Why Is Curmie Thinking about Charles Frohman?

The guy in the photo is our title character, Charles Frohman (1856-1915).  We’ll get to him in a moment.

The chances are, Gentle Reader, that you already know as much or more about the reasons Ed Sheeran, Macklemore, and Robert Kraft appear in many of the same stories these days.  If you need a quick synopsis, here’s a reasonably inclusive story about the whole business. 

Well, not quite the whole business, as when Sheeran capitulated to Kraft (the owner of Gillette Stadium, where Sheeran is scheduled to perform this weekend) and dropped Macklemore from his Loop tour for the apparently unforgiveable crime of saying “Free Palestine,” all the other supporting and warm-up act musicians for upcoming gigs—Grammy-winning singer/songwriter Finneas, Irish singer Aaron Rowe, the Irish band Beoga (Sheeran’s backing band), and the Danish pop group Lukas Graham—quit in solidarity.  A lengthier and more recent play-by-play of the last couple of weeks is here.

Sheeran has been ridiculed for cowardice; SNL UK was particularly brutal.  He has argued all along that dropping Macklemore from the tour was not his call, but was made by promoters.  That’s true, but of course there’s more to the story than that. 

In his first concert since the… erm… fecal matters interfaced the whirling rotors, Sheeran engaged in a little self-pity and even cried onstage, but also delivered an apology, noting that “What happened in Israel and at the Nova Music Festival on Oct. 7 was horrific and compounded centuries of Jewish pain. What is happening in Gaza is catastrophic and unjustifiable and disproportionate.”  Even that came under immediate scrutiny, however: one critic described it as “pro-Israel, teleprompter-read propaganda” that could have been written by Kraft himself; another called it “everything you'd expect from a person in his position: equivocating, meaningless bullshit that was most likely written by someone else.”  Ouch.

OK, Sheeran is in a tough place.  Curmie actually buys his story that he didn’t want to disappoint his fans.  And his self-consciously apolitical approach is understandable, at least up to a point.  Creating a space where everyone, irrespective of their political views, can come together to enjoy the music is indeed a worthy goal.  But there comes a point at which that stance won’t work anymore. 

And it’s certainly not true that music, or indeed any art form, is or ought to be apolitical.  Such an argument would certainly raise an eyebrow from the likes of Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, or Bob Dylan… or, hell, from Francis Scott Key, for that matter.  But whereas most of the criticism of Sheeran has come from those whose perspective on events in Gaza mirror Macklemore’s, that isn’t Curmie’s argument.  What matters isn’t whether we agree on the content of his speech; it’s whether he has the right to say it. 

Significantly, this isn’t a Colin Kaepernick case whether the protest has nothing to do with the job; Macklemore’s political stance, agree with it or not, is part of the performance.  If you go to a concert featuring Jason Aldean, you’re gonna hear some right-wing rhetoric.  If it’s today’s birthday boy, Bruce Springsteen: it’ll come from the left.  Both are fine with Curmie, although he obviously prefers one to the other.

Sheeran, if he had a spine, would have looked Kraft square in the eye and said something like, “Macklemore is my friend, and he’s part of the company on this tour.  If he goes, I do, too.  I’ll apologize to my fans and refund their money, but this isn’t about who’s right and who’s wrong in a situation 5500 miles or so to the east,  It’s about something far more significant than a political disagreement; it’s about free speech.”

Maybe Kraft would back down, as authorities in Jacksonville, Florida did in 1964 when the Beatles refused to play to a segregated audience.  Maybe he wouldn’t, echoing South African officials when Dusty Springfield took the same stance that same year.  Even if Kraft were to remain intransigent, however, one suspects that Sheeran, whose net worth is about $400 million, could still afford to super-size his Big Mac combo even without getting more income from this tour.  Either way, he’d have stood up for the cause of free speech.

We might wish that Sheeran were made of sterner stuff, but he’s not really the villain here.  It’s a lot easier to blame someone else for a lack of courage than to exercise that courage oneself.  The real culprit would be Robert Kraft, who is the very caricature of a corporate multi-billionaire: he’s been smug, acquisitive, and hubristic for decades. 

Don’t get Curmie wrong on this: Kraft, like everyone else, is entitled to his opinion on international events, and to speak his truth as he sees it.  If he chooses not to accept Macklemore’s apology for an incident a dozen years ago in which the rapper appeared on stage in what could reasonably be described as a caricature of Jewishness, so be it.  He can even choose to conflate criticism of the Israeli government with antisemitism, although Curmie thinks that’s idiotic.  What Kraft cannot legitimately do is to prevent the speech of someone who disagrees with him, and he sure as hell doesn’t have the right (ethically, at least) to round up a posse of his fellow fat-cats to join in the boycott.

And now <drumroll> we’re ready to talk about Charles Frohman, a theatre manager and promoter at the turn of the 20th century.  Frohman was the driving force behind an organization which pretty much dominated the American theatre scene for about 20 years.  It was called The Syndicate.  If, Gentle Reader, that sounds like the name of some manifestation of organized crime, well, it pretty much was… except that it was legal.  And ol’ Charlie sure does look the part, doesn’t he?  All those gangster movies we’ve watched for years wouldn’t lead us astray, would they?

What Frohman and his buds did was to establish a virtual monopoly.  They managed both theatre productions and performance spaces.  In an era in which New York was not yet the epicenter of American theatre activity, national tours were more important and ubiquitous than they are today.  The Syndicate didn’t concentrate on big cities, but rather on the various smaller venues in between on the railroad lines.  Companies needed those one- or two-night stops to make the tour profitable, so there would be performances in towns of only if few thousand people.  If there was an opera house there, that was enough.

