Thoughts on a Play Curmie Hasn't Seen

Henry Drummond (Billy Eugene Jones) interrogates
Matthew Harrison Brady (Dakin Matthews)
in the Arena Stage production of Inherit the Wind.

The Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee classic Inherit the Wind has played an important role in Curmie’s life more than once.  He first encountered the play when he was in high school, at a time when he began having real doubts about organized religion in general and Christianity in particular.  Of course, this was in the early ‘70s, a time of turbulence in American society in general—the Vietnam War, civil rights, what was then called “women’s liberation,” campus protests, drug culture…  Not all of those things had much of a direct effect on Curmie, but what had always been taken for granted was increasingly being questioned.

The play, of course, was based on the “Scopes Monkey Trial” in Tennessee in 1925.  The irreverence of Henry Drummond, the Clarence Darrow character, shows towards Matthew Harrison Brady (William Jennings Bryan) really caught Curmie’s attention.  He was particularly fond of the bit about where Cain’s wife came from: “Figure somebody pulled off another creation, over in the next county?”  That’s the kind of snark that appealed a lot to an adolescent who wanted desperately to be rebellious but couldn’t quite handle the social discomfort.  Fifty-something years later, Curmie still approves.

Above all, though, Curmie was introduced to the idea that drama can be about something, not just pretty words or an engaging story.  He hadn’t put all the pieces together yet, but this play was indeed destined to play a role in Curmie’s career choices, especially the willingness to explore the more academic side of the business after it became clear that he had more intellect than acting talent.

Speaking of which…  A few years later, in the summer between his freshman and sophomore years of college, Curmie auditioned for a production of Inherit the Wind in the summer season of the local college, whose theatre building was literally across the street from his house.  He was cast, not in the role he wanted, but cast.  His role may be the most difficult he’s ever played: not because it was a lead (Curmie has had a couple, though not many), but precisely because it wasn’t.  Part of the difficulty was, no doubt, due to Curmie’s inexperience; things would certainly have been easier had he had a few more shows behind him before essaying the part. 

But a good deal of the struggle came from the role itself.  Curmie played Harry Y. Esterbrook, the announcer for WGN radio in Chicago.  In the trial scenes, which are at the center of the play, Esterbrook is on stage, facing the audience, every moment.  All those clichés about how “acting is reacting” were certainly true for that part.  Curmie had very few lines to hide behind or build a character around, and it was one of those roles that can’t really help the show, but sure can hurt it.

But what Curmie really got out of that production was something different.  He had no choice but to watch the other actors, and indeed really to pay attention to them.  While Esterbrook was watching Drummond or Brady or Hornbeck (the H. L. Mencken character), Curmie was watching actors more skilled—whether by experience, talent, or both—than himself.  He noticed the difference between standing on the line and before it, the subtle but noticeable turn of the head that set up a moment, the pause that made the audience listen more intently to what followed.  He also listened to the director, who was excellent in some ways but given to rants… and he saw the veteran actors pretty much ignore these outbursts.  If you’re screaming all the time, it doesn’t matter that you’re screaming now.  That applies to life in general, of course, but especially to the stage.

Curmie got better as an actor, in large part because of that show: not good enough to make a living at it, but he did play a few featured roles in student productions as an undergrad and even a couple of leads in amateur productions after graduation.  But without even contemplating the possibility that he might someday be a director, he learned a great deal from the experience of Inherit the Wind about how to do that job, too.

It is ironic, to be sure, that whereas Curmie did indeed end up acting in a couple dozen more plays and directing 60 or so over the course of his career, his job was as a theatre scholar, and it wasn’t until years after being in that production of Inherit the Wind that he realized that the play is about the Scopes trial in very much the same way that The Crucible is about the Salem witch trials of the late 17th century: in other words, as a stand-in for something else.  In both cases, that “something else” was the anti-communist fervor exemplified by investigations by Joseph McCarthy et al. in the Senate and HUAC in the House.  Whereas Arthur Miller concentrated on the false accusations, Lawrence and Lee were more about the suppression of ideas, but the two plays end up in pretty much the same place, and do so in similar fashion, by creating a fictive world that approximates but does not reproduce historical events.

Cates, of course, is found guilty.  His fine has been paid, but he has no future in this small Tennessee town.  Drummond recognizes this, but provides a bit of context: “You don’t suppose this kind of thing is ever finished, do you?  Tomorrow it’ll be something else—and another fella will have to stand up.  And you’ve helped give him the guts to do it!”  We are left with the confidence that Cates, probably more than the IRL person on whom he is based, will be fine.

