4 ½ Updates

This one is long, even by Curmie’s standards.  Buckle up.

The four updates Curmie wants to write about today all concern recent news.  We’ll get to them in a moment, but let’s start with the “half an update.”  Curmie wrote “Questions. Curmie’s Got Questions.” three days after the (alleged?) assassination attempt on then-ex-President Trump in Butler, PA, in July of 2024.  He expressed some doubts about the official version of events, asking a series of questions, most of which remain unanswered nearly two years later. 

There’s no question that there were shots fired, that Thomas Michael Crooks fired them, or that rally attendee Corey Comperatore was killed and two other onlookers were wounded.  That’s as far as Curmie would go then, and it’s as far as he’ll go now.  No scenario matches what we know: those events sure as hell look staged, but such a scenario would require active collusion from multiple members of both the FBI and the Secret Service, and that’s asking a bit much.  On the other hand, Trump’s injured ear sure did heal fast and without a scar, there’s no reasonable explanation for why he’d have abandoned his shoes, and this little B-movie excerpt certainly helped his campaign.  Oh, and substitute “incompetence” for “collusion” in the bit about the FBI and Secret Service a couple of sentences back.

More importantly, there really hasn’t been a lot of new information forthcoming, task force recommendations notwithstanding.  Curmie remains skeptical, but is well short of being a full-fledged conspiracy theorist.  What’s the update?  Well, it used to be that those who were most vocal in their insistence that it was all a fraudulent publicity stunt were almost exclusively anti-MAGAs.  Now, that seems to be changing.

Well, sort of.  Marjorie Taylor Greene and Tucker Carlson aren’t exactly the elected spokespeople for the MAGA movement.  To suggest, as one headline does, that “MAGA now thinks Trump’s assassination attempt was actually a hoax” is obviously misleading, and it should come as no surprise that the majority of articles making the claim are on left-leading sites.  Also, of course, it’s not so much that those folks who are changing their minds aren’t really doubting the authenticity of the events at Butler; they’ve just come to realize that Dear Leader doesn’t really care about them, and that his seemingly miraculous escape just might not have been specifically ordained by God Himself.

It’s half an update, in other words.

OK, on to the other stories, in decreasing order of the likelihood that you, Gentle Reader, know about this stuff.  We start, then, with the re-naming of the Kennedy Center.  Back in December, Curmie described it as “Dear Leader’s Latest Vanity Endeavor.”  As you are probably aware, U.S. District Judge Christopher R. Cooper ruled that “the Kennedy Center Board’s decision to rename the Center, along with its decision to affix President Trump’s name to the building’s façade, violate Congress’s unequivocal mandate. As stated at the outset, Congress gave the Kennedy Center its name, and only Congress can change it.”  As for the board’s vote to close the Center for two years, he writes, “The trustees might have assessed the propriety of closure in a number of prudent ways. This was not one.”  That’s a pretty fair rebuke.

In a follow-up order, Cooper gave the board two weeks to “remove all physical signage on the Kennedy Center building and grounds, including the front portico, that purports to rename the Kennedy Center after President Trump or any other individual besides President Kennedy.” 

Dear Leader’s response was depressingly predictable, displaying a level of unhinged petulance seldom seen in anyone over the age of three.  Standard operating procedure for the Trump administration is two-fold: 1). Go ahead with whatever unauthorized activity floats your boat at a particular moment in time because it’s likely to be irrevocable by the time the rest of the country knows about it (demolition of the East Wing, painting the reflecting pool so it no longer reflects, etc.) and 2). simply disobeying any judicial order they don’t like (e.g., the Kilmar Abrego Garcia case).  Oh, come to think of it, there’s a #3: whine about how abused you are that you’re expected to follow the rules. 

#1 becomes relevant in terms of the shut-down, as the people who’d be scheduling acts for the future have all been sacked, and the Center has been winding down since the announcement (by Trump, without board approval, by the way) in March.  #2 is likely; the board, all but the ex officio members of which are gutless sycophants, is likely to appeal the ruling.  And, of course, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum is already equivocating about whether he’ll actually enforce the order.  To be fair, the headline of the Time article linked here—“Trump’s Name Won’t Be Coming off the Kennedy Center Just Yet, Despite Court Order”—is misleading.  Burgum is quite possibly simply anticipating the possibility of an appeal and waiting to see if the order still holds.  Removing the name is at most a two-day operation, after all.