The Syndicate’s deal was that productions managed by the Syndicate could play only in Syndicate-run spaces, and those spaces could book only Syndicate-backed productions.  At the height of their influence, the Syndicate controlled about 1500 venues and productions featuring most of the biggest stars of the age—William Gillette, John Drew, Maude Adams, et al. 

If you control all the venues, you can control the performers, and vice versa.  That’s the lesson of the Syndicate.  And that’s a variation on what Robert Kraft is attempting to do by enlisting all his billionaire buddies to help him suppress any performer who is unwilling to play his game by his rules. 

There are differences, of course.  Kraft isn’t looking at small towns the way the Syndicate did.  He’s concentrating on huge venues, both because those are the ones over which he and his fellow billionaires can exercise control, and because the likes of Ed Sheeran, who can fill them, knows you can sell a lot more tickets to a lot more fans and make a lot more money for an event in an NFL stadium that seats 60 or 70 thousand than in even a huge auditorium that seats a third that many folks. 

The other difference is that Frohman and his cohorts were interested primarily in making money.  Kraft seeks, rather, to control the narrative: who can speak, and what they can say. 

And that, Gentle Reader, is much worse than just wanting to be rich(er).

Two Football-Related Photos, Part 2: The Case of the Petulant Racist

 

Unlike Part 1 of this two-part essay, this isn’t about which team should have won in a closely-fought contest.  It’s about what you see here.  This is a still photo of a moment in a video posted on X on the official Texas Athletics account.  The video shows what turned out to be the clinching touchdown (technically, it tied the game; the extra point won it) scored by the Texas Longhorns to defeat the Ohio State Buckeyes in Austin on September 12.  There is then a pan showing fan reaction.

The score came with less than 30 seconds left in a game in which the Horns overcame a 20-point 4th-quarter deficit to take down what had been the #1 team in the country.  That, if you’re a football fan, especially a Texas fan, is pretty exciting stuff, as evidenced by the reaction of the young fans you see pictured here.  Indeed, there is little that is more American, more Texan, than celebrating a triumph on the football field.  What you and I see in this photo, Gentle Reader, is such a quintessential moment of Americana.

That is not, alas, what a creature called Bo French sees.  He posted the pic on his X account, writing “I heard UT graduation this year looked like this. I didn’t believe it. The problem is now obviously far worse than anyone imagined.”  Yes, really.  When his racist commentary was called out for being, well, racist commentary, he first doubled down with another tweet: “Like body-cams exposed criminals, social media is exposing how many Americans have been displaced by foreigners. It’s everywhere and far worse than any of us could imagine.”

This was followed, of course, by the whine/funds solicitation: “BREAKING: The radical left and their allies are attacking me. Join the thousands of patriots who are supporting our campaign here.”  (French is the Republican nominee for Texas Railraod Commissioner.)  Anyone who isn’t as big a xenophobic buffoon as French, you see, is a member of the “radical left.”  That would include folks like outgoing Republican US Senator John Cornyn and GOP Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, apparently.  Oh, and Karl Rove.  Buncha radical leftists, that lot…

If you’re not from Texas, Gentle Reader—or perhaps even if you are—you may not know that the Railroad Commissioner has literally nothing to do with railroads.  (It’s Texas, after all.)  The job actually entails supervision of the Oil and Gas industries—drilling, mines, pipelines, that sort of stuff—which of course are a rather big deal in this state.  French has little if any relevant experience and has said next to nothing about policy.  The Texas Oil and Gas Association and Governor Greg Abbott both endorsed his opponent in the Republican primary, with Abbott declaring that “His agenda would wreck the miracle that we have in producing more oil and gas than ever before.”

Ah, but he’s a sanctimonious bigot with a demonstrated history of racism, homophobia, both Islamophobia and antisemitism, and indeed about every form of prejudice one can imagine.  That’s enough for the average Texas Republican to think he’s just a dandy candidate.  It’s also worth noting that the only prominent Republican to say he’ll vote for the Democrat in the race is Rove.  Cornyn says he “might leave it blank.”  But as of this writing no one else has even suggested withholding support; most are indeed rallying around French.

Reporter Scott Braddock tweeted that “When the racism is embedded in a proposed law, Republicans around here vote for it.  When the racism is in a tweet during a tough midterm, they condemn it. Not that hard to understand.”  That’s a little cynical even for Curmie, but he does note that the condemnations from high-ranking Republicans do seem more than a little hollow if they aren’t accompanied by withdrawn endorsements.

Of course, as a couple of the articles linked about suggest, it’s not like these folks didn’t know what a racist asshole French is when they endorsed him to begin with.  Party unity and all that…  Yeah, he asked his followers whether Jews or Muslims are a greater threat to America, but boys will be boys, after all.  Sure, he’s used “gay” as a slur.  But… you know… that James Talarico guy is kinda baby-faced.

Anyway, let’s get back to that original post and its follow-up.  Former GOP Congresscritter Adam Kinzinger has a good analysis, and Curmie encourages you to read it if you haven’t already.  But there are some other points to make, too.

Let’s start by looking at that photo.  You’ll notice that if you look closely, the overwhelming majority of the people we see are white; it’s just that the dozen or so folks at the front are of South Asian descent.  Many if not most, perhaps even all, of them are American citizens.  French may regard anyone non-white as “foreign,” but it doesn’t work that way, even in Texas.

Especially striking here is the response of the students interviewed for Megan Menchaca’s piece on the brouhaha, published first by the Texas Tribune and subsequently picked up by CBS.  The students are described as being “dismayed but unsurprised” by French’s attack.  Again, Curmie encourages you to read the entire article, but wants to highlight in particular the commentary of UT sophomore Arsheeya Moreen:

If you were at the game, you know that picture is taken extremely out of context.  I'm gonna be completely candid. I think, as a politician, as somebody in the public eye, to take something like that out of context and manipulate it to fit your agenda and your views on a certain race is extremely unprofessional….

