Mark Twain Is Right. Again.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Three Stories about College Basketball. Sort of.

 

It’s a little later in the season than Curmie normally writes about college basketball: we’re already into the second weekend of the NCAA tournament, after all.  Nor is this piece focused primarily on the whimsicality of the selection committee, although that sort of comes into play.  What we have instead is the three-topic essay about things at least tangential to basketball.

First up: the Big 12 tournament, held at the T-Mobile Center in Kansas City.  There were a lot of complaints last year about how ugly the court was; an article in the Topeka Capital-Journal describes “a court design that could be generously described as unusual.”  Those folks were being kind.  The court was the perfect storm of ugly, boring, and self-indulgent: little “XII”s all lined up in a symmetrical pattern on a grey surface.  Curmie likes you too much to show a photo here, but if you’re curious, Gentle Reader, click here. 

That article also quotes Big 12 commissioner Brett Yormark as saying, “we wanted to make a profound statement.”  Well, they did that.  Unfortunately, that statement was that the league was being run by fucking idiots… or, perhaps by blind folks.  Yormark also said that all the players loved the floor.  He obviously didn’t talk to the players quoted in various articles… or he was lying: certainly a possibility, as admitting a mistake is apparently outside the realm of possibility.

A few weeks ago, when Curmie heard the conference was going to go in a different direction, he rejoiced.  He shouldn’t have.  What the league did was to spend an estimated $185,000 to rent (rent!) a spiffy LED floor that could show all kinds of cool graphics, team logos, updated stats and similar grooviness.  Of course, a lot of that was only going to be really legible from one side of the court, but we can imagine that stuff like team logos could swirl around the space.  Little of that stuff would be visible to TV viewers, but there were snippets.  But when the game was actually going on… the same fugly design as last year. 

Unfortunately, that wasn’t the biggest problem.  The damned floor was slippery.  Well, that’s what a lot of players said.  Others, presumably, weren’t bothered.  Curmie heard about it on a Kansas radio broadcast before the (men’s) regular season even ended.  That’s because KU women’s coach Brandon Schneider had warned men’s coach Bill Self about it after the KU women’s team played on it in their conference tournament.  At the time, the men’s team might get a “double bye,” or they might not.  It was even suggested that getting a lower seed might almost be preferable, as you’d have a game against a lesser team to familiarize yourselves with the court before playing a team that might legitimately beat you. 

True, there was a track record for the LED court, but it was mostly for exhibition games and the like: in other words, where the show was more important than the outcome.  Even the floor’s defenders admitted that the floor takes getting used to.  But K-State forward Taj Manning went straight to the point, noting not only that one of his teammates got a migraine from the lights, but that it was “slippery” and “a bad floor; they shouldn’t bring it back.”  Texas Tech coach Grant McCasland added that “I think with size around the basket it's not [a big issue] but the quickness of guard play, and stop-and-start action -- it just has a different response than what we're used to.”  In other words, it changes the dynamics of the game: giving the advantage to teams with size and power over those with speed and agility.  Texas Tech, who was already playing without their best big man, lost their star guard (and projected 1st-round draft pick) Christian Anderson when he slipped and suffered a groin injury during the Iowa State game.  Coincidence?  Perhaps.

The complaints finally grew loud enough that the league decided to change back to last year’s ugly but predictable floor for the semi-finals and final.  Be it noted: between the men’s and women’s tournaments, there were 30 games played.  27 of them were on the LED floor, despite the fact that concerns were raised in the first women’s games nine days earlier.  Of course, two things remain pretty constant in the world of major sports organizations (NCAA, IOC, NFL, FIFA…).  1). There’s one thing pretty certain about proclamations that it’s all about player safety: it’s never about player safety.  Witness, for example the 2023 Super Bowl or the 2015 Women’s World Cup in soccer.  2). And, as the latter example illustrates, player safety complaints matter more when they come from men rather than women.

Look, Gentle Reader, Curmie doesn’t know whether that court is literally unsafe or whether it just takes a little getting used to.  But it’s certainly different, and therefore should not have even been considered for a post-season conference tournament.  If one of those early-season invitationals like the already stupid “innovative” Geico Players Era “Festival,” go for it.  Everybody knows going in what they’re going to get, and the tournament is clearly more about flash and trash than basketball, anyway, so why not?  But not in a conference tournament with NCAA bids and seedings on the line.

Moving on.  There’s speculation that the appearance of the Queens University Royals in this year’s NCAA tournament might be their last.  The small Presbyterian-affiliated school with an undergraduate population of only a little over 1200 won the Atlantic Sun Conference tournament this year, defeating regular season champion Central Arkansas in overtime in the championship game.  The Royals moved up from Division II in 2022; this was their first year of eligibility to compete in the NCAAs.  (Don’t ask why the wait; Curmie has no idea.) 