#3, of course, has already happened.  Dear Leader, bratty toddler that he is, hurled abuse at Cooper, and is seemingly washing his tiny hands of the Center.  If he can’t put his name on it, it isn’t important to him.  Well, duh.

We’ll see where this one goes.  One thing is certain: there’s more to come.

Next up: This one got at least a little publicity when it happened.  Last November, Curmie wrote about the case of Larry Bushart.  He’s the retired Tennessee cop who was charged with a felony for posting a meme in the aftermath of the shooting of Charlie Kirk.  Curmie granted that Bushart, a self-described “asshole,” posts a lot of memes, some of them not in the best of taste.  Still, it’s beyond absurd that anyone could believe that the meme constituted any kind of threat, let alone of “mass violence at a school.”  (The meme showed Donald Trump declaring that “we have to get over it” in response to a school shooting at Perry High School in Iowa.  Coincidentally, the local high school in Tennessee is Perry County High School.  Not the same place, and no threat even if it were.)

Curmie noted at the time that FIRE had gotten involved, and that they were assisting Bushart in a lawsuit against the county, the sheriff, and the sheriff’s investigator.  On May 20, FIRE announced an out of court settlement for $835,000.  Frankly, that seems a little low, given that Bushart spent 37 days in jail, lost his post-retirement job, and missed the birth of his grandchild, all over a meme the sheriff now admits he knew was about a different school.  But that’s a sizable enough chunk of change that perhaps, just perhaps, the next idiot cop might pause before so blatantly and stupidly violating someone’s 1st Amendment rights.  At the very least, prosecutors and judges might exercise a little judgment; it might be asking to much to expect small-town cops to do so.

Along similar lines is a more recent case involving the censorship of a composition the Watertown (WI) Wind Ensemble was to have played at their spring concert.  The brouhaha was over a piece dedicated to Marsha P. Johnson, a black trans activist who participated in the Stonewall uprising in 1969, and that was enough to have the pearl-clutchers of the school board forbid playing the piece.  When Curmie wrote about the situation on May 20, there was a concert (actually just that one short song) scheduled for that night at a local church, conducted by the composer, Omar Thomas.  You can see the video of that event here.  There are a lot of speeches, which you’re welcome to watch, of course, but you might like to know that Thomas is introduced shortly before the 58-minute mark, and the band starts at about 1:09:56.

The other part of the story was the involvement of the Minocqua Brewing Company in the person of owner/proprietor Kirk Bangstad.  He’s a controversial figure, to say the least (check out Curmie’s post for some details), and there was some concern that his invitation for the band to play at his establishment (in Madison, 40-ish miles from Watertown) might be longer on self-promotion than on bona fide support for the band.

Curmie wondered at the time, “Is it possible that this whole business is a scam, that there will never be a concert at the Minocqua Brewing Company, or that few if any of the musicians will be high school kids?  Could the tens of thousands of dollars raised for a still not finalized 501(c)3 find their way into Bangstad’s pocket, instead?”  Well… no, there was not a concert at the bar, or even outside in the parking lot, nor was there one Saturday the 23rd.  But there was a concert, the 501(c)3 now does exist, and a fair amount of money seems to have been raised.  Allow Curmie to explain.

We start with the exchanges between Bangstad and band booster club president Jay Sandvick.  NB: these are Bangstad’s recollections, paraphrased.  Are they still accurate?  At least largely, one suspects.  Anyway, there seems to have been an attempt in Watertown to poison the well, whether this resulted from legitimate fears, distrust of Bangstad, or garden variety cowardice.  Interestingly, Sandvick seemed convinced that the antagonism was coming from progressives rather than MAGAs.  If he was right, and Curmie is fully prepared to believe that he was, it just shows that there are idiots at every spot on the political spectrum.

A lot of musicians dropped out, and cancellation of the event seemed very likely.  Luckily (as it happens), the departures were framed as safety issues regarding the parking lot.  That problem was solved by moving the time and place: from Saturday in the bar’s parking lot to the following Thursday at Madison’s Barrymore Theater.  There’s video of that event here.  Speeches start at about the 4:05 mark; the band starts playing at about 20:12.  Be warned: the sound quality of the recording isn’t the best, and there’s some background conversation.

