On the "Barbie" Snubs

Let’s get this part out of the way up front.  The only times Curmie has ever cared about awards like the Oscars were when a friend or a friend’s project was nominated.  Also, Curmie has never seen “Barbie,” and has no intention of doing so: he is outside the target audience for reasons of age, gender, temperament, and probably a host of other things, too.  That doesn’t means it’s a bad, or even undeserving, movie.  If, Gentle Reader, you saw it and loved it, Curmie is pleased that you were entertained or enlightened or whatever; if you saw it and were disappointed, Curmie sympathizes.  He’s been there.

Gentle Reader, you are no doubt at least as au courant with popular culture news as Curmie is, so you’ll already know that the anthropomorphized doll movie was a huge box office success.  It collected a passel of Oscar nominations, as well, including for Best Picture, Best Adapted Screenplay, and Supporting Actor/Actress—Ryan Gosling and America Ferrera.  Ah, but the two driving forces of the project, director Greta Gerwig and title actress Margot Robbie were not nominated in those categories (see below for the ”yeah, but…”).

On the one hand, there are certainly ironies at play.  The meme you see here is one of many variations on the theme.  Yes, it would be logical that if a film is nominated, then its director and star would be, too.  It’s certainly worthy of raising an eyebrow that in a film with such feminist undercurrents it would be Ken, not Barbie, who got recognized.

But “Past Lives” also got Best Picture and Screenplay nods without either a directing or leading actor/actress nomination, so it’s not a complete anomaly.  Plus, there’s the simple fact that there are twice as many nominations for Best Picture as there are for the other categories, so some major contributors to nominated films are inevitably left out.

This has not prevented howls of protest from the movie’s fans.  There are the usual, frankly rather tired, allegations of sexism, for example.  How could Ryan Gosling be nominated and Margot Robbie not be?  Well, perhaps the voters (all actors themselves—you can only vote in one category) liked his work better.  Perhaps there were more outstanding performances from female leads in other films than there were from supporting men in other films.  Gosling and Robbie wouldn’t be competing with each other, after all.  Perhaps Gosling just did better work than Robbie.

Perhaps, too, the directors who voted in that category just thought the work of Jonathan Glazer, Yorgos Lanthimos, Christopher Nolan, Martin Scorsese, and Justine Triet was better.  All of their films were Best Picture nominees, too, after all.  And those folks aren’t exactly rookies.  Between them, they had one Oscar win and ten other nominations in directing, and that doesn’t count their work as writers or producers, or awards like Golden Globes or BAFTAs, or wins at festivals like Cannes and Banff.

There is not, indeed cannot be, any great conspiracy to “erase women’s work” or some such nonsense.  Robbie didn’t get nominated because some other woman did.  Gerwig didn’t get nominated, but another woman did.  Yes, there will be those who claim that somehow all those voters secretly got together and decided that precisely one woman should get the nod.  Curmie sees <checks notes> zero evidence of that.  If, Gentle Reader, you think the “Barbie” women were better than one or more actresses or directors who did get nominated, that’s fine.  Curmie thinks something similar in virtually every category virtually every year.  But that’s a matter of taste, not backroom machinations.

It's also worth noting that the meme isn’t quite accurate.  No, Gerwig didn’t get nominated by name, but that’s because the award is for Best Adapted Screenplay, not Best Adapter, although exactly what she is alleged to have “adapted” is beyond Curmie’s ken.  (Get it?  Ken?  OK, moving on.)  Robbie, as one of the film’s producers, also has a nomination to call her own. 

Importantly, virtually any recognition for a film like “Barbie” is significant.  It may be that the movie wears its feminism a little ostentatiously, but the adjective Curmie’s friends who liked the movie have employed the most is “fun.”  The film may not be Curmie’s mug of lapsang souchong, but Curmie will take “fun” over “self-consciously earnest” ten times out of ten.  No, Curmie hasn’t stopped being an intellectual elitist, but he does believe that Hollywood is generally a lot better at entertainment than at intellectual stimulation.

In Curmie’s experience, most Oscar nominees are rather boring exercises in pseudo-intellectual pretentiousness.  Of the last several Oscar winners that Curmie has seen—he hasn’t bothered with some of them—there are more truly terrible films than excellent ones.  That’s just Curmie’s opinion, of course, and you should consider yourself under no obligation to agree.  But hopefully, Gentle Reader, you’ll grant that “fun” is not an adjective applied to most Oscar winners.  If “Barbie” changes that, it wouldn’t be a bad thing. 

Curmie would also bet that individual accolades are less important to Gerwig and Robbie than the success—in all the different definitions of that term—of the overall project… or at least they’ll say it is.  And so we move on to one of the most oft-referenced statements by a nominee ever, by Ryan Gosling :

I am extremely honored to be nominated by my colleagues alongside such remarkable artists in a year of so many great films. And I never thought I’d being saying this, but I’m also incredibly honored and proud that it’s for portraying a plastic doll named Ken.

But there is no Ken without Barbie, and there is no Barbie movie without Greta Gerwig and Margot Robbie, the two people most responsible for this history-making, globally-celebrated film.

No recognition would be possible for anyone on the film without their talent, grit and genius.

To say that I’m disappointed that they are not nominated in their respective categories would be an understatement.

Against all odds with nothing but a couple of soulless, scantily clad, and thankfully crotchless dolls, they made us laugh, they broke our hearts, they pushed the culture and they made history. Their work should be recognized along with the other very deserving nominees.

Having said that, I am so happy for America Ferrera and the other incredible artists who contributed their talents to making this such a groundbreaking film.

It is a gracious statement, expressing both appreciation for his own recognition and disappointment that his colleagues on the production were not similarly honored (well, they were, sort of, but we know what he means).  True, it has a little of the aroma of a press release, but there’s a legitimate possibility, even a probability, that it’s largely heartfelt, whether he actually wrote the thing himself or not.  People do tend to be loyal to friends and colleagues.

You can be forgiven your skepticism, Gentle Reader.  But please do not countenance descriptions of Gosling’s comments as “the baby goose’s insufferable blubbering,” “virtue signaling,” or “whining,” which apparently is what a fair number of people whose demographic profiles (but not politics) match Curmie’s seem to be suggesting to anyone who will listen.  Doing so would serve as evidence of precisely the attitude the film apparently seeks to lampoon.  Paranoid, mendacious, and bitchy is not an attractive combination.  There are more than a few walking exemplars of fragile masculinity to whom the truth of the foregoing sentence would seemingly be a revelation.

