Curmie Is So Old That He Remembers Something Called the Right of Privacy

The scene of the “crime.”

Over 16 years ago, in only the sixth post of this manifestation of Curmie’s blogging life, he wrote about the case of Gloria Y. Gadsden, who taught sociology at East Stroudsburg University in Pennsylvania.  She had recently been allowed to return to the classroom after having been suspended for a couple of Facebook posts in which she obviously jokingly wrote “Had a good day today, didn't want to kill even one student.:-) Now Friday was a different story ...” and “Does anyone know where I can find a very discrete [sic.] hitman, it's been that kind of day.”  Yes, really.

There have been a fair number of other incidents of administrations not merely making stupid decisions based on a toxic combination of humorlessness and paranoia, but clinging to their fantasies long after their hysterics were proven to have no merit.  There were the professor at the University of Wisconsin-Stout who ran afoul of the chief of the campus police for having a poster from the TV series “Firefly” on his office door, the faculty member at Bergen Community College  called on the carpet for posting a photo of his young daughter in a “Game of Thrones” t-shirt, the president of Oakton Community College who decided that a single-sentence May Day e-mail from a faculty member was a personal threat against her, and of course the student at Umpqua Community College who was suspended because she submitted an assignment that followed all of the stated guidelines. 

Plus, of course, all those “weapons” that, shall we say, weren’t: five of them are described here and another here.  (Those two posts were from the same year, by the way.)

Oh, and we mustn’t forget the retired cop who was jailed for over a month with a $2 million bond for posting a meme that referenced (not to be confused with “celebrated” or “threatened”) a school shooting.  (He sued and settled out of court for $835,000.)

There are dozens of others, no doubt, perhaps even including some that Curmie wrote about but didn’t link here.

But it’s that Gadsden case that’s the most relevant here.  This story is over a year old, but there was a recent article about it, apparently shortly after the release of bodycam footage of the incident  that a Friend of Curmie sent along to him.  (Thanks, Kirsten!).  And, alas, one suspects that this is a portent of things to come rather than a one-off.

Kristen Volpe was a student teacher at John L. Hensey Elementary in Washington, Illinois.  One of her students had closed her laptop mid-class, wiping out her lesson plan.  (Exactly how that works technologically, Curmie can’t quite understand, but that’s not the important part.)  Frustrated, she sent a private message to a total of three people, her boyfriend and two other roommates, via Snapchat.  The details of that post are unclear, or rather there are multiple versions out there because hallucinogenic pseudo-evidence and gossip will always dominate such cases, but the essence was something like “should I shoot him?”

Within an hour, she’d been arrested for “disorderly conduct.”  Say whaaaat?  Exactly how was what she did “disorderly”?  And how was the arrest anything but a violation of her 1st and 4th Amendment rights?

That bodycam footage shows that it’s clear that she believes she has nothing to hide.  That’s because no rational person would believe she did anything illegal, as the eventual dropping of charges underscores.  After she’s arrested, she says she made a “stupid post.”  Well, it wasn’t the smartest thing she’s ever done, but to Curmie’s mind it falls well short of the stupidity of literally everyone else involved in the case.  She was naïve, yes, in that she trusted that what was intended as a private vent would indeed be private.

This all started because Snapchat has some sort of algorithmic monitoring for certain messages, presumably key words: “shoot,” perhaps.  Curmie has read differing accounts as to whether there’s an intervening step involving a human at Snapchat.  If not, then there’s a lot of FBI time being wasted on messages about basketball games or filming schedules.  If there is, then whoever it was at Snapchat needs to be smacked up ‘side the head.

But the inanity only accelerates.  Someone at the FBI decided this message, obviously not intended to be taken seriously—and formed as a snarky question, not a threat—demanded immediate attention.  So, they called in the local police.  They ask for her phone, which she calmly surrenders.  Some commenters say the correct response to that request is “let me see your warrant” (there wasn’t one, of course).  They’re probably right, but that doesn’t necessarily come to mind for a post-adolescent convinced the cops had no reason to suspect her of any wrong-doing.

The cops proceed to lecture her about the alleged seriousness of her actions (Curmie can’t tell if they actually believe the drivel they’re spewing), keep her overnight (because they can, not because there was any legitimate reason to do so), and eventually let her go with no charges filed because even small-town cops can sometimes out-think an anvil.  The school administration promptly cut ties with her, probably ending her teaching career before it really started.  That’s because idiocy and cowardice are in a death struggle (oh shit, can I say “death”?) to be their defining characteristic.

There are, of course, plenty of people who place all the blame on Volpe.  The narrator of that Facebook page linked above (the bodycam stuff) is shocked, shocked!, as only Claude Rains in “Casablanca” has ever been shocked before, at the message.  He’s still not as annoying as “Mrs. Arensberg,” whose smirking commentary that “unfortunately, she had to learn the really hard way” drips with condescension.

Curmie’s got 20 bucks that says that every asshole who’s piling on Kristen Volpe has done the same thing… or worse, although perhaps not in writing.  Curmie has.  He remembers telling a stage manager that an actor who still hadn’t appeared for a dress rehearsal a half hour after call that “she’d better be dead or dying, or she’s going to be dead or dying.”  That, if you’re stupid enough, could be taken as an actual threat, not just asking for advice.  

A while back, Facebook informed Curmie that they’d taken down a message to a friend—not a post, a private message—about a year and a half after it was sent because it supposedly violated some damned policy.  A little late for that censorship to have a lot of effect, guys, especially since I’d long since forgotten what it might have been about.

There’s are three points to be made here.  One is that the level of surveillance of ordinary, innocent, people by the government and government-adjacent corporations has passed into Orwellian territory.  Curmie, being old enough to be Volpe’s grandfather, has never used Snapchat and doubtless never will.  He presumes that in signing up for an account, one has to agree to allow one’s private conversations to be surveilled, but of course no one ever reads all that lengthy legalese, and the Snapchat (and Facebook, and Instagram, and X, and Bluesky, and…) count on that.  It’s legal; it just isn’t ethical.

Second, this eavesdropping is largely if not exclusively instigated by algorithms, not people... not even idiots like those who sought to punish Dr. Gadsden in the case mentioned at the top of this piece.  At least those folks have the potential for reason, even if they choose not to use it.  The obeisance to AI means that context—including, but not limited to, sarcasm and other forms of humor—is lost.  And, of course, despite improvements over the past few months, the bots still get things very wrong, indeed: perhaps not quite to the extent of the “sexy onions” case from a few years ago, but bad enough.  There are, of course, too few checks on turning everything over to the whims of AI, and the ones that do exist are staffed by incompetents at every level, including, alas, the FBI. 

Finally, outrageous intrusions into personal privacy, whether by the government (think Flock cameras) or by some private corporation, are now routine.  The casual assumption by too many people seems to be that every over-reach by those who in Curmie’s day were called The Man should simply be accommodated.  Yes, there are lessons to be learned here about putting anything with even the potential to be misinterpreted in writing (it’s still illegal to monitor phone calls without a warrant).  It’s also true that tone of voice doesn’t translate to text, so the possibility of misunderstanding increases with the written word.

