Independence Day and the Notion of Pride

We can do better than this.

Curmie has posted here not infrequently on the 4th of July, usually with some commentary on the significance of Independence Day.  One of his personal favorites of the genre comes from 2020, when he riffed on the opening sequence of the Aaron Sorkin series “The Newsroom.”  Our hero, Will McEvoy (Jeff Daniels) is on a three-person panel in some sort of academic setting.  They are asked by “Jenny,” a sophomore at whatever university is hosting the event, to “say what makes America the greatest country in the world.” 

After the other two panelists respond with slogans—“diversity and opportunity” and “freedom and freedom, so let’s keep it that way”—McEvoy responds, “The New York Jets.”  Even a Jets fan like Curmie laughed at the absurdity of that one.  (At least back when that show was filmed, the Jets didn’t completely suck, which they have for most of Curmie’s adult life.) After another evasion, the camera cuts to a woman near the back of the auditorium.  We don’t know who she is yet, but it’s MacKenzie McHale, McEvoy’s ex-girlfriend and soon to be his new executive producer.  She holds up a sign that says, “It’s not.”  She then flips the sign over and writes something else: “But it can be.”

There are 11 seconds of silence, at least in terms of diegetic sound.  There’s another roundabout response, and the moderator demands “a human moment.”  The camera cuts back to McHale, holding the “It’s not” sign.  A moment later, McEvoy blurts out, “It’s not the greatest country in the world, professor.  That’s my answer.”  The follow-up goes on for three minutes.  You can check out the link above or read the transcript, but there are two things Curmie wants to highlight.  There’s the litany of rankings, addressed to “sorority girl”:

... there is absolutely no evidence to support the statement that we’re the greatest country in the world. We’re seventh in literacy, twenty-seventh in math, twenty-second in science, forty-ninth in life expectancy, 178th in infant mortality, third in median household income, number four in labor force, and number four in exports. We lead the world in only three categories: number of incarcerated citizens per capita, number of adults who believe angels are real, and defense spending, where we spend more than the next twenty-six countries combined, twenty-five of whom are allies.

There are a couple of exaggerations in there, but no more than in the average political speech.  More importantly, this isn’t an indictment of America, simply a warning about allowing patriotism to morph into jingoism and what might now be called hallucinatory rhetoric.  

The other thing to point out is that the sign is both an insistence on truth and a symbol of hope.  “But it can be” is a rallying cry, a call to arms (in the metaphorical sense, at least).  

At the risk of sounding like a Monty Python routine, Curmie adds a third point: in the opening moments of a left-leaning series that aired during the Obama administration, the central character yearns for the days when “We sure used to be” the greatest country in the world.  True, the litany of attributes—“We waged wars on poverty, not poor people,” for example—bespeaks a liberal mindset.  But the desire to return to the glories of the past sure sounds a lot like a desire to “Make America Great Again.”

How sadly ironic, then, that the slogan is most associated with an octogenarian toddler with no impulse control, a pathological inability to accept responsibility for his own actions, and a track record that includes stealing from a charity, sexual assault, and wholesale financial shenanigans ranging from garden variety grift to de facto selling pardons to people who really are “the worst of the worst.”  All the things that any normal President from either party would have orchestrated for the country’s 250th anniversary celebration are gone, replaced by ultra-partisan posturing and a level of ego-centrism that would make Narcissus himself blush. 

Plus, of course, there’s the destruction of the East Wing of the White House, the paving over of the Rose Garden, the vulgar and frankly embarrassing UFC extravaganza that destroyed even more of the White House lawn, the totally botched reflecting pool project, that ridiculous “state fair” farce… Curmie would go on, but he’s trying to keep this essay shorter than the Mahābhārata.

None of what Curmie is discussing here comes under the heading of actual policy decisions.  Curmie has disagreed with virtually everything this POTUS has done, but he had plenty of reservations about the policies of a lot of 47’s predecessors, too.  Curmie grants, however, that all of those guys were at least trying to do the best thing for the country, however much he would have preferred a different approach.  Not so, Dear Leader.  He has never cared about anyone or anything but himself and perhaps a small circle of sycophantic admirers or fellow billionaire hucksters.  If saying any of this makes Curmie “deranged,” then so fucking be it. 

Curmie is angry that a celebration he’d been looking forward to—let’s face it, I’m not going to be around for #300—has been derailed by the hubristic and incompetent machinations of the worst President in the history of the country.  Yes, angry.  Curmie is not a nationalist, but he does think he qualifies as a patriot.  Having spent at least three months in each of three other countries, he’s still going to consider himself lucky to be from the US.  That would be, of course the real US, the one that countless World Cup fans have encountered to their amazement: the place where foreigners are welcomed by the overwhelming majority of the locals; where neighbors help each other out; where the question isn’t whether to give to charities, but to which ones. 

This is not the America inhabited by Donald Trump or Stephen Miller or Mike Johnson.  But it’s where most of us live, irrespective of where (or if) we worship, who our favorite basketball team is, or even who we voted for last time out.  There are those who want to take that America away from us, and they think they have defeated us, or soon will.  Curmie responds (with a tip of the hat to Johnny Carson): Not so fast, Semiquincentennial-Breath.  We are not our government.  The real America is out there, embodied in people like Major Jason Watson, like Leen Hijaz, like the citizens of Curmie’s much-beloved former hometown of Lawrence, Kansas, whose embrace of the Algerian World Cup team using their city as a home base made international headlines.