To sum up: 1). Curmie neither knows not cares whether Gerwig and Robbie “deserved” to be nominated as director and leading actress.  2). An ironic coincidence is not the same as evidence of a conspiracy.  3). A lot of old white guys need more bran in their diet.  

In other words, no, nothing new here.

 

In Memoriam: Peter Schickele

 

Curmie won’t get an obituary in the NYT,
but he hopes he’ll at least get an
equivalent photo to this one.

One of the first things Curmie read this morning on his Facebook feed was the news that Peter Schickele had died at the age of 88.  To be honest, it never occurred to me that he was still with us; I hadn’t heard anything about him in years, and I’d always assumed that he was at least a dozen years older than he actually was.

He had, of course, stayed on my mind.  Beloved Spouse and I often refer not infrequently to the University of Southern North Dakota at Hoople, and I’ve more than occasionally wished I could have worked there—their theatre program didn’t have the reputation of their music program, but the school clearly appreciated the arts.  😉

More to the point, Schickele was instrumental in forming my attitude towards life in general in ways I hadn’t really thought about until this morning.  He was, of course, a gifted musician—he wrote over a hundred pieces of serious music: for symphonies, for Broadway, for Hollywood—but, like Victor Borge and Spike Jones (both of whom were more beloved of Curmie’s parents than of Curmie), he gained fame more for his wit and cheerful irreverence than for his composing or playing.

Still, the musicianship was there.  Schickele’s “discovery” of P.D.Q. Bach, the “last and by far the least” of Johann Sebastian Bach’s manifold offspring, clicked in Curmie’s mind in a particularly impactful way.  In a memorial tribute in the New York Times, Margalit Fox writes, “Mr. Schickele was such a keen compositional impersonator that the mock-Mozartean music he wrote in P.D.Q.’s name sounded exactly like Mozart — or like what Mozart would have sounded like if Salieri had slipped him a tab or two of LSD.”  That’s about right, both denotatively and tonally.

The “Concerto for Horn and Hardart” in particular struck a chord early on with Curmie, one of whose clearest memories of childhood was eating at a Horn and Hardart automat during a class trip to New York City sometime in the mid-’60s.  You have to be good to write the serious part of that piece; you have to be more than a little off-center to write (and perform) the rest, complete with such “musical instruments” as glass sliding doors with sandwiches behind them.  It meant something different to Curmie at first hearing, but now it is an emphatic reminder that Art can be… well… fun.

That combination—the clear understanding of the form and the willingness to play with it—is what was, and is, so appealing.  Can Curmie’s scholarly interest in adaptations of Greek tragedy be traced to “Iphigenia in Brooklyn”?  Probably not.  But Schickele’s saucy approach to inherited material certainly planted a seed.  Curmie loves word play, although he’s not quite the punster that some of his friends are.  Peter Schickele was one of the first to inspire that appreciation.  But it’s more than just plays on words.

Over the years, Curmie developed a repertoire of bits that re-occurred in his classes.  The Athenian politician Solon had the voice of a Good Ol’ Boy when warning that make-believe might find its way into “our serious bidness.”  Apollo sounded like Barry White when propositioning Cassandra, but was utterly fabulous when appearing as the deus ex machina in Euripides’ Orestes.  The possibility that a gunpowder-based bomb might have been implanted into a straw dummy when the title character’s body was “rejected by the earth” (launched by an underground catapult) in the Cornwall Death of Pilate became “’splodin’ P-Square.”  Hamlet was caught in the existential crisis of whether to be Goth or Emo.  And so on.

Importantly, the playfulness inherent in these performances was intended (and, one hopes, received) not as an attempt to ridicule the sources, but rather to provide a hermeneutic access to them.  Irreverence for its own sake is always smug and usually boring.  But, as such philosophers as Johan Huizinga and Roger Caillois have demonstrated, play, or rather a particular kind of play of which these snippets of pedagogical quirkiness are examples, is central not merely to our intellectual life, but to our humanity.  Huizinga even suggests that our species would more rightly be called homo ludens, replacing the Latin word for wisdom (sapiens) with the word for play.

Would Curmie’s lectures have been fundamentally different were it not for Peter Schickele?  Probably not, but it’s possible.  It’s even possible that there would have been no lectures at all, that without having developed a taste for the slightly naughty intellectual irreverence he found first in Schickele and later in the theatre, Curmie would have continued in the pre-law program he began as an undergrad.  He would then have been considerably richer.  And immeasurably poorer.

Of Bill O'Reilly, Hoising, and Petards

 

A modern day petard,
You didn’t really want to see a photo of Bill O'Reilly, did you?

We begin, Gentle Reader, with a short lesson in vocabulary and etymology in reference to the title of this entry.  Most people know the word “hoist” as either a verb meaning to raise up or as a noun meaning the mechanism by which that raising up is accomplished.  

Its most common usage today, however, may be in the expression “hoist by his own petard,” an expression employed by the title character in Act III of Hamlet.  (A petard is a medieval gunpowder-based bomb.)  In this expression, “hoist” is not a verb per se, but rather the past participle of the verb “hoise,” a verb meaning pretty much the same thing, but which has long since fallen into disuse. 

We do understand the expression correctly, however: to be hoist by one’s own petard is literally to be blown up by one’s own bomb, or figuratively to be undone by one’s own scheme.  Perhaps the best example in mythology (and subsequently in dramatic literature) is Oedipus, who would not have found himself in quite that relationship with his birth parents had he not attempted to avoid the fate foretold by the oracle.

Anyway, the most recent victim of such self-inflicted damage is the insufferable Bill O’Reilly.  Like so many other right-wing talking heads (Beck, Carlson, Ingraham, et al.), O’Reilly started out as a conservative-leaning commentator who not infrequently actually had something to say, but subsequently took a hard turn into Loonyville when it became apparent he could achieve more fame and fortune by doing so.  Even if O’Reilly weren’t a sexual predator, Curmie would have no sympathy for him. 

