The Visit of the Young Lady

A knowledge of dramatic literature comes in handy sometimes. There have been murmurs around my adopted state of Texas that a Lysistrata-like sex strike might be the only way to convince the privileged white males of the state that treating women a little worse than barnyard animals might not be the most effective strategy. Surely even intelligent opponents of abortion balk at the bullying and disingenuous tactics employed by Rick Perry, David Dewhurst and their minions to finally ram a bill through the Texas legislature to severely restrict the availability of not only abortions, but mammograms, pap smears, contraception, and other basic women’s health services.

Now it appears that a variation on the theme of the Friedrich Dürrenmatt classic Der Besuch der alten Dame (literally The Visit of the Old Lady, but generally translated into English simply as The Visit) might seem to be in order. Whereas people in Curmie’s business ought to know the play, this is not necessarily true for you, Gentle Reader, so here’s a quick synopsis.

The little town of Güllen (literally, to spread liquid manure) is struggling, but the fabulously wealthy Claire Zachanassian, a former resident, is paying a visit, and the townspeople hope she’ll come to their rescue. Anton Ill, her former lover, is enlisted to head up the appeal. Gradually, however, we learn that young Claire had left the town in disgrace, impregnated by Anton, who suborned perjury from two witnesses to evade justice and to be free to marry the shopkeeper’s daughter.

Claire was forced into prostitution, but a series of alliances to increasingly wealthy men who died and left her their fortunes turned her into a billionaire. We learn, too, that she is primarily responsible for the town’s financial struggles: she’s been buying up businesses and shutting them down, that sort of thing. Her traveling entourage includes a butler (the judge in her paternity suit who ruled against her) and two eunuchs (the perjured witnesses). She offers the town a billion (well, the unit of currency isn’t made clear, if I recall correctly, but we’re talking a lot of money), half to be given to the town per se, half to be divided among all the town’s families. There’s one condition: someone in the town must kill Anton Ill.

At first, it seems like bluster, and the townspeople reject the offer. Claire then calmly intones one of the most chilling lines in dramatic literature, “Ich werde warten.” (“I’ll wait.”) Inexorably, the town becomes obsessed by the money and Ill realizes that there is no escape. The mayor announces that the town’s imminent wealth is all due to Ill’s generosity. Ill is indeed killed by a townsman, but the doctors are quick to pronounce it a heart attack: he “died of joy.” Claire keeps her promise, writes a check, and boards the next train out of town. In the original production, the scenery shifted before the audience’s eyes from the dreariness of the first 99% of the show to clean and shining splendor. And… curtain.

I thought about this play when reading about the plight of Katie Barnett, an Ohio woman whose house was repossessed for non-payment of her mortgage… trouble is, the idiot repo guys went to the wrong house. They didn't want Ms. Barnett's house at all; they were supposed to go to the place across the street. Undeterred by competence, they removed, which is to say stole, all her possessions, which were either sold, given away, or simply trashed. Ms. Barnett remained remarkably calm under the circumstances. She called the police, but the chief, weeks later, declared the case closed because the culprits were the First National Bank of Wellston. Exactly why that matters is beyond my feeble ken, but I suppose it all makes sense if you’re an idiot small town police chief (as usual, apologies for the redundancy) like Tony Wood.

So Ms. Barnett assessed her losses, estimated at a little over $18,000, and went to the bank for reimbursement. The bank president, Tony Thorne (a lot of jackasses named Tony in those parts), admits that the situation was the bank’s fault—at least indirectly, in that they hired the moron repo crew—but still doesn’t want to pay up: “We’re not paying you retail here, that’s just the way it is,” quoth he (according to her, at least). He also whines that the “written list of items that she provided to us ... is inconsistent with the list and descriptions of items removed that was prepared by the employees who did the work.”