But that takes us to another point.  Curmie is proud of Lawrence, not because of the notoriety, but because they, my former neighbors, did something right.  Curmie was legitimately sad that Algerian team lost their elimination round game on the west coast Thursday night.  He may not be in Lawrence anymore, but Les Fennecs were his team, too (after the US). 

That notion of pride is intriguing, however.  Another video clip came across Curmie’s path this week.  It was of the late, great, George Carlin talking about, among other things, his problem with the slogan “proud to be an American.”  He suggests that “pride should be reserved for something you achieve or attain on your own, not something that happens by accident of birth…. You wouldn’t say I’m proud to be 5’11”.  I’m proud to have a predisposition for colon cancer…. If you’re happy with it, that’s fine: put that on your car.”

Speaking of pride: the first Pride events happened in the early 1970s, but Curmie wasn’t aware of them, or especially of their designation as “Pride” until later: after, in fact, the release of the Tom Robinson Band’s “Power in the Darkness” LP, which featured a song called “Sing If You’re Glad to Be Gay.”  Chances are, you’ve never heard it, Gentle Reader, because the TRB never had much influence west of the Atlantic; Curmie was working on his Master’s in England when the song came out in 1978.  Whether the TRB consciously rejected the notion of “pride,” or whether they’d never heard it (as Curmie hadn’t at the time), the result was to center on being “glad” or “happy” rather than “proud” of one’s sexual orientation, which of course is another of those accidents of birth that Carlin was talking about.

Pride in one’s own accomplishments is perfectly reasonable, of course, at least in moderation.  That extends, in Curmie’s world, to pride in the achievements of his former students, because in some small way he helped prepare them for that success.  And there is the crux.  George Carlin notwithstanding, pride in the good things that one’s nation has done makes some sense.  (So too, of course, is embarrassment at its transgressions.)  Indeed, taking pride in literally anyone’s honest attainments makes some sense; we’re all fellow travelers here, after all.  But that emotion is usually only a variation on happiness.  Curmie is happy the Knicks won the NBA title this year, but he’s not proud of them except to the extent that they manifested admirable qualities along the way: teamwork, refusal to give up, etc.  A player who simply has a good jump shot: cause for celebration, but not for pride.

For pride to truly manifest, however, there needs to be a personal connection.  Curmie is proud of the two former students who are off to grad school in the fall, but their perhaps equally qualified friends who never took my classes, not so much.  It would be nice to actually be proud to be an American.  The solution is obvious, and it isn’t capitulation.  We, all of us, need to become personally invested in creating a nation worthy of our pride.  That will take resolve, work, perhaps even sacrifice.  But we must, we can, we will, do this.  Roll up your sleeves, Gentle Reader.  We’ve got work to do.

Independence Day Contemplations on the Mythic, the Hallucinatory, and the Real

Independence Day posts have become something of a tradition for Curmie: not every year of late, but more often than not in the last few years.  In 2018 Curmie emerged from a writing hiatus to think of the day through Bruce Springsteen songs, especially “Independence Day,” which of course has nothing to do with the Fourth of July but does offer us this lyric: “Because there’s just different people coming down here now / And they see things in different ways / And soon everything we've known will just be swept away.”

Two years later, Curmie based his Independence Day musings on a line from the Aaron Sorkin TV series “The Newsroom”: the US is not “the greatest country in the world,” “but it can be.”  Two years later still, in 2022, Curmie headed his post with a quote from James Baldwin, “I love America more than any other country in the world and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.”

Last year’s “contemplations” included some stark observations about the state of the nation and the world, but ultimately expressed some hope that on this day at least we might start thinking of ourselves as Americans first and members of other taxonomies—political perspective, race, gender, religion, etc.—secondarily.

All of these posts revolve around the same theme: that our collective failure to achieve our aspirational goals for the country should lead not to despair but to resolve.  There was too much right about the USA to allow ourselves to be sucked into petty bickering and fear-mongering.

Curmie still believes in resolve, in fighting the good fight, but he despairs, nonetheless.  The two presumptive nominees for the presidency are both old men.  One is already an octogenarian, the other will be before the next presidential term expires.  Both spew incomprehensible word salads on a regular basis.  Neither is as sharp as he was even a couple of years ago, and neither was ever an intellectual giant.  Both are narcissistic, totalitarian, mentally suspect, and mendacious.  They manifest these traits in different ways and to different degrees, but all of them are strikingly obvious in both men.  In that 2020 piece, Curmie wrote that there are three fundamental criteria by which politicians ought to be judged: intelligence, integrity, and sanity.  Neither of these guys is even average at any of those standards.

We are left with fear, and perhaps a little whataboutism.  Seriously, Gentle Reader, what is the case for either of these candidates other than protecting the nation from the other guy… an other guy who threatens the very freedoms this fledgling nation sought to guarantee?  The problem is that both candidates are right about one thing if nothing else: the other guy is unfit for office.

Does Curmie think one of these guys is even worse than the other?  Sure, but that’s hardly the way things ought to work.  Eightyish years ago this country cast its lot with Josef Stalin in opposition to Adolf Hitler: not a happy choice, and one whose downside manifested itself for decades… but it was nonetheless the right call.  An alliance with Winston Churchill, whatever his faults, was still a lot more palatable.