So why the problem?  Well, Queens announced its merger with Elon University in December; the details will be worked out by the end of the summer.  Does that mean the two schools will have only one basketball team between them?  It’s possible.  Indeed, someone named Rob Reinhart proclaimed that Queens won’t have a team after this year.  Reinhart, or whoever he is, has been named a troll, though, so there’s that.  Still, the two campuses are only a couple miles apart, so it wouldn’t be difficult to merge the teams after staffing and other logistics are worked out.

There doesn’t seem to be a definitive answer at this point, but the probability is that, at least in the short term, the two schools will have different teams, playing in different conferences (Elon is in the Coastal Athletic Conference).  It will all depend on the details of the merger agreement, but if there can be teams called the University of North Carolina at Wilmington or Texas A&M Corpus Christi, then it doesn’t seem impossible that two affiliated schools could operate their athletics programs independently.  Or maybe it is.  We shall see.

Finally, there’s this year’s manifestation of Bruce Pearl being Bruce Pearl.  The most recent story was about his rant against the University of North Carolina’s firing of head coach and alumnus Hubert Davis, bemoaning the school’s lack of loyalty.  Before that, though, was his claim that the Miami (of Ohio) RedHawks shouldn’t be in the NCAA field despite their undefeated regular season after losing in the first round of their conference tournament.  Here’s The Athletic’s Will Leitch’s commentary on Pearl: 

This was a man literally banned by the sport who is now, and I suspect moving forward, going to be its public face, right there talking to the camera during the three weeks college basketball has the sports world’s undivided attention.  I can think of no better metaphor for the state of college basketball (and, really, the world).

Then he moves on the Pearl’s argument: 

Not having the RedHawks in the tournament — a tournament with 68 freaking teams in it — would have essentially argued not just that their regular season accomplishment meant nothing, but that the regular season, anyone’s regular season, was in fact pointless: It would tell college basketball fans across the country that there was no reason for any of them to pay attention until March, something non-college basketball fans already do, but nonetheless is not exactly the message you want to send to your most loyal customers.

The situation was aggravated, of course, by Pearl’s advocacy for Auburn, the team he coached last year and which, thanks in no small part to his interference advocacy, is now coached by his son. 

Bruce Pearl has been an unethical gasbag for years.  Curmie described him thus in 2010: 

Pearl and many (most?) of his brethren don’t give a crap about under-prepared kids in general, just the 6’8” ones with post-up skills. And when they’ve served the only purpose Pearl has for them, namely winning basketball games and thereby inflating his salary, he’s perfectly willing to toss them, 70% of them, sans degree or NBA contract, on the scrap heap.

Curmie isn’t a fan, to say the least.

But here’s the problem: Curmie agrees with him on both of these issues.  Unless there was some locker-room stuff we don’t know about, firing Davis was remarkably stupid.  The Tarheels’ best player, Caleb Wilson, was lost for the season due to a pair of injuries.  With him in the lineup, they were 19-4, including five wins against ranked teams.  Without him, they were 5-5, including losses in their first games in both the ACC and NCAA tournaments.  A little loyalty, or at least recognition that sometimes you have bad luck, wouldn’t have come amiss.

As for the NCAA selections…  Well, if I tell you that the team that won both the regular season and tournament in the Big East (St. John’s) was a 5-seed and the team that came in second in both (UConn) was a 2-seed, that should tell you how much the committee really cares about getting things right.  (Curmie had St. John’s as a 2 and UConn as a 4.)  And there’s absolutely no question that Miami shouldn’t have been in the tournament.  Yes, they went undefeated in the regular season, but their strength of schedule in the non-con according to KenPom was #361 (of 365).  If they’d played literally anyone actually good and lost a close game against, say, Ohio State (or even Cincinnati), that would probably have been the best game they played all year, but no one would be arguing for them; they’re somewhere around the 90th best team. 

Their best win was against Akron, at home, by one possession; they won four (!) games in overtime.  On the one hand, that makes them scrappy and well-coached.  On the other hand, it means that if in any of those four games, a single jump-shot in regulation had been a quarter of an inch in one direction or the other and therefore rattled in instead of out or vice versa, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.  They’d have taken their automatic bid to the NIT (the way Curmie’s former employer did, having won their conference regular season title and then losing in the championship game on their opponent’s home court (!) instead of a first-round loss to the #198 team in the country on a neutral court).  Note to Will Leitch: pay a little attention or you’ll say something stupid.

Curmie will grant that CBS shouldn’t have let Pearl opine about Auburn, but they probably couldn’t resist.  They also, of course, called on Wally Szczerbiak, unquestionably one of the two best players in RedHawks history, to make the case for his alma mater.  They probably think it’s cute.  They’re wrong.

So… that’s enough college basketball talk for now.  Until the next topic comes up, at least.

Thoughts on a Play Curmie Hasn't Seen

Henry Drummond (Billy Eugene Jones) interrogates
Matthew Harrison Brady (Dakin Matthews)
in the Arena Stage production of Inherit the Wind.

The Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee classic Inherit the Wind has played an important role in Curmie’s life more than once.  He first encountered the play when he was in high school, at a time when he began having real doubts about organized religion in general and Christianity in particular.  Of course, this was in the early ‘70s, a time of turbulence in American society in general—the Vietnam War, civil rights, what was then called “women’s liberation,” campus protests, drug culture…  Not all of those things had much of a direct effect on Curmie, but what had always been taken for granted was increasingly being questioned.

The play, of course, was based on the “Scopes Monkey Trial” in Tennessee in 1925.  The irreverence of Henry Drummond, the Clarence Darrow character, shows towards Matthew Harrison Brady (William Jennings Bryan) really caught Curmie’s attention.  He was particularly fond of the bit about where Cain’s wife came from: “Figure somebody pulled off another creation, over in the next county?”  That’s the kind of snark that appealed a lot to an adolescent who wanted desperately to be rebellious but couldn’t quite handle the social discomfort.  Fifty-something years later, Curmie still approves.

Above all, though, Curmie was introduced to the idea that drama can be about something, not just pretty words or an engaging story.  He hadn’t put all the pieces together yet, but this play was indeed destined to play a role in Curmie’s career choices, especially the willingness to explore the more academic side of the business after it became clear that he had more intellect than acting talent.

Speaking of which…  A few years later, in the summer between his freshman and sophomore years of college, Curmie auditioned for a production of Inherit the Wind in the summer season of the local college, whose theatre building was literally across the street from his house.  He was cast, not in the role he wanted, but cast.  His role may be the most difficult he’s ever played: not because it was a lead (Curmie has had a couple, though not many), but precisely because it wasn’t.  Part of the difficulty was, no doubt, due to Curmie’s inexperience; things would certainly have been easier had he had a few more shows behind him before essaying the part. 

But a good deal of the struggle came from the role itself.  Curmie played Harry Y. Esterbrook, the announcer for WGN radio in Chicago.  In the trial scenes, which are at the center of the play, Esterbrook is on stage, facing the audience, every moment.  All those clichés about how “acting is reacting” were certainly true for that part.  Curmie had very few lines to hide behind or build a character around, and it was one of those roles that can’t really help the show, but sure can hurt it.

But what Curmie really got out of that production was something different.  He had no choice but to watch the other actors, and indeed really to pay attention to them.  While Esterbrook was watching Drummond or Brady or Hornbeck (the H. L. Mencken character), Curmie was watching actors more skilled—whether by experience, talent, or both—than himself.  He noticed the difference between standing on the line and before it, the subtle but noticeable turn of the head that set up a moment, the pause that made the audience listen more intently to what followed.  He also listened to the director, who was excellent in some ways but given to rants… and he saw the veteran actors pretty much ignore these outbursts.  If you’re screaming all the time, it doesn’t matter that you’re screaming now.  That applies to life in general, of course, but especially to the stage.

Curmie got better as an actor, in large part because of that show: not good enough to make a living at it, but he did play a few featured roles in student productions as an undergrad and even a couple of leads in amateur productions after graduation.  But without even contemplating the possibility that he might someday be a director, he learned a great deal from the experience of Inherit the Wind about how to do that job, too.

It is ironic, to be sure, that whereas Curmie did indeed end up acting in a couple dozen more plays and directing 60 or so over the course of his career, his job was as a theatre scholar, and it wasn’t until years after being in that production of Inherit the Wind that he realized that the play is about the Scopes trial in very much the same way that The Crucible is about the Salem witch trials of the late 17th century: in other words, as a stand-in for something else.  In both cases, that “something else” was the anti-communist fervor exemplified by investigations by Joseph McCarthy et al. in the Senate and HUAC in the House.  Whereas Arthur Miller concentrated on the false accusations, Lawrence and Lee were more about the suppression of ideas, but the two plays end up in pretty much the same place, and do so in similar fashion, by creating a fictive world that approximates but does not reproduce historical events.

Cates, of course, is found guilty.  His fine has been paid, but he has no future in this small Tennessee town.  Drummond recognizes this, but provides a bit of context: “You don’t suppose this kind of thing is ever finished, do you?  Tomorrow it’ll be something else—and another fella will have to stand up.  And you’ve helped give him the guts to do it!”  We are left with the confidence that Cates, probably more than the IRL person on whom he is based, will be fine.

While it is a little embarrassing that Curmie took literally years to figure out that a play written in the immediate aftermath of the McCarthy era might be about something more than just a 30-year-old trial in Tennessee, at least he’s perceptive enough to notice that there’s a reason for theatre companies in 2026 to choose this particular chestnut.  Being that “next fella” matters, especially as attempts by the right to suppress any expression they don’t like are springing up faster than zits on prom night.  