OK, two things. 1). I think we’ve already determined how competent and trustworthy those “employees” are. 2). as of now, she’s being nice, but Ms. Barnett owns your future as surely as Claire Zachanassian owned Güllen’s. Why is it that the assholes and the idiots are so often the same people, and they’re so often in positions of power in petty and parochial small town settings? Do you really think any jury in a civil suit is going to care whether the list of items Ms. Barnett claims were illegally confiscated from her legal residence without the slightest cause conforms to what the clown show you hired for the repo wrote down? The circumstances all point in one direction: Ms. Barnett is an aggrieved party, and you, sir, are dumber than a stack of burnt toast. As she says, “I’m not running a yard sale here. I did not tell them to come in my house and make me an offer. They took my stuff, and I want it back.” And that seems reasonable enough, to the extent that the “stuff” is replaceable… and there ought to be a little penalty for destroying what is not replaceable, too.

You might, might, have a chance to get out of this for the 18 grand she says you owe her. But if I were her, I’d put some punitive damages onto that lawsuit I’d be virtually certain to win… say, 100 times the value of the items taken. Call it $1.8 million. And here’s where The Visit comes in. Tomorrow, O Bank Board of Directors, you can settle this for $18,000. Next week, it’s $18,000 and Tony Thorne is fired (killing him would be a bit much). The week after that, the dollar figure doubles, and it keeps doubling until the bank settles. Thorne? He had his chance. He’s gone, or we jump straight to seven figures. I kind of get the feeling the board of directors, being corporate types, after all, would be perfectly willing to throw Thorne under the bus if given half a chance. If I were Ms. Barnett, I’d be interested in finding out. (I might be tempted to sue the city, too, with Wood’s job as a bargaining chip.)

But Ms. Barnett is no doubt much nicer than Curmie. She’ll probably just take what she’s owed and try to get on with her life. For now.

[Note: there’s a Daily Kos petition about this, but the recipient is one Eric Emmert. He’s listed as President and CEO of Midwest Bancshares, the First National Bank’s parent company, in one place, as CEO of the bank in another. But it certainly seems to be Thorne who’s the idiot at front and center.]

More Incompetence in SAT-Land, But This One's Not All on Them

As an educator at the post-secondary level, I have deeply ambivalent feelings about standardized testing. The teach-to-the-test mentality engendered by high-stakes exams like the fetishistic stupidity propagated in my adopted state of Texas, for example, is as antithetical to real education as it is possible to be. There also are, or at least have been, serious concerns about cultural bias. Still, I won’t pretend that I don’t look pretty carefully at ACT and SAT scores when evaluating prospective students for admission into our program or scholarships.

This is a function of two things. First, there is the wide disparity between schools and their populations—being at the top of a weak class might be better or worse than being in the middle of a strong one. It’s useful to have some means of comparing such students.

Second, most recommendations written by high school teachers and administrators are utterly useless. I do understand that writing an effective, accurate recommendation takes time; I’ve written a fair number of them, after all. But in my time as coordinator of Theatre Day (that’s our tri-annual on-campus recruitment event) I’ve read recs that are a single sentence long, that are incoherent and/or ungrammatical, that praise a student in the bottom 20% of her class for excelling in the classroom (without any explanation why the little darling consistently gets C’s and D’s, including in that teacher’s classes), that talk more about the student’s parents than about him. One teacher in Dallas obviously has a template singing the praises of some generic student; she just swaps out one student name for another and sends it along. (We once had two students at the same Theatre Day with recs from her. The letters were identical except for the students’ names and the gender-specific pronouns.)

Standardized test scores aren’t the only criterion by which to measure a student’s academic skills, of course. Grades (and class rank relative to class size) count a lot; if we happen to get a well-crafted, individualized, recommendation that actually gives us insight into the student, that’s incredibly helpful. The résumé counts: both how it’s structured and what it contains. If you want to be a designer and your layout is cluttered, unimaginative, and unattractive, you’ve got some work to do. If you want to be an actor, your teacher can talk about how wonderful you are all she wants, but if you’ve never played anything but Chorus in a musical or Third Spear-Carrier from the Left, she’s really not all that impressed with your work.

Nor do minor differences in scores matter. A 550 and a 560 in Critical Reading are, for our purposes, identical. A 440 and a 650 aren’t. If you’re smart and can really handle the language, it doesn’t matter if your acting skills are marginal: a). you’re teachable and b). there are plenty of non-acting jobs in theatre (mine, for instance). On the other hand, you may audition well with carefully-chosen pieces, but if we’re not reasonably certain you can handle the work of a freshman-level Play Analysis course, we’re not going to invest our limited scholarship money on you.

