Three Stories from the OnStageBlog, Part 1: High School

The recent writer’s block and attendant dearth of posts is when Curmie turns to familiar topics… like theatre, for example.  There will be, I hope, a more complex piece forthcoming, triggered by a thought-provoking editorial a while back by JoelGrey in the New York Times.  For right now, though, it’s three stories from this fall that appeared on the OnStageBlog site.  Curmie is going to take two posts to cover the three stories—two here, one to come—lest the posts get too long even by Curmie’s standards.

A scene from the Dog Sees God dress rehearsal

The first two, from the world of high school theatre, are, as Stevie Nicks might have said, hauntingly familiar.  We start with Santa Rosa High School in California, where school officials shut down a production of Dog Sees God: Confessions of a Teenage Blockhead after opening night, capitulating to complaints that play is “obscene” and “offensive.”  The complainants were, of course, unidentified.  They always are.

Curmie read Bert V. Royal’s dark comedy, which imagines the Peanuts kids as dysfunctional teenagers, not long after its first production in 2004, and saw a production of it a couple of years ago.  He admits that he found it more vulgar than iconoclastic, more pretentious than profound, and frankly rather boring.  But it got great reviews from a lot of New York publications.  More importantly, small-town sexagenarian curmudgeons aren’t exactly the play’s target audience.  You know who it resonates with?  Adolescents and post-adolescents.  Go figure.

So… is Dog Sees God “obscene” or “offensive”?  Maybe.  After all, one of those reviews calls it “raunchy,” and the Dramatists Play Service blurb (linked above) suggests that “Drug use, suicide, eating disorders, teen violence, rebellion and sexual identity collide and careen…”  All that stuff does in fact appear on stage, but Curmie doesn’t remember ever finding anything offensive, per se.  Of course, he’s not easily offended, and he’s not the parent of a teenager, so he may be missing something. 

It’s also worth mentioning that the parents of all the students involved in the production had been informed of the play’s content and had given their consent for their children to participate.  Ah, but you see, the school hadn’t warned the parents of other kids.  Oh, bloody hell.  And of course, the decision to shut the play down had been “not made out of censorship but out of caution and concern.”  Translation, if you’re not familiar with educational bureaucracy-speak, Gentle Reader: “we absolutely censored the play because we’re afraid of idiots who are unwilling to stand for their beliefs openly.”

The point here is that some caution might be appropriate, but the time to impose any restrictions is much earlier than opening night: before spending hundreds if not thousands of dollars on scripts, royalties, sets, costumes, advertising, and all the other expenses involved in producing a play, and before the thousands of person-hours spent by faculty and students in rehearsal and in technical support.  It’s also worth noting, as Chris Peterson does in the article linked above, that another school in the same district did the play two years ago, placing second in a high school theatre festival. 

Given the fact that the cancelation was apparently ordered by district officials rather than by, say the school’s principal, that’s a rather significant indictment of the decision-makers.  If the previous production was “obscene,” then this one should not have been allowed to proceed (note: the theatre teacher didn’t write a personal check for the royalties).  If the earlier show was deemed acceptable, then the board is clearly signaling that they will be swayed by a heckler’s veto.  Not a good look.

Theatre people being a somewhat canny lot not given to submitting to authoritarian stupidity, the company proceeded to find another venue, the privately owned Mercury Theater in nearby Petaluma, whose owners volunteered their space after hearing of the cancellation.  (Hats off to them!)  They did two shows there, at least one of which was sold out to the point of turning people away.

The good news, such as it is, is that the board backed down, at least somewhat, following community uproar and nationwide humiliation upon reconsideration.  Their compromise solution, that the play could continue but only to audiences over 16, would have made sense as an initial decision, provided, of course, that those under 16 could see the show with parental approval (or perhaps if accompanied by a parent).  It’s unclear whether Santa Rosa High includes 9^th graders or not.  If it does, then there’s a reasonable chance that 15-year-old freshmen could work the show but wouldn’t be allowed to buy a ticket. 

This, alas, wouldn’t surprise Curmie.  School boards do all too often represent the perfect storm at the nexus of authoritarian impulses and intellectual cowardice.  Quoting Paul McCartney this time: “La la how the life goes on.”

Curmie was tempted to cite yet another popular song from decades ago to introduce the second OnStage article in question.  But with all due respect to Herman’s Hermits, “Second verse, same as the first” isn’t quite accurate, although it’s pretty close.  There are indeed similarities between the Santa Rosa situation and one at Cesar Chavez High School in Phoenix.  

In the latter case, officials from the Phoenix Union High School District delayed the opening of the school’s production of The Laramie Project only hours before the scheduled opening, citing “the need for additional time to better prepare our audience and the public for the seriousness of the play’s content. So there’s something akin to censorship by a school board who should have done their jobs earlier in the process.  A little communication between the theatre director and district officials would have gone a long way.

Here’s where Curmie’s profession may get in the way a little: no one in my line of work doesn’t know that The Laramie Project is about the torture and murder of Matthew Shepherd in Laramie in 1998 (well, Curmie had to look up the date, but you get the idea, Gentle Reader).  The play, constructed by Moisés Kaufman and the Tectonic Theater Project, consists of statements by Laramie residents, company members’ journal entries, and news reports, all transcribed verbatim and presented by a small group of actors, each of whom play several roles. 

But, as Curmie is reminded every time he and Beloved Spouse watch the Macy’s or Rose Parades, not everyone is expected to know everything: “Who the hell is that country singer who’s apparently so popular?”  So it’s not exactly dereliction of duty for school officials not to recognize the title of the play.  True, given the fact that reading as much as a one-sentence description of The Laramie Project would tell administrators pretty much all they’d need to know, that level of supervision doesn’t seem overburdening.  And if students’ claim that the board had initially signed off on the project is accurate (as opposed to the board not explicitly forbidding the show), then there’s a real problem.

Still, the theatre faculty certainly should have known that the material might require a warning to prospective audience members; that they didn’t initially provide one or (apparently) consult with the board doesn’t show them in the best of light.

Students, of course, started throwing around words like “censorship.”  But the board’s actual press release [] doesn’t seem outrageous.  Here’s part of that statement:

The themes and language in the play need additional acknowledgments and disclaimers for families and students in attendance. Many of our students have younger siblings, and we must properly inform families about the content they are going to see so they can make informed decisions about whether younger family members attend. In addition, we want to ensure proper mental health support is in place for those in the audience who may have strong feelings about the play’s contents.