Seventeen months ago Curmie surveyed the political field in the light of a then-recent poll showing that the majority of Democrats didn’t want Joe Biden to seek re-election.  The fact that Curmie titled his piece “2024 Election Preview: Be Afraid; Be Very Afraid” should tell you all you need to know.  As Curmie said at the time, “The problem here is not that the Democrats might lose the next election; it’s that the Republicans might win. And, alas, vice versa.”

Had Biden chosen to do what’s best for the country, he’d have dropped out of the race a year ago.  He might have even moved closer to securing the southern border, as Trump’s minions would have have less incentive to scuttle a bipartisan bill lest it give Biden a victory.  Much better, in their minds, to have a campaign issue than to solve a problem, after all.

Had Trump chosen to do what’s best for the country, he’d have accepted the rather resounding defeat he suffered in 2020 and faded away.  (Yeah, like that could have happened!)  Oh, and the Republican Party would have chosen someone at least a little less offensive to sane people.

Those rich white Christian guys who adopted the Declaration of Independence 248 years ago today did not succumb to either the negativity or the cowardice we see today.  They saw a vision of a glorious new nation, and they were ready to take on the greatest military power in the world to get it.  They knew that the fight, literal and figurative, would be long and intense.  And they were ready to take up the challenge.  We need to be the same. 

But how to do that?  By rallying behind a mentally declining old man because he may be less than honest but at least not malicious or evil?  “Our candidate sucks less than yours does” is less than an ideal rallying cry.  Communication theory suggests two kinds of persuasion: positive connections (X will lead to a good Y, and we therefore need to seek X) and negative connections (X will lead to a bad Y, and we therefore need to prevent X).  The campaigns so far are 90% (or more) negative on both sides.  We fear the consequences if “our side” loses rather than looking forward to the brighter future if we win.  This is both unsurprising and disturbing.  Alas, it’s also inevitable, as there isn’t a lot positive to say.

One of Curmie’s favorite new (in this context) terms is “hallucinatory,” referring to AI programs’ willingness, when the alternative is to admit that they don’t have an answer, to just make shit up.  It’s not exactly intentionally false; the program would have told the truth if it could have; it’s just that, like a politician, it doesn’t know how to shut up when it’s got nothing relevant to say.  Nor are all the untrue statements currently being hurled around by the pols and the pundits mendacious; some, perhaps many, are merely hallucinatory.  This is small consolation.

There is, as the title of a course Curmie taught as a grad student 40 years ago suggests, such a thing as the “American myth.”  The term as applied in that context uses “myth” in an anthropological sense: not as a fiction, necessarily, but as that which is believed on the basis of faith rather than evidence. To say that there is a lot of myth masquerading as reality on both sides of the political aisle is merely tautological.

Today, Independence Day, is the time to nevertheless celebrate the myth, and to pledge to seek to merge it with reality.  If we could keep the hallucinations at bay, that would be a good thing, too.

Please forgive the wonkiness of the formatting if you’re on a computer (it looked OK on my phone).  Blogspot being Blogspot.  Curmie spent 20 minutes trying to fix it, to no avail.

Some Independence Day Contemplations

A year ago on Independence Day, Curmie wrote this: “The standard line among liberals is that the system is stacked against anyone who isn’t white, male, rich, heterosexual, and Christian. The male and Christian parts of this aphorism certainly seem to have been upheld by SCOTUS of late.  We’ll see about the others.”  (Curmie was referring to the Dodds,  Carson, and Kennedy decisions.)

SCOTUS has now completed the clean sweep, as “white” in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, “rich” in Biden v. Nebraska, and “heterosexual” (and Christian) in 303 Creative v. Elenis all emerged triumphant in SCOTUS decisions issued in the last few days.  Or, rather, their opposites were unquestionably the losers.  All of these decisions were depressingly predictable along partisan lines. 

Certainly the profoundly unethical machinations of the evil (yes, evil) Mitch McConnell can be blamed for a lot of things… but not this.  Yes, the Carson and Kennedy decisions were both abominations, but the others were at least understandable, and most were actually the right call.  Dodds overturned a pretty bizarre rationale in Roe v. Wade.  We can object to the mendacity of the Trump appointees in declaring that Roe was “the law of the land” during their candidacy and then jumping at the first opportunity to reverse it.  We can also wonder whether Roe was so bad a decision that a right granted to American women for decades could legitimately be removed.  But as a matter of Constitutional law per se, Dodds is likely the correct ruling.

Similarly, whereas some form of recognition of racial diversity as a positive force in society would be preferable, the fact is that the Constitution is pretty absolutist about favoring one race over another.  And President Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan was indeed an overreach, probably in policy terms and certainly in terms of executive authority.

That leaves the 303 Creative case, which Curmie intends to come back to in a future post after he’s has a chance to really study the arguments.  There are some definitions to be clarified… which means there is at least a case to be made in favor of the SCOTUS decision.

Ultimately, what is revealed in all this is what we already knew: that politics will intrude into every decision, that Confucius was right that no set of laws can possibly anticipate every eventuality, and that the Venn diagram for that which is just and that which is legal is not a circle.  More importantly in terms of understanding where we are as a nation, someone is going to feel shortchanged (and not without at least some reason) by any decision made by SCOTUS or anyone else in the position to render a judgment.

Those perceiving others to have privilege will behave antagonistically.  Those perceived by others to have privilege will behave defensively.  At some point, it almost doesn’t matter if the descriptor is accurate.  But the key word here is “almost.”  More significantly, all of us have some form of privilege that others don’t; all of us lack some form of privilege that others enjoy.  Maybe we ought to remember that.

