The Casting of "The Odyssey" and Believing Rumors

 

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

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

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

Ahem.  

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Well, One of Them Is Excusable

<Sigh.>

Curmie, as you might well imagine, Gentle Reader, sees a lot of political cartoons, memes, and brief commentary from (generally) like-minded folks.  Every once in a while, he sees something so absurd on its face that it couldn’t possibly be true.  Alas, it turns out to be true more often the not.  Curmie, however, is skeptical by nature, and he really does try to avoid re-posting stuff that isn’t true. 

This week, there were two stories that caught Curmie’s eye in this regard: an alleged quotation from Ted Cruz and a video supposedly posted to Donald Trump’s Truth Social account.  Both were in the “this couldn’t be true… could it?” category.  Well, they were both true.  Sort of. 

Let’s start there, with Senator Cruz’s line that we should “stop attacking pedophiles.”  Did he really say that?  Yes, he did.  But it’s clear that, unlike the host of politicians who get busted for saying something outrageous or an outright lie, the “he misspoke” follow-up really is true.  His spokesperson is absolutely justified in saying that Cruz was “rattling off a series of crimes we should unite in opposing, started a sentence about opposing pedophilia, and added a stray word while talking it out.”

This is the kind of thing that happens when speaking off the cuff.  Anyone who spends a lot of time talking is going to screw up, and might not even be aware of it.  Curmie is pretty certain he did that several times over the course of his career; it’s just that his students and colleagues were kind enough to know what he meant and to let it go at that.  And Barack Obama doesn’t really think there are 57 states. 

Even when there’s enough time to think, these mistakes can happen.  There’s a Modelo beer commercial that assures listeners that they are “not to be reckoned with.”  They mean “not to be trifled with,” but that’s the opposite of what they say.  A few years ago, Curmie’s hometown didn’t get any appreciable rain for several weeks.  The city (or the county, or whoever) posted a bunch of signs about “drought protection.”  One suspects they weren’t actually trying to protect the drought.  See?  This stuff happens.

Look, Curmie is no fan of Ted Cruz.  The guy is a liar, a coward, and possessed of less integrity than even a run-of-the-mill partisan hack like his fellow Texas Senator, John Cornyn.  But that’s really sort of the point: give him a day or two, and he’ll say or do something that really is worth of derision, and “our side” can be a little less disingenuous.  Things get complicated by the fact that in one sense Cruz is indeed protecting pedophiles, but it’s by more by craven inaction than by clear intentionality.  He’ll never not be an asshole, but he’s pretty much innocent this time, and we need to respond accordingly.

On the other hand, there’s that video posted to Dear Leader’s Truth Social page that includes an image of Barack and Michelle Obama’s faces superimposed onto the bodies of apes.  Needless to say, the cries of “racism” were prompt and loud.  And they came from virtually everywhere.  Sure, Democrats were at the forefront and the criticism.  Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, and Hakeem Jeffries all weighed in.  But, unsurprisingly, it was firebrand Jasmine Crockett who pretty much led the charge: “Most of us already know who Donald Trump is. We already know there are no bounds to how low he’s willing to go. We know that he has no moral compass. We know that he is a disgrace. So while his behavior is not shocking, it is certainly disgusting and disturbing.”  That is not a subtle commentary.

That said, a lot of GOP pols weren’t far behind.  Representative Mike Turner (OH) wrote that “the release of racist images of former President Barack and First Lady Michelle Obama is offensive, heart breaking, and unacceptable. President Trump should apologize.”  Expressing similar sentiments were Senators Susan Collins (ME), John Curtis (UT), Pete Ricketts (NE), Tim Scott (SC), and Roger Wicker (MS), and Representative Mike Lawler (NY), among others, no doubt.

And it’s only fair to mention: last time out Curmie lamented Ethics Alarms’ Jack Marshall’s started allowing “excuses for inexcusable conduct by Dear Leader and his minions [to become] a significant part of the mix.”  But he writes “I regard that as about a half-step, maybe less, from the President calling the former First Couple ‘niggers,’ and subsequently adds that “this ugly episode fairly earns shame and criticism for the President, regardless of how it came about.” 

That last part is relevant.  The White House initially tried to pass the incident off as unworthy of consideration, and the response as “fake outrage.”  That strategy backfired, although J.D. Vance is still trying.  Their focus then shifted to placing the blame on… wait for it… an anonymous “staffer.”  Sigh.  Dear Leader sees no reason to apologize because, you see, he did nothing wrong.

Unfortunately, even if we believe what has now become the official line, things look bad.  First off, the best that can be said is that someone so stupid that they didn’t realize the racist overtones to the post was granted permission to post in POTUS’s name.  You know, that guy who hires only the best people.  The alternative is that the racism was intentional.  That’s certainly a possibility, especially given the comments by Lara Trump, who is trying to be as vile a creature as her father-in-law: “It's kinda like any good joke is rooted in truth.”  Ew.

Someone made that video, and, best case scenario, thought it relevant to… well… anything.  The full video shows Dear Leader as a lion, the king of the jungle, to whom a gaggle of leading Democrats as other animals ultimately bow down.  Frankly, it’s a stupid shtick, but its sycophancy is no doubt celebrated throughout Trumpistan.  But if it’s indeed supposed to be based on The Lion King, then it’s worth noting that there are no simians in that play or film.  The choice of apes for the Obamas, then, adds credence to the allegations of intentional racism.