That’s fine if they meant it, and if they were really talking about a delay rather than a cancellation… and it turns out they were.  The play went on a week after the scheduled opening.  According to one report, it was unaltered, although the director had apparently agreed to excise “bad language”  (over the strenuous, and absolutely legitimate objections of many of the students involved: “If you change all the language that was said, is it really even a hate crime anymore? You're censoring it. These real things were said about this person that died because of a hate crime.”)  It is unclear (to Curmie, at least) whether the bowdlerization ultimately occurred, or, if so, if it was approved by the rights-holders.

It seems that the production was originally scheduled for only a single performance.  That seems odd, but plausible.  If that’s the case, then the single show a week after schedule with appropriate content warnings almost, almost, solves the problem.  The good news, of course, is that there aren’t a lot of high school productions that get nationwide publicity.  We take our triumphs where the come.

More Annoying Commercials

 

Curmie has written a couple times in the past year or so about television commercials that annoy him—a pair of ads for the well-known board game Monopoly and one particular spot for Red Baron pizza.  Now it’s time for another round.

We start with the trio of ads that came out this fall for the Hello Apple Intelligence campaign, featuring actress Bella Ramsey.  Curmie never watched “Games of Thrones” and can’t remember her from “Resistance,” the only one of her credits he’s actually seen, so he doesn’t know whether or not she’s truly as horrible an actress as she appears to be in these commercials… but this post isn’t about her histrionic abilities. 

One of the ads, “Custom Memory Movies” (which Curmie never saw on TV, only online in doing some quick research for this piece), in which she comes to the rescue of a father trying to deliver a eulogy for his daughter’s beloved goldfish, is moderately cute and actually pretty inoffensive, if not exactly plausible. 

The other two, though, present some ethical issues.  AI has its uses, but, as Curmie mentioned last time, more than a few of those uses are to make deception easier, whether we’re talking about plagiarism or a different kind of misrepresentation.

In one spot, “More Personal Siri,” Ramsey uses her spiffy new iPhone to remember the name of someone she met “a couple of months ago at Café Grenel.”  At one level, this would appear to be a pretty innocuous use of the technology.  But whereas she could have responded to the man’s surprise that she remembers him with a platitude about seeing him again, she launches into a lie, “as soon as I saw you I’m like, it’s Zac.”  (Curmie is particularly amused by the error in the subtitles: how better to show off how great your product is, right?)  True, there are worse things, but this isn’t exactly a white lie, either… call it pearl grey.

The remaining ad, “Email Summary,” is more troubling.  Here, Ramsey, presumably as herself, uses her phone to pretend to have read an email pitch from the woman (producer? agent?) she’s apparently lunching with.  Not least of the problems here is that she may have just expressed interest in a project that if she’d actually read the email she’d dismiss out of hand.  Of course, the other woman would have to be pretty much of an imbecile not to notice the evasion, so how does that sell the product?  “If all you need to do is fool an idiot, we can help”?  But even if the subterfuge were a little more elegant, it’s difficult to see how “we make it easier to lie to your colleagues” scores very high on the Our-Product-Makes-the-World-a-Better-Place scale.

But Curmie hasn’t seen those Apple ads in several weeks.  What he has seen, often several times in an evening if he and Beloved Spouse happen to be watching old TV shows on Hulu, is a commercial for Kesimpta, a medication for those suffering from multiple sclerosis.  The spot features actress Jamie-Lynn Sigler, best known for “The Sopranos” (another show Curmie didn’t watch), who actually has relapsing MS and, one presumes, actually uses Kesimpta to control her symptoms.  I truly hope the product does work; I wouldn’t wish MS on anyone.

Curmie has two problems with the ad, however, one general and one specific.  The general one has bothered Curmie for decades: what is to be gained by advertising a prescription medication to the public?  Are we really ready to believe that the cost of advertising is offset by patients walking into their doctors’ offices and saying, in effect, “Look, I know you’ve got a medical degree and all, and I flunked high school biology, but I saw this ad on TV the other night, and I think you ought to prescribe this stuff for me.”  Any doctor who’d pay any attention to that argument deserves to lose their license.

But, Gentle Reader, what really drives Curmie crazy about this ad in particular is something else.  The spot proceeds predictably.  We see Sigler now able to lead a pretty much normal life: she takes a walk with a friend, does an interview, plays cornhole, and plays catch with a boy we presume to be her son.  It’s this last thing that I want to talk about.

As the photo above shows, she’s about to catch a baseball that’s coming in about sternum high.  But her glove is facing up, not out, and she pretty much catches the ball with her bare hand: not the best way to protect her hand in general or those nicely manicured fingernails in particular.  Or to demonstrate proper technique to her young companion, for that matter.  Yes, the ball was lobbed, but come on…

It’s also telling that Sigler’s father-in-law is Lenny “Nails” Dystra, a good-fielding centerfielder for several major league seasons.  In 1986, he was one of the stars of the last New York Mets team (Curmie’s team since their inception) to win the World Series.  It would be unkind and no doubt erroneous to attribute Nails’s stroke earlier this year to seeing that ad, but it is certainly embarrassing.  Sigler should know better.  The director should know better.  The corporation marketing exec who signed off on the commercial should know better.  Hell, the kid should know better.

The Apple ads seem intended to encourage deceit, but the Kesimpta ad actually annoys Curmie more.  It demonstrates that ineptitude is its own special variety of unethical behavior.

Musings on Returning to the Classroom

Curmie retired from full-time teaching in August of 2021.  It was August instead of May because I was hoping—to no avail, as it turns out—to do one more iteration of a Study Abroad program in Ireland; the trip had already been postponed from the previous summer.  I did teach one course per semester in the 2021-22 academic year, but then not at all for two years.

I assumed that I’d never be in a classroom again except for an occasional guest appearance to be, apparently, the local authority on absurdism.  But then a colleague got a one-semester sabbatical to work on her book.  It would be extremely unlikely to find someone who had both the ability to teach all the courses in question and the willingness to move to small-town East Texas for a one-semester gig at crappy pay.  The powers-that-be then decided to try to staff those courses locally.  I suspect I was the only available qualified person in a 75-mile radius, so I was asked if I’d teach Theatre History I and II this semester.  I agreed.

There were a lot of changes for me, completely apart from the two-year hiatus.  I’d taught both courses numerous times, but never in the same semester, and always on a Monday/Wednesday/Friday schedule; this time it was Tuesday/Thursday.  Back in the days when I was the only person teaching these courses I could insist that one of the research papers be on a certain type of topic; that’s no longer a requirement.  And I ditched the expensive anthology I’d used for years, switching to things that were available online.  This also allowed me to choose the plays I wanted to teach instead of necessarily the ones in the anthology: critics may agree that the The Cherry Orchard is Anton Chekhov’s best play, for example, but there is absolutely no question that The Seagull is far more important to theatre history, so I used that.

Anyway… what caught my attention?

