Mark Twain Is Right. Again.

Mark Twain has already been lauded by Curmie for his observation that “In the first place God made idiots. This was for practice. Then he made school boards.”  Of course, he’s not the only luminary who, despite having been dead for decades (or even millennia), has been cited for offering more incisive commentary on America in the 2020s than the vast majority of contemporary pundits have been able to generate.  Other folks in that category include Euripides, Luigi Pirandello, George Orwell, Martin Niemöller, and Gertrude Stein.  There are others, no doubt, who will be added to the list in the weeks and months ahead.

But ol’ Mark (or “Sam,” if you prefer, Gentle Reader) gets a second nod today for his observation that “there are three kinds of lies: regular lies, damned lies, and statistics.”  Curmie could have written about that line years ago in reference to, say, border security.  If administration X turns away more unauthorized migrants than administration Y does, does that mean there were more illegal crossings during the X administration or that the Y administration didn’t do as good a job of identifying wrong-doers?  Probably a little of both, one supposes.

Some statistics relating to crimes actually matter.  If there’s a dead body with bullet holes in it, there’s a really good chance a murder has been committed, whether someone is ultimately arrested, tried, and convicted or not.  But if the crime in question is, say, sneaking across the border, we generally don’t know of the existence of the offense until someone is caught. 

And this brings us to the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act.  Cutesy title notwithstanding, the bill is an abomination, but we’ll get nowhere arguing statistics.  There’s a meme out there that says the Cleveland Browns have started more quarterbacks since 1999 than non-citizens have voted in that time period.  Curmie actually fell for that one, but it’s a lie… not just an untruth, a lie.  More to the point, that claim wasn’t justified even by the statistics supposedly cited: its evidence was that there were fewer convictions than Browns quarterbacks.  That’s different than the number of illegal votes cast by a factor of…what? 2? 10? 100? 1000?  Who knows?

One side claims that prosecutions and convictions are extremely rare; the other side points to tens of thousands of names of non-citizens on voter lists.  They’re both right.  And they’re both exaggerating.  The following statements are all true, as far as Curmie can determine: 1). The majority of cases of illegal voting involve convicted felons, false impersonations, or registering in multiple constituencies, not non-citizens.  2). Some locales allow non-citizens to vote in local elections (school board, mayor, etc.).  3). Motor/voter programs may give non-citizens the impression that they can legally vote, especially if, say, they have a green card, have petitioned for asylum, etc.  4). A significant number of people who were about to have their registrations revoked were in fact citizens, and a disproportionate percentage of them were either black or Hispanic. 

Curmie made similar points 14 years ago when Texas was about to purge thousands of voters from the rolls.  It’s actually a pretty good essay.  You should read it in its entirety, Gentle Reader, but here are a couple of selections:

This all boils down to a simple illustration: if someone named Carlos Martinez, a registered Democrat, shows up to vote, too many Republicans want to say “no,” and too many Democrats want to say “yes.” The correct answer, of course, is “yes, if…”: if you’re a citizen, if you’re registered in this district and nowhere else, if you have some sort of reasonable proof that you are who you say you are….

We need to establish some system of presumption. You can’t register to vote unless you can prove citizenship; once registered, however, the government must prove you should be removed. None of this reliance on motor vehicle registrations or jury exemption lists: they’re notoriously unreliable. And the presumption rests always with the status quo. Once you’re registered, the burden of proof shifts to the government to demonstrate to a high standard of proof that you shouldn’t be….

As regards increased demand for appropriate identification, perhaps requiring a photo ID: yes, by all means, if and only if there is a full-scale, well-funded campaign to make sure that prospective voters know not only that the laws have changed, but how they’ve changed, and how to secure, without undue hassle, a legally sufficient, free, identification card.

The same argument about presumption re-appeared a few years later when Curmie was discussing a different xenophobic exercise in a different Trump administration: literally incarcerating and rescinding passports from honest-to-God born-in-the-USA citizens who happen to be… you know… of Hispanic heritage.  Curmie concluded that piece with this: “Yes, there are leftie commentators who are comparing this issue to the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II or even the worst excesses of Nazi Germany. Is that really where we are? Of course not. But have we taken far too many steps down a road towards a very nasty, xenophobic, and unjust nation? Oh, yes.”

So there’s no guarantee, on the one hand, that even having a US passport will in fact mean anything to the Mad King of Trumpistan.  But even if that particular strategy doesn’t re-appear, there’s plenty to hate about the SAVE Act.  No, we shouldn’t yammer on about how few violations there actually are (we can’t prove those assertions beyond the general observation that there aren’t many), but we sure as hell need to keep pounding the fact that this bill is all about voter suppression. 

Curmie remembers citing a quotation generally attributed to Benjamin Franklin in a blog post from four years ago: “That it is better 100 guilty Persons should escape than that one innocent Person should suffer, is a Maxim that has been long and generally approved.”  Unfortunately, however, Curmie also noted that a 2016 study by the Cato Institute found that a “terrifying 52% of Donald Trump’s ‘early core supporters’ responded to the question of which is worse, ‘having 20,000 people in prison who are actually innocent; or, having 20,000 people not in prison who are actually guilty’ by selecting the latter.”  There’s something fundamentally psychotic about that mindset, but… Trump supporters.  (Curmie antiphrastically refrains from suggesting to them that anyone whose name appears in the Epstein files should therefore be imprisoned immediately.)

The idea that it is somehow worth disenfranchising legitimate voters if by doing so we catch a few bad guys is, of course, the best case argument for supporting the SAVE Act.  The other rationales are even worse: that people who have changed their names for whatever reason—because they are trans or women who took their husband’s surname when they got married, for instance—ought to have to jump through more hoops than the rest of us just to be able to vote.  Oh, sure, a passport would work (assuming it hadn’t been arbitrarily revoked for spurious reasons) but those things cost a fair amount of money and take weeks or even months to get (especially since the Trump administration has initiated staff cuts in the agency charged with processing applications).  

Place the presumption with the status quo (if you’re currently registered to vote, you stay that way until and unless the government can prove that you should be disenfranchised) and make the process for new applicants fast, simple, and free, and we can talk.  Otherwise, it’s a poll tax intended to suppress the votes of women and poor people: those who would be more likely to vote against Republicans, in other words.

Of course, liberals are more likely to have passports than conservatives are, and liberal women are less likely to change their names when they get married, so it’s possible that this little stratagem would blow up in the smug faces of the Trumpistanian minions.  They’d certainly deserve it.  A better alternative, however, would be to have a couple of Republican Congresscritters care more about their country than about Dear Leader’s latest power grab.  As of this writing, there may just be a large enough handful of them to prevent this absurdity from becoming law.  We can but hope.  (Oh, and write, and call, and…)

About Those Gold Medal Hockey Teams...

