Proving the Relevance of "The Crucible"... by Cancelling It

The Offending Scene... we think

Administrators censor high school plays in many different ways.  Sometimes it’s refusal to put a show on the schedule; sometimes it’s butting into the design process; sometimes it’s shutting a production down during tech week or after a single performance; sometimes it’s firing a teacher/director for doing a show the administration had signed off on.  What’s consistent is that the school officials seldom if ever admit they screwed up, even if they do reverse themselves under nationwide or even international ridicule.

There have been, no doubt, dozens of cases over the past few years that Curmie missed… but there are a fair number he’s chronicled here.  In chronological order (in order of Curmie’s posts, not necessarily when stuff happened): Kismet in PA, Legally Blonde in OH, All Shook Up in UT, Almost, Maine in NC and Spamalot in PA, Indecent in FL, The 25^th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee in OH, The Addams Family Musical in PA, and Dog Sees God in CA and The Laramie Project in AZ… and now The Crucible in GA.

What’s particularly intriguing about this one is that no one is really sure why the show was cancelled after a single performance.  Or, rather, the only thing we know with any certainty is that someone, almost certainly the school’s administration, is flat-out lying. 

Curmie tends to learn about these incidents through one of three sources, all of whom have written about this one: Howard Sherman, Chris Peterson at the OnStage blog, and Jack Marshall at Ethics Alarms.  (Curmie hasn’t contributed as much as a comment on EA for months since it took a hard turn from its titular ethics orientation to GOP propaganda, but he suspected that Jack might weigh in on this one.) 

Here’s what we know for sure: a production of Arthur Miller’s McCarthyism-inspired play was scheduled for two performances at Fannin County High School in Blue Ridge, Georgia, and was cancelled after opening night.  We know, also, that the original director (a teacher?) was fired/forced to resign a couple of weeks before the show was to open, leaving a high school student in charge.  This much is about as far as we can go without fear of propagating untruths.  Well, there’s one more thing that we’ll get to in a moment, Gentle Reader…

We do have the school’s official statement on the affair.  Officials claim that “after Friday night’s performance of The Crucible, we received several complaints as to an unauthorized change in the script of the play.  Upon investigation, we learned that the performance did not reflect the original script.”  The likelihood that the school’s statement is an outright lie may be a little short of ontological certitude, but it’s pretty damned close.

You will notice, Gentle Reader, that no specifics about the alleged violation are forthcoming.  The students say they didn’t add, delete, or change any words, and there has been no assertion to the contrary by the administration.  That, one suspects, is because such a statement could too easily be shot down.  Better to leave it open-ended and hope the opposition—in this case, the students—admits to something. 

Well, that happened… sort of.  The production did open with a scene of the girls dancing in the woods, enacting a moment that was only narrated in the script.  One might suppose that you could argue that the scene represents a change in the script, but it’s pretty much of a stretch.  It’s only fair to point out that Jack Marshall writes that a director at the American Century Theater (where Marshall was Artistic Director) wanted to do precisely what the Fannin County students did, but was refused by both Dramatists Play Service and Arthur Miller himself.  There’s no reason to doubt this testimony, but professional and amateur contracts are different (Curmie has handled both), and things may be different since Miller’s death 20 years ago. 

Curmie, who directed about 50 educational theatre productions over six different decades, confesses he would never have even considered the possibility that he’d need permission to stage that scene… and he’s asked permission for a lot of trivial changes: changing “God dammit” to just “Dammit” for a production at a church-related college, changing the title of a Greek tragedy to the one we’d been using in publicity for the new season before deciding on a translation that used a less common Anglicization of the title, and so on.

More to the point, perhaps: Curmie has read, taught, and seen The Crucible multiple times, and he wouldn’t have caught the alleged departure from the text, or at least wouldn’t have thought it noteworthy in legal terms.  He might have been skeptical of the aesthetic choice, but that’s a different matter.  And you’re going to tell me that not one, but several, spectators at a high school production in a tiny town in northern Georgia caught that supposed breach of contract and were sufficiently incensed that they called the principal that night?  And that the “investigation” took only a couple of hours?  Curmie detects a distinct whiff of eau de cow pasture.

It’s also important to point out that terms like “as written” in licensing agreements not only need not, but literally cannot mean that literally everything in the staging must be exactly as prescribed.  Acting editions differ from published editions.  The latter version is what the playwright wrote; the former is generally transcribed by the stage manager of the original production.  Thus, for example, a character may be described physically according to what the actor in the Broadway show looked like; Broadway Licensing isn’t going to come after you if the “beautiful blonde” of a script is played by a beautiful redhead (or a beautiful Latina, Asian, or black woman, for that matter) unless there’s something in the script that demands that she be blonde.

Curmie remembers seeing a production of The Crucible performed in the round.  So what?  Well, the opening stage direction in the acting edition says “One emphatic source of light is at the left.”  There is no left or right in arena staging.  Is DPS going to forbid all but proscenium productions?  Of course not; they make their money, and their clients’ money, by getting as many legitimate productions as they can.  Some discretion is mandatory.  (Note also that the opening sequence in the acting edition is considerably more detailed than in the regular published form.)

The situation is aggravated by the fact that, according to Howard Sherman, two different parents contacted Broadway Licensing (now the parent company of Dramatists Play Service), and both were told that the licensing company did not shut the production down and would have been very unlikely to have done so, especially if the opening scene were removed.  You can hear both ends of one of those conversations here.  (We’ll casually avoid talking about the ethics and legalities of recording a phone conversation without the consent of the other person on the line.)

Sherman reports that students were initially told that the second performance was cancelled because of parental complaints that the show was “evil and disgusting and things like that.”  Fannin County is almost too stereotypical a place for this to happen: rural (not many county seats in the country with fewer than 1300 residents), overwhelmingly white (93% white and not Hispanic/Latino), overwhelmingly Christian, especially Protestant (over half the county’s congregations are Southern Baptist); MAGA (Donald Trump got over 82% of the vote in the ’24 election).  It is, in other words, precisely the kind of place where brie-eating, Chablis-sipping, clove-cigarette-smoking elitists (or, indeed, anyone with a little knowledge of the world) would suspect the locals would get their collective skivvies in a twist over a high school production of an American classic.