Curmie remembers a workshop at a conference he attended many years ago. Participants were divided consecutively by some distinguishing characteristic—say, race.  Then the workshop leader would say a few words, and we’d all be part of the whole again… only to be divided by gender, or rank in the professoriate, or institutional affiliation (R-1s over here, private liberal arts colleges over there, non-flagship state universities in that corner, community colleges way in the back…).  What we found was that whenever we were in the privileged group, we just stood there, awkwardly; when we were in a marginalized group, we chatted freely, even with people we’d never seen before.  There’s a lesson there.

The country is being pulled apart by factionalism.  The left and the right accuse each other of authoritarian tactics.  They’re both right on that score, which is about the only thing either is right about consistently.  And neither major political party has exactly bestowed its leadership roles on people of great insight or integrity.  The country is more divided than at any time since the time of Curmie’s youth and early adulthood: the days of race riots, “women’s liberation,” the Vietnam War, and Watergate.  We live, in the words of that supposedly Chinese curse, in interesting times.

There is plenty of reason for despair.  But for all his outward cynicism, Curmie is something of an idealist.  His describes this blog on his Facebook page as “a political blog for cynics and other romantics.”  So it is that he was particularly struck by a phrase in a 4^th of July musing by the redoubtable Ken White of Popehat: “an America that was more of the sum of its wrongs.”  What a felicitous description!

The ”more perfect union” envisioned by the Founding Fathers is a journey, not a destination.  There will be detours along the way.  Roadblocks may force us to double back from time to time to find the road that will ultimately lead us in the direction of our goals.  Some remarkably stupid utterances will no doubt emanate from our left and our right; we must not allow ourselves to be distracted, to get caught up in minutia rather than continuing our quest.

Our nation is comprised of people.  That makes us fallible on a good day, self-destructive on a bad one.  Independence Day may seem little more than a day off from work, a chance to eat some burgers, drink some beer, and watch some fireworks.  But there is something ennobling about it nonetheless.  For a few moments every year, we’re together as denizens of the same flawed but miraculous assemblage of disparate races, religions, socio-economic classes, and political views.  We are reminded, briefly but materially, that we not defined by our politicians or our differences.  Today, we don’t cease to Republicans, Democrats, or Independents, or any of the other labels that divide us.  But we do, ephemerally at least, put those taxonomies to the side and become Americans above all else.

Curmie isn’t naïve enough to think we’re all going to hold hands and sing “Kumbaya” (or “The Star-Spangled Banner,” for that matter) together.  We’re going to fight and scrap and call each other names.  We’ll punch each other in the nose (metaphorically, I hope).  But at the end of the day, perhaps… just perhaps… we’ll celebrate what we have and who we are, without losing sight of what we wish we might be. 

‘Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished. 

Independence Day Thoughts, Past and Present

Curmie hasn’t written here in almost three weeks.  Needless to say, it hasn’t been for lack of things to talk about.  SCOTUS alone would be good for at least two posts; Curmie may get to them, but he tries not to comment at any length on decisions he hasn’t read.  The Dodds ruling alone is over 200 pages, and the Carson and Kennedy decisions total another 120.  There are others, too…

There’s been a lot of other stuff, too, some of which I hope to get to, perhaps combining two or more stories into a single post.  But for now, perhaps it’s time to look at where we are in general terms.  The bad news is everywhere: the tanking stock market; soaring inflation; the Russian invasion of Ukraine; the fact that whoever the Presidential candidates in 2024 are, it’s extremely likely that Curmie will be voting for the less awful candidate instead of one he actually supports.  And then there are those SCOTUS decisions that are depressing in both their 1950s world view and their predictability.

But it’s the 4th of July, and that takes on special meaning this year.  A lot of Curmie’s Facebook friends are declaring that this isn’t Independence Day, it’s just Monday (with a day off from work).  One friend (a man, by the way) wrote “This year’s Fourth has a different feel to it, and it isn’t good.”  Curmie hears them.  There is, perhaps, less to be happy about, let alone proud of, today than many Independence Days past.  But, glancing back at some of what I’ve written on previous July 4s, there’s a trend. 

Two years ago, the piece was titled “’... but it can be.’ A 4th of July musing,” borrowing a line from the Aaron Sorkin series “The Newsroom.”  The context is that for all its chest-thumping, the US is not, in fact, the greatest nation in the world… but it can be.  Our reality doesn’t match our aspirations, but the solution isn’t to give up: it’s to do the work necessary to raise the nation closer to what we would like it to be.  It certainly isn’t to roll over and concede.  The otherwise depressing news from Ukraine should certainly have taught us this: to quote hockey great Wayne Gretzky, “you always miss the shots you don’t take.” Standing for something involves risk; Volodymyr Zelenskyy is an international hero for a reason.  Barry Goldwater meant something altogether different in declaring that “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice,” but those words themselves ring true: it’s just that Senator Goldwater and Curmie see “liberty” a little differently.

Four years ago, Curmie posted “Curmie Returns with a Bit of the Boss,” citing Bruce Springsteen’s song “Independence Day,” which has nothing to do with July 4, of course, but which still resonates on this day.  Especially relevant are these couple of lines: “Because there's just different people coming down here now / And they see things in different ways / And soon everything we’ve known will just be swept away.”  Disagreements about politics, for example, ought not—in most situations, at least—end friendships.  That doesn’t mean we should all “just get along.”  It does mean that unless we find some common ground on even contentious issues like gun control and abortion, society is going to unravel.  Alas, there are ideologues and authoritarians on both sides of such issues, and even recognizing the other side’s point of view as anything other than outright evil seems problematic for many.