The image Curmie prefers to remember

On February 22, 1980, Curmie sat in front of his TV, watching the “Miracle on Ice” hockey game, in which a bunch of American college kids defeated the mighty, seemingly invincible, USSR team by the score of 4-3.  There weren’t a lot of other people in the small Kentucky town where he lived at the time who knew a blue line from a cross-check; even fewer had ever watched a game live.  But within minutes after the conclusion of that telecast, there were dozens of people, mostly but not exclusively teen-agers, driving around town blowing their horns and hanging out of car windows, chanting “U-S-A!  U-S-A!  U-S-A!” with enough gusto that they weren’t just audible, but loud, in Curmie’s second-floor apartment.

It was a moment that those who watched that game (and its aftermath) will never forget.  It was a time of malaise, to coin a phrase.  The nation was still recovering from the energy crisis, the “misery index” (unemployment rate plus inflation rate) was over 20%, and the Iran Hostage Crisis was well into its fourth month.  We, collectively, needed some good news.

Not only that, but this was not merely Good vs. Evil, but also David vs. Goliath.  And a couple of guys named Jim Craig and Mike Eruzione brought their slingshots.  There has never been, before or since, a sporting event that so galvanized the nation.  (Curmie mentioned some other contenders a little over a year ago, but none of them can really compare.)

46 years to the day after the Miracle on Ice, the US men’s hockey team finally won another gold medal.  The circumstances were different.  The opponents, though probably a slight favorite even though playing without their injured captain, were hardly regarded as unbeatable, and the country they represented was our rival in sports but (at least prior to the reign of the Mad King of Trumpistan) our ally in everything else.  The US team was no longer a ragtag collection of college kids, but an all-star team of extremely highly-paid professionals (more on this in a moment).  So this was hardly a reprise of 1980; it was just another gold medal for the US… sorta like the one the US women’s hockey team had won a few nights earlier.

Indeed, the men’s and women’s tournaments were strikingly similar: the US defeated Canada 2-1 in overtime in the gold medal game behind stellar goaltending by Connor Hellebuyck and Aerin Frankel.  There were some differences, too.  The US women were clear favorites in their game, having dominated the tournament, outscoring their opponents 31-1 prior to the final, including a 5-0 rout of Canada in a round-robin game.  The men escaped their quarter-final game with an overtime win against Sweden.  But the women neared the end of regulation in the final behind because of a short-handed goal by Canada early in the 2nd period.  The US pulled their goalie to have a 6-5 skaters advantage, leaving an empty net, with about two and a half minutes left.  It worked, as Hilary Knight tipped in a shot from Laila Edwards to secure overtime with barely two minutes remaining.  Megan Keller took it from there to win the gold.

Both the men and women succeeded in making that commercial about how “for two weeks, we’re all on the same team” pretty much true.  Then, Kash Patel and Donald Trump went out of their way to break those bonds, and, alas, a number of players on the men’s team seem to have colluded with them.

The US women, who have won a medal—3 gold, 4 silver, and a bronze—at every Olympics since their sport was first included in Nagano in 1998, celebrated, accepted their gold medals, posed briefly for a photo, and that was it, except for a few interviews.  Curmie’s only regret was that in watching the awards ceremony, he missed seeing Alysa Liu’s free skate live.  He’ll survive.

The men, of course, had a different path.  Part of this was their own choosing; part was at least partially out of their control.  Their post-game celebration included parading the jersey of Johnny Gaudreau around the ice.  Gaudreau would have been their teammate had he not been killed in a car/bicycle accident a little under two years ago.  The team had hung his jersey in the locker room throughout the tournament as a commemoration/inspiration.

But then things got weird.  A couple of players skated over to the stands and collected Gaudreau’s young children, who were included in a couple of team photos, along with their dad’s jersey.  Curmie thought this was a bridge too far, and he wondered what Gaudreau’s widow really (as opposed to publicly) thought about seeing her kids used as props for a maudlin display of virtue signaling. 

Infomercial time: But wait!  That’s not all!  The scene now shifts to the locker room.  (Hats off to whoever took the video and sent it to ProPublica.)  There’s Kash Patel, who, rather than doing his job (although the country may be better off when he’s otherwise engaged) is partying with the team, apparently on the public’s dime.  And he calls Dear Leader, who offers to send “a military plane or something” to bring the team back to attend the State of the Union address.  He then, in what might be an attempt at humor from one of the most humorless people in history, says, jokingly (?), “And we have to—I must tell you—we’re going to have to bring the women’s team, you do know that.”  

Perhaps actually believing Trump had said something funny, perhaps just picking up his tone, perhaps just trying to humor him, the players laughed.  One guy tried to get a “Two for two!” chant going, but it went nowhere.  Then Trump added, “I do believe I probably would be impeached [if I didn’t].”  Big yucks all around.  Sigh.

There are no surprises here.  We already knew that Patel is a grifter and that Trump, who congratulated precisely zero other US gold medalists, is a sexist asshole incapable of even attempting a joke that isn’t intended to be insulting, or of uttering a complete paragraph without ultimately making it about himself.  We knew, too, although we might not have been thinking about it, that if we were looking for an audience likely to respond favorably to the Mad King of Trumpistan, we couldn’t do a lot better than a gaggle of exclusively white male multi-millionaires who attended college primarily for reasons completely independent of intellectual pursuits. 

By way of comparison: the average salary in the NHL is just a little under $3.5 million a year, not counting additional income from personal appearances, promotional work, and so on.  If Curmie had made his final salary, as a tenured full professor with a PhD and decades of teaching experience, for his entire 45 year career, he wouldn’t have made that much.  And the players on the national team, of course, are stars, so their salaries are commensurately higher.  A number of the members of the women’s team, by contrast, are still in college, reminiscent of those 1980 men’s gold medalists.  The rest play in the Professional Women’s Hockey League, where the salary cap for an entire team is $1.3 million.  Curmie is not going to get involved in a debate about whether that discrepancy is appropriate or not (see his commentary about that phenomenon in soccer for some of the variables involved), but he does note its existence.

Anyway, the women’s team promptly declined the invitation, and they fool no one with their “other obligations” shtick.  They were offended by POTUS’s glib put-down, and they responded with a polite but transparent monodigital salute.  Trump proclaimed in the SOTU that they’ll be visiting the White House soon.  Yeah, maybe.  We shall see.  Anyway, was the women’s response appropriate?  Absolutely.  A lot of the commentary from other sources, especially the stuff strongly critical of the men’s team as opposed to POTUS, may have been a little overblown, but it was at least understandable.

What about the men’s team?  Curmie can’t get too upset with anyone who gets to attend the SOTU and get a White House tour.  He’d probably have turned down an invitation from Dear Leader, but almost certainly would have accepted one from literally any other POTUS, including those he voted against.  (They’re a lot less likely to have dissed my friends, for one thing.)  We know that many if not all of the men’s players were cheering on the women in their gold medal game and indeed in some before that.  It’s hard to muster a lot of anger at someone celebrating a big victory and not choosing to spoil the moment by making a scene.  And, of course, five members of the men’s team—coincidentally (?) four of them are from Minnesota—also declined the invitation.  But, to quote The Athletic’s headline, “The U.S. men’s Olympic hockey team won gold — and then lost the room.”

