“A Properly Decent Human Being”

 

Curmie can’t speak for everyone, but sometimes, Gentle Reader, he could use a reminder that not all white South Africans are amoral Nazi plutocrats.  The recent passing of the great playwright Athol Fugard was one such reminder, but in a sad way.  It was a special pleasure, therefore, to read that a statue of the late musician and activist Johnny Clegg has now been unveiled in Cape Town as part of a unique and growing exhibition called The Long March to Freedom.

Curmie might as well quote rather than paraphrase Ashleigh Nefdt here:

The Long March to Freedom is a unique and monumental procession of life-size bronze statues, each of which depicts freedom fighters who never gave up the idea of a liberated South Africa. It tells a story of South Africa that spans 350 years; boasting the company of everyone from Khoi leaders who ruled hundreds of years ago, proud Zulu and Xhosa kings and those who led South Africa to light during our fiercest fight for freedom including Nelson and Winnie Mandela, Beyers Naude, Albert Luthuli, OR Tambo and now, Johnny Clegg.

Born in England, Clegg grew up in Johannesburg, where he became fascinated by Zulu culture.  He learned the language and both the musical and dance styles.  His first (by no means his last) arrest for violating apartheid laws came at the age of fifteen.  A year later he met and started to perform with Sipho Mchunu.  Needless to say, a white teenager and a young black man performing together raised more than a few eyebrows in South Africa in 1969.  The fact that they sang in both English and Zulu probably ruffled a few feathers, too.  That didn’t change when the duo expanded into the band Juluka, adding four more musicians: two white, two black.

Juluka faced harassment and censorship both before and after releasing their first album in 1979.  National broadcasters wouldn’t play their music, but they still did shows in churches, private residences, and the like.  And the band toured internationally as well as releasing two platinum and five gold albums.  Juluka disbanded in 1985 when Mchunu retired from music (they’d re-unite briefly in the late ‘90s).

Clegg then founded a new band, Savuka, with Juluka band-mate Dudu Zulu.  The band released four albums and an EP before Dudu Zulu was shot and killed in 1993.  The group’s first album, “Third World Child,” broke international sales records in three European countries, and “Heat, Dust, and Dreams” earned a Grammy nomination.

He went on to a solo career, still with both black and white fellow musicians, although that became less of a big deal after the fall of apartheid in 1993 and the election of Nelson Mandela the following year.  Most of the songs Clegg is known for came from the Juluka or Savuka days, and they figured prominently in his live shows. 

Curmie can’t remember when, exactly, he first encountered Clegg’s music, but it was at least thirty years ago.  He doesn’t own all of Clegg’s CDs, but he does have four of them: one with Juluka and three with Savuka.  Songs like “Scatterlings of Africa,” “Great Heart,” “African Sky Blue,” and “Cruel, Crazy, Beautiful World” have been heard a lot at Chez Curmie and on his Spotify feed.  But it’s “Asimbonanga” that holds special place in Curmie’s heart.

It was that song, about the incarceration of Nelson Mandela (“Asimbonanga” means “we have not seen him”), that Curmie chose as curtain call music for his production of Fugard’s “Master Harold”… and the boys, which Curmie firmly believes is the best show he’s ever directed.  The play has nothing to do with Mandela, but a lot to do with the apartheid system Mandela opposed.  Curmie stands by his choice, and he still can’t listen to that song without getting a little teary-eyed, and if it’s this clip from a 1999 concert, it’s all over.

Curmie thinks Johnny Clegg was an outstanding musician and song-writer.  But that doesn’t get you a statue in the Long Match to Freedom exhibition.  Rather, it was his activism, his perseverance, and his humanity which make him a worthy recipient of that honor.  It’s why he was mentioned alongside the likes of Athol Fugard, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Václav Havel in what became Curmie’s signature lecture, the “Uncle Norb Speech.”  It’s why Curmie’s alma mater awarded him an honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters in 2012.

The statue shows Clegg not with a guitar in his hands, but in a traditional Zulu dance. His family says he would often perform such dances at home “to ground himself during often heart-breaking and difficult times.”  His son describes “who he was at his core: Zulu culture, music, and dance.”