Curmie started to list the cases he’s written about just in this academic year, but that list got really long.  A couple of highlights, then: the cancellation of a student-directed play because there are… you know… <whispers> gay people in it; the professor who was fired and the retired cop who was charged with a felony (!) for posting memes insufficiently hagiographic about Charlie Kirk (certainly far less celebratory than Dear Leader’s recent outburst about the passing of Robert Mueller); the Texas A&M philosophy prof who was forbidden to assign a passage from Plato, and his colleague from a different department whose class was cancelled after it had already met because he couldn’t predict which specific days class discussion might veer into territory the censorial regime didn’t like.  And on and on. 

Plus, of course, we should mention the various felonies committed by ICE/DHS/whoever against citizens exercising their 1st Amendment rights, including but by no means limited to the murder of Alex Pretti.  Plus, of course, all of those incidents that Curmie posted about on his Facebook page but never wrote about… and the hundreds (no doubt) that Curmie never even heard about.  Yeah, it’s time for a production of Inherit the Wind, which, of course, also highlights the dangers of cherry-picking which sections of the Bible should form the foundation of a weltanschauung and which can be readily ignored.

So… anyway… there is such a production at Arena Stage in Washington, DC, presented in cooperation with Seattle-based The Feast company (director Ryan Guzzo Purcell is the founder of The Feast).  It is a trimmed-down version: there must have been a couple dozen actors in the production Curmie was in; this one has only ten, with a lot of doubling and only a sprinkling of jurors on stage at any given moment, for example.  As might be expected, this is a show created by Woke Folk: Drummond is black; Hornbeck is female (one presumes that the company got approval from the rights-holders for this change); the cast is listed alphabetically in the program, which also includes a land acknowledgment.  <Sigh.>

Curmie’s dear friend Paul Webb reviewed the production on his blog, which, Gentle Reader, if you’re a theatre-goer in the DC area, you should bookmark.  Paul touches on some curious choices in terms of time period: both in terms of costumes and, for example, the presence of a 50-star American flag, which strikes Curmie as more likely intentional than lazy (but he doesn’t totally reject the latter as a possibility).  A couple of other choices were curious: giving Brady, a Nebraskan, a southern drawl and even putting him in a white suit that make him look like a refugee from a KFC commercial for at least one scene, for instance.  (Bryan was from Illinois,)

Over at Ethics Alarms, Jack Marshall declares the production “stupid,” a “travesty,” and “absurd,” among similar endearments.  Is he right?  Up to a point, yes.  Part of the play’s appeal stems from the audience’s recognition of the historical reference: at some level, Bert Cates is John Scopes, Henry Drummond is Clarence Darrow, etc., and there’s no way some of what happens in this production could have occurred in the real world: no rational defendant would hire a black lawyer in Tennessee in 1925, for instance… not to mention the fact that the author of the textbook in question used evolution as a means of supporting eugenics and the alleged superiority of the white race, and it’s rather unlikely that a black man would be much interested in taking up that cause.

But this is a fictionalized version of events, not a literal re-telling with the “names changed to protect the innocent,” à la “Dragnet.”  For example, Bert Cates may be dating the preacher’s daughter, but John Scopes wasn’t; the locals may have been hoping Scopes would be convicted, but they weren’t hostile towards the outsiders (they welcomed the visitors who were spending money in their town); Bryan didn’t die until several days after the trial, in his sleep, not mere moments after the verdict was announced.  

Lawrence and Lee altered the story to make it more theatrical, in the same way that Shakespeare played fast and loose with his history plays.  (Curmie spent a very long time indeed re-learning the actual events of the Plantagenet and Tudor eras after first reading about them in plays like Henry V and Richard III.)  The changes wrought in Inherit the Wind tend mostly to increase the tension, making things more difficult for Cates: he has become more of a pariah in the community, and his personal and professional lives are more in conflict with each other.

What appears to have happened in the Arena production is to exaggerate these departures from history per se and their effects even more.  Without having seen the play in production, Curmie is loath to proclaim these changes successful or otherwise, but he suspects he’d have felt preached at and/or condescended to.  It’s important to note here that changing the time period, or the race and/or sex of a character aren’t inherently problematic: Curmie has indeed done all of the above, usually because there just wasn’t a good enough male actor or white singer or whatever.  Such problems are unlikely to present themselves in a professional production in Washington, DC.

In all probability, the squishiness of the time frame is intended to make the audience think about how this play, written over 70 years ago and referencing events of 30 years before that, is relevant to today’s world.  Curmie doesn’t think that’s necessary; rather, he’s going to trust the audience’s perspicacity (and his own story-telling ability) to make those connections without artificial assistance.  One of the essential elements of theatre is audience superiority: not just “I see what you did there,” but “and I saw it before the people in the row in front of me did.”  Whether a 50-star flag helps or hurts this process probably varies by spectator as well as by production choices.  (It would be interesting to know which came first: the decision to cast a black Drummond, necessitating the time change, or the time change, allowing a black Drummond.)