While it is a little embarrassing that Curmie took literally years to figure out that a play written in the immediate aftermath of the McCarthy era might be about something more than just a 30-year-old trial in Tennessee, at least he’s perceptive enough to notice that there’s a reason for theatre companies in 2026 to choose this particular chestnut.  Being that “next fella” matters, especially as attempts by the right to suppress any expression they don’t like are springing up faster than zits on prom night.  

Curmie started to list the cases he’s written about just in this academic year, but that list got really long.  A couple of highlights, then: the cancellation of a student-directed play because there are… you know… <whispers> gay people in it; the professor who was fired and the retired cop who was charged with a felony (!) for posting memes insufficiently hagiographic about Charlie Kirk (certainly far less celebratory than Dear Leader’s recent outburst about the passing of Robert Mueller); the Texas A&M philosophy prof who was forbidden to assign a passage from Plato, and his colleague from a different department whose class was cancelled after it had already met because he couldn’t predict which specific days class discussion might veer into territory the censorial regime didn’t like.  And on and on. 

Plus, of course, we should mention the various felonies committed by ICE/DHS/whoever against citizens exercising their 1st Amendment rights, including but by no means limited to the murder of Alex Pretti.  Plus, of course, all of those incidents that Curmie posted about on his Facebook page but never wrote about… and the hundreds (no doubt) that Curmie never even heard about.  Yeah, it’s time for a production of Inherit the Wind, which, of course, also highlights the dangers of cherry-picking which sections of the Bible should form the foundation of a weltanschauung and which can be readily ignored.

So… anyway… there is such a production at Arena Stage in Washington, DC, presented in cooperation with Seattle-based The Feast company (director Ryan Guzzo Purcell is the founder of The Feast).  It is a trimmed-down version: there must have been a couple dozen actors in the production Curmie was in; this one has only ten, with a lot of doubling and only a sprinkling of jurors on stage at any given moment, for example.  As might be expected, this is a show created by Woke Folk: Drummond is black; Hornbeck is female (one presumes that the company got approval from the rights-holders for this change); the cast is listed alphabetically in the program, which also includes a land acknowledgment.  <Sigh.>

Curmie’s dear friend Paul Webb reviewed the production on his blog, which, Gentle Reader, if you’re a theatre-goer in the DC area, you should bookmark.  Paul touches on some curious choices in terms of time period: both in terms of costumes and, for example, the presence of a 50-star American flag, which strikes Curmie as more likely intentional than lazy (but he doesn’t totally reject the latter as a possibility).  A couple of other choices were curious: giving Brady, a Nebraskan, a southern drawl and even putting him in a white suit that make him look like a refugee from a KFC commercial for at least one scene, for instance.  (Bryan was from Illinois,)

Over at Ethics Alarms, Jack Marshall declares the production “stupid,” a “travesty,” and “absurd,” among similar endearments.  Is he right?  Up to a point, yes.  Part of the play’s appeal stems from the audience’s recognition of the historical reference: at some level, Bert Cates is John Scopes, Henry Drummond is Clarence Darrow, etc., and there’s no way some of what happens in this production could have occurred in the real world: no rational defendant would hire a black lawyer in Tennessee in 1925, for instance… not to mention the fact that the author of the textbook in question used evolution as a means of supporting eugenics and the alleged superiority of the white race, and it’s rather unlikely that a black man would be much interested in taking up that cause.

But this is a fictionalized version of events, not a literal re-telling with the “names changed to protect the innocent,” à la “Dragnet.”  For example, Bert Cates may be dating the preacher’s daughter, but John Scopes wasn’t; the locals may have been hoping Scopes would be convicted, but they weren’t hostile towards the outsiders (they welcomed the visitors who were spending money in their town); Bryan didn’t die until several days after the trial, in his sleep, not mere moments after the verdict was announced.  

Lawrence and Lee altered the story to make it more theatrical, in the same way that Shakespeare played fast and loose with his history plays.  (Curmie spent a very long time indeed re-learning the actual events of the Plantagenet and Tudor eras after first reading about them in plays like Henry V and Richard III.)  The changes wrought in Inherit the Wind tend mostly to increase the tension, making things more difficult for Cates: he has become more of a pariah in the community, and his personal and professional lives are more in conflict with each other.