The source of the heady aroma of schadenfreude that currently fills the air is the news that two of O’Reilly’s books—Killing Jesus: A History and Killing Reagan: The Violent Assault That Changed a Presidency—are among books that have been at least temporarily pulled by Florida’s Escambia County School District lest they run afoul of Ron DeSantis’s purge of books that anyone anywhere might allege “to contain pornography or obscene depictions of sexual conduct.” 

The chances that O’Reilly’s books actually meet any reasonable interpretation of the criteria for removal is remarkably close to zero, but the same could be said for the overwhelming majority of the literally thousands of other  books similarly pulled from the shelves (see below).  O’Reilly’s objection just got more play, both because people recognize his name and because he was an outspoken proponent of DeSantis’s censorial machinations.

Like most such authoritarian regulations, those currently embroiling Floridians appear to have started as a legitimate concern.  There is little doubt that some books inappropriate for young readers found their way into a few school libraries, and some small percentage of librarians and school administrators failed to provide appropriate safeguards.  But “protecting the children” does not include sheltering them from realities like the facts that slavery and segregation are very much a part of this nation’s history, that gay people exist, or that “loving America” is not the ideology-free perspective the right wing proclaims it to be.

More importantly, perhaps, is that O’Reilly is actually right about one thing (insert stopped clock analogy here): the law as written is disastrously, almost certainly unconstitutionally, vague.  As Curmie wrote about a similar exercise in censorship in Utah last spring, “excluding everything you want to exclude while not forbidding what you don’t want to forbid requires language skills surpassing those of the average state legislator,” and censorial reactionaries are even less likely than the average pol to craft such a bill.

That’s why one Utahn (that’s the correct term, apparently) sought to have the Bible removed from schools: “Incest, onanism, bestiality, prostitution, genital mutilation, fellatio, dildos, rape, and even infanticide…. You’ll no doubt find that the Bible, under Utah Code Ann. § 76-10-1227, has ‘no serious values for minors’ because it’s pornographic by our new definition.”  According to the law, the complainant has a point, as no “socially redeeming value” exception is allowed.

The drafters of such legislation have two things in common: 1). they aren’t really interested in protecting children, but rather on ensuring that their weltanschauung is the only one permitted (OK, they wouldn’t use that word; it’s not ‘Merkin, after all), and 2). they’re relying on selective enforcement leading to prior restraint to do their dirty work.

In Florida, Ron DeSantis’s minions over-stepped in a different way.  By holding individual librarians responsible criminally responsible for allowing one of those naughty books to go unsuppressed, and by attaching absurd penalties for those alleged crimes of omission, they’ve prompted precisely the reaction we see now. 

If a single complaint from a parent (sorry, the internal link in Curmie’s piece is now behind a paywall) can get a 25-year-old episode of “The Wonderful World of Disney” about Ruby Bridges pulled from classrooms lest students come to the obvious and irrefutable conclusion that at a particular moment in time “white people hated black people,” then the Trouble right here in River City isn’t pool, but something that rhymes with pool: Fool, in the person of the Governor of Florida.

Curmie can’t be sure if the recent removal by the same school district that pulled O’Reilly’s books of Webster’s Dictionary for Students, along with over 2800 (!) other books, for potentially violating the state law against “sexual content” was precipitated by an actual concern or as a means of showing just how remarkably stupid the law is.  Curmie fears the suppression was  spawned by the former, but there is no doubt that the latter has been amply demonstrated.

To be fair (sort of), although Curmie doesn’t have immediate access to that particular volume, he suspects that more than a few words involving sexuality may well be spelled and defined therein.  It’s a dictionary! 

Revenons à nos moutons: feeling too much sympathy for hypocrites like Bill O’Reilly, who were all for censorship of other people’s books, may be too big of an ask.  But perhaps, just perhaps, his notoriety might initiate a review, not of books which happen to include a gay character or suggest that slavery may not have been such a good idea, but of a ridiculous, anti-intellectual, ethically unenforceable, and (dare I say it?) un-American law imposed at the behest of one of the country’s foremost proponents of governmental thought control. 

Even Curmudgeons can dream.

NCAA Football, Part 2: Some (Sort of) Solutions

OK, Curmie recently pointed out a handful of the manifold problems with college football as it is currently structured, especially with respect to the bowl system.  There are some issues that are insoluble, either legally (apparently) or structurally.  NIL and the transfer portal aren’t going away, but some tweaks are still possible. 

Next year’s expansion of the playoffs from four to twelve teams is stupid (it potentially adds three games to some teams’ schedules—let’s just forget about all that “student-athlete” rhetoric—but it does solve one problem and mitigate another.  There won’t be an undefeated major conference champion that isn’t given at least the opportunity to win a national title.  If you’re not clearly one of the twelve best teams in the country, STFU if you get ranked 13^th. 

Plus, there will be fewer opt-outs if there’s a national title at stake instead of the rather less impressive distinction of being the champion of the Pop-Tarts Bowl.  (Yes, that’s a real bowl game.)

But these don’t begin to solve all the problems.  Let’s take the ones Curmie identified earlier and offer some possible solutions.   

NIL is becoming the principal if not sole driver of collegiate athletics.  We can’t eliminate the system altogether, but we can impose restrictions.  For example: forbid universities from marketing their players, or seeking contributions from the public (“if you want your team to keep winning, send a check”).  To give a little perspective: it is hardly a secret that Curmie is a fan of the Kansas Jayhawks; KU is the only school from which Curmie has a degree that has Division 1 football. 

Jayhawks coach Lance Leipold was heavily rumored to be a contender for the University of Washington job after their coach, Kalen DeBoer, left for Alabama.  Curmie subscribes to an email list about KU athletics.  The most recent missive manages to whine on three separate occasions about the alleged insufficiency of KU’s NIL funds as a cause for concern.  KU, by the way, is about to give Leipold a substantial raise to his meager $5.7 million salary; it appears likely he’ll soon be able to get the large Coke with his Big Mac combo if he wants it.  Collegiate sports have been mostly about money for a long time; we’re moving towards being exclusively about money.

It would be nice to impose a cap on how much a “student athlete” could make, but that’s probably not feasible.  What could certainly be done is to make all NIL contracts include a promise by the athlete to be available to play in every game, including bowl games, except when ruled medically unable to do so or there is some other reasonable excuse (death in the family, that sort of thing).  “I’m an asshole who doesn’t want to risk injury” is not such a legitimate reason.  NIL sponsors should be permitted to claw back every nickel from players who don’t adhere to this rule.

