“Good Trouble” and the Canary in the Coalmine

Hannah Watters’s photo

Some stories are significant because they’re so singular: the explosion in Beirut this week is an example of this phenomenon. Some stories, on the other hand, are significant because everyone knows they represent the tip of the iceberg… or, in this case, the tip of multiple icebergs. And it returns Curmie to the erstwhile centerpiece of this blog: education, specifically idiots in charge.

Curmie wonders what the cumulative noun for school administrators is—you know, herd of buffalo, murder of crows, pod of dolphins… what for school administrators? A constipation? A harrumph? An idiocy? A Stasi? Well, anyway, a collection of these critters at North Paulding High School in Dallas, Georgia decided on a set of rules that seem pretty much designed to suppress the rights of their students and to avoid any responsibility for their imperiousness. And then they decided to prove how unfit they are for positions of authority. 

To be fair, they were put in a tough position by Georgia Governor Brian Kemp, who is a contender, along with Iowa’s Kim Reynolds, for the title of Most Irresponsible Handling of the COVID-19 Pandemic by a Non-President. Let’s face it, if you’ve outpaced the likes of Greg Abbott and Ron DeSantis for this… erm… distinction, you’re a LOT longer on arrogance than on sense. Kemp has not only not ordered a statewide mandate to wear masks; he has forbidden local jurisdictions from doing so. It’s unclear (to Curmie, at least) whether an individual school or school district could enforce a requirement should they choose to do so; the school’s own rhetoric suggests they could. North Paulding officials were undoubtedly pressured (at least) into re-opening with no regard for student and staff safety: this doesn’t let them off the hook, especially for the real thrust of this essay. 

As anyone who has ever been in a high school knows—hell, as anyone who has ever seen one of the zillions of movies, plays, or television series about high school knows—the changeover time between classes approaches bedlam, with virtually every student in the school (at North Paulding, that’s normally well over 2000 of them) spilling into cramped corridors and staircases. The chances of physical distancing are precisely those of Curmie voting for Loony Louie Gohmert in November: zero. Plus, of course, a significant number of them, whether on their own adolescent initiative or at the behest of troglodyte parental units, aren’t wearing masks. It doesn’t help that School Board President Jeff Fuller, holder of a BS in Political Science, thinks he knows more about epidemiology than people with… you know… relevant credentials, and declared CDC guidance “complete crap.” It should also be noted that several members of the football team had already tested positive, a staff member who was exhibiting symptoms (!) came into contact with most of the faculty, and there weren’t enough slots available in the school’s virtual learning program. Parents who mistakenly assumed the school would give a shit about its students and faculty enforce masks and social distancing guidelines missed the artificially imposed deadline to enroll their children in the virtual program. 

And so the school forged ahead with on-site classes. Students who didn’t get into the virtual program were told they face expulsion if they don’t attend in person. The school, by the way, would neither confirm nor deny the positive test of that staff member. Note: it’s hardly a violation of individual privacy to admit that yes, “a staff member” has been infected. They’re weaseling around trying to claim they’re concerned about literally anything but their public reputation, denying responsibility for the effects of their own actions. Certainly the safety of all concerned doesn’t seem to have been very high on their list of concerns. 

I know, I know, death tolls from the Rona for those under 24 are much lower than for old farts like Curmie, and masks aren’t a foolproof protection, especially for the wearer. Here is where Curmie offers apologies in advance: few people find their way to this blog without having an understanding of the basics of all the standard liberal arts subjects, including (in this case) history and biology. But let’s consider a few facts: 

1. There are other negative outcomes than just fatalities. True, the only personal friend of Curmie’s to have died from COVID-19 so far was in his seventies and already in poor health. (He still didn’t deserve to die!) But the number of Curmie’s former students, none of them as much as half his age, to have tested positive is now in double figures. (And they’re just the ones he knows about.) Several have/had serious symptoms for over a month. Two, at least, will have permanent damage to vital organs: one to her heart, one to her lungs. This is no hoax. 