There will always be racist people out there who feel OK with hiding behind a screen and commenting things about people that they don't know, but for a politician running for a public office to come out and say those same hateful things just takes it to a whole different level that you truly can't ignore anymore.

Curmie is old enough to remember—hell, people two generations younger than Curmie are old enough to remember—when Affirmative Action was the bête noire of the right.  They fought to remove consideration of the race of applicants in admissions decision.  They ultimately won with a 2023 SCOTUS decision.  But in one of those be-careful-what-you-wish-for moments, the right discovered that the decision in fact lowered the number of white students, as the increase in Asians more than replaced the decrease in blacks. 

The mostly white right got what they thought they wanted: a meritocracy based on the individual.  We can argue, perhaps, about how and why a disproportionate number of Asian students go to UT.  Perhaps they (and their families) value education more and they work harder in high school to achieve their goals.  Maybe their outsider status focuses their attention.  It could be that the best Asian students are more likely to want to attend UT, rather than looking at similarly prestigious places like SMU or Rice.  (Curmie has literally no evidence of this; he’s just spit-balling.)  Or they could, as a group, just be smarter.  😉 What matters is that they have better credentials, and were admitted on that basis.

There’s also the complaint that seats at UT are being taken by outsiders, i.e., non-Texans, including foreign students.  State law, however, decrees that 90% of undergrads at the university be from Texas.  Indeed, only 5% of UT undergrads are foreign students.  Oh, and there are more out-of-state black players on the football team than there are white guys, total.  But it’s OK that those guys, many of whom we might surmise don’t have impeccable scholarly records, are at UT; they help the football team win.  And that’s important, right?  It’s those damned academically qualified Asian guys who are just cheering for the home team that are the problem.  <Sigh.>

If you want to argue that foreigners shouldn’t make up almost a third of grad students, you’re free to do so, but, going back to that tweet, they’re a lot less likely to be attending sporting events.  If you added up the baseball, football, basketball, hockey, lacrosse, and skiing events Curmie saw as an undergrad, it would probably total somewhere pretty close to 100, certainly several dozen.  As a grad student: one basketball game: because his dissertation advisor’s wife had something else to do that night. 

The right-wingers got what they wanted: race-blind admissions and, as Kinzinger points out, assimilation of minority communities into mainstream culture.  But there’s little that says “assimilated” into a place like UT more than wearing a university-branded t-shirt and jumping up and down screaming while flashing the “Hook ‘em Horns” sign when the team scores a big touchdown.  Turns out, the racists and dominionists just wanted someone else to blame for their own inadequacies.

Go figure.

Two Football-Related Photos: Part 1, The Game Where Everybody Lost

Two photographs linked to college football have received a lot of attention of late.  Curmie’s original thought was to link them in a single post, but the first part went a little longer than anticipated, so let’s make this a two-parter.  

We’ll start with the image you see here, which made millions of people absolutely certain that the Western Michigan Broncos of the Mid-America Conference had defeated the four-touchdown favorite Michigan Wolverines of the Big 10 in the “Big House” in Ann Arbor on September 5.  It’s a still from the NBC feed, clearly demonstrating that time had expired before Michigan’s first Hail Mary pass touched anyone.  Someone was kind enough to circle the ball in the photo.

Except, of course, the officials reviewed the play, and contrary to what everyone except the most diehard and delusional Michigan fan saw, they declared there was still a second on the clock.  As fate would have it, the Wolverines, given a second chance, actually scored a 47-yard touchdown and won the game, 13-12.

NBC announcers assured us that their clock was synched to the game clock, but apparently it wasn’t.  Or maybe it was.  There are a lot of “proofs” out there (here’s one) that would seem to show that the officials ultimately got it right.  Maybe they did, but what was created was a situation in which everyone loses.

Let’s start with the problem itself, and assume for now that the officials ultimately made the correct call.  That means that whoever claimed to have synched NBC’s clock to the official game clock is either incompetent or lying.  Curmie doesn’t know how the process is supposed to work—whether the responsibility lies with a technician from NBC, or the Big 10, or the stadium—but somebody fucked up big time.  Certainly, NBC took a hit for their role.

It is clear that WMU safety Micah Davis had stepped out of the back of the endzone and not re-established inbounds before touching the ball.  That would mean that the clock should stop as soon as he made contact; if he’d been inbounds, it wouldn’t have been until the ball hit the ground.  Ironically, since there was no Michigan player who could conceivably have caught the ball inbounds, had Davis just ducked and let the ball sail out the back of the endzone, the clock wouldn’t stop until the ball hit the ground; that might have been long enough to make everything else moot.  That’s not Davis’s fault, of course: he simply did what he was trained to do, and he can’t be expected to simultaneously judge the location of everyone else. 

Nor can we blame the clock operator, whose job responsibilities do not include tracking whether a player is out of bounds for a moment.  The job is to watch the ball; anything else is a distraction.

It’s also true that all the Broncos needed to do was to defend another Hail Mary and we wouldn’t be having this discussion.  But it’s reasonable to suggest that their focus might have been shaken by the excitement of believing they’d just won a huge upset, only to have it snatched away.  They’d be angry, shocked, disbelieving… not the best headspace from which to defend against a legitimately good quarterback/receiver combo.

Western Michigan lost a game they had every reason to believe they’d won.  Michigan won, but millions of fans saw them lose, and their victory may have cost them more than a loss would have, if for no other reason than that the final sequence made headlines long after the game was over.  Two other things, neither relevant to this particular game (or were they?) didn’t help.

First, it’s generally the case that in inter-conference games, it’s the visiting team that provides the officiating crew, as indeed the SEC did when Oklahoma played at Michigan the following week.  That’s not always the case, of course, so whereas one might have expected a MAC crew, it wasn’t a huge surprise that this contract called for the Big 10 to provide the officials.  (There are only so many MAC crews, after all, and a lot of MAC teams were on the road that weekend.)  Still, it was indeed a Big 10 team that made what everyone thought was an obviously wrong call. 