And then, as if by magic, the complaint changed to a strained argument about production rights.  Oh, by the way, Caden Gerald, who played the leading role of John Proctor, says in a video posted to Facebook that administrators saw the scene in question “every morning that we ran it.”

Curmie finds it difficult to argue with Chris Peterson’s conclusion that the administration “didn’t stop the play to protect a license. They stopped it to quiet the backlash. They threw their students under the bus for the sake of avoiding Facebook drama.” 

Someone is lying.  All the students, their parents, and two customer service reps from DPS… or a chickenshit principal (the usual apologies for redundancy).  That seems like an easy call to Curmie. 

But there’s one more point to make.  Even if the administration is telling the truth, they are still 100% responsible for the fuck-up and for the nation-wide embarrassment wrought upon their school.  Let’s assume for the sake of argument that it was appropriate to fire the original director, and that there are legitimate reasons for not making the details known.  Let’s assume, also, that the students are lying about administrators’ seeing rehearsals, about being told the play was shut down because of content complaints, and about the administration only discovering (as opposed to announcing) the alleged violation two days after cancelling the second night.

It’s still the school’s fault.  It is the responsibility of the school, not of a high school senior, to comply with the licensing agreement.  In the absence of a responsible adult director, the school had an obligation to ensure that someone in a position to speak for the school be able to sign off on the production’s adherence to the licensing agreement.  If someone from the school saw even a single rehearsal, it was that person’s responsibility to ask the simple question, “did you change anything?”  If Caden Gerald is lying, and no one from the administration saw any rehearsals, they bloody well should have.

The Crucible remains in the canon and on stages throughout the country because it speaks to conditions far beyond colonial Massachusetts or even mid-century hysteria about the Red Menace.  It’s about the problems created when people abandon truth and justice in order to pander to the mob.  To say that the actions of Principal Scott Ramsey and his minions in shutting down the production is thus deeply ironic is to err on the side of understatement.

FIRE's Scorecard: 3 Wins, 1 Forfeit

Frequent readers of this blog know that Curmie views himself as more of a civil libertarian than a liberal.  There’s a lot of overlap, of course, especially in an era in which the POTUS is a narcissistic authoritarian.  (Curmie notes, apophasistically, that he didn’t use the word “fascistic” in the previous sentence.)  Curmie has followed FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, since back in the days when the RE in their acronym stood for “Rights in Education.”  He doesn’t always agree with them, but he did recently renew his membership, if that tells you something, Gentle Reader.

We start with the “forfeit” part of the title of this essay.  Whereas it is true that FIRE concerns itself primarily with freedom of speech and assembly, they do proclaim themselves to be champions of religious liberty.  So Curmie finds it interesting (concerning?) that FIRE offered no opinion on the recent SCOTUS case regarding Oklahoma’s attempt to create a specifically Christian charter school.  SCOTUS ultimately upheld, which in this case means “didn’t overturn” a lower court ruling blocking public funding for such an enterprise.  The vote was 4-4, with Justice Barrett (to her credit) recusing herself, and presumably one of the conservatives (probably Roberts, possibly Gorsuch) joining the liberals in supporting the Oklahoma Supreme Court ruling.

Ultimately, the case boils down to whether direct funding of religious schools is different from indirect funding, and whether there’s a substantive difference between full and partial funding.  No one seems terribly bothered by students at Brandeis or Baylor or BYU getting Pell Grants, for example.  But completely underwriting the entire cost of a religious school with public funds seems a bridge too far to a lot of folks, Curmie included.

Curmie suspects that FIRE might not agree with him, given their interest in supporting individuals rather than society if the two come into conflict.  That’s okay, but if so, Curmie would like to see their reasoning.  Their silence on this matter does not do them credit.

Moving on to the wins.  (Note: a “win” here is not about a legal victory, but about being on the “right side” in Curmie’s opinion.)

Back in February, the Maine legislature formally censured Representative Laurel Libby for posting on social media about a trans athlete who had won a championship in girls’ track.  The athlete, a minor, was identified by name and school, and there was a photo of the podium in which the faces of other competitors were blurred, presumably to protect their privacy, but the trans athlete’s was not. 

There have been at least three cases in Maine this year in which a trans female (the same one all three times!) secured a podium finish in some sort of athletic competition; Libby has been vocal about at least two of them.  OK, did Libby deserve censure?  Yes: not for the political opinion, but for the manner it was expressed.  Is she a smug, narcissistic, reckless, grand-standing, hypocrite?  Obviously.  Is she a bully, as Anelise Feldman, the second-place finisher in one of those events, would have it?  Yep.  Does she care more about getting publicity for herself than for her cause?  Well, duh.  She’s this year’s Elise Stefanik.  Is she an idiot?  She’s a proud anti-vaxxer, which pretty much tells Curmie all he needs to know.  Is she a bigot?  Quite possibly, although the issue of how trans athletes should be treated is complicated, and reasonable people can disagree about this one.

But, as FIRE pointed out on May 8, there’s a difference of kind, not merely degree, between a censure and denying Libby the right to speak or to vote in the legislature.  Curmie may think that she’s a blight on society, but her constituents deserve representation, even if Curmie thinks they’d have been better off choosing someone else. 

Daniel Ortner’s piece for FIRE also accuses the Democratic majority of “end-running Maine constitutional provisions that say a representative cannot be expelled absent a two-thirds vote or recall election.”  Trouble is, he’s right.  Just because there’s an authoritarian buffoon in the White House and the Republicans in Congress are too stupid, too corrupt, or too craven to stand in his way doesn’t mean the Democrats won’t behave in exactly the same manner if given the opportunity.  Alas.

SCOTUS agreed this week in a convincing if not unanimous 7-2 decision.  The only good news on the ethics front for Democrats is that Justice Kagan agreed with the majority, and that Maine officials immediately acceded to the ruling, unlike a certain portly pettifogger.

