Ice Dancing and the Inevitability of Discontent

Yeah, it’s another single-topic Olympics post.  Forgive me, Gentle Reader.  There may or may not be a combo post about the Olympics in the next few days.  We shall see.

Curmie’s lack of interest in what he regards as trash sports, or, rather, non-sports, i.e., those decided by necessarily subjective judges rather than by points or times or some other objective criteria, has been well-documented.  Traditionally, Winter Olympics events were largely objective: hockey, skiing (both Alpine and cross-country), curling, speed skating, luge, bobsled, biathlon, etc.  But even before the more recent proliferation of judged events on skis or snowboard, there was figure skating.  This discipline, alongside gymnastics in the Summer Olympics, stands as the most prominent pseudo-sport on record.  Be it noted: Curmie does not in any way demean figure skating or its practitioners; he just thinks that, like ballet, which also requires considerable athleticism,  it’s more of an art than a sport.  (Curmie, who has contributed in one way or another to well over 200 theatre productions, is unlikely to use any variation on the word “art” as an insult.)

The problem with competitions conducted in these terms is two-fold.  First, we’re not merely comparing the proverbial apples to oranges; we’re comparing the apples’ apple-ness to the oranges’ orange-ness.  In Curmie’s field, that means comparing one actor’s Macbeth to another’s Hamlet, or even to another’s Tartuffe… or his Rufus T. Firefly, for that matter.  There’s a reason Curmie cares little about the Tonys, Oscars, etc., unless a nominee is a personal friend.  (That has happened, but, needless to say, not very often.)

More importantly, at least in terms of the present discussion, is the fact that judges will disagree.  Fans of Team X will always argue that Team Y gets all the breaks on close calls.  It’s also true that sometimes referees or umpires or whatever they’re called in a particular sport just get something objectively wrong.  That was one of the problems in the women’s floor exercise debacle in Paris two years ago.  But some events are particularly susceptible to differences of opinion.  Figure skating is certainly near the top of that list, and ice dancing is the most subjective of the figure skating events, as there are fewer required elements.  It is completely reasonable that one judge might privilege athleticism, another technical mastery, another the difficulty of the routine, yet another grace or coordination with the music.

But there are two more serious problems, in that they affect the legitimacy of the “sport.”  One has bothered Curmie for decades: the fact, and it is a fact, that judges tend to give higher scores to the athletes who are supposed to win, irrespective of whether they deserve it.  We saw a variation on that phenomenon in the women’s slopestyle finals this year.  The gold medalist did significantly easier tricks than either the silver or bronze medalist, and her execution, if it was any better than her competitors’, was barely so.  One of the announcers for USA (the network, not the country) declared the judging “abysmal.”  Ah, but the winner was the defending Olympic champion, so of course she was wonderful this time, too, right?  

The ice dancing competition this year serves as another example.  The order of performance by the finalists is determined by their standing after the short program.  The first to go are the lowest-ranking finalists; the last are the leaders.  With one exception, a pair whose fairly significant errors were obvious even to a novice spectator like Curmie, every team moved into first place.  As far as Curmie was concerned, a number of the later teams weren’t even close to as good as earlier pairs had been.  But the order after the short program remained unchanged except for that one team that made obvious mistakes.

More importantly, of course, the French team that led after the short program held on for gold despite some pretty clear errors (like the lack of synchronization seen in the photo above).  But whereas the slopestyle competition mentioned earlier may have been judged… erm… whimsically, there was no hint of nationalistic impropriety.  One of the skiers whom just about everybody agreed should have been placed above the winner was from the same country, Japan.  The other was from New Zealand, and it was she, not the American who finished just off the podium, that the USA announcers (and Curmie) thought had been slighted.

But Curmie is old enough to remember the jokes about “and the Russian [or East German] judge gives it a…”  Soviet bloc countries cheated every way they could.  Some Eastern European athletes, like Nadia Comăneci in gymnastics or Katarina Witt in figure skating were clearly the best of their respective sports.  But others, to be polite, were not.  That doesn’t mean that they didn’t get unreasonably  high scores from judges from other Communist countries (or that Western athletes didn’t get lower scores than they deserved from those same judges).

