A Little Rage about Uvalde

Curmie was going to respond sooner to the latest (please, God, let it be the latest) school shooting, the one in Uvalde, Texas on Tuesday of this week.  But the interwebs were already cluttered with charges, counter-charges, conflicting timelines, and incessant posturing from politicians, cops, and everyday citizens.

On the one hand, there were members of the “do something” crowd, who had little but grief and indignation to offer.  On the other hand, there were the “price of freedom” brigade, the ones who really do seem to believe that a few more dead fourth graders is a reasonable price to pay for being able to strut around with a weapon designed for one purpose only: to kill our fellow travelers.

Curmie usually responds to these situations with great sadness.  This time, though, sadness took a distant second place to insensate anger.  I’m not sure why the difference—the proverbial last straw? the fact that Curmie has literally dozens of former students, many of them now close friends, who teach in Texas schools? or was it the coincidence of timing that this event happened as a virtual warmup act for the annual ritual fellation of the NRA by every GOP pol who can get to Houston this weekend?

Indeed, the comment that really struck home with Curmie was this one from one of those former students mentioned above.  (It was on a friends-only Facebook post, so I’ll not identify the author beyond that.) 

Teachers are sharing their active shooter kits and plans on social media so we can keep our students as safe as possible.  Remember that the next time politicians try to make us the scapegoats.  We are doing everything we can think of to stop the potential loss of life and they are getting ready for the NRA convention.

Police doing about the same thing at a makeshift memorial
as they did when kids’ lives were on the line.

Timelines about the series of events are now beginning to emerge.  What’s clear, above all else, is that the whole “good guy with a gun” scenario is unmitigated bullshit.  The Los Angeles Times claims that at 11:32 a.m., “Officers and Ramos exchanges [sic.] gunfire outside the school.”  

A few hours later, ABC claims to have “confirmed” that Salvador Ramos was “approached by one Uvalde ISD school resource officer. No gunfire is exchanged.”  Guess what?  Either way, the people whose job it is to protect the citizenry allowed a teenager carrying a semi-automatic rifle and literally hundreds of rounds of ammunition to stroll into an elementary school.  (There are conflicting reports about where Ramos dropped a backpack containing more ammunition—just inside or just outside the building.)  

Parents and neighbors literally screamed at police to enter the school.  Why didn’t they?  Cowardice?  Certainly virtually every cop Curmie has ever encountered is a Big Damn Deal, at least in his own mind, if he’s the only one with a gun… but perhaps not so much under other circumstances.  Lack of a clear plan?  Well, welcome to the real world.  Or was it just coffee break time?  (Dammit, Williams, it was your turn to bring the donuts.)

Eventually, police “pin down” Ramos in a classroom (presumably the one in which he’d killed all the legitimate inhabitants), but they don’t enter the room until over an hour and a half later, in part because they can’t get the door open; eventually, a staffer with a key (what a clever idea!) lets them in.  How many of those kids bled to death or suffered injuries that would have been serious instead of fatal if the cops had their act together, entered the room immediately, and gotten the kids medical treatment?  (Remember, Ramos shot his grandmother in the face; at last report, she was in serious condition but still alive over two days after the attack.) 

Several of Curmie’s FB friends have alleged that at least some of the local cops got their own kids out of other classrooms after Ramos was “pinned down” before anyone did anything more than that.  There’s no link to a credible source that Curmie can find, but the fact that he even looked rather than dismissing the story as beyond credibility says something about Curmie’s respect for small-town cops in Texas. We can be grateful that the threat was finally eliminated, but no one with an IQ above room temperature is going to start singing “One Shining Moment” in honor of the cops on the scene.

Anyway, a good deal of the current round of finger-pointing centers on the fact that a kid who had just turned 18 was able to purchase two AR-15-style rifles and 375 rounds (that we know of) of ammunition.  He can’t buy a beer, but semi-automatic rifles are fine.  Priorities, after all.

Curmie will grant that many of those imploring authorities to “do something” don’t have a lot of specifics about what exactly to do.  But there are certainly things that can be done: outlawing semi-automatic weapons altogether would be Curmie’s preference, as they exist only to kill people (or to compensate for under-sized male appendages).  If we can’t to do that, then real, honest-to-God background checks, waiting periods, application processes, licenses, required training.  A Friend of Curmie noted in a recent Facebook post that he’d had to fill out copious paperwork, demonstrate personal responsibility, and wait three weeks before he was allowed to adopt a couple of kittens.  It should be easier to get a kitten than a lethal weapon.

Ah, but there’s a litany of responses from the gun-obsessed.  Let’s look at those arguments.

“They’re coming for our guns.”  No, that actually isn’t true.  Sure, there are a couple of outliers; there always are.  But Curmie has seen nary a politician call for the elimination of all guns.  Stop with the Straw Man arguments, please.

The Second Amendment!  Oh, puh-leeez.  Does Salvador Ramos seem like a member of a “well-regulated militia” to you, Gentle Reader?  Even leaving aside that troublesome phrase, there are a number of other problems with this rationale.  Curmie will grant that the US Constitution and the accompanying Bill of Rights is among the most important documents ever written.  Still, there’s not a lot of concern about quartering of soldiers (Third Amendment) these days, and the Seventh Amendment’s reference to values “over twenty dollars” rather expands the original meaning a little, given the roughly 3000% inflation since the ratification of the Bill of Rights.  Times change.  Slavery is outlawed now; women can vote. 

Weaponry has changed, too.  In the late 18^th century, you had a rifle.  You fired it once and then had to re-load.  The revolver wasn’t going to be invented for nearly a half century.  Now, an 18-year-old kid can fire off 30 or more shots in less than a minute, with a weapon that has no value for hunting or sport.  No one takes an AR-15 into the woods to hunt for deer.  Perhaps the Constitution not only could, but should, adapt to the realities on the ground.  You know, like President Biden said: the Second Amendment isn’t absolute.

Biden, of course, caught a lot of flak from predictable sources for saying that, mostly because it’s true.  The First Amendment guarantees freedom of speech, but still allows for prohibitions against the proverbial “crying ‘fire’ in a crowded theater,” as well as libel, treason, and incitement to riot.  Similarly, although the gun lobby pretends not to acknowledge it, the Second Amendment still does not allow a private citizen to own a nuclear submarine, a tank, or surface-to-air missiles (among other things).  No one seems to be up in arms (literally or figuratively) about this.  In other words, there is no absolute right to own whatever weaponry an individual can afford to buy.  The line is already there; we’re talking about moving it, not inventing it.