Curmie will still pump his fist and shout “Yes!” when the men’s team scores in future contests, but this year’s gold medal in men’s hockey is relegated to maybe tenth place in the list of personal favorite Olympic moments: well behind the victories of a host of American women, including but not limited to Alysa Liu, Mikaela Shiffrin, Elana Meyers Taylor, and (of course) the hockey team.  Not just the Americans, though.  Johannes Høsflot Klæbo is unquestionably the greatest of all time at his sport, for example.  And, of course, there was Nazgul.

Alas, there’s one more thing.  Again, we have long since known that narcissism and boorishness continue their death struggle to be Dear Leader’s defining characteristic.  So now there’s a new video.  Watch it at your own risk, Gentle Reader, but Curmie strongly advises that you not do so shortly after eating.

Plessy v. Ferguson and Sports Organizations in the 2020s

If you’re like Curmie, Gentle Reader, one of the few Supreme Court decisions that was mentioned even in passing in your high school American History class was Plessy v. Ferguson.  Today, this decision, like the Dred Scott case four decades earlier (the only other 19th century SCOTUS ruling the Curmie could name without thinking long and hard), is a reminder of this country’s racist past.  (Yeah, yeah, yeah, racism is still with us, but it sure as hell used to be worse.) 

Plessy affirmed the constitutionality of segregation, provided the facilities, opportunities, etc., were “separate but equal.”  It’s difficult to imagine that anyone actually believed in that “equal” bit in 1896 or at any time after that, but the ruling was allowed to stand for over a half century until finally, in Brown v. Topeka, SCOTUS bothered to notice that equality wasn’t within the same universe as life on the ground for black Americans.

Blacks didn’t have the same rights as whites.  That’s a simple statement of fact, whether we’re talking about employment, educational opportunities, housing, voting rights… even water fountains. “Separate but equal” was always a canard.

Frequent readers of this blog will know that the way Curmie’s mind works is, shall we say, “quirky.”  So it was that he thought of that Supreme Court case from over a century and a quarter ago when he read about the second of two bone-headed decisions by two different organizations controlling two different sports at two different levels.

Josh Gibson of the Homestead Grays

The more recent example was Major League Baseball’s absurd decision to include statistics from the Negro Leagues in their official records.  This catapulted Josh Gibson to the top of the lists in batting average, slugging average, and OPS (on-base percentage plus slugging average) over Ty Cobb in the first instance and Babe Ruth in the latter two.

MLB is living in the fantasy world of the Plessy decision, because in baseball, as in so many other areas, separate was definitely not equal.  The level of competition in the Negro Leagues was not comparable to that in the major leagues.  It just wasn’t.  That doesn’t mean that Gibson or Satchel Paige wouldn’t have prospered had they been allowed to play for the Yankees or the Cubs or whoever, but the fact is that they didn’t play major league ball.

But even if we buy into the fiction that the leagues were comparable, there’s another problem, not even counting the fact that individual Negro League seasons were much shorter than major league seasons; it’s a lot easier to hit for a high average for 91 games (the longest Negro League season) than for a major league season of 154 or 162 games. 

No, Gentle Reader, it’s worse than that.  Even according to the people who did the search that led to the merging of records, the available statistics cover only about 75% of Negro League games.  That means that all of those alleged statistics have next to literally no validity.  Indeed, it’s a virtual impossibility that they’re accurate.  Perhaps those players did even better than the averages we have for them, but it’s more likely that they didn’t: statistics tend to trend toward the middle over time.

Curiously, no seems to be able to say, at this point at least, that Gibson hit x-number of home runs (over 1000, perhaps?) but we know his slugging percentage (!?!).  In other words, folks like John Labombarda of Elias Sports Bureau don’t know how many at bats he had, or how many total bases, but we can somehow accurately intuit the ratio between those arbitrary fanciful utterly fictitious numbers.  Curmie is no statistician, but he does know how numbers work, and, as the Old Vermonter in the joke would say, you cain’t get there from heah.

Nor is it a valid argument to talk about statistical anomalies accruing from changes in the game: live ball vs. dead ball, height of the pitcher’s mound, ballpark configurations, the introduction of artificial turf, etc.  Cy Young really had all those wins, and Nolan Ryan had all those strikeouts… in major leagues games.  Negro League players could have racked up those statistics had they been allowed to play, but they didn’t.  Ted Williams doesn’t get credit for the homers he would have hit had he not served in the military in both World War II and Korea, either.

It is an admirable impulse to want to honor the Buck O’Neills and the Cool Papa Bells of baseball yore.  They are, of course, in the Hall of Fame, but some additional recognition wouldn’t come amiss.  Put their stats on the website, but don’t intermingle them with those of Ty Cobb or Babe Ruth… or of Jackie Robinson and Willie Mays, for that matter.  It does no one any good to pretend that segregation didn’t exist.  (Curmie would make a 1984 reference here, but he used that allusion last time.)

But this episode also got me thinking about a different decision by a different collection of idiots regarding a different sport at a different level. And here’s one where the fanciful world of “separate but equal” really is true.  Indeed, the two allegedly different worlds were separate but identical in every significant way. 

If you paid attention to the hype in early February, you’d have thought that Iowa’s Caitlin Clark was about to become the all-time scoring leader in the history of women’s college basketball as she closed in on the numbers compiled by Washington’s Kelsey Plum. Thing was, that record belonged (and still does) to Pearl Moore, who scored over 4000 points between stints at Anderson Junior College and Francis Marion College. (Clark ultimately finished with 3951 points, more than Moore scored at the senior college level, and there really is a difference in the level of the competition the two women faced.)

Lynette Woodard of the Kansas Jayhawks

In terms of Division I women’s basketball, the career points leader at the time was Lynette Woodard, who totaled 3649 points to Plum’s 3527. Woodard played at Kansas a decade and a half or so before I started grad school there. Needless to say, there were a lot of Jayhawk fans incensed about the NCAA’s snub of Woodard. You see, she played when the governing body of women’s intercollegiate sports was the Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women; the NCAA at the time had no interest in women’s sports. 

Woodard played for a major university, played the same kind of schedule against the same level of competition, played according to the same rules (well, except that the 3-point line was introduced roughly concurrently with the NCAA’s takeover, so Woodard didn’t profit from it). But the NCAA seems to believe that they invented women’s college basketball, and most of the major media outlets cheerfully let them get away with it. Woodard’s name doesn’t appear, even as a footnote, on a number of lists of “Top 25 Women’s Division 1 scoring leaders.”