One other early July post from years past also seems relevant.  Twelve years and two days ago, Curmie wrote “The Lessons of Easter Week, 1916,” pointing out that the Rising of 1916 in Ireland failed to achieve anything that looked like independence from England.  And yet, it did, because of English over-reaction: providing emergency medical care to James Connolly so he wouldn’t die before they could shoot him, allowing a British officer who ordered the deaths of three men almost certainly guilty of literally nothing at all to plead insanity and retire to Canada on a full pension, dumping the bodies of the executed revolutionaries in a mass, unmarked, grave and covering them with quicklime. 

The Irish people in general thought the Republicans (in the Irish sense of that term) were annoying at best… until English arrogance was allowed to show itself in full bloom.  Sinn Féin, the leading ultra-nationalist party, increased its membership in parliament from 6 members to 73 in the first election after 1916.  The more moderate Irish Parliamentary Party showed a concomitant drop, from 68 votes to 7.  Oh, and the Irish Free State came into being less than six years after the Easter Rising.

What all this means is that perhaps Michel Foucault was right: that history happens not in events themselves, but in the interstices between events.  The Dodds decision in particular was an event.  It now remains to see what history ensues.  It just might be that over-reaching claims another victim.

The current Supreme Court has shown itself to be little interested in obeying either precedent, even after promising to do so, in the case of Dodds, or in the separation of church and state in the cases of Carson and Kennedy.  As noted above, Curmie hasn’t read those decisions, and will speculate on his response only to this extent: that he’ll be considerably less than surprised should he learn that these cases were decided on the basis of political ideology rather than actual constitutional issues.

The standard line among liberals is that the system is stacked against anyone who isn’t white, male, rich, heterosexual, and Christian.  The “male” and “Christian” parts of this aphorism certainly seem to have been upheld by SCOTUS of late.  We’ll see about the others. 

It’s important to realize here that perceptions are as important as reality in some regards.  No, we shouldn’t trust emotionality over reason, but certainly recent events have served to make many people, and not just the easily persuaded, distrust the system, and that’s not a good thing.  There’s no question that we’re not going to see the protection of individual rights (other than gun-toting) from this SCOTUS, and they’re likely to be around for a while.  Short of drastic measures (which Curmie does not support), we’re not going to have the citizenry prioritized over the interests of powerful entities for a good long time.  President Eisenhower warned about the “military/industrial complex”; replace the military with reactionary Christianity and that’s pretty much where we are now.

For all this, the conflict is not over.  Curmie used to identify his political stance as “from the radical middle.”  That’s beginning to be true, again.  The party of Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell is indeed a threat to American democracy.  But so are quotas, racial set-asides, and cancel culture.  Seriously, is there anything positive to say about Biden/Harris other than perhaps, perhaps, they’re a little less mentally unstable, a little less incompetent, a little less wrong on the issues, and little less dishonest than their predecessors?  So we should just pack it in, right?

In a word: no.

Curmie is a huge fan of the University of Kansas basketball team.  They’ve won two national championships in the last 15 years.  In one championship game, the Jayhawks trailed by nine points with less than two minutes to play.  In the other, they trailed by 16 early in the game and at the half by 15.  They didn’t give up, and they were the ones raising the trophy at game’s end. 

All is not lost, today.  Curmie won’t guarantee we’ll get there—to the founders’ “more perfect union,” to MLK’s “promised land,” to the greatness of our collective vision.  But striving for less, accepting less, cannot be countenanced.  We must heed the words of James Baldwin cited in the meme above: “I love America more than any other country in the world and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.”  This is the opposite of the “love it or leave it” rhetoric of the warhawks of Curmie’s youth.  Rather, this is a call to arms to fight for what is right… and despite its manifold failings, this nation has much that is positive on which to build.

246 years ago, a collection of flawed but prescient men—virtually all of whom would be regarded as both racist and sexist by today’s standards—released a document, radical for its day, that changed the world.  It was, of course, a seditious if not treasonous act, and it took more than a little courage to embark on a course that would inevitably lead to conflict with the world’s greatest military force.  On that day, those 56 privileged white men pledged not only to each other but to a fledgling nation of their own creation, their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor.  The current reality may not be worth this sacrifice, but the aspiration is.  We forget or ignore that at our peril.

“...but it can be.” A 4th of July musing.

Curmie and Beloved Spouse don’t have HBO, so it’s only now we’re getting around to watching the Aaron Sorkin series “The Newsroom,” which we enjoy a lot (one suspects this would be considerably less true if we disagreed with its obvious political slant). We’ve only just finished Season 1, so no spoilers, please.

But watching the concluding episode to that premier season, complete with the reminder that the US is not the greatest country in the world, but it can be, on Independence Eve makes for the sort of interesting juxtaposition of ideas that regular readers of this blog will know Curmie loves to examine. Because, hokey and sanctimonious as that line (and indeed the entire series) is, it’s true. 