If Curmie were in a management position with an NFL team, he’d make it clear that he’s a lot more interested in players who want their team to win and do what it takes to make that happen rather than in looking out for themselves alone.  Of course, the average NFL exec is a moron who wouldn’t come to that obvious conclusion, but even curmudgeons can dream, right?

That said, players who stand to make millions as professional athletes are indeed risking their future earnings by playing in bowl games.  They will receive insurance policies based on percentage of their anticipated future income, as determined by independent authorities; the cost of these policies will be shared equally by the NCAA and the player’s university.

The transfer portal will not be open until the day after the national championship game.  Schools who contact players from other teams will be ineligible for any post-season games, including conference championships, for one year (three years for a second offense in the three year period).  Players who advertise their availability prior to that start date will be ineligible to play for anyone for one year. 

And then there are all those bowl games that nobody has ever heard of unless your team plays in it.  Here’s Curmie’s proposal: no bowl game that includes a major conference team and attracts neither 25,000 fans to the stadium nor a TV rating of 1 (i.e., 1% of television sets in the country are tuned to the game) will continue next year.  Those numbers will be halved—12,500 fans and a rating of .5—for games between Group of 5 teams. 

Games that meet only one of those criteria will be on probation: if they reach the goals next year, great.  If their numbers improve but are still below the threshold, the bowl remains on probation.  If the numbers don’t improve, they’re gone.  No new bowl game can be played within 25 miles of the venue for five years.  (A different bowl in the same city that meets the requirements would be allowed to continue.)

Using TV ratings on Sports Media Watch and attendance figures from Wikipedia, Curmie would therefore cancel the Boca Raton and Fenway Bowls immediately, and place the Birmingham, Camelia, Cure, Famous Idaho Potato, Famous Toastery, Frisco, Hawaii, Independence, Las Vegas, Mobile, Myrtle Beach, and New Mexico Bowls on probation.

Of the five current “All-Star” games, the East-West Shrine Bowl would be allowed to continue because of its charitable cause; the others would be cancelled unless they, too, adopt a recognized charity recipient of the game’s revenues.  Such a charity must not be exclusive in terms of race, sex/gender, religion, etc. 

Even if all of these ideas were to be adopted, college football will never be the same.  Curmie supposes there’s something to be said for being upfront about the corruption of the process, but that seems rather a small consolation.  “Student athletes,” especially in football, will increasingly be regarded as commodities to be bought and sold, in large part because they’re marketing themselves that way.  But until someone comes up with a better way to spend a Saturday afternoon in the fall, Curmie will probably continue to watch.  Alas.

 

The Sauer/Trump Hail Mary Pass

John Sauer addresses the court.

One of the most common devices of Trump apologists is to cite some rumor or innuendo about a prominent Democrat and sneeringly remark “but sure, it’s Donald Trump who’s an existential threat to democracy.”  Curmie’s response is simple: show some actual evidence that Joe Biden (or whoever) has committed actual crimes and Curmie will cheerfully see them prosecuted and, if appropriate, convicted.  Whataboutism is an admission of guilt.

The fact that there are corrupt Democrats doesn’t make Trump any less of a menace, and Curmie would be hard-pressed to find any Democrat as petulant, vindictive, narcissistic, authoritarian, mendacious, hypocritical, or, frankly, unhinged (certainly not all at once), as The Donald.  These traits aren’t crimes, necessarily, but they’re sure as hell reason not to want him as President.

Curmie has known all this about Trump for years, and you probably have, too, Gentle Reader, as this page doesn’t attract a lot of idiots.  We need only look at the ongoing slanders against the Central Park Five even after DNA proved their innocence, at the absurd insistence that Barack Obama was born in Kenya, at that “grab ‘em by the pussy” line.  Racist?  Undoubtedly.  Sexist?  You bet.  Corrupt?  You have to ask?

All that said, there was a reasonable unease surrounding his criminal prosecutions.  They certainly could have been characterized as an attempt by Democrats (specifically Joe Biden?) to weaken a political opponent.  Notice, Gentle Reader, that the previous two sentences are in the past tense.  That’s because this week happened.

You’ve probably heard all about this incident already, Gentle Reader, and Curmie is far from the first to comment, but some ideas bear repeating.  This Tuesday, Trump lawyer John Sauer went on the record—with Trump by his side—arguing that Presidents or ex-Presidents could not be prosecuted for such crimes as selling pardons or even ordering SEAL Team Six to assassinate political rivals, provided only that they had not been impeached by the House and convicted by the Senate.  Trump himself appears to have endorsed his lawyer’s argument later this week.

Curmie isn’t going to bother to include a zillion links, many including audio recordings, of the courtroom proceedings—you can use the Google machine as well as Curmie can—but he does recommend Jacob Sullum’s article on Reason .

Needless to say, Judge Florence Pan eviscerated Sauer’s argument, and James Pearce, assistant to special counsel Jack Smith, piled on.  Pan pointed out that “Your separation of powers argument falls away, your policy arguments fall away if you concede that a president can be criminally prosecuted under some circumstances.”  Pearce pointed out that under Sauer’s reasoning a President could commit such an illegal act and then resign before he could be impeached, thereby literally getting away with murder.  (Please note that there will come a time when the President is a “she” or perhaps even a “they” rather than a “he.”  Please accept the masculine pronoun for convenience sake in the short term, at least, as it describes the current President and all of his predecessors.)

Sauer, not the brightest light in the marquee (seriously, what lawyer with any brains or integrity would make such an inane argument, and what competent judge, irrespective of political persuasion, would accept it?), then made things worse by arguing that such a scenario would be preferable to the possibility of a politically motivated prosecution. 

You read that correctly, Gentle Reader: politically motivated murder is not as bad as an arguably politically motivated prosecution which, of course, wouldn’t lead to a conviction except in the absence of reasonable doubt in the mind of even a single juror. 

Sauer also omits, presumably intentionally unless he’s an actual idiot as opposed to just not being very bright, the fact that such crimes could be perpetrated, or the President’s culpability discovered, late enough that an impeachment could not occur while that President was still in office.  (The Senate vote on Trump’s second impeachment came after he was out of office, and Mitch McConnell, among others, argued that one reason for acquittal was that Trump was no longer President and could still be tried for any criminal acts committed while in office.  The impeachment by the House, however, happened while Trump was still President.)