None of this changes the unethical conduct of everyone from Snapchat to the local school district’s administrators.  Unfortunately, however, blaming the victims of such snooping is now a blood sport, whether the aggression comes from ICE, the FBI, police in a small-town in Illinois, or somewhere else.  If someone who has no legitimate right to be monitoring what was presumed to be a private conversation doesn’t get the joke (or whatever), you’re in trouble. 

And we’re supposed to just go along, to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, as it were.  Curmie prefers Hamlet’s other option: to take arms against a sea of troubles and, by opposing, end them.  Given the topic at hand, Curmie hastens to clarify that the “taking arms” here is intended to be metaphorical.  He’s not going to perpetrate physical violence.  He’ll leave that to the goons in the masks.

Cause for Celebration? Wrong Verdict? Maybe Both?

Shiloh Hendrix at her trial.

Curmie has often claimed to be more of a civil libertarian than a liberal, but there are limits to that analysis.  He believes, for example, that the 2nd Amendment doesn’t mean that the general population ought to have ready access to semi-automatic weapons.  We’ve gone over those arguments before, and they needn’t be repeated here.

The 1st Amendment has similar boundaries: slander, “true threats,” incitement to immediate illegal activity, etc.  You can’t yell “Fire!” in a crowded theater, and so on.  But some situations aren’t so easy to classify.  One recent example would be pro-Palestinian protesters chanting “from the river to the sea.”  It’s not difficult to imagine a scenario in which those words could reasonably be construed by some onlookers as a “true threat,” but the mere fact that someone might be offended or even apprehensive isn’t enough to deny 1st Amendment protection.

Or at least that’s Curmie’s view; his position is supported by the likes of Eugene Volokh and Will Creeley.  They are, respectively, one of the most-respected constitutional scholars in the country and the legal director at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE). 

The most recent case to make national headlines concerns Shiloh Hendrix.  She’s the Minnesota woman who was recently convicted of disorderly conduct for calling a young black boy a “nigger.”  Well, actually, despite what a lot of the headlines imply, she was acquitted of that charge.

OK, here we go.  In April (naturally, Wikipedia says May) of last year, Hendrix, who is white, took her toddler to the park in Rochester, MN.  Curmie is trusting the account of FIRE’s Aaron Terr on what follows: an 8-year-old black boy allegedly reached into her diaper bag and took (i.e., stole) an applesauce pouch.  Hendrix then chased after him, and called him a “nigger.”

This caught the attention of a bystander, Sharmake Omar, who is also black.  Omar starts recording on his phone, criticizing Hendrix’s use of the racial slur.  She responds, “it’s none of your fucking business,” and adds a gesture that one of Curmie’s Irish friends refers to as “the long finger.”  Omar then challenges her to repeat the word; she obliges: “Fuck you, nigger. Nigger, nigger, nigger.” <Sigh.> 

After a little more cross-talk, she walks away, meaning there was never even a threat of violence.  Omar says, “OK, we’ll see about that, what the internet has to say about you.” That threat was indeed realized, as the video went viral, and Hendrix ended up being charged with three counts of disorderly conduct, that all-purpose charge which is sometimes legitimate and sometimes a stand-in for “you didn’t really do anything illegal, but we didn’t like it.”

Two of the three counts (Curmie can’t figure out what the third one was for… saying “fuck,” maybe?) went forward to trial, where Hendrix was actually acquitted for her using the slur to the child but convicted for her interaction with Omar.  Curmie can’t quite wrap his head around the reasoning there.  After all, Omar was egging her on; he’s as responsible as she is for that altercation.  All Curmie can think of is that what she said to the boy isn’t recorded.  Hendrix doesn’t explicitly acknowledge Omar’s allegation, so the evidence is perhaps a little shaky. 

There are other questions, too, before we get to the central argument.  Why wasn’t Omar called as a witness?  Was he, as some commenters on video posts suggested, “back in Somalia” (voluntarily or otherwise)?  Why did Shire Jimale, the boy’s father, testify?  If he was there at the incident, why didn’t he prevent his kid from stealing the applesauce?  (Or, whether he was there or not, teach him not to take other people’s stuff?)  If he wasn’t present, who was looking after the boy?  And what does he have to offer that is in any way pertinent?  That the boy is autistic has no relevance to Hendrix’s behavior, and therefore none to the case.

Is it relevant that Hendrix was doxed and raised some $860,000 for attorney’s fees and relocation?  Or that the NAACP raised over $300K for the boy?  Is there anyone in this case who we can actually cheer for?

Finally, Curmie notes that there seems to be something magical about the term “nigger” and its ability to trigger a response.  If the demographics were different (and remembering that it’s the encounter with Omar, not the boy, that got Hendrix convicted) would there even have been a case if the offensive term were “fag” or “spic” or “kike”… or “cheese-eating surrender monkey”?  Curmie has a couple of black friends who think that proverbial “n-word” really is different.  Curmie respects their perspective but struggles to see why he should agree with it.

The case is also intriguing for another reason.  Unlike the MAGA faithful, Curmie doesn’t think that something isn’t a problem just because he’s never personally seen it manifested.  That said, it’s been decades since he heard that—or, indeed any—racial slur applied in the speaker’s own voice, that is, not as an actor in a play or film, or as a critic, professor, or journalist quoting from a book, movie, etc.  That’s because most people, especially those with whom Curmie chooses to associate, have learned that using offensive terms, even those that were once commonplace, just isn’t cool.  So, there’s an added level of shock.  None of the foregoing, of course, is in any way intended to deny the experience of those who have indeed been on the receiving end of such verbal assaults.

So now we finally get to the key question: should that which is reprehensible automatically be illegal?  Curmie thinks not, not merely because that’s what seems in keeping with constitutionality, but also because assigning parameters of offensiveness sort of defeats the whole idea of free speech.  If Curmie calls some politician a “scum-sucking shitgibbon,” that’s part of the give-and-take of democratic (lower-case “d”) politics.  And if that pol responds in kind, that is, too.

Of course, there are limits.  Curmie may have pretty much abandoned Jack Marshall’s Ethics Alarms blog when it took a hard right turn into defending (or ignoring) indefensible behavior of the Trump administration, but there are some topics for which Jack’s perspective remains valuable.  His delineation of the relevant past SCOTUS rulings is particularly useful, even if the resulting guidelines are, in his words, “clear as mud.”

There are good arguments both ways, which is why the topic intrigues Curmie.  No one Curmie wants to associate with would use the word “nigger” the way Hendrix did.  Unlike, say, “from the river to the sea,” there is no other possible meaning except as slur.  That’s relevant, but does it meet the “fighting words” threshold?  Curmie doesn’t know, but presumably the jury thought so.  And, of course, a lot of the support, monetary and otherwise, Hendrix has received has come from other racist jackasses.  Most of them are savvy enough to cloak their vitriol in 1st Amendment garb, but the racial animus is still perceptible.