What appears to have happened in the Arena production is to exaggerate these departures from history per se and their effects even more.  Without having seen the play in production, Curmie is loath to proclaim these changes successful or otherwise, but he suspects he’d have felt preached at and/or condescended to.  It’s important to note here that changing the time period, or the race and/or sex of a character aren’t inherently problematic: Curmie has indeed done all of the above, usually because there just wasn’t a good enough male actor or white singer or whatever.  Such problems are unlikely to present themselves in a professional production in Washington, DC.

In all probability, the squishiness of the time frame is intended to make the audience think about how this play, written over 70 years ago and referencing events of 30 years before that, is relevant to today’s world.  Curmie doesn’t think that’s necessary; rather, he’s going to trust the audience’s perspicacity (and his own story-telling ability) to make those connections without artificial assistance.  One of the essential elements of theatre is audience superiority: not just “I see what you did there,” but “and I saw it before the people in the row in front of me did.”  Whether a 50-star flag helps or hurts this process probably varies by spectator as well as by production choices.  (It would be interesting to know which came first: the decision to cast a black Drummond, necessitating the time change, or the time change, allowing a black Drummond.)

But all of this dances around the central issue: there’s a professional production of Inherit the Wind out there!  Curmie would definitely go if he was in the area, but there are four screen versions, including three that seem to be available on Tubi: the original 1960 film with a host of recognizable actors led by Spencer Tracy as Drummond and Fredric March as Brady (this is the only one Curmie has seen; it’s really good); a 1988 TV version with Kirk Douglas and Jason Robards; and another TV version, this one from 1999, with Jack Lemmon and George C. Scott.  Curmie might just have to check one of these out before long…

4th Amendment? It was here a minute ago...

A disconcerting number of stories over the past few months concern abuses by police: whether it’s showing up en masse in riot gear and spraying military grade pepper spray against peaceful demonstrators in New York, Chicago, UC-Davis, and elsewhere, or escalating New York City’s stop and frisk policies that generally result in nothing more than completely innocent (89%... and the majority of the arrests that were made were of the rather squishy disturbing the peace variety) non-white (91%) people getting hassled by a collection of euphemistically-termed “peace officers” strutting around showing each other how tough they are, with little if any concern for actually preventing or punishing honest-to-God criminal behavior.

In 2003, about 1 in 266 of these stops resulted in actually finding a gun. That rate of return would lead any sane person to discontinue the policy, even apart from other concerns. New York City Resident Idiot Blowhard Mayor Michael Bloomberg, of course, doubled down, actually encouraging more of the tactic, complete with its attendant constitutional issues and racial overtones. By last year, with over three times as many stops, the “success rate” (if we can call it that) plummeted to 1 in 879.

Bloomberg defends this clearly problematic practice by claiming, disingenuously at best, that some 560,000 murders have been prevented by these goon tactics. To say that this figure is absurdly inflated is, of course, obvious, although one suspects that there has been some positive benefit to creating a situation in which to be young (ages 14-24), male, and black or Hispanic is to be an automatic suspect: people who meet all three of those criteria represent less than 5% of the population, but they account for nearly 42% of stop-and-frisk episodes.

Yes, such people are disproportionately likely to commit crimes, too, but the essence of the American legal system and (wait for it) one of the signature tenets of western conservative philosophy is that individuals ought to be considered as such rather than as representatives of groups: not all urban 18-year-olds named Enrique are criminals, and they shouldn’t be treated as if they are.

More to the point: I. Don’t. Care.

If you search literally everybody without any provocation, chances are pretty good you’ll catch someone with a gun or drugs or an outstanding warrant. But the price is too high except in the McCarthyite universe inhabited by arrogant buffoons like Mike Bloomberg. Really, if the price of “law and order” is a state in which the authorities can do whatever the hell they want, I’ll take a little risk.

We are not yet at a point at which I, as a law-abiding citizen, have more to fear from the police, the TSA, US Immigration and similar agencies than I do from random felons. As long as I’m a good little boy and don’t do something outrageous like exercise my 1st amendment rights, I’m probably OK. But my chances of facing unprovoked hassling from someone in uniform are actually considerably higher now than when I was a long-haired post-adolescent with a draft card I hadn't yet decided what to do about. (Luckily, that decision was made for me.)