But all of this dances around the central issue: there’s a professional production of Inherit the Wind out there!  Curmie would definitely go if he was in the area, but there are four screen versions, including three that seem to be available on Tubi: the original 1960 film with a host of recognizable actors led by Spencer Tracy as Drummond and Fredric March as Brady (this is the only one Curmie has seen; it’s really good); a 1988 TV version with Kirk Douglas and Jason Robards; and another TV version, this one from 1999, with Jack Lemmon and George C. Scott.  Curmie might just have to check one of these out before long…

Musings on the Afroman Defamation Case

Afroman dressed up for his court date.

Curmie has one piece about 80% written and two or three others pretty much blocked out in his head, but let’s go with the Saga of Afroman, who successfully defended a lawsuit for defamation this week.  If ever there was a definition by example of the Streisand Effect, this is it.  Curmie admits he’d never heard of Afroman (Joseph Foreman), or of “Lemon Pound Cake,” (the best-known of his responses to a botched raid on his property) or indeed his Grammy-nominated single “Because I Got High.”  But now, even the hopelessly uncool Curmie knows who he is, and, perhaps more relevantly, about that raid in August of 2022.

That raid, conducted by the sheriff’s office in Adams County, Ohio (that’s southeast of Cincinnati, along the Kentucky border), happened when our hero was out of town.  Yes, they did indeed kick the door in, cause considerable damage to the gate, cut the cords to his home security video system, and seize a significant amount of cash.  The warrant was for drug trafficking and kidnapping, and there was no evidence that could lead to a prosecution.  Oh, and the cops apparently refused to pay for the financial damage they caused, let alone the trauma inflicted by waving assault weapons in at least the general direction of Foreman’s kids, both tweens at the time.

That said, the warrant existed, and it wasn’t issued by the cops themselves.  If there was indeed a reasonable suspicion that there was kidnapping involved, then the whole weapons-drawn, kicking-down-the-door business is at least understandable.  And we have only Afroman’s testimony that the amount of cash returned was less than what was seized.  Indeed, we have only his word about the destruction to the property, although there doesn’t seem to be any denial forthcoming from the sheriff’s office.  More troubling are the lyrics to the newly released “Randy Walters Is a Son of Bitch,” which includes the line “that’s why I fucked his wife and got filthy rich.”  Completely apart from the language issue, there’s the suggestion of impropriety by Walters’s wife, and he’s got no legitimate beef with her, even if he does with her husband.  It appears to be the case that the officers in question were, at least at the raid itself, simply doing their jobs and executing a warrant; it is certainly true that some of the stuff in those videos was vicious and vengeful.

Anyway, the cops (seven of them!) sued for defamation to the tune of $3.5 million.  There were all kinds of courtroom histrionics, including Sgt. Walters testifying that he doesn’t know whether the allegations about his wife are true or not and Officer Lisa Phillips crying on the stand when viewing one of Afroman’s taunts (proving either that she doesn’t have the stuff to be a cop or that she got some really bad advice from her attorney).  Afroman himself, of course, completely controlled the narrative during his own testimony, remaining steadfastly on the offensive.

And that’s certainly one of the messages here: don’t sue someone who is smarter than you, funnier than you, accustomed to being a performer, and rich enough to hire a top-notch legal team... certainly not for a jury trial.  But should those be legitimate criteria?  Everyday folks have rights, too, and the cops were initially highlighted not because they did anything wrong, per se, but because they were easily identifiable.  There seems to have been little if any attempt to place blame on whoever provided the presumably false testimony that led to the warrant, or on the judge who signed off on it.  And surely the majority of the cops on the scene shouldn’t be expected to pay for repairs to the premises with their own money.  Moreover, we can reasonably assume that the money Afroman raised directly or indirectly from a viral video far exceeded the cost of the repairs to his residence.

It’s also true that the notion of being a public figure is, or at least ought to be, on a continuum.  At one end of the spectrum are celebrities of whatever description; at the other end are the overwhelming majority of us, people unknown except to their friends and associates.  The county sheriff would be between those extremes, but closer to the latter than to the former.  Is he a sufficiently “public individual” to allow greater latitude to someone ridiculing him, even up to the point of saying things that are gross exaggerations or even untruths?  Are his subordinates?

Is it relevant, therefore, that some of the things Afroman sings about never happened?  He wasn’t there to hear the glass break, for example.  He also says in his court testimony that his kids saw him being threatened.  They didn’t, and there’s a difference between what he puts in a song and what he says on the witness stand. 

Curmie’s initial response to the verdict in the Afroman case was a combination of celebration and laughter.  That’s in large part because the overwhelming majority of cops Curmie has encountered—whether he was reporting a crime, getting stopped for speeding, or anything in-between—have been self-important jackasses, and the small-town version is particularly obnoxious, because they’re also, generally, rather stupid.  Curmie shouldn’t assume that the small-town cops in question here fit that description, but that hypothesis has so far not been disproven.  And the fact that the ACLU and a host of other civil liberties organizations applauded the verdict tells us something.