First, the students were incredibly polite.  I don’t know whether that’s a good thing or not.  There’s an obvious upside, but it also suggests that they were less comfortable talking to me.  And, of course, there’s always the lurking suspicion that they’re trying to manipulate me somehow.  I’m pretty convinced that was sometimes but by no means always the motive.

Second, the majority were… well, “lazy” isn’t quite the right word, but it’s close.  They were interested in doing the minimum amount of work to get the requisite C in the course.  This phenomenon wasn’t new, of course, but it appeared in a significantly higher percentage of students than I’d seen before in 30 years of full-time teaching (plus a bunch of part-time work).  Part of the reason may have been an increasingly anti-intellectual, or at the very least not pro-intellectual, leadership at all levels of the university.  If university leaders and faculty advisors treat these courses as hurdles that must be cleared rather than as the source of valuable information, we can’t blame the students overmuch.

I mentioned “requisite C” earlier; majors must receive a C or better in both these courses. The percentage of students who dropped the course or got a D or an F this semester was probably three times as high as I’d ever seen.  Doing the work just didn’t seem an option.  Yes, one student in particular was overwhelmed by other responsibilities (that happens), but another dropped the course after receiving a C on the first test, worth 11% of the final grade, because doing the work to do better just didn’t seem to be on her radar as a possibility.

All that said, however, it’s extremely important to note that my best students were not only more numerous than average, but they were really outstanding.  They’d not only done the reading; they’d thought about it.  They asked pertinent questions and made intriguing comments, often analogizing (appropriately!) to other plays, novels, films, or historical events.  Most of all, and this was especially true of a couple of them, they were intellectually curious.  They’d read things that hadn’t been assigned, and then they’d ask me questions.  There is nothing more energizing for a professor than having to be on your “A-game” to stay ahead of your best students.

So the best students were truly wonderful.  But there was a paucity of good (as opposed to excellent in one direction or OK in the other) students.  These being upper-division courses taken almost exclusively by majors and the occasional minor, I’d guess that perhaps about 40% of the grades pre-COVID were B’s.  This time, it was fewer than half that number, and a couple of the ones that did exist were either barely a B or barely not an A.

This phenomenon appears to be pretty much universal.  My colleagues all note the same thing: “there’s no middle,” or, rather, not much of one.  We suspect that COVID contributed in a variety of ways.  This year’s juniors and seniors in college were sophomores and juniors in high school when schools were shut down, with lessons switched over to Zoom or the equivalent, and without any opportunity for teachers to adapt to the new strategies. 

Theatre, being by definition a function of sharing the same physical space, was hit particularly hard, both in the commercial world and the academic world.  We’re beginning to see some improvement with incoming freshmen, but many upperclassmen are still struggling, having lost a lot of momentum at a critical time of their development. 

We’re also a non-flagship state university.  COVID lost us a lot of money, not just in tuition, but especially in room and board fees.  Enrollment went down, and the obvious (not intelligent, but obvious) way to remedy that situation was to lower admission standards.  Probably 15-20% of the students in my classes this semester, in courses that (allegedly) require multiple pre-requisites with grades of C or better, wouldn’t have been accepted pre-COVID (well, unless they had a sweet jump shot, or something equally promising for success in the classroom).  But we’re also a lot cheaper than private schools, so we get a strange combination of really good students who can’t afford to go elsewhere and weaker students who shouldn’t be at a university at all.

But there’s another aspect at play here, too, one suggested by a young colleague.  She argued that the lack of a middle, while the number of excellent students remained the same or even increased, was also attributable to COVID.  Whereas the average student’s academic development was thwarted by online courses, inadequate supervision (generally not teachers’ fault, Curmie hastens to note), lack of social interaction, etc., the intellectually curious ones had no distractions, and therefore spent more time reading plays and novels, watching films that were intended to be more than simply commercial successes, going down rabbit holes of history or science, or otherwise becoming more engaged with what stodgy old professors such as Curmie call “the life of the mind.”  There’s no little merit to that observation.

Finally, of course, there’s the question of academic integrity.  There are multiple studies that suggest that students don’t think cheating is a problem, and that faculty either agree with that perspective or that they’re too beaten down to fight what they suspect will inevitably be a losing battle.  Computerized solutions don’t work.  A few years ago Curmie had a student who argued that his paper wasn’t plagiarized because he’d run it through a website that said so.  What he’d done was to figure out that the site he was using looked for five consecutive words used in some other paper, so he changed every fifth word to a synonym.  Curiously enough, I became suspicious of his multiple references to “Juliet and Romeo.” 

I have argued for years that it isn’t my job to catch every case of plagiarism.  My job is to make it harder to get something past me than it would be to write the damned paper.  This student might have done well to heed that warning.

Some cases are easy to catch, of course.  The student who lifted a sentence from an online source and cut-and-pasted it into his paper without checking to see if the font matched would be a good example.  But whereas that form of plagiarism is easy to prove (if they can Google it, I can Google it), AI technology, which didn’t really exist the last time I was in a classroom before this fall, creates a new set of problems.  You’d have to use exactly the same prompt to exactly the same program to get a copy of what the student generated through AI.  Luckily, AI likes to cite authorities that don’t exist at all, or books that our library doesn’t have.  Inter-Library Loan is a thing, but it takes time, and I know you didn’t even have a topic a week ago…

There are two (at least) ethical concerns I’m noticing in what I’ve described above.  One is the ongoing battle against plagiarism and other kinds of cheating.  It’s exhausting.  Once upon a time, you caught someone violating academic integrity, you gave ‘em an F, and you told your boss what you’d done and why.  Now there are forms and hearings and on and on. Yes, due process.  “Innocent until proven guilty,” even.  But there are so many cases: one of my former students, now a professor herself, noted on her Facebook page that she spent eight hours this week filling out the forms her university requires.  None of us signed up for this, and the power structure is always going to side with the one paying the tuition.

The other ethical issue is how to treat students who aren’t prepared to do the level of work required, through no (or very little) fault of their own.  Do we say, in effect, “well, under the circumstances, this was pretty good work”?  Or, alternatively, do we say “this just isn’t of sufficient quality to merit a good/passing grade”?  Curmie is an advocate for the latter, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t understand the other argument.

What I’m totally confident of is one thing, Gentle Reader: for all the joy Curmie felt working with that handful of really exciting young scholars, re-retirement looks absolutely awesome.

 

Athena, Whataboutism, and Retribution

We could use her about now.