But… but… Freedom!  Sigh.  Apart from the absolutism about the Bill of Rights argument, we get two variations on the theme: the fact that the US grants its citizens rights that other countries don’t grant theirs, and a parallel argument that those evil Democrats want to deny us our freedoms, just like they did with the response to COVID-19. 

OK, it’s true that as Americans we can do some things that our friends even in other First World countries cannot.  Usually, that’s a good thing.  But the freedoms in question could reasonably be applied to, say, the freedom to attend elementary school without fear of being shot.  No, huh? 

As for COVID-19, the brouhaha about masks and vaccinations can be traced directly to the Trump administration’s colossal mishandling of the pandemic, largely based on misinformation being propagated by POTUS himself.  Newsflash: the outbreak didn’t disappear on its own when the weather got warm two years ago.  But insisting that students be vaccinated against COVID was an infringement on personal freedoms akin to the Holocaust, to listen to some of the loonies on the right.  Of course, vaccination against meningitis to even enroll in college (let alone to appear on campus) is required by a law passed by Texas’s Republican legislature.  But that, you see, is a highly contagious disease that can lead to permanent damage to vital organs or even death.  COVID, on the other hand, is a highly contagious…  Oh… Wait.

But Gun Control Won’t Solve All the Problems.  Of course not.  The reason we have laws is to reduce the likelihood of bad things happening.  There are laws against murder, rape, and burglary: all those things still happen, and with grim regularity.  But, as has been demonstrated time and again with reference to this specific topic, those restrictions help.  There’s a meme circulating now about how there was a single incident in Dunblane, Scotland, some 26 years ago.  Britain tightened its gun laws, and there hasn’t been a school shooting since.  Curmie checked it out.  It’s true. 

In the US, there have been over 160 school shootings that resulted in at least one death since the turn of the century.  (This is from the Wikipedia list; some incidents may be included or excluded from what you might think appropriate, Gentle Reader, but this is a pretty good ballpark figure.)  Given that school shootings happen when school is in session, roughly 180 days a year, that works out to… pretty damned close to one every 26 days.  None in 26 years vs. one every 26 days.

Inevitably that means, according to the gun lobby and their minions in the GOP, that there’s literally never a good time to discuss gun control legislation, because we’re ALWAYS in the immediate aftermath of a lethal shooting.  Please note that the numbers cited here refer only to school shootings: if you get shot at the grocery store, or at a nightclub, or attending a country music festival, or literally any place that isn’t a school, that doesn’t count.

Plus, of course, we must remember the Onion’s greatest ever headline: “‘No Way to Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens.”

Yes, But Freedom.  As noted above, there are many things to prefer about the American system than even those other countries where Curmie has spent a lot of time: the UK, Ireland, and France.  But this isn’t one of them.  We don’t have to join the EU to think that maybe, just maybe, they might have this one idea that works better than anarchy.

Well, He Was Mentally Ill.  Oh, OK, so spending more money on mental health concerns should be a national priority.  Oh.  No?  They’re all faking it?  Got it.

You Don’t Even Know What You’re Talking About!  No, Curmie doesn’t know a lot about guns.  But the banshees have never had a student angry about a bad grade reach into their backpack and…  In Texas, I’m forbidden by law to restrict that student’s right to have a concealed handgun, even in my allegedly private office, and they can legally have one without a license.  More to the point, it’s reasonable to have an opinion about something without needing to be an expert in the field or being directly affected.  Men can have an opinion about abortion; atheists and religious zealots alike can have an opinion about the church/state relationship; pacifists can have an opinion about gun rights.

Curmie has even seen the argument that if you don’t know what the “AR” in AR-15 means, you’re not allowed an opinion.  Anyone?  Bueller?  No, not “assault rifle.”  ArmaLite Rifle, after the company that originally made them.  And if you didn’t know that… who fucking cares?  We all know what a USB port is, and what a URL is.  Perhaps you’ve invested a few dollars in a company that’s listed on the NASDAQ.  Surely you know the general terms of the PATRIOT Act, right, Gentle Reader?  But if you can tell me, without cheating, what all of those abbreviations stand for, you are, like Gunga Din, a better man (or woman) than I am.

But You’re Being All Emotional.  You’re goddamned right, I am.  That’s not all I am, but I sure as hell am that.  Deal with it.

Capitalism and Free Expression

Curmie was mostly done with this essay prior to learning of yet another school shooting, this one with a death toll of at least 21, about six and a half hours west of Chez Curmie.  That situation is, of course, most on all our minds at the moment.  Going ahead with this post, Curmie admits, is in part an avoidance mechanism, because he just doesn’t want to deal with the fact that the politicians, especially but not exclusively on the right, have prioritized campaign contributions from the NRA above the lives of schoolchildren (and teachers).  I just don’t want to wrap my head around that right now.

A few glimpses at the uneasy alliance between capitalism and free expression: three stories from this month.

#1.  Lufthansa’s Unconscionable Anti-Semitism.  So, apparently a few orthodox Jews refused to wear face masks for a Lufthansa flight from Frankfurt to Budapest earlier this month.  Many US Jews started their journey in New York and were changing planes in Frankfurt to continue on to a Budapest flight.  Many if not all of these people were on a pilgrimage to the small town of Bodrogkeresztúr as part of an annual commemoration on the anniversary of the death of Grand Rabbi Yesha Steiner, who died in 1925.

(Curmie has some experience with changing planes in a German airport… with a traveling companion from a country from which, at least at the time, Germany required a visa, even if all you were doing was changing planes.  Not the most fun travel experience in my life.  But I stray…)

We can disagree, Gentle Reader, about whether mask-wearing is a medical necessity, an essentially useless exercise in virtue-signaling, or somewhere in-between, but the fact is that both nations and corporations are free to set their own rules.  Don’t wear a mask; don’t get on the plane. Simple as that.  So Lufthansa staff enforced the rules, and did not allow those passengers to board.  So far, so good, right?

Well, they took the policy a little further than that.  Citing the article linked above:

Lufthansa staff allegedly blocked all passengers who were visibly identifiable as Jewish from boarding their connecting flight, German daily Frankfurter Allgemeiner Zeitung reported.  Local German media reported that the staff excluded those passengers who were recognisable as being Jewish because they were wearing skull caps or had sidelocks.

This would be a German corporation, in Germany, deciding that all Jews, not just those refusing to obey the rules, present a problem to public order and must be quarantined, lest they… well, whatever nefarious thing they might do.  Not the best of looks, there, Lufthansa.

