Please Tell Curmie This Is the Worst Case of Police and Prosecutorial Overreach This Year. Please.

 

Seriously, posting this is what generated a felony charge.

You will recall, Gentle Reader, that in the immediate aftermath of the assassination of Charlie Kirk, there was a flood of backlash against anyone who dared to suggest on social media that the late Mr. Kirk might not have been the Second Coming.  Curmie wrote specifically about Darren V. Michael, who was fired by Austin Peay State University for having the temerity to point out the irony that someone who proclaimed that “It’s worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment” should himself be the victim of gun violence.  There were plenty of other cases, as well, of course, but punishing a tenured theatre prof who sometimes says things that administrators don’t like sorta resonated at Chez Curmie.

Curmie, a retired tenured theatre prof did, after all, write that he “is not ‘celebrating’ the death of Kirk, although he does believe the world to be a better place without his racism, misogyny, trans- and homophobia, Christian nationalism, mendacity, and general assholitude.”  That comment might have gotten him in big trouble had he still been employed at a state university in a red state at the time. 

Anyway, revenons à nos moutons… APSU officials backed down, a little, when it became clear that their action was not within hailing distance of due process.  Michael’s termination was changed to a suspension; Curmie has been unable to find any more details.  [UPDATE: Michael sued and settled out of court for a hefty chunk of change.]  He did learn that a substantial majority of Faculty Senators voted “no confidence” in the university president, Mike Licari.  The motion “failed” because the vote was 23-12; a two-thirds majority is required for such resolutions.  Curmie is well aware that such votes have only symbolic significance, anyway: the Faculty Senate, Chairs Council, Deans Council, and Staff Council at Curmie’s former employer all voted “no confidence” in a president unanimously, and the Regents kept him around… until they let him go a few months later with a fat buyout and a promise to totally lie say good things about him to prospective employers. 

As it happens, however, Mike Licari isn’t the biggest freaking idiot in Tennessee, and Darren Michael’s suspension isn’t even close to the harshest and most illegitimate punishment for obviously protected speech.  Curmie only found out a couple days ago about the case of Larry Bushart, a retired police officer (!) who was incarcerated for 37 days with a $2,000,000 bond for posting a meme.  Yes, really.

The specifics: Bushart, who posts a lot of memes, some of them in rather poor taste, posted one to a message thread about a vigil for Charlie Kirk of then-candidate Trump saying, a day after a school shooting in Iowa, that “We have to get over it.”  Bushart, who was as unimpressed as Curmie was of the orgiastic keening over Charlie Kirk, appended a note: “This seems relevant today…” (That’s the post at the top of this page.) Bushart’s son notes the obvious: that his father was pointing out “the hypocrisy in honoring Charlie Kirk while ignoring other tragic incidents of mass violence.”  That can get you arrested in Tennessee, of course.  Sixth-graders are expendable, after all.  Sleazy millionaire podcasters are important!  The official charge was Felony Insufficient Sycophancy “Threatening Mass Violence at a School.” 

That’s a result of an overbroad law that only grandstanding Republicans could support.  Children’s advocates opposed the legislation.  The ACLU argued that “This legislation is worded so broadly that it could potentially criminalize a wide range of adults and children who do not have any intent of actually causing harm or making a threat -- people who are actually just exercising their constitutionally-protected right to free speech.”  But this is Tennessee; of course, this inanity became law.

So… this case…  You see, Gentle Reader, in what passes for a brain in Sheriff Nick Weems (what a delightfully Dickensian name for this buffoon!) and Sheriff’s Investigator Jason Morrow, “This was a means of communication, via picture, posted to a Perry County, TN Facebook page in which a reasonable person would conclude could lead to serious bodily injury, or death of multiple people.”  Uh, no.  No reasonable person would conclude that.  

The good news is that there are, apparently, precisely zero people in the community who interpreted the meme the way these bozos did.  Indeed, as Liliana Segura writes for The Intercept article linked above, “there were no public signs of this hysteria. Nor was there much evidence of an investigation — or any efforts to warn county schools.”  FIRE requested the school district for any communications pertaining to the case, including the terms “shooting,” “threat,” and “meme.”  The response: no records.  Nada.  Zip.  Zilch. 

The most succinct encapsulation was this, from a local resident commenting on the story on radio station WOPC’s page: “A man is in jail because the sheriff didn’t use google.”  Weems was still trying to spin it that Bushart created “mass hysteria to parents and teachers,” and that he did so intentionally.  That makes the sheriff both an incompetent idiot and a liar.  Curmie awaits Donald Trump’s appointment of Weems to a high-level position in the FBI, ICE, or ATF.  He has all the credentials that seem relevant to Dear Leader, after all.

OK, two things in the category of “the best Curmie can do to excuse this idiocy”: 1). Mr. Bushart is, at least at times, a self-described “asshole.”  2). The meme references “Perry High School”; one of the local schools is Perry County High School.  You will note, however, Gentle Reader, that as even the arresting officer declares, assholitude “is not illegal,” absent legitimate threats of violence or similar intentions of criminality.  And the high school referred to in the meme is, as noted above, not in Tennessee, but in Iowa.  Bushart’s comment makes it clear that he was referencing that event from over a year earlier.

OK, Curmie’s distaste for Charlie Kirk is evident.  That doesn’t mean that his murder was anything but abhorrent, or that those who idolized him and mourned his loss publicly shouldn’t be allowed to do so.  But posting a meme shouldn’t get you fired, and it sure as hell shouldn’t get you arrested.  What’s worse, of course, is the active collusion of multiple figures in the (in)justice system.  True, Nick Weems would come in third in a battle of wits with a broken stapler and a corn dog.  Hell, he’d even lose to Mike Licari.  

But there’s also an unnamed prosecutor who not only didn’t laugh in Weems’s face but actually requested a delayed hearing in response to Bushart’s lawyer’s reasonable claim that bail of $2 million for a nothingburger case like this might be un peu de trop.  And there’s General Sessions Judge Katerina Moore, who granted that request.  Someone should have stopped this absurdity before it embarrassed everyone involved.  They didn’t, at least until the coverage went viral.

