Elliot Page Isn't Playing Achilles! Who (other than Curmie) could have guessed?

You may, perhaps, recall, Gentle Reader, that Curmie had a good time a couple months ago, laughing at the conservative hand-wringers who convinced themselves that Elliot (formerly Ellen) Page was going to play Achilles in Christopher Nolan’s cinematic version of “The Odyssey.” 

There were rumors, you see, and that was sufficient evidence for idiots like Rob Finnerty of Newsmax and the terminally self-important and generally wrong Elon Musk to decry the casting of, in Finnerty’s words, “a girl who dresses as a guy who’s five-foot-one, 118 pounds” as “the greatest warrior in history.”  Even Finnerty acknowledges that Page would “reportedly” play Achilles, but the rest of his screed works on the assumption that the rumors should indeed be believed.  The once savvy Jack Marshall launched into a diatribe against “wokeness” and “stunt casting,” writing that Page “was cast” as Achilles.  No room for skepticism when there is righteous dudgeon just waiting to be spewed!

Guess what?  Page isn’t playing Achilles!  There is indeed some question as to whether Achilles even appears, either as a ghost or in a flashback.  The preview showing of the film happened a couple of nights ago, and Curmie can’t find any commentary he’d regard as trustworthy that says anything one way or the other.  Someone on Reddit says Achilles isn’t in the film, but Curmie isn’t betting the mortgage on that assurance.

Curmie confesses that it has been a very long time since he last read Homer, but does think it would be a little strange not to have Achilles appear, either as a shade in the underworld or in a flashback scene, especially since the role Page actually is playing, Sinon, doesn’t appear anywhere in Homer at all.  The character is best known to us through Vergil’s Aeneid.  He was the Greek soldier, a cousin of Odysseus, who allows himself to be captured by the Trojans, pretends to be a deserter, and convinces them to bring the Trojan Horse inside the city gates. 

Page’s Sinon isn’t going to over-power the Trojans, but that’s not his job.  He outwits them instead, and Page’s charisma and facility with language would seem to be appropriate qualifications for the role.  It’s also worth pointing out that Greek men in that period didn’t really have a lot of choice about whether they’d go to war.  You couldn’t opt out because you were small.  Moreover, Page’s diminutive size could actually be used to advantage for this particular role, making the subterfuge that Sinon had been forsaken or sacrificed by the Greek army more plausible.  Of course, we don’t know what the real Sinon looked like because... he never existed except as a fictive character.  That’s a 5th century CE image of him at the top of the page: over a millennium after he supposedly existed, in other words.  But he does look a little pudgy compared to Elliot Page...

Curmie is just spit-balling here, but there are, or at the very least could be, good and appropriate reasons to cast Elliot Page.  Plus, of course, there’s the likelihood that Nolan and Page just like working with each other.  There’s plenty of hot air about how Nolan cast Page to have a better chance at an Oscar.  That’s true to the extent that Page is a good actor, thereby making the film better, but the movie had already met those dumb “inclusion” requirements through other means, and Sinon is unlikely to be a big enough role to qualify as “significant,” anyway.

Curmie does note that he was led to believe that Page would probably take on the role of Elpenor (who at least appears in Homer’s epic!).  This rumor, too, was regarded as definitive by a lot of folks as recently as last week.  Curmie does point out, however, that he italicized the words “reported” and “expected” in his post back in May, suggesting that whereas the Elpenor rumor, unlike the Achilles rumor, was at least plausible, he wasn’t going to suggest that such casting was indeed a fact.

So, there are, unsurprisingly, those who feel the need to complain for the sake of complaining about changing Homer’s plotline, adding the Sinon character.  <Sigh.>  Adaptations, additions, and edits have been a part of the business since, well, at least as far back as Homer, who drew from other versions of what we’d now call mythological tales.  Greek tragedies borrowed (stole?) from Homer, Hesiod, and whoever else was handy.  The Aeschylean, Sophoclean, and Euripidean versions of the murders of Clytemnestra and Aegisthus by Orestes and Electra differ from each other in significant ways.  (Euripides’ Electra actually makes fun of Aeschylus’s Libation Bearers.)  More recently, if you see an author’s name as part of a movie title (“Agatha Christie’s this,” “Bram Stoker’s that”), you can pretty much take it to the bank that there is little if any relationship between the film version and the original book.