2. There are other people in schools than students: teachers and staff are people, too… although there was that one gym teacher Curmie wasn’t so sure about. Some of them are in high risk demographics because of age, general health, height (!), or specific medical conditions.  Others have high-risk family members at home.

3. Students have families to whom they might spread the disease. Parents tend to be older than their offspring, and grandparents even older than that. Duh. 

4. COVID is highly contagious, and can be spread by people who are pre-symptomatic or asymptomatic. (Typhoid Mary, anyone?) 

5. The medical community is virtually unanimous that wearing a mask and staying at least six feet away from others is the most effective means of controlling the spread of the virus. This professional opinion is particularly prevalent among immunologists, epidemiologists, cardiologists, and pulmonologists, so Curmie doesn’t really give a flying fuck what Jim-Bob on Facebook or even ophthalmologist Rand Paul have to say on the matter.

On to the specifics. Student Hannah Watters took a photo (seen above) and a video of the congestion in the hallways on the first day of classes (Monday) and posted them on Twitter. Someone else, @Freeyourmindkid, reposted the following day, and the posts turned viral. By Wednesday noontime, Hannah was called into the office and handed a five-day suspension for violating the school’s code of conduct, which, as we all know, Moses brought down from Mount Sinai. She was suspended for five days… actually something of a blessing that she wouldn’t be exposing herself and by extension her family to the virus, but still a bad mark on her record, etc., etc., etc. 

Her alleged violations (you can see the legalese in the linked article): 

1. Using a cellphone without permission.

2. Accessing Twitter during school hours without permission.

3. Using recording equipment without permission. Of special note: this provision seems specifically designed to prohibit “record[ing] misbehavior.” Nope, nothing to hide, these people. Nope.

For the record: Ms. Watters is, as a student in grades 9-12, permitted to use her phone when not specifically in class. Her Twitter post happened outside school hours. We’ve been here before, Curmiphiles. The good news is that we have a school that seems to acknowledge that except in exceptional circumstances they have no right to interfere in the private lives and communications of their students outside school hours. The bad news is that they seem perfect willing to lie (or, more charitably, to pay no heed to facts) in order to do precisely that. So there’s one legitimate complaint. 

Ms. Watters was apparently told (or perhaps misunderstood) that the problem was distributing photos of underage kids without consent, but that doesn’t seem to be the real issue here. There’s a law, intended to protect victims of child pornography, which is (of course) sometimes misapplied by schools and other agencies, but surely every small-town newspaper in the country runs photos of the fans at the local high school football game. It’s not that, at least not legitimately. 

Documenting “misbehaviors,” the specific target of the policy in question, is, if Curmie might be permitted a grad-school term, vexed. On the one hand, Curmie is not a fan of narcs. On the other hand, he is a fan of whistle-blowers. Curmie would argue that Hannah Watters was functioning in the latter capacity in this case. You, Gentle Reader, are free to disagree. But what matters is that this is an area that calls for discretion, which (needless to say) was not exercised. The school argues pragmatism for both the hallway congestion and the lack of a mandate for mask-wearing. In the former instance, they have a case. There’s simply no way to transport that many students from room to room in a matter of a few minutes other than what we see in that photograph. School officials are correct in noting that the changeovers are brief and unavoidable. Saying the photograph is “taken out of context,” however, is nonsense. The photo shows precisely the reality on the ground, and everyone who has ever been to high school except in the most rural areas knows it. 

According to analysis at Georgia Tech, any gathering of 100 people in Paulding County right now is 92% likely to include someone infected by the virus; it’s over 99% for groups of 500. Even with a significant portion of the student population staying home and attending virtually, there are roughly 1700 students in those hallways at a given moment: the chances that one of those kids is infectious approaches ontological certitude… and a single cough or sneeze could (not to be confused with “would”) infect hundreds. (UPDATE: yesterday, the Saturday after the first week of classes, an Atlanta TV station ran a report that six students and three staff members who had been in the school last week had now tested positive.) 