This case is so ridiculous, it’s almost inevitable that FIRE got involved.  Charges against Bushart have now been dropped, but that’s clearly not enough.  He lost his post-retirement job, was confined for over five weeks on an absurd charge because bail was set at a level no normal person could afford,  and missed the birth of his granddaughter.  He’s going to sue, with FIRE’s assistance, and he’s going to collect.  Bigly.  

Chris Eargle, who created the “Justice for Larry Bushart” Facebook page, posted on the “Re-Elect Weems for Sheriff” page, “Unwise persecution of people for their political views will cost the taxpayers millions of dollars.  He should never be allowed near public office again.”  He’s right, of course, on both counts.  If only the problem were limited to one boneheaded sheriff in a jerkwater county in Tennessee…

Expelled for... um... Greenface?

Back in the halcyon days of the 2010s, the big annual event of this blog was the Curmie Awards, presented to the person or organization who most embarrassed the profession of education.  Curmie would compile a list of nominees from stories he’d covered during the calendar year, and readers would vote on the most (un)deserving recipient.

There won’t be any Curmies awarded this year or in the foreseeable future for three reasons.  First, Curmie has written a lot less of late about educators behaving badly.  That doesn’t mean there haven’t been cases, of course, but, perhaps because he’s no longer in the game, as it were, other stories have done more to pique his interest.  Plus, the unethical or incompetent protagonists in most of the education-related stories Curmie has covered recently have been non-educators: students, politicians, or organizations like the NCAA.

Second, blogspot no longer supports the gadget that allowed polls, so there would have to be a link to an outside site like Survey Monkey or something, and Curmie doesn’t want to deal with all that noise.

Finally, there are a lot fewer of you.  Individual posts are garnering only 20% or so as many hits as in yesteryear.  You, Gentle Reader, are a member of an elite, not to say miniscule, group.  It doesn’t make sense to continue the poll if a half dozen votes would win the election.

All that said, Curmie’s netpal Jack Marshall at Ethics Alarms alerted him to a story that, if Curmies were still a thing, would mean that what passes for a brain trust at St. Francis High School in Mountain View, CA, like Terry Malloy (Marlon Brando’s character in “On the Waterfront”), coulda been a contender.

Our story begins in 2017, when three 14-year-old boys took a photo of themselves posing with anti-acne masks covering their faces.  One of the three apparently had rather severe acne, and the other two joined him in what Reason’s Jacob Sullum describes as “an act of playful solidarity.”  The medication started light green in color, but grew darker as it dried.  The lads photographed themselves because they “looked silly.”  Importantly, the boys did not post the photo to social media.

Nothing to see here, right?  Well, not to any rational person, no.  But this is a story about high school administrators, remember?  Two of those lads were about to enroll at St. Francis, a high-priced private school.  Again: so far, so good.

Flash forward three years.  It’s now 2020 and the aftermath of the George Floyd incident in Minnesota.  Some recent St. Francis grads had posted an apparently not-PC meme about Floyd’s death, so there was, perhaps, some increased tension.  Unbeknownst to the two boys attending St. Francis, the other lad in the photo had sent a copy to a friend, who “tagged a music playlist on her Spotify account with a copy of the photograph.”  And one of her friends (the administrators undoubtedly know who, but that information seems not to be available to the rest of us) saw it there, recognized the boys, and proclaimed them to be in blackface.  The photo was to be regarded as “another example” of racism at St. Francis.

Well, no self-respecting (i.e., self-important) school administrator wants that kind of publicity, so instead of…you know… listening to the mother of one of the boys, who explained the truth of the matter, they decided that due process was far too much to ask, so they summarily issued an ultimatum that the boys either withdraw or be expelled.

To be fair, those masks are pretty dark (see the photo above), and it’s not too outrageous a leap of faith to see them as blackface, especially if you’ve been prompted to do so.  So some of the furor, though not justified, was at least comprehensible.  But that doesn’t get the school off the hook.  They leapt to a false conclusion when even a cursory glance at the so-called evidence would have revealed that the boys did nothing wrong.  (Curmie isn’t convinced that what 14-year-olds do ought to be held against them years later even if they were in blackface, but that’s at least an arguable position.)

As Curmie has noted several times in the past, it’s important to get names out there if possible.  We may not know the name of the student who posted that photo, but we do know that President Jason Curtis immediately piled on without bothering to check the facts, and that Dean of Students Ray Hisatake called the boys’ parents but obviously didn’t care that they offered a reasonable and indeed true rebuttal to the accusations leveled against their sons.

The money quote, though, is that of Principal Katie Teekell, who said her decision was based not on the boys’ “intent,” but on “optics” and “the harm done to the St. Francis community.”  Of course, there is no indication that the student whose posting of the photo was obviously intended to demean the school has suffered any punishment at all.  Meanwhile the boys who did nothing wrong, and weren’t yet students at the school when the supposedly offending photo was taken, were almost literally run out of town.  The world knows that, now.  So, Ms. Teekell, as Matt Damon might have said in “Good Will Hunting,” “how do you like them optics?” 

This being an education story, and Curmie being a career educator, it seems only appropriate that we attempt to discern the explanation for the administrators’ actions with a multiple-choice quiz.

So…

They acted the way they did because…

a.    They have been so infected with a socio-political agenda that they are incapable of seeing the world except through woke-colored glasses.

b.  They have the ethical sensibility of a hungry cobra and the backbone of overcooked angel’s hair.

c.     They’d come in third place in a battle of wits with a dead battery and a turnip.

Yes, I know, Gentle Reader, “d. all of the above” is likely the best answer, but perhaps your mileage may vary.

This story has received new life of late because the boys sued the school and the jury recently awarded them over a million dollars.  The award is based on a new California law which demands the equivalent of due process from organizations like private schools, unions, hospitals, etc.  This is the first case to invoke the new law in a suit against a private secondary school.

The initial suit sought over twenty million dollars in damages, but the jury rejected claims of breach of contract, defamation, and violation of free speech.  Curmie reminds you, Gentle Reader, that he is not a lawyer, but he confesses astonishment that falsely labeling Bay Area teenagers (OK, they’re into their 20s now) as racists doesn’t qualify as defamation.  Still, each boy will receive over a half million dollars, and the school might have learned its lesson.