In this case, the competition didn’t change at all, but NCAA arrogance denied Woodard her deserved recognition. This isn’t Caitlin Clark’s fault, or Kelsey Plum’s, but the significant event should have been when Clark passed Woodard in late February, not Plum a couple weeks earlier. Clark has done wonders for fan interest in the game, and she seems to be a genuinely good person, something of a rarity among elite athletes. Nothing in my remarks is intended to take anything away from her accomplishments.

Oh, yeah, the racial element. Something of the reverse of MLB. Moore and Woodard are black, Clark and Plum are white. So all the headlines were about one white athlete passing another, when, depending on your perspective, at least one and possibly two black athletes had put up better numbers. Racism? Woodard thinks so, and whereas I’m disinclined to argue with her, I return to one of my mantras: all racism is stupid, but not all stupidity is racist.

In fact, Curmie suspects a situation akin to one I wrote about several years ago, in which I argued that the shooting of a young white woman by a black man was, contrary to the media hype, about male privilege more than race.  Looked at in this light, the similarities between this spring’s actions of the NCAA and Major League Baseball become clearer.

It’s easy to view the respective decisions as opposites: one organization decided to include statistics compiled outside their purview, and the other did not.  Of course, they both got it wrong: the stats that were legitimately separate but equal were treated as if they weren’t, and the ones that compared apples to oranges were viewed as interchangeable.

What unites the two decisions is a frantic if futile attempt to deny the past.  Black baseball players couldn’t play in the major leagues until after the Second World War, but that embarrasses MLB, so they’ll just pretend otherwise.  The NCAA had no interest in women’s sports until the 1980s, but that sorta makes them look sexist, so they’ll just pretend that anything before then didn’t happen. 

Curmie is no right-winger, but he agrees with conservative pundit Jim Pinkerton that “the truth yearns to be free.”  Denying reality, even indirectly, is never a good idea.  Getting MLB or the NCAA to understand that, however, is about likely as likely as putting the toothpaste back in the tube.

Harrison Butker and Staying in Your Lane

Harrison Butker is good at precisely one thing

Curmie is willing to bet that the graduation speech to receive the most press this season will not be that of a major politician, business mogul, or performer, nor will it be at a service academy, Ivy League school, or huge university.  No, it was given by someone you’ve likely never heard of unless you’re a football fan, at a small college you’re even less likely to know anything about.

Kansas City Chiefs placekicker Harrison Butker gave the address at Benedictine College, total enrollment a little over 2000, in Atchison, KS.  Butker is an outstanding kicker, one of the principal reasons his team is once again the Super Bowl champion.  He is also a conservative Catholic.  That combination—being a hero in Chiefs country and manifesting what appear to be the school’s (or at least the president’s) principles—made him a logical choice for the gig.

Butker’s comments were, to say the least, controversial, although it’s unclear if the majority of the people to whom he was speaking felt that way.  To the rest of us, well, the sexism, homophobia, and irrelevant political commentary didn’t sit quite as well as it might have.  Go figure.

Indeed, it doesn’t take him long to shift gears from congratulating the graduates to an attack on the alleged hypocrisy of President Biden.  Curmie isn’t familiar enough with Catholic doctrine to know whether this attack has merit, but he does know that bringing out the partisan politics barely 30 seconds into a graduation speech is tacky at best, even at a school where the overwhelming majority of the graduates are likely to agree with you.

It’s also a little difficult to figure how Joe Biden, apparently the Devil in Catholic’s clothing, was “behind the COVID lockdowns” when he didn’t take office until about ten months after they happened.  He may have advocated such actions, but they were initiated under the administration of that other guy, the one Butker will no doubt be supporting in the fall because being a hubristic, mendacious grifter is apparently the very essence of Christianity.

Of course, the line that seems to have drawn the most criticism is telling the female graduates “Some of you may go on to lead successful careers in the world, but I would venture to guess that the majority of you are most excited about your marriage and the children you will bring into this world.”  He subsequently urged male graduates to “Be unapologetic in your masculinity, fighting against the cultural emasculation of men.”

Frankly, the first statement is likely denotatively true: that among that group of women, many yearn more to be wives and mothers than to have what society deems a successful career.  Curmie knows not a few women who have impressive professional credentials but who nonetheless value their familial relationships more.  It’s the connotative implication (not outright statement) that women will have to choose one or the other that rankles.  And rankle, it does.  Plus, of course, the whole leaning-into-masculinity thing is precisely why there is, and must be, such a thing as feminism.  I mean seriously, ew.

Butker also seems to care a lot about having people “stay in their lane.”  Curmie confesses to being unsure exactly how this comports with a guy who majored in industrial engineering and makes his living kicking footballs, engaging in a profession which provides precious little value to society but sure does pay well, telling the graduates how to be good Catholics and not follow in the paths of the “priests and bishops misleading their flocks.” 

Benedictine College, by the way, exists because of the 1971 merger of an all-male college and an all-female college.  The latter was Mount St. Scholastica College, founded in 1923.  Shortly after Butker’s speech, the sisters of Mount St. Scholastica issued a statement which begins:

The sisters of Mount St. Scholastica do not believe that Harrison Butker’s comments in his 2024 Benedictine College commencement address represent the Catholic, Benedictine, liberal arts college that our founders envisioned and in which we have been so invested.    

Instead of promoting unity in our church, our nation, and the world, his comments seem to have fostered division.

True, that. 

Curmie is very much a proponent of free speech, and that extends most importantly to those with whom he disagrees.  If, Gentle Reader, you want to argue that Butker had no right to speak his truth, then Curmie will go to (verbal) war against you.  Conversely, however, if you want to suggest that the criticism he has received is somehow unwarranted because he was just expressing his opinion, well, his critics have the same 1st Amendment rights that he does.

Harrison Butker is a remnant of times past, a dinosaur trying to compete with mammals.  He is, in Curmie’s opinion, an idiot and an asshole.  Should the Chiefs cut him loose, as some lefties have argued?  Hell, no, or at least not unless he becomes a cancer in the locker room, which is unlikely but possible.  He’s really good at his job.

If only he’d stay in his lane. 

Again with the Dress Codes and the Idiots in Charge.

It may be a little late in the year to start collecting nominations for the Curmie Award, which we missed altogether last year, but since education has been and will always be a central topic of Curmie’s blog, I’m going to talk about this story whether there’s an award nomination down the line or not.

Summer Bond in the offending garment.

It is, alas, a familiar story of high school dress codes and administrators who get their jollies by forcing students—well, some students—to conform to arcane, archaic, and profoundly sexist regulations. A young woman named Summer Bond (she’s identified only as “Summer” in all the news stories, but her lawyer uses her full name in a press release, so Curmie will do so, as well) was suspended and, apparently, not allowed to participate in her graduation ceremony from Hickory Ridge High School in Harrisburg, NC, presumably for wearing the shirt you see in the picture on the left. Yes, really. Or perhaps for “insubordination” for not prostrating herself before Petty Tyrant Executive Moron Principal Michelle Cline, bellowing mea culpas at the top of her lungs. Whatever. Fact is, it’s stupid.