The second win for FIRE is kind of a silly case, but it does point to larger issues.  Apparently there are no actual problems anywhere on the campus of the University of California at Irvine: no lack of funding for library books, faculty salaries, or financial aid, no administrators who see their primary job as justifying their existence, no over-emphasis on athletics (Go, Anteaters!) at the expense of… you know, actual education.  Nope, nothing like any of that. 

This is the only rational reason why the university should care about (wait for it) doormats in university housing.  You read the correctly, Gentle Reader: doormats.  The issue, you see, is that one particular doormat had (GASP!) writing on it!  Worse, that writing was “No warrant.  No entry.”  You see, there’s a policy… except that, actually, there isn’t.  More on that in a moment.

FIRE’s Graham Piro was all over this on May 15.  Piro notes that had there been a policy prohibiting doormats altogether (for safety concerns, for example), there would be no problem.  But apparently, it’s the fact that there are words on this particular doormat that’s the problem.

Piro references the university’s Graduate and Family Housing Policies.  Curmie read through all the sections that even might be relevant (he has a masochistic streak sometimes): not a word about doormats, or writing, for that matter. 

But the university does have a prohibition against “all outward‐facing signs, decorations, and expressions in windows/on doors,” “materials, signs, banners, posters, etc. … anywhere within Student Housing,” (no exception for inside apartments, by the way) and “materials… posted on windows, including windows in resident rooms.” This incoherent and redundant slop could only have been created by some administrator in either Student Affairs or Housing.  It does seem to suggest that someone putting up a poster for their next concert on the outside of the door to their apartment, or indeed anywhere in the building, would be in violation. 

That’s OK, though, because the administration cheerfully admits that rather than re-write the policy to make sense, they merely engage in selective enforcement.  Piro writes that “the office probably wouldn’t ask someone to remove a holiday snowflake display but that it has asked ‘people to take down things like Pride flags, country flags, and advertisements for businesses.’”  They place content restrictions on protected speech, in other words.  That’s not a reasonable time, place, and action restriction.  You can see why FIRE’s headline suggests that UC Irvine is “wiping its feet on the Constitution.”

Finally, there’s the Great Harvard Brouhaha, the most recent episode of which was the absurd attempt by Kristi Noem (a.k.a., Gestapo Spice) to de-certify Harvard’s Student and Exchange Visitor Program, making it impossible for the university to enroll foreign students, who make up over a quarter of the current student body.  Most of those affected are grad students from over 100 countries.

Noem, of course, is a sociopathic narcissist, but that hardly separates her from the rest of the current administration.  Her allegations—that Harvard was “fostering violence, antisemitism, and coordinating with the Chinese Communist Party on its campus”—are paranoid delusions.  The demand for “any and all audio or visual footage, in the possession of Harvard University, of any protest activity involving a non-immigrant student on a Harvard University campus in the last five years” is not merely creepy, but unconstitutional.

That’s not just Curmie saying that.  Here’s FIRE’s Legal Director Will Creeley: “The Department’s demand that Harvard produce audio and video footage of all protest activity involving international students over the last five years is gravely alarming. This sweeping fishing expedition reaches protected expression and must be flatly rejected.”

Noem’s other demands—for evidence of foreign students’ actually violating the law, for example—have little relevance to any honest attempt to review Harvard’s operations, but at least that thin veneer of authenticity remains.  Not so for footage of “all protest activity.”  Here’s FIRE’s Nick Perrino in a follow-up article titled “This isn’t just about Harvard”: 

The feds are demanding more than just information involving illegal activity or violations of the student code of conduct. They want footage of “protest activity” — including speech protected by the First Amendment.

And unless those protests involve only international students, American citizens will also find their constitutionally protected speech in the hands of America's national security apparatus.

And how, exactly, is Harvard to know whether that person in the five-year-old video is a). a Harvard student and b). a citizen of another country?  Creeley’s calling this a “sweeping fishing expedition” may just have been a little too kind.

The good news, for the moment, at least, is that Harvard immediately filed a lawsuit, and U.S. District Judge Allison Burroughs issued a temporary restraining order.  Travis Gettys’s article on RawStory says that Burroughs “wrote in her order” that “Revoking Harvard’s certification is unlawful many times over…. The government’s effort to punish the University for its refusal to surrender its academic independence and for its perceived viewpoint is a patent violation of the First Amendment.”  

She did not.  That quotation is taken from Harvard’s motion for the TRO, not from Burroughs’s granting of that application, which merely states that in the absence of a TRO, Harvard “will sustain immediate and irreparable injury before there is an opportunity to hear from all parties.”

This, Gentle Reader, is why a raised eyebrow of skepticism is always your friend, even especially if the site in question generally aligns with your perspective.  Burroughs may actually believe what she’s quoted as saying (we can hope so), but she didn’t say it.  We’ll find out more at the hearing in a few days.

In the meantime, we return to Will Creeley to take us home:

The administration’s demand for a surveillance state at Harvard is anathema to American freedom. 

The administration seems hellbent on employing every means at its disposal — no matter how unlawful or unconstitutional — to retaliate against Harvard and other colleges and universities for speech it doesn’t like. This has to stop…. 

Whatever Harvard’s past failings, core campus rights cannot and will not be secured by surveillance, retaliation, and censorship.

No American should accept the federal government punishing its political opponents by demanding ideological conformity, surveilling and retaliating against protected speech, and violating the First Amendment.

Well done, FIRE.

Curmie promised that this piece would be shorter than the last one.  It is, but it’s still pretty long.  The next one will be less likely to achieve TLDR status.

Four Stories about Libraries

Curmie confesses that he didn’t have libraries and librarians figuring particularly prominently on his Apocalyptic Bingo card.  He should have known better, but to be honest he thought that even the blustering buffoon occupying the White House would show a little restraint.  Of course, 47 is so far round the bend into incoherence that he makes Joe Biden look like Socrates, Cicero, Abraham Lincoln, Patrick Pearse, Winston Churchill, and Martin Luther King Jr. rolled into one.  Curmie may get around to writing about the folks actually calling the shots, but that will come at a later date, if indeed at all.