The beginning of the reel is a standard whine about “stolen elections,” Trumpistan’s term for “it was completely fair, but our guy didn’t win.”  It then auto-advanced into the Lion King nonsense.  Curmie doesn’t know how that could happen accidentally, but he’s enough of a technological troglodyte that his ignorance doesn’t necessarily mean anything.  Perhaps there really is a perfectly innocent explanation.

But what if the worst we can say about the video is that it’s kinda dumb?  Now it becomes a variation on the familiar trope of the cover-up being worse than the crime.  All that needed to happen was a prompt removal, and a statement that the offending staffer has been fired.  People might still be suspicious, but the situation is reduced to the proverbial tempest in a teapot.  Of course, both transparency and admitting anything are verboten in Trumpistan.  So we get disingenuous commentary from the Usual Suspects.  They’re almost as incompetent as they are dishonest.  Alas.

Two Stories Set at Dodger Stadium

 

Curmie isn’t as big a baseball fan as he once was, and he’s never been a Dodgers fan, but it’s still not unusual for him to read about the goings-on at Dodger Stadium.  It’s usually about what happened on the field, though: Shohei Ohtani did this, Mookie Betts did that, and so on. 

Yeah, there was that moment a couple of years ago when stadium security couldn’t catch the idiot fan who had run on the field so the ball girl tackled him.  (Curmie thinks the best part wasn’t the takedown per se, but the casual stroll away afterwards.)  And there have been a couple of squabbles over the “ownership” of a couple of home run balls, especially Ohtani’s first homer as a Dodger and his “50/50” ball. 

But Curmie never had an urge to write about any of that.  Now, however, there are not one but two stories from the last month or so that caught Curmie’s attention.  Neither is really related to what happened on the field at all.  Neither made big headlines; indeed, the earlier one escaped Curmie’s notice altogether for about a fortnight.  Let’s start there.

Over the off-season, the Dodgers completed a $100 million renovation of the stadium.  Most of the improvements were to the field per se and to the clubhouses, but there were also some projects dedicated to ensuring a “top-notch game-day experience” for fans.

Yeah, well, maybe not quite so “top-notch.”  On May 30, a chunk of concrete about the size of a softball dislodged from an upper deck and hit a fan, Luis Ricardo Aquino, in the back, breaking a rib.  Aquino, a resident of Mexico City, had traveled to LA for the game. 

OK, there are elements to this story that Curmie is going to skim over really quickly here, but are worth mentioning: 1). $100 million in renovations and you can’t have a stadium that isn’t a death trap?  If Aquino had happened to be leaning back for some reason and that chunk of concrete had hit him in the head, it could have killed him.  2). How slimy do the Dodgers’ reps have to be to get Aquino not to file a complaint in exchange for a jersey, couple of trinkets and a bobble-head?  That’s a 7-figure lawsuit, easy.  3). Aquino declined a trip to the hospital, saying “this is not my country, so I did not feel comfortable.”  One reasonable translation would be “I’ll live with a broken rib until I get home, where I can actually afford medical care, and the Dodgers aren’t likely to pay.”

But the big story is that when help appeared on the scene, the first question wasn’t about where he was hit or the severity of the injury, but whether he was in the US legally.  Subsequent reporting by Michael Elizondo suggests that the questioning may not have been merely insensitive, tacky, and racist, but literally unlawful if performed by other than an immigration agent.  Notice also the blithe assumption that Aquino isn’t a citizen.

“Papers, please” has long since achieved cliché status in movies.  The line is usually given to some officious official representing an evil regime.  You know, Gentle Reader, like all those WWII movies with Nazis who always spoke in English but with German accents.  But we’re heading towards that level of intrusion in the US right now. 

Curmie has been lucky enough to be able the travel outside the US on numerous occasions.  He’s lived in two foreign countries and spent over three months total over several visits in another; he’s spent the night in eight others, and passed through (on a train, for example) or made a brief excursion into four more.  There are two more he specifically wants to add to the list, and many others he’d be happy to visit.  All this probably puts him above the mean for Americans, but he knows several people whose international experience far exceeds his own.

In all those voyages, Curmie has needed his passport (his “papers”) for precisely three kinds of events: crossing a national border, checking into a hotel, and (before ATMs became ubiqitous and linked) changing currency (or, in the old days, travelers checks) at a bank… and not literally every time for any of them.  He was told directly by trip organizers, experienced travelers, and even local law enforcement not to carry his passport except when necessary: better to leave it where you’re staying.  This was true, too, for when he had the UK equivalent of a green card when he was studying for his MA.

But whereas ICE goons needn’t have any identification at all to detain someone for… you know… looking and sounding like they might not be an American citizen (Curmie is certain the tourism industry has some choice words for these assholes), Mr. Aquino had to have his paperwork on his person to attend a freaking baseball game.  Imagine if he hadn’t! 

It is more than a little terrifying that any non-citizen in this country is subject to this level of scrutiny.  True, it’s not as bad as requiring applicants for student visas to supply details of their social media presence for the last five years and to set all their accounts to public, much less to the horrific idea that all “non-detained migrants” (that would include students) must wear GPS tracking devices.  But it’s still creepy as hell, and a far cry from anything resembling “the land of the free.”  Emma Lazarus famously wrote about the “golden door.”  In Trumpistan, having enough gold will get you a free pass through that door.  Everybody else gets treated like a criminal. 

OK, moving on to the other story…  On June 19th, the Dodgers tweeted that “ICE agents came to Dodger Stadium and requested permission to access the parking lots. They were denied entry to the grounds by the organization.”  There’s not much of a story there, right, Gentle Reader?  Stories of people facing down the goons are damned near ubiquitous.  Ah, but <insert late-night infomercial voice here> that’s not all! 