There are two other issues: First off, how many student musicians were there?  Curmie is old enough that anyone younger than 35 looks like a teenager, and even he suspects that the number of actual high-schoolers playing at either event could probably be counted on one hand.  Does that matter?  Well, sort of.  One would have hoped that more of the people directly affected by the censorial machinations of the school board would have participated, but Curmie isn’t going to assign blame, individually or collectively. 

The larger issue is whether the fund-raising event worked.  It did.  As noted in Curmie’s earlier piece, it would be hard to pull off any chicanery in an event so publicly accessible.  Bangstad presented an over-sized check for $82,000; the real check will apparently be for $85,188.12.  A cynic might argue that Bangstad actually collected more than that; that’s possible, one supposes, but Curmie doubts it.  Curmie does take issue with the “check number,” 8647.  First off, that’s just a little too cute.  More importantly, it takes away from the purpose of the event: this isn’t about national politics; it’s about demanding constitutional enforcement at the local level.  These cases continue: it was stupid for an Alaska high school to shut down a performance of “Bohemian Rhapsody” 15 years ago; it’s stupid to shut down a performance of “A Mother of a Revolution” today.  The most important battles are often the most seemingly insignificant ones.  Some hills are worth dying on… metaphorically only, please.

And so we move on to the story that you, Gentle Reader, are least likely to have heard about.  It may, in its own way, be more troubling than any of the others.  A little short of four years ago, Curmie wrote a post titled “Changing Voter Eligibility: Four Really Stupid Ideas.”  Curmie described one of them this way: “whereas this is the worst idea in a contest of plenty horrible ideas, it’s also the only one with a chance of becoming law.”  You see where this is going, don’t you, Gentle Reader?

Back then, the small town of Seaford, Delaware (population about 8,000) changed its charter to allow businesses to vote in local elections.  Quoth the idiot mayor, David Genshaw, “These are folks that have fully invested in their community with the money, with their time, with their sweat. We want them to have a voice if they choose to take it.”  Needless to say, not only is the policy stupid on its face, but Genshaw’s argument is barely coherent.  That doesn’t mean that other towns aren’t going to join in the stupidity, or that courts aren’t going to suck up to where the economic and therefore political power is (Citizens United, anyone?).

One of the other Delaware burgs to join in the fun is Fenwick Island, located about an hour ESE of Seaford.  They, too, decided to let companies vote (apparently they had done so for a long time).  Their mayor,  Natalie Magdeburger, makes Genshaw look positively Solomonic by comparison.  She actually argues that the majority of properties in her town are owned by family or marital trusts, and that therefore “our voting system is just, fair and gives everyone a voice. As a town, we believe that a property owner who pays taxes and is subject to our ordinances should have a say in who represents them on our Town Council.”  By this reasoning, Curmie could have voted in New Hampshire between inheriting his father’s house there in 1999 and selling the property in 2022, despite not having lived there since 1994.  Of course, Curmie is actually a human (and not an obscenely rich one), so he probably couldn’t get away with that nonsense. 

Significantly, if voting franchise is even slightly linked to property ownership, then we’re one step closer to oligarchy, with the next logical step being the disenfranchisement of apartment-dwellers and other renters.  And if your name isn’t on the deed—if, for example, the house is in your spouse’s name, or you’re a college kid living at home—then too bad, so sad.  No, Curmie isn’t predicting this, but despite his comment from 2022, he didn’t think the whole corporations-can-vote scam would stand up to a legal challenge.  But it just did.

The ACLU sued to ensure that voters should necessarily be of the flesh-and-blood variety.  They lost, because Judge Craig Karsnitz would lose a battle of wits with an anvil.  He argues that granting franchise to non-human entities doesn’t dilute the political power of actual residents.  That’s not just counter-intuitive; it’s insane.  The only reason to support the preposterous idea that corporations, LLCs, and trusts ought to have voting rights is precisely to reduce the suasion of actual residents. 

Politics is a zero-sum game in this regard: if we allow X to vote, then the power of not-X is concomitantly reduced.  We can disagree about who should have franchise—whether the voting age should be adjusted, or whether legal immigrants should be allowed to vote in certain types of elections, for example.  And if the mayors of tiny towns in Delaware and the idiots who elected them want to cede power to non-human moneyed interests, presumably with the hope of attracting even more of such entities to a state that already has over twice as many corporations as registered (human) voters, then we can at least find our way to something that looks like a rationale. 