And now we just might be experiencing a little déjà vu: a particularly apt term, since the perpetrator is, well, French.  OK, OK, alleged perpetrator.  After the short program in ice dancing the French team of Laurence Fournier Beaudry and Guillaume Cizeron held a narrow lead over Americans Madison Chock and Evan Bates.  In the final free skate, French judge Jézabel Dabouis gave her country’s pair 7.71 more points than their American rivals despite some errors.  The US team received a lower score from Dabouis than from any other judge, more than five points below the average.  She also gave the French pair a score nearly three points higher than the average score. 

That sure seems suspicious, and there were allegations of similar partisanship from her at earlier events.  It’s been over a half century since Curmie took the one freshman-level statistics course of his collegiate career, and he’s forgotten more than a little of what he learned then.  He’s therefore not in position to endorse or undermine the accuracy (or relevance) of SBNation’s James Dator assertion that “Not only did she judge the French pair 6.45 points higher than the mean, but she undervalued Chock/Bates by -7.19 [this apparently includes the short program]— giving us a +13.64 delta favoring France over USA in the final score. This represents a staggering 6.37 standard deviation z-score difference across the event.”  Dator concludes that “there is no doubt that the scoring of Dabois [sic.] was the key differentiator in deciding who won the event.”

Well, maybe.  In ice dancing, as in a number of other sports (competitive diving is the first to come to mind), the high and low scores are omitted from the final calculation.  In other words, Dabouis’s under-scoring of the Americans on the free skate had only an indirect effect on the rankings: the lowest other score was counted, and it wouldn’t have been had Dabouis scored them at or near the median.  Dabouis’s score for Beaudry and Cizeron did count, but that’s because the Czech judge scored them higher than Dabouis did, meaning her score wasn’t completely out of line.  The highest score for Chock and Bates came from the American judge, and three of the seven judges from other than the US or France had the French pair ahead.  It was very close, in other words.  Beaudry claims their routine was more technically demanding.  Perhaps it was; Curmie’s not the guy you want making that decision.

The  powers-that-be supported the judges’ decision, which of course would have been the case no matter how egregious the ethical violation might have been.  The International Skating Union issued a statement asserting that “It is normal for there to be a range of scores given by different judges in any panel and a number of mechanisms are used to mitigate these variations.”  The ISU claimed it has “full confidence in the scores given and remains completely committed to fairness.”  Uh huh.

But there’s one more thing.  Allow Curmie to quote two of the competitors.  One said, “I see some strange games being played that are destroying ice dance…. I don't think I’ve ever been to a competition like this in my career, from a judging standpoint.”  Another said, “Any time the public is confused by results, it does a disservice to our sport. I think it’s hard to retain fans when it's difficult to understand what is happening on the ice.  People need to understand what they’re cheering for and be able to feel confident in the sport that they’re supporting.”

Destroying the sport?  A disservice to the sport?  Those are pretty serious charges, especially coming from top competitors.  OK, Gentle Reader, wanna guess who said what?  The latter is Madison Chock after receiving silver instead of gold in Milan.  The former?  Guillaume Cizeron, after the rhythm dance at a Grand Prix event in Finland in November.  Indeed, at least one member of four teams (at least), including all three on the podium in Milan, has criticized the ISU and judging, just in the last few months.  True, there’s no doubt a little egotism at play, but it sure does look like there’s a real problem that the ISU doesn’t seem terribly interested in acknowledging, much less fixing.

There’s a suggestion that AI could be used to “judge” the technical elements, leaving human judges for the more artistic stuff, but that’s definitely creepy and almost certainly ineffective.  Not allowing judges from any country with a competitor sounds good in theory, but even if that were to apply only to the finalists, we’d still be wiping out the input of the dozen or so nations who best understand the sport.  It would be possible, presumably, to disallow a judge to vote on someone from their own country.  There could be ten judges, with one of them as an “alternate” who would vote only if one of the other nine was from the same country as a competitor.  Or maybe disallowing the top and bottom two votes instead of one.  Or…

The problem is that unless something is done, the appearance of impropriety will always overshadow honest disagreements.  The events Curmie considers trash sports aren’t going anywhere: they’re too popular amongst people who aren’t really sports fans and just want to watch some flashy showmanship every four years.  Looked at as an exhibition of prowess, a variation on Cirque du Soleil (or the Olympic opening and closing ceremonies), this is great stuff.  But if ice dancing in particular wants to be regarded as anything even resembling an honest competition, it needs to get its house in order.  Soon.