You see, ICE proclaimed they “were never there.”  They’re almost certainly lying, of course.  Anti-ICE activists, as the kids say, brought the receipts in the form of photographs.  It’s possible, of course, that they never asked permission (they’re not the type to be professional, of course), but they were certainly there.

So, why would they lie?  Well, it’s what they do, for one thing.  The number of times they’ve lied about the reason for an “asylum meeting” or blamed an American citizen they tackled for attacking them when there’s clear video evidence to the contrary has now reached into the “frequently” range.  We know that, like all bullies, they’re cowards: hence the masks, the refusal to show appropriate identification, the unwillingness to go after actual gang members when they can make their quota by rounding up hotel maids and dishwashers who sorta look Latino.  And they sure as hell don’t want to reveal the fragility of their faux machismo preening.  The fact that they tried and failed to throw their weight around simply cannot be allowed to become public knowledge.

But, Gentle Reader, you know what’s even worse than a gaggle of federal agents longer on testosterone than on empathy or truth-telling?  What if this time they were actually telling the truth?  That would mean that since ICE and their partners in crime (this is not merely an expression, of course) refuse to identify themselves, a bunch of other white male assholes can now try cosplaying as federal agents.  At least some of the detentions made by immigration officials are legitimate.  But the fake guys: actual, no-doubt-about-it kidnappings, with the potential for extortion, theft, assault, rape, even murder. 

All the while real police stand around and watch… and may even help.  We’re already seeing the inevitable: reports of fake ICE agents committing crimes are popping up with grim regularity.  Commenting on a case in Houston this week, ICE released a statement: 

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers and agents are highly trained and dedicated professionals who are sworn to uphold the law, protect the American people and support U.S. national security interests. ICE strongly condemns the impersonation of its officers or agents. This action is not only dangerous, but illegal. Imposters can be charged with various criminal offenses both at the state/local level, as well as federally (under 18 USC 912).

Yeah, right.  Actual cops need a badge, an ID, and a warrant.  And they’re not hiding behind masks.  Judge, lawyers, journalists… they’re not anonymous, and they do things that could get the bad guys mad at them.  But ICE?  They won’t identify themselves, which of course would make impersonating them considerably easier, but they’ll charge you with assault of law enforcement if you fight back.  They’re scum.  Literally every one of them, starting at the top.  As Curmie wrote during the 45 regime, “why else would anyone want to join a notoriously brutal, racist, self-important organization if not to be, well, brutal, racist, and self-important?”  Hat tip to the Dodgers for throwing them out.

Oh, there’s another non-baseball story about the Dodgers: they’re pledging $1 million to families affected by ICE raids.  Sure, it’s virtue-signaling and showboating.  And yes, they can afford it.  But underscoring the sadism, mendacity, and criminality of ICE… that’s not a bad thing.

 

So... Is Everyone in Fact Welcome in West Ada, Idaho Schools?

Riddle me this, Gentle Reader.  Here are images of two posters.  Here’s #1:

                                

Curmie asks that you pay particular attention to the right side of the poster under the heading “Kind.”  (Curmie apologizes for the reflections showing up in the image, and for the fact that #2 is crooked, but you can clearly see what he wants you to see.)

And here’s #2:

                  

OK.  So.  Poster #1 advocates “welcom[ing] others and embrac[ing] diversity.  Poster #2 says “everyone is welcome here.”  Pretty much the same thing, right?  Apparently not, at least according to the educational power structure in West Ada, Idaho.  (Ada County includes Boise, so its total population is about a half a million people; we are not, as Curmie first assumed, talking about some tiny town somewhere.)

Anyway, revenons à nos moutons.  The difference between the two posters, obviously (insert eye roll here) is that #1 is required in every classroom in the district, and that #2 is forbidden.  Why?  Because the authorities said so, of course.  If you’re looking for a rational reason, you’d better ask someone else, ‘cause Curmie’s got nothin’.

The story goes like this.  Sarah Inama is in her fourth year of teaching World Civilizations at Lewis and Clark Middle School in West Ada.  At least according to reporting by Brian Holmes on a local TV station, Poster #2 has been up in her classroom all along.  But this January the censorial bigots thought control school administration decided they had a problem with it, and insisted she remove it.

It’s a violation of policy, you see.  “In today’s political climate,” it “expresses a personal opinion.”  OK, now, Curmie is a grumpy old fart, and isn’t a fan of cutesy posters, even in a 6th grade classroom.  But if, in fact, anyone suggests that everyone should not be welcome in a public school classroom, that person should be kept as far as possible away from either students or teachers. 

Saying that everyone is welcome is not, according to the bozos, “content neutral,” but is a “personal opinion.”  You will forgive Curmie, Gentle Reader, if he wonders how welcoming others and embracing diversity is not, therefore, similarly personal.  By the way, no one had complained about those two posters.  The school administration was being pro-actively assholic.  Of course, they presented their inane decision as a means of “protecting” Inama.  If this sounds a little too much like a protection racket to you, you’re not alone.

Ah, but “everyone is welcome here” is not something everyone believes, so that justifies this idiocy.  Curmie notes that not everyone believes the earth is three-dimensional, so having a globe in a world civ classroom would also be problematic.  (Curmie apologizes to the sane people of the West Ada district if he’s given the kakistocracy any ideas.)

Anyway, Inama removed two posters, including #2 above.  The other one, which proclaimed that “in this room, everyone is welcome, important, accepted, respected, encouraged, valued, [and] equal” did it least have each of those words printed on a succession of colors suggestive of the rainbow.  And we know that there’s a subset of conservatives who break out in a rash if someone mentions that famous song Judy Garland sings in “The Wizard of Oz.”  Imana clearly didn’t see a problem with it, but did take it down. 