All that said, Curmie is still going to side with the civil libertarians on this one.  As Terr points out,

The video merely shows a heated verbal exchange between Hendrix and Omar. No threats. No violence. Nothing beyond words. However much offense they caused, that simply does not justify the government imprisoning, fining, or otherwise punishing the speaker. A public argument does not become a crime because a speaker used a particular word.

Hendrix’s behavior was unquestionably unethical.  She deserves to be shunned.  But if acting like an asshole for a minute or so is actually illegal, then virtually everyone in the country would have a criminal record.  “Yes,” as Terr says, “that means we must sometimes tolerate speech we find repugnant. But that’s the only way to ensure the speech we value remains free.”

In other words, Curmie thinks the prosecutor and the jury got it wrong.  (The defense attorney claims the judge was against him, too.  Curmie isn’t going to take sides in that squabble.)  But there are two reasons to be at least cautiously optimistic.  They seem to contradict each other, but that means that one of them (at least) is likely to be true.  Hendrix has already appealed the conviction, meaning that it will be reviewed by at least one higher court, possibly all the way up to SCOTUS.  An acquittal cannot be appealed, and double jeopardy would apply.  The conviction, then, allows a little more judicial light into the room. 

That is, one of two things must happen.  Curmie doubts that the conviction will be upheld, but if it is, then racists, homophobes, and similar bigots of the future might be a little more reticent about spewing their hatred into the world.  That would be a good thing.  If Hendrix wins on appeal, then the spirit of the 1st Amendment would be upheld, and some court, perhaps even SCOTUS, would be forced to better define the parameters of protected speech.  That, too, would be a good thing.

Oh, and both the city and Hendrix will have to spend a lot of money on the appeal process.  Good.  They both deserve it.

Reflections on the Reflecting Pool

Curmie recognizes that the Reflecting Pool saga is no longer front-page news, but he went ahead with this post for two reasons.  First, it was mostly written before Curmie went on vacation with Beloved Spouse, and it seemed a shame not to finish it.  Second, and more importantly, the whole episode serves as an apt encapsulation of the entire Trump administration. 

Step 1: find a minor problem and amplify it to significance to distract from the hugely unpopular war with Iran, the skyrocketing gasoline prices, the Epstein files, and a host of other manifestations of administrative incompetence (or worse). 

Step 2: hire a couple of cronies at inflated prices with little if any regard for their actual skill-sets. 

Step 3: when they proceed to make things far worse than they were when they started their project, make utterly unsupported and almost certainly mendacious claims—in this case about vandalism, including arresting people for touching the peeled paint floating on the surface of the pool. 

Step 4: when no one other than the MAGA faithful believes your bullshit, shout even louder and with even less plausibility.  A 350-foot-long gash with no photographic evidence?  And yet another tarp to block the view of anyone but your minions? Really?  Lather, rinse, repeat.  If there’s one thing you can count on with this administration, it’s that they will never take responsibility for their own failures.

If nothing else, the Reflecting Pool debacle has provided plenty of fodder for satirists, comedians, cartoonists, and similar wags.  Curmie is quite fond of the cartoon you see here (credit to Living Blue in Florida).  When I read about the arrest of David Hearn, the first thing that came to mind was the Group W bench described by Arlo Guthrie in “Alice’s Restaurant,” one of the anthems of my youth.  I thought of this before seeing that someone had already had the same thought.  Curmie notes the irony of telling you, Gentle Reader, that you’ll have to trust him about that part in an essay that discusses the lack of actual evidence for an assertion.  (We’ll get there, I promise.)

There are the paint swatches of swampy green labeled “American Flag Blue,” the designation of the pool as the Strait of Warm Ooze, and the restoration project “The Art of the Peel.”  There’s a supposed poll that shows Dear Leader “Vastly Less Popular than Algae”;  you can buy a “Piece of Presidential History” (a chunk of peeled paint) for a mere $250.  There’s the wonderful meme about Goody Proctor throwing algae into the reflecting pool, and the one in which Dear Leader says all he can see is scum, to receive the reply that it is a reflecting pool.

Curmie’s favorite, though, may be the (slightly adapted) song titles:  CCR’s “Green River” and of course Kermit the Frog’s classic “It’s Not Easy Bein’ Green” can go as is, but there are a goodly number of minor variants that still leave the original clearly identifiable: Bob Dylan’s “I Shall Be Resealed,” the Chambers Brothers’ “Slime Has Come Today,” Cyndi Lauper’s “Slime After Slime,” Jim Croce’s “Slime in a Bottle,” the Zombies’ “Slime of the Season,” the Doobies’ “What a Pool Believes,” Peter Frampton’s “Do You Peel Like I Do,” the Beatles’ “Scum Together,” Paul Simon’s “You Can Call Me Algae”… well, there are more, but that’s a good sample.  Someone added another suggestion Curmie particularly liked, but you’d probably have to be of his generation to get the allusion: it would be fun to hear the Hal David/Burt Bacharach song begin, “What’s it all about, Algae?”

Two points need to be made.  The first is that all the satire, punning, and the like are appropriate.  The whole process was (and is) a disaster: ethically, legally, environmentally, and financially.  And to call the contractors incompetent would probably be to give them too much credit.  There’s a good timeline on the NBC News site.  A few of the highlights: Trump, bypassing his legal obligation to involve Congress, announced the project in late April, saying it would cost between 1.5 and 2 million dollars, and would be done in “a week.”  The current cost is over $16 million, not counting the cost of the federal employees involved, and still isn’t complete three months later.

Two separate no-bid contracts were signed: one with Atlantic Industrial Coatings, the other with Green Water Solutions.  The former proclaims itself “a woman owned advanced coatings application company,” but the owner/VP is identified elsewhere as Curtis E. "Eddie" Wood, whose position is listed still elsewhere as CEO.  If you can make sense of all this, Gentle Reader, you’re way ahead of Curmie.  Oh, and they also remind us that “ALL the credit goes to Our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ!! Thank you!!”  <Sigh.>

The other contractor, Green Water, is headed by John Cafaro, who not only looks like the crime tsar in a gangster movie, but also acts like one, having pleaded guilty to bribing a Congresscritter and campaign finance fraud.  Needless to say, he was pardoned by Trump.  The $350,000 he donated to Trump’s ’20 and ’24 campaigns, plus apparently hundreds of thousands more to Trump-affiliated PACs, are of course totally unrelated to any of this.  😉  Oh, and the White House was not involved in selecting the contractors, and the folks who did were unaware of Cafaro’s… erm… largesse.  Hey, if you can’t trust a lackey from the Interior Department and a White House spokesperson, who can you trust?

The first step was to drain the pool, then to paint the bottom “American flag blue.”  There was a lawsuit filed to prevent the re-painting because changing the color would, among other things, make the pool less reflective.  The re-painting went forward, and the pool wasn’t as reflective.  Go figure. 

