Streisand Effect Redux: Clayton (NC) High School

Leen Hijaz giving her speech

Last week, Curmie wrote about Jonas Hole, who gave the salutatorian address at his graduation ceremony at D’Iberville High School in Biloxi despite being misgendered by his principal.  This time, the student graduation speaker to make national headlines is Leen Hijaz, who wasn’t allowed to finish her valedictory speech at Clayton (NC) High School, outside Raleigh. 

Well, that’s not quite accurate.  First off, it was technically a “welcome speech” as opposed to a valedictory address per se.  Curmie isn’t sure why that matters, but perhaps it does.  Secondly, it appears that she was able to finish the part of her remarks that had been pre-approved by the administration.  It was only the add-on at the end that caused controversy.  You will no doubt be shocked to learn, Gentle Reader, that Ms. Hijaz is not the first-ever adolescent to disobey the strictures of authority. 

Anyway, school principal Melissa Moore Hubbard stomps onto the stage and pushes Hijaz away from the podium, allegedly threatening not merely to withhold her diploma, but to deny her graduation.  And what heinous invocation of Satan himself did Hijaz utter?  Well, this:

Before I leave the stage, there is one more thing I have to say.  Every single person here has a voice, and we are privileged to have the freedom to use it when so many people around the world are struggling and suffering to be heard.  Whether it’s the millions suffering in Palestine, Sudan, Congo, Afghanistan and so many other countries around the world, or the families being torn apart by ICE, these are not distant issues. They are happening right now as I speak. My point is, we’re not given a voice to stay silent.

(She does repeat a couple of phrases; she explained in a TikTok post the next day that the principal had been yelling at her, causing her to “stutter.”)

You will note, Gentle Reader, that her words were a description of reality.  Are the young adults of the near future going to face a world in which the crises she describes are all too present?  Yes.  Are we, as Americans, however much we might feel constrained by this or that censorial asshat, “privileged” in terms of financial stability, educational opportunities, and constitutional guarantees of free expression, when compared to the inhabitants of much of the rest of the world?  Yes.  Is it appropriate for those with the ability to use their voices for the sake of the common good for them to do so?  Yes.  Are there millions of people in those specified locations (and many others) who are “struggling and suffering”?  Yes.  Are there families being torn apart by ICE?  Yes.

Hijaz argues that “Nothing [she] said was political; it was pure awareness.”  Curmie agrees.  There is no condemnation of Israel for events in Palestine, no insistence that the US intervene to stop the Ebola outbreak in Congo, and so on.  Yes, the line about ICE comes rather close to a comment on that agency’s cowardice, intentional cruelty, and perfidious over-reach, but those descriptors are Curmie’s, not hers.  She may (likely does) agree with Curmie, but all she said was an objective truth.

For her deviation from what we suspect was the pabulum of the approved script, she was shunned by the powers-that-be, or at least so she claims.  The superintendent and several other bigwigs put their hands in their pockets rather than shake her hand when the apparently-not-actual-diplomas were distributed.  Her friend who gave her a hug onstage was similarly told that her diploma would be withheld.  As if denying the high school valedictorian (who graduated a year early, by the way) a piece of paper matters in the least, right?  

Curmie is pretty sure he hasn’t seen his high school diploma in decades, although it might be in one of those boxes he salvaged in 2022 after selling what had been his father’s house.  It’s the transcript that matters, and we’re talking about a valedictorian here; she’s planning to attend the University of North Carolina, and it’s a pretty fair bet she’ll get her degree.  (The school now says she did get her diploma; we trust her friend did, too.)

What’s on display here is the puerile petulance of an all-too-prevalent strain of high school administrators: those whose self-importance completely outshadows any actual competence they might once have had.  Even threatening to withhold a diploma is an act of petulance, a last gasp of self-entitled relevance, and, as someone pointed out on Reddit, an excellent way of turning a minor incident into embarrassing headlines on a national scale.  And that sure did seem like a lot of applause from the audience when Hijaz went off-script.  Maybe reading the room would be a good thing. 