But after a few days, she emailed her principal and said that the kind of inclusivity suggested by the poster represented “the basis of public education.”  And she put poster #2 back up.  Good for her!  Naturally, the district muckety-mucks then got involved.  Chief Buffoon Academic Officer Marcus Myers quotes a policy proscribing “the advancement of individual beliefs.”  This is the same guy who brags about the relevance of poster #1, by the way.  More on that to come…

Somehow, in what passes for a brain Chez Myers, the Idaho law that requires that teachers “respect the dignity of others, acknowledge the rights of others to express differing opinions,” etc., is somehow violated by a poster that expresses those very thoughts.  To be fair, perhaps Myers isn’t as stupid and hypocritical as he appears: he’s doing the bidding of the board.  So maybe he’s just a coward.

The poster does, of course, highlight different skin colors.  Asked if the “differing view” would therefore be racist, Inama says, 

I can’t even wrap my head around what other ‘differing view’ would be… except for something that’s exclusionary….  This is the one small thing I that I feel like I can do, to speak out against this and stand up for [students], to protect them from being affected by racist sentiments affecting their classroom.

When the TV station reached out to the school district (repeatedly), they got the response that Marcus Myers was “not interested in being interviewed.”  (See above re: cowardice.)  Interestingly, that response also included examples of what is allowed, including, for example, “college or professional sports teams.”  So… if you went to the University of Idaho, it’s fine to festoon your classroom with Vandals gear, and the kid whose parents went to Boise State has to deal with it, but tell that kid she’s welcome… OMG, it’ll cause an attack of the vapors.

Naturally, Myers did agree to an interview with The Ranch Podcast, hosted by Matt Todd.  Quoting from the site here: “The Ranch Podcast is supported by Truth In Media Foundation, a non-profit media organization committed to unbiased, Idaho focused media.”  As frequent readers of this blog already know, one of Curmie’s mantras is “if you have to tell me, it ain’t so.”  “Truth in Media” means opinions are masquerading as facts; “unbiased” means “biased as all hell.” 

The Mediabiasfactcheck site rates Truth in Media as a “questionable source” with “low credibility,” “extreme right” bias, “low” factual reporting, and given to “propaganda, conspiracy, fake news, [and] pseudoscience.”  By the way, Curmie checked on that site’s description of a couple of left-biased sites, which are indeed identified as such. 

In other words, Myers agreed to be interviewed by someone he could feel pretty confident would not ask questions he couldn’t answer without revealing himself to be either an idiot or a bigot (not that bigots aren’t also idiots, but you know what Curmie means, Gentle Reader).  Todd pretty much provides him with escape routes, pretending, for example, that it is somehow obvious to everyone, not just racists, that having different skin colors appear on that poster or to anyone but homophobes that multiple colors (not even anything suggestive of a rainbow) somehow make it less inclusive.  Curmie couldn’t agree more with the first comment on that YouTube page: “The goal of this situation seems to be ‘don't offend the racists in Idaho.’”  Thank you, @kristenfrench4732, for that succinct encapsulation.

Questions any truly unbiased interviewer would ask: How, exactly, is poster #2 different in intent from poster #1?  Why would those same words be acceptable if there were no graphic design and they were simply white print on a black background?  How do you respond to the (by now) tens of thousands if not millions of people who think @kristenfrench4732 nailed it?  If there must be a “curricular tie-in” to literally everything, how is, for example, a poster celebrating the Seattle Seahawks allowed?  (Etc.)

The good news here is that this story got a fair amount of play, and there has been a tangible response.  To be fair to Todd, his interview with Alicia Purdy was considerably better than the one with Myers, largely because she actually had something to say.  For example: “Marcus Myers came and said… this actually coincides with our curriculum regarding positive behavior support.  And so, therefore it is tied to the curriculum.  So it does not violate policy under those constraints…. How is welcoming every student dividing our students?” 

When Todd says the problem wasn’t the verbal message but the graphic, she replies, “having that visual of the different skin tones, including white skin tones, that’s important… those students can see that.  Representation matters…. They [students] see the difference in skin tones, so why are we not addressing that?”  Curmie is not generally in the habit of praising someone for making pretty obvious points, but someone had to say all this, so Purdy gets the credit.

Now, apparently, the district is pivoting to claim that the poster’s use of those different-colored hands “aligns with themes commonly associated with DEI initiatives.”  Bullshit.  They’re desperately but unsuccessfully trying to save face.

In fact, the only way to interpret the district’s actions is to recognize that those folks will cheerfully pay lip service to cheery sayings about embracing diversity, as long as they aren’t reminded that there actually is a diverse population out there.  Those who would banish poster #2 are all about welcoming and equality until they actually have to practice it.  Trouble is, claiming to fix a problem while actually making it worse is both inefficient and evil.  If the acronym DOGE just flitted across your mind, Gentle Reader, that’s entirely on you.  😉

Inama has been told she can leave the poster up until the end of the academic year, and then the powers-that-be will ever-so-graciously help her find a suitable replacement.  Perhaps this brouhaha will indeed last that long, but Curmie suspects (or at least hopes) that the district, facing national and even international humiliation, will quietly capitulate, perhaps with the assurance the Inama won’t go public with an announcement of the reversal.