Much of Curmie’s career as a scholar concentrated on these adaptations.  There’s no such thing as a direct translation, of course, but there are certainly adapted works that try to keep as closely as possible to the original.  Others, there’s just a hint.  For example, there’s Brian Friel’s play Living Quarters: After Hippolytus.  Without the subtitle, even a perceptive and well-educated theatre-goer might miss the reference, as there are a lot of differences between Friel’s version and Euripides’, extending far past character names and settings.  Some of these adaptations really work; some don’t, usually because they beat the reader/spectator over the head with their presumed contemporary relevance.

Curmie isn’t going to talk about whether an idea worked or didn’t until he sees the final product.  He can speculate, as he did in discussing the Arena Stage production of Inherit the Wind, but that’s as far as he’ll go.  He could watch “The Odyssey” and love it… or hate it… or think it was “meh.”  He could think including Sinon or casting Page was brilliant or stupid or somewhere in-between.  But Christopher Nolan has proven to be someone who makes a lot of good choices, and Curmie isn’t going to criticize him without knowing a lot more than he does now.

Reviews from the London screening have all been positive, even enthusiastic.  Whether you or I agree, Gentle Reader, will be a matter of individual taste.  Maybe we think Nolan hit the proverbial home run; maybe we think he hit a lazy one-hop grounder to the shortstop… or struck out.  But one thing we must agree on is that he handled the casting controversies, especially the bit involving Elliot Page, brilliantly.  We know that he is heavily involved in the marketing of his films, and he got mountains of publicity for a project that hadn’t been released yet… and made the right-wing pundits look like idiots in the process.  Whether Nolan actively encouraged the mistaken belief that Page was to play Achilles or just sat back to watch the self-inflicted carnage almost doesn’t matter.

There’s one other aspect that Curmie, as a theatre historian, can’t help but mention.  When the famous Playboy riots happened at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin in 1907, the theatre’s directors kept the doors open.  For several nights, the audience couldn’t hear the performance over the boos of the protestors.  But—key point here—those folks had to buy a ticket to get inside to boo.  And a lot of other people wanted to see what all the fuss was about.  They bought tickets, too.  Curmie predicts “The Odyssey” will sell well, whether or not it’s a great, or even good, film.  Whatever you think of him as a director, Christopher Nolan is a bright lad.  Or maybe he just paid attention in Theatre History class.

Flo Balogun and the (Sort of) Disappearing Red Card

Curmie has a couple of essays already in progress, but he’s going to do something a little out of the ordinary: there are ways in which this piece will be passé within a few hours or so after it’s posted, so it’s quite possible that you, Gentle Reader, will know things that, as of this writing (morning and early afternoon of Monday the 6th), are still unknowable. 

It’s an interesting time of the year for sports fans.  If you narrow your vision to the major team sports in this country, there’s not a lot happening.  The NFL, NBA, and NHL seasons are over, and the MLB pennant races haven’t really shaped up yet: fans know who they want to win, but it’s unclear as yet what other team they want to lose to help their team’s chances.  But Wimbledon is heading into its final week, there’s the WNBA, horse racing (that dead heat in the featured race at Saratoga yesterday was pretty fun), golf… and above all, there’s the World Cup.

Tonight, the USMNT attempts to move on to the quarter-finals for the first time since 2002, and they’ll do so with star striker Folarin “Flo” Balogun in the lineup.  He has three goals in this tournament and no other American has more than one, so that matters.  Balogun received a red card for dangerous play in the second half of the Round of 32 game against Bosnia-Herzegovina; that carries with it not merely being sidelined (without being replaced) for the remainder of the match in question, but a suspension for the next game, as well.  Well, it did… for a while.  We’ll come back to that.