OK.  Let’s grant that deviating from the approved script broke the rules, but in this case, even though it was intentional, was the equivalent of going 57 in a 45 when you’re the only one on the road, not of stealing the car.  Talk to her privately after the event, express displeasure, and move on.  But something Hijaz said on TikTok really stood out: “Obviously, if I said what I was going to say at the end of my speech, if I submitted it to the school, they would have disapproved it immediately, because of how racist they are.”  The first part of that sentence is rather predictable.  Whether it’s true, Curmie can’t say, but young Leen seems a bright lass, and she knows the environment better than we do. 

But attributing Hubbard’s over-reaction to racism seems a bit much.  Curmie has no doubt that Hijaz faced actual racism at multiple points in her academic life.  When she references “all of the stuff that I personally have experienced as a Muslim Arab girl going to school here in Johnston County,” Curmie gets it.  But whether this particular incident in linked to racism is another matter.  As Curmie has said repeatedly for a very long time, all racism is stupid, bur not all stupidity is racist. 

Curmie suspects that if Suzy Creamcheese (bonus points if you catch the Frank Zappa reference, Gentle Reader) had the audacity to stray from the censored pre-approved script to actually say something in a graduation speech, Hubbard’s reaction would have been the same.  It may also be worth noting that whereas Hijaz claims she lives in “a very white area,” US News and World Report lists the minority population at 61%, so there may be some questions of perception here.  (To be fair, she also says “we do have a lot of diversity, still.”)  It’s also important that Hijaz’s comments about racism come after the graduation ceremony.  They are controversial in and of themselves; those tacked on to the end of her speech were not.  You know what was problematic?  The three (Christian) prayers at a public school event.

What Hijaz definitely did not do was to “make it all about [her]self,” as she claims Hubbard accused her of doing.  There are two variations on the theme of irony at play here.  One is the radical misinterpretation of an attempt to represent in some small way the millions of people who, through no fault of their own, are de facto silenced by their circumstances: the exact opposite of her intentions.  The other, of course, is censoring comments about how people ought to be free of censorship.  <Sigh.>

Finally, of course, there’s the Streisand Effect.  As suggested above, the Reddit post about the incident shows two things: overwhelming support for Hijaz rather than Hubbard, and frequent mentions of the simple fact that no one outside the immediate audience would have paid the slightest attention were it not for the attempt to silence a student, a valedictorian, at her own graduation.  Leen Hijaz’s actions are not above reproach, but she’s unquestionably the more sympathetic figure in this episode.  Forward-Bank8412’s comment on Reddit reads, “Streisand this shit, internet!!”  Curmie is just doing his part…

"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, only a few days before the concert.

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.

Musings on the Afroman Defamation Case

Afroman dressed up for his court date.

Curmie has one piece about 80% written and two or three others pretty much blocked out in his head, but let’s go with the Saga of Afroman, who successfully defended a lawsuit for defamation this week.  If ever there was a definition by example of the Streisand Effect, this is it.  Curmie admits he’d never heard of Afroman (Joseph Foreman), or of “Lemon Pound Cake,” (the best-known of his responses to a botched raid on his property) or indeed his Grammy-nominated single “Because I Got High.”  But now, even the hopelessly uncool Curmie knows who he is, and, perhaps more relevantly, about that raid in August of 2022.

That raid, conducted by the sheriff’s office in Adams County, Ohio (that’s southeast of Cincinnati, along the Kentucky border), happened when our hero was out of town.  Yes, they did indeed kick the door in, cause considerable damage to the gate, cut the cords to his home security video system, and seize a significant amount of cash.  The warrant was for drug trafficking and kidnapping, and there was no evidence that could lead to a prosecution.  Oh, and the cops apparently refused to pay for the financial damage they caused, let alone the trauma inflicted by waving assault weapons in at least the general direction of Foreman’s kids, both tweens at the time.

