic and theocratic view of the world. What purports to be an exercise in ideological balance and freedom of expression, therefore, is precisely the opposite. 

To be fair, this isn’t intrinsic to the bill, although we might reasonably suspect that some of its sponsors and supporters were aware of the dark ironies at play. Much of the blame can be placed squarely at the door of local school officials—boards of education, superintendents, principals—who tend to be (how to say this?) invertebratedly inclined. It’s easier to go along with utterly stupid interventions from even the most irresponsible sources than to say “no, this book stays, not only in the library, but in the curriculum.” Standing up to bullies can get you in trouble in places where being the loudest is all that matters. 

One of the cardinal principles of American government has always been, or at least was until recently, the twin concepts of majority rule and respect for the minority. The latter was often more aspirational than reality-based, but at least the concept was out there. But if you happen to be in a disenfranchised minority (if you’re gay or Muslim or—heaven forfend!—trans, for example), that respect is not always perceivable in certain communities even in tiny manifestations. 

Of course, BIPOC people are often at the center of these contretemps. Curmie isn’t going to deny that in some instances the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction (DEI regulations are often contrary to at least two of their three initials, for example), but the two specific cases Curmie mentioned in his introductory paragraph certainly do little to suggest that racism isn’t a major force in the “parental rights” movement. 

The first story is sort of a two-parter. The exact details are a little unclear, in part because there’s contradictory evidence, in part because not all journalists write well. We know, sort of, that some 73 books were returned to the distributor by the Duval County, Florida, school district in December. 

Quoting the online version of Jacksonville Today: “Among the rejected titles are a book about Martin Luther King Jr. intended for fourth graders; a biography of Rosa Parks for second grade classrooms; a first grade Berenstain Bears book about God; and multiple titles including LGBTQ+ characters and families.” Gee, I wonder what the agenda of those censors was. 

Homophobia and variations on the theme are still considered acceptable in some places, but rejecting books about perhaps the two most famous figures in the Civil Rights movement suggests a racial animus that ought to infuriate even the most conservative members of the citizenry. (Curmie grants that they could just be terribly written books, but if that’s your argument, you damned well better make it, and provide some evidence for the allegation.) 

Duval officials claim they didn’t really reject the Rosa Parks book because, you see, they never actually bought it to begin with. It was apparently shipped as a substitution for some other book in the order; anyone who placed an online order for grocery pickup during the pandemic understands this phenomenon. 

What appears pretty clear is that Duval did reject the book after it was delivered (intentionally purchased or not), and Curmie is tempted to wonder how it looks better for Duval that they’re now claiming they had the opportunity to order the book but declined, sight unseen. 

Books about black baseball players Hank Aaron and Roberto Clemente, the two greatest rightfielders of Curmie’s youth, were finally approved, but only after a long delay and a national outcry. Nope. Nothing to see here. Keep the line moving. Move along. 

But let’s return to Rosa Parks for a moment. The Grio reports that the publisher Studies Weekly actually tried pandering to Florida’s absurd governmental interference by producing multiple versions of their Rosa Parks story. One version omits race altogether, saying only that “She was told to move to a different seat.” Apparently this was too much even for Florida, but the mere fact that the publisher thought it was worth a try tells us more than a little. 

Let’s face it, Gentle Reader, we all know about Rosa Parks not because she was somehow accidentally in the wrong seat, but because people of her race weren’t allowed to sit where she was sitting. The publisher bears a good share of the blame here, but their cowardice wouldn’t have been necessary, even to them, if the state weren’t run by people whose paranoia is exceeded only by their authoritarianism. Hell, Curmie would settle for grown-ups. 

The last (please, let it be the last!) story in our trio looks a whole lot like the second, except in happened in a different city and about a different medium. This one comes, again, as the result of a single complaint, from a parent in St. Petersburg about the 1998 Disney film (well, technically an episode of “The Wonderful World of Disney”) ”Ruby Bridges,” which had been a staple in Pinellas County classrooms for years. 