We’re not in a good place right now. There are charlatans and buffoons at every level of government. There is literally not a single elected official “representing” Curmie who is even average at all three of three basic criteria: integrity, intelligence, and sanity. POTUS fails miserably at all three (well, to be fair, he might not actually be as stupid as he seems). There’s a pandemic of a deadly virus that has been spectacularly mishandled by those in charge; they’ve managed not only to ignore the people who actually have expertise, but have attempted to denigrate them, as well. Literally millions of Americans have shown themselves to be a toxic blend of ignorance, arrogance, and recklessness in their own personal responses to COVID-19.

Curmie’s twin professions of education and the performing arts are under serious threat, yet he’s luckier than most. The national debt currently stands at over $75,000 per capita, and will undoubtedly soar higher in the months ahead. At a time when they know they’re under increased scrutiny, police forces across the country have responded with even more arrogance, even more brutality, than they’d hitherto exhibited; their response to charges of racism has been not to take measures to eliminate that behavior, but to brutalize some white people, too. The Democratic Party and its flagbearer offer little in the way of actual ideas; “we’re not as big assholes as those guys” is a difficult slogan to rally behind.

And yet… and yet…

Five years ago Curmie wrote that he feared another Kent State couldn’t happen:

I fear that, because such a declaration betrays a profound and disturbing apathy among today’s post-adolescents. This isn’t true of all late-teens and 20-somethings, but a terrifying percentage of my students can’t be bothered to fulfill their responsibility (yes, responsibility) as citizens and even vote, let alone write letters to Congresscritters or actively engage in political campaigns…. The overwhelming majority of people under 30 are liberal on social issues, but that doesn’t matter if making their voices heard isn’t worth a few minutes of their time.

The killing of George Floyd—or, rather, the release of the video showing that horrible event—changed that. Citizens of all ages are literally taking to the streets, asserting what should be the indisputable fact that Black Lives Matter. More to the point, they’re willing to do so in the face of rubber bullets and tear gas, and, as someone (Curmie regrets that he can’t remember who) said a few weeks back, if they’re willing to do that, they’ll get themselves to the polls in November, whatever it takes. 

The initial surge of engagement has died down, but Curmie senses something different this time than in all the other flashpoints since the Reagan administration. Curmie’s own students—would that they were representative of their generation!—are more politically engaged than any collection of undergrads since Curmie himself was in college and US soldiers were still dying in the rice paddies of Vietnam.

We are, in short, at a crossroads. Curmie truly believes that another four years of a Trump administration and a GOP-led Senate will signal the end of American democracy. There is much to suggest that all is already lost, that “liberty and justice for all” was never more than sloganeering, that the greed of the capitalist class and the immorality of their political symbiotic partners in perfidy will crush us all. But, like all true cynics (and like all educators worthy of the name), Curmie is a romantic at heart. He sees what could be, and his snark is deeply rooted not in negativity per se, but in the profound faith that we not only should, but can do better.

As most readers of this blog know, Curmie is a theatre director. Not every first rehearsal looks the same, but there’s one element always present: a hortatory message that if we set clear goals, work together, trust each other, and believe in those who believe in us, we can do great things. Sometimes, of course, it doesn’t work out; Curmie takes responsibility for some pretty mediocre (or worse) productions. But sometimes… sometimes we achieve more than anyone thought possible. We need that magic now. It will take work, dedication, faith, focus, and possibly even courage. But “a more perfect union” is within reach. We can do this.

Ours is not the nation of liberty, freedom, and righteousness we claim it to be.

But it can be.

Curmie Returns with a Bit of The Boss

A little under two weeks ago, Curmie sat in a classroom at the O’Donohue Centre for Drama, Theatre, and Performance at the National University of Ireland—Galway. He and his 17 students were doing a seminar/workshop with Dr. Catherine Morris. The session turned out to be an intriguing blend of theatre historiography lesson and writing workshop. One of the exercises was to go outside and find a locale in which to set a story (play, short story, whatever). This was followed by a 15-minute period of solid writing, and then by the choosing of a short passage of what had been written.

Curmie’s wandering took him to an old stone wall—Dr. Morris had mentioned the walls in passing as being Famine-era, so from the 1840s, in other words. What struck me was that, unlike virtually every other stone wall I’d seen in several trips to the west of Ireland, this wall had been mortared: inexpertly, at that. It occurred to me that whoever had constructed that barrier wasn’t a wall-builder (or a farmer) by trade. There were a lot of possibilities, but I settled on the notion that the laborer performed the service in some sort of barter arrangement for a scrap of food for himself or his family. This was the area hit hardest by the Great Hunger, after all… although Galway per se, with its access to the harbor and therefore to fishing, may have been slightly better off than its neighbors: Athenry, the setting of what is now the most famous song about that era in Irish history, is only two towns to the east on the train route to Dublin. Moreover, it was unlikely that the worker who constructed that stone wall would ever again have been allowed to pass through the barrier he created.

So it was that Curmie’s 15 minutes of writing took him to describing the location thus: “Our story is set in a place outside of the sight of God (or of one who cares, at any rate), of government, of charity, beyond the hope of salvation in any sense of that term. It is set in the real world, in other words.” The purplish melodrama of the foregoing explains why Curmie is more at home in this forum than in the world of fiction-writing, but it also suggests something of the tenor of our own times: I’m not sure that even a sensitivity to the plight of those mid-19th century Irish families would have taken me to that place a couple of years ago.

And that explains, in part, why Curmie hasn’t written anything in months: not a lack of things to say, but quite the opposite. If Curmie churned out 1000 to 1500 words every time the current Grifter-in-Chief did something outrageous, there would be time for little if anything else. The machinations of what passes for an opposition party would, if similarly commented upon, take up the remainder of the waking hours… and then some.

