*Hamilton*, Hypocrisy, and... Havel?

A little over seven hours SSW of Chez Curmie is the medium-sized city of McAllen, TX, home to, no doubt, some quite wonderful people.  Alas, it is also home to the Door Church and RGV Productions: these people are considerably less than wonderful unless your definition of that term includes intellectual property theft, active misreading, hypocrisy, hatefulness and general assholitude.

This weekend, RGV Productions staged a production of the Broadway megahit Hamilton at the Door Church in McAllen; they also videoed the show and posted it to YouTube (it’s since been taken down).  What they didn’t do was to obtain the rights to do the play at all, let alone to make changes that completely distort the meaning of the script.  Curmie confesses that he’s never actually seen a production of the show, but he feels pretty confident that the story doesn’t end with a preacher telling us we can be cured of our problem with homosexuality.

The issues here are in one sense pretty clear: there is no question that the production company and the church violated copyright law, or that they did so absolutely intentionally.  There is similarly no doubt but that they are sufficiently self-righteous that they believe themselves exempt from the dictates of regulations they consider inconvenient.  One wonders how the notoriously anti-Christian Friedrich Nietzsche would respond to his concept of the amoral übermensch being co-opted by a passel of dim-witted Bible-thumpers.

As for those folks, it seems that whole “render unto Caesar” business that appears in not one, but three, of the Gospels (Matthew 22:21, Mark 12:17, and Luke 20:25, for those of you playing along at home), got skipped over while they were concentrating on mistranslating passages that condemned pederasty and raping male slaves as if they were indictments of homosexuality in general.

Certainly if Lin-Manuel Miranda and his cohorts chose to sue the production company, the church, and all the individual decision-makers involved, they’d have a very strong case, and, as Chris Peterson of the OnStage Blog notes, the penalty for the offenders could easily run to five or six figures.

Part of Curmie wants LMM and Disney, which paid a very large chunk of change ($75 million) for exclusive video rights to the show, to put these hypocritical buffoons out of business permanently.  They certainly deserve it. 

But Curmie is also reminded of one of his favorite acting roles, that of Leopold Nettles in the great Czech playwright (and, later, President) Václav Havel’s Largo Desolato.  In that play, Nettles, the central character, has written a book which the powers-that-be don’t like.  Indeed, he is visited by two goons we are led to believe are representatives of the ŠtB (the Czech equivalent of the USSR’s KGB or East Germany’s Stasi).  Still, he remains undaunted.  They do eventually succeed in breaking him down, however, by removing their threats, suggesting that his book was too insignificant to merit their attention.

It’s certainly true that Hamilton, like virtually every other show anyone has ever liked, probably gets staged illegally on a regular basis, and that chasing them all down might be more trouble than it’s worth.  A lawsuit could also feed the church’s finely crafted persecution complex, as if idiots like what passes for a brain-trust at Door McAllen were somehow innocent victims of a massive conspiracy to deny their religious expression or some such horseshit.

Perhaps, then, the way to go would be to issue a statement that the church’s ill-intentioned theft of intellectual property was so insignificant, that despite the best efforts of the perpetrators the production failed so miserably to undermine the meaning of Hamilton that to sue such a gaggle of incompetent amateurs would be beneath our collective dignity… but do this again, to literally anyone else, and we will clobber you so hard and so fast that you will never know what hit you, only that you’re penniless, nationally disgraced, and revealed as the small-time con men you truly are.

There’s something to be said for this strategic approach.  Still, Curmie would absolutely love it if LMM and the Mouse were to squash this church and all its adherents like a bug on the windshield at 70 mph.   

 

The APA Flunks Their Psych Exam

Dr. Ruba with one of her awards

Dr. Ashley Ruba is a recent graduate of the PhD program in psychology at the University of Washington.  She is, apparently, very good at what she does: she received not only a dissertation award but also an early-career grant from the American Psychological Association (APA).  So far, so good, right?

Well, uh… no.  You see, Gentle Reader, in order to actually receive her awards in person at the convention in Minneapolis this week, she’d have had to pay the organization $595.  That’s the registration fee for someone like herself: neither an APA member nor (anymore) a student.  

Her response was predictable, at least to those of us who aren’t professional psychologists: she told them to perform an exercise best suited to particularly limber hermaphrodites.  Well, she was more polite than that, but there’s no doubt about her intent.  She tweeted,

So, let me get this straight. I won not one, but two @APA awards. But, in order to accept these awards at the conference, I need to pay nearly $600 in registration fees. 

No one day pass. No fee waiver. No way to attend a 50 min ceremony.