There’s already been a walkout by Renaissance High School students, including some of Inama’s former students, to protest the district’s actions.  A local t-shirt shop is struggling to keep up with orders for shirts depicting the allegedly controversial image; they’re getting orders from all over the country, and had sold over 8,000 shirts as of last Tuesday.  Tomorrow (i.e., Monday the 24th) there will be a lot of those shirts worn in the hallways and classrooms of West Ada schools.

The most scathing take-down Curmie has seen, though, appears as an editorial by Marty Trillhaase in the Lewiston Tribune.  He argues that the reason to take down the poster is that “[it’s] blatantly false.  Not everyone is welcome in Idaho.” 

He enumerates all the kinds of people who aren’t welcome in the state: essentially anyone who isn’t a cisgendered straight white male Protestant.  Physicians and union members are similarly unwelcome.  His chilling conclusion is that “When school resumes next fall, Inama and other Idaho teachers might have to replace that sign with what passes for Idaho’s attitude toward anyone who is different — a bus ticket. “

In other words, the real problem with Inama’s poster for the right-wingers in Idaho is that in her classroom, those words ring true.  And, since their entire weltanschauung is based on hatred, they despise her for that.  Curmie, on the other hand, thinks she’s a bad-ass heroine.

On Greg Abbott’s Outrageous Pardon of Daniel Perry

  

Curmie won’t make anyone look at a photo of Greg Abbott

Curmie had intended to write about this story since it came to light, but other topics and life in general interfered.  But then came a wonderful piece on the Bulwark site by Jonathan V. Last.  On the one hand, Curmie can’t improve on Last’s commentary, but he nonetheless feels compelled to comment, in part because he’s reminded of just how outrageous the actions of Texas’s petty despot governor, Greg Abbott, have become of late.

There were the twin debacles concerning pro-Palestinian demonstrations at the campus of the University of Texas at Austin, and Curmie has another piece in the works in which Abbott’s knee-jerk petulance is foregrounded.  (Watch this space!)  And now he’s pardoned a convicted murderer just because he didn’t like the victim’s politics.

As Last points out, Garrett Foster was something of a right-wing pol’s wet dream (Curmie’s term, not Last’s).  Young, attractive, a military veteran, a strong enough supporter of the 2^nd Amendment that he took at AK-47 to a Black Lives Matter protest.  Oh, and white.  Mustn’t forget that part. 

Trouble was, he wasn’t there to interfere with the demonstration; he was a participant.  So a self-proclaimed racist and likely perv named Daniel Perry shot and killed Foster on the night of July 25, 2020.

It appears that Perry researched the various levels of murder and manslaughter charges and apparently sought to create a situation in which he could claim to have been in fear for his life so he could shoot somebody.  What a noble lad!

On the night in question, Perry finished his shift as an Uber driver (remind Curmie to use Lyft if he’s in Austin), rounded the corner and came upon the protest.  He could easily have driven around it, but instead, he ran a red light and rammed into the crowd, hitting a number of people, including Foster’s wheelchair-bound fiancée.  Curiously (OK, not actually curiously at all), the “exhaustive review” conducted by the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles (all of them appointed by Abbott, of course) didn’t bother to mention this part of the story.  Or perhaps it did, and Greg Abbott just didn’t care.  It matters little if that little detail was omitted by Abbott himself or by his appointed minions.

Anyway, according to literally every witness, Foster stayed calm and did what he could to alleviate the pressure.  He tried to wave Perry on.  Yes, he was carrying an assault rifle.  Why these things are legal to open-carry in Texas is beyond Curmie’s ken, but Greg Abbott seems to think it’s a good idea… unless, of course, the guy doing so doesn’t own a MAGA hat or answer to “Jim-Bob” or “Bubba.”

Again, according to literally every witness, Foster did not raise his weapon and indeed did not have a finger on the trigger.  To be fair, all of those witnesses were protesters themselves, so they might be a little biased against the guy who killed their comrade.  But <insert late-night informercial voice here> that’s not all!  You know who else says Foster didn’t raise his weapon?  Daniel Perry.  You read that correctly, Gentle Reader.  The guy who’s claiming self-defense initially admitted that he wasn’t actually being threatened: “I believe he was going to aim at me. I didn’t want to give him a chance to aim at me” (emphasis added).

By this logic, and that of some “expert” defense witness Perry’s lawyer dredged up out of the “Testimony for Sale” database, if Curmie now sees someone, anyone, walking down the street carrying a gun, I’m within my rights to shoot to kill, not just if he does anything to actually threaten me, but even if I’m a paranoid coward like Daniel Perry and just sorta kinda think he might.

Oh, and unless Curmie’s been led astray by all those cop and lawyer shows he’s watched over the last half century or more, self-defense is an affirmative defense, meaning the burden of proof shifts.  The prosecution must prove that the defendant committed the act; the defendant doesn’t need to prove that he didn’t, only that the case hasn’t been proved beyond reasonable doubt.  When self-defense is presented as an argument, however, the presumption is that the claim is untrue, and the defendant must prove, at the very least, that it is more likely than not that he was indeed acting in self-defense.

And guess what?  The jury didn’t buy the argument.  Let me put it a different way: twelve out of twelve jurors were convinced that Perry was lying.  Not a single juror had even reasonable doubt of Perry’s legal and ethical guilt.  It may be a little problematic that all of the witnesses were participating in a demonstration that Foster joined and Perry sought to disrupt.  But it’s a hell of a lot more problematic that the only person claiming self-defense is the defendant, on trial for murder, and that he himself acknowledged, at least initially, that there was no immediate threat.

Of course, the day after the obvious verdict was announced, before Perry was even sentenced (!), Greg Abbott proclaimed that he’d grant a pardon if his hand-picked minions the Board of Pardons and Paroles recommended it.  Was he acquiescing to the demands of the despicable Tucker Carlson, or did he come to this remarkably moronic conclusion on his own?  We’ll probably never know.