Young Ruby, you may recall, Gentle Reader, was the 6-year-old girl who had the grim but significant responsibility of being the black child who integrated New Orleans schools in 1960 (six years after Brown v. Topeka, in other words). The film presents an accurate portrayal of historical events, centering, of course, on the steadfast courage Bridges showed, even as a child, in the face of racial slurs and threats of violence directed against her. 

Ah, but you see, an accurate depiction of those events might lead to the impression that white people hate black people. Or that’s the argument of a paranoid and/or racist idiot named Emily Conklin, who wouldn’t allow her child to watch the film and subsequently lodged a formal complaint. Needless to say, rather than telling Conklin to shut up and sit down, school officials capitulated, at least to the point of banning a program that was shown on network television over 20 years ago from all classrooms at North Shore Elementary until a committee can decide what to do about the situation. 

Now, of course, the school is saying they didn’t actually ban the film (despite considerable evidence that they did): it was a “miscommunication,” you see. If you take that excuse at face value, Gentle Reader, please accept my apologies, but you’re on the wrong page: this blog is for grown-ups. It’s far more likely that they got busted for being craven imbeciles, and now they’re backfilling as fast as they can. 

It’s worth noting at this juncture that Curmie has more than a little sympathy for parents who don’t want their child exposed to truly controversial materials. Curmie wouldn’t put images of Michelangelo’s David, a book about Rosa Parks, or a film about Ruby Bridges on that list, but whatever… None of this, however, grants a lone parent the right to prevent other people’s kids from having access to those media. 

Considerable damage has already been done, of course: damage to the schools’ reputations, to the possibility that good sense might someday prevail in Florida, to the education system in Florida and beyond. That this morass should be the direct result of political initiatives of the GOP—you know, the unintrusive small government, reduced bureaucracy, individual freedoms folks—is darkly ironic but hardly surprising. Duh: they’re hypocrites. 

Curmie isn’t saying the Democrats aren’t, of course. In the words of the image currently used on the cover photo on the Curmudgeon Central Facebook page, “A plague o’ both your houses.” (Note: you’ll have to click on the image to see the quote; Curmie hopes many of you will recognize John McEnery as Mercutio in the Roman Polanski film version of Romeo and Juliet, so you’d know what Curmie was up to without the quote.) 

There are, of course, a few professions that gather as much commentary from people who don’t know what the hell they’re talking about as teaching does—professional athletics comes to mind, acting is up there—but there are literally none which allow a tiny minority of often stupid and almost always ignorant people to have such an outsized influence on the way a profession operates. The subtitle of a recent article in Salon may be a little harsh, but it’s not altogether inaccurate: “Republicans want the dumbest parent at the school to control the curriculum.” 

But no one in the New York Jets hierarchy, for example—not the coach, not the general manager, not the owner—gives a damn that Joe from Poughkeepsie (or Curmie from Texas) thinks that spending potloads of money and talent to get a 39-year-old prima donna as their quarterback is a bad idea. But virtually every board of education or principal will do backflips at the behest of some moron who thinks Michelangelo was a pornographer. 

Curmie has often argued that the only people who know (or care) less about education than boards of trustees and boards of education are state legislators. It appears that US congresscritters felt overlooked in this analysis and wanted to assert their claim. But (with the exception noted above, which is inexcusable), at least some of them might have thought they were doing the right thing instead of paying obeisance to the prescribed talking points. Doubtful, but possible. 

But there’s a reason that all three of the incidents Curmie mentions here are from the same state. Ron DeSantis has been masterful at maintaining plausible deniability (Curmie has a half-written piece about this phenomenon that he may someday finish), but if he’s going to run for President using his intrusions into a space where he doesn’t belong, he needs to be held accountable. Indeed, he’s the scarier of the two front-runners for the GOP nomination. Donald Trump is just as wrong on the issues, just as authoritarian, and even more narcissistic, but at least he’s stupid.