These people are stupid, but they’re not as stupid as the judge who thinks there will be no likelihood of non-human “voters” overturning the will of actual human residents.  Indeed, the only people who cannot vote on behalf of a trust or a corporation or whatever in which they have an interest are those who actually live there, as that, you see, would give them more than one vote.  Curmie would also like to see a corporation show up at a polling place.  Tailgate East12 pretty much nails it: “Corporations cannot vote. A human has to place that vote on behalf of said corporations essential[ly] giving a Delaware voter more than [one] vote or giving an out of state owner of a corporation an illegal vote or giving a foreign owner of a corporation a vote which he or she is not entitled to.”  A group called Demand Justice argues, quite reasonably, that “Corporations aren't people. They don’t have kids in local schools, they don’t drink the water, they can’t be jailed for crimes, and they shouldn’t get a vote.”

It’s also worth noting, as pointed out by Jacob Owens on spotlightdelaware.org,  “there are no limits on the number of artificial non-human entities eligible to vote based on their ownership interest in any single property parcel nor is there a minimum share of a property required to register. That means if several LLCs jointly own a beach home in Fenwick Island, all of the owners can register to vote, regardless of how little a stake.”  Curmie will trust you to understand the implications, Gentle Reader. 

The good news, such as it is, is that a couple of Delaware legislators intend to introduce legislation that would end this inane practice.  Curmie wishes them luck.

So, the count for the 4 1/2 updates: three positive, at least in the short term, one negative, one-half pretty much neutral.

Thoughts on the KC/ACTF Divorce

 

Curmie has never been a particular fan of the Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival.  They’re too political, in two senses of the term: your show will stand a much better chance of advancing to the next round if it espouses a sort of squishy Kumbaya leftie ideology, and your actors will be more likely to succeed in the Irene Ryan competition (a sort of best collegiate actor in the country award) if they’re BIPOC and/or LGBTQ+.  Oh, and above all, make sure your director is a muckety-muck in the KCACTF hierarchy.  Students from the same school as a regional official tend to do very well, indeed.  Go figure. 

By way of contrast, when Curmie became an officer in a different national theatre organization, he stopped nominating his own students for a fairly substantial scholarship awarded by that society.  “Appearance of impropriety,” and all that…  FWIW, two of his students had won that award in the previous three years. 

Even apart from Curmie’s discomfort at the whole art-as-competition business, KCACTF judges are sometimes quite helpful, but a goodly number of them are either eminently unqualified or condescending jerks who think “you should have said the line this way” (sez you) or “that light was white” (duh) is somehow a useful contribution to the discussion.  It’s also a problem that someone outside the production team is telling student actors (in particular), generally before the show has closed, that they should do something other than listen to their director for guidance.  At the other end of the spectrum, the proliferation of extra “merit” awards, generally little more than an opportunity to stroke a director’s pet students, had reached the level of farce long ago.

And, of course, going to the regional or national conferences prevented students from participating in the productions at the home college.  You might be able to miss a weekend early in a rehearsal process, but whenever Curmie happened to be directing in the first slot of the spring semester, he often did so without the availability of some of the best actors at the school because they’d be gone during tech or performance dates.  A couple of times, actors came to him before auditions, saying “I want to do your show if I get this or this part, but otherwise I’m going to KCACTF.”  It may or may not have been in keeping with departmental policy to go along, but Curmie did.  In one instance, the actor got one of the desired roles; in another, an actor who would have had a featured role went uncast.

Finally, it’s expensive.  If you want your show critiqued, you have to pay the judge, and generally that also means taking them to dinner and putting them up in a local hotel for a night.  Sending students to a regional or national festival means one of two things: either the department picks up the bill for transportation, housing, food, and registration, thereby reducing the budget for the production season, or the opportunities are limited to those students who can finance their own attendance.  Both alternatives kinda suck, although a reasonable alternative fails to present itself.

All that said, there was a definite upside, and Curmie has a number of friends whose experience of the organization has been considerably better than his own.  It should also be clear from the foregoing that whereas some of Curmie’s concerns were caused by KCACTF per se, most were simply the nature of the beast: if you’re going to have this kind of event, it’s going to take time and money away from someone.

More to the point, KCACTF has indeed provided opportunities for theatre students to meet and interact, and they’ve been useful advocates for arts education in general.  They have encouraged tens of thousands of young thespians over the years.  And they have no doubt saved a department or two simply by giving prizes.  In Curmie’s adopted state of Texas, if you can win a trophy at something, it’s a good thing.  Not as important as football, of course, but still worthy.  