At the unveiling ceremony, Dali Tambo, the founder of Artists Against Apartheid, highlighted “the fact that he always represented racial harmony, a coming together, a uniting of the people of South Africa.  He was anti-apartheid in that way; he was anti-racist in that way.”  Clegg’s longtime friend Max De Preez said that “Johnny would have reminded us today that the safest, richest, future would be to embrace the people and cultures and music and humanity of our continent.”

De Preez sums up Johnny Clegg: “he was a properly decent human being, and that is the biggest compliment that can be paid to anyone.”  Curmie can’t improve on that description.

 

Signaling Incompetence

Trying to keep up with the latest developments in the recent national security fuck-up for the ages is a bit like trying to drink from a fire hose.  There are new revelations—or suspected revelations, at the very least—appearing at an alarming rate.

What we know at this point is troubling enough.  A host of the people who are charged with defending the country proved themselves to be not merely “not ready for the big leagues” (hey, baseball season is upon us; gotta show some respect), but probably not worthy of sitting on the bench for the high school JV team. 

We know that this collection of absurdly unqualified hacks defied Pentagon regulations and used a commercial product, Signal, to plan an imminent attack on Houthi forces in Yemen.  We know that somehow Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, got added to the group chat by Mike Waltz, the national security advisor (!). 

We know that there was concern, probably more than mere concern, that Russia and perhaps China could hack Signal virtually at will.  So why use it?  The most likely reason is that messages there disappear without a trace after 30 days.  Shades of the self-destructing tapes on the old “Mission: Impossible” series.  Alas, there was no Jim Phelps or Rollin Hand or Cinnamon Carter in this group: just a gaggle of boneheads getting off on causing the deaths of a few dozen people, a couple of whom might even be considered enemies.  Note: the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was not included.  Neither was POTUS.  Is Curmie the only one who thinks that’s odd?

There are other possibilities, of course, but all are ultimately worse than concluding that everyone included in that chat is an idiot.  What if this was a variation on a game of chicken: who can flout the laws and national security the most?  What if they wanted the allegedly top secret discussion to be hacked?  Curmie isn’t saying, as has been alleged, that President Trump and Director of National Security Tulsi Gabbard are Russian assets, but as someone (Curmie regrets that he forgets who) wondered, what would they do differently if they were?

Mistakes do happen, so perhaps Mike Waltz is just sloppy, as opposed to utterly incompetent.  Curmie remembers asking a student why he hadn’t sent a required email.  The student responded that he had done so, and included a copy of his message… which had been sent to someone in a totally different part of campus.  Ah, but his name was pretty close to Curmie’s, and the student looked online instead of on the course syllabus for my e-address.  Thing is, though, matters of national security are of somewhat greater importance than asking for an extension on a due date or whatever it was.  And blunders of this magnitude are—or should be—firing offenses, irrespective of circumstances.

There’s one other possibility, and this would also account for why Goldberg was in on the chat: it was a clumsy attempt at a trap.  Bait him into releasing the information before the raid, and now he’s guilty of a serious federal crime.  Of course, Goldberg is neither an idiot nor a felon—a description that doesn’t apply to many of those we assume were the intended participants in that chat—so he waited until the strike was over before releasing his initial story. 

It’s also interesting to note that the various denials that the chat contained classified information work in some ways to Goldberg’s favor.  On the one hand, if that wasn’t classified information, it sure as hell should have been, so Hegseth et al. look like the inept buffoons they are.  But if that information really had been classified, then the government could claim that Goldberg released classified documents: a serious federal offense.  But all the players insist that there was nothing classified there, so they’re the first witnesses for the defense should a prosecution be threatened.

We also know that the chat included all sorts of details about the planned raid: times, places, ordinance, even the name of a covert CIA operative.  We therefore know that at least three of the members of that chat—Secretary of Defense Hegseth, CIA Director John Radcliffe, and Gabbard—have already lied to Congress about what was contained in those communications. 

Oh, and FBI Director Kash Patel wasn’t in on the group chat, but he couldn’t let other people have all the fun, so he lied to Congress, too.  These are facts, not opinions or even interpretations.  Those folks knowingly and intentionally lied, going all in on what turned out to be a losing hand: betting that Goldberg wouldn’t release a transcript. 