It also appears that Sauer is arguing that even if a President were to be impeached and convicted of, say, selling pardons, he couldn’t subsequently be prosecuted for… oh… giving nuclear secrets to Vladimir Putin, or in fact calling out SEAL Team Six to whack a political rival.  If the Constitution really does say any of this stuff, then it's time to throw the thing out and start over.  But, of course, it doesn’t.

But there’s a layer of outright stupidity here that has barely been plumbed.  Donald Trump is making it increasingly clear that if he ever enters the White House again except as a tourist, and if his immunity argument is regarded as reasonable, then he not only could, but will, use that power to enrich himself and sound the death knell for the nation as we know it.

But, you see, if a President can do anything he wants in his official capacity, up to and including ordering the murder of political rivals… well, Joe Biden is President now, and there’s this annoying loud-mouthed demagogue who threatens not merely Biden’s political future, but the entire nation’s freedom.  And SEAL Team Six is only a phone call away.

What Sauer is hoping for, of course, is a delay.  He believes that the longer the court takes to tell him to take a long walk on a short pier, the better it is for his client.  Significantly, however, this strategy is a good one only if Trump really is guilty.  Curmie, who despises Donald Trump with every fiber of his being, doesn’t know enough about the specific laws and the specific charges faced by the former President to declare him guilty of crimes.  That said, if Trump is really innocent, he’d want the trial to happen quickly, get an acquittal, and then bellow even louder that Biden is exacting vengeance on a political rival.  Instead, the defense team implicitly grants that Trump’s actions were illegal, but argues that he ought to have been able to get away with them.

It is not a news flash that Donald Trump is both dangerous and stupid.  Sauer’s argument is, too.  It is so palpably ridiculous that it could only be a desperation move: a Hail Mary pass, as it were.  You don’t throw a Hail Mary if you can win the game by taking a knee.  Sauer’s stratagem is therefore not merely desperate in its own right, but also a pointer to a larger desperation.  He knows the relevant statutes and the evidence far better than you or I, Gentle Reader, and he clearly believes that if the case were actually to go to trial, a conviction is more likely than not.

Here’s hoping the prison will allow The Donald to dye his toupée so the color doesn’t clash with his orange jumpsuit.  A refusal of such a request would be far closer to cruel and unusual punishment than holding him accountable for his own actions will ever be.

NCAA Football, Part 1: (Some of) The Problems

The college football season ended this week with the Michigan Wolverines convincingly defeating the Washington Huskies, 34-13, in the national championship game.  Curmie admits to being a fan of the sport despite the manifold problems associated with it: corruption, injuries (both acute and chronic), etc.

And this was a particularly good year in some ways, at least for Curmie: Cortland State, the team from the town where Curmie went to high school and where he did a few shows as an actor and technician, won the national championship in Division 3.  Dartmouth, Curmie’s undergrad alma mater, tied for the Ivy League championship.  And Curmie’s PhD school, the Kansas Jayhawks, after years of being a doormat in the Big 12 and a national laughingstock, continued their improvement, finishing 9-4 with a win over traditional power Oklahoma, a bowl victory, and a top-25 ranking at the end of the season.

Ah, Gentle Reader, but the news is not all good.  Indeed, other than the success of teams Curmie cheers for, it’s a disaster.  The head coach of the national champion was suspended for literally half of the regular season for two separate violations; if Michigan keeps cheating like this, the SEC is going to sue for trademark violation.

But ultimately, that’s the least (well, among the least) of our worries.  The combination of the transfer portal and NIL (name, image, and likeness) deals have made the game all but unrecognizable.  The problem isn’t specifically related to football, of course: Curmie watched a basketball game the other night in which the total number of non-freshman “scholarship” players (for both teams combined) who were playing for the team where they started their collegiate career was two, and one of them had committed elsewhere before changing his mind before actually enrolling.

But if unlimited movement weren’t bad enough, the NIL business is worse, not even counting the way the system lends itself to abuse.  Let me count the ways.  First, NIL allows virtually unlimited funding for jocks, meaning that the schools with the most rabid and wealthy fans will always get the best athletes because they can and do offer the most money.  And by “always,” Curmie means both “universally” and “in perpetuity.” 

Second, it devalues those traits the sports are allegedly designed to inculcate: loyalty, perseverance, teamwork, and so on.  Third, it places an inordinant emphasis on so-called “revenue-producing sports,” football and men’s basketball.  We’ll leave aside the observation that for most universities, even—or perhaps especially—these sports are net drains on the school’s financial resources.  Women’s sports are especially overlooked in NIL.

Most importantly, of course, these deals exacerbate the already precipitous decline of the university into what what one quipster has called “a sporting franchise with a side hustle in tertiary education.”  The best high school physics student in the state won’t get as sweet a deal as someone destined to be the backup punter, especially if the latter is a handsome and well-spoken lad.  Even (or, again, perhaps especially) outstanding students with public-facing skillsets—journalists, actors, musicians, et al.—aren’t going to compete with the third-string linebacker.  This is because, not to put too fine a point on it, most universities have dropped even the pretense of caring about excellence within academic disciplines.  They’ll give their often wildly corrupt athletic programs whatever they want, and History, Chemistry, Philosophy, et al., are left to fight over the scraps.

If we want to see the clearest manifestation of the problems with college football, it’s the bowl games.  First off, there are far too many of them.  62% of FBS (i.e., Division 1) teams went to a bowl this year.  How’d that happen if you have to be at least 6-6, you ask?  Well, first off, there were a couple of 5-7 teams that got bowl invitations because there weren’t enough 6-win teams to play in the Ty-D-Bol in Bismarck in January.  (OK, Curmie made that one up, but a baker’s dozen bowl teams ended the season with losing records.)  More frequently, teams became eligible by beating up on the Little Sisters of the Poor.  Those games count towards the necessary six victories, even though no rational person think that a win over Chattanooga or UT-Martin means much to a major conference team.

And some of the games are played in ridiculous locations.  Memphis got a bowl game on their own field this year.  That’s absurd enough, but imagine playing for Georgia State and having a decent year.  Your reward: playing in a 2/3 empty outdoor stadium in Boise in late December.  Or you’re SMU, finish the regular season ranked in the top 25, and get to play in a 2/3 empty baseball stadium in Boston.  Against Boston College.  In late December.  In the morning, Eastern time.  Or, frankly, if you’re any team in about any bowl game that nobody has ever heard of, which is to say most of them.