Inertia begets inertia. The longer Curmie went without writing, the harder it became to return. What story is sufficiently significant to mark a return, while being narrowly enough focused that a blog piece doesn’t morph into a book? Curmie has thought about answering netpal Jack Marshall’s challenge to defend a policy of what most readers of this blog would regard as reasonable gun control: but such a position paper requires far more work than I have time for right now. On the other hand, some idiot high school principal (apologies for the borderline redundancy) refusing to let the school valedictorian give a speech at graduation doesn’t seem like the topic around which to build a return after nearly a year of quiescence.

So. It’s the 4th of July. Two of Curmie’s friends (that he knows about) have already written excellent pieces around that subject: Gina Barreca looks at the notion of patriotism, using Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the USA” as a lens; Jackie Rosenfeld envisions the country as “a loved one who hasn’t been herself lately.” I can’t improve on these short essays, but I can steal an idea from my friend Gina: The Boss. 

The other Springsteen song which routinely gets trotted out at this time of the year is “Independence Day,” which of course has nothing to do with the national holiday, just as “Born in the USA” is a far cry from a jingoistic anthem. But whereas the song is about a dissolving father-son relationship, it includes these lyrics: “Because there's just different people coming down here now / And they see things in different ways / And soon everything we've known will just be swept away.”

What’s important here, for Curmie, is that last line, and the leap from difference of opinion to erasure of the other: in this case, the past as understood. Curmie has precisely one friend whom he knows voted for Donald Trump (as opposed to against Hillary Clinton). We were never really close, but we share some history, some interests, and some beliefs outside the world of politics as narrowly defined, and so we comment on each other’s Facebook posts from time to time. He posts political memes not infrequently. Some are funny, even if/when they support a candidate or a point of view I’m not so fond of; these I sometimes even “like.” Others offer objectively false information; sometimes I try to correct the record, but I’ve taken to blocking the source as an annoyance my life doesn’t need. Others I just disagree with; these, I ignore.

My point here is that the disagreement on many matters doesn’t have a profound effect on our relationship. Had this man ever been a really close friend, we might have grown more distant as a result of our respective views of the mendacious, xenophobic buffoon who now occupies the White House, but being friendly without being intimate works for us. Plus, a distance of 1500 miles or so also makes for a nice buffer.

It’s become clear, however, that the current administration seeks nothing less than the destruction of all that came before: there is no other way to account for the appointments of the likes of Scott Pruitt, Betsy DeVos, Ben Carson, Rick Perry… the list goes on and on. Curmie is old enough to remember when politicians of both parties held most of the same essential beliefs: they differed on the means to those ends, and often on priorities, but there was never a doubt that things like healthcare and education were valued by pols on both sides of the aisle. Not so much, any more. It would be silly to believe the Democrats have answers to the country’s problems, but it’s a dead cert that the Republicans don’t. There hasn’t been an important policy decision the GOP has got right in a decade or more. We have a President who thinks he’s an emperor, and a GOP Congress without the brains, the integrity, or the courage to tell him otherwise. Cue The Boss: “Rich man wanna be king / And a king ain't satisfied / Till he rules everything.”

And soon everything we know will just be swept away.

There’s a recent Gallup poll that shows that for the first time since they started asking the question in 2001, fewer than half of Americans claim to be “extremely proud” to be so. The numbers for Democrats and liberals are even lower: fewer than 1 in 3 Democrats and 1 in 4 liberals thus identify. Curmie is with the majority on this one. The country is headed by a bull-headed ignoramus who is a worldwide laughingstock, and he’s dragging the country down with him. Our policies on immigration, guns, and trade, in particular, are impossible to even describe, let alone endorse, to the satisfaction of Curmie’s friends abroad.

Secondly, the article linked above notes that the decline started at about the beginning of the 2016 election cycle. Given the presumed inevitability of Hillary Clinton as the Democratic nominee and the clown-car of Republican candidates, who wouldn’t start feeling a little embarrassment at the state of the union?

Moreover, it seems strange to take too much pride in an accident of birth. Curmie is reminded of the incisive words of George Bernard Shaw: “Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all others because you were born in it.” If one of my students or former students succeeds—gets a job or an award or a promotion—that’s a source of pride, because I might have had something, however insignificant or indirect, to do with it. But I can’t take a lot of pride in the fact that people born in the same country as me defeated Hitler before I was born. This country may have saved the world once, but it hasn’t been at the forefront in moral or ethical terms in a long while.

Still, the idea of America is worth fighting for, and the struggle to achieve the greatness that currently lies dormant or, worse, shackled, is indeed a worthy endeavor: one that can legitimately engender (yes) pride, for the honor inherent in the attempt as much as in any successes along the way. We may have forgotten the words of Thomas Jefferson or Emma Lazarus, but we can remember them again, teach them again, reinvigorate them. To that end, Curmie will try (no promises) to write a lot more in the year ahead. There’s a battle looming, a battle not merely worth winning, but imperative. New resolve, then. As Bruce might say, “No retreat, baby, no surrender.”