Yeah, that’s likely to happen…

 

 

Dress Codes and Potential Curmie Nominees

Curmie is WAAAAAAYYY behind on his writing, but we’re going to try to play catch-up in the waning days of 2015 so the most deserving of Curmie contenders get their fair shot at that coveted title.

Over the summer, Curmie wrote about stupid dress codes associated with high school proms, and promised a second post about stupid dress codes not associated with prom. Here it is, with six examples that happened to have crossed Curmie’s vision over the past few months. The frightening thing is that there is little doubt that we’re only scratching the surface of this inanity; there are no doubt dozens if not hundreds of idiot administrators enforcing moronic dress codes all over the country. These are just the ones that got written up in a place Curmie happened to see them.

We’re going to take these a little out of chronological order in order to start with the one story that isn’t about double standards for girls and boys, and to conclude with Curmie’s choice for the Ontologically Stupidest Dress Code in the History of Ontologically Stupid Dress Codes. It will almost surely get a Curmie nomination; one or two of the others might, too, and you, Gentle Reader, will get to vote for your… erm… favorite.

Gay O.K. is not O.K.

We start, then, at Faubion Middle School in McKinney, TX, where two 7th-grade students were sent home and a dozen or so others were forced to change clothes or cover up t-shirts that read “Gay O.K.” The students say they were showing support for a classmate who had come out as gay and was being bullied. The school, of course, did nothing about the bullying allegations because, well, Texas.

The students say they were confronted by administrators as soon as they arrived at school, but according to Sammy Heiman, who designed the shirts, “we were doing perfectly fine until lunch. And then … [the administration] called us all out, all the people wearing them, called us out of the cafeteria. And people started getting rowdy because they knew what was going on. They were making us take off the shirts.”

I need hardly mention, Gentle Reader, that there was nothing in the school’s dress code that prohibited a political statement of this kind: the district instead relied on a clause reading “any disruptive or distractive mode of clothing or appearance that adversely impacts the educational process is not permitted.” This is, of course, as Curmie has pointed out before (in a very similar case in Ohio three years ago), administrative code for “there’s nothing illegal, unethical, or immoral about what you’re doing, but we don’t like it and we’re going to forbid it because we can.”

By the way, the dress code seems to have been changed over the summer to a more draconian version that outlaws basically everything, including “items that display… slogans, or language that is provocative.” (“Provocative” is another useful word to hide behind for censorious asshats who seek to deny 1st amendment rights.) Nothing like a little ex post facto cover-up to brighten all our days, after all.

Of course, we were subjected to the utterly disingenuous response of the school’s designated talking head, one Cody Cunningham, who self-righteously proclaimed that the school’s “primary obligation is to ensure a safe and productive learning environment.” OK. How is safety an issue here, except by means of a heckler’s veto, and if you were all that interested in productivity and lack of distraction, maybe you shouldn’t have initiated the confrontation? And forgive Curmie the suspicion that if the t-shirts had called President Obama a tyrant, suddenly your hypocritical administration would have been all about free speech.

Anyway, we move on to four—count ‘em, four—instances in which high school girls were subjected to idiotic rules with even more idiotic enforcement for dressing, well, completely appropriately according to any rational standards.

This dress is too short?

We start, then, in Dayton, Idaho, where senior Evette Raye was suspended with only a half hour left in her high school career for wearing a dress that violated West Side High’s dress code. If this incident falls a little short of a Curmie nomination, it will be because the dress really was shorter than the allowable limit. The rule is certainly stupid and probably sexist, but it is at least the rule. And the insubordination charge may actually be legitimate in that manifest defiance of stupid rules administered by puritanical jackasses is still insubordinate.

If the kerfuffle garners a Curmie nod, it will be because of the ham-handed treatment of Ms. Reay by a boatload of school officials. A teacher, Legrand Leavitt, chose the last 30 minutes of a student’s high school experience to be a dick strut his authority enforce the dress code; the school violated their own policy in suspending Ms. Reay: their handbook reads “If a student is inappropriately dressed, he/she will be required to call home to arrange for appropriate clothing, or the school will provide a t-shirt, sweatshirt or sweatpants to be worn that day.” The school didn’t offer to make any such accommodations, nor would they allow Reay’s mother to bring something else for her to wear. (By the time she could have gotten there, the school day—and year—would have been over, and then petty little morons like Leavitt and Principal Tyler Telford wouldn’t have had the chance to feel self-important.)

Shoulders!  Think of the children!

And so we move on to Fort Myers, Florida, where junior Cameron Boland had the audacity to wear a spaghetti-strap sundress to deliver a victory speech after being elected historian for her county’s National Honor Society chapters. Yes, really. A sundress. In Florida. In May. OMG, shoulders! Blindfold the young ‘uns: we can’t have them subjected to this lasciviousness!

As usual, the dress code is a grammatical and syntactical nightmare as well as a sexist manifesto, essentially blaming girls for boys’ distractedness. (Curmie does like the injunction against “tub tops,” though.) To be fair, spaghetti straps are indeed forbidden. In school. This is an extracurricular activity, and the event was held at another school. It’s reasonable to suggest (though obviously not certain) that Ms. Boland really didn’t know she was breaking any rules. Technically, of course, she was, and she should have known that if she didn’t. But it is beyond question that she didn’t violate any rational standards of decency.

Once again, the manner of enforcement of what is already a stupid rule is the real problem. First off, the voters in the election in question were presumably students, so the district’s over-riding of the results translates into a usurpation of students’ (honor students’), authority. And notice that the speech was allowed to happen. You can’t stand by and watch what Pompous Twatwaffle of the Year School Board Vice Chairman Steven Teuber, in a predictably ungrammatical and boorish screed in the local newspaper (so much for FERPA, right?) calls “a flagrant violation” of the rules, and then decide 45 minutes later that the results of a free and fair election must be overturned. Cameron Boland may or may not be a trouble-maker and a provocateur. But two things are eminently clear: The NHS advisors who made the initial call are buffoons or hypocrites or both. And Steven Teuber is an ass, and apparently a creepy one, at that. Sending a Facebook friend request to a 17-year-old girl you’ve never met? Ewwwww.

