"A Mother of a Revolution," the Streisand Effect, and Good Trouble

Two nights ago there was an end-of-the-school-year band concert by students at Watertown High School in Wisconsin.  That’s hardly headline-making news, of course.  Curmie regrets that he can’t even tell you, Gentle Reader, what selections were played.  That’s because the important part of the story, the part that makes people across the country (including Curmie) pay attention, is what was not played: Omar Thomas’s “A Mother of a Revolution.”

That composition, you see, was dedicated to Marsha P. Johnson, a black trans activist who participated in the Stonewall uprising in 1969.  That is apparently enough for the district’s clown car board of education to forbid the piece from being performed.  They describe Stonewall as “a six-day riot which included the beating of police officers and attempting to burn down a building with human beings trapped inside.”  They leave out the whole “finally had enough of police brutality” part.  Oh, and the “was a seminal event in giving agency to the LGBT community” part, too.  We might Color Curmie unsurprised.  

Using the board’s logic, of course, the American Revolution could be characterized as an armed insurrection against the lawfully constituted authority of His Majesty’s government, resulting in the deaths of thousands of loyal British soldiers.  Equally importantly, we know that Johnson was an “agitator” in Stonewall, but it’s unclear exactly what that means.  Moreover, Curmie would suggest that she was a significant figure before and especially after, as well as during, Stonewall.

A couple other factors would seem to be important.  First off, “A Mother of a Revolution” is an instrumental piece.  You can hear it here, performed by the University of North Texas Wind Symphony, if you’re interested.  Whether you like the tune or not, there’s nothing to suggest that there’s anything political in the music per se.  It’s not like they brought in the choir to sing the Internationale or even “Do You Hear the People Sing.” We’re going to get upset by whose memory is being invoked?  Seriously?

More problematically, this whole commedia is very much the product of the process, which is designed primarily as an exercise in prior restraint.  You can do something “controversial,” but only if you get prior approval from parents.  The band director sent out the appropriate forms last fall, got the necessary signatures, and started rehearsals in October.  But here’s the bind: if you don’t send out the notifications, then you’re in violation of the stupid rules.  If you do, then you’re admitting that someone might object, and that honesty will come back to bite you in the ass more often than not.  It’s also worth noting that the board had also signed off on using the piece… until, of course, they didn’t.

As usual in such cases, there were “parental complaints” from unnamed sources.  Band members’ parents had already given consent, so this was some other kids’ parents.  All this presumes that the board is even telling the truth, but a Watertown parent Katie Vanderlinden said at Monday’s board meeting that she was told by the superintendent that “there were zero parental complaints.”  Anyway, the board does what such bodies always do: they capitulated. 

The correct response, of course, would have been to tell those folks who didn’t want to hear the piece not to come.  Usually, a board’s failure to do so is the product of cowardice.  There may have been some of that here, too (there’s no question that they’re avoiding the subject now), but the problem seems to be more that the majority of board members seem to have been elected on a platform of “ending indoctrination in radical curriculum.”  Those, by the way, are the words of an attendee at Monday’s board meeting, not of a board member per se.  The argument is that playing the song encourages violence.  The actual reason Johnson is celebrated, of course, is her demand for acceptance and inclusion, but… whatever.

There’s always a rationale for censorship, and it’s always bullshit.  Whether the board acted out of cowardice, stupidity, or partisanship doesn’t matter.  They earned their nationwide humiliation.

But the story gets better.  News spread to Madison, a little under an hour away, where Kirk Bangstad, the owner of the Minocqua Brewing Company, offered to host the group in his beer garden (the event was later moved outside to the parking lot to accommodate more people) and charge admission, with proceeds to go to the band.  There’s some legalistic stuff, but basically it works out like this.  The band director was not involved in the offer or the planning, so one hopes (at least) that he will suffer no repercussions.  Not all members of the Watertown Wind Symphony will participate, and those who do will do so as individual volunteers.  Those who choose not to play for whatever reason will be replaced by alumni, college kids, guest artists, whoever.  We’ve subsequently been assured that “as of last Saturday, there were enough students who wanted to do it and enough people who could actually play who had volunteered to play it.”