All of which brings us to the use of masks. Ms. Watters claims that, on average, well under half the students in her classes were wearing masks. She tracked twelve meetings (classes or advisement): the percentages ranged from a high of 57% to a low of 29%. Of course, the school claims that mandating mask usage is unenforceable. Bullshit. The problem isn’t that they couldn’t enforce such a requirement; it’s that they won’t. (Side note: it appears that Curmie’s current employer will open for business-as-sort-of-usual in a couple of weeks. But masks are mandatory except in one’s own private office or outside if physical distancing can be maintained. Faculty can ask offending students to leave the classroom, and to call the university police if the student won’t comply.) 

Moreover, you can bet that girls at North Paulding will still get sent home for wearing spaghetti straps or short skirts… in Georgia… in August. These deeply sexist dress codes are founded on the principle that boys can’t concentrate if they can see girls’ thighs, midriffs, cleavage, or (OMG!) shoulders, and it’s the girls’ fault. Curmie went to high school in the days of the miniskirt, and can’t remember a time in a 40-year college/university teaching career (including ten years at church-affiliated institutions) when a week would go by without some young woman wearing something that would get her sent home from North Paulding High. Somehow, Curmie and indeed all the other males (and interested others) in the room managed to stay on task. Moreover, I suspect that learning my classmate will have permanent organ damage because I behaved like a privileged asshole might affect my concentration more than a glimpse of female shoulders would. There’s no mask mandate solely because school administrators are idiots, cowards, or sociopaths. (Curmie notes that these terms are not mutually exclusive.) 

To be fair to the braintrust at North Paulding, they’re the canary in the coalmine. They’re not more reckless, more hypocritical, more craven, more hubristic, or more disingenuous than hundreds if not thousands of other schools across the country trying to achieve normalcy when that’s just not possible. They’re not worse than the others; they just got there first. And Hannah Watters goes to their school. She repeats the famous invocation of “good trouble, necessary trouble.” Somewhere, John Lewis is nodding and smiling.

AOC, Father Damien, and Patriarchal White Supremacy

About the only Democrat making news these days is the ever-controversial Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC). Joe Biden, following the advice of (at least one of) Sun Tzu, Napoleon Bonaparte, and Paul Begala, seems content to stay out of the spotlight and not interrupt as the Trump administration self-destructs (unfortunately, it’s taking the country with him, and Biden isn’t exactly the guy to reverse the trend). His potential running mates are similarly MIA, fearing, no doubt, a gaffe that would derail their candidacy. Biden’s own struggles with coherence are to be excused, of course: at least he’s better than the alternative, and “we’re idiots and charlatans, but we’re not as bad as those guys” seems to have become the rallying cry of the Democratic Party.

Best known of the members of “The Squad” of first-term liberal Democratic Congresswomen, AOC represents what Howard Dean used to call “the Democratic Wing of the Democratic Party.” She is an agitator, and as such has both more wins (her ritual disemboweling of Ted Yoho on the floor of the House, for example) and losses (describing the Pentagon’s budget total as the increase in that budget, for example). This week, Representative Ocasio-Cortez posted the following on her Instagram page:

Even when we select figures to tell the stories of colonized places, it is the colonizers and settlers whose stories are told – and virtually no one else. Check out Hawaii’s statue. It’s not Queen Lili’uokalani of Hawaii, the only Queen Regnant of Hawaii, who is immortalized and whose story is told. It is Father Damien. This isn’t to litigate each and every individual statue, but to point out the patterns that have emerged among the totality of them in who we are taught to deify in our nation’s Capitol: virtually all men, all white, and mostly both. This is what patriarchy and white supremacist culture looks like! It’s not radical or crazy to understand the influence white supremacist culture has historically had in our overall culture & how it impacts the present day.

I know, shocking, right? It’s obvious (well, it’s obvious to an objective observer) that she’s simply using an example to illustrate a larger point; she’s not attacking Father Damien’s worthiness, merely pointing out that given a choice between a white man (even a non-American!) and an indigenous woman, the powers-that-be opted for the former. It’s equally obvious that she could have picked a better illustration of her larger point. As Simcha Fisher writes, “As often happens with AOC, she wasn’t wrong, but she also managed to say something true in a way that you have to work to defend.”