That said, the warrant existed, and it wasn’t issued by the cops themselves.  If there was indeed a reasonable suspicion that there was kidnapping involved, then the whole weapons-drawn, kicking-down-the-door business is at least understandable.  And we have only Afroman’s testimony that the amount of cash returned was less than what was seized.  Indeed, we have only his word about the destruction to the property, although there doesn’t seem to be any denial forthcoming from the sheriff’s office.  More troubling are the lyrics to the newly released “Randy Walters Is a Son of Bitch,” which includes the line “that’s why I fucked his wife and got filthy rich.”  Completely apart from the language issue, there’s the suggestion of impropriety by Walters’s wife, and he’s got no legitimate beef with her, even if he does with her husband.  It appears to be the case that the officers in question were, at least at the raid itself, simply doing their jobs and executing a warrant; it is certainly true that some of the stuff in those videos was vicious and vengeful.

Anyway, the cops (seven of them!) sued for defamation to the tune of $3.5 million.  There were all kinds of courtroom histrionics, including Sgt. Walters testifying that he doesn’t know whether the allegations about his wife are true or not and Officer Lisa Phillips crying on the stand when viewing one of Afroman’s taunts (proving either that she doesn’t have the stuff to be a cop or that she got some really bad advice from her attorney).  Afroman himself, of course, completely controlled the narrative during his own testimony, remaining steadfastly on the offensive.

And that’s certainly one of the messages here: don’t sue someone who is smarter than you, funnier than you, accustomed to being a performer, and rich enough to hire a top-notch legal team... certainly not for a jury trial.  But should those be legitimate criteria?  Everyday folks have rights, too, and the cops were initially highlighted not because they did anything wrong, per se, but because they were easily identifiable.  There seems to have been little if any attempt to place blame on whoever provided the presumably false testimony that led to the warrant, or on the judge who signed off on it.  And surely the majority of the cops on the scene shouldn’t be expected to pay for repairs to the premises with their own money.  Moreover, we can reasonably assume that the money Afroman raised directly or indirectly from a viral video far exceeded the cost of the repairs to his residence.

It’s also true that the notion of being a public figure is, or at least ought to be, on a continuum.  At one end of the spectrum are celebrities of whatever description; at the other end are the overwhelming majority of us, people unknown except to their friends and associates.  The county sheriff would be between those extremes, but closer to the latter than to the former.  Is he a sufficiently “public individual” to allow greater latitude to someone ridiculing him, even up to the point of saying things that are gross exaggerations or even untruths?  Are his subordinates?

Is it relevant, therefore, that some of the things Afroman sings about never happened?  He wasn’t there to hear the glass break, for example.  He also says in his court testimony that his kids saw him being threatened.  They didn’t, and there’s a difference between what he puts in a song and what he says on the witness stand. 

Curmie’s initial response to the verdict in the Afroman case was a combination of celebration and laughter.  That’s in large part because the overwhelming majority of cops Curmie has encountered—whether he was reporting a crime, getting stopped for speeding, or anything in-between—have been self-important jackasses, and the small-town version is particularly obnoxious, because they’re also, generally, rather stupid.  Curmie shouldn’t assume that the small-town cops in question here fit that description, but that hypothesis has so far not been disproven.  And the fact that the ACLU and a host of other civil liberties organizations applauded the verdict tells us something.

It’s unsettling, though, that Afroman is also pretty much a jerk.  He’s clever and charismatic, but that doesn’t make him other than cruel and vindictive.  It’s also true that, as someone said in a comment on one of those YouTube videos, this episode has extended his career by 15 years.  Yes, his legal victory brought a refreshing break from whatever other stories appeared in the daily doomscrolling, but there’s something disquieting, too.

Afroman is the hero we need.  Whether he is the hero we deserve is up for debate.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Freedom of Expression and the Duty to STFU.