It’s unsettling, though, that Afroman is also pretty much a jerk.  He’s clever and charismatic, but that doesn’t make him other than cruel and vindictive.  It’s also true that, as someone said in a comment on one of those YouTube videos, this episode has extended his career by 15 years.  Yes, his legal victory brought a refreshing break from whatever other stories appeared in the daily doomscrolling, but there’s something disquieting, too.

Afroman is the hero we need.  Whether he is the hero we deserve is up for debate.

There Are Illegalities and Illegalities

The recent attacks on Iran raise multiple concerns: strategic, political, and legal.  Curmie thinks the raids were stupid and sincerely hopes they’ll prove as disastrous for the Trump regime as they already have for the nation’s standing as a promoter of peace.  But what he really wants to talk about is that last item: were they legal?

There are two independent facets to that question.  The first is the one that’s been noised about by a good share of the left-leaning press: that Trump lacked Congressional approval and that the assault was therefore illegal.  Curmie thinks so, but there’s a little wiggle room.  It all boils down to what the War Powers Act actually was intended to do… and to what it says, which may be different things.  Neither Congress nor SCOTUS has seen fit to clarify the terms.

The obvious intent was to allow the President, as Commander-in-Chief, to respond to exigencies: imminent threats, that sort of thing.  The Trump administration can’t seem to get its story straight about what prompted this particular action, which is why Curmie is more than a little suspicious that these shenanigans aren’t entirely on the up-and-up.  Did we go along with this because Israel was going to do it, anyway, as Marco Rubio first argued?  Or was it something else, since he subsequently denied saying what he’s on tape saying?  Was it to stop Iran’s nuclear program, the one that was supposedly “obliterated” last year?  Or to respond to an Iranian threat that’s presumably been imminent for <checks notes> 47 years?  Curmie raises a skeptical eyebrow.

Whatever squishiness there might be in the wording of the War Powers Act, Curmie is pretty much convinced that yes, this was illegal.  The response from Trumpian apologists has been to accuse Democrats of hypocrisy because they were perfectly willing to allow President Obama to bomb Libya back in 2011, casually omitting the fact the two incidents are pretty much parallel: a POTUS of one party uses what may or may not be legitimate authority to execute a military mission, and the other party starts screaming about illegality, even unconstitutionality.  Are the Democrats being two-faced?  Of course they are!  Are the Republicans just as bad?  Yep.

But Curmie hears the GOP sycophants wondering “where was all this liberal concern for restricting the power of the presidency in such cases when Obama was in office?”  Right here, is where.  Here’s the central paragraph of what Curmie wrote 15 years ago:

The administration’s case, one which ignored the objections of Jeh C. Johnson, the Pentagon general counsel, and of Caroline D. Krass, the acting head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, is founded on three independent premises, none of which stand up to much scrutiny. The first is that an offensive mission involving drone attacks, sustained bombing, and occasional casualties doesn’t really constitute “hostilities.” The second is that, despite the fact that participation in a NATO-run, UN-sanctioned, mission to protect civilians has morphed into an aggressive attack on Colonel Qaddafi’s compound, the military and geo-political missions have not merged. The third is the apparent assertion that since the mission has taken longer than expected (and that’s never happened before, right?), we should really only be looking at how long the campaign was supposed to last. Add to that the extreme rarity of any White House over-riding the opinion of the Office of Legal Counsel, and the Obama administration has a mess on its hands… or perhaps on its shoes, because they’ve really stepped in something.

Moving on to the second part of the critique of present-day hostilities.  Let’s talk about bombing that elementary school in Minab, killing scores of little girls aged 7-12, which according to the best information we have, was perpetrated by American forces.  This is about as clear a violation of international law, not to mention common decency, as it’s possible to imagine.  It is unmistakably a war crime.  Yes, Gentle Reader, mistakes happen: “fog of war” and all that.  Bullshit.  At best, this was a manifestation of breathtaking recklessness and incompetence.  At worst, it was such an intentional infliction of pain and suffering on young girls that you’d think it was ordered by one of those pervs whose name keeps appearing in the Epstein files.  Oh… wait…

What’s the excuse?  Why aren’t the so-called journalists asking how such an atrocity can happen?  Were we just lobbing bombs into populated areas with no regard for what or who might be on the receiving end?  Was the reported death of Ayatollah Khameini therefore just blind luck?  After all, if you can target a particular area to attack, you can similarly identify a different area not to attack.  Or did some idiot like Pete Hegseth decide to demonstrate his manliness by asserting his absolute authority over a bunch of elementary schoolers.  They might have been in math class, learning about Arabic numerals, after all.  Another explanation is that this was a “precise targeting”: the school building used to be an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) base, you see.  Ya might wanna check that shit out next time...