There are four very different stories involving libraries on Curmie’s mind at the moment.  They all involve some combination of censorship, incompetence, and a particularly noxious blend of racism, sexism, and xenophobia.  Curmie hastens to note that actual librarians are never the bad guys in these scenaria.  At worst, those folks might be too unwilling to risk their livelihoods by refusing to accommodate absurd demands from “superiors.”  At best, they almost literally man the barricades against authoritarian idiots.

Library Story #1: Back in late March, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who turns out to be even less qualified than Curmie believed when his confirmation was still pending, ordered the Naval Academy’s library to eliminate any books that promoted diversity, equity, and inclusion viewpoints.  Some 900 books were “reviewed,” and 400 were indeed removed.

This silliness (or it would be silliness if the effects weren’t so real) is even worse than the crap we’ve seen in schools in Florida, Utah, Kansas, and elsewhere.  At least there, the censorship was at the public school level where there is at least the whiff of validity to the plaintive cries of “think of the children.”  The examples linked above, of course, are just about book bans; there are plenty of other variations on the general theme of what can’t be said in a classroom (a student’s preferred name, for example) or, God forbid, shown on a stage (too many examples to mention).

But there are no little kids at the Naval Academy.  Its library should reflect its status as a respected institution of higher learning.  Every major book on whatever topic, from whatever culture or era, should be there.  Indeed, as the saying goes, “a truly great library contains something in it to offend everyone.”  Having a book on a library shelf is not an endorsement of its ideas.  Indeed, it’s vital that we understand the arguments of those with whom we disagree: otherwise, it’s impossible to effectively critique that reasoning.

And that means there should be a copy of The Prince, and Leviathan, and Das Kapital, and (wait for it…) Mein Kampf on those shelves.  And it sure as hell means that there ought to be at least some representation of more recent works by the likes of Robin DiAngelo, Ibram X. Kendi, and Ta-Nehisi Coates.

None of this is to suggest that these books should necessarily be required reading, or that a decision not to buy a particular volume is inherently problematic.  Removing already purchased books for no reason other than the capricious political predilections of a government official, however, is a little too far down the road to the scenario described in a not-so-coincidentally frequently banned book, Fahrenheit 451, for Curmie’s taste.  Book-burners, literal or metaphoric, are never, and Curmie does mean never, the good guys.

Library Story #2: Speaking of book-burners… in April, a man checked out a total of 100 books over two trips to the public library in Beachwood, Ohio.  (That’s a little over a half hour away from the library where Curmie’s sister-in-law worked for over 40 years.)  The books were about black and Jewish history and LGBTQ+ education.  He then apparently burned them all in what he called a “cleansing,” posting a video to the Gab.com social media site, which is described by the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism as “an online hub for extremist and conspiratorial content” frequented by “conspiracy theorists, white nationalists, neo-Nazis, members of militias and influential figures among the alt right.”

That’s disturbing enough, but it appears that the library is powerless to do much until the books are overdue, and even then the punishment may be simply to pay the cost of the books, which is listed at approximately $1700.  That figure seems quite low to Curmie.  Might it be the original cost, or perhaps a “used copy” cost?  It’s difficult to imagine that new replacement copies would cost less than $17 apiece. 

Moreover, whereas the guy had to have a name and address associated with his library card (the library seems to think they can send him a bill), he is “unidentified” according to news reports, and there seems to be little interest on the part of the police to make this a criminal case.  It might be turned over to the city prosecutor for a civil case.

There is some good news coming out of this, though.  There’s a good deal of indignation on the part of the locals.  More importantly, there’s some action.  The Interfaith Group Against Hate [https://www.igahcle.org/] describes itself as “a coalition led by Jewish, Muslim, and Christian congregations in solidarity with community partners united by the belief that we must confront white supremacy and create a society where people of all races and religions thrive together.” 

They’ve promised to collect and donate “1000 new books lifting up Black, Jewish, and LGBTQ+ voices.”  As of this writing, they’re up to 100 and counting.  Rabbi Robert Nosanchuk from Congregation Mishkan Or summed up the group’s response: “Whoever perpetuated the idea that you can burn us out of Cleveland, deport us out of Cleveland and deny our ideas and oppress us and frighten us to the corner… they picked the wrong community!”

And that, Gentle Reader, is how you do that.

Library Story #3: For a primer on how not to do that, we turn to Columbia University.  Columbia has been apparently rudderless for some time, somehow managing to suppress protected speech while simultaneously failing to take action against students (and others) who actually were breaking the law in pro-Palestinian protests dating all the way back to the Hamas attack in October of ’23.

The university leadership, and Curmie uses that term rather loosely, has spent most of this calendar year academic year groveling and capitulating to Trumpian bellicosity.  It has done them precisely zero good.  Worse, they’ve picked up on the recklessness and lack of concern for things like due process that have become the signature characteristic of the 47 regime.

Earlier this month, students at Columbia and its affiliate Barnard College occupied a reading room at the Butler Library as a response to Israel’s acceleration of attacks on Gaza.  This was, apparently, a violation of the university’s “time, place, and manner” restrictions.  Curmie has no opinion on whether those regulations are reasonable; such a consideration is irrelevant to the point to be made here.

Anyway, there were dozens of arrests.  Curmie isn’t going to comment on them, either.  Rather, he’s going to concentrate on the university’s actions, which included suspending a host of students, including at least four student journalists who were merely covering the protest and at least two who were simply studying in a different part of the library.  And that’s not just the affected students who are saying that; Columbia and Barnard de facto admitted as much by lifting those suspensions, all the while threatening the possibility of future sanctions.

Let’s get a couple of things established up front.  1). Criticism of a foreign government is protected speech, and criticism of Israel is not inherently anti-Semitic.  2).  Chanting “from the river to the sea” and similar slogans is not inherently illegal (irrespective of the claims of Trump and Rubio), but doing so in that place at that time (especially during finals!) may well be.  3).  Actual threats, violence, and vandalism are indeed subject to both criminal prosecution and sanctions, such as suspension, imposed by the university; actions have consequences.