There’s a fair amount of consternation that President Biden has used his authority to pardon his ne’er-do-well son, Hunter (they’ll be JB and HB hereafter if there’s any chance for confusion) after promising not to do so.  The outrage is mostly from the right, as might be expected, but there’s also no little anger emanating from the left, mostly from those who believed, probably naïvely, that JB would show respect for the law, keep his promise, and thereby differentiate himself, and by extension his party, from Donald Trump’s openly stated imminent campaign of retribution.  Curmie is disappointed but hardly surprised at his reversal of course.

JB’s defenders argue that the pardon of his son is legitimized by the fact that Trump had pardoned many of his minions who had been convicted of worse crimes than those of HB.  Did Trump do that?  Yes, of course, he did.  Is that a defense for JB’s actions?  Not in Curmie’s books.  It’s difficult to say what was going in in JB’s mind when he made the vow—did he really believe that he would keep his word, or was that just another lie told by a politician looking to appear objective and above the fray of partisan squabbling? 

Did he think he would win re-election and could then “change his mind”?  Was this a strategic move intended to suggest that the prosecutions of Trump were other than politically motivated?  Curmie can’t answer those questions with authority, but let’s just say he has his suspicions.

That said, two things: 1). Trump is indeed a convicted felon.  However much those charges may have been motivated by something other than a concern for justice, the guy who crows incessantly about hiring only the best people had a legal team that really screwed the pooch if he really was innocent.  They were present for the trial, including the voir dire of prospective jurors.  All they needed was one juror who wasn’t convinced beyond reasonable doubt that the actions were not only criminal but felonious, that it was reasonable to have 34 indictments, and that Trump was guilty on all counts.  That… erm… didn’t happen.

2). JB’s announcement was ill-timed politically because it became the lead story across a compliant and lazy media who might otherwise have been noting that Trump’s nominees for important government posts are the greatest collection of rogues, scoundrels, and scalawags since Catwoman, the Joker, the Riddler, and the Penguin joined forces to form the United Underworld.  Trump also threw in a couple of idiots and wackadoodles: his version of an inclusion initiative, apparently.  (Can Vivek Ramaswamy really be so stupid that he misses the irony of his disparagement of “unelected bureaucrats”?)

The problem is that the majority of the allegations on both sides are, well, true.  Both candidates for the Presidency (well, all three if we count Biden along with the two finalists) babbled incoherently on the campaign trail, lied about themselves and their opponent, and generally proved to be unfit for office.  Both are intentionally divisive; both significantly threaten First Amendment freedoms. 

Curmie has already noted that he voted for NotTrump in three consecutive elections, not because he was particularly impressed with any of the Democratic candidates, but because he believes that Donald Trump is indeed an existential threat to democracy.  (Note to any right-leaning readers: the fact that Biden and Kamala Harris may also qualify for this description does not mean the Trump does not: not all situations are either/or; some are both/and.)

Over the years, Curmie has collected more than a few posters of shows, museums, and the like: far too many to be able to display them all, although virtually none have actually been discarded.  One that always finds its way onto a wall somewhere in the house or apartment we’ve lived in is from the London production of Aeschylus’s trilogy The Oresteia, directed by Sir Peter Hall.

The principal reason it has a place of honor at Chez Curmie is that the play was the standout production (against some pretty solid competition) that he and Beloved Spouse saw on their honeymoon <mumblemumble> years ago.  But for the purposes of this essay, it’s more than that: the poster declares The Oresteia to be “the world’s first dramatic masterpiece,” and Curmie has no argument with that description. 

What is remarkable about the trilogy is that the cycle of violence and retribution perpetuates itself until it is finally resolved by divine intervention.  King Agamemnon of Argos had sacrificed his daughter, Iphigenia, believing it to be the only way to get to Troy and thereby to return Helen to her husband, Menelaus.  In the first play of the trilogy, Agamemnon, the title character returns victorious, only to be killed, along with his concubine Cassandra, by his wife Clytemnestra and her consort, Aegisthus.

In the middle play, The Libation Bearers, Agamemnon’s other children, Orestes and Electra, egged on at least indirectly by the god Apollo, conspire to kill Clytemnestra and Aegisthus.  They succeed, but Orestes ends the play hounded by the Furies, the chthonic goddesses who believe no crime to be worse than matricide.  The fact that only he can see them may be a practical dramatic necessity, but it also renders the moment all the more terrifying: a tactic later employed by the likes of Alfred Hitchcock, who knew that the unknown can conjure a level of dread that no literal representation can match.

Finally, in the Eumenides, Orestes is brought to trial.  The judge is Athena, the goddess of wisdom.  The immortals—Apollo and the Furies—state their respective cases, with the ultimate issue being trying to rank the evils of filicide, regicide/mariticide, and regicide/matricide.  Athena has appointed a jury of the leading men of Athens, the Areopagus, to decide the case.  Their vote ends in a tie; Athena casts the deciding vote for mercy, but assures the Furies (now re-named the Eumenides, the Kindly Ones) that they will henceforth be appropriately honored in exchange for their benevolence.

Athena thus effectively ends the spiral of retribution and whataboutism.  As we prepare for a radical change in government in January, we desperately need an Athena.  The chances that Joe Biden will morph into such a figure in his last days in office: one in a million.  The chances Donald Trump will ever do so: zero.

Alas.

Curmie Is Voting for Not Trump

Yeah, Curmie could support these guys if necessary

People lie.  Politicians lie more than the average person.  Kamala Harris is a politician, and not a particularly honest one, even in comparison to other pols.  Curmie will still vote for her, however.  No, he doesn’t think she’s very accomplished, smart, or consistent.  He thinks she would be a pretty bad POTUS, in fact.  But she’s running against Donald Trump (and J.D. Vance), and Curmie is on the record that he’d vote for the Sauron/Voldemort ticket before he’d vote for them. 

Those fictional villains may be evil, but at least they’re sane, and that makes them at least moderately predictable.  They could construct complete sentences, even paragraphs.  Neither of them ever taped a maxipad to their ear to cover a quite possibly non-existent wound.  They probably even pay their bills, and they certainly wouldn’t publicly contemplate the prodigiousness of a deceased golfer’s penis.

Those on the right will no doubt call Curmie Trump-deranged.  Fine.  He’s been called worse.  Is it likely that a second Trump presidency would destroy the democratic (lower-case “d”) principles on which the nation was founded?  “Likely,” no; “plausible,” yes.  And that’s sufficiently terrifying, thank you.  Should we “vote like it’s Germany in 1932”?  Well, actually, yes.

In Peter Nichols’s brilliant play [A Day in the Death of] Joe Egg, busy-bodies Freddie and Pam refer frequently to people who are PLU: People Like Us.  The MAGA playbook is all about blaming literally everything that ever goes wrong on folks who are Not-PLU: immigrants (even legal ones), Muslims, BIPOCs, LGBTQs, the poor, educators… women.  The legitimacy of these people’s ideas is never considered; it is enough that they are Other.  Indeed, Trump’s positions on issues (has he actually said anything of substance on anything in the last year?) are irrelevant.  He’s the cult leader—a more dangerous one than Sun yung Moon, Jim Jones, or David Koresh—and that’s enough for his flock.