This is even more true at the high school level, but there are a lot of collegiate programs out there that choose to advertise that they had actors nominated to compete in the Irene Ryan competition.  The fact that two actors from every show critiqued by a KCACTF judge are automatically advanced goes unmentioned.  And if, as was the case for a student-directed show Curmie advised a few years ago, there are only two people in the cast, there’s a pretty good chance they’ll both be nominated.  (Luckily, both actors happened to be very good, but they wouldn’t have been treated differently if they weren’t.)

You will have surmised by now, Gentle Reader, that when Curmie reached the point in his career when he could decline an opportunity to participate in KCACTF, he did so.  Again, this is in no way intended to denigrate anyone who has had a different experience than Curmie’s.  But, as noted above, he’s never been a fan.

And now, finally, we get to the catalyst for this post: the decision  by the National Committee of the American College Theater Festival to sever their 58-year-old alliance with the Kennedy Center.  The announcement doesn’t specifically mention the bone-headed decision to append the name of Dear Leader to the front (!) of the Kennedy Center’s official title, but it doesn’t have to.  “Circumstances and decisions that do not align with our organization’s values” gets the job done a little more politicly.  Everyone knew what they meant. 

The affiliation between the Kennedy center and ACTF goes back to when Curmie was in junior high, with literally zero thoughts of ever going into theatre as a career.  His major accomplishment in the field to that point was playing Scrooge in a 5th-grade version of A Christmas Carol, a role he got because Mrs. Hamilton thought he could learn all the lines.  But the linkage wasn’t made explicit in the title until Curmie was already teaching college.  That is, the festival was the ACTF, not the KCACTF.  The change happened quite a while ago, though, and one can understand why: both organizations benefitted from being associated with the other, so it made sense to play up the partnership.

Since the Kennedy Center has devolved under the “leadership” of Dear Leader himself into a celebration of popular mediocrity  (Sylvester Stallone?  Really?), there is no upside for ACTF.  There’s no prestige, certainly, and indeed the linkage suggests a capitulation to the censorial and ultra-partisan idiocy that now seems to pervade literally everything associated with the Kennedy Center.  So the split makes sense from ACTF’s perspective.  They’ll run their own festival for the foreseeable future (i.e., probably another three years).

Of course, ACTF is not without its own partisanship, and their decision was in part a predictable exercise in virtue signaling.  But was it necessary?  Yes.  Yes, it was.

Dear Leader's Latest Vanity Endeavor

How telling is it that they’re either too stupid or too lazy
to use the right damned font?

It’s still the Gulf of Mexico.  It’s still the Department of Defense.  It’s still the Kennedy Center.  When we are finally rid of the Sociopath-in-Chief, these titles, at least, can return to normalcy with some dispatch.  It will take longer to recover from the crippling blows to the country’s international reputation, the exploitation of the poor to benefit a handful of corrupt billionaires, or, perhaps most problematically, the willingness of far too many Americans from SCOTUS to Congresscritters to everyday citizens to let him get away with this shit.

The latest exploit of Curmie’s least favorite narcissist, as you probably know, Gentle Reader, was to arbitrarily and illegally re-name the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts after himself.  Oh, sure, he didn’t actually do so alone; his hand-picked gaggle of sycophants the Kennedy Center board did so, presumably although not provably at his behest.  And, to be fair, he didn’t totally co-opt the name; he just gave himself top billing.  As one does.

Whatever you may think of their respective presidencies, Gentle Reader, Mr. Kennedy was a patron of the arts; Mr. Trump is a patron of Mr. Trump.  Kennedy was assassinated before the founding of the National Endowment for the Arts, but he certainly set things in motion for that agency to exist.  The White House Historical Society (an independent agency, or Trump’s Ministry of Truth would have scrubbed their website by now) writes that:

President John F. Kennedy and First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy’s advocacy for the arts endures as a vital part of their White House legacy. From 1961 to 1963, the White House became a focal point for the arts and cultural engagement. The Kennedys hosted numerous concerts and performances and infused the Executive Mansion and the country with the same vitality, youth, and idealism that followed them on their journey to the White House.

That’s a little purple, but essentially accurate.