There are two separate yet equally important (go ahead, Gentle Reader, insert the “Law & Order” “dundun” here) problems here: the algae and the peeling paint.  The former has been a problem for a long time: direct sunlight, pretty much stagnant water, warm weather… that adds up to a pretty good possibility of algae accumulation, and that can happen very quickly.  Curmie can’t find a reliable source to support the claim that the pool was refilled with water from the Potomac, which would indeed have been colossally stupid and therefore, given this administration and its hirelings, quite plausible.  It’s not necessarily the fault of the administration or the contractors that things seem out of control now… well, except for the fact that Green Water was hired specifically to keep this from happening. 

The peeling paint, on the other hand, is directly attributable to the incompetence of the Atlantic Industrial Coatings team, who were clearly out of their depth (if you’ll pardon the expression, Gentle Reader) on this project.  Curmie claims no expertise in matters relating to reflecting pool maintenance and repair, and he knows better than to unhesitatingly trust some stranger on Facebook who claims to know what he’s talking about.  That said, the comments from people who say they’re professionals do make sense: here’s one example:

As a DC9 union painter with 30+ years in coatings, I’m looking at the failure not a conspiracy theory.  When a coating is lifting off in large sheets like this, that points to an adhesion failure: improper surface preparation, contamination left behind, the wrong coating system, poot recoat timing, or water introduced before the system fully cured.

A quality two-part epoxy system can perform well but the product is only as good as the prop and the application.  The substrate has to be properly profiled/cleaned, the specified primer or first coat applied correctly, recoat windows followed, and the full system allowed to cure before being put back into service.

That is not “vandals.”  That is a coating failure that deserves a real independent inspection and an explanation of exactly what system was specified and how it was applied.

That sounds pretty reasonable to Curmie.  He also suggests that driving a freaking convoy over the surface before it was fully cured might not have been the best idea in history.  Well, unless the whole thing was intended as a diversion all along.  Yes, that’s a totally unsupported hypothesis… which makes it more believable than anything coming from this administration.

Curmie vs. The Man

The primary reason Curmie has been relatively quiet online of late is that he and Beloved Spouse took a much-deserved (by her, at least) vacation trip to Ireland.  There’s another reason, too, but we’ll get to that in a moment.  It was our first visit to that country together without a bevy of undergraduates in tow, which meant we could do things we couldn’t before, and could skip things we’d seen before and didn’t need to see again.

All in all, it was a wonderful week.  We saw some magnificent shows, took a bus tour we’d wanted to take for years but couldn’t because of course responsibilities, had lunch with a dear friend, ate at both our favorite Galway restaurants, and had absolutely fabulous weather the entire trip.

There were some less fun moments, of course; with the exception of Curmie’s first-ever case of sunburn rash, they pretty much all fell under the category of corporate incompetence (or deception), most of it technology-related. 

We begin at the beginning.  We live over a two-hour drive from the Houston airport, and our flight to Chicago to connect to Shannon was reasonably early Sunday morning, so we decided to do what we’d done several times when taking students on their Study Abroad trips: we headed to Houston Saturday afternoon and stayed at the Sleep Inn near the airport.  If you spend the night, you can park there for free for the length of your trip (or at least for a set number of days), making the difference between spending the night and paying for airport parking pretty reasonable.  And they run a free shuttle to and from the airport. 

Except.  We showed up, told them we had a reservation, even showed the guy at the desk a print-out which showed we not only had a reservation but had paid a deposit… but we weren’t in their system.  It took over a half hour and a phone call to the manager to finally get into our room.  (The fact that the room was musty and they couldn’t be bothered to answer the phone to get a shuttle back from the airport wasn’t corporate’s fault.)

Anyway, we were finally able to dump our stuff in the room and go get something to eat.  On our return, we decided to check in for our morning flight.  We hadn’t flown internationally since COVID, so we figured that anything to reduce the time at the airport was probably a good idea.  It took Curmie a couple of minutes, but he got his boarding passes without a lot of trouble.  Beloved Spouse was not so lucky.  She’d been going back and forth with United for some time: she was good to go, then they needed “travel documents,” which of course they already had, then she was good again…

That process continued Saturday evening.  Then, after several tries, Beloved Spouse thought she’d finally checked in.  But they’d sent her Curmie’s boarding passes, not her own!  So, the attempt to get a good night’s sleep before the flight ended up doing the opposite, as we were on edge, wondering if we’d even be able to go.  This may have been an irrational fear, but that doesn’t make it any less real.

The next morning, we got up earlier than we’d wanted to so we could get to the airport and see what we could do.  We were able to get on an earlier shuttle.  The woman we talked to at the terminal may have been a little abrupt, but she guided us through the process.  Beloved Spouse had her boarding pass, and we were through security before our shuttle ride was originally scheduled.  So, we were in good shape… until…

Beloved Spouse, knowing that Curmie is both claustrophobic and reasonably long-legged, had splurged when she bought the tickets and paid extra to get bulkhead seats for the Chicago to Shannon portion of the trip.  Guess what plane didn’t have bulkhead seats?

Anyway, we arrived in Shannon on time, so now it was a matter of waiting for the Expressway bus to take us to Galway.  We saw a bus arrive, and it showed that it was the number 51 bus: the route that would take us to Galway.  We loaded our stuff into the luggage compartment and went to get on the bus.  The driver said that no, this was the bus to Cork, not Galway.  Both are the #51 bus.  Of course, they are!  Welcome to Ireland.  We dragged our bags out and waited for the actual Galway bus, which showed up only a few minutes later.

We had at least been wise enough to partake of the toilet facilities in the airport, as neither of us would claim our bladders as the strongest part of our bodies.  Yes, the website said there was a toilet on the bus… and there was.  It was locked, however, and judging by the expressions on the face of the young woman who apparently asked the driver about it and his response, it was going to stay that way throughout the journey (roughly two hours to Galway, although I think she got off at an earlier stop).  Hey, it wasn’t false advertising.  There was a toilet on the bus; they didn’t say anything about it being usable.

Skip ahead to Wednesday morning.  Beloved Spouse had booked us on a Citilink bus to Dublin for a quick visit with the aforementioned dear friend, a former student who now lives and works there.  We were to leave at 8:45, but the reservation came back as 8:15.  We knew generally where the coach station was, but we weren’t exactly sure, and the QR codes e-mailed to Beloved Spouse wouldn’t work as screenshots.  We found a guy who looked rather like the Scott’s turfbuilder dude; he was very helpful, and we ended up on the 8:45 we wanted to begin with.

By this time, Optimum, Beloved Spouse’s e-mail provider, had “temporarily” suspended access to her account for “suspicious activity” or some such; Curmie can’t remember the exact phrasing.  Beloved Spouse spent the majority of the 2 ½ hour trip to Dublin dealing with Optimum, trying to get her e-mail back.  (To be fair, it would have been the middle of the night in the US, so maybe they weren’t staffed as well, quantitatively or qualitatively, as they would have been at a different time.)  One of the reps said that no, there wasn’t any suspicious activity, and he’d fix it.  He didn’t.

Two different reps declared the problem solved.  It wasn’t, and indeed it wasn’t until we were back in the US that e-mail was restored.