The biggest problem in these terms, however, was the number of players who “opted out” of their bowl games.  This year’s Heisman Trophy winner, Jayden Daniels of LSU, didn’t play.  Neither did last year’s Heisman winner, Caleb Williams of USC.  Ohio State lost their bowl game in part because their starting quarterback and their top receiver (the leading Heisman vote-getter other than quarterbacks) opted out.  Curmie’s beloved Jayhawks played without their best offensive lineman and their best defensive lineman. 

The list goes on and on.  The biggest story, though, was Florida State.  The Seminoles had a reasonable case (see below) that they should have been in the four-team playoff for the national title, but when they didn’t make the cut, players abandoned ship en masse.  Over 30 players, including their top three receivers, best running back, and backup quarterback (their starter was actually injured, so he has an excuse) opted out to enter either the NFL draft or the transfer portal.  Playing a bunch of second- and third-stringers, FSU was crushed by 60 points in the Orange Bowl (oops… sorry) the Capital One Orange Bowl by Georgia, who also had a lot of opt-outs, but nowhere near as many really important ones. 

Curmie is old enough to remember when playing for the team mattered, when a bowl victory, even if “only” a regular bowl game, especially a New Year’s Day game, mattered.  Hell, people two generations younger than Curmie can remember that.  Not anymore.  Particularly despicable are the players—including both Jayhawks mentioned above—who opted out of their team’s bowl game but will play in one of those inane all-star games that will happen over the next couple of weeks.  Guess what: you can get injured in one of them, too.

OK, so about Florida State’s plaint.  One of the big questions about how the playoff teams are chosen is whether the committee was looking for the four best teams or the four most deserving teams.  They managed to choose neither.  Two of the four best teams—Michigan and Alabama—made the cut.  The other two would be Georgia and Ohio State.  The former was the #1 team in the country before losing to Alabama by a single score in the SEC title game; the latter was relegated to #7 (!) because they lost by a single score on the road against the ultimate #1 team.  But they happen to be in the same division of the same conference as Michigan, so they didn’t even compete for the league title, even though they were one of the best four teams in the country.  And “the committee” places a ridiculous amount of emphasis on being a conference champion.  Except, of course, when they don’t care at all (see: FSU).

You want to make a case for Texas?  Curmie will listen.  After all, it took a remarkably stupid strategy by Auburn’s defensive coordinator to keep Bama from picking up a second loss, but picking the Longhorns over the Tide solely because they won a head-to-head game early in the season is downright silly.  Let’s play that game a little further.  Texas lost to Oklahoma, who lost to Kansas, who lost to Texas Tech, who lost to Wyoming… anybody wanna say Wyoming should have been in the playoff?  Texas beat Alabama before the latter had figured out their quarterback situation.  That single game should matter, but not much if the goal is getting the best teams.

More to the point, the committee’s logic is inconsistent.  They claim they want the best teams, but they went with TCU last year.  TCU was one of the four most deserving teams, but not one of the best.  Washington wasn’t one of the best teams this year, either, but they were at least deserving, since they went undefeated and won their conference title game.  Of course, so did Florida State, who beat a ranked Louisville team by double digits on a neutral site behind a third-string quarterback (the second-stringer would have been available for a playoff game).  But with the third-stringer, they “didn’t look like they could win the national title.”  In other words, what’s happening right now is what matters, unless we’re talking about Texas and Alabama, in which case what matters is what happened in early September. 

Curmie could go on, put he’ll spare you, Gentle Reader.

In Part Two: some solutions.

Schrödinger's Cat and Right-Wing Punditry

Back in the days of yore, when Curmie was an undergraduate Government major, one of the core principles in his Political Ideals class, only slightly oversimplified, was that conservatives tend to think in terms of individuals, whereas liberals tend to think in terms of groups. When the discussion is about who gets the job or promotion or college admission or whatever, this distinction comes to the forefront.

That is, the definition of “level playing field” comes into dispute.  If we assume it up front, then in a field like academia that cis white male over there with the “best” credentials—GPA, board scores, publication record, grant money attracted, student evaluations, whatever—gets the gig.  But if we notice that some group—based on gender, race, religion, whatever—is under-represented and attempt to… wait for it… “level the playing field,” then maybe that guy isn’t the best choice.  Perhaps adding a different perspective is worth more than a couple of points on a standardized test.

In other words, liberals are looking for a socially equitable solution, whereas conservatives are looking to find the best-qualified individual irrespective of demographic profile.  Neither is inherently right or wrong, except at the extremes.  Claiming that, say, a black woman got an academic job based solely (or primarily) on DEI concerns is problematic if (hypothetically speaking) she has a doctorate from Harvard and received tenure at Stanford; saying that her firing is based solely (or primarily) on an anti-DEI agenda is just as bad if (hypothetically speaking) she’s a university president busted for plagiarism.

The paradigm breaks down, however, in the political sphere.  After all, here’s Curmie, well to the left of center politically, harping on and on about Confucian principles of looking at each case (and by extension each person) individually.  Meanwhile, look at any right-leaning publication or blog.  We don’t expect them to point out things like the fact that the economic “misery index” (unemployment plus inflation) is substantially lower now than it was when President Biden took office, or that if Republicans really cared about border security as anything but a campaign issue, they’d pass the supplemental spending request which earmarks $13.6 billion (with a “b”) specifically for that purpose.  That would be too much to ask, apparently.

Rather, look at the “honest” sites, the ones that recognize that Donald Trump is an unstable narcissist (even if they still prefer him to Biden), that Lauren Boebert is a vulgar hypocrite, that Nikki Haley will never answer a question truthfully if she sees an advantage to do otherwise. 

But look at how those stories are framed.  Chris Christie is a has-been blowhard.  George Santos is a mendacious jerk.  Marjorie Taylor Greene is a certifiable idiot.  But when the politician saying or doing something stupid or unethical is Rashida Tlaib, Jamaal Bowman, or Chuck Schumer?  These are Democrats, and their boneheadedness is taken as representative of their kind.