Naturally, whether out of honest conviction or risk minimalization, the highers-up at the airline and the local pols scrambled to apologize.  Lufthansa proclaimed “zero tolerance for racism, antisemitism and discrimination of any type,” and the anti-semitism commissioner for the state of Hesse asserted that “this is discriminatory and not a trivial matter, and all the more reason why the company’s top management should also feel personally responsible for apologising for this incident and taking a clear and unequivocal stand.”

Sure.  Unsurprisingly, the Anti-Defamation League is unconvinced of the sincerity of the corporation: “This non-apology fails to admit fault or identify the banned passengers as Jews. It also refers to them as a group, even though many were strangers. They had one commonality—being visibly Jewish.”

Curmie knows little to nothing about German law—whether there were criminal offenses committed or whether Lufthansa can be sued in a civil case.  But he does know this much: Lufthansa had better do a full-scale investigation culminating in firing the offending employees—at the very least the supervisor who was recorded saying “everyone has to pay” for the handful of Jews who violated the mask order, “it’s Jews coming from JFK…. Jewish people who were the mess, who made the problems ... just for this flight.”   If not, they will not only lose all credibility as an ethical corporation, but they will also be lucky to escape with only eight figures of lawsuit payouts.

#2.  Netflix and the Warning Shot.  There’s no one to cheer for in this one.  Netflix, which recently underwent the first quarter of declining subscriptions in a decade, is still flexing its corporate muscles, sending what one headline calls a “warning shot at its woke employees” who objected (for example) to the network’s continued affiliation with Dave Chappelle, whose comedy special those employees regarded as transphobic.

Here are selections from the “Artistic Expression” section of the new corporate culture memo:

Not everyone will like — or agree with — everything on our service….  While every title is different, we approach them based on the same set of principles: we support the artistic expression of the creators we choose to work with; we program for a diversity of audiences and tastes; and we let viewers decide what’s appropriate for them, versus having Netflix censor specific artists or voices….

As employees we support the principle that Netflix offers a diversity of stories, even if we find some titles counter to our own personal values. Depending on your role, you may need to work on titles you perceive to be harmful. If you’d find it hard to support our content breadth, Netflix may not be the best place for you.

Things get a little vexed on the free speech arena here.  Some topics are inherently not funny; others bother only those who need more bran in their diets.  Curmie has never found Chappelle even moderately entertaining, so, not having seen the Offending Object, is ill-positioned to comment on the extent (or existence) of its offensiveness.  But, of course, although the brouhaha seems centered on a single offering—Netflix’s original fare is largely progressive in tone.  Those on the right who cry “Woke” may do their cause little good, but they’re not fundamentally wrong.

Netflix is, above all, a business concern.  They want to make money for their investors and employees alike.  They’re going to buy the programs they think will attract viewers and not the ones they think won’t do so.  That’s the way it works.  If enough people want to see a Dave Chappelle special, it’s going on Netflix.  Same goes for projects like “Don’t Look Up,” another show Curmie hasn’t seen, but which his more conservative friends decry as leftist propaganda.  Perhaps it is; Curmie won’t care unless he’s forced to watch it, and for all the attempts from left and right alike, we aren’t there, yet.

It is tempting, of course, to grant at least some sway to the Netflix employees who are legitimately offended by the network’s offerings.  They—at least some of them—do not want to be associated with programming they cannot support.  (Others, let’s be real, live to be offended.)  But we’re not talking about a closed system here.  As Netflix’s recent hemorrhaging of subscribers, largely due to competition from Hulu, Disney+, etc., suggests there are other employers out there.  Capitalism as practiced in the US falls well short of a perfect system, but it’s the one we’ve got, and failing to recognize that reality just isn’t a good place from which to start an argument.

#3.  Not content with being censorious asshats (the usual hat-tip to Ken White for the felicitous phrase) in public schools, a gaggle of right-wing pseudo-Christians with a desperate need for increased fiber intake have shifted their focus to Barnes & Noble.  According to a couple of second-division pols looking to boost their images with the yahoo set, the Virginia Beach Circuit Court found “probable cause that the books Gender Queer and A Court of Mist and Fury are obscene to unrestricted viewing by minors.”

Curmie asks you to note, Gentle Reader, that whereas we all make typographical mistakes from time to time, the quotation above is a grammatical and syntactical nightmare.  It was written and posted on Facebook by a lawyer, Tim Anderson, who apparently passed law school without making a stop at 6th grade English on the way.  (He mentions “parent consent” later in the same post.)  More to the point, it hasn’t been corrected in the ensuing week, suggesting that he believes what he has written makes any damned sense.  The one thing that is clear is the not-so-veiled threat to file (or encourage others to file) nuisance suits like this all over the state: “Suits like this can be filed all over Virginia. There are dozens of books. Hundreds of schools.”  Oh, jolly.

Barnes and Noble is hardly Curmie’s favorite store, but they responded with the only logical statement: that they carry “thousands of books whose subject matter some may find offensive…. We ask that our customers respect our responsibility to offer this breadth of reading materials, and respect also that, while they chose not to purchase many of these themselves, they may be of interest to others.”

An important point is made in an article on the Book Riot site: and not merely that “Neither book fits the definition of obscene and neither book is pornography.”  Rather, they note that “As a private business, they are not only allowed to sell what they wish to sell, but they are under no obligation by anyone to move materials out of their facilities. Further, no private business like the bookseller would simply ‘supply’ books to the school district.”

The books in question, by the way, are (of course) recommended by the American Library Association as being of particular interest to… you guessed it: teens.  And, of course, there’s little that will do more to stimulate the adolescent mind into curiosity than the allure of delicious naughtiness.  As the recent soar in sales for Maus after it was banned by a Tennessee school board demonstrates, the adage about there being no such thing as bad publicity seems at least as true as ever. 

But, easy as it is to make fun of the Bible-thumping hordes who seek to ban books they haven’t even skimmed, it’s also true that there are such things as legitimate concerns… they just don’t seem to be applicable here.  What is available to the general public—books, movies, whatever—ought only to be off limits if there is real consensus, not if just the wackadoodle puritans don’t like it.  Requiring a text for classes is a different standard, but simply having teens (or anyone) have access to material is essential to a society that is actually free.

What we’re seeing isn’t a dystopian novel—not 1984 nor Fahrenheit 451—but it does seem like the first chapter of a prequel to those books, and that is quite scary enough.

What Female Athletes Wear...