So, now we’re in Dublin, and we’re going to take the train back to Galway.  We have specific seat assignments: Coach C, seats 61 and 62.  (Don’t quote me on the numbers.)   But the coaches aren’t marked, and there are no seats with those numbers in the most logical choice for Coach C.  Or in the second-best choice, either.  We ended up just grabbing a couple of empty seats.  Other than being in rather too close proximity to an obnoxious frat boy (the usual apologies for redundancy) who seemed to make it his mission to embody every unflattering stereotype of Americans abroad, we had a good trip and made it back to Galway in plenty of time to make our dinner reservation at our favorite restaurant.

We did notice that morning that although our confirmation for the bus ride back to Shannon Airport said it left from the Galway Coach Station, there was no Expressway presence there.  Curmie asked at the information desk.  The guy there was the only rude person we met in Ireland.  He disdainfully declared that “they have their own station at the top of the hill.”  They do not, of course, but we finally figured out that since we already had our tickets, we could just show up where our bus into Galway had unloaded.  No harm done, except a little unwanted exercise.

We adopted the same strategy for the flight home as we’d used heading east.  Our flight to Chicago was pretty early Sunday morning, so we headed to Shannon airport on the #51 bus (!), arriving about 7:00 Saturday evening.  Our hotel in Galway had stored our bags when we arrived there a few hours before check-in time, but for some reason they wouldn’t do that after we’d checked out.  Curmie had never heard of a hotel doing that, but we saw a similar sign in a different hotel, so maybe that’s standard procedure now.  So we schlepped our bags across Eyre Square to a “left luggage” place, and for 19 Euro we were unencumbered until a few minutes before our bus left.

We’d stayed at the Park Inn in Shannon once before, and it’s literally a couple hundred yards across a parking lot to the airport.  It purports to be a 3-star hotel, and is now a Radisson property (Curmie can’t remember if that was true when we stayed there in 2010 or thereabouts).

So.  3-star hotel.  No elevator/lift to our room on the third floor.  (They did have someone carry our bags up.)  No air conditioning.  It wasn’t hot out, but it was sunny, and the drapes were open, meaning we were effectively in a greenhouse; the fan helped, but was insufficient.  Nowhere near enough space in the restaurant, which virtually everyone in the hotel would want to use.  <Sigh.>

Anyway, the trip home was uneventful.  Indeed, the check-in, security clearance, and US customs/immigration processes were as smooth as Curmie has ever experienced.  With the exception of a lousy cabin crew on the Chicago to Houston leg, it was great.  (And we did get exit row seats Shannon to Chicago.)

We got home about 9:00 CDT (3:00 a.m. Ireland time) Sunday night.  All was well until Curmie’s laptop wouldn’t turn on Monday morning.  No telling what happened, and Curmie makes no accusations.  But there are enough things that he wants to do on the laptop every day that getting a replacement as soon as possible was definitely called for.  (It is indeed sad how reliant we have become on our devices.)

We’d bought the old laptop through Walmart, so we cranked up Beloved Spouse’s desktop and went to their website.  According to the site, basically every laptop they sold could be delivered in less than 20 minutes if we paid an extra $10, or sometime that day for free.  We ordered one, deciding that same-day delivery was sufficient.  Shortly thereafter, we got a notice that our laptop would be delivered a week later (!).  We could cancel the order, so we did, and actually got a better deal from Amazon, who’d deliver on Tuesday.  (They did.)  When Amazon are the good guys in a scenario, it’s not a good thing.

Approximately ten hours after we cancelled the Walmart order, they shipped the damned thing, anyway.  It arrived yesterday (Thursday).  Now we’ve got to figure out how to return something that any competent company wouldn’t have shipped.  Arrrggghh.

Oh, and when Curmie was setting up the new computer, he got a message that started “Since you bought your laptop in Nigeria…”  Way to go, Lenovo.

Elliot Page Isn't Playing Achilles! Who (other than Curmie) could have guessed?

You may perhaps recall, Gentle Reader, that Curmie had a good time a couple months ago, laughing at the conservative hand-wringers who convinced themselves that Elliot (formerly Ellen) Page was going to play Achilles in Christopher Nolan’s cinematic version of “The Odyssey.” 

There were rumors, you see, and that was sufficient evidence for idiots like Rob Finnerty of Newsmax and the terminally self-important and generally wrong Elon Musk to decry the casting of, in Finnerty’s words, “a girl who dresses as a guy who’s five-foot-one, 118 pounds” as “the greatest warrior in history.”  Even Finnerty acknowledges that Page would “reportedly” play Achilles, but the rest of his screed works on the assumption that the rumors should indeed be believed.  The once savvy Jack Marshall launched into a diatribe against “wokeness” and “stunt casting,” writing that Page “was cast” as Achilles.  No room for skepticism when there is righteous dudgeon just waiting to be spewed!

Guess what?  Page isn’t playing Achilles!  There is indeed some question as to whether Achilles even appears, either as a ghost or in a flashback.  The preview showing of the film happened a couple of nights ago, and Curmie can’t find any commentary he’d regard as trustworthy that says anything one way or the other.  Someone on Reddit says Achilles isn’t in the film, but Curmie isn’t betting the mortgage on that assurance.

Curmie confesses that it has been a very long time since he last read Homer, but does think it would be a little strange not to have Achilles appear, either as a shade in the underworld or in a flashback scene, especially since the role Page actually is playing, Sinon, doesn’t appear anywhere in Homer at all.  The character is best known to us through Vergil’s Aeneid.  He was the Greek soldier, a cousin of Odysseus, who allows himself to be captured by the Trojans, pretends to be a deserter, and convinces them to bring the Trojan Horse inside the city gates. 

Page’s Sinon isn’t going to over-power the Trojans, but that’s not his job.  He outwits them instead, and Page’s charisma and facility with language would seem to be appropriate qualifications for the role.  It’s also worth pointing out that Greek men in that period didn’t really have a lot of choice about whether they’d go to war.  You couldn’t opt out because you were small.  Moreover, Page’s diminutive size could actually be used to advantage for this particular role, making the subterfuge that Sinon had been forsaken or sacrificed by the Greek army more plausible.  Of course, we don’t know what the real Sinon looked like because... he never existed except as a fictive character.  That’s a 5th century CE image of him at the top of the page: over a millennium after he supposedly existed, in other words.  But he does look a little pudgy compared to Elliot Page...

Curmie is just spit-balling here, but there are, or at the very least could be, good and appropriate reasons to cast Elliot Page.  Plus, of course, there’s the likelihood that Nolan and Page just like working with each other.  There’s plenty of hot air about how Nolan cast Page to have a better chance at an Oscar.  That’s true to the extent that Page is a good actor, thereby making the film better, but the movie had already met those dumb “inclusion” requirements through other means, and Sinon is unlikely to be a big enough role to qualify as “significant,” anyway.