In short, the attacks on 4th Amendment injunctions against unreasonable search and seizure are even more profound than those on 1st Amendment guarantees of freedom of assembly. This was never more apparent than a recent case in Aurora, Colorado. Aurora, you may recall, is where they charged a six-year-old with sexual harassment for quoting from the lyrics to a popular song. They do grow ‘em stupid there, apparently.

This time, the police held over 40 people for over two hours because they had information—a “virtual certainty” in the words of Moron in Charge Police Chief Dan Oates—that an armed bank robber was in one of twenty or so vehicles stopped at a red light. So, naturally, the cops stopped everyone. But, as they say in the late-night infomercials, that’s not all. Let Officer Frank Fania tell it: “Most of the adults were handcuffed, then were told what was going on and were asked for permission to search the car. They all granted permission, and once nothing was found in their cars, they were un-handcuffed.”

Permission. Yeah, you’ve been handcuffed for no good reason, prior to being told what the hell is going on, by a police force that has just demonstrated that they don’t think they have to follow any rules. You know that you’ve been held up already for two hours while the cops strut their ability to hold ordinary law-abiding citizens without cause. Despite police bungling, you may yet be able to salvage your job, catch your flight, make it to your kid’s concert if you don’t do your shopping first, as you’d planned to do. You’re not really likely to make a reasoned decision about whether to stand on the part of your 4th-amendment rights that haven’t already been violated. You just want this stupidity to end. Notice also that “un-handcuffed” is different from “apologized to and told they were free to go.” A sloppier operation would be difficult to imagine.

When the case first made news, that bizarre quote from Chief Oates caught my attention. How could there be a “virtual certainty” if there was no description of the suspect? In other words, if the suspect is a 45-year-old white male, then I can understand a brief detention of white men who might be 45-ish. But all adults, for two hours? Not a chance.

Later, it came to light that the tip was actually in the form of a tracking device. This, of course, makes the situation even worse. It means that the police could simply have followed the suspect to his destination, which would have almost certainly been less crowded and, by extension, less dangerous for the public.

The smug declaration by police Officer Fania that “The result of the whole ordeal is that it paid off. We have arrested and charged a suspect” misses the point altogether. I don’t know whether Fania is that stupid or that disingenuous, but the fact that no one was hurt and the suspect was apprehended in this case was simply luck, not the product of effective police work.

The constitutional catastrophe, it turns out, was promptly pointed out. Jim Miller, described in the TV piece as a “legal expert” (whatever that means) points out that the “officers… who were involved involved couldn’t point to any of these people they stopped and say, ‘here’s my articulable suspicion for believing that you did something wrong.’”

Justin Marceau, who teaches law at Denver University, amplifies the point, noting that any detention of a person beyond a minute or two means the person has been seized:

What if the tip had been that the robber lived on my block– no other information? Could they detain and handcuff everyone who lives on my block in the hope of catching one bank robber? No, they couldn’t. The Fourth Amendment is pretty clear. I don’t have a problem saying the police violated these people’s Fourth Amendment rights.

Marceau also points out that none of the initial statements from the police expressed any particular interest in public safety. By this observation, neither he nor I, I’m sure, mean to suggest the police weren’t concerned about safety issues, but rather that the detention of dozens of people they knew to be innocent (they just didn’t know which one might not have been) was not prompted by safety concerns. This becomes relevant because it therefore does not allow an exception to normal constitutional protection the way random roadblocks to catch drunk drivers would. (I think that should be illegal, too, but I do see the argument.)

They said they did it to catch a bank robber. If their purpose was to catch a criminal then they need probable cause or reasonable suspicion for each person they detain. If 19 people were detained to catch one, then a one in nineteen chance that a person might be a criminal is not reasonable suspicion. Under settled law, this went way beyond what police are allowed to do.

Of course, the city attorney and “numerous other attorneys” think everything is just peachy. Apparently one becomes city attorney in Aurora when one is too stupid to be an elementary school principal.

Eugene Volokh, the constitutional specialist whose Volokh Conspiracy blog is on my blogroll, also weighed in on this case, noting that “Handcuffing someone generally requires probable cause to believe that they are guilty of a crime, or—in the context of a brief investigative stop—‘particularized suspicion’ to believe that the person is dangerous to the investigators.” He cites legal precedent—Manzanares v. Higdon and Ybarra v. Illinois, for those of you keeping score at home—and concludes

…even if the 5% chance that any particular driver was an armed and dangerous bank robber (1/19, even assuming that the tip was seen as having a 100% chance of being accurate) sufficed to provide enough “individualized suspicion” for a brief investigatory stop—perhaps, depending on the circumstances, including a patdown for weapons—I don’t think it would justify keeping all the innocent people handcuffed for an hour and a half.