By contrast, Mr. Trump shows no indication of ever having read a book (let alone of the poetry which JFK adored), and apparently believes that mediocrities like Sylvester Stallone and KISS are worthy recipients of Kennedy Center honors.  The most outstanding artist of this year’s recipients, Michael Crawford, is a native Briton living in New Zealand, and reportedly received the recognition because Phantom of the Opera was Dear Leader’s favorite musical: i.e., not for a lifetime of outstanding work, just because DJT liked a show he was in.  (Sigh.)  For what it’s worth, although Curmie isn’t a particular fan of the genres represented by George Strait or Gloria Gaynor, he does not object to their being honored.  

When GOP lapdogs Congress voted to name the Center’s opera house after Melania, Curmie responded thus: “Naming literally anything after a vulgar trophy wife known primarily for posing for some soft-core porn is beyond laughable.  Remember, this is the couple who broke tradition by not attending the Kennedy Center Awards during 45’s term.  ‘Appreciation of the arts,’  my ass.” This is worse, because although it’s unlikely that many Republicans would actually defy Dear Leader on one of his vain and petulant whims, this time they haven’t yet bothered to go through that process.  But the signage on the building has already been changed.  

Of course, Designated Liar Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt proclaimed the decision to have been “unanimous.”  That assertion has been called into question by JFK’s grandson, Jack Schlossberg.  He tweeted that “Microphones were muted and the board meeting and vote NOT unanimous.”  This was confirmed by Rep. Joyce Beatty, who posted that “The White House claims the vote to rename the Kennedy Center was ‘unanimous.’ That is false. I was muted on the call and denied the opportunity to speak or register my opposition. That is not consensus. That is censorship.”  Actually, it’s worse than that.  It’s about yet another lie emanating from this utterly corrupt administration.

Well, of course, that’s only true if a Democratic Rep and a Democratic candidate are telling the truth.  That’s more likely than that Leavitt is doing so, but it’s well short of a certainty. Pols are pols, after all.  And Schlossberg’s contention that “Trump explicitly motivated to act by JACK FOR NEW YORK.  Our campaign represents everything Trump can’t stand or defeat,” shall we say, at the very least borders on the vainglorious. 

But no rational person believes that the Kennedy Center ought to be re-named in honor of an anti-intellectual, narcissistic, vulgarian like Donald Trump.  A unanimous decision or not, approved by Congress or not, this is beyond embarrassing… and it’s the new reality, because we sure as hell can’t count on SCOTUS to do their jobs.  Jolly.

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 nor 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.

On the 21st-Century Relevance of the Bottle Riot of 1822

Curmie may have retired from teaching theatre history (probably permanently this time), but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t remember stuff.  He once wrote a conference paper about the “Bottle Riot,” which happened at the Theatre Royal in Dublin in 1822.  So why is he writing about it today?  Have patience, Gentle Reader.  We’ll get there.

Ireland was still under British control then, and there were tensions between the Anglicans in power and the Catholic majority, especially since the former had a long and rather disgusting history of discrimination against the latter.  The Lord Lieutenant (a.k.a., the Viceroy) at the time, Richard Wellesley, tried valiantly to find some common ground, or at least some peace.

The Orange Order was named for William of Orange, who restored Anglican rule to Britain after his defeat of the forces of James II in the Battle of the Boyne in 1693.  The Orangemen had a rather unusual way of celebrating their eponym’s birthday, October 4.  They and their ideological brethren would gather around William’s statue in College Green (i.e., the campus of Trinity College Dublin, which was then a Protestant-only institution) and… wait for it… paint it orange! 

Like the Orange Order’s parades through Catholic communities in Northern Ireland in more recent years during “marching season” (early July, in commemoration of the anniversary of the Battle of the Boyne), this exercise was part celebration, part intentional provocation of the Catholic majority.  It did indeed lead to skirmishes between the two factions.

Wellesley therefore forbade that particular observance in 1822.  Protestants in general and the Orange Order in particular didn’t take kindly to that decision, calling Wellesley a “papist sympathizer” amongst other more colorful locutions.

Fast forward a couple of months to late December.  Everyone knew that Wellesley was attending a performance of the classic Oliver Goldsmith comedy, She Stoops to Conquer at the Theatre Royal in Hawkins Street.  A group of still-angry Protestant men got good and drunk at a pub, then found their way to the theatre.  The inebriated insurgents proceeded to disrupt the proceedings: shouting, booing, using noise-makers, and so on.