Good scores matter, in other words. And whereas a fair number of high school seniors don’t seem to comprehend much else, they do get that much. All of which means there’s a lot of pressure to perform well. For those with more money than brains or morality, that means an increased temptation to cheat: specifically, to hire a similarly immoral, but intelligent, surrogate to take the test in your stead. And that is what happened, repeatedly, in an upscale suburban area of Long Island over at least a three-year period.

The New York Times reports that some 20 people have been arrested over the past two months for being at one or the other end of such transactions: either paying someone to take the exam or accepting payment to impersonate someone else in order to take the test. The group faces felony charges of scheming to defraud, as well as misdemeanor charges of falsifying business records and criminal impersonation.

The victims here are of two kinds: the middling but honest students whose chances of getting entrance to the university of their choice or receive a scholarship to do so have been compromised by a competition that cheats, and (now) every honest and gifted kid in the area, whose own good scores, the product of native intelligence and hard work, are now (alas, quite reasonably) viewed as suspect.

There are two problems here. One is that the College Board/Educational Testing Service folks (who administer the SAT), in particular, have been more than somewhat less than diligent in preventing or prosecuting cheating. An earlier NYT article quotes Bernard Kaplan, principal of Great Neck North High School, lambasting the administrators of the SAT: “The procedures E.T.S. uses to give the test are grossly inadequate in terms of security. Furthermore, E.T.S.’s response when the inevitable cheating occurs is grossly inadequate. Very simply, E.T.S. has made it very easy to cheat, very difficult to get caught.” Mr. Kaplan adds:

It is ridiculously easy to take the test for someone else. That’s why when E.T.S. says this kind of impersonation is a rare occurrence, you just have to laugh. How would they know? All they can say is they are unaware of a large number of impersonations. I’m sure, that’s true. They are most assuredly unaware.

OK, you know how this blog consistently reams high school principals and school superintendents? Credit where it’s due: Mr. Kaplan seems to be the exception that proves the rule. It was his initial investigation that led to the arrests: “I think it’s [cheating] widespread across the country,” he said Tuesday. “We were the school that stood up to it.” And to say that the security has been lax with respect to ensuring that test-takers are who they claim to be is sort of like saying that NBA power forwards tend to be large men. [Side note: sign off on the damned agreement and play ball!]

After all, Samuel Eshaghoff is accused of impersonating six different students, including a girl to take the SAT for them at $3500 a pop, earning scores up to the 97th percentile. (I guess it wouldn’t have been worth it for me to hire him, as I did better than that on my own.) And, write the Times’s Jenny Anderson and Winnie Hu, “Currently, if a score is suspect, E.T.S. investigates. If cheating is uncovered, the score is canceled and the student is permitted to get a refund and take the test again. Neither the student’s high school nor any college is notified.” Seriously? No penalty at all?

Here’s the College Board’s attitude:

You got sick and couldn’t make the test? Sorry, no refund. Need to change the date of your test more than two weeks in advance? Well, OK, but it’ll cost you $25. Oh, you’re an immoral, self-entitled little weasel who thinks rules are for other people? Sorry, sir/madam, we thought you might be an honest kid with a legitimate excuse. Of course you can have a refund. Of course we won’t notify anyone who might be interested in whether you’ve already proven that you have no intention of actually learning anything at their academic institution. Would you like us to give you the names of a few really smart, dishonest people whom we’re far too stupid to catch if they impersonate you next time?

Not being a lawyer, I don’t know whether this qualifies as “criminal negligence” according to our legal system. But in a just universe, the cretinous yahoos at the CB/ETS who decided on this policy would lose their jobs, have “unethical moron” branded into their foreheads, and be publicly pilloried. Preferably literally.

Still, the fact that everyone in the ETS hierarchy seems to be terminally incompetent does not absolve the little urchins from taking responsibility for their actions. The recent economic meltdown may have been facilitated by de-regulation, but it was caused by specific immoral, greedy wheeler-dealers. Whether what these students did was criminal may be up for debate (I can’t imagine that there’s a legitimate legal argument there, but Dickens’s Mr. Bumble is, alas, too often correct in his assertion that “the law is an ass”). If not, every college that admitted one of these lying little bastards based on false information should immediately expel those students and sue the ETS. Actually, they should do that, anyway.