Curmie has written a lot of late about matters relating in one way or another to the notion of freedom of expression. We had the art history professor punished for doing her job (and for going out of her way not to offend or embarrass students), the cancellation of high school plays in Florida and in Ohio, the Associated Press’s ridiculous campaign against “the” and the University of Southern California’s Social Work Department’s even sillier skittishness at the word “field,” Stanford’s administration’s getting all in a tizzy that someone would actually read Mein Kampf, and a Broadway star’s narcissistic inability to take a joke. You could probably include the insistence that the globe immediately stop rotating because a football player suffered a medical emergency. 

All of these episodes at least appear to have originated on the left, where hypersensitivity, virtue signaling, and garden variety silliness are regarded as exemplary characteristics. The right, not wishing to be left out, exercises its desire to squelch voices other than their own by governmental action, packing the board of a state university with True Believers, reacting to “threats” they know damned well to be imaginary, and seeking to de facto eliminate the protections of tenure. 

There are plenty of similar stories out there now. The lead has to be that FIRE (the Federation for Individual Rights and Expression) has now released its list of the 10 Worst Colleges for Free Speech. Curmie wrote about the case at Hamline (linked above), the Georgetown case, and, over a year ago, about part of the debacle at Collin College. A couple others prompted links on Curmie’s Facebook page, but he never wrote about them here. And a couple escaped his attention altogether. Curmie did write about cases that didn’t make the Top-10 cut at FIRE here and here. The goal is to cover over half of next year’s FIRE Top-10 while the stories are still news. We shall see. 

Also in the news of late is the case of Jeff Gray, who has filed suit against a pair of small-town southern police departments for arresting him, thereby depriving him of his 1st amendment rights. His alleged crime: holding a man-made sign reading “God bless the homeless vets” on public property. Is Gray (and FIRE) grandstanding? Of course, if for no other reason than you can pretty much count on cops to do something stupid if given the opportunity. He dangled the bait, but they took it. 

Not all of these cases are on this side of the big pond, of course. The Welsh Rugby Union has banned the Tom Jones classic “Delilah” from the Principality Stadium choirs’ song list because of the WRU is “respectfully aware [whatever the hell that means] that it is problematic and upsetting to some supporters because of its subject matter.” 

OK, a couple of things. First, it is indeed a song about a man stabbing his unfaithful lover in a fit of jealous rage. There aren’t a lot of other ways to interpret “She stood there laughing / I felt the knife in my hand and she laughed no more.” That’s not a healthy respect for women we’re talking about. Still, it would seem that the authorities might have noticed that previously in the over half-century since the song’s release. (To be fair, the song was dropped from halftime playlists in 2015.) 

Curmie does admit, however, that he’s heard the song dozens of times and never paid much attention to those lyrics, concentrating on the famous chorus, which is also the part spectators want to sing along to at rugby matches. Of course, it’s not the only song with similar lyrics—“Hey Joe,” best known in the rendition by Jimi Hendrix, comes to mind immediately—and one would have thought that if the song is so problematic, it wouldn’t have been featured at the Diamond Jubilee concert. 

Curmie has no difficulty understanding why some people would not want to hear the song featured at a rugby match, especially at the forthcoming Six Nations competition. And Welsh rugby has apparently come under scrutiny for racism, sexism, and homophobia of late. So the move has merit, even if it does seem to substitute for actually doing something about actual substantive problems. 

But Curmie also has a little experience of such things. He entered Dartmouth College shortly after the unofficial “Indian symbol” was officially discontinued. The urge to append a chant—“Dart-mouth! Indians! Scalp ‘em!”—after the sort of unofficial football fight song was overwhelming among the upperclassmen, mostly, no doubt, as a display of post-adolescent defiance and bravado. By the time Curmie was a senior, the chant had pretty much disappeared. 

But undergraduates tend to leave after four years; rugby fans are likely to be around a lot longer. Curmie predicts a variation on the Streisand Effect, with the song being sung louder and more often by fans, who are not subject to the ban, as they don’t represent the WRU. As “Durham Steel” tweeted, “You do realise the first song Welsh rugby fans will sing, after the national anthem, will be Delilah & they'll sing it non stop i reckon just to prove a point, just like the English did when tried to ban Swing Low.” (There was an attempt a few years ago to ban “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” the unofficial anthem of English rugby, for being culturally appropriative.) 