Apparently cooler heads have prevailed, and Ms. Boland has been duly installed as co-historian of the county’s NHS chapters. The “co-“ part is a compromise position enacted by Superintendent Nancy Graham, who, unlike Mr. Teuber, seems to have an intellect superior to that of a pile of rotting leaves.

OMG, this girl has a collarbone.

Next up in our tour around the country: Woodford County High School in Kentucky. Because if you thought shoulders were over-stimulating, you should look at (Curmie blushes to even type the word)… collarbones. Once again, there is technically a violation at play here: yes, the dress code says that necklines can’t extend below the collarbone. Well, actually, it was written by the usual pack of illiterate butt-scratchers, so what it really says is that the shirt can’t do so—that really would cause some distraction! But we know what the censorious asshats meant. They meant that Stephanie Hughes was in violation for the outfit you see here. Curmie, who is not a collarbone fetishist, honestly couldn’t figure out what the problem was until he read the article.

The dress code had been the subject of no little debate before this year, largely because of a Youtube video created by a student named Maggie Sunseri. In it, girls describe how virtually all of them have been found in violation of the dress code at one time or another. They complain that even if the majority of teachers have no problem with a student’s apparel, “one person can call it inappropriate and make us miss class.” Curmie didn’t watch the whole thing, but was caught by this thoughtful response, obviously to a question about why there is a dress code at all: “…to give everyone a good learning environment, but honestly, it distracts from it. If you’re worried about, hey, am I going to get caught for dress code today because I couldn’t find a shirt that I could wear that was in dress code, “am I going to get caught for dress code today,” not “what’s the lesson on today.” Curmie suspects that the girls in question probably could indeed have found such a shirt… but also notes that the dress code applies almost exclusively to girls, and thereby privileges the “good learning environment” for boys—wouldn’t want them to be led astray by those collarbones, after all--at the expense of fostering such an environment for girls. “It sends a message to boys that’s it’s all girls’ fault,” says another girl. Precisely.

And, of course, we also get the platitudes from the principal about getting students “college and career ready” and similar bovine feces. As one of the girls points out, “college doesn’t have a dress code, so it’s not really preparing us for college.” Curmie can attest to the validity of that point. But the other thing is… sometimes someone wears something inappropriate once or twice, and then they don’t anymore. These things tend to sort themselves out if you let them.

The good news is that Ms. Hughes and her mom, Stacie Dunn, seem little interested in suffering fools, so when Stephanie was busted for clavicular revelation, not only was a social media campaign born; it went viral... and by “viral” I mean 46,000+ shares. Curmie heard about it at the time, for example, even if he’s only writing about it now. Ultimately, the mobilization of dozens of students and parents (and a healthy dollop of international embarrassment) proved sufficient: the new standard (to be implemented in January, apparently) is still written by someone who shouldn’t have been let out of 6th grade, let alone a college-level Freshman Comp course. But it says that necklines can now extend 2 ¼” below the base of the collarbone—a not unreasonable criterion. If only the powers that be had listened years ago.

Not really a violation at all, but we’ll pretend it is.

Finally… well, finally before the grand finale… there’s this from Huntsville, Alabama’s Grissom High School, where Josefina Thompson was punished for wearing leggings, despite the fact that her outfit seemed to be acceptable under a provision that “Students may wear yoga pants, tights, leggings, or jeggings as long as they are used as an undergarment covered by shorts, skirts, or dresses that are at least no higher than three inches above the bend of the back of the knee.” Is the problem that she was wearing a sweatshirt instead of a dress over the leggings? Curmie doubts it.

Rather, it’s all about that “distracting” thing. Ms. Thompson, by the way, was stopped not by a teacher or administrator, but by a security officer, whose business ought, in any sane universe, to be, well, security, and not to interpret the dress code. This isn’t Brecht’s Caucasian Chalk Circle, where a comely young woman’s backside is determined by the drunken but just (or just but drunken, depending on your point of view) judge Azdak to be a deadly weapon. This is an average high school girl whose choice of apparel would be acceptable to any rational being even if the sweatshirt was too short, which it doesn’t appear to be.

Like Stephanie Hughes, Ms. Thompson has a mom who cuts to the central argument in a hurry. In a Facebook post, shared over 2000 times (!), Deanna Wolf writes:

Huntsville City Schools, I would like to ask a question. What are you teaching our children about their bodies and their minds? My daughter was not allowed to go to class, and was held in ILC for an entire class period because she wore this outfit to school. She would have been held even longer had someone not been able to bring her more “appropriate” clothing. I would like someone to please explain to me how this is justified. Why single a student out, put her in a locked room and inhibit her learning because of one faculty member’s INTERPRETATION of her clothing? It boils down to the claim that girls’ “revealing” clothing is a distraction to male students. That the mere idea of a girl even HAVING a derriere (or, heaven forbid, shoulders) is so scandalous that we must stop everything and hide her away. I am sick to death of the public shaming of the female form. You are telling girls that their bodies are to be hidden, and that boys cannot control their minds if they see the basic female figure. It’s disgusting and it belittles both sexes. Not to mention that this whole situation clearly states that a girl’s education has less importance than a boy’s education, and that her right to said education is secondary to providing a distraction free learning environment for the opposite sex. Your misguided attempt at disciplining my child has only succeeded in giving an example of the skewed gender bias perpetuated by society. The lesson she learned today was NOT that her clothes were inappropriate, but rather that the behavior of the school was inappropriate. It’s asinine things like this which push more and more parents to homeschool their children.

Yes. What she said.

Curmie is also, by the way, particularly impressed (notice he didn’t say “positively”) with Keith Ward, communications director for the system, who tried valiantly to convince us that “the dress code applies to everyone.” This is an all too common avoidance of responsibility, akin to “no, it isn’t sexist to tax tampons; men who buy them have to pay the tax, too.” Ward also professed ignorance as to whether students are allowed to, say, wear cheerleading uniforms to class. Way to know your job, there, Keith. For the record, cheerleaders in Curmie’s high school days were required to wear their uniforms to class on game days, skirts in general were shorter then, and we all managed to survive and even get diplomas. Either the adolescent libido or the inanity of school administrators has increased exponentially in the intervening years. Curmie’s money is on the latter.