When the Chinese embassy in Belgrade was bombed by American forces in 1999, President Clinton apologized to the Chinese President Jiang Zemin promptly and profusely, claiming that the incident was accidental.  Given that there was no rational reason to attack the embassy, Clinton was probably telling the truth, even if the Chinese tried to spin the story to their geopolitical advantage.  There’s no reason to bomb an elementary school in Iran in 2026, either.  The difference between the events is two-fold.  First, Clinton, unlike Trump, was willing to admit to a mistake, and even to take responsibility for something that is extremely unlikely to have been under his direct control.  Secondly, whereas Bill Clinton is hardly an exemplar of truth-telling, his sanity has never been in question.

There are reports that Iran was negotiating with the US when the attacks occurred.  Perhaps that’s true; perhaps it’s leftie spin (or worse).  But there is no question that the logistics of the mission, from choosing targets to strategies for removing Americans from sites likely to be struck by the inevitable retaliation (“get on a commercial plane at your own expense at an airport that’s closed” isn’t terribly helpful advice), were an absolute disaster.  That’s what happens when you choose cabinet members based on sycophancy rather than relevant experience, intelligence, or… you know… competence.

We can hope that the Iranian people will soon be better off, that the military exercise will achieve its purported goal.  It’s not likely, given the history of other attempts at regime change, but it’s not impossible.  It is also possible that new evidence will emerge that will exonerate the US military, but there is something of the boy who cried “wolf” at play here.  What reasonably intelligent person would believe anything this administration says after its serial prevarications about ICE operations?  

Indeed, the two things that will linger in Curmie’s mind for a very long time indeed are the loss of any remaining remnant of American honor or integrity in international relations… and the nagging feeling that de facto Commander-in-Chief of the US military is Bibi Netanyahu.

“First, They Came for…”

Two facts about Curmie:

1. He lived in Kansas for seven years, working on his doctorate and staying on for another year when a full-time teaching gig didn’t materialize.  At the time, the state legislature was more conservative than Curmie would have preferred, but it wasn’t controlled by wackadoodles. 

2. He’s friends with (at least) six trans people, one of whom is also his nephew.  None of them, thankfully, live in Kansas.

Yes, it’s true that the lead story of the past few days is yet another reckless act by the Sociopath-in-Chief.  Were Curmie of a cynical disposition, he might suggest that killing little girls is a rather bizarre (and ineffective) means of trying to divert attention away from credible evidence that one has raped little girls.  But that was an act of desperation perpetrated by a single person (well, and his sycophantic minions) and whose victims committed the grievous ethical failing of being born in a different country.  What happened this week in Kansas was, in its own way, even worse.

No, there won’t be any Kansans buried under the rubble of their elementary school, but the level of bigotry disguised as piety and of quite intentional cruelty perpetrated for its own sake by the Kansas legislature is startling, even when compared to other examples of GOP malevolence towards their own constituents.  If you haven’t been following the story, Gentle Reader, Kansas Republicans overrode a gubernatorial veto and essentially disenfranchised trans voters, while causing the maximum amount of disruption in their lives in other ways, as well.  This was made easier for the bigots by circumventing the standard opportunity for the public to weigh in on an issue: a tactic called “gut and go,” by which the contents of a bill are “replaced” by, well, whatever the hell some jackass wants, thereby bypassing the public.  It’s now the “House Substitute for Senate Bill 244.”

A letter dated February 23 informed trans people that as of February 26, their state-issued driver’s licenses would no longer be valid because such identification, according to K.S.A. 77-207, must show the sex of the individual at birth.  Moreover, “the Legislature did not provide a grace period for updating credentials.  This means that once the law is officially enacted, your current credential will be invalid immediately, and you may be subject to additional penalties if you are operating a vehicle without a valid credential.”  Oh, bloody hell.

But wait!  That’s not all!  Recipients of that letter are “directed to surrender [their] current credential to the Kansas Division of Vehicles.”  A “new credential reflecting the gender identification consistent with statutory requirements” would then be issued.  OK, all this is annoying enough simply at face value.  But the real devil, and here Curmie really does mean the physical manifestation of evil, is in the details.

Where to begin?  First off, who cares whether that one letter on a license is an M or an F, since both are acceptable?  The best argument is that it helps identify the driver.  More than a photo does?  Anyway, the more important thing is that things change over time.  Curmie used to have a Kansas driver’s license.  It listed his hair color as brown and his weight at 155 pounds.  Both of those descriptions were accurate 30-something years ago when Curmie moved to Kansas.  Today, however, while there are still a few brown strands in there, the hair is grey (well, maybe “silver” if someone wanted to get on my good side) and the weight was about three inches of waist size ago.  More to the point, those things can change over just the duration of the license.  Other folks change their names: they get married or divorced, for example.  The world changes, except in what passes for a brain in a Republican pol, and we ought to try to keep up as best we can.

There are some areas in which reasonable people can disagree.  There are legitimate fairness arguments that trans women ought not to be playing women’s sports, for example.  Perhaps, although Curmie knows of not a single case in which a trans woman, or even someone pretending to be a trans woman, harassed cis women in a rest room, there’s a scintilla of honest, paranoia-free, argumentation in favor of bathroom bills.  (Needless to say, Curmie disagrees with that perspective, but at least there’s the potential for a rationale.)