Of course, the school board then insisted that no school-owned instruments could be used for an unsanctioned event.  Bangstad and the leadership of the Band Boosters found a way around that, too, as “Band directors and music stores from around the Midwest immediately sprang to action and loaned the band the instruments they needed to play this concert.”  Aaaaand they’re setting up a 501(c)3 that will be completely separate from the school per se, so the board gets no say in how their money is spent.  Curmie doesn’t have up-to-date figures on how much money has been raised, but as of the middle of Saturday afternoon, it was almost $66,000.  Musical instruments are expensive, but that kind of money would make a good start.

Bangstad says he wanted to create the Streisand Effect, and he did.  The song will now be played twice, as there will also be a performance tonight at Immanuel Evangelical Lutheran Church in Watertown.  (EDIT: The video of the performance at the church is available here.) The conductor will be the composer, Omar Thomas, who is apparently flying in from Austin, Texas, for the event.  The church’s website lists the rules for attendees (no recording, no posters, that kind of thing) and notes that,

The purpose of this event is to experience a piece of music that has been prepared by and for people who are rooted in our Watertown community. The performers do not desire to be the center of attention, and we are not gathering for a rally or protest. Instead, the musicians’ hope is for an audience to focus on the work they put into A Mother of a Revolution! and for the music to tell its own story.

It’s unclear—to Curmie, at least—whether the percentage of high schoolers playing this evening will be higher than on Saturday.  It’s certainly reasonable that a parent might think that a local church might be a more appropriate venue than a bar 40 miles away for their teenager to play.  Or they might support both or neither.

Traffic has been heavy on the YouTube pages of a host of universities and youth orchestras that have played the piece.  As Curmie writes this, the first comment we come to on the University of Georgia’s Wind Ensemble’s version sort of says it all: “Raise your hand if you're here because you won't be told what not to listen to.” Well said, acdeeiprrt!  Curmie suspects Thomas’s composition been heard by more people in the last few days than ever before.  Good.

It’s worth noting that Bangstad is a controversial figure to say the least.  He’s a rather virulent anti-MAGA, and apparently something of a hothead.  Just in the last few weeks, he’s pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct, been interrogated by the FBI and Secret Service for comments about President Trump, and declared his candidacy for governor.  Busy lad!

There have also been allegations that he used funds from a PAC he established to pay his personal expenses.  There’s sufficient smoke, in other words, to suspect there’s a fire around there somewhere.  Is it possible that this whole business is a scam, that there will never be a concert at the Minocqua Brewing Company, or that few if any of the musicians will be high school kids?  Could the tens of thousands of dollars raised for a still not finalized 501(c)3 find their way into Bangstad’s pocket, instead?  Is this the left’s small-scale response to the Trump phone scam, which netted Dear Leader and his family something in the neighborhood of $59 million for a product that may never be made?

Curmie supposes so, but it seems improbable here: not because Bangstad is above reproach, but for two independent other reasons.  First, it’s difficult to imagine that a local church would make promises they can’t keep.  Second, everything is too public.  If there’s no performance in Madison in Saturday, we’ll know.  If none of the musicians are high schoolers, we’ll know.  If the Band Boosters don’t get access to that money, we’ll know… and we’ll know whom to blame. Kirk Bangstad may be all the horrible things his detractors say about him, but he’s not stupid.  Neither are the leaders of the booster group, who’ll be sure that they’re getting all the money they should.

Ultimately, we’ll know something tonight, more on Saturday, and more still a few days after that.  Bangstad said recently that the story here is that “Thousands of people have gotten together to say ‘We won’t stand for censorship.  We won’t stand for bigotry.  And we’re gonna get into some good trouble.”  That part is true, whether Bangstad is on the up and up or not.

Curmie was not in band in high school, but Beloved Spouse was.  And we’re both fans of free expression.  We sent in a few bucks.  Here’s hoping it ends up where we intended.

BTW, Gentle Reader, if you’d like to make a donation, go here and click on “get tickets.”  The event is sold out, but there’s a “donate to the band” option.