The IOC Is Hypocritical, Craven, and Inept. Also, Water Is Wet.

Curmie initially intended to write about this year’s Winter Olympics in general.  He may do that down the road, but right now there’s one story that deserves its own post.  Skeleton slider Vladyslav Heraskevych was barred from competition because he insisted on wearing a helmet honoring his fellow Ukrainian athletes killed in the conflict with Russia in his homeland. 

You can see a photo of the offending headgear at the top of this page, Gentle Reader.  There’s nothing particularly controversial there, as far as Curmie is concerned.  There’s no text, and it’s not like there’s a photo of Vladimir Putin with a target on his forehead.  It’s a memorial, full stop.

But, you see, the organization that won’t allow athletes from Russia or Belarus to compete under their country’s banner doesn’t allow political expression.  Yeah, that makes sense.  ☹ The London Olympics in the summer of 2012 included a recognition of those killed in the 7/7 bombings in 2005, as well as a reminder of the Blitz.  The fact that NBC couldn’t be bothered to cover that part of the opening ceremony doesn’t change the fact that it happened.  Such expressions are indeed commonplace.

Of course, the majority of the headlines are about how Heraskevych “violated the rules” or some such nonsense.  That’s because journalism is dead.  The alleged transgression is of rule 50.2 of the Olympic Charter, which states that “no kind of demonstration or political, religious or racial propaganda is permitted in any Olympic sites, venues or other areas.”  There’s a men’s figure skater who, according to NBC talking head Ashley Wagner “becomes the Pope” at the end of his long program.  That’s not “propaganda,” but a helmet with a couple of photos of countrymen and -women is?  Give me a damned break.  Indeed, an over-zealous interpretation of the rule would prevent an athlete from wearing a cross or a Star of David to breakfast in the Olympic village.  Even the IOC isn’t that stupid, but it’s what the charter could be contorted into meaning.

The story is that the International Olympic Committee remains the quintessence of hypocritical waffling.  IOC President Kirsty Coventry’s statement is especially absurd: “It’s not about the messaging. It’s literally about the rules and the regulations and that, in this case, the field of play, we have to be able to keep a safe environment for everyone and sadly, that just means no messaging is allowed.”  Curmie awaits any rational argument that Heraskevych’s helmet affects the safety of literally anyone.  This expansion of the definition of safety is, alas, endemic, but that doesn’t make it reasonable.

It goes without saying that Ukrainians are virtually unanimous in support for Heraskevych.  Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s post on X is worth reading in its entirety, but he insists that “No rule has been broken,” and concludes his tweet (are they still called that?) with this: “We are proud of Vladyslav and of what he did. Having courage is worth more than any medal.”  Zelenskyy subsequently awarded Heraskevych their country’s highest civilian honor, the Order of Freedom.  (That link also includes the names of the 22 Ukrainian athletes memorialized on Heraskevych’s helmet.)

Of course, there’s a fair amount of posturing involved here.  Heraskevych wasn’t regarded as a medal contender, but now he’s one of the most talked-about athletes to have travelled to northern Italy of late.  Could he have accepted the “compromise” of wearing a black armband or something along those lines?  Sure.  But in refusing to compromise, he got a lot more attention.  Curmie has no idea whether Heraskevych’s intransigence was a function of integrity or publicity-seeking.  Either way, the IOC got clobbered by the Streisand Effect.  In attempting to suppress discussion of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, they called a lot more attention to it.  What would have been at most an isolated mini-protest by a single athlete became the stuff of international headlines.  Ukraine is appealing to the Court of Arbitration for Sport, and the Latvian coach is appealing the decision to the International Bobsleigh and Skeleton Federation.