As the photo above shows, there’s no question that Balogun stepped on the ankle of Tarik Muharemovic in a scuffle for a loose ball.  That part is undeniable.  It’s also clear that it was completely unintentional, not malicious or even reckless; Balogun wasn’t even looking at Muharemovic.  Furthermore, it appears that the VAR (Video Assisted Referee) review of the play showed the referee only still and slow-motion images.  A full-speed version would have added important context; former English Premier league referee Andy Davies says the omission “does not align with VAR protocols.”  Anyway, a play that the referee didn’t initially even call a foul turned into a red card. 

Curmie’s own athletic career is, shall we say, rather undistinguished.  He never played in an organized league at a level above collegiate intramurals.  There was one incident, though, that’s pretty memorable, even over a half-century later.  Curmie was in goal for his dorm against our arch-rivals (the dorm just up the hill from ours).  I made a pretty good save (if I do say so myself), diving to my right, making the stop, and covering up the ball while lying on the ground.  One of the other team’s forwards proceeded to kick me in the left ear.  Was it intentional?  Maybe.  I think it was in that grey area: not really intended, but he could have jumped over me pretty easily. 

A moment later, there was a referee’s whistle.  Any thoughts I might have had about a delayed foul call against the guy who kicked me soon vanished.  That dude did get punished, though… just not in the way I’d contemplated.  One of my fullbacks, who happened to be a linebacker on the varsity football team, didn’t take kindly to seeing his friend and teammate kicked in the head, especially by someone from that team… so he body-slammed the guy.  Yeah, he got the equivalent of a red card.  I appreciated the gesture, but would have preferred not to have played the rest of the game a man down.  (To be honest, I don’t remember if we ultimately won.  I think so, though.)

Revenons à nos moutons…  It’s difficult to say whether the red card against Balogun was considered legitimate by objective and knowledgeable viewers.  The folks on Fox thought not, but it’s difficult to say where the line between neutrality and jingoism is drawn.  It’s worth noting that the British newspaper The Guardian described the play as “a seemingly innocuous challenge” and the red card as “widely condemned as extremely harsh.”  And the quality of the officiating in general has been, to put it politely, somewhat less than what would be appropriate for an event of this magnitude.  The France/Paraguay match may be the most egregious example, but it’s not alone.

Balogun, to his credit, reacted to the suspension about as professionally as he possibly could have: “It’s important for me to say, first and foremost, it was totally unintentional.  The choice of the referee was his choice. I don’t think it was the correct choice. I think a yellow card would’ve been fair, due to it not being intentional….  It’s something that happened; we have to move forward, and I have to accept it.”  Elsewhere, he says, “There’s still lots of people we’re inspiring, little kids, boys and girls who are watching, and we have to show them the correct way to handle things, even when you think it’s unjust.”  He’s a class act.

According to FIFA (the Fédération Internationale de Football Association) rules, such suspensions cannot be appealed.  Uh huh.  Yesterday, FIFA announced that the ban against Balogun had been suspended for a year.  The rationale was not clearly stated, at least not in any place Curmie has been able to find.  It’s presumed that the misuse of VAR was the determinant (fig leaf?).  If you put enough modifiers on the change of direction, it’s unprecedented.  It’s the first time since the next-game suspension rule was put in place that a player did not, in fact, have to sit out the next game for a red card in a World Cup game per se.  There was a case in 1962 (before that rule), and a number of players, including Portuguese star Cristiano Ronaldo, have been granted suspended sentences, as it were, for red cards in international competitions held before the World Cup got underway.

Needless to say, FIFA, the organization Curmie once described as “The perfect blend of corruption, arrogance, incompetence, sexism, and boorishness” bears a lot of responsibility.  The sexism isn’t as foregrounded in this Men’s World Cup (Curmie’s earlier comments were linked to the 2015 Women’s World Cup), but the other descriptors are certainly on display. 