A fair number of people are still convinced that WMU was cheated outed of the victory, especially since a different MAC team, UMass, unquestionably the worst FBS team last year, has already beaten another Big 10 team, Rutgers, on the road earlier that day.  The Big 10’s official statement, however accurate it might be, sure reads more like a defense of the decision than an honest evaluation.

Plus, of course, Michigan football has been the poster child for scandals of late: sign-stealing and impermissible recruiting, not to mention the head coach having an affair with a staffer… The suggestion that Michigan would cheat if they thought they might get away with it is rather like saying that Donald Trump might not really have lower drug prices by over 500%.  If nothing else, the end of the WMU game reminded everyone of Michigan’s past transgressions.

Oh, and by the way, the officials’ decision to add a second back on the clock violated NCAA protocols.  That’s not Curmie saying that; it’s the Division I Football Bowl Subdivision Oversight Committee, who “agreed that the instant replay protocols were not followed in the contest’s second-to-last play. Had the protocols been followed, the outcome of the game would have been different.”  Still, they couldn’t (or at least didn’t) award the game to Western Michigan, so they look pretty impotent.

The good news, little though it may be, is that with the notable exceptions noted above, there’s little effect.  Yes, the WMU players would love to be able to tell their grandkids that they’d won in the Big House, but telling them about how they’d been screwed makes for a great story, too.  Importantly neither team will make or not make playoff or bowl games based on this result except in the unlikely event that Michigan goes exactly 3-6 in their Big 10 season.

Of course, Colorado beat Missouri in 1990 in the second “5th Down” game, allowing the Buffs to claim co-ownership of the national championship.  This was in the days before a national championship game; we can blame the voters for that one.

Notice that Curmie said “second” in the previous sentence.  Lesser known to most folks, but not to Curmie, who attended both schools in question, happened well before Curmie was born: when Cornell scored a touchdown against Dartmouth on what should have been 5th down in their game in 1940.  Cornell officials discovered the error and sent a telegram to Dartmouth, conceding the game.  Uh… don’t expect anyone associated with any FBS team to even approach that level of honesty or sportsmanship: not Colorado in 1990, not Michigan in 2026.  Curmie would like to believe it could still happen in the Ivy League, but he wouldn’t bet on it.

Land Acknowledgements and the 1st Amendment

Like many other Americans, Curmie is something of a mongrel in terms of ethnicity.  He’s never done a formal genealogical study of his ancestry, but assuming he was not led astray by parents and grandparents, his heritage includes representatives from at least six western European countries… and one Native American tribe.  His paternal grandfather would have been the last in the line to be able to claim tribal membership, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t something there.

As Curmie suggested, channeling George Carlin, back on the 4th of July, it’s sort of strange to take pride in something that is totally beyond one’s control.  Curmie isn’t “proud to be an American,” although he’s reasonably content, current government notwithstanding.  Pretty much the same could be said for his First Nations heritage: he thinks it’s kinda cool, but that’s as far as it goes.

Of course, his status is somewhat in-between.  He’s got more Native ancestry than most folks, but to suggest that he is in any way part of that world, part of that culture, would be silly at best.  Is his position, then, liminal? compromised? intermediary?  Whatever.  Does this give Curmie a slightly different perspective on questions regarding land acknowledgements, which have become something of a lightning rod in both directions of late?  I dunno.  Maybe?  At least it gives Curmie a bit more than an average person’s interest in the phenomenon.

There are those who would argue that these pre-event speeches, additions to syllabi, etc., are an appropriate recognition of history.  Others think they’re no more than self-congratulatory virtue-signaling.  The issue splits more or less on ideological lines, with liberals in favor and conservatives opposed.  On this one, though, Curmie leans rather more to the conservative view.

One particular aspect stands out in Curmie’s mind: The Man, however embodied, always wants to tell everyone what to do.  A few years ago, Curmie was (he thinks) the only faculty director at his university not to include a land acknowledgement at the beginning of his shows.  He does confess to taking that stand at least as much to resist conforming to liberal dogma as for thinking the whole thing rather inane.  And there was pressure: the tone of “you don’t have to…” made it clear that the politically wise choice was rather obvious.

A year or two ago, after Curmie had retired, at least from production work, his university was absorbed into the gaping maw of the University of Texas system.  Word came down from somewhere on high—the governor, the state legislature, the politically-appointed Regents, the Higher Education Coordinating Board, the system chancellor, the university president… somewhere—that land acknowledgements were now banned at state universities.  They’re political, you see, so we’re going to use our political power to prevent you from using yours… or your 1st Amendment rights. 

It’s probably not very surprising that after over four decades in the classroom, Curmie is likely to side with the professoriate rather than the administration except in truly exceptional cases.  So it is—well, mostly, at least—with the story that prompts this essay: the case of University of Washington computer science professor Stuart Reges (seen above), who just got a $600,000 settlement from the University of Washington for their retaliation against him for criticizing the land acknowledgement policy and including a parody version in his syllabus.

Ok, let’s go back to whether this all started.  Back in the fall semester of 2021, UW’s Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering issued a “best practices” document which included an “Indigenous Land Acknowledgement”: “The University of Washington acknowledges the Coast Salish peoples of this land, the land which touches the shared waters of all tribes and bands within the Suquamish, Tulalip and Muckleshoot nations.”  (The document seems to have been online back then, but the links no longer work.)

Despite what it says in an article in the not-exactly-politically-neutral Campus Reform, it does not appear that faculty were required to include the passage in their syllabi.  According to a letter from the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE’s name before changing the latter two words of their title to “and Expression”), however, if they mentioned the topic at all, they had to use precisely the version approved by the administration. 