Still, the emotion displayed by Coventry in discussing her unsuccessful attempt at talking Heraskevych down caught Curmie’s attention.  It’s unlikely that she’s an idiot… which means that we should pay attention when she says “No one, especially me, is disagreeing with the messaging; it’s a powerful message, it’s a message of remembrance, a message of memory, and no one is disagreeing with that.”  That seems to be very close indeed to an admission that there’s nothing really problematic about that helmet.  And that would mean that perhaps Coventry isn’t all that unhappy about all the publicity, even if it seems to put the IOC in a negative light… it might just be worth it.

Curmie doesn’t necessarily believe that, but even he can dream.

Well, One of Them Is Excusable

<Sigh.>

Curmie, as you might well imagine, Gentle Reader, sees a lot of political cartoons, memes, and brief commentary from (generally) like-minded folks.  Every once in a while, he sees something so absurd on its face that it couldn’t possibly be true.  Alas, it turns out to be true more often the not.  Curmie, however, is skeptical by nature, and he really does try to avoid re-posting stuff that isn’t true. 

This week, there were two stories that caught Curmie’s eye in this regard: an alleged quotation from Ted Cruz and a video supposedly posted to Donald Trump’s Truth Social account.  Both were in the “this couldn’t be true… could it?” category.  Well, they were both true.  Sort of. 

Let’s start there, with Senator Cruz’s line that we should “stop attacking pedophiles.”  Did he really say that?  Yes, he did.  But it’s clear that, unlike the host of politicians who get busted for saying something outrageous or an outright lie, the “he misspoke” follow-up really is true.  His spokesperson is absolutely justified in saying that Cruz was “rattling off a series of crimes we should unite in opposing, started a sentence about opposing pedophilia, and added a stray word while talking it out.”

This is the kind of thing that happens when speaking off the cuff.  Anyone who spends a lot of time talking is going to screw up, and might not even be aware of it.  Curmie is pretty certain he did that several times over the course of his career; it’s just that his students and colleagues were kind enough to know what he meant and to let it go at that.  And Barack Obama doesn’t really think there are 57 states. 

Even when there’s enough time to think, these mistakes can happen.  There’s a Modelo beer commercial that assures listeners that they are “not to be reckoned with.”  They mean “not to be trifled with,” but that’s the opposite of what they say.  A few years ago, Curmie’s hometown didn’t get any appreciable rain for several weeks.  The city (or the county, or whoever) posted a bunch of signs about “drought protection.”  One suspects they weren’t actually trying to protect the drought.  See?  This stuff happens.

Look, Curmie is no fan of Ted Cruz.  The guy is a liar, a coward, and possessed of less integrity than even a run-of-the-mill partisan hack like his fellow Texas Senator, John Cornyn.  But that’s really sort of the point: give him a day or two, and he’ll say or do something that really is worth of derision, and “our side” can be a little less disingenuous.  Things get complicated by the fact that in one sense Cruz is indeed protecting pedophiles, but it’s by more by craven inaction than by clear intentionality.  He’ll never not be an asshole, but he’s pretty much innocent this time, and we need to respond accordingly.

On the other hand, there’s that video posted to Dear Leader’s Truth Social page that includes an image of Barack and Michelle Obama’s faces superimposed onto the bodies of apes.  Needless to say, the cries of “racism” were prompt and loud.  And they came from virtually everywhere.  Sure, Democrats were at the forefront and the criticism.  Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, and Hakeem Jeffries all weighed in.  But, unsurprisingly, it was firebrand Jasmine Crockett who pretty much led the charge: “Most of us already know who Donald Trump is. We already know there are no bounds to how low he’s willing to go. We know that he has no moral compass. We know that he is a disgrace. So while his behavior is not shocking, it is certainly disgusting and disturbing.”  That is not a subtle commentary.

That said, a lot of GOP pols weren’t far behind.  Representative Mike Turner (OH) wrote that “the release of racist images of former President Barack and First Lady Michelle Obama is offensive, heart breaking, and unacceptable. President Trump should apologize.”  Expressing similar sentiments were Senators Susan Collins (ME), John Curtis (UT), Pete Ricketts (NE), Tim Scott (SC), and Roger Wicker (MS), and Representative Mike Lawler (NY), among others, no doubt.