The suspensions were effective immediately, meal cards were voided, and students were given 48 hours to vacate campus housing.  Is this an appropriate punishment for students willfully participating in a protest they knew to be a violation of the university’s code of conduct?  Sure.  But.  (Insert tired joke about a “big but” here.)  That’s a reasonable response after due process.  This wasn’t quite as bad as some of ICE’s kidnappings, but the “guilty until proven innocent” (“…and even then we won’t necessarily concede”) attitude is pretty similar.

Most if not all of the readers of this blog have undergone a finals week at a college or university.  Not the least stressful moments in your life, Curmie suspects.  So add to that not merely the threat of suspension, but a suspension per se and expulsion from your dorm room.  How the hell is any student supposed to be able to perform at their best under those circumstances? 

Apparently, the administration promised even those who really did participate in the protest they’d get due process should any disciplinary proceedings be undertaken.  They lied.  (Of course.)  And for at least several of those suspended, the “crime” in question turns out to be… not being able to leave the library when a bunch of people you don’t know block the exit.  Oh, and being brown-skinned and having a name like Samra Roosa, whose tale is told in the story in The Intercept, linked above.  Mustn’t forget that part. 

By the way, if you’re smart enough to get into Columbia or Barnard, you’re unlikely to be an intellectual pushover.  Here’s Ms. Roosa’s statement:

This accusation has caused me significant emotional distress and disrupted my ability to complete my final assignments. As a Muslim woman, I feel that Barnard has repeatedly failed to create a safe and supportive environment for students like myself. It is unacceptable for the College to claim inclusivity while subjecting students of color to racial profiling and false accusations.

This description, unlike those of too many students (and others) who seek victimhood as a substitute for accomplishment, rings true. 

As might be expected, the Trump administration’s task force on antisemitism (there is, of course, no such program to address Islamophobia) praised Columbia president Claire Shipman, despite (because of?) the obvious sloppiness and lack of anything approaching due process.  But, of course, the fact that the majority of the students suspended by Columbia/Barnard probably deserved it doesn’t change the fact that the administration acted too hastily and with little or no concern for the guilt or innocence of the individual students. 

Curmie has to agree with the assessment of Joseph Howley of Columbia’s Classics faculty: “Hasty punishments and violations of due process are exactly what we would expect when we allow our disciplinary and public safety policies to be dictated by political forces that value repression more than our community’s well-being.”

Library Story #4:  A little over a fortnight ago, the White House, to quote the CNN article, “notified Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden that she was removed from her position.”  There was no immediate explanation, but Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt (Bullshit Barbie) later responded to a reporter’s question by asserting that “there were quite concerning things she had done at the Library of Congress in the pursuit of DEI, and putting inappropriate books in the library for children.”

Blessed Athena, tell Curmie where to begin!  With the very questionable assertion that the Executive Branch has any damned business making any decisions whatsoever about the Library of Congress without legislative approval?  With the fact that every book published in the country is housed in the Library (provided only that a copy is sent there), so the content is irrelevant?  With the lack of specificity with respect to the “DEI” allegations, which likely wouldn’t stand up to even casual scrutiny?  With the fact that the Library of Congress is a research library, not a lending library, and you have to be over 16 to even get through the door?  This administration can’t even be bothered to make their lies plausible.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries argues the firing is, “a disgrace and the latest in his [Trump’s] ongoing effort to ban books, whitewash American history and turn back the clock.”  That seems a little foam-flecked for Curmie’s taste, but he does strongly suspect that the real reason for Hayden’s dismissal (that’s a photo of her at the top of the page) had a lot to do with her surplus of melanin and X-chromosomes. 

Well, on second thought, not necessarily.  Perhaps she was terminated, as was Shira Perlmutter a couple of days later from her position as the Registrar of Copyrights: because they were impediments to what Congressman Joe Morelle describes as “a brazen, unprecedented power grab with no legal basis. It is surely no coincidence [Trump] acted less than a day after [Perlmutter] refused to rubber-stamp Elon Musk’s efforts to mine troves of copyrighted works to train AI models.”

So maybe Trump was acting as a grifter rather than a bigot, which, of course, would make everything all better, right?  Curmie will let you decide, Gentle Reader.

But here, too, there’s some good news.  After appointing his personal lawyer, Todd Blanche, who, needless to say, has literally no relevant experience for the job, as the new Librarian if Congress, 47 then appointed a couple more DOJ minions, Paul Perkins and Brian Nieves.  Perkins was to take over for Perlmutter, Nieves was to be Blanche’s deputy.  But when they showed up to work, they “were not allowed into offices.” Curmie can’t find a follow-up, or even determine if Perkins and Nieves were shown the door by staffers—you know, actual librarians—or by Capitol Police.

This is likely a blip in the seemingly inexorable and not-so-gradual take-over by Demented Don, (F)Elon, and their cabal of billionaire cronies and sycophantic underlings of literally every vestige of independent thought, Constitutional protections, or a meritocracy.  There is not a Republican in Congress with the patriotism, courage, or common decency to stand in Trump’s way when it really matters.  When the closest thing to a principled conservative in DC is Amy Coney Barrett, the future does not look bright. 

The damage that has already been done will take decades to fix, even if the process can start soon after the 2026 elections.  But the American Dream is not dead yet, and for at least one shining moment, the anti-intellectuals, authoritarians, and plutocrats were held at bay.  It’s not a lot, but it’s something.

The Arts Are Messy, And That's a Good Thing

So, apparently several members of a touring company of Les Misérables scheduled to perform at the Kennedy Center on June 11 have decided to boycott that performance rather than participate in what CNN calls a “high-dollar fundraiser” for the Center with President Trump in attendance.

The cast was apparently given the option of sitting out that performance, and about a dozen of them decided not to go on.  Exactly who gave them the choice and under what circumstances is unclear.