What is clear is that it is that Abbott could not possibly have studied the evidence presented at the trial and done his actual job at the same time.  Not in order to issue a reasonable statement a day after the verdict.  Life is easier, of course, if you form a conclusion based on your prejudices and then grab hold of any excuse, however spurious, to ignore the actual facts.  Those of us who care about actual justice have more struggles.

It is obvious that Greg Abbott is a grand-standing fraud, a hypocritical ideologue, and an authoritarian asshole.  Whether he’s also a racist idiot, or just likes pandering to his base, a sizable proportion of whom are racist idiots, is unclear.

It’s also crystal clear that the pardon, which the Houston Chronicle’s Cayla Harris and Neena Satija describe as “the first time in at least decades that a Texas governor has pardoned someone for a serious violent crime, let alone murder,” was an act of raw political power, a show of force, with no concern for the reality of the events described.  There is literally (and, Gentle Reader, you know that Curmie is enough of a Grammar Nazi that when he writes “literally,” he means literally) no evidence to support a claim of self-defense except Perry’s (ahem…) “amended” memory of what happened. 

Oh, and by the way, there seems to be no disputing that Perry did indeed run a red light and drive into the crowd, thereby surrendering any claim to self-defense.  The best the defense had to offer was the the claim that Perry inadvertently ran that red light and plowed into the protesters while texting.  Oh, well if he was only reckless when he obviously broke the law, that’s all right, then, right?  Even if Perry’s claim is true, which is about as likely as Curmie’s undergrad alma mater winning next year’s NCAA basketball tournament (they were dead last in a pretty weak league this year), there would be no way the demonstrators could have known that he had no ill intent, but was rather a reckless jackass who still shouldn’t be driving for Uber.  It would be reasonable for them to believe that they were being threatened.  Had Foster shot Perry, in other words, there might have been a legitimate self-defense argument.  Not the other way around, though.

Witness, too, Abbott’s cheap shot at prosecutor, Travis County District Attorney José Garza, who had the audacity to prosecute a murderer whose politics aligned with the governor’s.  It’s difficult to argue with Garza’s assertion that the pardon places “politics over justice and made a mockery of our legal system.” 

Side note: if Greg Abbott wants to say nasty things about José Garza as a personal opinion, he’s absolutely entitled to do so, just as Curmie can offer a personal opinion about Greg Abbott.  But to use the power of the governor’s office to say nasty things about Garza as fact in an official document is pretty close to libel, if indeed it hasn’t crossed that line.

A couple days after announcing the pardon, Abbott slithered off to the annual fellation (we can hope that it was only metaphoric) of the NRA.  Of course, he’d just pardoned a murderer who had killed a man for the sole reason that the victim was openly carrying a weapon; one might imagine that the NRA wouldn’t take kindly to that, but of course they’re just as ideological and almost as hypocritical as Abbott.  And one suspects that the average melanin count of attendees was rather low.

Gentle Reader, if you want to say that there is no clear evidence of a racial motive in the killing of George Floyd, you’ll get no argument here.  If you want to suggest that the death of a single petty criminal in Minnesota shouldn’t incite massive protests around the country, Curmie’s willing to listen, at the very least.  If you want to claim that some BLM protests became violent, and that some of that violence was initiated by the demonstrators themselves, Curmie nods in agreement.

But this particular episode at this particular protest at this particular time in this particular place needs to be looked at individually.  (Curmie goes Confucian again.  Who’da thunk it?)  This incident is clear-cut.  Daniel Perry is a racist, a liar, a coward, and… oh, yeah, a murderer.  He should be in prison because he’s an obvious danger to society.  Not as big a danger as Greg Abbott, though.

On the Faux Controversy over Taylor Swift's Lyrics

Taylor Swift is making news again.  Shocking, huh?

Her newest deluxe album, “The Dead Poets Department: The Anthology,” dropped last week to much applause from Curmie’s Swiftie friends and no little jabbering from those whose primary aspiration is apparently to claim victimhood.  

At the center of what passes for controversy is a lyric in the song “I Hate It Here”: “My friends used to play a game where / We would pick a decade / We wished we could live in instead of this / I’d say the 1830s but without all the racists / And getting married off for the highest bid.”

Yes, Gentle Reader, the righteous dudgeon is thick on the ground about that “1830s but without all the racists” business.  Anyone with a modicum of skill at interpreting text, of course, would realize that the line in question anticipates the revelation: “Everyone would look down ‘cause it wasn’t fun now / Seems like it was never even fun back then / Nostalgia is a mind’s trick / If I’d been there, I’d hate it / It was freezing in the palace.” 

The first thing to notice is the last line, suggesting that a little girl’s fantasies involved being a princess.  Stop the presses!  But the narrator figure’s thinking has evolved since childhood; she now recognizes that wishing for the 1830s without racism and without arranged or forced marriages is rather like yearning for the NBA without all the tall guys.  Nostalgia, especially for a period long before one’s own lifetime, is indeed a “mind’s trick.”

To be fair, there’s not a lot in the 1830s to get excited about.  It is certainly passing strange that a song referencing that decade would be included in an album with a title invoking dead poets.  There were some significant composers (Wagner, Verdi, Berlioz, Chopin, et al.), and the careers of novelists Charles Dickens and George Sand were beginning to take off; Büchner and Gogol wrote plays that are still part of the canon.  But poets?  Of the “big six” Romantic poets, only Wordsworth was still alive in 1830, and whereas Poe undoubtedly wrote some of the poems for which he is now famous in that decade, most weren’t published until the ‘40s.  Walt Whitman was a tween in 1830; Emily Dickinson wasn’t born until December of that year.