Curmie does note that he was led to believe that Page would probably take on the role of Elpenor (who at least appears in Homer’s epic!).  This rumor, too, was regarded as definitive by a lot of folks as recently as last week.  Curmie does point out, however, that he italicized the words “reported” and “expected” in his post back in May, suggesting that whereas the Elpenor rumor, unlike the Achilles rumor, was at least plausible, he wasn’t going to suggest that such casting was indeed a fact.

So, there are, unsurprisingly, those who feel the need to complain for the sake of complaining about changing Homer’s plotline, adding the Sinon character.  <Sigh.>  Adaptations, additions, and edits have been a part of the business since, well, at least as far back as Homer, who drew from other versions of what we’d now call mythological tales.  Greek tragedies borrowed (stole?) from Homer, Hesiod, and whoever else was handy.  The Aeschylean, Sophoclean, and Euripidean versions of the murders of Clytemnestra and Aegisthus by Orestes and Electra differ from each other in significant ways.  (Euripides’ Electra actually makes fun of Aeschylus’s Libation Bearers.)  More recently, if you see an author’s name as part of a movie title (“Agatha Christie’s this,” “Bram Stoker’s that”), you can pretty much take it to the bank that there is little if any relationship between the film version and the original book.

Much of Curmie’s career as a scholar concentrated on these adaptations.  There’s no such thing as a direct translation, of course, but there are certainly adapted works that try to keep as closely as possible to the original.  Others, there’s just a hint.  For example, there’s Brian Friel’s play Living Quarters: After Hippolytus.  Without the subtitle, even a perceptive and well-educated theatre-goer might miss the reference, as there are a lot of differences between Friel’s version and Euripides’, extending far past character names and settings.  Some of these adaptations really work; some don’t, usually because they beat the reader/spectator over the head with their presumed contemporary relevance.

Curmie isn’t going to talk about whether an idea worked or didn’t until he sees the final product.  He can speculate, as he did in discussing the Arena Stage production of Inherit the Wind, but that’s as far as he’ll go.  He could watch “The Odyssey” and love it… or hate it… or think it was “meh.”  He could think including Sinon or casting Page was brilliant or stupid or somewhere in-between.  But Christopher Nolan has proven to be someone who makes a lot of good choices, and Curmie isn’t going to criticize him without knowing a lot more than he does now.

Reviews from the London screening have all been positive, even enthusiastic.  Whether you or I agree, Gentle Reader, will be a matter of individual taste.  Maybe we think Nolan hit the proverbial home run; maybe we think he hit a lazy one-hop grounder to the shortstop… or struck out.  But one thing we must agree on is that he handled the casting controversies, especially the bit involving Elliot Page, brilliantly.  We know that he is heavily involved in the marketing of his films, and he got mountains of publicity for a project that hadn’t been released yet… and made the right-wing pundits look like idiots in the process.  Whether Nolan actively encouraged the mistaken belief that Page was to play Achilles or just sat back to watch the self-inflicted carnage almost doesn’t matter.

There’s one other aspect that Curmie, as a theatre historian, can’t help but mention.  When the famous Playboy riots happened at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin in 1907, the theatre’s directors kept the doors open.  For several nights, the audience couldn’t hear the performance over the boos of the protestors.  But—key point here—those folks had to buy a ticket to get inside to boo.  And a lot of other people wanted to see what all the fuss was about.  They bought tickets, too.  Curmie predicts “The Odyssey” will sell well, whether or not it’s a great, or even good, film.  Whatever you think of him as a director, Christopher Nolan is a bright lad.  Or maybe he just paid attention in Theatre History class.

Flo Balogun and the (Sort of) Disappearing Red Card

Curmie has a couple of essays already in progress, but he’s going to do something a little out of the ordinary: there are ways in which this piece will be passé within a few hours or so after it’s posted, so it’s quite possible that you, Gentle Reader, will know things that, as of this writing (morning and early afternoon of Monday the 6th), are still unknowable. 

It’s an interesting time of the year for sports fans.  If you narrow your vision to the major team sports in this country, there’s not a lot happening.  The NFL, NBA, and NHL seasons are over, and the MLB pennant races haven’t really shaped up yet: fans know who they want to win, but it’s unclear as yet what other team they want to lose to help their team’s chances.  But Wimbledon is heading into its final week, there’s the WNBA, horse racing (that dead heat in the featured race at Saratoga yesterday was pretty fun), golf… and above all, there’s the World Cup.

Tonight, the USMNT attempts to move on to the quarter-finals for the first time since 2002, and they’ll do so with star striker Folarin “Flo” Balogun in the lineup.  He has three goals in this tournament and no other American has more than one, so that matters.  Balogun received a red card for dangerous play in the second half of the Round of 32 game against Bosnia-Herzegovina; that carries with it not merely being sidelined (without being replaced) for the remainder of the match in question, but a suspension for the next game, as well.  Well, it did… for a while.  We’ll come back to that.

As the photo above shows, there’s no question that Balogun stepped on the ankle of Tarik Muharemovic in a scuffle for a loose ball.  That part is undeniable.  It’s also clear that it was completely unintentional, not malicious or even reckless; Balogun wasn’t even looking at Muharemovic.  Furthermore, it appears that the VAR (Video Assisted Referee) review of the play showed the referee only still and slow-motion images.  A full-speed version would have added important context; former English Premier league referee Andy Davies says the omission “does not align with VAR protocols.”  Anyway, a play that the referee didn’t initially even call a foul turned into a red card. 

Curmie’s own athletic career is, shall we say, rather undistinguished.  He never played in an organized league at a level above collegiate intramurals.  There was one incident, though, that’s pretty memorable, even over a half-century later.  Curmie was in goal for his dorm against our arch-rivals (the dorm just up the hill from ours).  I made a pretty good save (if I do say so myself), diving to my right, making the stop, and covering up the ball while lying on the ground.  One of the other team’s forwards proceeded to kick me in the left ear.  Was it intentional?  Maybe.  I think it was in that grey area: not really intended, but he could have jumped over me pretty easily. 

A moment later, there was a referee’s whistle.  Any thoughts I might have had about a delayed foul call against the guy who kicked me soon vanished.  That dude did get punished, though… just not in the way I’d contemplated.  One of my fullbacks, who happened to be a linebacker on the varsity football team, didn’t take kindly to seeing his friend and teammate kicked in the head, especially by someone from that team… so he body-slammed the guy.  Yeah, he got the equivalent of a red card.  I appreciated the gesture, but would have preferred not to have played the rest of the game a man down.  (To be honest, I don’t remember if we ultimately won.  I think so, though.)

Revenons à nos moutons…  It’s difficult to say whether the red card against Balogun was considered legitimate by objective and knowledgeable viewers.  The folks on Fox thought not, but it’s difficult to say where the line between neutrality and jingoism is drawn.  It’s worth noting that the British newspaper The Guardian described the play as “a seemingly innocuous challenge” and the red card as “widely condemned as extremely harsh.”  And the quality of the officiating in general has been, to put it politely, somewhat less than what would be appropriate for an event of this magnitude.  The France/Paraguay match may be the most egregious example, but it’s not alone.