The Casting of "The Odyssey" and Believing Rumors

 

Curmie has written numerous times about variations on the theme of casting decisions for plays, movies, and television series.  In June of 2017, he discussed the controversy surrounding the Public Theater’s production of Julius Caesar, in which the title character bore more than passing resemblance to Donald Trump.  In 2021, it was the brouhaha at the University of Michigan when a Distinguished Professor of Music showed the Laurence Olivier version of Othello in class.  The following spring, Curmie argued that no, you don’t have to be disabled to play Richard III.  In February of ’23, he suggested that obeying the terms of the rights contract shouldn’t lead to the cancelation of a production of Waiting for Godot.

In April of 2023, Curmie wrote about the casting of black-presenting actress Adele James as Cleopatra in what Netflix would have had us believe was a documentary.  And in January of 2025, the topic was the entirely white-presenting chorus (some of the leads were BIPOC) for a production of the musical Elf in Sacramento.  Oh, and there was a lengthy comment on a post on Ethics Alarms in 2021 about the casting of black actress Jodie Turner-Smith as Anne Boleyn; that one was designated a Comment of the Day.

Anyway, here we go again.  Curmie thought that if he wrote about Christopher Nolan’s upcoming film version of The Odyssey, he’d concentrate on Nolan’s fondness for the controversial (?) feminist (?) translation of Emily Wilson, which Curmie definitely wants to read.  But he’s going to write instead about the three (Count ‘em!  Three!) casting decisions that have raised the ire of conservative commentators.  Well, there are three that Curmie knows about; there may be others.  The first and third, chronologically in terms of the brouhaha, are pretty similar and frankly rather boring: OMG, Nolan cast a black woman (Lupita Nyong’o) as Helen of Troy (and her sister Clytemnestra) and a black man (rapper Travis Scott) as a bardic narrator figure!  They should look like the originals, you see.  <Sigh.>

Ahem.  

First off, there almost certainly were no real-life originals.  Were there Bronze Age places called Troy and Greece?  Yes.  Was there a war between the Greeks and Trojans, fought at least partially at Troy?  Perhaps.  Were there important (royal) people named Helen, Odysseus, Agamemnon, etc.?  Unlikely, but possible.  Are the events of The Odyssey (Circe, Scylla and Charybdis, sirens…) even plausible?  Uh, no.  Homer, whoever he, she, or they may have been, either made that stuff up or perhaps inherited some of it from other writers not lucky enough to have had their works preserved.  Oh, and that line the right-wing critics like to quote about Helen being “the face that launched a thousand ships”?  That wasn’t Homer; that was Christopher Marlowe, over two millennia later.  Curmie’s a theatre historian; he knows this stuff.

Secondly, even assuming that there were real-life historical figures who served as the basis for Homer’s epic… uh… wouldn’t they be and look… uh… Greek?  As far as Curmie can tell, there is not a single Greek cast member, or indeed with any Greek forebears.  Interesting, that.  It may be a bit strong to use the term “racist” to describe those who see no problem with casting Matt Damon or Anne Hathaway but get righteously indignant over Lupita Nyong’o or Zendaya, but not by much.  People of Greek heritage who claim cultural appropriation have more of a point than those who want white actors only.

Is it a bit too cute for Nolan to justify casting Scott by suggesting that rappers are the closest thing we have today to the reception of ancient texts via bardic oral tradition?  Sure.  But it’s not a totally crazy idea, and Curmie, being of the wrong generation and race to fully appreciate Scott’s work, isn’t going to criticize that casting without as much as seeing the film.

But all of this leaves the source of peak indignation from the usual suspects, namely the casting of Elliot (formerly Ellen) Page.  There were rumors that Page, at a slender 5’1”, was to play Achilles, the greatest of the Greek warriors.  The response of Newsmax’s Rob Finnerty was predictably assholic: “You might even remember Brad Pitt played Achilles in a movie 20 years ago, meaning we go from Brad Pitt to a girl who dresses as a guy who’s five-foot-one, 118 pounds. That’s the person who’s going to be playing the greatest warrior in history, because to the left, that is normal. That’s okay.”  A little later, he proclaims that Helen was white.  Nothing to see here; move along.