Naturally, Kennedy Center director Richard Grenell, yet another spectacularly unqualified but heartily sycophantic Trump appointee, got in a tizzy about that, declaring those actors “vapid and intolerant,” while delivering banalities that neither he not his boss believe about spectators of different political perspectives enjoying a show together.  Grenell appears to be incapable of independent thought, at least in his public pronouncements, so we can assume that he was sent out by Trump to spin the story.  Whether, as well-known theatre wag Howard Sherman suggests in a Facebook post, 47 is “completely incapable of appreciating the politics buried within the show itself” may be a matter of opinion, there is no doubt that there’s a fair bit of irony present.

The CNN article also refers to Trump’s February post, “NO MORE DRAG SHOWS, OR OTHER ANTI-AMERICAN PROPAGANDA — ONLY THE BEST,” (yes, it was in all caps, because Trump is incapable of using an inside voice) while casually neglecting the inherent censorship involved in that proclamation and the fact that the single show in question was about as innocuous as it could possibly be, the drag queen in question behaving very much like a panto dame.  So much for the “leftist” press.

OK, let’s tease this out a little in as objective a manner as possible.  Chris Peterson’s double-header posts on the OnStageBlog site, first about the cast members’ announcement and later about Grenell’s response, were, to steal his phrase, “gloriously on brand.”  The actors are to be praised for being “rare and gutsy,” “putting their values before the stage lights,” and “principled,” and a host of other epithets.

Yeah, no.  The actors are quite likely (not necessarily, but probably) a gaggle of petulant virtue-signalers who think that not fulfilling the terms of their contracts and refusing to perform at a fund-raiser for the Kennedy Center somehow makes them righteous.  It does not.  They’re risking little if anything: Grenell’s threats are similarly puerile and almost certainly meaningless, unless we really are headed for another McCarthy/HUAC era witch hunt, in which case those actors would likely be blackballed whether they perform next month or not.

Curmie strongly suspects that if the performers’ identities are indeed ever known, they’ll get more rather than fewer gigs in the future: theatre producers (and audiences!) are, in general, a rather liberal lot, and whereas actors’ notoriety may not be quite the same as fame, it’s still good for box office. 

Yes, productions at the Kennedy Center are likely to be (stealing Grenell’s phrase here) “vapid and intolerant” at least until Trump is no longer calling the shots, and there are those, as a Friend of Curmie recently posted on Facebook, who would rather see the Kennedy Center burned to the ground than turned over to the Emperor of Trumpistan.  But it is impossible to praise the US Army Chorus for their in-your-face rendition of “Do You Hear the People Sing” (as Curmie did) and also commend these folks for refusing to do so.

Is this a tempest in a teapot, then?  Taken in isolation, yes.  Both the actors and the Kennedy Center brass behaved utterly predictably, and neither looked good in the process.  It’s almost as if the arts were… you know… messy.

Curmie remains baffled, however, by the apparent belief that art is somehow apolitical.  Check out that image at the top of this post, Gentle Reader.  You will, no doubt, recognize it as one of the most famous paintings by Pablo Picasso.  (Curmie was visited as soon as he typed that sentence by the ghost of René Magritte proclaiming “Ceci n’est pas une peinture,” but you know what I mean.)  It is impossible to believe that “Guernica” doesn’t have a potent political message.  There’s a famous story that a Gestapo officer had barged into Picasso’s apartment, pointed at the painting, and demanded “Did you do this?”  The painter responded, “No, you did.”  Even if, as one might reasonably suspect, that anecdote is apocryphal, it rings true.  And if it’s fiction, it’s something of a work of art in its own right.

Ask Curmie what his favorite movie of all time is, and he’ll probably respond with either “Le Roi de Cœur” (“The King of Hearts”) or “Casablanca.”  Both are set in times of war: WWI and WWII, respectively.  At the end of the former, the denizens of the local insane asylum, having been released into the town, witness the deaths of dozens of opposing soldiers, then solemnly return to the relative sanity of the asylum.  Our hero, Private Plumpick (Alan Bates) climbs aboard a troop transport truck to head back to his unit… but then jumps off outside the asylum, strips naked, and rings the bell to enter, carrying only a cage with his beloved carrier pigeon. 

Curmie’s favorite sequence in “Casablanca” is the one in which Victor Lazlo (Paul Henreid) tells the orchestra to play “La Marseillaise” to drown out the Nazi officers who are singing the German anthem “Die Wacht am Rhein” (“The Watch on the Rhine”).  Rick Blaine (Humphrey Bogart) nods his acquiescence, the band plays, and everyone in the bar joins in.  (Apologies that I was unable to find a clip without a commercial.)  It is a triumphant moment, and everyone who sees it—well, maybe not Elon Musk, but everyone else—is uplifted, even if only briefly. 

Of course, Captain Renault (Claude Rains) has to shut down the bar in response.  His pretext, that he is “shocked, shocked to find out that gambling is going on in here.”  This moment, of course, is immediately followed by collecting his winnings. 

OK, Gentle Reader, does anyone want to argue that those films aren’t politically loaded? 

Curmie has argued for decades that the Dionysian Festival in Ancient Athens was founded more to consolidate the power of the tyrant Peisistratus than to celebrate a hitherto little-known demi-god.  Shakespeare’s dramaturgy changed when a female monarch died, to be replaced by a gynophobic one.  Expressionism in Germany and shingeki in Japan are unquestionably linked to socialist politics.  The list goes on.

Many artists throughout history have served at the pleasure of the politically powerful.  Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven were all court musicians.  In theatre, Shakespeare, Racine, Calderón, and Zeami all received royal patronage.  But there were those who worked against the power structure: Euripides self-exiled from Athens; the plays of Václav Havel and Gao Xingjian were outlawed in their homelands; Athol Fugard was an outspoken critic of apartheid while that policy was still in place.

But here’s the thing: you don’t have to agree with an artist’s point of view to appreciate the work.  You needn’t be Hindu to like The Recognition of Shakuntala, Buddhist to be engaged by The Lady Aoi, or Christian to enjoy The Second Shepherds Play.  And you certainly don’t have to believe in Apollo or Athena to treasure The Oresteia.