Reges, who opposes DEI initiatives in general and apparently this one in particular, didn’t follow that policy.  He distributed an email opposing land acknowledgements and included the following statement in his syllabus: “I acknowledge that by the labor theory of property the Coast Salish people can claim historical ownership of almost none of the land currently occupied by the University of Washington.”  That, Curmie is told, is based on John Locke’s theory of property rights.  It’s been over a half century since Curmie read any Locke, and he remembers little if any it, so he’s going to have to accept that analysis.  It doesn’t really matter, anyway.

The university’s response was what in Curmie’s day was called a conniption.  Allen School Director Magdalena Balazinska described Reges’s parody as “not related to course content,” “inappropriate,” and “offensive,” and demanded that he remove it.  He refused.  So the university changed his syllabus anyway, apologized in an email to students which claimed Reges’s commentary “dehumanizes and demeans Indigenous people,” and opened a competing section of the same course scheduled at the same time. 

OK, let’s rate those claims.  “Not related to course content”: true.  Of course, land acknowledgments of any description aren’t related to course content in any class except perhaps for a handful of examples in history or the social sciences… certainly not in computer science.  Spewing the party line would, of course, not have been a problem for the administration.  “Inappropriate”: yeah, at least a little.  “Offensive”: nope.  “Dehumanizes and demeans Indigenous people”: give me a fucking break.  And don’t get Curmie started on the sense of smug superiority that fairly drips off the page.

Exactly why Reges put the fake land acknowledgement on his syllabus isn’t clear.  Perhaps he foresaw the opportunity to sue if he were punished for it.  Maybe he just wanted his proverbial 15 minutes of fame.  Or he regarded land acknowledgments as inane, and he couldn’t stand yet another politically-inspired edict forbidding him from being political.

Look, Reges is a conservative, opposed to anything in the general vicinity of DEI, and land acknowledgements are in Curmie’s opinion one of the sillier versions of that phenomenon.  It’s difficult to see how Indigenous folks would see them as anything but a hollow promise of support, provided, of course, that no actual action would be required.  Curmie understands Reges’s frustration, is not above a little snark himself, and does appreciate the impulse to throw a spanner in the works.  Still, his comment about Bret Weinstein, the Evergreen State prof who questioned a radical change to a campus tradition a few years ago might apply here, as well: “Curmie admires his stance against thought control, but isn’t so sure he’d want him as a colleague.”  Different reasons; same conclusion.

Anyway, FIRE got into the act rather quickly.  Three days after that organization wrote to the university, Reges raised the visibility of the case by doing an interview with Campus Reform and publishing a piece there titled “REGES: Defy the nonsense of indigenous land acknowledgments.” (Curmie doesn’t know if Reges wrote the headline, although he suspects not).

A few months later FIRE sued the university on Reges’s behalf, arguing that the investigation and punishment constituted viewpoint discrimination and were therefore a 1st Amendment violation, and that the policy itself was overbroad and unconstitutionally vague.  Nearly two years after that, in May of 2024, the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington ruled in favor of the university, citing Pickering v. Board of Education as precedent.  That’s particularly interesting because that case was ruled in favor of the teacher involved over the school district.

That 1968 Supreme Court ruling affirmed the rights of teachers to comment on matters of public concern, provided only that they did not knowingly or recklessly make false statements.  Justice Thurgood Marshall advocated a “balance between the interests of the teacher, as a citizen, in commenting upon matters of public concern and the interest of the State, as an employer, in promoting the efficiency of the public services it performs through its employees.”

Reges and FIRE appealed the district court’s decision, and in December of 2025 the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit overturned the lower court’s ruling and remanded “for further proceedings.”  Shortly thereafter, the university decided to settle rather than prolong the process; the details of the agreement were announced earlier this month.

There are a couple of things Curmie finds intriguing here.  Foremost among them is where Curmie himself stands on the two central issues of the case.  He is something of a liberal, after all, so one might reasonably expect him to go along with the university’s land acknowledgement policy.  He does not; he thinks that policy is both silly and authoritarian.

One might also anticipate that Curmie, after an entire career in the classroom, would want professors to have absolute control over their syllabi.  Actually, though, this is where things get sticky.  Yes, faculty should be able to determine what gets taught in their courses; those decisions should never be questioned by some administrator from outside the discipline or state legislator or whoever.  But that’s a matter of course content, which of course is what the right-wingers want to control rather than acceding to the professional expertise of the person in the classroom.

And it’s certainly true that Curmie has expressed disdain for what he regarded as stupid ideas propagated by administrators, politicians and the like.  He’s even done that in class if it was relevant to the coursework or to the efficient functioning of the class.  But when we start talking about syllabi, we begin to head into a different territory.  In Curmie’s adopted state of Texas, all syllabi at state universities have to be posted online, accessible within three clicks.  That makes them into something like public documents disseminated by the university.  That the administration ought to have some control over what goes out over its name doesn’t seem unreasonable.

Of course, Washington may not have a rule like that, but the general principle still applies.  Yes, the whole land acknowledgement business is rather dumb, but Reges was in fact being deliberately provocative with his little foray into satire, some students were indeed disturbed, and to the extent that the university may appear to be endorsing his commentary, there’s a problem.  Is Reges acting as an individual, or as a representative of the school?  That’s a tough one, frankly.  Curmie therefore regards the court’s decision as a net positive, but not without its downside.

The other item worth mentioning is that those often paranoid cries from the right that some story isn’t being covered by the mainstream press are actually pretty accurate in this case.  As far as Curmie can tell, there are no stories on the major networks or in the big-name newspapers about the settlement.  Yes, FIRE talks about it, but there’s not even a story that Curmie can find on PEN America, who filed an amicus brief for Reges when the case was before the Ninth Circuit.  There’s a brief piece on Inside Higher Ed (it’s behind a paywall, but it’s there), but nothing in the Chronicle of Higher Education.  Yahoo did have a story, and it looks like some kind of commentary in the Washington Post about the cost of humorlessness, but it’s behind a paywall.