Let’s get some stuff out of the way in a hurry. First, the dress code is (of course) an exercise in sexism. Girls mustn’t distract boys by, you know, looking attractive or fashionable. Obviously, there are legitimate functions of a dress code: no school wants gang signs or explicit bigotry on clothing, and it’s true that see-through tops or similar manifestations are at best unprofessional and at worst disruptive. OK, fine. But Curmie went to high school with some very beautiful young women who routinely (it being the ‘70s) wore skirts that wouldn’t come close to passing Hickory Ridge’s current dress code, and still managed to keep his mind on his courses. The “no cleavage” rule might work at a high school in North Carolina, but it wouldn’t last a day at virtually any university in the country. Curiously, students across the gender spectrum manage to concentrate.

We have further evidence of the gender-based nature of the school’s dress code in this reporting from WCNC in Charlotte: “earlier this year, 45 girls were brought into the principal’s office just because they were wearing leggings without shirts that were long enough.” (For the record, on any given day, about half the women in Curmie’s department would be similarly dressed.) Curiously, there are no reports from Hickory Ridge of boys violating the dress code. Go figure.

OK, Curmie gets it. The fact that high school dress codes are designed to blame girls for boys’ behavior is old news. Moving on. Other things to note up front:

• The fact that Summer is an excellent student is irrelevant. She could be barely passing, and the injustice would be just as manifest.
• She will, of course, graduate, although she may not walk. Even Michelle Cline isn’t stupid enough to risk the kind of damages that lawsuit would inevitably precipitate.
• She was never in danger of losing (note correct spelling, please, multiple sources) her scholarship to “a major university.” Any university that would give any credence to the petulant grandstanding of a two-bit high school principal instead of Ms. Bond’s grades, board scores, and recommendations is unworthy of attendance.
• There seems to be some history between Summer, her mom, and Principal Cline. This would appear to be at the center of the controversy.

Assuming the news reports are correct, here’s what happened: Principal Cline approached Summer at lunch (note that apparently no one had complained all morning), demanding that she put a jacket on over her top. Summer protested that there was nothing wrong with what she was wearing, but a friend loaned her a jacket, which she put on. We’re done, right? No, apparently that wasn’t enough, for reasons that aren’t entirely clear.  One source suggests that (according to Cline) Summer's lower back still wasn’t covered, making that top the strangest shaped garment in history, but whatever…

Anyway, Cline then demanded that Summer change clothes altogether, but—because of that chronic tension mentioned earlier—there was apparently an arrangement (or merely a maternal insistence?) that Summer could not be punished in any way without her mom being notified first. So, with the school’s inability to contact the mom, we’re done, right? Nope. Cline throws everyone else out of a school assembly, calls in an armed School Resource Officer, and threatens Summer with arrest (!) for… uh… well, something. The mom called the school back just in time, but Summer was still suspended for ten days and threatened with expulsion.

OK. Analysis time. Notice that the local story from WCNC says that the problem is that Summer’s shirt “rests just off the tops of her shoulders and exposes her collarbone.” The HuffPost article specifically states that Summer was “suspended for wearing a shirt that showed her collarbones.” Curiously (not really) the school’s vaunted dress code, which school officials would have us believe descended from Mount Sinai to a trumpet fanfare, has nary a word about collarbones. Imagine Curmie’s surprise. The closest thing to an actual violation on Ms. Bond’s part is in fact a pure judgment call: the dress code demands that “all shirts should adequately cover the upper body including the shoulders…” Summer’s shoulders were covered, but one might reasonably quibble over the definition of “adequately.” As a side note, the WCNC’s Tanya Mindes wore a shoulder-revealing top as she reported from the scene. One suspects that viewers were somehow able to listen to what she was saying. (Curmie has wondered repeatedly over the years about what is so inappropriate about shoulders: here, here, and here, for example.)

It’s also worth noting that a suspension of more than two days for a dress code violation is allowed only for the sixth offense, but that the same student handbook gives carte blanche to school administrators to do pretty much whatever they want for some pretty ill-defined offenses. It’s another “Fuck You, We’re the Administration” clause. The order of the violations which can lead to suspension is telling. Here are the most egregious violations:

• 1. Being a persistent discipline problem.
• 2. Failure to report to the Control Room.
• 4. Disrespect to an Administrator.

More minor offenses—you know, stuff like actual crimes—are also included. Stealing is #11, vandalism is #12, bringing a weapon to school is #15, fighting is #16, drugs and alcohol #17. But the really important stuff to the school is at the top, and Curmie suspects that anything short of abject obeisance is going to be regarded by the likes of Michelle Cline as disrespect. It isn’t. Disrespect is what Curmie feels and expresses towards you, Ms. Cline, you heinous, bullying, buffoon.

Dress Codes and Potential Curmie Nominees

Curmie is WAAAAAAYYY behind on his writing, but we’re going to try to play catch-up in the waning days of 2015 so the most deserving of Curmie contenders get their fair shot at that coveted title.

Over the summer, Curmie wrote about stupid dress codes associated with high school proms, and promised a second post about stupid dress codes not associated with prom. Here it is, with six examples that happened to have crossed Curmie’s vision over the past few months. The frightening thing is that there is little doubt that we’re only scratching the surface of this inanity; there are no doubt dozens if not hundreds of idiot administrators enforcing moronic dress codes all over the country. These are just the ones that got written up in a place Curmie happened to see them.

We’re going to take these a little out of chronological order in order to start with the one story that isn’t about double standards for girls and boys, and to conclude with Curmie’s choice for the Ontologically Stupidest Dress Code in the History of Ontologically Stupid Dress Codes. It will almost surely get a Curmie nomination; one or two of the others might, too, and you, Gentle Reader, will get to vote for your… erm… favorite.

Gay O.K. is not O.K.

We start, then, at Faubion Middle School in McKinney, TX, where two 7th-grade students were sent home and a dozen or so others were forced to change clothes or cover up t-shirts that read “Gay O.K.” The students say they were showing support for a classmate who had come out as gay and was being bullied. The school, of course, did nothing about the bullying allegations because, well, Texas.

The students say they were confronted by administrators as soon as they arrived at school, but according to Sammy Heiman, who designed the shirts, “we were doing perfectly fine until lunch. And then … [the administration] called us all out, all the people wearing them, called us out of the cafeteria. And people started getting rowdy because they knew what was going on. They were making us take off the shirts.”

I need hardly mention, Gentle Reader, that there was nothing in the school’s dress code that prohibited a political statement of this kind: the district instead relied on a clause reading “any disruptive or distractive mode of clothing or appearance that adversely impacts the educational process is not permitted.” This is, of course, as Curmie has pointed out before (in a very similar case in Ohio three years ago), administrative code for “there’s nothing illegal, unethical, or immoral about what you’re doing, but we don’t like it and we’re going to forbid it because we can.”