The situation is complicated further by the intervention of Donald Trump into the whole business.  His phone call(s?) to FIFA Head Honcho Gianni Infantino may have been simply a political leader sticking up for his nation’s team, but you can be certain, Gentle Reader, that the rest of the world won’t see it that way, especially after that utterly bizarre “FIFA Peace Prize” nonsense a few months ago.  Of course, Trump felt it necessary to brag about his intrusion into the process, thereby intensifying the suspicions of everyone who isn’t, well, American... and plenty of us who are. It’s also worth noting the irony that Balogun wouldn’t be playing for the US at all except for the birthright citizenry Trump seeks to overturn.  La la, how the life goes on.

Even Sepp Blatter, the former Exalted Poobah of FIFA, and one of the most loathsome creatures ever to slither across the planet’s surface, argues that “Red cards are not overturned by political phone calls. They are overturned by rules, evidence and independent bodies.  If a U.S. President intervenes with the FIFA President—and a player is suddenly cleared before a World Cup knockout match—the question is unavoidable: Quo vadis, FIFA?  Football must never become a playground for political power.”  True, Blatter is not the best spokesperson for such an argument, but he does have a point.

Tonight’s US match is against Belgium, whose coach, Rudi Garcia, and the Royal Belgian Football Association [RBFA] aren’t thrilled that their team will now face an American squad at full strength instead of one missing its greatest goal-scoring threat.  Garcia brought out the snark: “I didn’t know that 5 July was equal to 1 April at FIFA.”  Part of the Belgian complaint sounds whiny, however much they say they’re protecting the sanctity of the game rather than their own interests.  They do have a point, however, that they prepared for three days for tonight’s game with the assurance that Balogun wouldn’t play, so their entire defensive strategy has to be revised on short notice.

UEFA (the Union of European Football Associations) issued a statement which pulls no punches.  Here’s part of it:

Sometimes rules are open to interpretation. In this case not. A minimum automatic suspension of one match following a red card is not a discretionary option and does not require the decision of a competent body to be enacted. It is a principle embedded in regulations, which cannot be made subject to exceptions, let alone in the middle of a tournament where several other players have been in the same situation and regularly served their suspension…. We express our disbelief at such an unprecedented, incomprehensible and unjustifiable decision.

Tell us how you really feel, guys…

Former England star Wayne Rooney calls the reversal “an absolute disgrace” and “wrong in every way,” but he makes the further point that had FIFA lifted the red card altogether, which he calls “probably the right decision,” things would be different.  But leaving it while postponing the suspension is sort of the worst of both worlds.

There are plenty of other expressions of dismay, but… as a dear friend and former colleague was wont to say, “What is, is.”  Balogun will almost certainly play.  It would be a display of extraordinary sportsmanship were he not to do so, and that Instagram post with Michael Jackson’s “Bad” playing over the top certainly suggests that he’ll be in the lineup.  He will no doubt be booed by opposing fans for a situation he didn’t create.  Previously neutral fans will flock to whoever is playing the US.  Belgium will seek to appeal, but will almost certainly be unsuccessful.  Should the US prevail over Belgium, especially if Balogun plays a significant role, it and any subsequent success will be tainted.

Curmie finds himself agreeing with ESPN’s Mark Ogden that, as the headline says, “Nobody benefits from FIFA letting Balogun off the hook—not even the USMNT.”  The integrity of the competition is compromised, and “Who wants to win if victory becomes tainted by murky interventions that take place without any explanation or transparency?”

As US soccer fans, the best we can hope for is for an American victory in which Balogun is a non-factor—that we get goals from Christian Pulisic or Tim Weah or Weston McKennie or whoever… or a 0-0 draw going to a shootout the US wins despite Balogun missing his shot.  Not that Curmie wouldn’t be happy to see Flo get a hat trick, but it would be weird.