It seems we can’t go very long as a culture without someone complaining about how someone else dresses, how long their hair is, or related foolishness.  Most of Curmie’s commentary (at least here) has related to the almost (but not quite) uniformly sexist school dress codes that have forbidden five-year-olds from wearing sun dresses with spaghetti straps, de facto declared clavicles and shoulders erogenous zones, and are so unevenly applied that allegations of selective enforcement border on the obvious.  (Curmie isn’t going to link to all those stories, Gentle Reader, but you’re free to look them up.)

In a variation on the theme, there’s been a fair amount of publicity in the last year or so surrounding what female athletes wear.  There’s Paralympian Olivia Breen, who was told by an official her shorts were too short (this does not seem to have affected her eligibility, however).  There was the brouhaha over the Norwegian beach handball team’s decision to (OMG!) wear shorts instead of bikini bottoms, in defiance of the profoundly sexist edict of the International Handball Federation.  There was the IOC’s inane decision to prevent black women swimmers from wearing “soul caps,” which, if anything, would have created more drag than traditional headgear.  (Curmie actually wrote about this one, here).  Indeed, the fact that the German women’s gymnastics team made headlines for wearing regulation-compliant unitards rather than “traditional” leotards at the Olympics tells us rather a lot.

So here are two more stories about how female athletes choose to dress and the silly responses of people in power.  Both stories involve change.org petitions, although Curmie learned of one of them through other means.

Team members posed in sports bras
for a photo to accompany the change.org petition

Let’s start with the girls track team at Albany (NY) high school.  This may come as a surprise to you, Gentle Reader, but sometimes it gets hot in May.  Not only that, but doing strenuous exercise in that heat makes you feel even hotter.  Thus, some of the girls on the team, noting that the boys team was allowed to practice shirtless, sought to practice in sports bras.  Seems reasonable, yes?  No, of course not, according to school officials.

According to the Albany Times-Union, on May 12, Athletic Director Ashley Chapple asked the girls thus attired to leave practice.  The girls complied, but Jordan Johnson, a sophomore sprinter on the team, posted a petition on change.org to rally support for their cause.  At the Times-Union’s press time on the 17th, the petition had gathered over 2500 online signatures; as Curmie writes this on the 22nd, the petition has over 10,000 signatories (including Curmie’s).  You should feel free to increase that number, of course.

The girls—13 members of a 15-member team, apparently—were subsequently banned from attending a lacrosse game later that day, and suspended the following day for “inappropriate and disrespectful behavior directed toward an administrator,” which, of course was “in no way related to wardrobe.”  Oh, no, of course not.  You may believe this if you choose, Gentle Reader, but Curmie will indeed lower his opinion of your sagacity. 

The Hegemonic Legion of Doom School officials held a meeting on Monday with the girls—parents were forbidden from attending, for reasons you’re no doubt sufficiently worldly to guess, Gentle Reader—and reiterated their position before re-instating 12 team members (what happened to the 13th is unclear).  Of course, the pseudo-educators in charge can’t even keep their story straight.  According to the girls, they were told by Principal Jodi Commerford that they were suspended for not wearing something over their sports bras because there were male coaches present.  What an insult to those coaches that they are presumed not be able to concentrate on their duties because some high school girls were wearing only a little more above the waist than those gents would see at any beach or swimming pool!  (OMG!  Midriffs!)

But if Superintendent Kaweeda G. Adams is to be believed, that’s not true.  So the problem was attending the lacrosse game (why shouldn’t they?)… or maybe something they said at the game?  School authorities say the girls were swearing; they say they weren’t.  The girls wouldn’t be the first to deny doing something they actually did; school officials wouldn’t be the first to lie about students in an attempt to extricate themselves from an embarrassing situation of their own making.  But since the power structure at the school has produced no legitimate rationale for denying the girls access to the lacrosse game to begin with (they aren’t charged with insubordination at their practice, only at the lacrosse game), there are only two possibilities: school officials are lying about the swearing, or they richly deserved it (or both, of course).

The real reason for the suspensions, of course, was that the girls had the audacity to go public with a change.org petition, thereby revealing the school administrators as authoritarian buffoons.

The suspension notices, by the way, state that each girl “poses a continuing danger to persons or property or an ongoing threat of disruption to the academic and athletic process.”  No, Ms. Adams, you’re going to have to look in the mirror to see someone who does that.

Latifa McBryde in action.

The other story pertains to Latifah McBryde.  She’s a Muslim wrestler who, according to the change.org petition, earned a place on the US team to compete at the Pan-Am Games in Mexico in July.  The problem is that for religious reasons, she “dresses in modest clothes and a hijab.”  Ah, but the stupid rules require a singlet.

Here’s the description of “A Wrestling Fan,” who started the change.org petition:

What do people in the wrestling room wear most often to practice? It’s not a singlet. What are high school wrestlers now allowed to wear in competition? Hint - also not a singlet. What does the Iranian Muslim women’s wrestling team wear? … Not a singlet! Latifah wears the same thing that the Iranian women’s wrestling team wears - knee-length pants strongly secured to spandex leggings, a long sleeve shirt also strongly secured at the waist and wrists, and a tightly secured headscarf sewed directly onto a rashguard.

Once again, as in the case of the “soul cap,” wearing what McBryde wants to wear is, if anything, a competitive disadvantage, so there ought to be no problem.  This, however, would be based on the apparently hasty assumption that the hierarchy of United World Wrestling can out-think a dead flounder.  USA Wrestling doesn’t seem to be much help, either.

If the NCAA—not known for either imparting justice or exhibiting intelligence—can ensure that a basketball team from Brigham Young University doesn’t have to compete on a Sunday in the NCAA tournament, then UWW and USAW can remove their phalangeal digits from their rectal cavities and find a way to allow McBryde to compete without violating her religious standards. 

In these two incidents, we see all-too-familiar patterns: blaming girls for being distracting (and concomitantly blaming boys/men for being so easily distracted), school officials believing their actions to be above reproach and their fecal matter odor-free, intransigent requirements imposed by sports authorities based on “the way it’s always been” without recognizing even the possibility of legitimate exceptions to the rule.

Curmie’s natural impulse is to look for guidance from Confucius, who has been referenced with approbation numerous times in this blog.  Alas, this time, Curmie is drawn instead to the wise words of a beloved former student: “People are stupid, y’all.”

Universities Behaving Badly (Again)

Universities behaving badly is a sport that never takes an off-season.  The economic straits engendered by COVID, the right’s ongoing desire to censor anything they don’t understand, and the left’s overblown reaction to the killing of George Floyd have all merely added fuel to a fire that didn’t need stoking.  Three stories, then, chronologically by the date of Curmie’s lead source for each story.