By the way, the dress code seems to have been changed over the summer to a more draconian version that outlaws basically everything, including “items that display… slogans, or language that is provocative.” (“Provocative” is another useful word to hide behind for censorious asshats who seek to deny 1st amendment rights.) Nothing like a little ex post facto cover-up to brighten all our days, after all.

Of course, we were subjected to the utterly disingenuous response of the school’s designated talking head, one Cody Cunningham, who self-righteously proclaimed that the school’s “primary obligation is to ensure a safe and productive learning environment.” OK. How is safety an issue here, except by means of a heckler’s veto, and if you were all that interested in productivity and lack of distraction, maybe you shouldn’t have initiated the confrontation? And forgive Curmie the suspicion that if the t-shirts had called President Obama a tyrant, suddenly your hypocritical administration would have been all about free speech.

Anyway, we move on to four—count ‘em, four—instances in which high school girls were subjected to idiotic rules with even more idiotic enforcement for dressing, well, completely appropriately according to any rational standards.

This dress is too short?

We start, then, in Dayton, Idaho, where senior Evette Raye was suspended with only a half hour left in her high school career for wearing a dress that violated West Side High’s dress code. If this incident falls a little short of a Curmie nomination, it will be because the dress really was shorter than the allowable limit. The rule is certainly stupid and probably sexist, but it is at least the rule. And the insubordination charge may actually be legitimate in that manifest defiance of stupid rules administered by puritanical jackasses is still insubordinate.

If the kerfuffle garners a Curmie nod, it will be because of the ham-handed treatment of Ms. Reay by a boatload of school officials. A teacher, Legrand Leavitt, chose the last 30 minutes of a student’s high school experience to be a dick strut his authority enforce the dress code; the school violated their own policy in suspending Ms. Reay: their handbook reads “If a student is inappropriately dressed, he/she will be required to call home to arrange for appropriate clothing, or the school will provide a t-shirt, sweatshirt or sweatpants to be worn that day.” The school didn’t offer to make any such accommodations, nor would they allow Reay’s mother to bring something else for her to wear. (By the time she could have gotten there, the school day—and year—would have been over, and then petty little morons like Leavitt and Principal Tyler Telford wouldn’t have had the chance to feel self-important.)

Shoulders!  Think of the children!

And so we move on to Fort Myers, Florida, where junior Cameron Boland had the audacity to wear a spaghetti-strap sundress to deliver a victory speech after being elected historian for her county’s National Honor Society chapters. Yes, really. A sundress. In Florida. In May. OMG, shoulders! Blindfold the young ‘uns: we can’t have them subjected to this lasciviousness!

As usual, the dress code is a grammatical and syntactical nightmare as well as a sexist manifesto, essentially blaming girls for boys’ distractedness. (Curmie does like the injunction against “tub tops,” though.) To be fair, spaghetti straps are indeed forbidden. In school. This is an extracurricular activity, and the event was held at another school. It’s reasonable to suggest (though obviously not certain) that Ms. Boland really didn’t know she was breaking any rules. Technically, of course, she was, and she should have known that if she didn’t. But it is beyond question that she didn’t violate any rational standards of decency.

Once again, the manner of enforcement of what is already a stupid rule is the real problem. First off, the voters in the election in question were presumably students, so the district’s over-riding of the results translates into a usurpation of students’ (honor students’), authority. And notice that the speech was allowed to happen. You can’t stand by and watch what Pompous Twatwaffle of the Year School Board Vice Chairman Steven Teuber, in a predictably ungrammatical and boorish screed in the local newspaper (so much for FERPA, right?) calls “a flagrant violation” of the rules, and then decide 45 minutes later that the results of a free and fair election must be overturned. Cameron Boland may or may not be a trouble-maker and a provocateur. But two things are eminently clear: The NHS advisors who made the initial call are buffoons or hypocrites or both. And Steven Teuber is an ass, and apparently a creepy one, at that. Sending a Facebook friend request to a 17-year-old girl you’ve never met? Ewwwww.

Apparently cooler heads have prevailed, and Ms. Boland has been duly installed as co-historian of the county’s NHS chapters. The “co-“ part is a compromise position enacted by Superintendent Nancy Graham, who, unlike Mr. Teuber, seems to have an intellect superior to that of a pile of rotting leaves.

OMG, this girl has a collarbone.

Next up in our tour around the country: Woodford County High School in Kentucky. Because if you thought shoulders were over-stimulating, you should look at (Curmie blushes to even type the word)… collarbones. Once again, there is technically a violation at play here: yes, the dress code says that necklines can’t extend below the collarbone. Well, actually, it was written by the usual pack of illiterate butt-scratchers, so what it really says is that the shirt can’t do so—that really would cause some distraction! But we know what the censorious asshats meant. They meant that Stephanie Hughes was in violation for the outfit you see here. Curmie, who is not a collarbone fetishist, honestly couldn’t figure out what the problem was until he read the article.

The dress code had been the subject of no little debate before this year, largely because of a Youtube video created by a student named Maggie Sunseri. In it, girls describe how virtually all of them have been found in violation of the dress code at one time or another. They complain that even if the majority of teachers have no problem with a student’s apparel, “one person can call it inappropriate and make us miss class.” Curmie didn’t watch the whole thing, but was caught by this thoughtful response, obviously to a question about why there is a dress code at all: “…to give everyone a good learning environment, but honestly, it distracts from it. If you’re worried about, hey, am I going to get caught for dress code today because I couldn’t find a shirt that I could wear that was in dress code, “am I going to get caught for dress code today,” not “what’s the lesson on today.” Curmie suspects that the girls in question probably could indeed have found such a shirt… but also notes that the dress code applies almost exclusively to girls, and thereby privileges the “good learning environment” for boys—wouldn’t want them to be led astray by those collarbones, after all--at the expense of fostering such an environment for girls. “It sends a message to boys that’s it’s all girls’ fault,” says another girl. Precisely.

And, of course, we also get the platitudes from the principal about getting students “college and career ready” and similar bovine feces. As one of the girls points out, “college doesn’t have a dress code, so it’s not really preparing us for college.” Curmie can attest to the validity of that point. But the other thing is… sometimes someone wears something inappropriate once or twice, and then they don’t anymore. These things tend to sort themselves out if you let them.

The good news is that Ms. Hughes and her mom, Stacie Dunn, seem little interested in suffering fools, so when Stephanie was busted for clavicular revelation, not only was a social media campaign born; it went viral... and by “viral” I mean 46,000+ shares. Curmie heard about it at the time, for example, even if he’s only writing about it now. Ultimately, the mobilization of dozens of students and parents (and a healthy dollop of international embarrassment) proved sufficient: the new standard (to be implemented in January, apparently) is still written by someone who shouldn’t have been let out of 6th grade, let alone a college-level Freshman Comp course. But it says that necklines can now extend 2 ¼” below the base of the collarbone—a not unreasonable criterion. If only the powers that be had listened years ago.