Conferences are a scam. I’m not going. [an obvious typo corrected]

Kim Mills, the APA’s talking head, of course sniffed that it’s not feasible to grant awardees free registration because the conference runs on a tight budget: “We couldn’t possibly offer that many free registrations to people.”  There are assholes, and there are idiots, but seldom do we see such a stellar example of both at once.

First, Curmie knows a little about professional conferences, having attended several dozen of them and served on a conference committee or two.  Breaking even on a conference is a good but not absolutely necessary thing, especially for an entity like the APA, which sits on net assets of about $49 million and makes the overwhelming majority of its money through other means.  Yes, there are some professional organizations which are in danger of going under if their conference loses too much money; the APA isn’t close to being one of them.

Second, extending a one-day pass to an award recipient costs the APA <checks notes> precisely the cost of a name badge, or maybe a buck or so if you want the fancy kind with the accompanying lanyard.  (I’m even willing to bet Dr. Ruba would have paid for her own badge.)  It’s not like the hotel or conference center or whatever charges the organization for everyone who enters the space.  And Curmie will bet the proverbial ranch that it cost more to send her the plaques than it would have to let her pick them up in person.  Seriously, how freaking stupid can you get?

Are conferences a “scam,” as Dr. Ruba suggests?  Well, Curmie isn’t going to go that far, but it’s certainly true that they’re damned expensive.  Curmie was lucky in that for the last couple decades of his career his university would pick up at least a healthy percentage of the cost of attending one and often two conferences a year. 

Counting everything—conference registration, driving to and from the airport, parking, airfare, transportation to and from the hotel, the hotel itself, meals, internet (it may be free at the Super8, but not at the Hilton)…—we’re often looking at $2000 or more for a national conference.  It’s also true that the people who benefit most from conferences, those in early career, are also those least likely to be able to afford to attend.  Fortuitously, Dr. Ruba was already going to be in Minneapolis for other reasons, so she could have attended the ceremony… if the APA was run by people who actually gave a damn.

Curmie truly believes that his university got its money’s worth on their investment in his conference attendance.  I won’t deny that seeing friends is also a perq, but I got better at my job—in the classroom and rehearsal hall, but also in terms of understanding how universities operate—by talking with colleagues from around the country (and sometimes from around the world). 

I was able to advance my career, but, more importantly, I was also able to make connections that helped advance my students’ careers.  But Dr. Ruba has moved out of academe, so this last benefit doesn’t exist for her.  Her frustration, especially given her specific circumstances, is more than understandable.

Curmie happens to be the national president of a professional organization with considerably less than 2% of the APA’s resources.  We award a few thousand dollars a year in scholarships to outstanding students.  Usually, the recipients can’t attend our annual meeting (held within the conference of a larger organization) in person, but whereas we’re not going to underwrite all their travel expenses, if they can get to the conference center, we’ll make damned sure they can get inside without paying for the privilege.  

There are so many downsides to the situation Dr. Ruba describes, but the worst may be that the culprit here is the American Psychological Association, an organization which one presumes is dedicated to furthering understanding of how the human mind works.  It is a cruel irony that these are the folks who are apparently incapable of understanding how people respond to stimuli, or how they should be treated.

Well Done, Kansas!

Curmie was born in New Hampshire and grew up in New York; he spent three years in Kentucky, seven in Iowa, and one in the UK; he’s lived in Texas three times longer than he did in Kansas.  All that said, there is a strong urge to consider himself a Kansan.  This was true before Tuesday, but that day’s events certainly did nothing to quell that impulse.

Tuesday, everyday Kansans, the same folks who gave Donald Trump a 15-point victory over Joe Biden, thrashed, by 18 points, a GOP power grab amendment which would have granted the state legislature, controlled by the looniest of right-wing pseudo-Christians, the ability to outlaw abortion in literally all cases, with no exceptions for rape, incest, or even the life of the mother.  And those folks are blinkered enough to have done so.

All of this, obviously, comes in the wake of SCOTUS’s ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overturned the nearly 50-year-old Roe v. Wade decision ensuring the right to abortion under certain limitations.  We can trace this, of course, to the egregious manipulation of the SCOTUS approval process by Mitch McConnell, certainly one of the most loathsome creatures to have slithered across the political landscape in decades. 

If McConnell had a soul, let alone any ethical sensibility, Merrick Garland would have been confirmed (or at least had a vote!), and Amy Coney Barrett wouldn’t have.  This is not, Curmie hastens to add, necessarily to suggest that Justice Barrett is unqualified, only that there wasn’t sufficient time to appropriately vet her candidacy prior to the 2020 election, and McConnell is on record as saying that his job was to get her confirmed (not, be it noted, to give her a fair hearing).