But this essay isn’t about the manifold ways in which Donald Trump is unfit for office.  It’s about one in particular.  Yes, all politicians lie.  But most, even the slimiest ones like Mitch McConnell, do so only to advance their particular perspective: they exaggerate their own accomplishments, actively and consciously misinterpret their opponents’ votes or rhetoric, and otherwise prevaricate their way to what they hope will be a political victory for their side. 

Trump is different.  He’s reckless and ultimately cruel in his dishonesty.  He railed against the Central Park Five long after DNA evidence proved their innocence.  He blathered on about how Barack Obama was supposedly born in Kenya.  Even these escapades, however, pale in comparison to his recent antics in the aftermath of the two hurricanes that battered the southeast.  Despite the testimony of the governors of the affected states, most of whom are Republicans, that the Biden administration and FEMA have been doing an extraordinary job under the circumstances, Cult45 is out there claiming the response was delayed (it wasn’t), and inadequate (given the enormity of the devastation, it could not be otherwise, but that, of course, wasn’t what he meant).

As a private citizen, he inserted himself into the spotlight, getting in the way of people (FEMA, relief organizations, actual volunteers) who were trying to do something to help.  He even riled up the yahoos to believe that FEMA was actually the enemy, to the extent that some operations had to be curtailed when workers feared for their safety!  The problem isn’t that Trump said outrageous, false things: as Jerome Kern wrote (sort of), fish gotta swim, liars gotta lie.  It’s not that he’s mendacious, hubristic, sociopathic, or narcissistic, even by politicians’ standards.  It’s not (just) that he’s a convicted felon.  It’s not that he was rather stupid already before devolving into a babbling ignoramus we see on the campaign trail. 

We’ve all witnessed that cognitive decline, too.  Even major Republicans are calling him “unhinged” and “dangerous.”  That’s just the ones who have joined in the chorus recently, not the host of military leaders, cabinet members, staffers, and (oh, yeah) his Vice President who endorsed Harris or at the very least made their lack of endorsement of Trump public weeks or months ago.

We knew he was amoral, too.  But he seems to have morphed from someone who didn’t care about anyone but himself into someone who consciously and intentionally hurts others: a progression from amorality to hard-core immorality, if you will.  Were he to win the upcoming election, he will only get worse.  And the best-case scenario would be that he would be replaced by J.D. Vance, who is nearly as arrogant, just as hypocritical, and probably even more Fascistic. 

It is possible—unlikely, but possible—that Vance actually believes in the crap that comes out of his mouth.  The difference is that Trump cares only about himself, whereas Vance might actually believe in a cause: a cause which ought to terrify us all.  Indeed, he may be even scarier for that reason.  The good news is that for whatever reason, Trump has groupies and Vance does not. 

Kamala Harris is a terrible candidate.  Her detractors say that her entire campaign is based on not being Trump.  That’s unfair—although far from impressive, she’s been far more detailed and coherent than her opponent about virtually anything you can mention—but even if it were true, being Not Trump is good enough for Curmie.

 

 

 

Skeezix, Gaza, and Empathy

Here’s a cat cafe in Gaza
It seemed appropriate.

Those who know Curmie personally know that he and Beloved Spouse recently came to the awful but necessary decision to have their elder cat, Olivia (aka Skeezix), euthanized.  That sent him back to his “other,” seldom-used blog, to a post about when Skeezix was the younger cat in the family and her older “sister,” Helena (Catbert), was dying. 

As I wrote five years ago:

...seeing her sister’s lack of appetite, Olivia made sure that her sister had had first shot at anything she might want. It was more important to her that Helena eat than that she herself get the choicest food. She didn’t make a big deal of it; she just did it. And then, when it became clear that Catbert wasn’t going to be wanting any food [when we came home from the vet’s without her, clearly very sad], she calmly reverted to her normal behavior. 

It is a sad but ultimately ennobling fact for our species: our pets have better ethics than we do.

Olivia was always a great comfort to Curmie and Beloved Spouse; whenever we were ill or sad, she magically appeared on the scene to help us through the bad times.  She never got along quite as well with her younger sister, Hermione (Snippet) as she did with Helena, but in Skeezix’s last days, Snippet showed obvious concern for her sibling, touching noses in what was clearly a gesture of compassion, for example.  Her yielding of the choicest morsels to her elder sister wasn’t as obvious as Skeezix’s had been, but it was there.  Empathy is not merely a human quality; it is innate across much if not all of the animal kingdom.

It’s also worth noting that the outpouring of sympathy and support from friends (over 200 reactions on Facebook alone) to our loss has been both overwhelming and much appreciated.  Curmie has heard from more than a few former students he had no idea were still on Facebook, and from professional colleagues he’s never even met in person.  Current students (Curmie is back in the classroom as a sabbatical replacement this semester) who barely know me have been especially kind, and, no, I don’t think it’s to increase their chances of a good grade.  We are, in some way, hard-wired to care about others.

Well, most of us are.

In one of those coincidences that lead to blog posts from people like Curmie, I happened across an essay decrying the media’s presumed obsession with chronicling the suffering in Gaza.  The inhabitants asked for it, you see, by electing Hamas, and the Israeli military is just trying to protect their citizens from further attacks by a terrorist organization.

To this, Curmie responds in a manner familiar to his students, especially in his Asian theatre classes: yes and no.  I have no sympathy for Hamas, but of course they’re not the ones bearing the brunt of the Israeli attacks, because active belligerents make up only a small percentage of the residents.  It may indeed be true that the average Gazan now supports (as opposed to “joins”) Hamas, but it doesn’t take a strategic genius to figure out the idea that someone might be less likely to align with the folks who are bombing you than the ones opposing the bombers.  “The enemy of my enemy…” and all that.

It’s also more than a bit of a stretch to say that current Gazans elected Hamas.  Half of the people in Gaza weren’t even born the last time there was an election there.  Half of those who were hadn’t reached voting age.  Not everyone voted.  Oh, and Hamas got a plurality, not a majority, of the votes; they got a majority of the legislative seats, but not of the votes.  In other words, the number of Gazans residents who ever voted for Hamas is perhaps as high as 10%.