And it’s only fair to mention: last time out Curmie lamented Ethics Alarms’ Jack Marshall’s started allowing “excuses for inexcusable conduct by Dear Leader and his minions [to become] a significant part of the mix.”  But he writes “I regard that as about a half-step, maybe less, from the President calling the former First Couple ‘niggers,’ and subsequently adds that “this ugly episode fairly earns shame and criticism for the President, regardless of how it came about.” 

That last part is relevant.  The White House initially tried to pass the incident off as unworthy of consideration, and the response as “fake outrage.”  That strategy backfired, although J.D. Vance is still trying.  Their focus then shifted to placing the blame on… wait for it… an anonymous “staffer.”  Sigh.  Dear Leader sees no reason to apologize because, you see, he did nothing wrong.

Unfortunately, even if we believe what has now become the official line, things look bad.  First off, the best that can be said is that someone so stupid that they didn’t realize the racist overtones to the post was granted permission to post in POTUS’s name.  You know, that guy who hires only the best people.  The alternative is that the racism was intentional.  That’s certainly a possibility, especially given the comments by Lara Trump, who is trying to be as vile a creature as her father-in-law: “It's kinda like any good joke is rooted in truth.”  Ew.

Someone made that video, and, best case scenario, thought it relevant to… well… anything.  The full video shows Dear Leader as a lion, the king of the jungle, to whom a gaggle of leading Democrats as other animals ultimately bow down to him.  Frankly, it’s a stupid shtick, but its sycophancy is no doubt celebrated throughout Trumpistan.  But if it’s indeed supposed to be based on The Lion King, then it’s worth noting that there are no simians in that play or film.  The choice of apes for the Obamas, then, adds credence to the allegations of intentional racism.

The beginning of the reel is a standard whine about “stolen elections,” Trumpistan’s term for “it was completely fair, but our guy didn’t win.”  It then auto-advanced into the Lion King nonsense.  Curmie doesn’t know how that could happen accidentally, but he’s enough of a technological troglodyte that his ignorance doesn’t necessarily mean anything.  Perhaps there really is a perfectly innocent explanation.

But what if the worst we can say about the video is that it’s kinda dumb?  Now it becomes a variation on the familiar trope of the cover-up being worse than the crime.  All that needed to happen was a prompt removal, and a statement that the offending staffer has been fired.  People might still be suspicious, but the situation is reduced to the proverbial tempest in a teapot.  Of course, both transparency and admitting anything are verboten in Trumpistan.  So we get disingenuous commentary from the Usual Suspects.  They’re almost as incompetent as they are dishonest.  Alas.

On the Reactions to "Melania"

One, but hardly the only, response

Curmie, once a not infrequent guest columnist on Jack Marshall’s Ethics Alarms page, hasn’t posted as much as a comment there in over a year.  He does drop by occasionally to see if it has reverted to its titular ethics orientation instead of its more recent manifestation as a right-wing propaganda outlet.  It has not, alas.  To be sure, even when Curmie was a frequent contributor, his views on gun control (quite similar to those of Ronald Reagan, by the way) were described as “un-American,” and his position on abortion (pretty much that of every Protestant or Jewish denomination prior to the ‘80s) “unethical.”  This is standard partisan blather, and Curmie freely admits to indulging in the same tactics from time to time.  (He doesn’t pretend to be an ethicist, however.)

Anyway, Curmie once found it fairly easy just to disengage from that stuff, mostly because it represented only a smallish fraction of what Jack posted.  But when the “Democrats hate America” bullshit started to become the subject of the overwhelming majority of the output, and when excuses for inexcusable conduct by Dear Leader and his minions became a significant part of the mix, Curmie just couldn’t take it anymore.  The cadre of sycophantic commenters, most of whom hadn’t ever said anything positive about anyone to the left of Louis XIV, just made things worse.  Curmie bailed, thereby making what had already become an echo chamber into even more of one.  If any EA readers find their way to this page, he apologizes for that part.