It therefore sounds to me like the police might be facing 19 lawsuits (one in which the jury might not be that sympathetic to the plaintiff, and 18 in which they will likely be much more sympathetic), as well as one likely pretty solid suppression-of-evidence motion. I should hope that the police department and its elected superiors will also face some political blowback. Protecting the public from armed bank robbers is certainly very important; but handcuffing dozens of innocent people—in a situation where it was certain that the great bulk of the people were indeed innocent—for over an hour as part of this sort of blanket seizure strikes me as much too high a price to pay for this sort of law enforcement.

Yeah. What he said.

So, anyway, I thought this was going to be the “can you freaking believe this?” episode for the week. Then, between starting and finishing this piece, I read about the guy who had a diabetic seizure on his way home from Bible study, crashed his car, and was pepper-sprayed, clubbed and Tasered by police. To death. If these allegations are proven to be even within hailing distance of the truth, I take back what I said earlier about not yet being at the point where we have more to fear from the police (in the broad sense of that term) than we do from random criminality. We’re there. Enjoy the view.

Arrogant Intrusions into Personal Freedom and the House GOP (not about women's health issues)

“No matter how cynical I get, I just can’t keep up.”

—Lily Tomlin

Okay, so when was the last time Facebook was on the right side of a privacy issue? Well, they are this time—of course, it’s also in their selfish interest to be on the right side of this one, so they don’t get a lot of credit, but still….

Facebook’s Chief Privacy Officer, Eric Egan, issued a statement about the abhorrent policy adopted by some potential employers, including (especially?) law enforcement agencies, of requiring job applicants to surrender their passwords to Facebook and similar social media accounts as part of the interview process. Egan points out that:

As a user, you shouldn’t be forced to share your private information and communications just to get a job. And as the friend of a user, you shouldn’t have to worry that your private information or communications will be revealed to someone you don’t know and didn’t intend to share with just because that user is looking for a job. That’s why we’ve made it a violation of Facebook’s Statement of Rights and Responsibilities to share or solicit a Facebook password.

The legalistic tone is actually supported here: the insistence that an applicant reveal private information is indeed a violation of the TOS agreement with Facebook. In other words, the request is a de facto demand to break a contract: the fact that the most egregious offenders are law enforcement agencies—as, for example, the Maryland Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services and the McLean County, IL, sheriff's office, as spelled out in Manuel Valdes’s AP article last week—adds a piquant savor of irony to the whole mix.

It is, of course, all well and good for those of us not on the job market to be righteously indignant about this policy—and certainly all prospective employers who try this kind of crap should be called out on it, publicly—but the fact is that in this economic environment, applicants will do pretty much anything to get a job. This makes it all the more important that employers act responsibly, and all the less likely that they’ll actually do so.

Employers can get away with being arrogant asshats, so they’ll jerk off to their little power plays at least until such time as the pool of well-qualified candidates is significantly affected either by lack of applications to begin with or by enough job-seekers telling the personnel office to perform an act most easily accomplished by especially limber hermaphrodites. More importantly, this affects all of us, not just those who are being extorted directly. If you give up your password, my privacy as your friend is compromised, even to the extent that an employer who has no real intention of hiring you, anyway, now has access to my private communications to you.

It’s no wonder Facebook is a little grumpy about this. I find myself constantly warning my students about things they have released to the public. And Facebook has always been rather free and easy with other people’s privacy—making default privacy settings as loose as possible, sometimes without as much as telling users of new policies. This Machiavellian hellishness is worse, however: if I’m taking reasonably good care of my own privacy, I have relatively little to fear from your actions—I need to expect that anything I post to your wall, for example, will be read by people who are strangers to me or even antagonistic towards me. But I can do something about that, simply by not posting anything I’m not perfectly happy to have associated with me by everyone from my boss to my students to my teenaged niece.