There are stories all over the right-wing outlets, though: Fox News, Seattle Red, Campus Reform, Minding the Campus… you get the picture.  It would seem to Curmie that the general population, not just the conservative echo chamber, ought to know about this stuff.  But now, at least, you know, Gentle Reader.

On the Meet and Greet at Áras an Uachtaráin

Someone looks rather like a naughty schoolboy
who just got verbally eviscerated by
the headmistress.

Curmie, like many Americans, has some Irish heritage—in his case, on his mother’s side of the family—but he’s never considered himself Irish-American.  He’s spent a little over four months in the country if you add up the dozen or so visits, but only one week-long trip this July was purely for pleasure.  The rest of the time, the main purpose for being there was either research for the doctoral dissertation or a conference paper/article, or organizing and leading a total of seven Study Abroad trips with a group of undergraduates in tow. 

The trips with students meant offering course credit, and Curmie (unlike some of his colleagues, alas) wanted to ensure that there was a real academic quality to the process.  That meant not only concentrating on visiting culturally significant sites in Ireland, but also spending two weeks on campus before departure, not only reading and discussing a number of significant Irish plays, but also lecturing on Irish history and society. 

It’s said that the best way to learn something is to have to teach it to someone else… thus, Curmie learned far more about Strongbow (Richard de Clare), the Siege of Drogheda, the Penal Laws, the Great Hunger (the more accurate term for what is often termed the Famine), and the Easter Rising than he’d known prior to preparing for that first Study Abroad trip in 2006.  He learned the origins of the term “beyond the Pale,” and gained a deeper understanding of why an Irishman’s second-favorite football (soccer) national squad is whoever is playing England.    

Most relevant to this essay, however, was gaining at least an inkling of how the Irish government is structured today.  Most confusing to Americans—or at least to Curmie—was the function of the President.  This role, like, say, the monarch of the United Kingdom, is largely ceremonial, while the head of the government is the Taoiseach (Prime Minister).  But the Presidency is not inherited; presidents are elected by the citizenry for a seven-year term; the position is limited to two terms of office.  Candidates are, or at least can be, nominated by political parties, but the position is regarded as apolitical.

When Curmie was figuring all this out, Mary McAleese, a member of the center-right Fianna Fáil party, was in her second term.  Her successor, from the Labour party, was Michael D. Higgins, whom Curmie admires immensely.  He was everything one might want in a leader: intelligent, thoughtful (in both senses of the term), and resolute.  The facts that he was also a poet and a steadfast supporter of the arts, and that his absolutely adorable Bernese Mountain Dogs—Bród (“pride”), Síoda (“silk”), and Misneach (“courage”)—accompanied him virtually everywhere didn’t hurt, either.  It was no surprise that he was re-elected in 2018 with 56% of the first-ballot votes in a six-way race, winning literally all 40 constituencies in the country.

By the way, Higgins was 84 when he left office, but despite some health problems, he retained a keen and active mind, in contrast to a couple of recent octogenarian Presidents on this side of the Atlantic.  Replacing a figure of his stature wasn’t going to be easy.  That said, Catherine Connolly seems very much up to the task.  She had started her political career as a member of Labour, serving as a councilwoman and briefly as mayor of her native Galway.  She left the party in 2006 and has been an Independent ever since, serving as a TD (Teachta Dála, i.e., a representative of the lower house of parliament) for Galway West for nine years before she was elected President.

Her landslide victory in that election in 2025—winning over 63% of the votes in a three-way race—certainly suggested that the Irish public wanted someone to restrain the power of the Fianna Fáil-led coalition headed by Taoiseach Micheál Martin.  Connolly is self-described socialist pacifist, well to the left of Curmie, who isn’t exactly a die-hard conservative. 

She has been critical of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, but also of NATO, especially Germany’s plans to boost military spending, suggesting parallels to the 1930s.  She has railed against what she calls genocide in Gaza, and declared that “Genocide was enabled and resourced by American money.”  She insists that there should be a role for Hamas in a future Palestinian state.

In 2015, Ireland became the first country in the world to legalize gay marriage by national popular vote; in 2018, another referendum overturned the Eighth Amendment to the constitution, allowing access to abortion at least through the first 12 weeks.  In both cases, Connolly was a significant proponent of what might be called the liberal view.  Both measures passed by nearly 2:1 margins, suggesting that the populace might be electing center-right governments, but there was a streak of left-leaning libertarianism at play, as well.

Anyway, Catherine Connolly about as far politically from Donald Trump as it is possible to be.  Since his visit to Ireland was not on official business, however, it was she, not Taoiseach Martin, who welcomed him to the country, meeting with him at Áras an Uachtaráin, the official presidential residence located in Phoenix Park in Dublin.  Asked in a presidential debate shortly before the election whether she would challenge Trump about the US support for Israel and the Gaza War, she replied, “If it’s just a meet and greet, then I will meet and greet. If the discussion is genocide, then that’s a completely different thing.”

Well, the meeting this week was in fact just a meet and greet, but it appears she gave him a piece of her mind, anyway.  Here’s her description of what she said:

As President of Ireland, I am very conscious that Ireland and the United States of America are bound by strong ties.

This is a deep connection, built over centuries, which allows us to speak openly to one another.

We are in a world facing the existential threat posed by war and climate change, both of which are inextricably interlinked.

I conveyed the strong view of the Irish people that the normalisation of war and genocide can never be accepted.