Not really a violation at all, but we’ll pretend it is.

Finally… well, finally before the grand finale… there’s this from Huntsville, Alabama’s Grissom High School, where Josefina Thompson was punished for wearing leggings, despite the fact that her outfit seemed to be acceptable under a provision that “Students may wear yoga pants, tights, leggings, or jeggings as long as they are used as an undergarment covered by shorts, skirts, or dresses that are at least no higher than three inches above the bend of the back of the knee.” Is the problem that she was wearing a sweatshirt instead of a dress over the leggings? Curmie doubts it.

Rather, it’s all about that “distracting” thing. Ms. Thompson, by the way, was stopped not by a teacher or administrator, but by a security officer, whose business ought, in any sane universe, to be, well, security, and not to interpret the dress code. This isn’t Brecht’s Caucasian Chalk Circle, where a comely young woman’s backside is determined by the drunken but just (or just but drunken, depending on your point of view) judge Azdak to be a deadly weapon. This is an average high school girl whose choice of apparel would be acceptable to any rational being even if the sweatshirt was too short, which it doesn’t appear to be.

Like Stephanie Hughes, Ms. Thompson has a mom who cuts to the central argument in a hurry. In a Facebook post, shared over 2000 times (!), Deanna Wolf writes:

Huntsville City Schools, I would like to ask a question. What are you teaching our children about their bodies and their minds? My daughter was not allowed to go to class, and was held in ILC for an entire class period because she wore this outfit to school. She would have been held even longer had someone not been able to bring her more “appropriate” clothing. I would like someone to please explain to me how this is justified. Why single a student out, put her in a locked room and inhibit her learning because of one faculty member’s INTERPRETATION of her clothing? It boils down to the claim that girls’ “revealing” clothing is a distraction to male students. That the mere idea of a girl even HAVING a derriere (or, heaven forbid, shoulders) is so scandalous that we must stop everything and hide her away. I am sick to death of the public shaming of the female form. You are telling girls that their bodies are to be hidden, and that boys cannot control their minds if they see the basic female figure. It’s disgusting and it belittles both sexes. Not to mention that this whole situation clearly states that a girl’s education has less importance than a boy’s education, and that her right to said education is secondary to providing a distraction free learning environment for the opposite sex. Your misguided attempt at disciplining my child has only succeeded in giving an example of the skewed gender bias perpetuated by society. The lesson she learned today was NOT that her clothes were inappropriate, but rather that the behavior of the school was inappropriate. It’s asinine things like this which push more and more parents to homeschool their children.

Yes. What she said.

Curmie is also, by the way, particularly impressed (notice he didn’t say “positively”) with Keith Ward, communications director for the system, who tried valiantly to convince us that “the dress code applies to everyone.” This is an all too common avoidance of responsibility, akin to “no, it isn’t sexist to tax tampons; men who buy them have to pay the tax, too.” Ward also professed ignorance as to whether students are allowed to, say, wear cheerleading uniforms to class. Way to know your job, there, Keith. For the record, cheerleaders in Curmie’s high school days were required to wear their uniforms to class on game days, skirts in general were shorter then, and we all managed to survive and even get diplomas. Either the adolescent libido or the inanity of school administrators has increased exponentially in the intervening years. Curmie’s money is on the latter.

And so we move on to the incident Curmie regards as the most ridiculous of them all… Drumroll. A couple hours down the road from Curmie is the Cypress-Fairbanks School District in greater Houston. Cy-Fair, as it is commonly known, is a well-respected school system; at least three of Curmie’s former students teach there (or did). But it is also home to a certain Curmie contender.

The perp and the offending dress.  Be afraid.  Be very afraid.

Here’s the story. Parent Jef Rouner wondered why his daughter was wearing a shirt over the sundress she wore to school. Was she cold? “No… I had to change because spaghetti straps are against the rules.” Rouner’s daughter has also had to change into jeans despite the fact that her dress went all the way to the floor. Did Curmie mention that she’s five, and we’re talking about kindergarten, here?

In Rouner’s words:

Five. You get me? She's five. Cut her hair and put her next to a boy with no shirt on and she is fundamentally identical. I guess you could argue that a boy would not be allowed to wear a shirt with spaghetti straps either, but the day they sell anything like that in the boys section of a Target I will happily withdraw my objections.

Yes, there is a specific injunction against spaghetti straps (Rouner rightly notes that there is nary a male-specific rule in the list, but plenty of female-specific ones), but surely any rational person would link that prohibition to the writers’ palpable terror of breasts and cleavage, right? Well, apparently not. Because… she’s five, remember?

Rouner again:

Make no mistake; every school dress code that is not a set uniform is about policing girls and girls alone. The only time I've ever seen it go the other way around was when I was fighting the battle for my long hair throughout middle and high school. That was last century, but I had a friend go through the same thing with Needville ISD less than a decade ago with her son. And why? Because long hair belongs on girls. There's literally no other possible reason to force a boy to cut his hair if he doesn't want to.

Let’s hear it for parents worthy of the name. But stupid, senseless, draconian, body-shaming, sexist, and otherwise despicable dress codes can teach only two things, both of them bad: patriarchic bullshit or contempt for legitimate laws. The perpetrators are probably so insensate that they fail to realize the harm they cause. But we must not look away. We must not be silent. We must not fail.

FIFA and the Women's World Cup, Part II: Incompetence, Arrogance, and Sexism

Another image we'd like to remember.

So, we scratched the surface of FIFA’s colossal array of sexism, incompetence, venality, hubris, and all-purpose criminality yesterday, concluding with the observation that the monumental prize money disparity between the men’s and women’s World Cups is actually well down the list of FIFA’s crimes against the sport, against women, and against any reasonable conception of either law or ethics.

So what’s higher on the list? Well, for one thing, more garden-variety corruption. As Jeff Kassouf explains, FIFA cheerfully stacked the deck for what it perversely calls “sporting reasons.” First, it put the Canadian and American sides in the biggest venues in the biggest cities, ensuring not merely larger crowds (which could be considered a pragmatically good and ethically neutral endeavor), but also bigger partisan crowds, giving even more home-pitch advantage to the two North American sides.

Secondly, FIFA arranged the seeds in such a way that—oh, so coincidentally, of course—the only two seeds who, assuming they won through, wouldn’t have to face another seeded team until the semis were (who’da thunk it?) Canada and the USA. FIFA says this was unintentional.  I believe them.  I also believe in the tooth fairy. Of course, Canada was seeded only because they were the host nation, and they were derailed by England (who, ironically, would—or at least should have been seeded had the top six teams in fact been the seeds) in the quarterfinals. Meanwhile, two of the three top teams in the world—Germany and France—met each other in the quarters. And the winner got the other Top 3 team, the US, in the semis. That is, the world’s #1 team would need to beat #3 and then #2 to even make it to the finals, whereas world #4 Japan wouldn’t need to play anyone ranked above #6 to get there. (Overall #5 Sweden wasn’t seeded because FIFA whimsically thought it would be kind of cool to seed #7 Brazil instead.)