#1. St. Mary’s University of Minnesota is precisely the kind of institution that will take the greatest hit from the multiple factors affecting enrollment: politically-motivated cynicism regarding the legitimacy of higher education, unraveling support for student aid programs, declining population numbers for post-adolescents, perceived demand for outstanding brick-and-mortar facilities… and then add COVID into the mix.  St. Mary’s is a good school, but their “sticker price” is over $51,000 a year, more than twice as much as what an in-state student (and over 75% more than an out-of-state student) would pay at Winona State in the same city.  And whereas they have a good reputation, they’re not a Macalester or a Grinnell, whose graduates have instant credibility with prospective employers.  So it’s no surprise that they experienced a 13.5% drop in enrollment from fall 2019 to fall 2021.

Nor, alas, is it a surprise that their administration did two things in response: 1). panic and 2). use the enrollment decline as an excuse to abandon their mission in precisely the manner the administration had no doubt wanted to do for some time.  Curmie should probably mention here that he knows a little (not a lot) more about St. Mary’s than about most comparable universities: he has a friend who used to teach there, and the theatre programs at St. Mary’s and at Curmie’s employer at one time had similar exchange programs with the same British conservatory.  In some bizarre way, this makes it personal.

“Makes what personal?” you may well ask, Gentle Reader.  Well, this press release, announcing the discontinuation of some eleven academic majors, and a “new program portfolio…concentrated in business, technology, and the sciences.”  Even if Curmie thought the idea was a good one, pondering such jargon as “program portfolio” is enough to nauseate the hardiest constitution.  But, of course, turning a once-reputable university into an over-priced trade school isn’t at all a good idea; it is, in fact, remarkably stupid in every way possible, including the only one the St. Mary’s leadership seems to care about: financial viability.

Three years ago, Curmie savaged Goucher College for eliminating a host of majors and minors and pretending to remain a liberal arts institution.  Curmie directs you to that piece, Gentle Reader, where he makes many of the same arguments that apply to the St. Mary’s case: the schools are similar in many ways, and the betrayal of core values is (hat tip to Stevie Nicks) hauntingly familiar. 

But, frighteningly, the St. Mary’s case is even worse.  Both schools, of course, eliminated majors in the arts—hide-bound anti-intellectuals fear and loathe creativity even as they pretend to embrace it—and Goucher stupidly dropped math and physics, as well.  But if you’re going to call yourself a university, the list of majors that are absolutely, no-question-about-it, mandatory begins like this: 1). English.  2). History.  Guess which two majors are included on the St. Mary’s hit list.  Oh, and the erstwhile university seeks to impart its Catholic values by eliminating the theology major, as well.  Sigh.

Please allow Curmie to quote himself in a comment on his personal Facebook page about a different topic:

It’s the corporatization of higher education. Once upon a time, the goal was an informed citizenry, broadly knowledgeable and capable of critical thinking. But if you were one of the idiot politicians or CEOs who run the country, would you want that? No, you would want compliant drones, capable enough to do menial work but not to realize what a gaggle of wankers are at the top of the food chain... but you’d still want someone else to train them for you so you didn’t have to pay for that.

Sometimes Curmie hates it when he’s right.

#2. Old Dominion University is another well-respected institution that did something remarkably wrong-headed.  Curmie’s central source is a recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, but that’s likely behind a paywall, so you, Gentle Reader, can check out the basics here.

Dr. Allyn Walker (they/them) is a trans scholar, a now-former Assistant Professor at ODU, who wrote a book titled A Long, Dark Shadow: Minor-Attracted People and Their Pursuit of Dignity.  Anticipating backlash, Walker makes it clear in the introduction to the book that “This book does not promote sexual contact between adults and minors” (emphasis in original), and sent university leaders talking points with which to respond to whatever outrage might ensue.  The book, in fact, is in large part the result of Walker’s discovery that there are adults attracted to children but who avoid any sexual contact.  Wait… really?  There’s a difference between having an impulse and acting on it?  Who knew, right?

Here’s Walker, describing the parameters of the question: “There is no morality or immorality attached to attraction to anyone because no one can control who they’re attracted to at all. In other words, it’s not who we’re attracted to that’s either OK or not OK. It’s our behaviors and responding to that attraction that are either OK or not OK.”  This argument may not be unassailable, but to suggest it’s outside the realm of legitimate speculation is utterly ridiculous… which is why professional idiots like Tucker Carlson clambered over each other to jump on the Stupid Train first and hardest.  (It doesn’t appear that Walker was slandered in the narrow legal sense of the term, but the end result is all but indistinguishable.)

The complaint, of course, was with the term “minor-attracted”; they accused Walker of advocating for pedophiles.  In strictly technical linguistic terms, they’re actually right… well, sort of.  The term “pedophilia” actually refers to the attraction rather than anything more than that, but it has come to be synonymous with “child molester.”  Actually, of course, the Greek word φιλία (philía) suggests the kind of love between friends or equals… or that big city in Pennsylvania named for “brotherly love” would have a very creepy name, indeed.  But Curmie has strayed… back to the subject at hand.

In one of the first posts in this iteration of Curmie’s blogging life, some dozen years ago, Curmie wrote about the case of Gloria Y. Gadsden, who was suspended from her position at East Stroudsburg State University for two Facebook posts: “Had a good day today, didn't want to kill even one student.:-) Now Friday was a different story...” and “Does anyone know where I can find a very discrete [sic] hitman, it's been that kind of day.”  Anyone who has taught at any level for more than a fortnight empathizes with Dr. Gadsden; few of us have hired hitmen, though, however much the short-term temptation seemed appealing.

With the exception of the fact that Gadsden was joking and Walker was specifically and intentionally calling attention to the distinction between thought and action, the cases are pretty similar, up to and including university administrators once again demonstrating their uncanny ability to demonstrate hypocrisy, cowardice, and insufficient fiber in the diet simultaneously. 

In the Chronicle article linked above, reporter Emma Pettit wonders, “Did Old Dominion make a difficult trade-off between principle and public safety? Or did it cut and run when asked to protect a scholar with controversial ideas?”  Oh, that one is easy, Emma.  The latter.  A university worthy of the name would make a very public statement in support of academic freedom, even for a mere assistant professor.  (Side note for those not in academia: the overwhelming majority of assistant professors are untenured, and academic freedom doesn’t completely kick in until tenure.)  But, of course, the university, like most, is run by intellectual cowards and risk-averse morons.  Walker was promptly suspended and then “by mutual consent” (wherever is that eau de cow pasture coming from?), they resigned.