Interestingly, if the Trumpsters just acknowledged their mistake, apologized profusely, swore off Signal (and meant it), promised it wouldn’t happen again, etc., Goldberg might just have taken the journalistic win and called it good.  But, as egotistical bullies generally do, they accused him of lying.  So he felt compelled to prove that he wasn’t.  And… boom.

Of course, none of the insiders were quite as ostentatiously mendacious as White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt (a.k.a. Bullshit Barbie), but it’s her job to lie, and Curmie supposes that it’s ultimately a good thing that she’s so horrible at it that no one with an IQ above room temperature could possibly believe anything she says. 

The best she could come up with was proclaiming that The Atlantic had “admitted” that there weren’t “war plans” in the conversation.  That’s because the headline accompanying the release of some of the transcript referred to “attack plans.”  Seriously, that’s the argument.  When you’re desperate enough, you say some pretty strange things, especially if you’re a not terribly bright spokesperson for a narcissistic administration run by someone given to both delusions and prevarication.

Technically, it’s true that there weren’t “war plans,” as there’s no declaration of war.  There wasn’t for what we all refer to as the Vietnam War, either, but anyone who transmitted plans for a raid on Hanoi over an insecure line would have been court-martialed or worse.  But Curmie digresses.

What matters here is not the fuck-up itself, or, rather, not just the fuck-up itself, but the aftermath.  There is no doubt that literally everyone who participated in that chat prior to the attack (except Goldberg, of course) should be out of a job immediately: Vance impeached, the others fired.  Oh, and for the MAGA folks who are screaming about Hilary Clinton’s private server: yes, she should have been fired, too.  Willfully disobeying rules when lives are at stake: inexcusable.  End of discussion. 

Oh, and also on the probably-should-be-fired list is Katie Arrington, the Deputy Chief Information Officer for Cybersecurity and Chief Information Security Officer at the Department of Defense.  (Good Lord, what a title!)  She is apparently responsible for not merely allowing Signal to be installed on government devices, but insisting on it.  To be fair, it appears that she may have been referring only to unclassified communications: hence the “probably” in the first sentence of this paragraph.  

There have been murmurs, but little more than that, by a handful of Republican pols that perhaps this level of incompetence (or worse) should not go unpunished.  Curmie awaits the chorus of these faux patriots demanding accountability.  He fears there will be a rather long wait.

(You will note, Gentle Reader, that Curmie has not followed his usual practice of providing links in the foregoing commentary.  Instead, he suggests a few suggestions for further reading (he warns you, it’s a rabbit hole): a précis of relevant DoD regulations, Jennifer Griffin of Fox News (!) outlining some of the semantics concerning terms like “war plans” and “classified,” Jeffrey Goldberg saying in a interview that the CIA Director (!) put the name of a covert agent into an insecure chat, a Google Threat Intelligence Group post from February describing Signal as a “high-value target for adversaries seeking to intercept sensitive information,” the NSA policy on the use of Signal, Fred Wellman on Arrington’s role in all this, a report in Der Spiegel that contact data including the mobile phone numbers and even passwords of Waltz, Gabbard, and Hegseth are freely available on the internet, 10-year veteran Andrew Mercado’s take on accountability, and one of the incomparable Heather Cox Richardson’s essays on this whole business.  There’s more, of course, but perhaps you might have a life to lead…)

So... Is Everyone in Fact Welcome in West Ada, Idaho Schools?

Riddle me this, Gentle Reader.  Here are images of two posters.  Here’s #1:

                                

Curmie asks that you pay particular attention to the right side of the poster under the heading “Kind.”  (Curmie apologizes for the reflections showing up in the image, and for the fact that #2 is crooked, but you can clearly see what he wants you to see.)

And here’s #2:

                  

OK.  So.  Poster #1 advocates “welcom[ing] others and embrac[ing] diversity.  Poster #2 says “everyone is welcome here.”  Pretty much the same thing, right?  Apparently not, at least according to the educational power structure in West Ada, Idaho.  (Ada County includes Boise, so its total population is about a half a million people; we are not, as Curmie first assumed, talking about some tiny town somewhere.)

Anyway, revenons à nos moutons.  The difference between the two posters, obviously (insert eye roll here) is that #1 is required in every classroom in the district, and that #2 is forbidden.  Why?  Because the authorities said so, of course.  If you’re looking for a rational reason, you’d better ask someone else, ‘cause Curmie’s got nothin’.