Others, like the insufferable Elon Musk, also piled on.  The problem, though, is that whereas there’s no legitimate reason to object to Nyong’o’s casting, Page as Achilles is indeed a bit of a stretch, to say the least.  True, Achilles appears as a ghost (you will recall, Gentle Reader that he was killed by Paris in The Iliad), and it might be possible to film only close-ups, or in full armor, or with distortions, or whatever.  But Elliot Page would do well to lift a Bronze Age sword, let alone wield one well enough to defeat Hector one-on-one.

But here, Gentle Reader, is where Curmie urges you to read his introduction to this topic carefully: “there were rumors” that Page would play Achilles.  As of this writing, the imdb page for the film lists Page as a cast member, but doesn’t specify a role.  There has been no official announcement, but it is now reported that that Page is expected to play Elpenor, the youngest member of Odysseus’s crew, who gets drunk and falls off a roof to his death.  He’s the first ghost Odysseus encounters in the Underworld (Achilles appears later), and causes some angst because Odysseus had left him unburied.  Elpenor, like Achilles, is a relatively minor character in The Odyssey; either or both could end up as little more than a cameo… or could be expanded into something more.  We shall see.

When Curmie first read about this controversy, the site he was reading proclaimed that Page would play Achilles.  Even Finnerty introduced his screed by noting that Page reportedly would be in that role.  But human nature being what it is, a rumor became a report, and the report became a “fact.” 

Were he of a cynical or snarky disposition (perish the thought!), Curmie might suggest that Christopher Nolan is not an idiot.  Announce that Elliot Page is in the cast.  Don’t announce who’s playing Achilles (if indeed the character will actually appear).  Maybe even get a minion to accidentally-on-purpose mention that Page was under consideration (leaving out the “for maybe five seconds” part).  Result: well, the right-wing critics look like folks who believe articles in The Onion.  More importantly, there is a mountain of free publicity: we’re still two months away from the release date, and “The Odyssey” is getting a lot more headlines than anything that’s actually in theaters now.  Perhaps, just perhaps, Team Nolan dangled a particularly juicy fake story out there… and Finneran, Musk, et al., rose to the bait.

Curmie suppresses a smirk.  Oh, OK, no, he doesn’t.

The Head of a University System Should Not Be a Knuckle-Dragging Bigot

Chancellor Brandon Creighton

Curmie started a piece a couple of weeks ago about the North Carolina community college whose administration demanded changes to the set for a production of Euripides’ Bacchae only hours before the show was to open.   He thought about perhaps appending some commentary on Utah Valley University’s withdrawal of the offer to best-selling author Sharon McMahon to deliver the commencement address because, although she described herself as “gutted” by the assassination of Charlie Kirk on that campus, she said she understood why some people weren’t grieving as loudly as the some other folks wanted.  She had the audacity to quote directly Kirk’s reprehensible statements about gays, Muslims, and blacks.  That, in the world of fawning obeisance to Dear Leader and his minions, is apparently inexcusable.

Anyway, Curmie didn’t get very far with that essay that night, but he did get a start: “Sometimes Curmie thinks there are tests of intelligence, integrity, and courage for people who want to be college presidents.  You have to fail at least two to get the gig.”  Curmie expresses all due disrespect for the stupidity, over-reaching, and cowardice of Jim Morton at Cape Fear Community College and Astrid Tuminez at Utah Valley (to be fair to the latter, the rabid responses of those who regarded a smug asshole like Kirk as akin to the Second Coming might indeed have suggested the possibility of legitimate security concerns).  But the easy winner of the Censorial Asshat Tournament (post-A&M edition) goes to Texas Tech (TTU) Chancellor Brandon Creighton, whose antics Curmie read about when a friend posted a story from the Erin in the Morning page to her Facebook page, describing a litany of restrictions on, well, teaching and learning at all TTU affiliated campuses.

A little background:

There are, in fact, three different state university systems in Texas (Curmie has no idea why): the University of Texas (UT), Texas A&M (TAMU), and Texas Tech.  Curmie’s former school was independent of control from Austin, College Station, or Lubbock until a couple of years ago (when Curmie was already retired from full-time teaching), but has now been absorbed into the UT network.  UT is not without its censorial impulses (see here and here, for instance), but so far, at least, it’s the least problematic of the three systems in terms of restricting curriculum.  That’s relatively speaking good news for Curmie’s former colleagues (it could be worse!), but Curmie waits with some trepidation for the other shoe to drop.