On the one hand, there are 102 officially recognized sculptures in the National Statuary Hall Collection: two chosen by each state, one by the District of Columbia, and one (Rosa Parks) not linked to a particular location. If Curmie’s quick perusal is correct, 85 are of white men. The only state with two BIPOC representatives is New Mexico, which chose Popé, the leader of a 17th century Pueblo revolt against the Spanish, and Dennis Chávez, the nation’s first Hispanic to win a full term in the US Senate. So it’s pretty easy to make a case that the statues, taken in aggregate, suggest a disproportionate interest in the contributions of white men. The argument isn’t that these men aren’t worthy (although some aren’t), but that they are not more worthy than people with more melanin or fewer Y chromosomes. Unfortunately, of course, AOC’s initial post only hints at what subsequent statements from her office make clear, that she considers Father Damien an important figure and a great man, but that’s not what she’s talking about:

Fr. Damien conducted acts of great good, and his is a story worth telling. It is still worthy for us to examine from a US history perspective why a non-Hawaiian, non-American was chosen as the statue to represent Hawaii in the Capitol over other Hawaiian natives who conducted great acts of good, and why so few women and people of color are represented in Capitol statues at all.

Naturally, if even an active misreading of Ocasio-Cortez’s remarks could serve as red meat for the right-wing press, desperate for anything vaguely political that doesn’t demonstrate just how venal, incompetent, and mendacious the GOP has become in the days of Trump, they’re all over it. In this instance, they could also count on the righteous indignation of the Catholic Church, eager to make headlines for something other than diddling altar boys. It’s also interesting to note that whereas Joe Biden is the de facto leader of the Democratic Party right now, the attack dogs are focusing primarily on AOC, Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, and (still) Hillary Clinton. Gee, I wonder what those people have in common, and why would a bunch of beneficiaries of patriarchal white supremacy choose these folks in particular for derision?

Of course, AOC is a politician, and as such craves notoriety. She could have chosen a far less revered figure than Father Damien to serve as the example of patriarchy and white supremacy. In a way, her follow-up point is more thought-provoking this way, but that’s only for the people who didn’t tune her out after the original post. She has something legitimate to say, but the story became about her, not her message. That’s a tactic for the other guys.

Senator Cotton, “Necessary Evil,” and Correcting the Correction

Curmie has been doing a different kind of writing of late—you know, like… his job—so the blog hasn’t been active for a couple of weeks. There have obviously been a lot of potential subjects: the continuing COVID-19 response incompetence; the misreporting of events in (especially) Portland and the still not completely identified goon squads (feds? mercenaries?) trampling on the Constitution; the upcoming election… But what interests me most, for a variety of reasons, is Senator Tom Cotton’s comment about slavery as a “necessary evil.” Well, sort of.

Senator Cotton

The brouhaha—or at least this manifestation of it—began with the New York Times’s controversial 1619 Project, a revisioning of American history which treats the de facto beginning of the country not as of the Declaration of Independence in 1776, but rather with the arrival in the New World of the first slave ship in… well, 1619. Senator Cotton, to say the least, is not a fan. He recently proposed legislation to withhold federal funding from schools which use the 1619 Project. Of course, like “defund” in the unfortunate slogan “Defund the Police,” “withhold” in the previous sentence really means “reduce.” The proposal would make schools adopting the 1619 Project ineligible for federal professional development funds. The logic of preventing the biology teacher from getting better because the history teacher chooses to partake of a free resource that a politician in another state doesn’t like is not readily apparent, but there you go.

According to an article in the Arkansas Democrat Gazette, federal funds would also be reduced on a pro-rated basis, according to “cost associated with teaching the 1619 Project, including in planning time and teaching time.” Given the fact that use of the Project per se is free, we’re talking about… what? Curmie can’t predict how much time an individual school would spend on the 1619 Project, but he did a little rough guessing based on his old high school’s faculty size and current budget. Assuming every American History course spent two weeks doing nothing else but the 1619 Project, and we pro-rate the salaries of those teachers accordingly, we’re looking at about 2/100 of 1% of the district’s budget. In other words, a penny per $50.00. Even if Curmie’s guesses are off by a factor of 10, he doubts that many districts would file for financial exigency on this basis alone. Moreover, the legislation appears to have little traction even in the Republican Senate; it would be DOA in the Democratic House.