And so we move on to the incident Curmie regards as the most ridiculous of them all… Drumroll. A couple hours down the road from Curmie is the Cypress-Fairbanks School District in greater Houston. Cy-Fair, as it is commonly known, is a well-respected school system; at least three of Curmie’s former students teach there (or did). But it is also home to a certain Curmie contender.

The perp and the offending dress.  Be afraid.  Be very afraid.

Here’s the story. Parent Jef Rouner wondered why his daughter was wearing a shirt over the sundress she wore to school. Was she cold? “No… I had to change because spaghetti straps are against the rules.” Rouner’s daughter has also had to change into jeans despite the fact that her dress went all the way to the floor. Did Curmie mention that she’s five, and we’re talking about kindergarten, here?

In Rouner’s words:

Five. You get me? She's five. Cut her hair and put her next to a boy with no shirt on and she is fundamentally identical. I guess you could argue that a boy would not be allowed to wear a shirt with spaghetti straps either, but the day they sell anything like that in the boys section of a Target I will happily withdraw my objections.

Yes, there is a specific injunction against spaghetti straps (Rouner rightly notes that there is nary a male-specific rule in the list, but plenty of female-specific ones), but surely any rational person would link that prohibition to the writers’ palpable terror of breasts and cleavage, right? Well, apparently not. Because… she’s five, remember?

Rouner again:

Make no mistake; every school dress code that is not a set uniform is about policing girls and girls alone. The only time I've ever seen it go the other way around was when I was fighting the battle for my long hair throughout middle and high school. That was last century, but I had a friend go through the same thing with Needville ISD less than a decade ago with her son. And why? Because long hair belongs on girls. There's literally no other possible reason to force a boy to cut his hair if he doesn't want to.

Let’s hear it for parents worthy of the name. But stupid, senseless, draconian, body-shaming, sexist, and otherwise despicable dress codes can teach only two things, both of them bad: patriarchic bullshit or contempt for legitimate laws. The perpetrators are probably so insensate that they fail to realize the harm they cause. But we must not look away. We must not be silent. We must not fail.

Curmie Wannabees: Punishing Heroes

To say that Curmie is behind in his writing is roughly akin to saying that NFL nose tackles tend to be rather large men. And there’s a backlog of Curmie contenders to get through. It will take a while to catch up, but let’s start with two variations on the same theme: a student reprimanded (or worse) for being a hero.

We look first to Florida (where else?), where, in late February, a 16-year-old student at Cypress Lake High School disarmed a 15-year-old football player who was pointing a loaded .22 caliber revolver at a teammate and threatening to kill him. The incident occurred on a school bus, apparently the aftermath of an argument during practice. (They practice football in February?) The names of most of the leading characters in this little drama haven’t been released because of their ages, so Curmie is going to refer to them as Perp (yes, he was later identified, but this keeps it simple), Hero, and Victim—you can follow that, right, Gentle Reader? Idiots #1 and #2 will make their entrance shortly.

Anyway, Perp is upset with Victim and pulls out a loaded handgun. Hero and a couple of his friends wrestle the gun away from Perp, apparently saving the life of Victim and quite possibly others. Who says so? Well, Victim, for one, and apparently other witnesses as well.

Jeffrey Nadel, the president of the National Youth Rights Association, gets this one right: “This student should be hailed as a life-saving hero.” Indeed, anyone with a lick of sense is praising this young man.

So, what was the school’s response, specifically that of Idiot #1 (that would be Principal Tracey Perkins)? Why, to suspend Hero, of course! You see, he “was involved in an incident where a weapon was present.” The school later changed the rationale (about the time, one suspects, when people started talking about how fucking stupid the idiots running that school are) to the fact that Hero was “uncooperative” with the investigation—under duress, without access to his mother or an attorney, in shock, raised not to be a ”snitch,” fearful of retaliation…—gee, I can’t understand why he might not be a nice, compliant little narc.

Even if Hero’s reluctance to cooperate, whatever his motivation, were to be a legitimate cause for suspension, the fact is that there’s that pesky document with… you know… photographs of it and stuff (left) that shows that all that was needed to suspend Hero was the fact that rather than allow a fellow student to be shot at point-blank range, he intervened. Well, that and having a principal who doesn’t have the brains to be a speed bump.

Let’s face it, Idiot #1, if you know he was there, you also know what he did, and if you have the brains God gave a turnip, you know that suspending Hero sends every possible variety of wrong message to the students in your charge. Yes, yes, I know. Under Florida law, you had the legal right to issue an “emergency suspension” without having to deal with all those messy due process issues. Idiot #2 (district mouthpiece Alberto Rodriguez) told us that: “Florida law allows the principal to suspend a student immediately pending a hearing.” But presumably even the assembled cretins in Tallahassee didn’t anticipate that you’d suspend a kid for stopping the potential for gun violence. The fact that you can do something colossally moronic doesn’t mean that you should.

Principal Perkins, I think it’s a safe bet to call you an early front-runner for the Curmie Award. I truly do hope you win, because for someone to beat you, they’d have to invent a whole new kind of stupid, and I really don’t want to see that.

It saddens me to note, however, that Florida doesn’t have a monopoly on this particular kind of insanity. There are idiots running schools in Canada, too: in Calgary, to be precise.

This time, the incident took place in a classroom in May, and the weapon of choice was a knife instead of a gun. Otherwise, I suspect that Stevie Nicks would call the story “hauntingly familiar.”

Briar MacLean (right), age 13, heard the “flick” of a knife (and that means it wasn’t exactly a Boy Scout knife, if you catch my drift) and heard someone say that a bully indeed had a knife. The teacher was on the other side of the room. So he stepped in, pushing the bully away. The situation didn’t escalate… until young Briar was summoned to the principal’s office and not allowed to leave. The police were called in; his locker was searched; his mother was called.

The mother, Leah O’Donnell, was rightfully puzzled at why her son was in trouble for doing what everyone in the world other than a school administrator would recognize as the obviously right thing. The school does not “condone heroics,” she was told. She asked the logical next question: “I asked: ‘In the time it would have taken him to go get a teacher, could that kid’s throat have been slit?’ She [the vice-principal] said yes, but that’s beside the point. That we ‘don’t condone heroics in this school.’”