Things get a little messier when we talk about political perspective.  You can appreciate the artistry of “Birth of a Nation,” “The Battleship Potemkin,” or “The Triumph of the Will” without being a racist, a Communist, or a Nazi, but there’s friction, nonetheless.  That’s OK. 

We also need to understand that the same theatre artist can enjoy working on the plays of Shakespeare or Racine, which never contemplate even the possibility of a political structure other than monarchy, and also on plays by Bertolt Brecht or Lillian Hellman, who were Communists… and for the same spectator to enjoy them all, as well.

Performing before an audience, or even an audience member, you don’t want to perform for… that’s a different matter.  Should you take that lucrative gig in Russia or Saudi Arabia or China that you suspect will be used for propaganda purposes? 

Curmie is reminded of Dusty Springfield’s abortive tour of South Africa in 1964.  The British singer had apparently sneaked a clause into her contract that she would not perform for segregated audiences; the authorities were not amused.  She was de facto deported for her stance.  As a dear friend of Curmie wrote about the incident when posting about it on Facebook a few years ago, “Sometimes you don’t know who the punk rockers are until it’s punk rock time.”

How do we reasonably analyze the current kerfuffle?  Here’s Curmie’s take: if you’ve got a contract to do a show and you fake an illness or something to get out of a particular date, whatever your reasons, that’s unethical.  But if you’re given a choice of whether to go on or not, you damned well ought to be able to make your own decision. 

Would Curmie boycott the show?  Anyone who’s ever heard Curmie sing will know he’ll never have to make that call about being in a musical.  But yeah, it would take some cogitation.  Are you performing for President Trump or for President Trump, who really is in a separate category from literally anyone else ever to hold that office?  This is not a black and white scenario.  The question is about what shade of grey we’re talking about.

A Convergence of Facts and Coincidences

The front page of Vancouver’s Georgia Straight
after the Kent State massacre

Regular readers of this blog will know how much Curmie loves to take unrelated events and look at how they actually fit together into a single narrative.  Here’s another example. 

Today’s background: 1). When Netflix discontinued their DVD service to concentrate on streaming, they told their customers to just keep the last DVDs they’d been shipped.  2).  About that same time, Curmie and Beloved Spouse replaced the carpet in their living room.  3). There was a major storm in the area Friday, and we were without cable or internet all that evening and into Saturday.  4). Yesterday was May 4 (Curmie hoped to finish this piece then; it didn’t happen).  5). Curmie gestures, broadly and inclusively, at the current attempts by a wannabe dictator to subvert the Constitution and to benefit himself and his cronies at the expense of literally everyone else.  6). Curmie also notices that folks who don’t cower in fear from the tribble-topped bully generally do just fine: Harvard University, Maine governor Janet Mills, and international students who sued the ironically named Justice Department, to name a few.

So… replacing carpeting means getting everything off the floor so the installers can do their job.  During that process, one of the three HDMI cables literally broke off in the TV.  We couldn’t use it or remove it, meaning we lost a connection.  We did get a new TV, but it had only two outlets for HDMI, meaning we could get only two out of three of cable, Chromecast, and DVD.  We chose the former two. 

Yes, we could and did order a splitter, but by the time it arrived the hassle of trying to get everything set up seemed greater than the desire to play DVDs, especially since we were no longer getting any new shipments from Netflix.  Besides, if we really wanted to see something, we could watch it on the desktop computer, which has a pretty good-sized monitor.  But since we didn’t have the DVD player hooked up to the TV, those last three disks from Netflix didn’t get watched.

Our evening ritual generally includes watching something on the TV.  Between cable channels and a host of subscription services, we have a lot of options… or, rather, we do when there’s internet and cable.  But Friday evening our viewing choices were limited to what we had on DVD that we could play on the computer.  So we looked at those three Netflix DVDs.

Two of them were film versions of Shakespeare plays, but it was the third that caught our attention: Johanna Hamilton’s 2014 documentary, “1971.”  Here’s Netflix’s blurb: “In 1971, eight antiwar activists broke into a Pennsylvania FBI office and made off with a treasure trove of documents revealing a massive illegal surveillance program.  More than 40 years later, they’re finally talking about the burglary.”  Yeah, we’re going to watch that.

The burglars, young anti-war demonstrators calling themselves the Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI (hereafter, CCIF), found accounts of the COINTELPRO (Counterintelligence Program), which had attempted to infiltrate and discredit any movement J. Edgar Hoover and his goons decided was “subversive.”  That included, of course, any organizations dedicated to racial equality, women’s rights, or opposition to the Vietnam War.  COINTELPRO’s stated goal with respect to black nationalist organizations, for example, was “to expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize” their activities.

The CCIF took “about a thousand” documents, many of which, of course, outlined legitimate operations by the FBI.  But, as CCIF member John Raines was to reveal over 40 years later,

Sixty percent of the files were clearly political in intent, and those were the ones we began to sort through. And we began to find—even on the morning, early morning, of the night, we began to find documents that were quite exciting….  Well, like the one that said, “Let’s increase the paranoia and have these folks be persuaded that there’s a FBI agent behind every mailbox.”  I mean, that is—that’s not surveillance; that’s obviously intimidation.  All right?  Intimidation is a political act; it’s not an act of an investigative organization like the FBI.

After sorting through the stacks of papers, the CCIF sent photocopies of to a number of leading newspapers.  The New York Times and Los Angeles Times capitulated to the demands of Attorney General John Mitchell not to publish the story.  The Washington Post did not, running a front-page exposé, thereby opening the flood-gates. 

Post reporter Betty Medsger, who was later to write The Burglary: The Discovery of J. Edgar Hoover's Secret FBI, the book on which “1971” was based, had written about something contained in a document marked “COINTELPRO-New Left.”  No one knew what that meant, but Hoover gleaned from Medsger’s article that the label had been seen… so he changed the name of the operation but didn’t end it.  Ultimately, dogged reporting by NBC’s Carl Stern—the first person to successfully sue the FBI for release of documents under the Freedom of Information Act—and subsequently by CBS’s Seymour Hirsch led to a massive Congressional investigation headed by Idaho Senator Frank Church, which in turn led to substantial changes in the FBI and CIA.