As a country which has suffered famine, colonisation and the violence of the Troubles, but also the importance of the long and challenging road to peace, I emphasised the unique insight which Irish people can bring to the resolution of conflict.

I highlighted to President Trump the strong commitment which the Irish people have to international relations, to the importance of the United Nations, including the pride which Irish people feel in Ireland’s contribution to UN Peacekeeping since 1958, and to the obligations contained within Article 29 of our Constitution towards the peaceful resolution of international disputes.

I assured President Trump that the Irish people would strongly support all those who have the strength to build a shared peace in all those parts of the world currently suffering from such horrific war and violence.

One of the leftie sites in this country said she specifically mentioned “the genocide in Gaza.”  That’s almost certainly what she meant, but it’s unlikely that she’d have been that impolitic.

Anyway, she gifted Trump with a St. Brigid’s cross and two books: the Navigatio Sancti Brendani (The Voyage of St. Brendan) and the collected poems of Michael Longley, probably best known for his 14-liner (is it still a sonnet if it’s not in iambic pentameter?  Curmie has seen conflicting opinion on this point) “Ceasefire,” which views the Iliad within the context of the Troubles in Northern Ireland.  (Side note: Curmie actually once attended a lengthy poetry reading by Longley himself, but it was several years before that particular poem was written.)

Those items are intriguing.  There are few things more immediately recognizably Irish than a St. Brigid’s cross.  St. Brendan’s voyage was across the Atlantic to Newfoundland; the tale thus suggests one of the earliest links between Ireland and North America.

Longley, who died last year, was a Belfast-born poet.  A lot of the commentary about that particular book centers on the one poem at least as much for its title as anything else.  But it’s also worth mentioning that Connolly is outspoken in her desire for a united Ireland; there are certainly plenty of significant poets from the Republic whose works could have been used.  By the way, the prospect of a united Ireland seems to be one thing on which Connolly and Trump agree.

Of course, there’s a lot of speculation from predictable leftie sources that Connolly was taunting Trump because he is, shall we say, not an inveterate reader, especially of poetry.  Maybe, but probably not.  It’s certainly true that she’s no fan of Dear Leader, having accurately described him as “volatile” and “acting like a bully.”  But she doesn’t seem to be at all out of step with her constituents.

Curmie acknowledges that most if not all of his Irish friends are associated with the arts, a traditionally liberal group of folks.  That said, both what he reads in the Irish press and what he observed on the brief vacation in July suggest that Donald Trump is despised by the overwhelming majority of the Irish citizenry.  The huge sign reading “FxCK TRUMP” that couldn’t be missed on the approach to Shannon Airport is also an indication.  The massive protests throughout Dublin were another.  The country that has a portrait of JFK in their newest cathedral, that welcomed Barack Obama (or O’Bama, as many decided to call him) as one of their own, that restored the cobblestones at Dublin Castle when they heard Bill Clinton speaking wistfully of them… that country seems to have little use for this particular American President.

Curmie has indeed loved Ireland for a long time.  Maybe even a little more now...

 

There's a New “America’s Mayor”

Zohran Mamdani:
The New “America’s Mayor” 

Two items stood out on Curmie’s Facebook feed this morning.  Both referred not to the horrific events of a quarter century ago today, but to the aftermath, the response.  One post talked about the Canadian people, especially but not exclusively those of Gander, Newfoundland who took in stranded passengers, fed and housed them, and generally showed the kind of compassion and empathy that has since become anathema to Dear Leader and his minions.  The musical Come from Away, based on those events, has become an international hit.  (Curmie saw it London several years ago.)

The other post was a photo Curmie had never seen before, or at least had long forgotten.  What was pictured wasn’t from September 11, but from a full ten days later.  It shows an impromptu gathering on the pitcher’s mound of Shea Stadium, where the New York Mets had just defeated the Atlanta Braves 3-2 after a come-from-behind two-run homer in the 8th inning by Mike Piazza.  The game was the first sporting event to be held in New York since the attack, and was significant for that reason.  That the home team prevailed over their arch-rival in such a dramatic fashion was indeed a beacon of hope for a city that was reeling. 

But there was something special about that meeting on the mound.  It wasn’t just the Mets who were celebrating.  A lot of the Braves players were there, too.  And they weren’t just congratulating their opponents with a nod or even a handshake.  Star pitcher Tom Glavine is shown in the photo linked above hugging Mets reliever John Franco.  Even in defeat, they needed that game, that moment, that monodigital salute to those who would attack us, nearly as much as New Yorkers did.  Curmie has a couple of friends who are die-hard Braves fans.  They didn’t want to lose, but just this once, they were fine with the outcome, and the fact that the game even happened made the day a win for them.

All of us who are old enough to remember that particular 9/11 will remember where we were when we heard the horrible news—each of the four terrible events of the day.  But, like the hope that remained in Pandora’s box after the evil had escaped, there was a feeling of resolve, a sense of shared purpose to an extent that Curmie had never seen before.  From Canadians opening their homes to terrified strangers, to the entire crew of a German destroyer flying an American flag and declaring solidarity, to playing the Star Spangled Banner at the Changing of the Guard at Buckingham Palace (King Charles repeated the tribute this morning, by the way), to countless other manifestations of condolence and support from around the globe, it became very clear very fact that people and governments worldwide were aghast at what had happened and determined to help us get back on our feet as a nation.

Here in the States, as Curmie wrote on his Facebook page last year, “If anything good came out of that nightmare, it is that, for a brief interval, we were Americans first and everything else--religion, race, political orientation, etc.--was secondary.”  We even granted Rudy Giuliani the unofficial title of “America’s Mayor” for what seemed at the time, at least, to be his adept handling of the aftermath of the attack.  He had overwhelming support from New Yorkers, was named Person of the Year by Time magazine, and even got an honorary knighthood from Queen Elizabeth.