EDIT: It’s now Tuesday morning, and the US team got convincingly thumped last night.  Belgium was probably the better team.  They were certainly smarter, better-coached, and more prepared for the moment.  One suspects that the fact that they felt aggrieved by the FIFA reversal added to their resolve.  Would the US have fared better had the Balogun suspension not been reversed?  Probably, as they would have been the side that had been wronged by a bad call instead of the one benefitting from political interference.  

Would they have lost, anyway?  Probably.  But they’re unlikely to have been that sluggish, sloppy, and stupid.  It was embarrassing.  One of Curmie’s friends wrote that “Everything Trump touches turns to shit.”  Let’s just say there is little evidence to the contrary.

Independence Day and the Notion of Pride

We can do better than this.

Curmie has posted here not infrequently on the 4th of July, usually with some commentary on the significance of Independence Day.  One of his personal favorites of the genre comes from 2020, when he riffed on the opening sequence of the Aaron Sorkin series “The Newsroom.”  Our hero, Will McEvoy (Jeff Daniels) is on a three-person panel in some sort of academic setting.  They are asked by “Jenny,” a sophomore at whatever university is hosting the event, to “say what makes America the greatest country in the world.” 

After the other two panelists respond with slogans—“diversity and opportunity” and “freedom and freedom, so let’s keep it that way”—McEvoy responds, “The New York Jets.”  Even a Jets fan like Curmie laughed at the absurdity of that one.  (At least back when that show was filmed, the Jets didn’t completely suck, which they have for most of Curmie’s adult life.) After another evasion, the camera cuts to a woman near the back of the auditorium.  We don’t know who she is yet, but it’s MacKenzie McHale, McEvoy’s ex-girlfriend and soon to be his new executive producer.  She holds up a sign that says, “It’s not.”  She then flips the sign over and writes something else: “But it can be.”

There are 11 seconds of silence, at least in terms of diegetic sound.  There’s another roundabout response, and the moderator demands “a human moment.”  The camera cuts back to McHale, holding the “It’s not” sign.  A moment later, McEvoy blurts out, “It’s not the greatest country in the world, professor.  That’s my answer.”  The follow-up goes on for three minutes.  You can check out the link above or read the transcript, but there are two things Curmie wants to highlight.  There’s the litany of rankings, addressed to “sorority girl”:

... there is absolutely no evidence to support the statement that we’re the greatest country in the world. We’re seventh in literacy, twenty-seventh in math, twenty-second in science, forty-ninth in life expectancy, 178th in infant mortality, third in median household income, number four in labor force, and number four in exports. We lead the world in only three categories: number of incarcerated citizens per capita, number of adults who believe angels are real, and defense spending, where we spend more than the next twenty-six countries combined, twenty-five of whom are allies.

There are a couple of exaggerations in there, but no more than in the average political speech.  More importantly, this isn’t an indictment of America, simply a warning about allowing patriotism to morph into jingoism and what might now be called hallucinatory rhetoric.  

The other thing to point out is that the sign is both an insistence on truth and a symbol of hope.  “But it can be” is a rallying cry, a call to arms (in the metaphorical sense, at least).  

At the risk of sounding like a Monty Python routine, Curmie adds a third point: in the opening moments of a left-leaning series that aired during the Obama administration, the central character yearns for the days when “We sure used to be” the greatest country in the world.  True, the litany of attributes—“We waged wars on poverty, not poor people,” for example—bespeaks a liberal mindset.  But the desire to return to the glories of the past sure sounds a lot like a desire to “Make America Great Again.”

How sadly ironic, then, that the slogan is most associated with an octogenarian toddler with no impulse control, a pathological inability to accept responsibility for his own actions, and a track record that includes stealing from a charity, sexual assault, and wholesale financial shenanigans ranging from garden variety grift to de facto selling pardons to people who really are “the worst of the worst.”  All the things that any normal President from either party would have orchestrated for the country’s 250th anniversary celebration are gone, replaced by ultra-partisan posturing and a level of ego-centrism that would make Narcissus himself blush. 