This is a phenomenon Curmie calls the Schrödinger sentence, simultaneously true and untrue.  Yes, “Democrats say X,” because more than one of them say that, but the implication is that all Democrats say X, whereas a lot, perhaps even most, of them think X is downright moronic.  The other variation on the theme is the line beloved of Fox News, that “people are saying…”  No one outside the Fox studio is saying that, and they’re only saying it because their bosses told them to, but they are in fact saying it and they are in fact people, so it’s deceptive but not exactly a lie.

Curmie is neither partisan enough nor stupid enough to suggest that left-leaning sites like MSNBC, Alternet, or Raw Story don’t do exactly the same thing, or that the right has a monopoly on hypocrisy.  But sex scandals involving Republican pols schtupping the pool boy are more interesting (and newsworthy) than those involving Democrats because the Bill Clintons of the world aren’t yammering on about “family values” or whatever the latest right-wing catchphrase is.  Similarly, the cognitive dissonance alarms ring a little louder when the party that preaches individual merit is the one lumping everyone to their political left into an amorphous lump of Otherness. 

Let a single Democratic pol suggest that the minimum wage ought to be raised, that slavery existed in this country and that students ought to know about it, or that we ought to investigate the way higher education is funded in Western Europe, and there’s a dead cert guarantee that some on the right (notice that Curmie said “some,” not “all”) will start screeching that the moderate Democrat in question is a Communist.  If they’re really in a bind—losing an argument, for example—they’ll fall back to their go-to: “liberals [all of them!] hate America.” 

Curmie can’t think of a liberal in his acquaintance about whom that could reasonably be said, although he is getting more forgetful of late, so he refrains from saying it never applies.  Trying to fix the things that are wrong is precisely the opposite of hatred.  And disagreeing, even outspokenly, with this or that governmental policy or proposed legislation is no indication of hateful or even unpatriotic predilections. 

Curmie does admit, however, that whereas “hate” is a very strong word, he does have contempt for a small minority of Americans (as opposed to the country they were born into).  Those who ignorantly and arrogantly make sweeping generalizations about entire groups of people are on that list.  The ones who know better but use that rhetoric anyway are worse.

Hanlon's Razor Rides to the Defense of KERA

Good programs, less good membership department

A couple of days ago, one of Curmie’s longtime friends posted on Facebook about the onslaught of pleas from various charities—charities to which he’d already donated recently—for yet further contributions.  Trust me, Gentle Reader, Curmie understands, and suspects that you could tell your own stories, as well.

Like you (he suspects), Curmie has contributed to various causes over the years: alumni funds, theatres and other arts agencies, charities dedicated to helping those in need or overcoming medical conditions.  He’s almost never contributed to individual political candidates, but he’s sent a fair amount of money to organizations whose work borders on the political—FIRE, Amnesty International, etc.

It’s not unusual for such organizations to send out appeals, especially at the end of a year, that read something like, “Thank you for your ongoing support; we’re in an especially difficult time right now [they always are, of course], and we’re asking you for an additional contribution.”  This tactic seldom if ever works, at least with Curmie, but at least it’s by email, and Curmie can just delete the message and move on with his life.

Curmie has supported PBS stations for well over 40 years.  He’s not always enthralled by the programming, especially (ironically enough) at pledging time, but there’s enough good stuff there to merit our support.  In fact, this Sunday, we watched their entire primetime lineup.  I’m pretty sure the last time we watched even a single episode of a show on one of the major commercial networks was a few years ago when I knew that a friend had a guest appearance on a cop show.  Plus, the opportunity to watch things we’d missed or hadn’t seen in decades (e.g., the BBC Shakespeare series) adds to the attraction.

Anyway, we’ve been members of the local PBS affiliate, KERA in Dallas, since shortly after we moved here over 20 years ago.  Curmie was initially going to avoid mentioning the specific station in this post, but ultimately decided they deserved the… erm… recognition that follows.  Plus, there are actually two PBS stations closer to Chez Curmie than KERA is, and we wouldn’t want to impugn them in the minds of those who know where Curmie lives but not the details of our cable package.  (How the local cable provider decides which Public Television station to carry is a mystery that would baffle even Miss Marple.)

To the point: in November, Curmie received an email message that our membership was about to expire.  OK, fine.  I thought we’d set it up to automatically renew at the same level, but whatever.  It took a couple of days to get around to going online and filling out the form to charge our credit card, but it still happened before Thanksgiving.

Two weeks later we received, by mail (meaning the station incurred the expense of printing, postage, etc., despite the fact that they obviously had my email address) a dire warning that our membership was about to expire.  Curmie is distrustful of technology, and he’s been known to forget to hit “submit” or to make similar mistakes or omissions.  Since the membership fee was to be paid in monthly installments, he had no proof that the renewal had gone through, as the November payment had been made but the December one wasn’t due yet.  So he called the station, and got a recording of what the business hours were.  Needless to say, Curmie had called about 1:30 in the afternoon of a weekday.  There was no opportunity to leave a voicemail.

Rather perturbed, Curmie resorted to email, requesting a response.  In return, he received an auto-generated form letter (or whatever the email equivalent of such a missive might be) with lots of links to click: none of them relevant, of course.  No actual person could be bothered to spend two minutes to check if our account was current and send a reply reading simply “You’re good” or “We don’t seem to have it.”

We could still access the members-only part of Passport (the site for online material), however, so we decided we wouldn’t worry about the situation until and unless that access was denied.  Fast forward a couple of weeks and we get a (worthless) membership card in the mail.  Another week or so and we get the end-of-the-year whine about needing more money.  A couple of days later, it’s a “thank you” email.

But then… but then we get another letter (yes, letter, with the associated costs of sending it), telling us our membership “expired last month.”  Curmie admits to having chosen a participial adjective of Anglo-Saxon origin to describe the particular kind of moron these people are. 

But then he began to wonder if what he was witnessing wasn’t simply a perfect storm of indifference, laziness, and general incompetence, but something even worse.  Surely no one could be that inept accidentally?  Could they?  What if they hired some consulting firm that told them they’d make money if they pulled this stunt because 2% of people would unthinkingly send them another check, and the break-even point is 1%?

Curmie has never been much of a conspiracy theorist, however—Hanlon’s Razor and all that.  We’re just going to go with KERA’s membership department being in the hands of folks who’d come in third in a battle of wits with an anvil and a rotting kumquat.  Curmie feels so much better now.