But what the hell has “sex at birth” to do with ability to operate a car?  Men can drive; women can drive.  So can murderers, rapists, thieves… even (gasp!) “illegal aliens,” all legally.  Oh, and pedophiles, too; mustn’t forget them.  So even if being trans were to be regarded as unlawful (alas, there have been attempts, including in Curmie’s adopted state of Texas, to make it so), that shouldn’t prevent someone from having a driver’s license.  And there’s certainly nothing about being trans that translates (Curmie apologizes; he couldn’t resist) into being a danger on the road.  People who are, like those with multiple DUI convictions, can still have a driver’s license.  But trans folks who legally had their “M” changed to an “F” or vice versa: nope.

Oh, and if you’re trans, you need a new ID, even if your old one does show your sex at birth.  Andrea Ellis legally changed her name in December, then updated her driver’s license in January.  But, she “saw the writing on the wall after listening to [Attorney General] Kobach’s testimony for H.B. 2426” (the bill that would eventually morph into SB 244 and its demon spawn).  She therefore didn’t change the gender marker on her license, but got the same letter as other transgendered folks.  Yes, she had to change out her old license for one that was literally identical.  She’s trans, after all.

Then we add on the timing.  Apparently these letters were sent by mail no sooner than a Monday, and recipients had only until Wednesday to follow the dictates, as the law would go into effect on Thursday.  Of course, the morons on SCOTUS have decided that it’s OK for the postal service to intentionally not deliver mail, so that potentially complicates things even more.  Chances are very good that some people didn’t even know about what they were required to do until it was literally too late.  What if they were on vacation, for example?  

And then they were expected to turn in their old “credential.”  In person, of course, and you know damned well there will be no extended hours.  So that means taking time off work on short notice, finding a way to the office because you aren’t allowed to drive there, waiting in line, paying $46 (according to one source) for a new ID (poll tax, anyone?), and apparently waiting up to 45 days for a new license (N.B., Curmie isn’t completely convinced about the legitimacy of this claim), without which you’re not allowed to drive: not to work, not to the grocery store, not to visit a friend or relative in the hospital (or hospice), nowhere.

It is, of course, self-evident that new licenses could be created with considerably more alacrity than that—the technology exists to do so in no more than a few minutes—but the powers-that-be will slow-walk the process as much as they can, for no other reason than that, for them, cruelty is fun.  There is no rationality for this law, just bigotry and hatred.  Oh, and they’re handing out $1000 bounties for today’s variation on narcs, i.e., those who report folks they decide are peeing in the wrong restroom.  For a group that thinks “communists” (anyone to the left of Jesse Helms, in other words) are worse than, say, pedophiles, these asswipes sure do like to emulate the Stasi.

Well, actually, the disenfranchisement might be the rationale, as it obviously is for the SAVE Act: identify a group likely to oppose the Reich-wing zealots, and make it harder for them to vote.  That’s the argument raised by real-life Friend of Curmie Will Averill, in a Substack post that also suggests that GOP pols are particularly interested in “Bein’ Hicks and Checkin’ Dicks.”  Will doesn’t say this outright, but Curmie will: this obsession with examining specific body parts is perilously close to the prurient if not the perverse.  But that’s OK, you see, because they’re “protecting our women and children.”  <Sigh.>

There is no lack of posturing on this issue.  Lyft, for example hastened to the rescue, promising half-price rides… which are limited to $10 and expire early next week, long before there’s any reasonable solution.  That’s not help; that’s a scammy marketing campaign. 

The ACLU is filing suit on behalf of two transgendered Kansans, and it appears that there might be some other litigants, as well.  That’s a start, but the suit names only folks like the state Attorney General and Director of Vehicles, not the legislators who are directly responsible for this travesty.  Curmie’s no lawyer, so maybe that’s the appropriate tack, but it still seems insufficient.

Curmie is not, as a rule, given to “thin edge of the wedge” arguments, but with various federal agencies not merely admitting, but bragging about, compiling files on, say, people photographing ICE abuses with the goal of labeling such folks as domestic terrorists, the thought that one violation of Constitutional rights might lead to another becomes foregrounded.  And that famous passage by Martin Niemöller referenced in the title of this piece floats to the surface.

One thing is clear.  Even if we were to buy the spurious argument that trans women in particular are just pretending to be something they’re not, such a subterfuge would pale in qualitative significance in comparison to these… erm… individuals of Oedipal predilections masquerading as Christians.  Curmie has pondered whether every single pol who voted for this heinous bill should, in a just universe, be horse-whipped or sent to the stocks for a week to be pelted with rotten vegetables. 

¿Por Qué No Los Dos?

About Those Gold Medal Hockey Teams...

The image Curmie prefers to remember

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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