The story goes like this.  Sarah Inama is in her fourth year of teaching World Civilizations at Lewis and Clark Middle School in West Ada.  At least according to reporting by Brian Holmes on a local TV station, Poster #2 has been up in her classroom all along.  But this January the censorial bigots thought control school administration decided they had a problem with it, and insisted she remove it.

It’s a violation of policy, you see.  “In today’s political climate,” it “expresses a personal opinion.”  OK, now, Curmie is a grumpy old fart, and isn’t a fan of cutesy posters, even in a 6^th grade classroom.  But if, in fact, anyone suggests that everyone should not be welcome in a public school classroom, that person should be kept as far as possible away from either students or teachers. 

Saying that everyone is welcome is not, according to the bozos, “content neutral,” but is a “personal opinion.”  You will forgive Curmie, Gentle Reader, if he wonders how welcoming others and embracing diversity is not, therefore, similarly personal.  By the way, no one had complained about those two posters.  The school administration was being pro-actively assholic.  Of course, they presented their inane decision as a means of “protecting” Inama.  If this sounds a little too much like a protection racket to you, you’re not alone.

Ah, but “everyone is welcome here” is not something everyone believes, so that justifies this idiocy.  Curmie notes that not everyone believes the earth is three-dimensional, so having a globe in a world civ classroom would also be problematic.  (Curmie apologizes to the sane people of the West Ada district if he’s given the kakistocracy any ideas.)

Anyway, Inama removed two posters, including #2 above.  The other one, which proclaimed that “in this room, everyone is welcome, important, accepted, respected, encouraged, valued, [and] equal” did it least have each of those words printed on a succession of colors suggestive of the rainbow.  And we know that there’s a subset of conservatives who break out in a rash if someone mentions that famous song Judy Garland sings in “The Wizard of Oz.”  Imana clearly didn’t see a problem with it, but did take it down. 

But after a few days, she emailed her principal and said that the kind of inclusivity suggested by the poster represented “the basis of public education.”  And she put poster #2 back up.  Good for her!  Naturally, the district muckety-mucks then got involved.  Chief Buffoon Academic Officer Marcus Myers quotes a policy proscribing “the advancement of individual beliefs.”  This is the same guy who brags about the relevance of poster #1, by the way.  More on that to come…

Somehow, in what passes for a brain Chez Myers, the Idaho law that requires that teachers “respect the dignity of others, acknowledge the rights of others to express differing opinions,” etc., is somehow violated by a poster that expresses those very thoughts.  To be fair, perhaps Myers isn’t as stupid and hypocritical as he appears: he’s doing the bidding of the board.  So maybe he’s just a coward.

The poster does, of course, highlight different skin colors.  Asked if the “differing view” would therefore be racist, Inama says, 

I can’t even wrap my head around what other ‘differing view’ would be… except for something that’s exclusionary….  This is the one small thing I that I feel like I can do, to speak out against this and stand up for [students], to protect them from being affected by racist sentiments affecting their classroom.

When the TV station reached out to the school district (repeatedly), they got the response that Marcus Myers was “not interested in being interviewed.”  (See above re: cowardice.)  Interestingly, that response also included examples of what is allowed, including, for example, “college or professional sports teams.”  So… if you went to the University of Idaho, it’s fine to festoon your classroom with Vandals gear, and the kid whose parents went to Boise State has to deal with it, but tell that kid she’s welcome… OMG, it’ll cause an attack of the vapors.

Naturally, Myers did agree to an interview with The Ranch Podcast, hosted by Matt Todd.  Quoting from the site here: “The Ranch Podcast is supported by Truth In Media Foundation, a non-profit media organization committed to unbiased, Idaho focused media.”  As frequent readers of this blog already know, one of Curmie’s mantras is “if you have to tell me, it ain’t so.”  “Truth in Media” means opinions are masquerading as facts; “unbiased” means “biased as all hell.” 

The Mediabiasfactcheck site rates Truth in Media as a “questionable source” with “low credibility,” “extreme right” bias, “low” factual reporting, and given to “propaganda, conspiracy, fake news, [and] pseudoscience.”  By the way, Curmie checked on that site’s description of a couple of left-biased sites, which are indeed identified as such. 