 

The Belfry Theatre’s Crisis of Nerve

The Belfry Theatre was vandalized last month
while the venue was deciding whether to go forward
the production of The Runner.

There is a theory, one to which Curmie subscribes, which suggests that the Dionysian Festival of classical Athens began not really as a religious observance in honor of a demi-god but rather as a means of consolidating the political power of the tyrant Peisistratus.  Whether or not this is true, there is no doubt that by 458 BCE Aeschylus’ Oresteia, widely acclaimed as “the world’s first dramatic masterpiece,” offers commentary on the reforms of the Areopagus enacted by the strategos Ephialtes some three years earlier.

There is no question that since that time the theatre has often—not always, but often—been political.  The 20^th century offered more than a few examples of playwrights and production companies who, often at personal risk, critiqued the power structures around them: Jean-Paul Sartre took on the Nazis; Lorraine Hansberry, racism in the US; Athol Fugard, apartheid; Václav Havel, communism in Eastern Europe.

Not all such efforts were for causes most of us would endorse, of course.  Socialist Realism was a Stalinist policy under which all art had to support The Revolution: not just avoid criticism of the regime, but actively and explicitly endorse it.  More recently, the Freedom Theatre of Jenin (on the occupied West Bank) has been in the news.  A few weeks ago, one of the student organizations at Curmie’s university posted an encomium to the company, which they described as “an example of creating liberating theatre and serving communities through theatrical pedagogy and profound performance.”  

Curmie remembered having written about that theatre a dozen or so years ago (and quoting his post on LiveJournal—yeah, Curmie is old—written several years before that).  If I might quote myself for a moment: “Turns out that the Freedom Theatre was pretty damned proud of having turned out alumni who engaged in armed insurrection, and at least one of whom, a suicide bomber, richly merited description as a terrorist.” 

So no, propagandistic theatre isn’t always a good thing… but, Gentle Reader, engaging with the world is.  Even subtle messages matter.  Under normal circumstances, Aunt Eller’s wish that “the farmer and the cowman can be friends” doesn’t amount to much.  But Oklahoma! hit Broadway after the declaration of war against the Axis powers and before D-Day.  “Territory folks” need to put aside their petty grievances when there’s a guy with a funny mustache who’s far worse than any of your neighbors will ever be.

And now we come to what this little essay is really about.  The Belfry Theatre in Victoria, British Columbia, announced this week that they were not going forward with the production of The Runner, a one-man show written and performed by Canadian playwright/actor Christopher Morris. The theatre’s management says the decision to cancel the performance was “not easy,” but they believed that “Given the current conflict in the Middle East, this is not the time for a play which may further tensions among our community.”

The play has won numerous awards, and was booked last year for a performance at the Spark Festival this March.  I don’t know the play (it’s available on Kindle, if anyone is interested) but some basics of the plot have come out in news reports.  An article in the National Post summarizes thus: “The one-man play focuses on the moral dilemma faced by a volunteer of ZAKA, an Israeli group of mostly Orthodox Jewish men who provide emergency medical rescues.  The character ‘grapples with the political and moral fallout after saving a Palestinian woman’s life — and leaving a fatally wounded Israeli soldier behind,’ Belfry wrote in a description of the play on its website.”  

Other articles suggest that the woman was probably the person responsible for fatally wounding the soldier.  The central character, then, chooses to administer aid to an enemy whose life can be saved rather than an ally who is beyond physical salvation. 

Exactly what stance the play takes is unclear.  The playwright says that he had hoped to provide “the opportunity to come together in a theatre to explore their common humanity, share their grief and perhaps discover a flicker of solace and hope.”  His other statements suggest a sort of naïve pacifism, but that’s a position worthy of critical examination, as well.

It appears that supporters of Israel were more interested in having the production move forward than were supporters of the Palestinian cause.  The collection of letters published on Friday in the Times Colonist show a wide range of responses.  The play is “a period piece replete with colonialist stereotypes” according to one writer.  Another claims that “the sole reason [for the play’s cancellation] is that it is set in Israel. It does not take sides and concerns the human condition in extremity. Some people hate Israel so much that they object to any cultural production that comes from Israel or deals with its issues.”  Yet another writes that “proponents of the cancellation have crossed a line from anti-Zionism to a form of outright anti-Semitism that seeks to hold all Jews collectively responsible for the appalling behaviour of the Israeli government.”

I noted above that scholars are unanimous that the Eumenides, the third play of Aeschylus’s Oresteia trilogy, references the reforms of Ephialtes.  What they can’t agree on, as I learned while researching a paper for a grad seminar 40-ish years ago, is whether Aeschylus approved or disapproved of those changes to the status quo ante.  And there is absolutely nothing wrong with that ambiguity.

More to the point, who cares if the play has a particular point of view?  Many years ago, the great English theatre critic Kenneth Tynan dismissed the relevance of complaints that the plays of Bertolt Brecht were “unfair” to capitalism: “Henry V is unfair to the French; Everyman is unfair to the Devil.”

There seems to be little support for the Belfry’s decision to cancel the production: it’s called “a lamentable act of cowardice” by one correspondent and “an affront to Canadian’s rights and freedoms” by another.  As both a theatre practitioner and a free speech advocate, of course, Curmie agrees that the show should go on as scheduled.  It strikes me that right now is precisely the time to stage of play of this nature.  Provide opportunities for actual discussion before and/or after performances.  Get people talking and, hopefully, listening.  Sing “Kumbaya” together.  (OK, maybe not that last part.)

If the basis for the cancellation was to avoid “tensions,” well, that horse has left the stable and is halfway to Omaha.  I strongly suspect that the cancellation will enflame more passions than the production would have.  It’s possible, of course, that the theatre feared that the vandalism you see in the photograph above might escalate into something physically threatening to the production staff or audience members, in which case caution is certainly appropriate.  That seems rather a stretch, though. 

“Hold[ing] the mirror up to nature” is one of the principal attributes of theatre production, and live theatre’s effect cannot be duplicated by technologically mediated forms like film and television.  Cancelling a production purely for political efficacy is deeply problematic if not inexcusable.  The Belfry Theatre faced a crisis of nerve, and they failed.

Of course, Curmie isn’t the guy who has to figure out how to get that graffiti off the front of his building.

This post is a slightly edited version of one which first appeared as a guest article on Ethics Alarms.