There's No 3-D Chess Here

Nope.

It had probably been months since Curmie had heard the term “3-D Chess” to describe someone so strategically brilliant as to leave the rest of us in the dust.  Then he encountered the metaphor twice on Wednesday of this week.  In both cases, Curmie’s response was, shall we say, skeptical.

The first occurrence was during the FIRE members-only webcast.  One of the viewers asked if it was possible that the administration at Texas A&M was in fact sympathetic with faculty who just want to teach their courses based on their professional expertise.  The argument, you see, was that censoring Plato in a Philosophy course was so remarkably stupid that it invites a lawsuit, which would, hypothetically, free the university from the grotesquerie that is SB37.  In other words, university policy-makers—the Regents and the administration—were hoping for a 1st Amendment challenge to an obviously unconstitutional law.  It would succeed, and control of the curriculum would thereby be wrested from idiot pols and returned to its rightful place, the university itself.

It was not an outrageous question, but FIRE’s General Counsel Ronnie London doubted that university officials were indeed “playing 3-D chess.”  He granted the possibility, but made it clear that such a scenario was unlikely.  Curmie agrees, not merely because he doubts that anyone would employ such a strategy, but because the Regents are appointed by ultra-right wing Governor Greg Abbott, whose fingerprints are all over the legislation in question… and they, in turn appoint the President.  The principal qualifications to be a Regent for a state university in Texas are simple: you must be a rich Republican who neither knows nor cares anything about higher education except as a means of advancing a political agenda.  Abbott certainly found his flock at A&M.

Remember, too, that last fall a young woman described by Curmie as “a single narcissistic and reactionary student” objected to a discussion topic because it violated an Executive Order from Dear Leader, and the professor, department chair, dean, and president all lost their jobs. 

By the way, it’s been reported that the reason that the department chair (and presumably those up the food chain) got in trouble was that they allowed the prof to teach something that wasn’t in the course description.  As a side note: when Curmie came to the university form which he is now retired, the catalog description for the second half of the Theatre History sequence said the course stopped chronologically at World War II.  Curmie said he was going to extend the timeline to the present, thereby including absurdism, the Angry Young Men, Off- and Off-Off Broadway, playwrights like Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller, feminist dramaturgy, deconstruction… well, you get the idea, Gentle Reader.  

And get this: Curmie’s boss agreed to it without any hesitation!  Such insubordination from a department chair!  We did, by the way, change the course description, but it took a couple of years to get the revisions through the system.  In the meantime, it would appear that Curmie and his boss were both very naughty, indeed.  Luckily, the statute of limitations has run out.

But revenons à nos moutons.  The powers-that-be had their chance to challenge or even circumvent the state’s censorial policy and passed on the opportunity.  If the Regents actually wanted to halt this unconstitutional idiocy, they would have done so.  Nope.  They’re absolutely complicit.

So now we turn to the other contender for “3-D chess” designation: 47’s stated intention of annexing Greenland through whatever means necessary.  Actually, the CNN story Curmie read references MAGA-dom’s belief that Dear Leader is playing 4-D chess, and similar inanities have apparently been uttered not infrequently for some time, especially with respect to events in Venezuela.  Curmie either just didn’t see them or succeeded in ignoring them.

Last Friday, Chris Cillizza’s YouTube post (which Curmie didn’t see until today) opened with some pretty open mockery of the idea that “Donald Trump is always playing 3- or maybe 4- or maybe 5-dimensional chess, while the Democrats, the reporters covering him, everyone else, is sort of playing checkers at best.  The essence of the argument is that Trump is so strategically smart that he’s always multiple moves ahead of everyone else.”  Cillizza proceeds to talk about the strategic stupidity involved in describing that Susan Collins, the most vulnerable Republican Senator seeking re-election, as a “disaster” who “should never be elected to office again.”  Collins, of course, only votes against GOP directives when it won’t make any difference (a point Cillizza doesn’t raise), and of course her vote on a procedural matter that will lead to nothing substantive fits that description nicely.

So Cillizza has a point.  But the true coup de grâce came a couple days after Cillizza’s piece, when Greenland became the topic of conversation on Sunday and then again on Wednesday.  The apologists’ argument is that only by threatening to invade an ally could Trump get Western Europe to send troops to protect Greenland, even if the perceived enemy is… well… us.  Pursuing this policy is far stupider than attacking Susan Collins. 

Sure, Greenland has some strategic importance, and we’d rather not have it taken over by Russia or China.  But first of all, that isn’t going to happen, and secondly, the downside of 47’s bluster is enormous.  His recklessness on the international stage has already cost this country more than can be regained in a decade or more of actual diplomacy and ethical leadership.  What ally would possibly trust the US now?  The idea that there would actually be a US military operation against Greenland would be laughable if we had a sane President.  As it is, the possibility looms. 

And if such an invasion were to take place, the situation would change from bad to cataclysmic.  There’s commentary out there that has been attributed to Brent Molnar (although why it doesn’t appear on his Facebook or Bluesky pages is a mystery).  Regardless of who wrote it, it’s pretty scary.  Curmie suspects it may be a little alarmist (“the world as we know it ends” may be a bit much), but virtually everything mentioned in the piece is at least a possibility if not a probability: the destruction of NATO is virtually assured; closure of American military bases in Europe, economic retaliation from the EU resulting in staggering inflation, the expulsion of US corporations from European countries, cessation of trans-Atlantic travel: all well within the realm of possibility…  It’s not a pretty picture.  

More to the point, not only would the loss of status, economic stability, and the moral high ground be devastating, there would be no upside.  The only country to gain from this ill-begotten fever dream is Russia, since European powers would be distracted away from supporting Ukraine.  Curmie judiciously refrains from wondering if that was the whole point.

Curmie would like to think that military leaders would either talk Dear Leader out of doing something so suicidal to American interests, or that they would listen to Senator Kelly and refuse an illegal order.  But when the Generals and Admirals are our last line of defense against a sociopathic POTUS with the maturity of a pampered toddler, we are neck deep in the shit and sinking fast.  Suddenly, “Doctor Strangelove” doesn’t seem so funny anymore.

So, no.  Neither the folks at Texas A&M nor in the White House inner circle are playing 3-D chess.  They’d be lucky to handle the complexities of Go Fish.