Giving over your log-in credentials, however, means that your prospective employer has access to my private messages to you: the one about my loved one’s terminal illness, my decision to look for another job, my venting about my boss (which I’d only do to you, because I rightly trust your integrity and trustworthiness, although I underestimate your economic desperation). And as if that weren’t enough, some hack in the personnel office also gets to find out what sites I’ve liked: they’re not interested in the fact that I’m a New York Rangers fan, or even that I like the Grateful Dead… no, they care about the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network; Being Liberal; Don’t Invite Anyone Who Thinks Ayn Rand Makes Sense to Your Next Party; The Other 98%. Because thus invading my privacy means, to their McCarthyite mentality, that you hang around with undesirables… even if I haven’t seen you since we were in high school together almost 40 years ago and we weren’t really close even then. Of course, this all presupposes that the little parasites are even pretending to be doing their job and not just feeding their voyeuristic fantasies: a hasty assumption, to be sure.

Oh, how I wish the people conducting these little assaults on a free society weren’t dead stupid. I’d love it if someone asked for a Facebook password and hired the first person who showed appropriate common sense and discretion and told them fold it five ways and shove it where the sun don’t shine. Alas, the folks perpetrating this unethical and sleazy attack on personal freedom are generally dumber than the proverbial box of rocks. One of my students reminded me this morning of the late, great, George Carlin’s observation: “Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize that half of them are stupider than that.” Yeah, that seems rather pertinent about now.

The only slightly less sleazy first cousin of this tactic is to insist that employees “friend” their boss or some minion in the personnel office or whatever. This is still intrusive, still unethical, but it can be circumvented, and it’s not going to open up other people’s lives to scrutiny. Of course, there’s still something creepy about this business: I consciously avoid friending students or others who might think they’re under some obligation to respond favorably to a friend request. I will respond to their requests to me, but they must initiate the process. The result is that there are a number of students with whom I’m rather close but who are not FB friends, whereas others whom I know only slightly are friended (some are granted only limited access to my page, however). But that’s OK. I really have no particular desire to be a stalker.

The reason I’m writing about this is more than simply astonishment at the audacity of the perpetrators, however. You see, Congressman Earl Perlmutter (D-CO) tried to do something about this situation. He introduced an amendment to a House bill, attempting to allow the FCC to prevent the practice:

Nothing in this Act or any amendment made by this Act shall be construed to limit or restrict the ability of the Federal Communications Commission to adopt a rule or to amend an existing rule to protect online privacy, including requirements in such rule that prohibit licensees or regulated entities from mandating that job applicants or employees disclose confidential passwords to social networking web sites.

And not a single Republican in the whole damned House of Representatives voted for it. Really.

OK, OK, so Perlmutter’s scheme may have been more political than substantive. It was a motion to re-commit. That means he wanted to send the whole bill (the Federal Communications Commission Process Reform Act of 2012, to be precise) back to committee. He wanted to delay the passage of the bill, in other words. He could have introduced the amendment per se, and didn’t. He chose instead a tactic that, had it been successful (in legislative as opposed to political terms), would have thwarted, at least for a while, legislation intended to make the FCC more transparent. Wait… I thought it was the Democrats who wanted transparency and the Republicans who were obstructionists. But, then again, it was the Democrats under Clinton who played around with the Clipper Chip and similar nonsense (albeit the erosion of 1st Amendment rights by the PATRIOT Act—the most perversely ironic political term since Bolshevik—trumps all). You can’t tell the players without a scorecard.

Anyway, Greg Walden (R-OR), the chairman of the Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Communications and Technology, argued that Perlmutter’s amendment “wouldn’t protect the consumer.” Ummmm… were any of us talking about consumers? In any case, Walden argued that the amendment wouldn’t work (why not?), all the while pretending that his objections weren’t just as disingenuous as Perlmutter’s motion. The Republicans wanted their bill passed, and the Democrats wanted to play for time. But Perlmutter and his cohorts also know that this topic is a political winner for their side, especially if they can maneuver the GOP into opposing this obviously people-friendly legislation. The House Republicans would have to be pretty stupid to fall for that little subterfuge. Needless to say, they are, and they did.

Walden might even be telling the truth that he really is interested in privacy issues and really is willing to talk further about the topic. But the political horse is already out of the barn. The Democrats might not have gotten everything on their wish list, but they accomplished their principal objective of those within their reach: not really able to influence legislation, they succeeded in making the Republicans look bad… not that those guys need any help. It was a cynical ploy, and it worked. Ah, the political life…

There’s a Bob Dylan lyric that sums up the Democrats’ strategy:

You didn't know it
You didn't think it could be done
In the final end he won the wars
After losin’ every battle.

The song? “Idiot Wind.”

Apt.