McConnell’s hypocrisy, outrageous as it was, wouldn’t have mattered, of course, if Hillary Clinton had run a competent campaign, or (perhaps) if the trio of Trump appointees, nominated by a candidate who had lost the popular vote by a pretty sizable margin, had been honest in their responses to questions about Roe.  They lied.  Everyone—left, right, and center—knew they lied, but it would have been impolitic to have said so, so they got away with it in a GOP-dominated Senate.  (Side note: no one believes Ketanji Brown Jackson doesn’t have a definition of “woman,” either.)

The Dodds ruling was red meat to the right-wing base, but it appears that Curmie may have been correct back in early May when he wrote:

Be careful what you wish for, GOP.  You’ll likely find that your rallying cry whimpered its way to death alongside the SCOTUS ruling you so despise….

“Right this wrong” is a far more rousing slogan than “Maintain the status quo!”.  Now, the energy is on the other side.  Far more people will rally, both literally and figuratively, behind what they perceive as an issue of gender-based discrimination than did so because a single petty criminal was inadvertently killed by an asshole (not necessarily racist) cop in Minnesota.  And the protests will almost certainly be less violent, making them less objectionable to those in the middle, politically.  

It’s difficult, from outside the state, to get much of a read of what was happening in Kansas.  Curmie still has a lot of friends there, but virtually all if not indeed literally all of them are at least as progressive as he is.  Two things were clear from their posts on Facebook: that they were genuinely concerned that the amendment might pass (it’s Kansas, after all), and that they were organized and ready to take on the challenge.  Curmie went into Tuesday cautiously optimistic, but no more than that.

After all, the state’s GOP had orchestrated their attempted overthrow of abortion rights very competently.  Last year, they passed a law which was (no doubt intentionally) sufficiently vaguely worded that the state’s League of Women Voters stopped their decades-old tradition of registering new voters.  This tactic wasn’t aimed at abortion rights per se, of course, but who, exactly, are those prospective voters who couldn’t register the way generations of their forebears could?  Well, at a guess, they’re young, disenfranchised, disproportionately female… whyever would the entitled white male power structure want those people to have political suasion?

The campaign from the Bible-thumpers (though seldom Bible-readers) was promoted as “Value Them Both,” nomenclature which bears as much relationship to reality as the “German Democratic Republic” or “states rights” as the cause of the Civil War.  The whole impetus of the proposed amendment was to deny autonomy to women and to grant personhood to fertilized (not even implanted) eggs.  The ways in which this proposal values pregnant women elude Curmie’s normally well-developed imagination, let alone his logic.

Then, the vote was scheduled not during the general election (as those for other constitutional amendments were), but during the primaries in early August: when the voter turnout is disproportionately older and more conservative.  Oh, yeah, and the opposition would have three months less time to organize.  Interesting coincidence, huh?

By the way, exceptionally high turnout, as much as twice the total for the last “normal” election season, for a traditionally sleepy August primary certainly contributed to Tuesday’s result.  Give people something important on the ballot and they’ll show up.  Who’da thunk it, right?

Finally, there was an robocall campaign which flat-out lied about what a vote meant.  Voting “yes” was to turn over power to the legislature, but the “anonymous” call reversed that.  Curmie doesn’t know if that call was aimed primarily if not exclusively at, say, registered Democrats, but at least three friends posted on Facebook that they received that robocall, and a number of their friends commented that they had, too.  Luckily, the “no” side was all over that nonsense, and voted the way they intended.

Given all this, the serious thumping administered to this amendment is rather impressive.  The New York Times is now suggesting, based on the Kansas results, that voters in only seven states would endorse the kind of proposal presented to Kansans (one other state would be a complete toss-up).  Was Tuesday’s result in Kansas truly a bellwether, even a portent?  Is it, as Politico would have us believe, “a political earthquake with the potential to reshape the entire midterm campaign”?

Frankly, Curmie doubts it, although it sure would be nice if it were true.  GOP pols may be pawns of corporate power, evangelical immoderation, and the NRA, but they’re not total idiots… well, some of them are, but you know what I mean, Gentle Reader.  There’s plenty of time for the right to re-group and re-strategize before November. 

But this week may lead to a little more forthrightness from both sides.  Curmie has already seen that Mike Collier, the Democrat running for Lieutenant Governor of Texas, will (if elected, of course) “codify Roe v. Wade into Texas law.”  Curmie doubts that it's entirely coincidental that Collier’s tweet first appeared less than an hour after the news networks declared Kansas’s Value Them Both Amendment soundly defeated.  If all we get out of this week is a Democratic Party prepared to run on what it believes, and perhaps a Republican Party that must either stake out an extremist position or be seen to equivocate, Curmie would call this a win.

Hell, it’s a win, anyway, and Curmie celebrates (in absentia) with his Kansas friends.