Anyway, as noted above, Curmie does drop by EA occasionally, especially if, as was the case in the suppression of that high school production of The Crucible last spring, it’s a topic about which Jack’s perspective would be at least interesting if not indeed enlightening.  There was no such specific impulse a couple of days ago, but Curmie did find a piece about the very different Rotten Tomatoes rankings of “Melania,” the documentary about FLOTUS’s preparations for the second inaugural.  The screengrab Jack posted showed a 6% “tomatometer” ranking, but a 98% “popcornmeter” rating.  The former is the percentage of professional critics who gave the film a 3.5 out of 5 or better; the latter is from the general public.  As of this writing, there’s even more distance between the two scores: 5% vs. 99%.  Here’s that link, Gentle Reader; of course those numbers may have changed again between Curmie’s writing and your visiting the site. 

Imdb.com, in case you’re wondering, has the film at 1.3 out of 10, a level of negativity surpassed, as far as Curmie can remember, only by the 1.2 for the “Queen Cleopatra” series on Netflix that Curmie wrote about in the spring of 2023.

OK, that’s a tremendous spread.  Curmie can’t comment about the film itself, as he has not seen it, nor does he have any intention of ever doing so.  Curmie’s interest in watching a documentary is largely determined by his interest in the subject.  If his interest level is 10 out of 10, he’ll probably watch even if the film gets bad reviews; if it’s below 5, it’s going to take someone whose opinion Curmie really trusts saying, “No, really, this movie is really good” to even consider it.  Perhaps now would be a good time to say that it’s doubtful that Curmie will watch a different FLOTUS’s film, Michele Obama’s “Becoming,” either.  It’s been out since 2020 and is currently on Netflix, meaning it’s de facto free for Curmie and Beloved Spouse to watch should we be of a mind to do so.  And it’s got significantly better ratings from the critics (93%); the 78% “popcornmeter” rating looks pretty comparable to the 7.1 on imdb.  But it’s still pretty unlikely that we’ll watch.

Note that whereas the general public who voted on Rotten Tomatoes and those who voted on imdb pretty much agree on “Becoming,” they couldn’t be much further apart on “Melania.”  There’s not a whole lot above a 99% on the former or below a 1.2 on the latter.  Does this mean that the Woke Folk head to imdb and the MAGAs to Rotten Tomatoes?  Probably, at least to some degree.  Is it possible that one group or the other (or both) bombarded one of those sites with votes from people who hadn’t seen the film, or even from bots programmed to skew the results?  Of course.

But let’s look at Jack Marshall’s comments.  He notes that the opening weekend attracted a larger audience than expected (or at least than was expected after early predictions were revised downwards); it was indeed one of the biggest opening weekends for any documentary in a long time.  He doesn’t mention the $35 million marketing budget, which… erm… might well have been a factor.  He does admit that “There is always a chance that the popular reviews were rigged by MAGA zealots,” and that “The divide does not mean that the critics are wrong.”  He then proceeds to declare that “movie critics tend to be members of the progressive bubble, and are probably incapable of watching anything connected to President Trump objectively,” and that “the split also shows incompetent and irresponsible critics.”  Wait… what?

Curmie used to do some theatre criticism and even reviewed a couple of films.  It was never his job to predict what the reader would like or dislike, but to state as clearly as possible what he thought worked… or didn’t.  If a film is bad, it’s bad, and it’s the critic’s job to say so.  Ooh… but you shouldn’t do that if you’re a liberal and the movie you’re reviewing is both politically conservative and crap.  Leni Riefenstahl and Sergei Eisenstein both made excellent films, even if they were exercises in propaganda.  It appears that Brett Ratner doesn’t belong in their company.  Of course, it’s unlikely that Curmie will even know for sure.