Even apart from enacting laws any reasonable person would call 1st Amendment violations, the governor and state legislature pull all the strings.  The governor, the despicable Greg Abbott, appoints the Regents, who appoint the Chancellor and university Presidents.  Back in the Dark Ages when Curmie was a lad, such appointments were based on who could best serve the interests of the school, its people (faculty, staff, students, and alumni), and the state. 

Curmie has mentioned a few times that his father was a President in the State University of New York system.  The chair of the College Council (the equivalent of the Regents) for several of his years in office, was appointed by a Republican governor; he was the chair of the Democratic Party in an adjoining county.  Back then, both the governor and the council chair cared more about education than about pushing a political agenda (or stifling someone else’s) in the state colleges.  Curmie can’t speak for other states, but in the two he’s most familiar with, Kansas and Texas, such an attitude would now be regarded by every politician in sight as hopelessly naïve, even quaint.

Even a decade or so ago, although prospective Regents in Texas had to be active Republicans, at least some attention was paid to the ways they might benefit the institution.  Now, the only requirement is stolid sycophancy.  And it probably goes without saying that Creighton, like his compatriots at Texas A&M, has no damned business heading any educational institution, let alone a system of colleges and universities.  He has no relevant experience: he’s a lawyer and former hard-right state legislator.  He neither knows nor cares anything about education, except as a tool for propaganda. 

One more point that sort of makes this personal.  As you probably know, Gentle Reader, Curmie came out of retirement to teach two sections of Theatre History as a sabbatical replacement in the fall of 2024.  It was an intriguing return to the classroom.  Far too many students were unwilling or unable to do the level of work expected in an upper-division course, but, as Curmie noted at the end of that semester: 

...it’s extremely important to note that my best students were not only more numerous than average, but they were really outstanding.  They’d not only done the reading; they’d thought about it.  They asked pertinent questions and made intriguing comments, often analogizing (appropriately!) to other plays, novels, films, or historical events.  Most of all, and this was especially true of a couple of them, they were intellectually curious.  They’d read things that hadn’t been assigned, and then they’d ask me questions.

After a couple of decades in this business, one learns to identify students who not only excel at the undergraduate level, but show considerable potential for success in graduate school, as well.  One young woman in particular was everything you could want in a budding scholar.  I was happy to help her navigate the process, and although Texas Tech wouldn’t have been my choice for her, she was enthusiastic about her interactions with the department, and I wrote a very positive letter of recommendation for her.  I warned her about the prospect of censorship, and she took it seriously, but she was thrilled to have been offered an assistantship there.  That was all, of course, before this latest round of anti-intellectual shenanigans.  I heard from her a week or so ago; she plans to go ahead with her studies at TTU.  Curmie may wish she’d chosen a different school, but he sincerely hopes never to have the words “I told you so” form in his mind in this regard.

The white robe was at
the cleaners.

I will say this: if Creighton and his evil minions mess with her—whether by censoring professors’ ability to present the full range of information required of a course or by limiting what she could choose as a thesis topic—he’d do well to be careful out there.  Curmie makes no threats, but there just might be an angry old man (like the one at the left) with long grey hair, a beard, and a Gandalf staff, parked in Creighton’s outer office.

So… is the memo sent out by Creighton really as bad as Erin in the Morning would have us believe?  Probably not quite.  It does, for example, differentiate between course content which is “centered on,” “includes,” or contains “incidental reference” to SOGI (that’s Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity, for those of you not au courant with the latest alphabet soup).  But there’s always one sentence too many.  It’s expressly permitted, for example, to discuss “chromosomal variations” or “intersex biological conditions,” but not to make the obvious inference, that there might be more than two genders, or that “gender identity is a fluid spectrum.”