What is most terrifying about this incident is not that a 13-year-old kid would carry a flick-knife to school and apparently be prepared to use it; it is not even that another boy should be reprimanded for doing the right thing. No, it is that that vice-principal has no freaking idea how stupid she and her boss look.

Sure, if Hero in Florida or Briar in Calgary hadn’t intervened, there might have been a couple of dead bodies, but rules are rules. And this is where, yet again (as here, here, and here), Curmie invokes the wisdom of Confucius, who always advised against rules and in favor of a wise arbiter.

Now, it is only fair to grant that there is a certain amount of consequentialism at play here: important elements of these stories would be very different had Hero been shot or Briar stabbed. But in a very real sense, nothing would have changed. Demonstrating the courage to stand up for those in danger ought to be regarded as a virtue worthy of considerable praise. It is not by accident that Briar MacLean’s story is linked to a “related” story by the editors at the National Post to the tale of Ingrid Loyau-Kennett, the middle-aged woman who talked down the heavily armed killers of that British soldier on the streets of London a few days earlier.

This is obviously not an appeal for more weapons or more laws or more enforcement. This is, rather, a straightforward statement of fact: heroes are real and we need more of them. Not vigilantes, not rulebook-toting nanny-staters, not legalistic regulation-parsers. Heroes. We also need fewer stupid people in charge.

Standing Up to Bullies Is Not Allowed in Umatilla High School: And Don't You Forget It

Usually, when a school administration starts being noised about as a Curmie contender, it’s for creating and enforcing stupid rules: that you can’t walk at graduation if you have more than x-number of absences, even if any rational person would excuse most of those “truancies”; that you can’t go to prom alone or with someone of the same sex; that your skirt was a half-inch too short, even though other girls’ outfits were far more risqué and they weren’t punished at all; that you can’t quote the lyrics to a popular song to a classmate without getting charged with sexual harassment, even if you’re six.

Authorities at Umatilla High School in Florida have created a whole new category, however. This time, the specific rule in question is actually fine. (It actually over-reaches considerably, but that encroaching nanny-statism is not directly relevant to this discussion.) Unfortunately, it is being enforced by idiots who’d have to take a step up in class to achieve the intellect of a prune danish.

Anyway, the folks in the Lake County school system purport to take bullying pretty seriously. Here’s the relevant section from their Code of Student Conduct:

The School Board of Lake County, Florida, is committed to providing a safe, positive, productive, and nurturing educational environment for all of its students. The Board encourages the promotion of positive interpersonal relations between members of the school community. Aggressive behavior, bullying, harassment, and similar acts toward a student, whether by other students, staff, or third parties is strictly prohibited and will not be tolerated.

There’s more, including both a detailed definition and the aforementioned over-reaching, but you get the idea. The intro to the policy manual is also clear:

Each student must obey district rules while on school grounds; while being transported to or from school at public expense; and during school-sponsored events, field trips, athletic functions, and similar activities. During such times, all students are subject to the immediate control and direction of teachers, staff members, or bus drivers to whom such responsibility has been assigned by the principal.

But the school’s pious proclamations don’t hold up so well when it comes to… you know… actually doing something. Here’s the story. An 18-year-old senior named Stormy Rich (shown at left) had enough credits to not take a 1st-period class, so she was granted permission to ride the later bus to the nearby middle school.

Also on that bus was a mentally-challenged girl who was subjected to abuse by a gaggle of middle-school girls. As Rich explained to local TV reporter Jennifer Bisram,

Just because she doesn’t understand doesn’t mean this should be happening to her…. They would just be mean to her, tell her she couldn’t sit in certain spots on the bus. They were giving her food that they had put in their mouth. I had to tell her to actually spit it out, because she didn’t understand.

Rich told the bullies to stop. That worked for a while, but not for long. She then complained to the bus driver, who did nothing. Then she went to school officials, who, likewise, did nothing. She reported the abuse again. And again. And again. The girls threatened her. She went to school authorities yet again. Nothing. Out of frustration, she told the bullying brats that if the school wouldn’t do something, she would. Ah… now school officials woke up… and rescinded her right to ride on that bus. You see, she was “displaying bullying behavior.”

Yes, Gentle Reader, they really are that stupid, that incompetent, that recto-cranially inverted. The unidentified school spokesperson presumably said “two wrongs don’t make a right,” apparently too dim-witted to understand that this constitutes a tacit admission that Rich’s allegations are in fact true, and that the school did bupkes about it. You see, the victim, whom you will recall is incapable of understanding her own victimhood, didn’t report the abuse herself. Of course, there’s a school policy that states that “Lake County busses [sic.] are equipped with video/audio cameras for security purposes. Students are being taped during their ride. These tapes may be used to determine violations of the Code of Student Conduct.” In other words, there’s documentation. If the school believes Rich’s claims are disproved by the video evidence, say so. More likely, the tapes show that she’s exactly right, and that the bus driver is complicit in the bullying—by inaction and denial, at the very least.

True, being denied access to a school bus that doesn’t even go to your school isn’t exactly like getting sent to the Gulag, but the fact remains that Rich should be praised for her efforts, not punished, even a little bit. More importantly, what’s happening here is an all-too-familiar tactic by people who lack leadership skills but are nonetheless placed in positions of authority: the situation is resolved not by actually solving the underlying problem, but by silencing the witness. The school says there have been no incidents since Stormy Rich was removed from the bus. That may be true… but I wouldn’t bet the rent. My suspicion is that all that’s happened is that no one else wants to be kicked off the bus.

I’m reminded of the furor a few years ago when then-Vice President Cheney got his skivvies in a twist about the New York Times’ coverage of warrantless wiretaps that went well beyond any legitimate national security justification. You see, the threat to world peace wasn’t the fact that the spying itself was a violation of both international law and the U.S. Constitution; it was that we knew about it. The bullying of one mentally-challenged teen-ager by a pack of mean girls isn’t on that scale, of course. But it is the thin edge of the wedge: the harbinger of more criminality unpunished, more whistle-blowing suppressed, and more sanctimonious posturing by unethical buffoons paraded for our delectation.