Plus, of course, there’s the destruction of the East Wing of the White House, the paving over of the Rose Garden, the vulgar and frankly embarrassing UFC extravaganza that destroyed even more of the White House lawn, the totally botched reflecting pool project, that ridiculous “state fair” farce… Curmie would go on, but he’s trying to keep this essay shorter than the Mahābhārata.

None of what Curmie is discussing here comes under the heading of actual policy decisions.  Curmie has disagreed with virtually everything this POTUS has done, but he had plenty of reservations about the policies of a lot of 47’s predecessors, too.  Curmie grants, however, that all of those guys were at least trying to do the best thing for the country, however much he would have preferred a different approach.  Not so, Dear Leader.  He has never cared about anyone or anything but himself and perhaps a small circle of sycophantic admirers or fellow billionaire hucksters.  If saying any of this makes Curmie “deranged,” then so fucking be it. 

Curmie is angry that a celebration he’d been looking forward to—let’s face it, I’m not going to be around for #300—has been derailed by the hubristic and incompetent machinations of the worst President in the history of the country.  Yes, angry.  Curmie is not a nationalist, but he does think he qualifies as a patriot.  Having spent at least three months in each of three other countries, he’s still going to consider himself lucky to be from the US.  That would be, of course the real US, the one that countless World Cup fans have encountered to their amazement: the place where foreigners are welcomed by the overwhelming majority of the locals; where neighbors help each other out; where the question isn’t whether to give to charities, but to which ones. 

This is not the America inhabited by Donald Trump or Stephen Miller or Mike Johnson.  But it’s where most of us live, irrespective of where (or if) we worship, who our favorite basketball team is, or even who we voted for last time out.  There are those who want to take that America away from us, and they think they have defeated us, or soon will.  Curmie responds (with a tip of the hat to Johnny Carson): Not so fast, Semiquincentennial-Breath.  We are not our government.  The real America is out there, embodied in people like Major Jason Watson, like Leen Hijaz, like the citizens of Curmie’s much-beloved former hometown of Lawrence, Kansas, whose embrace of the Algerian World Cup team using their city as a home base made international headlines.

But that takes us to another point.  Curmie is proud of Lawrence, not because of the notoriety, but because they, my former neighbors, did something right.  Curmie was legitimately sad that Algerian team lost their elimination round game on the west coast Thursday night.  He may not be in Lawrence anymore, but Les Fennecs were his team, too (after the US). 

That notion of pride is intriguing, however.  Another video clip came across Curmie’s path this week.  It was of the late, great, George Carlin talking about, among other things, his problem with the slogan “proud to be an American.”  He suggests that “pride should be reserved for something you achieve or attain on your own, not something that happens by accident of birth…. You wouldn’t say I’m proud to be 5’11”.  I’m proud to have a predisposition for colon cancer…. If you’re happy with it, that’s fine: put that on your car.”

Speaking of pride: the first Pride events happened in the early 1970s, but Curmie wasn’t aware of them, or especially of their designation as “Pride” until later: after, in fact, the release of the Tom Robinson Band’s “Power in the Darkness” LP, which featured a song called “Sing If You’re Glad to Be Gay.”  Chances are, you’ve never heard it, Gentle Reader, because the TRB never had much influence west of the Atlantic; Curmie was working on his Master’s in England when the song came out in 1978.  Whether the TRB consciously rejected the notion of “pride,” or whether they’d never heard it (as Curmie hadn’t at the time), the result was to center on being “glad” or “happy” rather than “proud” of one’s sexual orientation, which of course is another of those accidents of birth that Carlin was talking about.