Curmie also wants to tease out the implications of some of Creighton’s definitions.  An example of an “incidental reference,” for example, is “a single sentence in a larger text.”  That hardly qualifies as a reference at all, and is most likely a side comment rather than part of a prepared lecture.  Curmie never taught a course that would qualify as “centered on” SOGI topics, but he has a number of good friends who have done so, and most if not all of Curmie’s classes are in the “includes” range.  This is especially true if we look at the “SO” part of “SOGI.”  Most of the hoopla of late has centered on trans or gender-fluid people, but if sexual orientation is also part of the equation, then anything related to homosexuality also figures into the mix.

But notice that the course need not be “centered on” one of those impermissible subjects.  It’s enough if some “course materials” do so, and Curmie can’t remember ever teaching a course that didn’t cross over that threshold.  Moreover, “in courses where course materials (inclusive of all assigned works, readings, case studies, peer-reviewed research, videos, etc.) are centered on or include sexual orientation or gender identity, alternate materials must be utilized.”  (emphasis added)  Must, mind you. 

It’s important to point out, of course, the implicit assumptions here.  Cishet relationships, because they are in the majority (and because that’s the world inhabited by the censors), are de facto not considered to be about sexual orientation, thus conflating the statistically probable with the normative.  There’s a pretty wide range of statistics concerning what percentage of the population self-identifies as LGBTQ+.  Let’s go with the Williams Institute report that puts that figure at 5.5%.  (The rate in Texas is slightly lower, at 5.1%, but that still means that well over a million Texas thus identify.)  Two things are significant here.  First, nationwide, university-age (18-24) respondents self-reported at nearly three times that figure, 15.2%.  Second, we’re going to pretend for a moment that everyone who didn’t say they were LGBT self-identified as straight, whereas a significant number of people didn’t give a yes/no answer to the question (e.g., they listed themselves as asexual, refused to answer, etc.).

Even using this probably artificially low percentage of LGBT people in the population, the chances are better than even that a class of a mere 14 Texas students includes at least one LGBT individual.  If we use the national figure for 18-24-year-olds, a class of 25 students is almost 98.5% likely to have an LGBT student, and the likelihood would be three or four.  Curmie has taught core classes of 73 (the capacity of the room) several times at a Texas public university.  Using the estimate for university-aged individuals, the chances that all 73 of those students are straight is about .0006%.  Not very damned likely, in other words.  And those LGBTQ+ students might like to see themselves treated with at least respect if not representation.

Of course, Creighton wants to leave himself some wiggle room.  This manifests in two forms: selective enforcement and prior restraint.  No matter how precise the language tries to be, it can never allow everything it wants to allow and disallow everything it wants to disallow.  There will be judgment calls every semester, and the criteria will seldom be limited to course content.  You will perhaps recall, Gentle Reader, that the two Texas A&M professors who most ran afoul of that university’s censorial dictates were the Chair of the Academic Freedom Council and the President of the A&M chapter of the American Association of University Professors, an organization that’s very close to being a faculty union if indeed it isn’t one: people most likely to think that faculty ought to have a say in university governance, in other words.  Coincidence, huh?

But Curmie is most concerned about prior restraint.  Most faculty would like to… you know… keep their jobs, and not everyone has a sufficiently high profile that they can just pack up and leave for a private university the way Martin Peterson (he of the infamous reading from Plato in a philosophy course) did.  That means looking over your shoulder a lot. 

Will I get into trouble if I talk about the piquancy of a boy playing a girl playing a boy playing a girl in As You Like It?  What about the theory that Peace in Aristophanes’ Lysistrata may have been played by a (nude) female slave, thereby not following the tradition of women being played by men?  Can I talk about John Lyly’s Gallathea at all?  (Or do I get a partial exemption because I wrote my Master’s thesis about Lyly?)  Should I not show that video about the onnagata when discussing Kabuki?  Or mention the only Chinese Opera actor most Americans have ever heard of, Mei Lanfang, who played exclusively women’s roles?