Ms. Rich: if things don’t work out for you at Daytona State, you’re welcome in my classroom. Umatilla High officials: enjoy your Curmie nomination.

Curmie Contenders: I... Can't... Keep... Up

It’s May, so I’m beginning to feel like Oprah: You get a Curmie nomination, and you get a Curmie nomination, and you get a Curmie nomination, and you get a Curmie nomination. Yes, four of them: all making news in the past week or so, each worthy, if that is the word, of serious consideration for the coveted award given to the educator who most embarrasses the profession.

I have my personal… erm… favorite of the quartet, but since I mean it that all four might get a Curmie nomination this December, I don’t want to prejudice the voting. So I’ll take them in the order I found out about them.

Leading off, then, is the story out of North Rowan High School in North Carolina. Social studies teacher Tanya Dixon-Neely was taped by student Hunter Rogers saying some pretty stupid things in the classroom.

Now, allow me to register a few caveats. First, Rogers is no hero for surreptitiously recording the class without permission and then posting the tape to YouTube instead of turning it over to school officials. (Curiously, I don’t see anything in the news reports about Rogers being suspended or even reprimanded for using a cell phone in class.) He’s an unethical little brat who thinks the ends justify the means: and the default position is that the means were sleazy if not illegal. Perhaps Dixon-Neely deserved it. His classmates didn’t… unless they were all in on the subterfuge, and Dixon-Neely was being set up to be ambushed. The fact that Dixon-Neely seems to have been prodded into her angry outburst doesn’t do much for the accusers’ credibility.

Second, the combination of poor sound quality and no video, coupled with a couple of pops and gaps, makes me wonder if the tape was edited. Andrew Breitbart might no longer be with us, but his legacy is. As I wrote a year ago, “I suspect that I’m not the only faculty member in the country who wonders whether today is the day that some student will show up in my class with a grudge, a recording device, and access to editing equipment.”

Third, some of what Dixon-Neely argues—and has been widely ridiculed for arguing—is indeed true, or at least could be argued to be true in general terms. I’d suggest, for example, that the behavior that Barack Obama admits to in one of his books doesn’t rise to the level of bullying, but the allegations about Mitt Romney do… of course, that’s not exactly what Dixon-Neely actually says, and she passes on an opportunity for a teaching moment. Moreover, the fact that we have a constitutional right to criticize the President doesn’t mean that people haven’t been arrested for doing so, as, say, the case of Nicole and Jeff Rank demonstrates. Oh, sure, the authorities called it something else, but yeah, they pretty much got arrested for criticizing then-President Bush.

Is this what Dixon-Neely was referencing? Given the incoherence of some of the rest of what she says, probably not, but we can’t know that for certain, and she deserves due process. That doesn’t mean that getting her out of the classroom was a bad idea; it means that there may be more to her side of the story than the deafening drum-beat of the rightist press will allow us to hear. It’s also saddening to see the specifically racist and sexist anger directed at Dixon-Neely. She deserves criticism for screwing up, for sure. But ”Ignorant Black Leftist SLUT Tanya Dixon-Neely Needs To Be Fired”? Really?

Still, the idea that you can disparage Romney because “he’s running for President; Obama is the President” is pretty bizarre, and describing President Bush as “shitty” may be an opinion with which I agree, but it is an opinion, vulgarly expressed. Opinions framed as opinions about non-political matters are fine. So is challenging a student’s assumptions. Using the excremental adjective to describe a POTUS while on the clock as a teacher, however: nope. It’s pretty clear that Ms. Dixon-Neely ceased to function as a teacher and began being an Obama campaigner not long into the tirade. I struggle in vain to imagine a scenario by which this would be appropriate behavior. Yeah, Hunter Rogers is a right little asshole, but Dixon-Neely is a Curmie contender.

Next up: the school nurse at Deltona High School in Florida who refused to give an asthmatic student his inhaler while he was having an attack. In fact, she locked herself in her office while he gasped for breath on her floor. And then, (you can see this coming, can’t you, Gentle Reader?) the school officials defended her actions. You see, they didn’t have a parental consent form signed this year. His mom had filled out the form in previous years and hadn’t revoked that permission. Not good enough. And, of course, they’d confiscated his inhaler—unopened, with his name and prescription clearly legible—from his locker. But, you see, there are rules.

What the hell is going on? It’s the rules to let a kid die? It’s the rules for someone whose profession is to heal the sick to refuse treatment? What kind of Ayn Randian nightmare is happening here? Yeah, I get it. The school could get sued if some other kid got the inhaler and had an allergic reaction or whatever. This is because some “victims” are greedy, because some lawyers are unethical, because some judges and juries are stupid. That’s where these odious “zero tolerance” policies come from. I proposed a solution to this problem on my old blog nearly seven years ago. Curiously enough, no one listened.

But this case raises the bar of callousness. Remember, the school seized the inhaler or there wouldn’t have been a problem. Even though knew the medication was his, that it had been prescribed, that there were release forms from previous years on record, they not only wouldn’t then administer potentially life-saving medication to young Michael Rudi, they wouldn’t let him do it himself, and they couldn’t be bothered to call 911. Frighteningly, this kind of depraved indifference is apparently not uncommon: I’ve heard of this happening at least twice in Texas, just in cases involving my students or former students. Ironically but absolutely appropriately, this inhuman treatment of a fellow traveler resulted in precisely what the stupid policy was intended to prevent: a lawsuit.

While part of me would like the nurse to be placed in an airtight room until she passes out, my better nature prevails. Just sue the shit out of her, the school, and every idiot administrator who sought to justify her indefensible actions. Maybe, just maybe, someone will get the message.

Next on the hit parade is the news from Walker, Michigan, where Kenowa Hills High School Principal Katie Pennington suspended 65 seniors for riding bicycles to school as a last-day-of-class senior activity. The students were escorted by a police cruiser, the city’s mayor “rode shotgun” and provided donuts for the group.

But, as is the tradition at Kenowa Hills, and probably at every other high school in the country, the students didn’t tell their administration about what they were going to do. (I’d call it a prank, but I yield to the linguistic distinction drawn by Zac Totten, the class president: “A prank is something that causes harm, funny for one side and not the other. I think she reacted the way she did because we kind of blind-sided her.”) Yes, that’s the problem: she wasn’t in on the gag, and that is an offense grievous enough to suspend over 20% of your imminent graduates, denying them their traditional “senior walk.”