Pride in one’s own accomplishments is perfectly reasonable, of course, at least in moderation.  That extends, in Curmie’s world, to pride in the achievements of his former students, because in some small way he helped prepare them for that success.  And there is the crux.  George Carlin notwithstanding, pride in the good things that one’s nation has done makes some sense.  (So too, of course, is embarrassment at its transgressions.)  Indeed, taking pride in literally anyone’s honest attainments makes some sense; we’re all fellow travelers here, after all.  But that emotion is usually only a variation on happiness.  Curmie is happy the Knicks won the NBA title this year, but he’s not proud of them except to the extent that they manifested admirable qualities along the way: teamwork, refusal to give up, etc.  A player who simply has a good jump shot: cause for celebration, but not for pride.

For pride to truly manifest, however, there needs to be a personal connection.  Curmie is proud of the two former students who are off to grad school in the fall, but their perhaps equally qualified friends who never took my classes, not so much.  It would be nice to actually be proud to be an American.  The solution is obvious, and it isn’t capitulation.  We, all of us, need to become personally invested in creating a nation worthy of our pride.  That will take resolve, work, perhaps even sacrifice.  But we must, we can, we will, do this.  Roll up your sleeves, Gentle Reader.  We’ve got work to do.

Contemplating Trump v. Barbara

 

This was intended to be the first of a handful of topics for Curmie to discuss with a paragraph or two devoted to each story.  It kinda took on a life of its own: enough to be a stand-alone piece.  Curmie will (or perhaps won’t) write about those other issues in due course.  Anyway…

The SCOTUS ruling on birthright citizenship was both welcome and disturbing.  It is troubling that the court even looked at Dear Leader’s strained argument; that the decision was less than unanimous is unconscionable.  Of course, Alito and Thomas are nothing if not corrupt partisan hacks; Curmie expected better from Gorsuch, though.  (Kavanaugh’s partial dissent is at least pretty much coherent even if Curmie disagrees with his conclusions; that’s the highest praise Curmie has ever given Kavanaugh, btw.)  The 14th Amendment is strikingly clear: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” 

The pseudo-Christian right offers objections: that somehow babies born to mothers in the country temporarily or illegally are not “subject to the jurisdiction” of the US, and that the world has changed since 1868.  The first argument is patently absurd (the fact that Folarin Balogun, the leading US goal-scorer in this year’s World Cup, was born to such a “temporary” resident makes Curmie smirk a little).  The second claim is both self-evident and irrelevant to the Trump v. Barbara judgment.  Well, there’s a third argument that we’ll get to in a moment. 

We’ll leave aside Trump’s own rhetoric, both the nationalist/racist stuff about protecting American values and the outright lies about being the only country in the world to have birthright citizenship, and move on to the real issues.

The 14th Amendment, written in the wake of the horrific Dred Scott decision, was intended primarily to ensure the rights of newly-freed slaves and their descendants.  The “subject to the jurisdiction” business was clarified in US v. Wong Kim Ark in 1898.  Basing their decision largely on English common law, the court declared the only exceptions to be “children of foreign sovereigns or their ministers, or born on foreign public ships, or of enemies within and during a hostile occupation of part of our territory,” and “Indians not taxed.”  In the absence of a renunciation of American citizenship or the declaration of loyalty to some other nation, everyone else born in the US is a citizen thereof.  It’s time for Curmie to repeat that he’s not a lawyer, but all this seems pretty straightforward, and indeed every subsequent case has been decided on similar grounds.

To be fair, the left’s sniping that Marco Rubio and three of Trump’s children would be denied citizenship by Trump’s policy is a cheap shot.  Executive Order 14160 specifically states that “Nothing in this order shall be construed to affect the entitlement of other individuals, including children of lawful permanent residents, to obtain documentation of their United States citizenship.”  Granted, too, it’s certainly possible for one SCOTUS to overturn the ruling of an earlier version.  US v. Ark is itself a good example.  In more recent times, Brown v. Topeka overturned Plessy v. Ferguson; the Dobbs decision overturned Roe v. Wade.  So it’s possible for this SCOTUS to reverse some or all of the US v. Ark findings.  But the Constitution itself cannot be overturned by SCOTUS, only by amendment or a Constitutional Convention. 