Can I, as an acting teacher, assign roles to student actors which may not conform to their sexual orientation or gender identity?  Must a production of Jean Genet’s The Maids cast all three roles as women (the play is written that way), or could a director cast the play with men, as Genet suggested he might like to do?  Is the farcical element of, say, The Breasts of Tiresias, in which the female lead grows a full beard in a matter of seconds and the male lead gives birth to 40,000 babies overnight, enough to exempt it?  Is The Children’s Hour verboten?  Is Cat on a Hot Tin Roof?  Is Rent?  Or Some Like It Hot?  Is it trans actors or trans roles I can’t use?

It’s easier to avoid that confrontation, to submit, to water everything down to accommodate the stolid and the bigoted.  But that’s not education; that’s capitulation.  Far better to suggest to Chancellor Creighton that he perform an exercise best suited to particularly limber hermaphrodites.  (Easy for Curmie to say…)

Further Musings on the Kent State Shootings... and Today

The Facebook Memories tab becomes especially relevant on some days more than others.  Today is one of them, because today, May 4, there’s a BK and an AK (explanation of terms forthcoming in a moment).  Curmie has written more than once (in 2015, 2022, 2024, and 2025) about how the murder (yes, murder) of four Kent State University students by National Guardsmen on May 4, 1970, was a life-changing event for him. 

It wasn’t so much what had happened.  That was terrible enough, and the now-famous photograph of Mary Vecchio screaming over the body of Jeffrey Miller brought everything home in dramatic fashion.  No, it was the aftermath: the explanations and excuses by government officials and even the allegedly left-leaning media.  They’d have had us believe that the dead and injured students were somehow to blame for their own victimhood.  Even at age 14, Curmie smelled bullshit, and came to understand something profoundly important: those in power will employ whatever means necessary to maintain their privileged position.

The lies, deceptions, and evasions came fast and furious.  Curmie quotes himself from last year: 

Of course, the political leaders at the time didn’t wait for the facts to emerge before blaming the victims.  President Nixon called them “bums”; Ohio Governor Jim Rhodes described them as “the worst type of people that we harbor in America”; Ronald Reagan, Governor of California at the time, said that “if it takes bloodbath” to deal with campus demonstrators “let's get it over with.”

These characterizations, intended to excuse or even to extol the actions of the Guardsmen, had precisely the opposite effect on Curmie.

There was just something not right about all of the claims that the Guardsmen were fearful of their own lives and just trying to defuse a tense situation.  These guys with military-grade weapons were afraid of a bunch of post-adolescents armed with… um… flowers?  As Curmie wrote four years ago, he knew very quickly that “[what] happened in that early afternoon in eastern Ohio wasn’t self-defense; it wasn’t inevitable; it wasn’t triggered by the actions of radical peaceniks.  And it sure as hell wasn’t a small sacrifice worth making to restore law and order.” 

Curmie learned to distrust—or, rather, not to trust uncritically—any pronouncement from government officials, the news media, or any variation on the theme of someone in a uniform carrying a gun.  It was life-changing.  What happened wasn’t a huge shift in perspective; it was a change in the grounding for that perspective.  What had been an unfocused adolescent rebelliousness morphed into a more mature skepticism.  Curmie may or may not have become a 14-year-old curmudgeon, but he was well on the way.

You will note, however, Gentle Reader, that Curmie had this blog for over five years before ever mentioning Kent State,  His personal Facebook page has one brief mention on this date in 2010, outnumbered prior to 2015 by variations on “May the 4th be with you.”  There was a Star Wars reference in 2011 on Curmie’s FB page, too.  But things changed in 2015.  Curmie was lucky enough to have been selected as one of 36 scholars from a host of academic disciplines to attend an NEH-sponsored Summer Institute on translation theory.  The organizers were both faculty members at Kent State, so that’s where the sessions were held in June.  (Hence: BK, Before Kent; AK, After Kent.) 

My first experience of the campus was driving into a parking lot near the dorm where I’d be staying for the three weeks of the Institute.  There were four columns, perhaps four feet high or so, in that lot.  They were memorials to the students killed about 100 or 150 yards away a little over 45 years earlier.  They had flat tops, and each was topped with several pebbles; I learned later that these were placed there by visitors as tokens of solemn remembrance and respect.  Yes, Gentle Reader, Curmie added a pebble to each column before leaving campus.