The list of abuses by the FBI, CIA, and NSA is too long and too chilling to enumerate here.  Suffice it to say that literally nothing—assassination, slander, perjury, extortion, intimidation, you name it, Gentle Reader—was out of bounds.  It was an awful period in American history, although only the victims really knew it.

Yes, “1971” has a little exaggeration for effect: the burglary was indeed on the evening of the “Fight of the Century” between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier, but there was no live coverage on either television or radio, so whereas there was a distraction caused by that much-hyped event, there weren’t swells of cheering (or whatever) to cover the sound of breaking into the office, as the film presents.  It appears, however, that the film was generally accurate.  Unfortunately, there’s a coda which suggests portentously that reforms tend to be temporary.  Alas, that part is true, too.

There are also moments of humor: a clip from the old “All in the Family” series in which Archie Bunker doesn’t want to bother the government with following the Constitution, and shots of a street fair with posters for sale of FBI agents whose attempts to infiltrate the anti-war movement were, shall we say, not entirely successful.  The tie-dyed t-shirts were nice, but the crew cuts and wing-tips didn’t really complete the ensemble.  It’s a really good film, Gentle Reader.  It may be hard to come by these days, but it’s worth a little effort.

Moving on: the reference to yesterday’s date is because May 4, 1970 was the date of the killings of four Kent State University students by the Ohio National Guard.  Curmie has commented on those events several times, most notably in this post, written in a dormitory room on that very campus.  

A couple of years ago, several years after that blog post, Curmie posted something on his personal Facebook page on the anniversary of those murders.  One of his friends, an ex-Marine who was probably born in the early to mid-‘70s, was astounded by the facts: that none of the students who were killed was within 80 yards of the Guardsmen; that at least three of the casualties, including one of the dead, were not even participating in the protest (one of them was actually in ROTC); that 11 of the 13 casualties were shot in the back; that the Guardsmen seemed to be retreating but then turned in unison to fire, apparently randomly, into the crowd.  These are facts, not speculation, but the narrative nonetheless remains that the victims were all protesters who precipitated their own demise by threatening the lives of those guys with the military-grade rifles.

Of course, the political leaders at the time didn’t wait for the facts to emerge before blaming the victims.  President Nixon called them “bums”; Ohio Governor Jim Rhodes described them as “the worst type of people that we harbor in America”; Ronald Reagan, Governor of California at the time, said that “if it takes bloodbath” to deal with campus demonstrators “let's get it over with.”

The names and faces have changed, but the stories have not.  In the early ‘70s, the protesters were primarily those who were most directly affected by an uncaring or even hostile government: blacks, women, and college students in particular.  That’s still true today, except that virtually everyone is directly affected: women, Hispanics, Muslims, scientists, educators, federal employees, union members, anyone LGBTQ+, people reliant on Medicaid or Social Security, anyone with a market-based pension fund, etc.

In those days, it was the FBI that orchestrated smear campaigns; that’s probably still true, especially given the fact that the so-called Justice Department has replaced competent veteran employees with folks whose literally only credential is adherence to Trumpian authoritarianism.  Back then, it was the National Guard at Kent State and local police at Jackson State a week and a half later who were the out of control “law enforcement” officials.  Now it’s ICE and DHS who seem to think the Constitution is at best a suggestion.  Either way, it’s who we used to call The Man. The FBI also engaged in illegal surveillance in the ‘60s and ‘70s.  Now, that’s the function of (F)Elon Musk and his minions. 

Sites of higher education are always on the hit list for authoritarians.  In 1970, Kent and Jackson State were the big stories, but virtually every campus became a target in one way or another.  Now it’s Harvard and Columbia, and anyone else who thinks the Constitution applies to everyone, even if we disagree with them.  The same people who were chanting “Jews will not replace us” a few years ago are now so concerned with anti-Semitism that they insist that even criticism of the Israeli government is no longer protected speech under the First Amendment.  Translation: “We still hate Jews; we just hate Muslims more.”

Politicians lied about Kent State’s victims and sought to disparage their memories.  Now we have the Vice President claiming that Kilmar Abrego-Garcia is a “convicted MS-13 gang member” despite the fact that he’s never been convicted of literally anything.  The President purports to believe in the authenticity of one of the worst photoshopped images in history, making him either a liar or dumber than the proverbial sack of hammers.  (Yes, I know, Gentle Reader, ¿por qué no los dos?)

How a devout Christian celebrates the holiest day of the year.

Protesters in the days of Curmie’s youth were “bums” and “the worst kind of people.”  Now, those who take a radical position like “the government ought to obey the Constitution” or “SCOTUS rulings should be adhered to” are “Radical Left Lunatics who are fighting and scheming so hard to bring Murderers, Drug Lords, Dangerous Prisoners, the Mentally Insane, and well known MS-13 Gang Members and Wife Beaters, back into our Country.”  (Say what you will about Nixon, at least he was sane… and understood capitalization.)

The parallels are striking.  But.  The nation emerged from the conflict in Southeast Asia without that elusive “peace with honor.”  The power of the FBI, CIA, and other federal agencies to spy on innocent people was indeed reined in, even if not permanently; eight brave and ingenious people set that in motion.  We endured. 

It will be harder this time.  Whereas the likes of Howard Baker weren’t going to look the other way just because the corrupt President was from their party, today we can’t get a single Republican to say that we shouldn’t be deporting American citizens or that people raking in over a billion (yes, with a “b”) dollars a year don’t need a tax cut.  Occasionally, there will be a whimper of faux bravado from a Mitch McConnell or a Rand Paul, and Susan Collins will tut-tut before obeying, but generally speaking GOP legislators are treating Trump like a dominatrix, and there’s a lot of boot-kissing going on.

Still, turn-outs are good for rallies and protests.  The Bernie and AOC road show more than doubled Trump’s attendance in the same deep-red Michigan city a couple of weeks ago. GOP pols, even in safe districts, are avoiding town halls, apparently afraid they might have to defend their records.  The cracks in the façade are there.  We just need to have the courage and the resilience to resist.