More to the point: who is going to any opening weekend?  Professional critics… and fans.  Curmie admits that he’d never heard of Cinemascore prior to doing a little research for this post.  Those folks gave “Melania” an “A.” But then you look at their methodology, which seems to rely exclusively on interviews with the opening night audience.  It’s human nature to like things you agree with.  You’re a lot more likely to say this movie was really good if you’re a fan of FLOTUS (or her hubby) than if you think she’s a dim-witted, vulgar, bimbo.  Curmie remembers when, back in the days Netflix had customers rate movies on a scale of 1 to 5, he gave a 4 to a documentary on Václav Havel, not because it was a good film (it deserved a 2 as a film), but because he was a huge fan of Havel and hoped Netflix would suggest more movies about him or similar topics.  That kind of response is completely understandable.

The people who went to see “Melania” on the opening weekend wanted to see that film because of its topic.  It’s difficult to say much more than that.  Imdb has a note that their “rating mechanism has detected unusual voting activity on this title.”  Ya think?  The rating distribution is pretty much an inverse bell curve, or rather it would be if the 10s were anywhere near as plentiful as the 1s.  Virtually no one gives the film a 4 or 5, and damned few opt for 2-3 or 6-9.  Concluding that most moviegoers responded more politically than aesthetically seems pretty reasonable.  It’s not completely out of line to suggest that at least some critics did the same, but it’s a lot less certain.

What hasn’t been mentioned is what all this ought to be telling us.  Curmie doubts that there has ever been a film about which what critics or voters on one of those websites say means less than this one.  No critic is going to dissuade a faithful MAGA from going; no outpouring of positive sentiment is going to convince a leftie of the film’s qualities.  The reaction to this film, like “life” in one of the most famous speeches in Macbeth, is “but a walking shadow, a poor player, / That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, / And then is heard no more.  It is a tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing.”

This Time for Sure!

To quote the great 20th-century philosopher Bullwinkle J. Moose, “This time for sure!”  Curmie really is going to write about something that not only isn’t about ICE, it isn’t even about the 47 Regime at all!

As regular readers of this blog know, Curmie is a retired theatre professor.  He is virtually certain that he’ll never return to the classroom except, perhaps, as a one-day guest.  He’s no longer a member of any professional organization except one specifically linked to his PhD alma mater; he has three writing projects started, but he’s lost momentum on all of them, and it’s considerably more likely that none of them will ever be finished than that more than one will.  But there is one area of the job where he’s still rather active.  Five former students in the last couple of months have asked him to be a reference for them.  Four are applying to grad schools; one is looking for jobs as a teacher.  We’ll just call her “SA,” as Curmie doesn’t want to hurt her job prospects just because he can be an asshole from time to time.

It’s SA’s case that spurs this post.  Over the years, Curmie has discerned a rather disturbing phenomenon.  Whereas virtually every grad school or theatre company that has taken a serious interest in a student who’s listed him as a reference has made contact one way or another, public schools in Texas (at least) pretty much don’t care.  Curmie has lost count of how many former students have applied for jobs teaching theatre in a high school or junior high; it’s in the dozens, at least.  Most of these folks got a job; that’s the good news.  The number of schools that contacted Curmie at all totals perhaps 15% of that number.  Perhaps other references were so positive that the mere fact that Curmie agreed to be a reference was enough.  More likely, administrators just couldn’t be bothered to do their jobs.  It’s reasonable not to bother to check references if a candidate clearly isn’t going to make the cut.  But it’s unconscionable not to do so before hiring someone as a teacher.

One of the students for whom Curmie wasn’t a reference was what we call a “paper major,” i.e., someone who takes all the required classes for a Theatre major, but works on shows only to the extent specifically required by coursework: no auditioning, no volunteering for crews, none of that kind of stuff that might actually provide relevant experience.  She got a job as a technical director for a high school, because the person you want to show other people how to work a counterweight system or use power tools is someone who’s pretty much never done it herself.  ☹ Oh, but she went to that high school, so that’s OK, then.

But whereas those schools that don’t even bother to check references are the greater problem, those that do are almost as bad.  Now we come to the first rec I get to write to support SA’s quest for a teaching position.  They don’t want a letter; there’s a form to fill out.  We start with some questions with drop-down responses.  A couple of them are reasonable: things like time management, willingness to assume responsibility, etc.  Others are clearly variations on “can we push the applicant around (please say ‘yes’)?”  Curmie will pretend he doesn’t understand the subtext and answer what the question literally asks: about “ability to follow instructions,” for example.  His former student follows instructions very well, thank you.  But she’s clearly a lot more intelligent than whoever designed this questionnaire, and might just rebel a little if “instructed” to do something freaking stupid.  That is precisely why Curmie agreed to recommend her.