It’s interesting, too, that opponents of birthright citizenship want to quibble over a phrase in the 14th Amendment, but a lot of those same people pretend that a much stronger case about the 2nd doesn’t exist.  Curmie thinks the right to bears arms, as described in that amendment, seems to exist primarily to support “a well-regulated militia.”  There’s obviously room for debate here, and there’s no conceivable way the fledgling government of the late 18th century would have attempted to take guns away from hunters or westward explorers and settlers.  But there’s a lot stronger constitutional authority for some form of gun control than for denying birthright citizenship.  (Curmie also notes here, as he’s done before, that personal ownership of some weapons is indeed illegal.  We’re not talking about drawing a line that’s never existed; it’s about possibly moving one that’s already there.)

Considerations of the 2nd Amendment and the debate over gun control also lead us inexorably to the argument that… wait for it… times have changed.  Weaponry is a lot different now than in was in the late 18th century.  The revolver as we now think of it wasn’t invented until 45 years after the Bill of Rights was ratified.  The enclosed cartridge didn’t come along for another 18 years (a little longer than that for an American-made version).  Even in all those Old West movies set in the late 19th century, where the good guy and the bad guy both carried a pair of six-shooters, you get 12 shots and then have to re-load, one bullet at a time.  That’s a far cry from what a currently completely legal semi-automatic rifle can do today.  “Things have changed” arguments are either legitimate or they’re not.  Both sides want to be able to use that argument themselves but deny it to the opposition.

As is perhaps inevitable, the concept of “original intent” appears in this debate.  It is certainly true that the 14th Amendment was in many ways a rebuttal to Dred Scott, but, Justice Thomas’s argument to the contrary notwithstanding, it was not only that, and Supreme Courts have ruled accordingly on several occasions over the last century and a half.  One of the more interesting, not to be confused with intelligent, arguments against the SCOTUS decision comes from Texas Racist-in-Chief Governor Greg Abbott.  He calls the 6-3 decision “a missed opportunity,” “a powerful magnet for illegal immigration,” “an absurdity that was never contemplated by our Constitution nor agreed to by the American people.” 

He’s even partially correct: the idea that children born to people in the country illegally should be granted citizenship would indeed have been alien to the framers of the Constitution or the 14th Amendment.  That’s because the concept of someone being in the country illegally didn’t exist.  It wasn’t until the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 that there was anything approaching closed national borders.  That’s 14 years after the ratification of the 14th Amendment.

The other part of Abbott’s plaint, that unrestricted birthright citizenship encourages illegal immigration, is not without its merits.  “Anchor babies” do exist; a little over a quarter of a million babies are born each year to parents in the country illegally.  Curmie completely understands the impulse to end the current practice.  But the point is this: that’s irrelevant to the SCOTUS decision.  It is not the job of the Supreme Court to opt for what they consider to be the “best” option, but to consider only the constitutionality of a law or an action.  Thus, Curmie can be a supporter of abortion rights and still think Roe v. Wade was a bad decision.  There are plenty of “the ends justify the means” folks out there.  Most politicians on either side of the aisle fit that paradigm.  Curmie does not.

It may indeed be the case that the country would be better off if Trump’s Executive Order were allowed to stand.  What matters is that the Constitution won’t allow it.  Governor Abbott and his ideological kinfolk are free to attempt to amend the Constitution; the 21st Amendment repealed the 18th, after all.  Yes, that will take time and effort; just ask the proponents of the Equal Rights Amendment, which may or may not be the 28th Amendment. 

But the avenue is there, and it seems more reasonable than allowing a mentally incompetent jackass who happens to be President to ignore what the Constitution says and unilaterally decide the matter based on nothing but his own xenophobia.  Of course, being a narcissistic idiot, Dear Leader is now calling on Congress to pass a law eliminating birthright citizenship.  Uh, Donny Boy, it would still be unconstitutional if Congress did do so.  But wasting time and money on a frivolous and arguably racist crusade sure does play to the base, and it’s a lot easier than actually governing.

La la, how the life goes on.