Indeed, Senator Cotton admits that the exercise, even if by some miracle it were to be signed into law, is little more than symbolic: “It won’t be much money. But even a penny is too much to go to the 1619 Project in our public schools.” So Senator Cotton is, depending on your point of view, standing up for principle… or just grandstanding. But what really caught headlines this summer was a statement Senator Cotton made in an interview with the Arkansas Democrat Gazette (linked above). Here’s the full paragraph:

We have to study the history of slavery and its role and impact on the development of our country because otherwise we can’t understand our country. As the Founding Fathers said, it was the necessary evil upon which the union was built, but the union was built in a way, as Lincoln said, to put slavery on the course to its ultimate extinction.

And now the fun begins. A lot of media, especially but not exclusively of the left-leaning variety, seized on the “slavery was a necessary evil” phrase, attributing it to Cotton. Here are links to CNN, The Guardian, even Business Insider, for example. Trouble is: he didn’t say that. He said that the Founding Fathers said it. Actually, of course, they didn’t actually say that, but some may well have believed it.  Of course, they weren’t exactly of a single mind. The Southerners—Washington, Jefferson, Lee, et al.--may have thought in those terms; indeed, over 70% of the signers of the Declaration of Independence were slave-owners. Others, however, not only didn’t own slaves themselves, but were, either at the time of the Declaration or thereafter, active abolitionists. President Lincoln did indeed make an argument akin to what Senator Cotton attributes to him. In one of the famous Lincoln-Douglas debates, he says this:

I say in the way our fathers originally left the slavery question, the institution was in the course of ultimate extinction, and the public mind rested in the belief that it was in the course of ultimate extinction. I say when this government was first established it was the policy of the founders to prohibit the spread of slavery into the new territories of the United States, where it had not existed.

It’s quite a step from there to argue that the Founding Fathers intentionally put slavery on the path to extinction, but we’ll let that slide. And, of course, Senator Cotton was righteously indignant that anyone would accuse him of arguing in favor of that necessity, tweeting: “More lies from the debunked 1619 Project. Describing the *views of the Founders* and how they put the evil institution on a path to extinction, a point frequently made by Lincoln, is not endorsing or justifying slavery. No surprise that the 1619 Project can't get facts right.” Perhaps Senator Cotton will someday learn not to bring a peashooter to a knife fight. That time has not yet arrived.

We turn now to Times writer Nikole Hannah-Jones, the Pulitzer-winning journalist behind the 1619 Project. Here’s her reply tweet: “You said, quote: ‘As the Founding Fathers said, it was the necessary evil upon which the union was built.’ That ‘as’ denotes agreement. Further, if by path to extinction you mean growing the enslaved poP from 500k to 4 million at Civil War, a war fought over slavery, then, ok.” And, since Ms. Hannah-Jones beats me to this argument: yes, “as” does indeed denote agreement. Leaving that word out would have rendered Cotton’s arguments merely historically problematic. As it is, whether he has sufficient command of English grammar and rhetoric to realize it or not, what he’s actually doing is using the alleged beliefs of the Founding Fathers as authority for his assertion of “necessary evil.”

To be fair, Tom Cotton’s intellectual superiority to wilted lettuce is not statistically significant, so he might just not be able to write coherently: a failure that would link him even more closely with a certain other Twittering twit. It may be that “as” was a misprint (Curmie often neglects to delete all the remnants of an abandoned sentence structure; he understands). Or maybe it’s a Freudian slip: a little truth about Cotton’s own attitude that slipped out unconsciously while he was desperately grasping for high moral ground. Or maybe, just maybe, Senator Cotton said exactly what he meant, making him a lousy historian, a racist asshole, and an opportunist pol in a party looking for its next generation of despicable “leaders.” Oh, and a liar. Mustn’t forget that.