As noted in the 2015 post linked above, “the university appears to have been quite adept at walking a very fine line, simultaneously commemorating the chilling events of [then] 45 years ago and moving on with the academic mission of the institution.”  There are a few memorials, and the university has since added markers to honor the wounded as well as the dead.

Curmie does not adhere to the MAGA perspective that it’s not a problem unless it affects him directly.  But anyone with even a modicum of empathy will inevitably be affected more when there’s a personal connection, even an indirect one caused by physical proximity to the site where something significant occurred.  Still, it wasn’t just being on the Kent State campus that changed Curmie’s life again.  It wasn’t even the visit to the May 4 Museum that precipitated that 2015 essay, written in a dorm room only 150 yards or so from where those students were gunned down.  Yes, that visit was significant in and of itself, but it catalyzed something more important: it inspired not merely sorrow and anger, but curiosity, that essential element for any search for the truth.  

Prior to that visit, Curmie was aware only of the generalities: that the students were not a threat, that the government was more interested in protecting the reputation of the killers than of the victims, that sort of thing.  But the museum also provided some specifics.  Curmie spent a couple more hours of research before writing this:

It turns out, of course, that my suspicions were correct. The Guardsmen, seemingly retreating to avoid further confrontation, turned in unison to fire into the crowd.  The nearest of the four students fatally shot by the Guard was about 85 yards away and simply observing the activities, not even taking part in the protest. And this is according to Nixon’s own appointed commission, headed by former Pennsylvania governor William Scranton. The nearest of the nine students wounded in the 13-second fusillade (a total of 60+ shots fired from 28 military-grade rifles) was 20 yards from the Guardsman; the furthest was nearly 250 yards away. Think about that. 250 yards away, and he was shot in the neck… by the alleged good guys? Only two of the 13 casualties were shot from the front. They were the aggressors? I don’t think so, criminal acquittals of the killers notwithstanding.

No. The Kent State killings (and the disingenuous aftermath) were indeed the ultimate declaration of war by the authorities on my generation, and I knew then, with my 15th birthday still nearly five months away, not only that I’d have to take sides, but which side I’d have to take.

Today, the average person is unaware of just how egregious the events and the cover-up were.  Over half of today’s population wasn’t born yet, and a good many others were too young to understand.  Kent State resonated with Curmie because it was the first major event in which his reaction was truly his own rather than a version of his parents’ thinking.  Someone even a couple of years younger probably wouldn’t have been ready to take that step.  But there are plenty of folks old enough to remember, but who bought the spin instead of the facts.

And we are once again in a period in which heavily armed and under-trained federal forces are given virtual carte blanche to attack protesters.  Nixon may have intentionally mis-characterized what happened at Kent State, but even he appointed a commission to find out the truth.  Their findings were under-reported, but at least they existed.  The Trump administration has not only lied about the actions of ICE and similar goon squads; they have repeatedly refused to cooperate with Minnesota authorities regarding the shootings on Renee Good and Alex Pretti.  Need Curmie remind you that murders are state rather than federal offenses?

Back in 2015, Curmie expressed the fear that there couldn’t be another Kent State because of the political apathy of the college-aged population.  That’s still true: the median age of No Kings participants is probably in the 40s.  But the spirit of resistance lives on, and the violence and mendacity of the administration have not gone unnoticed.  When the likes of Tucker Carlson and Marjorie Taylor Greene have jumped ship, things aren’t looking good for the long-term prospects of the regime.  Curmie is not unhappy about that.

Unprovoked violence by those in power suggests their inability to make a reasoned argument.  Their obvious lies undermine their presumed authority.  And, as the banner above suggests, they can’t kill us all.  What happened at Kent State 56 years ago today was horrible.  But if there was a silver lining to that dark cloud, it was the clarity it brought to the fore about the Vietnam War and its proponents.  Whether Nixon knew it or not, it was the beginning of the end… or at least the end of the beginning.  Clarity about the advocates of the Iran War (and so many other remarkably stupid policies) is also emerging.  To quote a line attributed to Mark Twain, “History doesn’t repeat, but it often rhymes.”

For some of us, May 4, 1970, was a turning point.  Curmie is wearing his Kent State t-shirt today.  It seems like the least he could do.