One might almost suspect that the 1830s was chosen as the decade to reference in “I Hate It Here” more because it fit the scansion than for any particular attribute.  Stuff like that happens sometimes, one might dare to presume.

Ah, but that would leave the Perpetually Aggrieved with nothing to whine about, and we can’t have that, now, can we?  So we read that Swift “draws backlash,” “faces controversy,” and so on.  According to Snopes, someone with the X handle @ghostijn, “garnered more than 6.3 million views and 25,000 likes, as of this writing,” which was four days ago.  The post was apparently taken down and then reposted: you can see it here if you really care to.  It quotes the lines in question with the commentary: “y’all..😭 there are so many wrong things about this.”

Curmie, apparently being rather slow on the uptake, would settle for one thing wrong; he can’t handle “so many things.”  But all I can see is a lyricist setting up a reversal to acknowledge that our fantasies about other times and places almost invariably leave out the bad stuff: racism, marriage for sale, poverty, disease, etc.  And we tend to place ourselves in privileged positions—it’s unlikely that too many little girls of any race or nationality choose to be scullery maids in their fantasy worlds.

A completely imagined universe, however, one with “a better planet [where] only the gentle survived,” is another thing altogether.  The “secret gardens,” where Swift holds the only key to the entrance: those are controllable, and there can be no intrusion of injustice or pestilence or sorrow.  We have all escaped to such a world as a break from quotidian reality; as long as we don’t live there, the mental health benefits outweigh any downside.

In short, there is nothing in these lyrics to get upset about.  But you knew that, Gentle Reader.

Curmie repeats what he said in an earlier post, that he is no Swiftie.  He couldn’t hum one of her tunes if his life depended on it.  And she’s certainly made some mistakes in her romantic life (unlike the rest of us!).  But she seems to be a genuinely good person in a world in which “billionaire” and “narcissistic asshole” have become virtual synonyms.  Her songs strike a chord especially but not exclusively with women of her generation, and she is a worthy role model for younger girls.  She’ll be writing and singing hit songs long after her detractors’ proverbial 15 minutes of fame have passed into the ether.

And that’s a good thing.

Jason Aldean and the Three Possibilities

The list of things Curmie has started to write about, or started the research to write about, without ever finishing the job keeps growing. Add the WGA and SAG/AFTRA strikes to that compilation. He’ll get back to them if they remain relevant. But for now, let’s talk about the Jason Aldean “Try That in a Small Town” kerfuffle. You can find the song on YouTube or Spotify. Curmie won’t provide links, though, because he doesn’t want to be directly responsible for even one more hit. Curmie listened; call it taking one for the team. 

Needless to say, Gentle Reader, Curmie is not an aficionado of country music. In fact, his personal vision of hell includes a soundtrack of trite faux patriotic lyrics and twangy vocals. If you’d asked him a few days ago who Jason Aldean is, he’d probably have been more likely to guess that he’s a minor league infielder included in some trade package for a star player than a country singer. But Aldean is apparently rather a big deal: Billboard lists him at #7 on the country charts for 2022, ahead of a handful of people Curmie’s actually heard of, and he has ten platinum albums. 

Be it noted, Gentle Reader, that if you’re a fan of country music in general or Jason Aldean in particular, that’s fine, as long as you don’t make Curmie listen. (He similarly promises not to foist his musical tastes on you, except, perhaps, via a link you can choose not to click.) But Curmie does believe he knows something of small town life, having lived in towns or cities of fewer than 85,000 people for over 66 years (and in places under 35,000 folks for 58+ years), as opposed to Aldean’s [checks notes] literally never. 

Curmie is amused but unoffended by Aldean’s inauthenticity. Yes, an earlier song of his, “Rearview Town” paints a very different picture of small towns. No, Aldean has never actually lived in one. But Bruce Springsteen has sorta passed his sell-by date as a voice of the working class, too. And Curmie is still a fan. Songs don’t have to be about personal experience. 

It’s also worth noting that “Try That in a Small Town” was actually written by the quartet of Kelley Lovelace, Neil Thrasher, Tully Kennedy, and Kurt Allison, not by Aldean. Still, it’s Aldean at the center of the controversy, so we’ll continue as if this is all his doing, even though he’s just singing someone else’s lyrics. In other words, Gentle Reader, please mentally insert “…and the songwriters” after Aldean’s name in the ensuing discussion. If you’d similarly change the verbs to match their newly plural subjects, that would be appreciated, too. 

The song starts by describing behavior which we’d all agree is both reprehensible and illegal: sucker punching someone, carjacking an old lady, robbing a liquor store. But then things start getting a little more divisive: “cuss[ing] out a cop” and “stomp[ing] on” or “light[ing] up the flag” may not be activities Curmie would recommend, but they’ve been consistently reaffirmed as protected speech. 

The response: “Well, try that in a small town / See how far ya make it down the road / Around here, we take care of our own / You cross that line, it won’t take long / For you to find out, I recommend you don’t / Try that in a small town.” Whoa. Stop right there. “See how far you make it down the road”? Really? The appropriate response to the exercise of First Amendment protected speech you disagree with is to chase someone down, and prevent them, presumably by force, from going down the road? 

Here it’s worth pointing out that, especially given the immediate reference to “a gun that my granddad gave me,” that we’re not talking about being “shunned” or “unpopular,” however much Jack Marshall of Ethics Alarms might try that spin in a comment on his post on the subject. (Today’s apophasis is that we’ll let the Tin Foil Hat paranoia of “they say one day they’re gonna round up” go without comment for now.) 