But this post isn’t really about any of these attempts to limit free expression. It’s about when someone in a position of authority is too stupid to shut up. In Providence, Rhode Island, assistant principal at Mount Pleasant High School Stefani Harvey sent out an email from her school account, reading,

Hello team:

Please see the message below regarding your consideration for an urgent matter to support one of our own students here at Mount.

We have a student who came to America with “Coyote”, which is a group that helps people. This group gives you a time frame to make a payment of $5000 to those, who bring them into the states.

Our student needs our urgent support to raise another $2000 to meet his goal of $5000 by February 1, 2023.

Please considering helping if you can by donating on Friday. Melanea will be around to collect money between 8:00-8:45am.

And yes, it hurt Curmie to reproduce that email’s manifold errors. One thing four decades in the classroom teaches you is how to distinguish between the inevitable typos we all commit and the inability to write at the 6th grade level. This is the latter. 

No, not these guys...

Even more problematic than an assistant principal who ought to be in middle school, however, is one who ought to be in federal prison. Can it be possible that she doesn’t know that “coyotes” are human traffickers? Even if that were the case, how is it “helping people” to charge them $5000 to get into the country? 

More to the point, as Jonathan Turley points out, “Harvey was trying to help the student pay off the coyote fee, but there is a little problem with this fundraiser: transporting aliens is a federal crime. Even worse, these ‘contracts’ for human smuggling often become human trafficking enterprises where those who cannot pay are used in prostitution or the drug trade.” No one wants the student to become victimized further than has already happened, but (quoting Turley again):

It is not known the status of the student beyond the illegal entry. It is a federal crime under 18 U.S.C. 1324(a)(1)(A)(i) and 1324(a)(2) to knowingly bring or attempt to bring into the United States an alien into the country illegally. Section 1324(a)(1)(A)(ii) makes it a crime for any person, with knowledge or reckless disregard of the alien’s illegal immigrations status, to transport an alien within the United States by any means of transportation.

It is also a crime to harbor an illegal immigrant or shield the alien from detection. Section 1324(a)(1)(A)(iii). It is also a crime under Section 1324(a)(1)(A)(iv) to encourage or induce an alien to come to, enter, or reside in the United States as well as conspiring or aiding or abetting in any of these crime. Section 1324(a)(1)(A)(v). This is a direct campaign to raise money for an unlawful payment to a human trafficker.

That’s not good, right? The principal, Tiffany Delaney, did what damage control she could early on, but Harvey is now on paid leave. PAID LEAVE? For committing a federal crime that it’s obvious she committed? What the hell would it take to get fired? 

Curmie’s more conservative friends suggest that the answer to that question is to be other than a black lesbian who, in their view, was hired to begin with to fulfill a DEI quota rather than for any actual credentials. Problem is, in this case, they’re probably right.

Curmie Contender: Dew Yew Bee Leave This? Edition

Sometimes people just jump up and down and scream that they want to be in the running for next year’s Curmie Award, given to the person or institution who most embarrasses the profession of education. Well, metaphorically, at least.

Clarke Woodger: Curmie Contender

Such an eager contestant is one Clarke Woodger, the owner of the Nomen Global Language Center, a private school in Provo, Utah that specializes in variations on the theme of English as a second language. According to an article in the Salt Lake Tribune, Woodger fired his social media specialist, for writing about homophones. Yes, really.

Tim Torkildson wrote a blog on the school’s website explaining what homophones are—words that sound the same but mean different things and are often spelled differently. This would seem to anyone with an IQ above room temperature to be an obvious topic to discuss with ESL learners: one of the most difficult things about English is that we have far more homophones than most other languages do. While this adds to the richness of our discourse—and allows for many more puns and other word-play—it’s a particularly arduous task for non-native speakers (Nomen caters to foreign students seeking admission to American higher education) to differentiate between “pairs” and “pears,” “be” and “bee,” “road” and “rode,” and the like.