All of this happened last fall, but the Chronicle article brought it back into Curmie’s consciousness.  Curmie has no idea whether Dr. Walker’s book, or teaching, or anything else, is worthy of tenure or even of a contract extension.  But there is no question that Old Dominion checked all the boxes of how not to respond to a situation like this.  The good news, at least for Walker if not also for the profession, is that they’ve just signed on as a postdoctoral fellow at (get this!) the Johns Hopkins University’s Moore Center for Prevention of Child Sexual Abuse.  Curmie is pretty certain that hire will attract a little right-wing attention, too.

#3.  Illinois State University, feeling compelled to show that the left can be as stupid as the right, has introduced a new graduation requirement, to begin with incoming students in the fall of 2023, for a course in “diversity, equity, and inclusion.” 

Such courses already exist, of course, and already fulfill general education requirements. History/Sociology 111 (American Diversity: Contested Visions Of The U.S. Experience), and Latin America and Latino Studies/Sociology 109 (Introduction to Latina/O Studies) both fulfill the United States Traditions section of the GenEd requirements.  One suspects that virtually any course that checks the box for the Individuals and Civic Life section, while not focused exclusively on IDEAS issues (that’s Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, and Access in Society, for those of you who might be jargon-deprived), will certainly spend a lot of time there.  Anthropology/English/Language, Literature and Culture 143 (Unity and Diversity in Language), Family and Consumer Services 222 (Cultural Diversity in Dress), Management and Quantitative Methods 120 (Diversity, Inclusion and Equity in the Workplace) all fulfill the Social Sciences requirement.

Ah, but you see, a student could, hypothetically, avoid any of these courses by taking different coursework in the humanities and social sciences, the same way they can avoid Western Civilization, a single course in a foreign language, or a second semester of English Comp, and we can’t have that.  So now there’s going to be a new category, and students will have to take at least one “IDEAS-approved” course, although exactly which courses will be so designated has apparently yet to be determined.

Usually, Curmie raises a skeptical eyebrow at protestations from the right about “indoctrination,” but not this time.  Be it noted that Curmie absolutely supports the availability of IDEAS courses.  But requiring such coursework really is an example of “adopt this ideology or fail.”  How does Curmie know?  Because he’s seen how these programs operate.  Victimhood trumps excellence every time, or close enough to it not to matter.  This is not to say that such courses necessarily lack legitimacy or rigor, but whereas Curmie can teach Racine without being a monarchist, Brecht without being a communist, or Kālidāsa without being Hindu, a professor who teaches an IDEAS course without believing in a particular politico-philosophical perspective and indeed expecting agreement from students is roughly as common as AOC saying something nice about Donald Trump.  Don’t expect a lot of contemplation of the fact that goals of “inclusion” and “equity” are often in opposition, for example.

Of course, Illinois State is hardly alone in all this.  Looking for some source material for this essay, Curmie stumbled across the fact that a different ISU, Iowa State University, had already instituted such a policy, and indeed maintained it in defiance of an equally stupid state law.  Curmie has consciously avoided looking up Indiana State and Idaho State, lest there be a grand slam.

Curmie isn’t sure whether to be somewhat relieved or even more apprehensive that he’s seen it all (well, nearly all) before in 40+ years of college and university teaching.  The Big Bad Problem was once sexism/sexual assault, then homophobia, then transphobia, and now racism… with a couple of short-term stops at Islamophobia after the Iran hostage crisis and again after 9/11.  In all cases, the response to a real problem was an initially unrestrained over-reaction: one case of date rape on campus meant every incoming freshman had to endure a “training” session.  Guess what?  The tiny percentage of prospective perpetrators didn’t pay any attention, and the overwhelming majority soon tuned out, as well.  “Don’t do something that you already know to be stupid, immoral, and illegal” doesn’t really need to be repeated for two hours, even if there’s a badly-produced skit involved.

We, which is to say academia in general rather than an individual institution, endured all that and eventually settled on reasonably intelligent policies to protect the rights of actual victims (or prospective victims) without labeling everyone and their cousin a perpetrator.  The system isn’t perfect, but it’s better than it was at striking that precarious balance. 

This situation seems different, though: both more sinister and more permanent.  Here’s a case where Curmie hopes, down the road, to be proven wrong.  In the meantime: Curmie, although officially retired, taught a course a semester this academic year, but isn’t currently on the schedule to teach again in the fall.  As he looks around at the current state of higher education, especially at those in leadership positions, he increasingly believes this to be a consummation devoutly to be wished.

"Vicarious Liability" and the Walking Lawyer Joke

Two memories as background…

1. From 2006-18, Curmie led a contingent of university theatre students to Ireland every even-numbered summer.  2020 was looking to be the best trip of the bunch, but then COVID hit, and the wheels fell off that wagon.  And now Curmie is retired…

Anyway, we’d land in Dublin on a Monday morning, having taken the red-eye from somewhere on the east coast.  Monday evening, we’d do something that would hopefully keep us awake, so we’d wake up on Ireland time on Tuesday.  We’d let people sleep in, although we discouraged it.  But early Tuesday afternoon, we’d do the Historical Walking Tour of the city.  One of my favorite parts of that tour was that every guide took a different route, so I’d see something I hadn’t seen before even after doing the tour several times.

Lady Justice at Dublin Castle

One stop on every tour, though, was Dublin Castle, once the home of the British government in what was once a colonial outpost.  Above the main entrance was a statue of Lady Liberty.  But there were some idiosyncrasies, to say the least.  First, she was not blindfolded, so the “justice is blind” argument was already undercut.  The scales of justice she holds actually work, which turned out to be a bad thing, as rainfall would not infrequently throw them out of balance; eventually holes were drilled in them to prevent that happening.

But perhaps the most interesting thing about the statue is that it faced inward towards the castle, prompting the verse, “The Statue of Justice, mark well her station / her face to the castle and her arse to the nation!”  This post, as you will have surmised, Gentle Reader, is about legal injustice.

2. Curmie has received a dozen or more jury summonses over the years, but most have come during the academic year.  Curmie got a postponement, and wasn’t called again for another couple of years… also during the academic year.  (Lather, rinse, repeat.)  He’s actually made it to the courtroom exactly twice: once for a criminal case in Kansas (for which he actually served on the jury), and once for a civil case in Texas.

It’s this latter case that is on his mind at the moment, for reasons he hopes will become clear in a moment.  It was about 15 years ago.  At the voir dire, we learned something of the nature of the case.  I remember a few of the details.  A man, a local fat-cat auto dealer, died in the hospital.  The family sued… a doctor—a radiologist, perhaps?—who wasn’t even in the room.   (He had deeper pockets or better insurance or whatever, and therefore made a more attractive target for the money-grubbing family.)