In other words, Myers agreed to be interviewed by someone he could feel pretty confident would not ask questions he couldn’t answer without revealing himself to be either an idiot or a bigot (not that bigots aren’t also idiots, but you know what Curmie means, Gentle Reader).  Todd pretty much provides him with escape routes, pretending, for example, that it is somehow obvious to everyone, not just racists, that having different skin colors appear on that poster or to anyone but homophobes that multiple colors (not even anything suggestive of a rainbow) somehow make it less inclusive.  Curmie couldn’t agree more with the first comment on that YouTube page: “The goal of this situation seems to be ‘don't offend the racists in Idaho.’”  Thank you, @kristenfrench4732, for that succinct encapsulation.

Questions any truly unbiased interviewer would ask: How, exactly, is poster #2 different in intent from poster #1?  Why would those same words be acceptable if there were no graphic design and they were simply white print on a black background?  How do you respond to the (by now) tens of thousands if not millions of people who think @kristenfrench4732 nailed it?  If there must be a “curricular tie-in” to literally everything, how is, for example, a poster celebrating the Seattle Seahawks allowed?  (Etc.)

The good news here is that this story got a fair amount of play, and there has been a tangible response.  To be fair to Todd, his interview with Alicia Purdy was considerably better than the one with Myers, largely because she actually had something to say.  For example: “Marcus Myers came and said… this actually coincides with our curriculum regarding positive behavior support.  And so, therefore it is tied to the curriculum.  So it does not violate policy under those constraints…. How is welcoming every student dividing our students?” 

When Todd says the problem wasn’t the verbal message but the graphic, she replies, “having that visual of the different skin tones, including white skin tones, that’s important… those students can see that.  Representation matters…. They [students] see the difference in skin tones, so why are we not addressing that?”  Curmie is not generally in the habit of praising someone for making pretty obvious points, but someone had to say all this, so Purdy gets the credit.

Now, apparently, the district is pivoting to claim that the poster’s use of those different-colored hands “aligns with themes commonly associated with DEI initiatives.”  Bullshit.  They’re desperately but unsuccessfully trying to save face.

In fact, the only way to interpret the district’s actions is to recognize that those folks will cheerfully pay lip service to cheery sayings about embracing diversity, as long as they aren’t reminded that there actually is a diverse population out there.  Those who would banish poster #2 are all about welcoming and equality until they actually have to practice it.  Trouble is, claiming to fix a problem while actually making it worse is both inefficient and evil.  If the acronym DOGE just flitted across your mind, Gentle Reader, that’s entirely on you.  😉

Inama has been told she can leave the poster up until the end of the academic year, and then the powers-that-be will ever-so-graciously help her find a suitable replacement.  Perhaps this brouhaha will indeed last that long, but Curmie suspects (or at least hopes) that the district, facing national and even international humiliation, will quietly capitulate, perhaps with the assurance the Inama won’t go public with an announcement of the reversal.

There’s already been a walkout by Renaissance High School students, including some of Inama’s former students, to protest the district’s actions.  A local t-shirt shop is struggling to keep up with orders for shirts depicting the allegedly controversial image; they’re getting orders from all over the country, and had sold over 8,000 shirts as of last Tuesday.  Tomorrow (i.e., Monday the 24^th) there will be a lot of those shirts worn in the hallways and classrooms of West Ada schools.

The most scathing take-down Curmie has seen, though, appears as an editorial by Marty Trillhaase in the Lewiston Tribune.  He argues that the reason to take down the poster is that “[it’s] blatantly false.  Not everyone is welcome in Idaho.” 

He enumerates all the kinds of people who aren’t welcome in the state: essentially anyone who isn’t a cisgendered straight white male Protestant.  Physicians and union members are similarly unwelcome.  His chilling conclusion is that “When school resumes next fall, Inama and other Idaho teachers might have to replace that sign with what passes for Idaho’s attitude toward anyone who is different — a bus ticket. “

In other words, the real problem with Inama’s poster for the right-wingers in Idaho is that in her classroom, those words ring true.  And, since their entire weltanschauung is based on hatred, they despise her for that.  Curmie, on the other hand, thinks she’s a bad-ass heroine.