Well, let Torkildson tell it:

This week I was fired for writing a blog about homophones for an educational website.

“I’m letting you go because I can’t trust you” said Clarke Woodger, my boss and the owner of Nomen Global Language Center. “This blog about homophones was the last straw. Now our school is going to be associated with homosexuality.”

I said nothing, stunned into silence.

“I had to look up the word” he continued, “because I didn’t know what the hell you were talking about. We don’t teach this kind of advanced stuff to our students, and it’s extremely inappropriate. Can you have your desk cleaned out by eleven this morning? I’ll have your check ready.”

To be fair, Woodger claims that his concerns with the blog had nothing to do with homosexuality, and it may be true that the blog entry in question, which has been taken down, was problematic in other ways. Still, the Tribune’s Paul Rolly does quote Woodger as saying that “People at this level of English… may see the ‘homo’ side and think it has something to do with gay sex.” So his protestations seem a little… compromised.

That said, Torkildson himself defended Woodger against some of the more damning accusations that have come from all quarters in the past couple of days. The now-unemployed blogger told Newsweek’s Zach Schonfeld that he hadn’t been accused of advocating a gay agenda or anything like that. The objection was simply that Woodger thought students would be confused.

That presents us with a different problem, but a problem nonetheless. Woodger is not, in the typically clever and typically vulgar term used on the Wonkette site, an “ash whole.” He is, rather, at best nigh eve and probably more than a little dents.

When I first came across this story and posted it to the Curmudgeon Central Facebook page, it didn’t take long for a dear friend and former student of Curmie, now a middle-school teacher, to point out that her 5th-graders know what homophones are. Another commenter suggests that homophones are introduced in the 2nd grade. So… yeah. I’m all for giving the benefit of the doubt. Mr. Woodger is not, perhaps, a homophobic (not to be confused with “homophonic”) jerk, or at least as big a one as some have alleged. He is, however, dumber than a turnip and totally unfit to run a lemonade stand, let alone a school.

Are we really to believe that someone who runs a language school doesn’t have the… wait for it… language skills of a 5th-grader? Are we to believe that he doesn’t think that teaching ESL students about homophones will make their future lives in the Anglophone world considerably easier? Are we to believe that the owner of the largest ESL school in the state doesn’t understand the Streisand Effect? Because if he’d simply said that Torkildson had been released for other reasons, this would have been a prime example of tempest in a teapot. Everything would have blown over quickly once people realized they were hearing only one side of the story, and perhaps Mr. Torkildson might not be as sore abused as he would have us believe.

But Woodger’s bizarre statement that suggests that any word that begins with “homo”—“homogenized” or “homogeneous,” for example—is inherently so confusing to the adult mind that no one could possibly think of anything other than homosexuality… well, that is precisely why the word “homosexual” is at all associated with the school. (Note: I remain unclear as to why such a linkage constitutes a problem at all, but that’s a rant for another day.) It will no doubt come as a shock to Mr. Woodger, but other languages use prefixes, too. Of course, he’d know that if he had the language skills of one of my friend’s 5th graders. (It might take a high school education to know what I mean by celebrating his wonderfully “Dickensian” name.)

Clarke Woodger strikes me as the kind of person who begins sentences with “Some of my best friends are…” or “I’m not prejudiced, but…”. Is he as obnoxious as the Rick Santorums of the world? No. But he’s just as stupid. And a better contender for the Curmie.

Call It The SeaWorld Effect

One of the more intriguing phenomena of the Internet age is the so-called Streisand effect, named for an attempt by the famous singer to prevent dissemination of photographs of her home in Malibu. The attempted suppression, however, drew a whirlwind of publicity… and widespread distribution of the very photographs she didn’t want made public.