The other thing I remember is that I wasn’t the only prospective juror dismissed by the plaintiffs’ attorney: literally everyone who had even a college degree met the same fate.  I remember thinking that was rather telling with respect to the plaintiffs’ attorney’s confidence that he could convince an educated and skeptical jury that he was anything but a shyster and his clients anything but entitled and acquisitive asshats.  I never found out how the case turned out, although the defense attorney seemed pretty competent, and I feel rather confident that he could convince even a relatively uneducated jury of the simple fact that the plaintiffs had literally no case.

So now we move on to more recent events.  In March of 2020, a man took his manual transmission Jeep to the local dealership in Rochester Hills, MI, for an oil change.  He gave the keys to a young mechanic and went to wait in the lobby. 

The (ahem) mechanic, who has no driver’s license and didn’t know how to drive a stick-shift, starts the car without actually getting inside.  The car lurches forward, striking and killing another employee, Jeffrey Hawkins.  Now, over two years later, Hawkins’s family is suing.  It certainly appears that they have grounds to do so.

The question is: whom do they sue?  The kid, who certainly had to know he didn’t know what the hell he was doing, and may well have lied about having a license to get the job?  Nope.  The dealership owner, who obviously didn’t do anything approaching due diligence in hiring the kid, or in letting him drive, and who ought to be responsible for any lapses in professionalism on his watch?  Nope.  The Jeep owner, of course.  Try to keep up, Gentle Reader.

Apparently, as in the case for which Curmie wasn’t on the jury, the family felt aggrieved (at least in this case they had reason to) and, dammit, they were going to sue somebody.  So they hired an ambulance chaser named David Femminineo. 

The family can seek workman’s comp from the dealership, but that appears to be it. Michigan law prevents an employee from suing his boss for injuries suffered as a result of the boss’s negligence.  If I’m reading this correctly, had Hawkins been a customer, the family could have sued the dealership, but because he was an employee, they can’t.  Well, that’s a jaw-droppingly stupid law, but bosses have more money than employees do to contribute to political campaigns, so Curmie isn’t surprised. 

And apparently the incompetent kid can’t be sued, either, although Curmie struggles to understand the rationale here.  There’s an argument that he can’t be tried for a criminal offense, but even that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, if all those references in TV lawyer shows to “criminally negligent homicide” or some such transgression can be believed.  Why he can’t be sued (other than the fact that he’s no doubt uninsured and has a net worth of about a buck and a quarter) remains unclear to Curmie.

But… but… our husband/father died, and WE WANNA SUE SOMEBODY, DAMMIT!

Michigan law includes something called vicarious liability, under which standard the owner of a vehicle is responsible if he’s given his permission for someone else to drive it.  This applies, apparently, not just to allowing a friend to borrow the car, but to restaurant or hotel valets, and yes, to mechanics.  It’s a stupid law in that it makes no distinction between personal and professional use. 

It’s problematic, but at least comprehensible, that if I loan my car to a friend, I’m responsible for their actions.  But when someone is operating my vehicle in a professional capacity—as a mechanic or a valet—it’s the employer who should take on that responsibility.  Interesting that both of these questionable-at-best laws favor the boss, who in a just universe would be responsible in both cases.  Funny how that works.

But stupid laws are still laws.  And so the shyster Femminineo appeases the family by suing the owner, for… get this… $15 million dollars, although he knows damned well that the owner did nothing wrong, or even negligent.  Asked why he’s doing that, Femminineo responded, “I have to do that.”  No, actually you don’t, you obnoxious little asshole.

There remains a possibility that the ultimate result will be fine.  The owner has sued the dealership for indemnity, meaning that if there’s a finding against the owner, the dealership would be forced to pay the settlement.  That would be taking the long way around, but at least it would lead to a reasonable result.  But two separate lawsuits would have to go in a particular direction for that to happen.

Bottom line: There are at least two remarkably stupid laws at play here, which the Michigan legislature needs to fix in a damned hurry (but probably won’t).  The owner is completely innocent.  The family is rightfully upset but unethical in pursuing a case against the owner.  And David Femminineo is a walking lawyer joke.

Able-Bodied Actors Can't Play Richard III?

Given Curmie’s profession, it’s not surprising that he’s written a fair amount about casting decisions—when it is imperative that an actor be of a certain “look” (age, gender, race, etc.) and when it is not.

Curmie, in his own career, has cast many actors who don’t fit the character’s profile, or at least the description of the actor who first played the role… and that’s not even counting the plays by Euripides and Shakespeare, in which Clytemnestra, Rosalind, and Lady Macbeth would all have been originally played by men.  Sometimes, of course, you can’t do a play without having the actors fit a particular demographic: I wouldn’t have attempted “Master Harold”… and the boys or Trojan Barbie without being confident going into auditions that there were enough sufficiently talented and reliable black actors to do the play appropriately.

Sometimes, of course, “non-traditional casting” is done completely as a gimmick—casting a white actor as Martin Luther King, Jr. or a black woman as Anne Boleyn.  One of Curmie’s former students was just cast in an all-female version of Henry V.  Who knows… it might work, although Curmie raises an eyebrow of skepticism.

But much of what we’re seeing lately manifests as contempt for the acting profession: you can’t possibly play such-and-such a role without actually being of the same heritage.  One of the earlier manifestations of this phenomenon was when Chicago’s Porchlight Theatre cast an Italian-American (whom the company thought was Latino when they cast him) as the Dominican-born lead in their production of In the Heights a few years ago.  He looked the part, acted the part, sang and danced the part, but he wasn’t Latino.  There was much howling and gnashing of teeth.  The production and the company made headlines for all the wrong reasons.

Even a reasonably close look at what’s happening of late reveals a sort of affirmative action program: it’s fine for a Jewish actor to play a Christian, a black actor to play a traditionally white character, a gay actor to play a straight role… but, recently, at least, reversing that pattern is guaranteed to produce ululation and rending of garments.  

The real Richard III
was pretty normal-looking

In the latest variation on the theme, the Times of London reports that “The days of able-bodied actors playing Richard III are over just as they are for white ones playing Othello, the outgoing head of the Royal Shakespeare Company has suggested.”  The only good news in this sentence is the word “outgoing.”

Apart from the irony if not hypocrisy—Gregory Doran, the RSC head in question, is the widower of Sir Anthony Sher, an able-bodied actor whose most famous role was Richard III—there are at least two considerations at play here.  One is the old “it’s called acting” response.  