The defendants’ lawyers are paid to defend their clients, and they should do so as vigorously as they can. They are not, however, entitled to spew forth such rubbish as this from Gerald McCloskey: “My feeling is that it should be handled administratively by the College Board and the school board, not criminally, especially when the county is experiencing budget issues and resources are limited to begin with.” How noble of him to be so concerned with the county’s fiscal restraints. Translation: “My client is guilty as sin. Obfuscate!” Or Melvin Roth: “I think this is overkill for this kind of thing.” Yes, stealing is only stealing when someone other than Mr. Roth’s client does it. These guys are why there are lawyer jokes.

I strongly suspect that the ETS’s estimate of perhaps 150 cases of cheating a year is off by a factor of 100 or so. So it’s up to people like me to make sure no one gets a college diploma without earning one. Time to go to work…

Walter Vance and the Expansiveness of Culpability

Want to know what’s wrong with America? Two words: Walter Vance. No, not the man himself, who was apparently a lovely person. No, it was the manner of Mr. Vance’s death in the early hours of Friday morning that ought to send shivers up our collective spines.

Mr. Vance, a pharmacist in Logan County, WV, was shopping for some Christmas decorations for his drug store shortly after midnight, i.e. at the very beginning of “Black Friday,” when he collapsed onto the floor of a Target store in South Charleston. And then… nothing.

Multiple reports suggest that shoppers and employees alike paid no attention, even stepping over him as he struggled for his life. Finally, a nurse and a paramedic who happened to be shopping in the store came to his aid. 911 was called, but Mr. Vance died at the hospital. Frankly, he may not have made it, anyway. He had a history of heart trouble, and, in his widow’s words, “I think it was time for him to go. The Lord called him home.”

But here’s the point: It doesn’t matter. A man needed help, and the overwhelming majority of people who were in position to offer it, even to the extent of comforting a dying man, did precisely bupkes. There was a sale on, after all. Gotta get that crappy over-priced toy or the tacky outfit for a couple bucks less than normal. “Sorry, old man. Geez, would you get the hell out of the way. You’re dying? You think that’s an excuse? Get out of the damned aisle!”

With the exception of the two professionals who did what they could (another report suggests as many as six nurses offered aid), and the woman who apparently fished Vance’s cell phone out of his pocket to call his wife, everyone else in that building deserves coal in their stocking this year: not enough to heat their home with, however. Seriously, how many people don’t have cell phones with which to call 911? How many of the phoneless don’t have a voice with which to demand that someone else make that call? How many of us are really so important that we can’t spare a few words of comfort for a fellow traveler in distress?

There are, apparently, lots of eye-witness reports about other people’s inhumanity. But… uh… if you were there to see it, what did you do to help? Not much, I’d be willing to bet. True, once there’s someone who knows what s/he’s doing on the scene, it’s better to stay out of the way. But stepping over a prostrate body to get to the great mark-downs on Chia Pets doesn’t qualify as ethical behavior.

Target employees told television station WSAZ that “company policy” forbids them from offering physical assistance. (Interestingly, that detail is omitted from the updated written story on the station’s website, but the broadcast story includes it.) This leaves us with two alternatives: either the employees are lying to cover up their own inadequacies as human beings, or there really is such a policy.

It terrifies me that I believe the latter. That sounds exactly like the kind of inanity cooked up by the litigation-shy and utterly amoral jackals that run all too many corporations. Still, that doesn’t let the employees off the hook. A man is dying and you don’t help because you might lose your barely-above-minimum-wage (if that) job at a store that insists you work the graveyard shift on Black Friday because they’ve got to unload their stock of crap that will actually be cheaper in a couple of weeks? Really? That’s what you’re going to tell St. Peter at the Pearly Gates?

Mr. Vance’s friend and colleague Sue Compton sums the whole business up pretty well: “Where is the good Samaritan side of people? How could you not notice someone was in trouble? I just don’t understand if people didn’t help, what their reason was, other than greed because of a sale.”

Christmas in America. Bah, humbug.