There are two fair ways of working out the seeds. You can power-rank: have the top two seeds play the two advancers who were second in their group, with #3 against #6, and #4 against #5. Or you can do what the men do, and randomize the process, so that every team has an equal chance of playing against a particularly strong opponent… or against a relatively weak one.  FIFA, of course, chose neither of these strategies.

As it happened, #1 Germany advanced to the semis on penalty kicks over France, and French star Camille Abily made her feelings known: “At some point FIFA has to stop taking women for idiots. I’m sorry but if they did a real draw maybe we would not have played Germany or the United States after. Inevitably, it’s frustrating even if we knew this from the start.” FIFA, of course, unabashedly admitted its perfidy: “[Teams] are seeded and allocated into specific groups for ticketing and promotion reasons…. The allocation of teams to venues, the ticketing and promotion plan and the ticket price strategy are among the key factors for the overall success of the event.” That’s asshole-speak for “of course, we created an unfair event. We’re FIFA. We can’t help ourselves.”

Sydney Leroux released this photo of what her legs look like

after playing on artificial turf.

Then there are the venues. FIFA and the Canadian Soccer Association decided it would be just a peachy idea to have all the games played on artificial turf. This was widely and accurately regarded as a sexist decision: as Abby Wambach argued, “the reality is, the men would never play (the World Cup) on field turf, so for me, it’s a women's rights issue, it’s an equality issue.” Here’s USA striker Sydney Leroux on the subject:

Between men and women… this is not equal. For us to be playing the biggest tournament for women’s soccer on artificial grass is unacceptable. The game is completely different. It’s fake. So you don’t know how it’s gonna bounce. You don’t know how the ball is gonna run. It’s terrible for your body. The constant pounding. You’re running pretty much on cement. … We’re the guinea pigs.

FIFA knows all that, of course. They just don’t give a shit. They’re FIFA, and in their feeble and deluded minds, they rule the universe. A coalition of at least 18 players, many of them stars, from eleven or more countries sued FIFA and the CSA to have the World Cup played, as it should be, on natural grass. The suit’s argument is that:

CSA and FIFA’s decision to hold the tournament on artificial turf is inherently discriminatory and injures an elite group of female athletes in three significant ways: (1) by forcing them to compete on a surface that fundamentally alters the way the game is played, (2) by subjecting them to unique and serious risks of injury, and (3) by devaluing their dignity, state of mind and self-respect as a result of requiring them to play on a second-class surface before tens of thousands of stadium spectators and a global broadcast audience.

Characteristically, FIFA didn’t care. FIFA deputy director of women’s competition Tatjana Haenni said “there’s no plan B” and that the World Cup would be played on artificial turf. Why? Because FIFA said so.

Eventually, when it became clear that FIFA was going to do whatever it damned pleased regardless of the outcome of the lawsuit (the players had made it clear they weren’t going to boycott), and it became clear that some of the players were being threatened with reprisals, the suit was withdrawn. FIFA responded, as might be expected, by lying: “we are totally committed to providing the best possible surface to enable everyone to enjoy a great footballing spectacle.” That was FIFA Secretary General Valcke, by the way. One way you can tell he was lying is that his statement so obviously flies in the face of the fact that literally no one thinks an artificial surface is the “best possible surface” for soccer. The other way is recognizing that he works for FIFA and that his lips were moving.

A more accurate assessment comes from Hampton Dellinger, one of the players’ attorneys: “The players are doing what FIFA and CSA have proven incapable of: putting the sport of soccer first.” And the players did achieve something—apart from calling (further) attention to what a repulsive gaggle of goons comprise the FIFA leadership. Goal-line technology was introduced, apparently as a direct result of the players’ suit, and the turf at BC Place in Vancouver, the site of the final, was indeed replaced by something a little less horrible.

But yeah… about that finals site… it didn’t require the former goalie in Curmie to notice that at the beginning of the final match, one end of the pitch was in shade, whereas at the other end, the goalkeeper would not only be staring into the sun, but shots might start in light, disappear (in relative terms) into shade, then re-appear in bright sunshine. Seriously, did no one at FIFA or CSA even check out the site for the final… like, you know, what it would look like in late afternoon in early July? This is the level of incompetence that would be unacceptable for a high school regional tournament, let alone a World Cup final.

Even the Fox announcers proclaimed that it was a huge advantage to be heading in one direction (right to left on our TV screens) in the first half. Carli Lloyd’s hat trick was scored in that direction. There were seven goals in the game. One came after shade covered the entire field. In five of the other six, the goaltender was looking into the sun. And seeing goalkeepers of the caliber of Solo (on Japan’s second goal) and Japan’s Ayumi Kaihori (on Lloyd’s midfield bomb) look so flat-footed: was that a coincidence, the product of their being human, after all, or did they literally have trouble seeing the ball? The point is that we’ll never know, and the idea that unequal playing conditions even might influence the outcome of the most important match in the entirety of a sport for four years—well, that doubt ought never enter our minds.

And finally, there was that medal ceremony. Sepp Blatter may not have been there in person, but the guy whose solution to making the women’s game more popular was to have them wear tighter shorts (really!) was certainly there in spirit. The medals and trophies were brought ought by a phalanx of young women in slinky black dresses. Curmie can’t improve on this description by Rachel Bertsche, so he’ll just repeat it:

When models in skimpy tight dresses walked onto the field dressed like Robert Palmer girls, fans on social media let out a collective groan. “Sepp Blatter’s last middle finger to women’s soccer is medal-bearing, black-dress-wearing models from Robert Palmer’s ‘Addicted to Love’ video,” sportswriter Tom Reed tweeted about the president of FIFA.

Don’t get me wrong. Curmie likes seeing attractive young women in sexy outfits as much as the next guy, but let’s not be ridiculous.

Curmie talks in his theatre history classes about the evolving meaning of the ancient Greek word hamartía. In the archaic age, it meant missing the mark, as, say, in archery. By the time of Aristotle, the word suggested more of an error in judgment, a mistake. A few centuries later, it became the word for “sin” in the Greek New Testament. The medal ceremony didn’t just miss the mark. It wasn’t merely a mistake in judgment. It was a sin.

None of this changes the magnificent effort put forth by so many of the athletes from all over the world, or the joy that we Americans take in a well-deserved victory by “our team.” FIFA did their level best to destroy their own sport, and they failed. Just as the demagogues and charlatans who gravitate towards political office in this country do not represent the spirit of the nation, neither do the petty despots of FIFA represent soccer (men’s or women’s), its players, or its fans. Despite all the chicanery, all the incompetence, all the arrogance of FIFA, our memories will be of this:

  

And that is how it should be.