What’s being advocated here is not adopting a music hall French accent and declaring you fart in someone’s general direction. No, this is absolutely and literally a paean to vigilantism. The fact that it doesn’t rise to the level of a “true threat” in legal terms means only that the song shouldn’t be censored, which, of course, is different from whether a private enterprise like Country Music Television decides to broadcast the video or not. 

This invocation of violence then continues with a reference to a small town being “Full of good ol’ boys, raised up right / If you’re looking for a fight.” Curmie finds it difficult, given the preceding verses, to think the fight in question is anything but literal. This is what “raised up right” means? Jolly. 

Of course, it’s the video, even more than the song, that is really drawing fire from the left. There are scenes of rioting that suggest we’re looking at the BLM-inspired violence of a couple of years ago. A fair share isn’t, of course; Rolling Stone reports that a lot of the imagery comes from stock footage of demonstrations in Toronto and Montreal. Go figure, right? 

Plus, of course, the backdrop for the shots of Aldean himself is the Maury County Courthouse in Columbia, Tennessee, which seems to be literally the source of light in the video. Oh yeah, it’s also the site of the lynching of Henry Choate in 1927 and of the Columbia race riot of 1946. Charming. 

So all of this raises the question of just what the hell is going on. It strikes Curmie that there are three possible explanations. The first is that Aldean really is a racist, and that Curmie’s friend who suggested that the reason the song is called “Try That in a Small Town” is that “’Try That in a Sundown Town’ wouldn’t have the same ring to it” might be on to something. The possibility that a MAGAmaniac who dressed his kids in t-shirts reading “Hidin’ from Biden” might be evincing the predilections of a small but demonstrable contingent of that red-capped horde cannot be discarded out of hand. 

The carefully manipulated video, the racial implications of the distinction between urban and rural, and the choice of backdrop all could reasonably be perceived to point in that direction. Curmie is insufficiently attuned to dog whistles of that particular variety to have a strong opinion, and he refuses to engage in the kind of straw man arguments he sees all too often online. Curmie doesn’t like it when some ultrapartisan conservative decides what progressives think, and he declines to do the same thing in reverse. So… is Aldean’s song (or the video) racist? Perhaps, but Curmie would take some more convincing, and isn’t going to label someone he’s never met without more evidence than this. 

The second alternative is that Aldean is a garden-variety idiot. (All racists are idiots; not all idiots are racists.) Were this to be the case, he’d be unaware of the symbolism of the setting and of the overtones associated with the distinction between the urban and the rural (or semi-rural). He’d honestly believe that not mentioning race per se in the lyrics would mean the song wouldn’t be interpreted as being about race. 

He’d still view vigilantes as people “raised up right,” and threats of violence as appropriate responses to those whose politics are different from one’s own. But thuggery against people who see the world a little differently than you isn’t the same as doing so because their melanin count is higher than yours, right? 

The third possibility is the most intriguing. No one is going to call Jason Aldean an intellectual giant, but, as Mitch McConnell has proved, being smart and being shrewd aren’t the same thing. So what if the brouhaha, the removal of the song from CMT, the defiant stand at a concert in Cincinnati (in front of a lot of fans, none of whom appear to be more darkly complected than Curmie)… what if it was all a set-up? “One high-level exec” told Mikael Woods of the Los Angeles Times “Aldean is irrelevant today — a sideshow all the way.” And what is the current hubbub if not a sideshow? 

Curmie has argued for years that not all seemingly bad work (or bad results) ought necessarily to be read that way. To choose an example from Curmie’s field: the deus ex machina (literally!) ending to Euripides’ Orestes has been decried by many critics as faulty dramaturgy because it is so utterly implausible. But was one of the great classical tragedians really that sloppy? Or is it just possible that we’re supposed to notice the awkwardness, that the most famous atheist of his era might just be suggesting that it’s unreasonable to expect the gods to fix our problems, that the best way out of a difficult situation is not to get into it in the first place? 

Similarly, might Aldean or his handlers have anticipated that CMT pulling the song was the best possible outcome in a world of YouTube and Spotify? That he’d have every Republican talking head or Presidential candidate singing his praises? That morons like “Veteran Biker” would claim that Aldean “may be on the Mount Rushmore of country music”? (As above, you can search out the link if you choose, but there’s no question about the coded messages and dog whistles in this one.) 

Might they have guessed that people like Curmie, who’d never heard of Aldean, now know who he is, and even listened (once) to the song? That the song would rocket up the charts as an immediate response to the controversy? That even otherwise intelligent people would valiantly attempt to defend the song’s message as opposed to simply his right to sing it? 

Did Aldean dangle the song and the video out there, hoping (not without cause) the leftie press would rise to the bait like a Kardashian who’s spotted a camera? Is Aldean that cunning? Are his handlers? Did Aldean’s people actually leak the bit about the Maury County Courthouse? Maybe. After all, a boycott of something you weren’t going to buy anyway doesn’t carry much of a threat, and appealing to the base has its advantages. 

What Curmie knows for sure is that actual small towns are both better and worse than Aldean’s fantasized imaginings. That the same Constitution that allows Aldean to sing “Try That in a Small Town” also allows Curmie to call it violence-excusing crap. And that if Aldean ever actually ventured into the actual small town Curmie calls home, Curmie sure as hell wouldn’t go to his concert… but he also wouldn’t get a bunch of friends together to beat him up. Or even threaten to.