Tilikum, one of the stars of "Blackfish"

A case in the news this week is a first cousin to this syndrome. This fall, CNN produced and aired a documentary entitled “Blackfish.” I haven’t seen the film, but I suspect I have a pretty good idea what it’s about, especially after reading the account of Death at SeaWorld: Shamu and the Dark Side of Killer Whales in Captivity author David Kirby. The broadcast concludes, apparently, that SeaWorld is guilty of manifold transgressions, including cruelty to the very sea mammals it purports to be championing. Needless to say, the show wasn’t intended to send viewers flocking to SeaWorld.

That TV special got some good ratings, but still attracted fewer than a million and a half viewers: less than one half of one percent of the total population. (A lot more have no doubt seen it seen it became available on Netflix.) Curmie, interested in animal rights but not much of a TV viewer, wasn’t even aware of the documentary until yesterday, in fact. And why did it come to his attention then?

Well, the Orlando Business Journal posted an online poll asking “Has CNN’s ‘Blackfish’ documentary changed your perception of SeaWorld?” This is where I turn the commentary over to Richard Bilbao of that publication:

As of midday Jan. 2, the results were staggeringly in favor of those saying the film hasn't had any impact on their perception of the parks — roughly 99 percent siding in SeaWorld's favor. 

With all the heat SeaWorld has been receiving over the past couple of months, including the loss of musical acts, I decided to make sure the numbers weren’t skewed by some computer bot set to constantly choose “No.” 

But imagine our surprise when we noticed that one single Internet Protocol Address (IP Address) accounted for more than 54 percent of the votes, or about 180 of the total 328 votes. IP Addresses are typically unique Internet identifiers given to a computer or series of devices — say a multi-computer network in your office.

And who’s the owner of the domain name and company that address belong to? SeaWorld.com and SeaWorld Parks & Entertainment.

In another post, Bilbao reports the response SeaWorld spokesman Nick Gollattscheck:

Our team members have strong feelings about their park and company, and we encourage them to make their opinions known. 

We have three parks and our corporate offices in Orlando. You would expect that we would have a lot of team members in Orlando — and throughout our company — who would vote. If a poll goes up regarding SeaWorld, our team members have as much a right to vote as anyone else, and vote they did. We don’t have a ‘bot’ — each of those votes that came from SeaWorld were cast by a team member who is passionate about who we are and what we do.

Fine. I know that the computer in my office has a different IP address than the one in the office of my colleague next door. But I’m no IT guy, and maybe the talking head guy’s comments are honest. Maybe there was a corporate effort to strongarm employees into voting; maybe not. But whether or not this was a conscious attempt to skew the poll or not, it did: in the opposite direction. At the time of Bilbao’s initial article, the poll was going overwhelming in SeaWorld’s direction: 99%, in fact. Even if all the votes from SeaWorld were discounted, the votes were still 95% (!) “No,” that the film had had no effect.

And then the perceived manipulation went public… and then viral. As I write this, the percentage of those answering “Yes” has swelled to 80%. Yes, 80%, up from 1%. That takes a lot of voting. I’d be willing to bet that a fair number of those poll participants a). didn’t know there was such a thing as the Orlando Business Journal before this week, let alone ever read it, or b). have never seen “Blackfish.”

No, the reaction was purely visceral. Whether SeaWorld did anything wrong—either in terms of the content of the film or with respect to the poll—matters little. It appears that they did, and that’s enough to get people riled up. Unscientific polls, which this one freely admits to being, get hijacked all the time. Advocacy groups of every political description openly call on their supporters to do exactly that, as if “winning” a completely irrelevant online ballot meant anything at all. [Curmie is aware, by the way, of the irony of making this comment while in the process of conducting an utterly unscientific online poll for the Curmie Award… but vote anyway: nominees here; ballot in the upper right corner of this page.]

What has happened, then, is that the poll has been transformed from inconsequential to completely useless in terms of reflecting public opinion. Still, it offers considerable insight into the way the American psyche operates. And a lot more people are aware of the existence of the movie now, and of the conclusions it draws.  The incident also suggests that, volitionally or otherwise, SeaWorld made a whale of a mistake.