But then one of liquored-up lads threw an empty bottle in the general direction of the Lord Lieutenant.  It hit a curtain in front of the royal box, tearing a hole “the size of a shilling” in the fabric.  That was the proverbial bridge too far.  The miscreants were pointed out by their fellow spectators and promptly taken into custody.

End of story, right?  Erm… no.  Wellesley’s secretary decided to up the charges from obvious things like creating a public nuisance or vandalism to attempted murder of the Viceroy.  There followed a series of less than ethical posturings on both sides: a grand jury hand-selected by the sheriff (an Orange Order member, himself) refused to indict.  The Crown then proceeded to bypass that pesky requirement and took the case to trial anyway.  (Hey, at least they weren’t sent off to Louisiana without as much as being charged with a crime…).

Anyway… when the case went to trial (this is the relevant part, Gentle Reader), the judge ruled that booing public figures was indeed acceptable behavior.  Even attending the theatre with the sole purpose of doing so was unethical but legal.  Ah, but gathering a group to create a nuisance constituted conspiracy. 

That judge’s ruling became the precedent for numerous other cases involving heckling or booing public figures at events.  OK, so that was the UK two centuries ago.  How is that relevant today in the US?  Well, there was the case of JD Vance and the little missus (that’s how the Veep undoubtedly thinks of her, after all) getting booed at a National Symphony Orchestra concert at the Kennedy Center.  (The photo above is of that concert.)

There are similarities with the Bottle Riot case: a public figure attending an artistic event intending to be seen rather than actually engaging with the performance, preferential seating for the politically powerful, a healthy round of boos from a not insignificant minority of those in attendance, the event in question rendered irrelevant or nearly so by the reaction to the celebrity attendee.  Most importantly, the spectators are extremely unlikely to have planned their response, at least together.  It’s doubtful that many people knew in advance that Vance would be there, although the Secret Service presence would have tipped them off.

There are differences, too, of course.  There was one shout that could have been “kill the Vice” (nothing close to the threats against TFG’s former Veep on January 6, 2021, of course), and sounded more like “kill that light” to Curmie. There are multiple reports of someone shouting that the Trump administration had “ruined this place,” although Curmie can’t find them on the video.  There were no projectiles, the protest did not interrupt the performance, and no one was arrested (apparently, at least). 

Vance is, of course, a total fraud from top to bottom.  He is an intellectual flyweight (that’s four weight classes down from lightweight, in case you were wondering, Gentle Reader) who has no core beliefs other than his own selfish interests, which are completely tied up with being a Trumpian sycophant.  Does he deserve to be booed?  Absolutely.  Is a concert the right venue?  Perhaps not. 

Of course, the right-wing talking heads went apoplectic.  Trump minion Presidential Envoy for Special Missions Richard Grenell, for example, whined that ”The intolerant Left are radicals who can’t even sit in the same room with people that don’t vote like they do. What has happened to today’s Democrats? They are so intolerant.”  <sigh>  Not voting the way I do doesn’t bother Curmie.  Firing people who are good at the valuable thing they do because they didn’t vote the way you wanted them to: now, that’s intolerance.

Right-wing hypocrisy continues to be manifest, and they absolutely should be mocked for it.  They’re fine with chanting “Fuck Joe Biden” (and its oh-so-cleverly coded version, “Let’s go, Brandon”), but the free speech guarantees of the First Amendment, as we all know, apply only to them.  Booing the VP is Un‘merkan. 

Vance’s reception, of course, was prompted in large part by his Lord and Master’s intrusion into the Kennedy Center’s operations, appointing himself as Executive Exalted Poobah Chairman of the Board, with Usha Vance as a board member.  The tipping point seems to have been the Center’s hosting drag shows aimed at kids last year.  The fact that such performances never existed is, of course, of no consequence whatsoever in Trumpistan.

There is absolutely no question that the audience response, individually and collectively, is protected speech.  Still, booing Vance was a little vulgar, something of a cheap shot, and perhaps evidence of a form of herd mentality.  That said, if that smarmy little jackass shows up in these parts, Curmie might just buy a ticket just to join in the boo-bird chorus.  You could too, Gentle Reader.  But remember: we didn’t talk about it beforehand.

Oh, and by the way… none of the Bottle Rioters were convicted.  Just sayin’.