A Matter of Context: Yes, That Float Was Tacky

The world’s first great democracy, ancient Athens, showcased the strength of its government and citizenry by a variety of means, not the least of which was self-mockery. At the Lenaea Festival and later even at the Great City Dionysia, the polis staged rowdy and vulgar satires that left no one free from the scathing wit of the likes of Aristophanes, whose barbs were aimed at everyone from the strategos Cleon (The Knights) to Socrates (The Clouds) to the demi-god Dionysus himself (The Frogs). Variations on the theme appear in other governmental systems as well: the Feast of Fools, for example, or the wide political latitude granted to the court jester.

The phenomenon may seem counter-intuitive at first glance, but a little reflection leads us to the simple fact that the ability to laugh at oneself is a sign of strength, not weakness. This phenomenon has also played out in this country’s fairly recent history. One of the most reassuring moments in the period immediately after 9/11, for example, was when David Letterman went back on the air in New York. But we knew we were really going to be all right when he started telling Bush jokes again.

So there is nothing whatsoever wrong with satirizing American politicians, up to and including President Obama. Except, well…

In Norfolk, Nebraska this 4th of July, a float carried on the back of a flatbed truck showed, in the words of the Omaha World Herald’s Hunter Woodall:

... a figure standing outside an outhouse labeled the “Obama Presidential Library”.…
The figure was dressed in overalls and standing next to a walker outside of the outhouse. The hands and head of the figure were greenish and appeared to be zombielike; the hands were pressed against the sides of the figure’s head. Miniature American flags were atop the float and on the truck.

As one might expect, there were two fundamentally different responses, or rather two fundamentally different sets of responses. There were those, like Gloria Kathurima, who regarded the float as “not OK,” and indeed as “not just political [but] absolutely a racial statement.” Kathurima, who immigrated from Kenya as a girl and is now a naturalized citizen, was, according to the NBC affiliate in Sioux City, IA (about 90 miles to the northeast), “deeply offended.” The station aired an interview with her in which she says, “[Some people were] laughing, some people were pointing, some people were clapping, and that’s when I really became scared. I was thinking ‘What are you guys laughing at? What's remotely funny about this?’ I don't see any sort of policy being argued. I don't see any sort of stance being taken.”

We can argue with the characterization of racism—see Jack Marshall’s piece at Ethics Alarms, for example—but in a town in which whites outnumber blacks by a ratio of about 55:1, an apparently gratuitous insult to a black man who also happens to be the President of the United States does take on a certain distastefulness. Couple that with Kathurima’s daughter’s experience in the local school district—descriptions of the other kids’ not liking her, always wanting to touch her hair: this speaks to an alienation, whether or not inspired by racial animus. Intended or not, that’s going to look a lot like “a racial statement” to a lot of people, especially those with a little more melanin than average in a small Nebraska town.

But even if we discount the racial element altogether, we’re still left agreeing with Jack Marshall’s list of adjectives: “wrong,” “harmful,” “ugly,” “inept,” “unfunny,” and “divisive.” Ms. Kathumira is unquestionably correct that there really isn’t a policy statement to be derived from the display: just contempt for the current President. And here’s where we get to the other group of people mentioned earlier: the ones who approved the float, the ones who laughed—these are not the cream of the nation’s intellectual crop.

But H. Dale Remmich, who designed and built this monstrosity, is a special kind of incompetent. He claims to have had two impetuses for his creation: the “ongoing issues of the Veteran's Affairs administration” and “the government's handling of the Bergdahl scandal.” OK, if you tell me that I’m looking for the former in this float’s satiric intent, I might be able to find my way there with a guide dog—I guess the figure could be taken to be a veteran whose benefits got bound up in VA incompetence. (Remmich claims it was intended to represent himself… why it was so intended is less than entirely clear.) But the Bergdahl case? How in the name of all that’s holy are we supposed to derive that particular meaning, based on this ill-conceived and poorly constructed monument to self-described “political disgust”?

For all this, Remmich is an intellectual giant compared to the judges who gave the float an award and especially to parade committee member Rick Konopasek and announcer Wally Sonnenschein, whose mental superiority to a decaying cucumber is not immediately apparent. Konopasek, having just said that floats could and would be denied for being “morally objectionable,” meaning, apparently, that anything sexual would be banned, immediately proceeds to claim that “If we start saying no to certain floats, we might as well not have a parade at all.” Uh, Rick… you are, presumably, saying no to certain floats.

The prize-winner, however, is Sonnenschein, who, it seems, was able to keep a straight face while declaring that “I really don’t see anything wrong with the Obama float and I’m kind of amazed anyone is complaining.” The first part of his statement is no doubt true, more’s the pity. The second part is either utterly disingenuous or ol’ Wally would come in third place in a battle of wits with a corn dog and an anvil.

The fact is that context matters. If this parade has a history of poking a little fun at political leaders, so be it. But no one seems to be defending the float on those grounds, meaning that this year’s entry was probably an outlier: one that should have been denied a spot in the parade for being out of tune with the purpose of the event. Analogously, when Representative Joe Wilson interrupted the State of the Union address a few years back to shout “You lie” at the President, he was rightly rebuked not because his accusation was inaccurate (although it was, at least in that particular moment), or that he didn’t have the legal right to object to the speech, but rather because expressing himself in that way, in those circumstances, was boorish, disrespectful of the presidency (not merely of the President), and a disgrace to his own constituency.

One of the things that stuck in my mind this Independence Day season was the number of friends who rejoiced in the fact that for this one day, at least, we get to cease being members of a particular political party or religion or race or socio-economic status and simply be Americans. Remmich, Konopasek, Sonnenschein and their ilk seek to deny us that unity, and we are all the poorer for that.