Is this relevant?  Sort of, to the extent that the pro-Israeli arguments are rendered less legitimate.  The overwhelming majority of those dying, starving, and otherwise in peril in Gaza have done nothing to warrant punishment.  They’re simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.  Of course, that is the way of war.  Those who make the decisions are seldom the ones who suffer most.  The citizens of Melos in the Peloponnesian War, of Antwerp in World War I, of Hiroshima in World War II (to name but three from literally hundreds of examples), were innocent, but that didn’t save them.  Those who perished in the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001, were similarly targeted without cause.

It is certainly possible to view at least many of the untold deaths in similar circumstances over the last three millennia or so in primarily strategic terms: had this horrible thing not happened, then an even worse fate would inevitably have occurred.  

Sometimes.  But the key word in that sentence is “primarily.”  It is reasonable enough to argue that capitulation to tyranny is never acceptable.  Curmie is a native of New Hampshire, where the state motto is “live free or die.”  I get it.  And whereas it makes us uneasy to think in terms of how much “collateral damage” is acceptable, it is naïve to believe that such conversations are anything but commonplace… and necessary.  Military decisions are in a different category than what to watch on TV tonight.  There are significant real-world consequences, both positive and negative.

Getting into the weeds and weighing considerations like responsibility and proportionality is fraught with peril.  Everything becomes a matter of perspective, and decisions are likely to tell us more about the decision-maker than about the relative merits of opposing positions.  Curmie isn’t going to get involved in such disputes, as there is much to be said on both sides.  He’ll go only so far as he’s already gone, when he wrote “Are the Israelis the “good guys” here?  No.  They’re the less despicable guys.” 

All that said, Curmie just can’t wrap his head around the utter lack of even a modicum of sympathy for those caught in the proverbial crossfire through no fault of their own.  No, Gentle Reader, they didn’t fucking “ask for it.”  They’re just trying to survive a horrific set of circumstances that they had little if anything to do with creating.

Even if we don’t agree that politico-military decisions should override humanitarian concerns in at least some such cases, we can grant that there’s an argument to be made.  And concentrating exclusively on the suffering of one set of victims (in this case, innocent Gazans) while ignoring another set of victims (equally innocent Israelis) is at best sloppy journalism.

But anyone who insists that basic human compassion and empathy for those who suffer are unwarranted simply because of who they are and what a minority of their ancestors thought was a good idea… such a person is just a little too close to a monster for Curmie’s taste.  And Skeezix would not approve.

The Pearl-Clutching Podium

Curmie finds great amusement in the meme you see reproduced on the left.  He knew he’d seen the two women whose greatly magnified faces appeared above the water-line as boats carrying athletes to the opening ceremony of the Paris Olympics passed by.  He got as far as presuming the images to have been from a painting in the Louvre, but he confesses that he couldn’t quite place them, and had given up the search through the memory bank until a friend from high school posted the meme.

Of course!  Curmie remembers seeing the painting in person over a half-century ago, possibly in the company of that friend; we were roommates on a spring break trip to London and Paris sponsored by the school’s French club.  Curmie saw it again a couple years later while on a college Language Study Abroad program, and photos have crossed his path a few times in the ensuing decades.  He’s mildly embarrassed that he didn’t immediately see the tweak (if you’ll pardon the expression, Gentle Reader) to the spectators, but mostly he’s still giggling over the pearl-clutchers’ inability to partake of the low-hanging fruit: the part of the portrait that is suggested but not seen is indeed a little risqué by American television standards.  The resounding silence from the American right is indeed ironic, especially in the context of what did get their collective skivvies in a twist.  

Most of the controversies arising out of this year’s Olympics had to do with actions, past or present, of the athletes: were the Chinese swimmers (still) doping, what should be done about the convicted child rapist, what the hell was that Australian woman doing, stuff like that.  A couple of stories were about how members of the media behaved.  And, of course, there was the Great Floor Exercise Debacle, in which most Americans thought Jordan Chiles was much abused based primarily on the fact that she is American and the other contenders for the bronze medal are not.

But none of these stories make it to the podium in the Olympic Pearl-Clutching finals.  To reach those lofty heights, a contender must claim victimization on the basis of something other than nationality, and the top scorers are not the athletes themselves, but television viewers, who must claim to have suffered mightily themselves.  The outrageousness of the outrage, not its reach, is what determines the winner.

We begin, then, with the bronze medalist, the furor over Algerian boxer Imane Khelif.  Yes, it was a bit ridiculous to make a big deal out of the fact that an athlete who competed as a woman in the Tokyo Olympics was allowed to do so again in Paris.  And yes, the Italian woman who initially accused her of being male recanted after the “agony of defeat” wore off. 

But we can’t rank this any higher than third place because there’s some very real mitigation.  Transgender women, those who went through puberty as males, are in fact likely to have better upper-body strength than women who were born female.  As Lia Thomas has amply demonstrated, mediocre or merely good male athletes can become stars by doing little more than declaring themselves female.  There was, of course, a fair amount of internet chatter (without evidence, of course) that Khelif is transgender.  Some of this came from despicable but somehow trusted folks like Elon Musk and J.K. Rowling, both of whom Khelif has sued for cyberbullying.

Curmie, an advocate for both free speech and victims’ rights, hasn’t completely wrapped his head around the legal issues.  What is definitely true is that Khelif is intersex, not trans.  A lot of the people who expressed outrage believed the false reports; we can raise an eyebrow at their willingness to think the likes of Musk are even capable of truth-telling, but we can’t blame them too much.  And the fact that she’s been beaten before doesn’t automatically mean she doesn’t have an advantage. 

Moreover, there is no standard means of dealing with such issues: should we be considering testosterone levels? the presence or absence of XY chromosomes? visible male dangly bits?  The Olympics apparently make their decisions based on what it says on a passport. 

Curmie has a friend whose passport says “male” even though it was issued to someone who was born female and had only just begun the transitioning process: I can’t speak to the details with confidence, but I’d bet that surgery hadn’t happened, and testosterone boosters had only just begun if in fact they’d begun at all.  If that’s what the process looked like in that direction, it’s doubtful that going the other direction would be much different.  And there are certainly countries which would be willing to (ahem) bend the rules if there were no criteria other than passports.

Moreover, Khelif was indeed disqualified from the 2023 World Championships after the fact by the Russian-controlled International Boxing Association for unspecified offenses totally unrelated to the fact that she had the audacity to beat a Russian boxer.  (Ahem.)  The IOC cut ties with the IBA and criticized that judgment, which they claimed was “sudden and arbitrary” and devoid of due process.  When you’re too corrupt for the IOC, you are definitely not the good guys in the story.

Still, we can understand those who are hesitant to advocate for Khelif in the absence of further evidence.  So these pearl-clutchers aren’t the champions of their event.  But the mere fact that the same people who insist that everyone should be permanently classified according to the sex they were assigned at birth are the ones howling that Khelif should not be allowed to compete… erm… according to the sex she was assigned at birth is enough to earn them a spot on the podium.