Alas, there are worse examples.  First question: “What is your relationship to this candidate?”  If that’s a fill-in-the-blank kind of query, it’s a logical way to start (assuming you’re too lazy and/or dim-witted to want an actual letter of recommendation).  But remember that this is a drop-down, and there’s no option that corresponds to the faculty/student relationship we had when she was an undergrad.  The only choices: “Supervisor,” “Peer,” “Friend,” and “Other.”  Supervisor?  Well, sort of, but it’s not like I was her boss or something.  Peer?  No.  Friend?  Well, yes, now, but that’s not what they mean.  

By the way, if there’s no professional relationship, what the hell use is the recommendation of someone who’s simply a friend?  “We were apartment-mates junior year, and she always did the dishes when it was her turn, and got out of the way when my boyfriend came over” might make her someone to go have a beer with, but it’s hardly a relevant concern in assessing her suitability as a teacher. 

Curmie supposes that makes him “Other.”  (He can hear those who know him personally snickering something like “Ain’t that the truth.”)  It’s just weird that Curmie (and her Master’s program supervisor) are relegated to “otherness,” but “friends” are given their own category.

The other question Curmie struggled with was about SA’s “teaching strategies.”  The closest Curmie has ever come to seeing SA’s “strategies” in action was when he advised her production of a 10-minute play a couple of decades ago.  And it’s not like Curmie remembers details of that show; even if he did, we can reasonably assume that she’s learned some things in the interim. “I don’t really know” is the honest answer.  Nope, not allowed on their divinely inspired form.  What to do?  

Well, SA has been living abroad for several years, successfully running a company that integrates ESL with theatre work.  This is a strategy that was very much foregrounded in Tudor England (except that the language in question was Latin instead of English), and was the driving principle behind the “French plays” Curmie saw and participated in when he was an undergrad.  Making that work for any period of time requires both creativity and pragmatism.  In the absence of evidence to the contrary, Curmie is calling that “excellent” and moving on.

Curmie’s initial thought was that this school’s form—farmed out to some company at taxpayer expense because either wanting actual letters or creating the school’s own form might take a few minutes of the administrators’ precious time that could be better spent playing solitaire on the office computer—was the stupidest he’d seen, against some very steep competition.  But then he thought back a little further.  One of the first such forms Curmie filled out for a former student does indeed take the Too Fucking Stupid to Believe Grand Prize.

It’s been a long time, so Curmie can’t remember all the details, including (luckily for them) the name of the school; he’s only reasonably confident he remembers who the student in question was.  If it’s who he thinks it was, she was truly remarkable, and has become a very successful teacher in a different district than the cretinous yahoos who distributed the form.  For this school, there was a list of something like 20 statements, with a drop-downs ranging from “strongly agree” to “strongly disagree.”  The very first question, presumably what the school cared about the most, was “Applicant is well groomed.”  Yes, really.  Curmie remembers that one.  There followed a series of prompts about the candidate’s being “obedient” (yes, Curmie remembers that specific word), “respectful,” and similar code words for passive servility.

Finally, about Question #16, we get to something about knowing the subject material.  There was one other question—Curmie can’t remember what it was, exactly—that was actually relevant to whether an applicant would be good at the job.  The rest, by far the majority, were all about looking nice and being inoffensive.  Those readers who know Curmie personally know what Curmie thinks of those priorities; the rest of you can no doubt guess.

The problem, as it so often is, is that the people who make hiring decisions—principals, etc.—are, as a class, even lazier than they are stupid, and that’s saying rather a lot.  Our public education system has been turned over not to competent professionals but to stolid bullies who care more about their own authority than about educating students.  They have degrees in educational administration but no damned sense.  All principals, superintendents, and similar folk?  Of course not.  But the word “most” has surpassed “many” in Curmie’s contemplation of this issue.  That’s not a good thing.