Last night, Curmie and Beloved Spouse watched the Roman Polanski film “Venus in Fur.”  (Yes, I know, Polanski is a creep.  If you want to boycott his films, Gentle Reader, go right ahead.  But he’s also a great director, and Curmie, at least in this case, chooses not to deprive himself of art simply because of antipathy for the artist.)  The female character in the film’s source (the David Ives play) and the source’s source (Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s novel) is 24.  That description of her is cut from the film because the actress, Emmanuelle Seigner, was just short of twice that age. 

What’s interesting, though, is that… wait for it: she’s good at her job.  With the exception of a couple of brief close-up moments when Seigner’s real age is suggested (she could still have passed for 30), Curmie would have bought that she was indeed 24.  An actor’s ability to make the spectator believe in the character’s reality is far more important than any demographic overlap between the character and the actor.

Second, the question must arise: just how similar must the actor be to the description of the character.  We actually learn more about Richard’s disabilities in Henry VI, Part 3 than we do in Richard III.  His arm is “[shrunk] like a withered stump”; he has an “envious mountain on [his] back; his legs are “of unequal size.”  In Richard III, we learn no specifics, only that he is “not shaped for sportive tricks” (Curmie, never having been confused with Adonis, has this line on a t-shirt he must dig out again soon… hoping it still fits), that he is “rudely stamped,” etc.

The real-life Richard was far less impaired, suffering from a relatively mild case of scoliosis.  The rest was simply Shakespeare sucking up to the current monarch, whose throne resulted from her grandfather defeating Richard at Bosworth Field, by conflating Richard’s allegedly deformed ethics with similar warpage of his body.

Curmie knows better than to believe that characters necessarily stay the same from play to play.  He once played Creon in Oedipus the King, and had more than one discussion (perhaps even argument) with the director, who wanted me to play the authoritarian and borderline evil character from Antigone instead of the loyal and unjustly distrusted brother-in-law in the play we were actually performing.  Still, to the extent that the physical portrayal of Richard has become codified and perhaps calcified over time, it’s worth looking at both those descriptions and what the character is required to do.

We’re leaving aside here such nagging questions as whether you need to be a murderous English nobleman (or from the fifteenth century) to play the role.  What must the character be able to do, and not do?  If we take our cues only from Richard III, per se, he just needs to have something less than the perfect physique, meaning that you don’t have to have an actual disability to play the role, even in the Wokest of scenaria.  But if we look to the earlier play for guidance, then he’s got a hunchback, a withered arm, and mismatched legs.  

If we’re insisting that the actor be other than able-bodied, we must logically insist that he meet all three of these requirements.  Also, of course, he must be capable of actually going into battle at the end of the play: he needs to be able to ride, to wield a sword with presumably his good arm, and so on.  So: in addition to the famous hunched back, the actor must have exactly one good arm, must be able to walk and ride, must have one leg significantly longer or thicker than the other… doesn’t that narrow the field a bit much?

Of course, it often happens is that the members of the fill-in-the-blank “community” are satisfied when one of their own gets cast.  A couple of years ago, Curmie directed an evening of one-act plays by Asian authors.  We made sure that we weren’t indulging in cultural appropriation: for example, one of the playwrights was famous for writing plays in which there was no family connection between characters, so that when the play was presented outside his native China, any actor of any race could play any role.  Needless to say, Curmie was publicly criticized by a student for not casting more students of color, such as herself, of course.  She’s Latina.  (Side note: two students of color were indeed cast.)

“So… let’s see… hunchback, withered arm, legs that don’t match.  Well, Bill over there lost an eye.  He’s disabled, so he’s fine.  Just don’t cast anyone able-bodied.”

All of this leads to another point, or perhaps just an extension of this one: maybe, maybe, if you’re the RSC you have a reasonable supply of accomplished actors with (how to say this?) appropriate disabilities.  But the rest of us don’t.  Quiara Alegría Hudes, co-author of In the Heights, addressed this issue with respect to that Porchlight production mentioned above.  Even while expressing disappointment in that company for their casting decision, she grounded her commentary in the fact that there are certainly good Latino actors in Chicago. 

But, she says, “I do not hold these views as strongly with educational and non-professional productions. I’m happy for schools and communities who do not have these actors on hand to use In the Heights as an educational experience for participants of all stripes.”  That’s a step.  Of course, she also argues that directors of color should be hired to do “Shakespeare and Molière and Ibsen and Cruz. Not just Cruz.”  But, one suspects, she’d argue that a director named O’Reilly or Kleinschmidt or Lundqvist should not be directing Cruz.  (Sigh.)

It may also be worth mentioning that when Curmie directed the production of “Master Harold”… and the boys mentioned above, he waited to go forward with the choice of play until at least three good black male actors were available to play the two black servant characters, Sam and Willy: you weren’t going to get cast just because you were the right race and gender. 

There are, needless to say, a lot more black actors than actors with the appropriate combination of disabilities to play Richard III “authentically.”  But Curmie would argue that if you’re going to insist that only disabled actors are eligible for casting, there need to be enough of them to not cast some.

But the stupidity of Doran’s position is more problematic than just being terminally woke.  Rather, it draws attention to itself rather than to an actual issue, one which Doran glosses over while ostensibly attempting to make: the fact that there are too few opportunities for disabled actors.  Even characters with disabilities are overwhelmingly played by able-bodied actors.  A quota system isn’t the answer, and making up bogus or misleading statistics (like that 20% of the population is disabled) is more of a problem than a solution.

Sometimes, there’s a real attempt at authenticity: for example, a number of productions, both professional and amateur, of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time have sought out actors on the autism spectrum to play the young central character.  And there are companies which concentrate specifically on providing opportunities for theatre artists with disabilities.  (One of Curmie’s favorite former students worked for such a company for several years.)

But it’s in the everyday roles that progress needs to be made.  Why can’t the boss or the best friend or the mother-in-law or… wait for it… the lead be played by someone on the spectrum or in a wheelchair or with a guide dog?  Sure, some roles will require able-bodied actors, the same way they require an actor of a particular race or gender or age.  But thousands of roles do not.  A good actor is a good actor: let’s make certain the roles go to those who deserve them.

It's easy to understand the frustration of disabled actors who aren’t even given the opportunity to compete for a number of roles they could play, and who simultaneously  aren’t granted priority for characters most like themselves.  Still, preventing actors—able-bodied or otherwise—from playing roles which are in their range is problematic.

It’s a truism of the theatre that the actor’s ability to cry is secondary to his ability to make the audience do so.  Similarly, the actor who can make us believe he suffers as the character does is always preferable to the one who merely does so suffer.  And exclusion is never the path to inclusion.