In the silver medal position is the weeping, wailing, and gnashing of teeth that accompanied the perception that there was a brief moment in the opening ceremony that someone decided had parodied the Last Supper… not the event, to be sure, but the painting.  Every pseudo-Christian yahoo with access to an X account or a Fox station was sore aggrieved, although it’s unclear whether people were actually offended or whether they dutifully pretended to be so when instructed by right-wing media.  And no, the fact that a lot of people purported to be offended does not mean there’s legitimacy to their claim.

The facts that there were a lot more people in the image than there were at the Last Supper, that there was no table, that the artist who created that particular vignette insisted it was intended to reference both the Greek origins of the Olympics and the notion of Dionysian (or, to use the Roman term, Bacchanalian) revelry: all this is to be ignored, apparently.  Even the Vatican got into the act, albeit belatedly, with this bizarre statement: “The Holy See was saddened by certain scenes at the opening ceremony of the Paris Olympic Games and cannot but join the voices raised in recent days to deplore the offense done to many Christians and believers of other religions [?!?]”  (emphasis added).

Curmie confesses that he didn’t know what the hell that moment was all about.  He didn’t think of Dionysus, although in retrospect that identification makes sense, but he fancies himself reasonably adept at understanding both cultural references and symbology, and never thought of the Last Supper, either.  It was just another in a series of rather strange vignettes that bespoke the avant-garde or, perhaps more specifically and relevantly, Frenchness. 

But let’s assume for the moment that Curmie was just asleep at the proverbial wheel on this one, and that the MAGA hordes were correct that DaVinci’s Last Supper was being referenced.  At the risk of rendering further offense, Curmie wonders, “So what?”  The Christian religion is not being parodied. 

First off, that would be a remarkably silly thing to do in a city whose principal tourist attractions include the cathedral of Notre Dame (it is an amazing space, and Curmie is very happy it will soon re-open), the chapel of Sainte-Chapelle, and the basilica of Sacré-Cœur.  But more to the point, there is nothing sacred about that painting.  A painting of a bunch of white guys all sitting on the same side of a long table isn’t likely to represent, even to believers, an accurate portrayal of a meal served a couple of millennia ago.  It’s on a religious theme; that’s it.  It would be only marginally sillier to have forbidden Curmie to cheer for his alma mater’s football team when we played the Holy Cross Crusaders.

There are, in fact, sacred relics in Paris.  When Curmie was last in that city, Sainte-Chapelle housed what they proclaimed to be the crown of thorns, a piece of the true cross, and so on.  (Those relics are now apparently housed in the Louvre.)  Make fun of those—or of items of similar significance to another religion—and you’re a first-class jackass, even if you’re “right” to doubt their authenticity.  But to suggest a pastiche of a painting obliquely and perhaps even unintentionally?  Seriously?  Your God is pretty much a wimp if he can’t handle that level of presumed disrespect.  And so, O Much-Abused Faux Christian, are you.

There’s no question that these folks deserve their silver medal.  But the fact that few observers immediately caught on to what was being represented, and that it’s merely a stretch as opposed to a fabrication to see the Last Supper referenced lends a pinch of legitimacy to the hand-wringers.  Despite their over-enthusiastic clamor, therefore, they don’t get the gold medal.

Remember, it’s the outrageousness of the paranoia, not the extent to which it gained traction, that earns points in the battle for the pearl-clutching gold.  The top of the podium is therefore reserved for those who gasped at the demonic figure in the closing ceremony.  

It is, as Curmie recognized immediately, and suspects you did, as well, Gentle Reader, a replica of the Winged Victory of Samothrace.  You can see the original here, to the right.  It strikes me as a particularly apt usage, combining the notion of victory, certainly relevant to the competitions of the previous couple of weeks, with the Olympics’ origins in Greece (Samothrace is a Greek island), with the host city (the statue has been on display in the Louvre for about a century and a half). 

It is certainly one of the most famous statues in the world.  What’s better known?  Well, the Venus de Milo, Rodin’s Thinker, Michelangelo’s David, Christ the Redeemer overlooking Rio de Janeiro, the Statue of Liberty… and maybe something else that’s slipping Curmie’s mind right now.  But it’s certainly in the top ten in the world. 

Ah, but not to the proudly ignorant X user Carolann, who asserts that it is a “headless, and armless Angel with what appears to be an effigy of Lucifer (The Golden Voyager) standing in gold. Certainly a fitting close to the MOST demonic & satanic Olympics in history.”  Needless to say, there are followers who say that it is “a slap in the face to all Christians” and similar hogwash. 

Someone points out what virtually anyone with a modicum of cultural literacy knows (or at the very least suspects), but our gal Carolann responds with the classic “we can see what it is from here.”  It is impossible to argue with such idiots.  Evidence means nothing to them.  Only two things enter their minds: chauvinistic hatred and the quest for victimhood.

The latter used to be the sole preserve (or nearly so) of the so-called underprivileged or disenfranchised, whose failures are to be excused because of their demographic profile: hence, for example, criticisms of Kamala Harris’s politics or performance, even if deserved, are dismissed as racist or sexist or both.  But now the (pseudo-) Christian right is demanding their place in the Victimhood Hall of Fame, despite the lack of anyone actually doing anything to even inconvenience them.

The good news is that this particular hallucination doesn’t seem to have generated much of a following, but the mere fact that someone could go on the record with such paranoid ramblings about imaginary threats to an already privileged position is somewhere between chilling and terrifying.  Yes, the MAGA cultists are weird.

La la, how the life goes on.

Incompetence and Arrogance of Olympian Proportions

 

The three women you see pictured at the top of the page, Gentle Reader, currently stand in the third (i.e., bronze medal), fourth, and fifth positions in the Olympics final in the women’s floor exercise. You see them from top to bottom in their relative positions as Curmie writes this; whether those will be the final rankings remains to be seen.

Anyway, from the top down we see Romania’s Ana Bărbosu and Sabrina Maneca-Voinea, and the US’s Jordan Chiles.  Each of them has reason to believe that she—and she alone—should be the bronze medalist.  But a series of judges’ fuck-ups (sorry, Gentle Reader, there is no other term) have turned what should have been an easy ranking into a brouhaha that makes clear that whatever the NCAA or FIFA may do, the IOC isn’t going to give up its title of Most Corrupt and Incompetent Sports Organization without a fight.  But wait!  Who’s that coming up on the outside?  It’s the Tribunal Arbitral du Sport (Court of Arbitration for Sport), or TAS,  staking their claim, and they’re backing it up with hubristic posturing!  It’s coming down to the wire, Gentle Reader, and it’s anyone’s race!