Balogun, to his credit, reacted to the suspension about as professionally as he possibly could have: “It’s important for me to say, first and foremost, it was totally unintentional.  The choice of the referee was his choice. I don’t think it was the correct choice. I think a yellow card would’ve been fair, due to it not being intentional….  It’s something that happened; we have to move forward, and I have to accept it.”  Elsewhere, he says, “There’s still lots of people we’re inspiring, little kids, boys and girls who are watching, and we have to show them the correct way to handle things, even when you think it’s unjust.”  He’s a class act.

According to FIFA (the Fédération Internationale de Football Association) rules, such suspensions cannot be appealed.  Uh huh.  Yesterday, FIFA announced that the ban against Balogun had been suspended for a year.  The rationale was not clearly stated, at least not in any place Curmie has been able to find.  It’s presumed that the misuse of VAR was the determinant (fig leaf?).  If you put enough modifiers on the change of direction, it’s unprecedented.  It’s the first time since the next-game suspension rule was put in place that a player did not, in fact, have to sit out the next game for a red card in a World Cup game per se.  There was a case in 1962 (before that rule), and a number of players, including Portuguese star Cristiano Ronaldo, have been granted suspended sentences, as it were, for red cards in international competitions held before the World Cup got underway.

Needless to say, FIFA, the organization Curmie once described as “The perfect blend of corruption, arrogance, incompetence, sexism, and boorishness” bears a lot of responsibility.  The sexism isn’t as foregrounded in this Men’s World Cup (Curmie’s earlier comments were linked to the 2015 Women’s World Cup), but the other descriptors are certainly on display. 

The situation is complicated further by the intervention of Donald Trump into the whole business.  His phone call(s?) to FIFA Head Honcho Gianni Infantino may have been simply a political leader sticking up for his nation’s team, but you can be certain, Gentle Reader, that the rest of the world won’t see it that way, especially after that utterly bizarre “FIFA Peace Prize” nonsense a few months ago.  Of course, Trump felt it necessary to brag about his intrusion into the process, thereby intensifying the suspicions of everyone who isn’t, well, American... and plenty of us who are. It’s also worth noting the irony that Balogun wouldn’t be playing for the US at all except for the birthright citizenry Trump seeks to overturn.  La la, how the life goes on.

Even Sepp Blatter, the former Exalted Poobah of FIFA, and one of the most loathsome creatures ever to slither across the planet’s surface, argues that “Red cards are not overturned by political phone calls. They are overturned by rules, evidence and independent bodies.  If a U.S. President intervenes with the FIFA President—and a player is suddenly cleared before a World Cup knockout match—the question is unavoidable: Quo vadis, FIFA?  Football must never become a playground for political power.”  True, Blatter is not the best spokesperson for such an argument, but he does have a point.

Tonight’s US match is against Belgium, whose coach, Rudi Garcia, and the Royal Belgian Football Association [RBFA] aren’t thrilled that their team will now face an American squad at full strength instead of one missing its greatest goal-scoring threat.  Garcia brought out the snark: “I didn’t know that 5 July was equal to 1 April at FIFA.”  Part of the Belgian complaint sounds whiny, however much they say they’re protecting the sanctity of the game rather than their own interests.  They do have a point, however, that they prepared for three days for tonight’s game with the assurance that Balogun wouldn’t play, so their entire defensive strategy has to be revised on short notice.

UEFA (the Union of European Football Associations) issued a statement which pulls no punches.  Here’s part of it:

Sometimes rules are open to interpretation. In this case not. A minimum automatic suspension of one match following a red card is not a discretionary option and does not require the decision of a competent body to be enacted. It is a principle embedded in regulations, which cannot be made subject to exceptions, let alone in the middle of a tournament where several other players have been in the same situation and regularly served their suspension…. We express our disbelief at such an unprecedented, incomprehensible and unjustifiable decision.

Tell us how you really feel, guys…

Former England star Wayne Rooney calls the reversal “an absolute disgrace” and “wrong in every way,” but he makes the further point that had FIFA lifted the red card altogether, which he calls “probably the right decision,” things would be different.  But leaving it while postponing the suspension is sort of the worst of both worlds.

There are plenty of other expressions of dismay, but… as a dear friend and former colleague was wont to say, “What is, is.”  Balogun will almost certainly play.  It would be a display of extraordinary sportsmanship were he not to do so, and that Instagram post with Michael Jackson’s “Bad” playing over the top certainly suggests that he’ll be in the lineup.  He will no doubt be booed by opposing fans for a situation he didn’t create.  Previously neutral fans will flock to whoever is playing the US.  Belgium will seek to appeal, but will almost certainly be unsuccessful.  Should the US prevail over Belgium, especially if Balogun plays a significant role, it and any subsequent success will be tainted.

Curmie finds himself agreeing with ESPN’s Mark Ogden that, as the headline says, “Nobody benefits from FIFA letting Balogun off the hook—not even the USMNT.”  The integrity of the competition is compromised, and “Who wants to win if victory becomes tainted by murky interventions that take place without any explanation or transparency?”

As US soccer fans, the best we can hope for is for an American victory in which Balogun is a non-factor—that we get goals from Christian Pulisic or Tim Weah or Weston McKennie or whoever… or a 0-0 draw going to a shootout the US wins despite Balogun missing his shot.  Not that Curmie wouldn’t be happy to see Flo get a hat trick, but it would be weird.

EDIT: It’s now Tuesday morning, and the US team got convincingly thumped last night.  Belgium was probably the better team.  They were certainly smarter, better-coached, and more prepared for the moment.  One suspects that the fact that they felt aggrieved by the FIFA reversal added to their resolve.  Would the US have fared better had the Balogun suspension not been reversed?  Probably, as they would have been the side that had been wronged by a bad call instead of the one benefitting from political interference.  

Would they have lost, anyway?  Probably.  But they’re unlikely to have been that sluggish, sloppy, and stupid.  It was embarrassing.  One of Curmie’s friends wrote that “Everything Trump touches turns to shit.”  Let’s just say there is little evidence to the contrary.

Independence Day and the Notion of Pride

We can do better than this.

Curmie has posted here not infrequently on the 4th of July, usually with some commentary on the significance of Independence Day.  One of his personal favorites of the genre comes from 2020, when he riffed on the opening sequence of the Aaron Sorkin series “The Newsroom.”  Our hero, Will McEvoy (Jeff Daniels) is on a three-person panel in some sort of academic setting.  They are asked by “Jenny,” a sophomore at whatever university is hosting the event, to “say what makes America the greatest country in the world.” 

After the other two panelists respond with slogans—“diversity and opportunity” and “freedom and freedom, so let’s keep it that way”—McEvoy responds, “The New York Jets.”  Even a Jets fan like Curmie laughed at the absurdity of that one.  (At least back when that show was filmed, the Jets didn’t completely suck, which they have for most of Curmie’s adult life.) After another evasion, the camera cuts to a woman near the back of the auditorium.  We don’t know who she is yet, but it’s MacKenzie McHale, McEvoy’s ex-girlfriend and soon to be his new executive producer.  She holds up a sign that says, “It’s not.”  She then flips the sign over and writes something else: “But it can be.”