Unfortunately for Giuliani’s political ambitions, however, George W. Bush was in his first term and ran for re-election in 2004.  That meant it was 2008 before Giuliani could seek the presidency.  He was the favorite to get the Republican nomination when he declared his candidacy early in 2007.  He’d been a leading figure in the GOP, after all, and had been a key supporter of Bush’s campaign.  By this time, though, there were questions about a series of extra-marital affairs, conflicts of interest and other scandals.  More importantly, perhaps, some of the luster had worn off his response to 9/11. 

It was reported that a fair number of things for which Giuliani had taken credit were actually performed by someone else.  More significantly, shortly after his candidacy was announced, the International Association of Fire Fighters declared that Giuliani’s actions in the recovery operation:

meant that firefighters and citizens who perished would either remain buried at Ground Zero forever, with no closure for families, or be removed like so much garbage and deposited at the Fresh Kills landfill…. Hundreds remained entombed in Ground Zero when Giuliani gave up on them…. What Giuliani showed is a disgraceful lack of respect for the fallen and those brothers still searching for them.

Moreover, EPA chief (and former Republican governor of New Jersey) Christine Todd Whitman asserted that her efforts to get Ground Zero workers to wear respirators and haz-mat suits were blocked by Giuliani, who (and this part is Curmie’s reading of the situation) seemed more interested in making things look normal than in getting them to be normal.  She even suggested that illnesses killing first responders could be attributed, at least in part, to the city’s actions (or lack thereof).

After that 2008 presidential campaign collapsed in a series of 3rd, 4th, and 5th place finishes in primaries and caucuses, Giuliani has become increasingly irrelevant.  He still makes headlines occasionally—sometimes for yet another scandal in his personal life, sometimes for his sycophancy to Dear Leader, sometimes for his alleged criminality, sometimes for some rather misapplied hair dye, sometimes for… well, what the hell was that Four Seasons Landscaping business all about, anyway?

Most recently, in one last (we can hope it’s the last) attempt to get his name in the papers, the one-time America’s Mayor goes full-out Islamophobe and says he’s offended by the fact that current mayor Zohran Mamdani would do his damned job and attend the commemorations.  He launches into a despicable racist attack, claiming that “They want to dominate us.… Mamdani is a clear—a clear—supporter of that.  All of the Muslims he supports are murderers.”  If Rudy Giuliani ever deserved our respect or even our empathy, those days are now long behind us.  Whether he was always a bigoted asshole or not, he sure as hell is now.

Curmie has often noted that one of the basic principles taught in the Political Ideals class he took in college a little over a half century ago is that, generally, conservatives tend to think in terms of individuals and liberals think more in terms of group identities, often in demographic terms.  Liberals still think that way, sometimes with reason, sometimes without.  But conservatives like Giuliani, Trump, Hegseth, et al., are more than ready to characterize anyone who isn’t a straight white male Christian nationalist as simply The Other and therefore unworthy of respect or even notice, irrespective of what an individual person says or does. 

Look, Gentle Reader… you can agree or disagree with Mayor Mamdani’s politics are.  Curmie generally likes what he sees; you needn’t.  But the chances are you wouldn’t have found your way to this blog if you weren’t perceptive enough to know that octogenarian demagogues would be just as loud in denunciation had Mamdani decided not to attend: “See?  He won’t even show respect to those who lost their lives on 9/11!”

Mamdani’s response was, to be sure, a political gesture, but it also had substance: the release of 170,000 pages of documents suggesting that the Giuliani administration (and, indeed, all the subsequent ones) knowingly lied to the public about air quality concerns.  One example, from the CNN article linked above: 

an internal memo written by Associate Health Commissioner Kelly McKinney on October 6, 2001, warning that “air quality [for asbestos] at those locations is not yet suitable for reoccupancy,” came the same day that Giuliani publicly declared the air to be safe, the documents say.

Curmie isn’t going to read all 170,000 pages.  You won’t, either, Gentle Reader, but someone will.  It may turn out that allegations of a cover-up are unfounded, or that the evidence is sufficiently complex or contradictory that judgment calls were reasonable at the time, even if they look wrong with the benefit of hindsight.  If so, we’ll at least know.

One more thing: all but one living POTUS attended the commemoration, willingly agreeing not to speak, lest the event become political rather than a solemn remembrance.  The one who wasn’t there, of course, is the one who is pathologically unable to allow literally any event or discussion to be about anything but himself, the one whose fish stories about his own activities in the aftermath of 9/11 have now reached great white shark territory.  He is best remembered for his unwillingness to remember.

We close, then, with Mayor Mamdani’s comments in a statement (not at the event per se, remember).  Here it is:

September 11th was a horrific act of terror, a day of immeasurable loss.

2,753 parents and children, husbands and wives, friends and colleagues.

2,753 universes gone in an instant, and in the years since, 1000s more have died from illnesses caused by the toxic air they breathed and the months they spent working on the pile.

We remember 9/11 as the darkest day in our city's history, but we also remember what so many New Yorkers did in that darkness.

We remember the 1000s upon 1000s of New Yorkers who lined up for hours to donate blood.

We remember the people who opened their homes to those who could not get home.

We remember the workers who carried their colleagues down hundreds of stairs, then turned around and went back up to find someone else who needed help.

25 years later, we have a sacred obligation to those who were stolen from us to care for one another as they cared for strangers, to live lives worthy of the sacrifices they made, and to build a city worthy of their courage, a city where we run toward one another.

That is how we remember.

Gentle Reader, as noted above, you can agree with Mamdani’s politics or not... or sort of.  But this statement is what the sitting mayor of the nation’s greatest city is supposed to say on an occasion like this.  He has picked up the title of America’s Mayor from the sputtering old man whose outrageous prejudice made him unworthy of the appellation.  And that, at least, is unquestionably a good thing.