Curmie has already made clear his distaste for sports which rely on the subjective opinions of judges rather than on some objective criterion.  Yes, referees can make mistakes, but at least we know that the team that scores the most points will win, as will the swimmer who touches the wall first.  In these events, it’s clear: the US won a gold medal in the 100m sprint because a photograph made it clear that Noah Lyles’s torso crossed the finish line .005 seconds before Kishane Thompson’s did.  The US women’s basketball team also narrowly won gold, beating the French team by a single point.

Those close finishes seem more arbitrary when there’s no objective way of distinguishing between the performances.  It’s also true that gymnastics is second only to figure skating in terms of judges giving credit to established stars just because they’re established. 

But let’s assume for the moment that the judges’ votes, though subjective, were both informed and honest.  The point that if you were to ask a dozen experts which of the three women discussed here was the “best,” suggesting that all three would get at least two votes apiece is both accurate and irrelevant.  These women didn’t go to Paris to get a participation trophy.

OK, so what happened?  By the time Chiles, the last to do her routine, hit the floor, the gold and silver medals were de facto wrapped up by Rebecca Andrade and Simone Biles, but the bronze was very much up in the air.  Bărbosu  and Maneca-Voinea were tied on points, with the former placed third because her execution score was higher.  Chiles performed well, but came up just short, with a score of 13.666, behind the two Romanian women’s 13.700.  But American coach Cecile Landi submitted an inquiry about Chiles’s difficulty score.  Less than a minute after Chiles’s score was posted, the appeal was granted, her score was raised by a tenth of a point, and she catapulted from fifth to third.

By this time, Bărbosu had already draped a Romanian flag over her shoulders to celebrate the first of her country’s Olympic medals in gymnastics in a dozen years: this in a sport once dominated by the likes of Nadia Comăneci.  Indeed, from the time Comăneci appeared on the scene in 1976 through 2012, six different Romanian women won Olympic gold in the floor exercise, and ten earned a medal of some color, averaging more than one competitor per Olympics on the podium.  This was big for the individual gymnast, but perhaps even more so for her country.

Needless to say, Bărbosu was devastated by the change in Chiles’s score.  It’s completely understandable that she felt frustrated, betrayed, and, yes, bitter.  Her initial response garnered her a substantial amount of harassment on social media.  Of course, Chiles suffered that fate, as well, being accused of cheating, as if she had anything to do with the judges’ decisions.  Chiles received the bronze at the medal ceremony, and initiated one of the iconic images of the Games, as she and Biles bowed to Andrade in a gesture of respect and friendship to their Brazilian competitor.

But the story doesn’t end there.  The Romanian team submitted a challenge, claiming that the inquiry about Chiles’s score came after the allotted one-minute window for such appeals.  The TAS ruled that Landi’s challenge did indeed come in four seconds too late, and was therefore disallowed.  That meant Chiles’s score reverted to 13.666.  The TAS kicked the subject of what should happen to the medal back to the FIG (the Fédération International de Gymnastique) who punted the decision back to the IOC, who predictably ignored the Romanian team’s suggestion that all three women should receive bronze medals.  The IOC decided that, having already awarded Chiles the medal, they wanted it back, despite no wrongdoing on Chiles’s part.

But, as they say in the late night infomercials, Wait!  That’s not all!  Notice that the Romanians suggested that not merely Chiles and Bărbosu should receive medals, but so should Maneca-Voinea.  Why?  Well, the Romanian team sought to change her score because she suffered a tenth of a point reduction for stepping out of bounds… which replay showed she did not do.  But that appeal was denied, without explanation (!).

In other words, if the judges had done their job in the first place, Maneca-Voinea would have had a score of 13.800 and would have won the bronze medal.  Even with the extra tenth of a point she received for doing a more difficult routine than she was initially given credit for, Chiles would have finished behind her.  The inquiry, even if it was late, was still submitted before Chiles’s score was posted (the one minute timetable is from the end of the routine), so it would have gone forward, but there’d be no reason for the Romanians to quibble about the timing, because it wouldn’t have affected the medals.  No one cares who was fourth as opposed to fifth. 

Who precipitated the kerfuffle?  Not Chiles or Landi.  Not Bărbosu or Maneca-Voinea or their coaches.  This is all on the judges, the IOC, the FIG, and the TAS.  And not because somebody thinks Gymnast A was “better” than Gymnast B.  No, this is all about getting things objectively wrong.

Let’s not forget that getting Maneca-Voinea’s score correct in objective terms would have prevented all this.  But competent judges would have prevented the Chiles/Bărbosu controversy, as well.  They could have noticed that Landi’s inquiry came too late (assuming it did), and said, right then and there “we’re sorry, this request came outside the time limit, and we therefore can’t review the situation.”  Or they could have waited an extra 30 seconds or so before posting Chiles’s score, thereby announcing only the upwardly-revised total, placing her directly into third place, and not giving Bărbosu the impression that she’d won a medal, only to snatch it away moments later.

The US team subsequently submitted time-stamped evidence that Landi’s inquiry was submitted after 47 seconds, not 64.  The TAS, of course, refuses to re-examine the case in the light of new evidence, and Chiles has been ordered to return her medal.  After all, it’s her fault that the governing bodies fucked up and apparently believed false information (Curmie apologizes if it appears he’s strayed into politics here).

The two teams are, of course, looking after their own, but the Romanian suggestion that the three women each receive a medal is easily the closest we could get to a judicious and ethical conclusion.  Bărbosu has gone on social media commiserating with Chiles (she knows what it feels like, after all), and hoping that the three of them will share a podium in Los Angeles in 2028.  The athletes, the eldest of whom is Chiles at 23, are showing a lot more maturity and a lot more humility than the constipated and flat-out stupid narcissists at the IOC and TAS.

The US team vows to continue the fight to allow Chiles to keep the medal they believe is her due.  Curmie makes no prediction what will happen down the road.  What he does know is that if he were Jordan Chiles or Ana Bărbosu and they came for my medal, I’d be sore tempted to tell them to perform an exercise best suited to extremely limber hermaphrodites.  And I’d know, or at least suspect, that Sabrina Maneca-Voinea might just have a better case than I do.

EDIT: two new pieces of evidence further demonstrate the bungling of the TAS.  First, they notified the wrong US officials of the hearing (!).  Oh, and the International Institute for Conflict Prevention & Resolution reports that Dr. Hamid G. Gharavi, the head of the hearing board which handed down the TAS decision, has represented Romanian interests in such cases on numerous occasions.  That doesn’t mean that he’s corrupt, of course, but he’s definitely pulling a Clarence Thomas by not recusing himself when there’s plenty of appearance of conflict of interest.