There are 11 seconds of silence, at least in terms of diegetic sound.  There’s another roundabout response, and the moderator demands “a human moment.”  The camera cuts back to McHale, holding the “It’s not” sign.  A moment later, McEvoy blurts out, “It’s not the greatest country in the world, professor.  That’s my answer.”  The follow-up goes on for three minutes.  You can check out the link above or read the transcript, but there are two things Curmie wants to highlight.  There’s the litany of rankings, addressed to “sorority girl”:

... there is absolutely no evidence to support the statement that we’re the greatest country in the world. We’re seventh in literacy, twenty-seventh in math, twenty-second in science, forty-ninth in life expectancy, 178th in infant mortality, third in median household income, number four in labor force, and number four in exports. We lead the world in only three categories: number of incarcerated citizens per capita, number of adults who believe angels are real, and defense spending, where we spend more than the next twenty-six countries combined, twenty-five of whom are allies.

There are a couple of exaggerations in there, but no more than in the average political speech.  More importantly, this isn’t an indictment of America, simply a warning about allowing patriotism to morph into jingoism and what might now be called hallucinatory rhetoric.  

The other thing to point out is that the sign is both an insistence on truth and a symbol of hope.  “But it can be” is a rallying cry, a call to arms (in the metaphorical sense, at least).  

At the risk of sounding like a Monty Python routine, Curmie adds a third point: in the opening moments of a left-leaning series that aired during the Obama administration, the central character yearns for the days when “We sure used to be” the greatest country in the world.  True, the litany of attributes—“We waged wars on poverty, not poor people,” for example—bespeaks a liberal mindset.  But the desire to return to the glories of the past sure sounds a lot like a desire to “Make America Great Again.”

How sadly ironic, then, that the slogan is most associated with an octogenarian toddler with no impulse control, a pathological inability to accept responsibility for his own actions, and a track record that includes stealing from a charity, sexual assault, and wholesale financial shenanigans ranging from garden variety grift to de facto selling pardons to people who really are “the worst of the worst.”  All the things that any normal President from either party would have orchestrated for the country’s 250th anniversary celebration are gone, replaced by ultra-partisan posturing and a level of ego-centrism that would make Narcissus himself blush. 

Plus, of course, there’s the destruction of the East Wing of the White House, the paving over of the Rose Garden, the vulgar and frankly embarrassing UFC extravaganza that destroyed even more of the White House lawn, the totally botched reflecting pool project, that ridiculous “state fair” farce… Curmie would go on, but he’s trying to keep this essay shorter than the Mahābhārata.

None of what Curmie is discussing here comes under the heading of actual policy decisions.  Curmie has disagreed with virtually everything this POTUS has done, but he had plenty of reservations about the policies of a lot of 47’s predecessors, too.  Curmie grants, however, that all of those guys were at least trying to do the best thing for the country, however much he would have preferred a different approach.  Not so, Dear Leader.  He has never cared about anyone or anything but himself and perhaps a small circle of sycophantic admirers or fellow billionaire hucksters.  If saying any of this makes Curmie “deranged,” then so fucking be it. 

Curmie is angry that a celebration he’d been looking forward to—let’s face it, I’m not going to be around for #300—has been derailed by the hubristic and incompetent machinations of the worst President in the history of the country.  Yes, angry.  Curmie is not a nationalist, but he does think he qualifies as a patriot.  Having spent at least three months in each of three other countries, he’s still going to consider himself lucky to be from the US.  That would be, of course the real US, the one that countless World Cup fans have encountered to their amazement: the place where foreigners are welcomed by the overwhelming majority of the locals; where neighbors help each other out; where the question isn’t whether to give to charities, but to which ones. 

This is not the America inhabited by Donald Trump or Stephen Miller or Mike Johnson.  But it’s where most of us live, irrespective of where (or if) we worship, who our favorite basketball team is, or even who we voted for last time out.  There are those who want to take that America away from us, and they think they have defeated us, or soon will.  Curmie responds (with a tip of the hat to Johnny Carson): Not so fast, Semiquincentennial-Breath.  We are not our government.  The real America is out there, embodied in people like Major Jason Watson, like Leen Hijaz, like the citizens of Curmie’s much-beloved former hometown of Lawrence, Kansas, whose embrace of the Algerian World Cup team using their city as a home base made international headlines.

But that takes us to another point.  Curmie is proud of Lawrence, not because of the notoriety, but because they, my former neighbors, did something right.  Curmie was legitimately sad that Algerian team lost their elimination round game on the west coast Thursday night.  He may not be in Lawrence anymore, but Les Fennecs were his team, too (after the US). 

That notion of pride is intriguing, however.  Another video clip came across Curmie’s path this week.  It was of the late, great, George Carlin talking about, among other things, his problem with the slogan “proud to be an American.”  He suggests that “pride should be reserved for something you achieve or attain on your own, not something that happens by accident of birth…. You wouldn’t say I’m proud to be 5’11”.  I’m proud to have a predisposition for colon cancer…. If you’re happy with it, that’s fine: put that on your car.”

Speaking of pride: the first Pride events happened in the early 1970s, but Curmie wasn’t aware of them, or especially of their designation as “Pride” until later: after, in fact, the release of the Tom Robinson Band’s “Power in the Darkness” LP, which featured a song called “Sing If You’re Glad to Be Gay.”  Chances are, you’ve never heard it, Gentle Reader, because the TRB never had much influence west of the Atlantic; Curmie was working on his Master’s in England when the song came out in 1978.  Whether the TRB consciously rejected the notion of “pride,” or whether they’d never heard it (as Curmie hadn’t at the time), the result was to center on being “glad” or “happy” rather than “proud” of one’s sexual orientation, which of course is another of those accidents of birth that Carlin was talking about.

Pride in one’s own accomplishments is perfectly reasonable, of course, at least in moderation.  That extends, in Curmie’s world, to pride in the achievements of his former students, because in some small way he helped prepare them for that success.  And there is the crux.  George Carlin notwithstanding, pride in the good things that one’s nation has done makes some sense.  (So too, of course, is embarrassment at its transgressions.)  Indeed, taking pride in literally anyone’s honest attainments makes some sense; we’re all fellow travelers here, after all.  But that emotion is usually only a variation on happiness.  Curmie is happy the Knicks won the NBA title this year, but he’s not proud of them except to the extent that they manifested admirable qualities along the way: teamwork, refusal to give up, etc.  A player who simply has a good jump shot: cause for celebration, but not for pride.

For pride to truly manifest, however, there needs to be a personal connection.  Curmie is proud of the two former students who are off to grad school in the fall, but their perhaps equally qualified friends who never took my classes, not so much.  It would be nice to actually be proud to be an American.  The solution is obvious, and it isn’t capitulation.  We, all of us, need to become personally invested in creating a nation worthy of our pride.  That will take resolve, work, perhaps even sacrifice.  But we must, we can, we will, do this.  Roll up your sleeves, Gentle Reader.  We’ve got work to do.