What an idiot. Yes, one might point out that there were safety issues involved, that a little more advance warning would have provided a second police cruiser, that discretion is generally a good thing. But no one got hurt; there’s nothing illegal about riding a bicycle. People in town thought it was a great idea. I can understand the safety concerns, if indeed they were legitimate and not simply a convenient cover for what was in fact no more that administrative petulance.

After the case brought national notoriety, Pennington and Superintendent Gerald Hopkins, who (wait for it…) supported her actions, relented. Pennington even offered a public apology. That’s a step, I suppose. Reversing a silly decision before it makes national headlines would be better. Best of all would be a higher-fiber diet.

Finally, case #4, which I am rushing to write up lest there be a #5 on the horizon before I finish. This one concerns Jessica Barba, a student at Longwood High School in Middle Island, New York. For a class project, she created a video and a Facebook page, both clearly labeled as fictional, to demonstrate the real effects of bullying. “Hailey Bennett,” the adolescent heroine of the piece, is isolated when her best friend moves away, is subjected to constant bullying at school, and ultimately commits suicide.

It’s not the best project in history—not least because of the atrocious spelling employed throughout—but there is some creativity there, the video is well-edited, it shows the evidence of a lot more work than most high school kids will put into any assignment, and the project as a whole relates to a real issue in schools. Bullying happens, and too little is done to stop it. (No, Gentle Reader, I’m not going off on that screed.) Jessica can articulate a persuasive response (that was the assignment) to this situation far more effectively than she can to whether the elections in Egypt will lead to a new golden age, a return to military rule, or an increase in power for Islamic fundamentalists. She’s 15. Go figure.

But some parent apparently saw the Facebook page (why? how?), didn’t notice that it was clearly marked as fictional, and called the cops, who in turn over-reacted, as did the school, which promptly suspended the girl for… erm… “[creating] a substantial disruption to the school.” Those are the words of the Superintendent, unidentified in the article by Meghan Neal in the New York Daily News, but apparently one Allan Gerstenlauer, assuming the website is kept up to date. Of course, winning the big game in basketball would also cause substantial disruption, but I guess we’re not supposed to notice that.

As often happens in cases like these, it was the national press attention that really turned the tide. Let’s face it, whether this is a good thing or not, if Matt Lauer calls you out, you’d better be ready. There was also an on-line petition that gathered nearly 15,000 signatures. Caving more to public pressure than to any real beliefs, school officials rescinded the suspension and wiped Jessica’s record clean.

Three further observations:

First, whatever else may be true here, it’s clear that once again school officials think they have the right to control every aspect of their students’ lives. I don’t care that kids at school were talking about the video. If there was a disruption, maybe that’s a good thing. And, once again, we’ve got a school demanding a student’s Facebook password to delete the offending page. Maybe, maybe the account should have been taken down because it violated Facebook’s TOS agreement. But that’s Facebook’s call. Dammit, we’ve just been here. This kind of intrusion is stupid, unprofessional and unethical in Geneva, IL. What makes these bozos think it’s any different on Long Island?

Second, not every kid can drop by the “Today Show” studios with her parents. This, too, raises a familiar issue, a variation on the theme of one I discussed a few months ago. The internet helps, but you can be sure that somewhere in the country there’s some idiot administrator over-reaching just as much as the clowns in charge of this high school did… and getting away with it because there’s no Neil Gaiman or Clint Dempsey or Matt Lauer to take up the cause. (Side note here: my first post on the situation at UW-Stout has had more views than any other two articles I’ve written, combined, and about 10 times as often as the median. Wanna bet having the link tweeted by Adam Baldwin had something to do with that?)

Third, there was a snarky piece by Judith Warner in Time about this case. Warner is right to wonder,

shouldn’t a 15-year-old, ostensibly advanced enough in English to be taking a “persuasive speech” class (as opposed to, say, an old-fashioned class focused on reading and writing) know that “bestfriend” isn’t a word? That a “whole in her heart” makes no sense and that there’s no such thing as a “branned name shirt”?

What comes next is problematic, however:

And while we’re on the subject of academics, is allowing a kid to do something for a homework assignment that she’d probably love to do anyway – make a video, post on Facebook – really such a great idea? In an era of panic over the shrinking skills of our future workforce, and of “results-oriented” education reform, can we afford to waste students’ time on feel-good assignments rather than push them to master the basics of grammar, spelling and punctuation?

Rubbish. Warner would have us believe that students who actually enjoy an assignment are somehow doing something wrong. Look, I’m a grammar Nazi (ask any of my students), but correct spelling is only one component of education. Yes, I wish I didn’t cringe every time I look at a stack of papers from university juniors and seniors, let alone high school sophomores: I know that there will be some colossally stupid constructions in half or more of those essays. But any reasonable view of education seeks a balance between left-brain and right-brain activity. Jessica Barba deserves to lose points for her orthographic sloppiness. Neither Warner nor I know whether she did. But she’s got a good heart, a creative flair, and a fair amount of technical skill. There’s the potential for a promising adult in there. Still, she wasn’t completely successful. Her message about the perils of bullying and humiliation clearly didn’t resonate with the pompous Ms. Warner. Otherwise, this 15-year-old girl wouldn’t have been held up to ridicule in a national publication.

So there you have it… four more contenders for the Curmie. By my rough count, that brings the total for 2012 to about 16. It’s only May. Jolly.

No Good Deed Goes Unpunished: Ryan Young and the Idiocracy at Safeway

Simmering on the back burner: a piece on identity and self-identification that will, I suspect, re-affirm my status as curmudgeon and annoy the hell out of those who think that I should be a good little progressive and roll over for the likes of Barack Obama and Elizabeth Warren just because I generally agree with them politically. Roughly 2/3 written: an update piece covering several stories I’ve talked about in the past couple of years.

But today’s topic: the saga of Ryan Young. The utterly incompetently written piece linked here nonetheless communicates the essential information: Mr. Young was working as a meat clerk at a Safeway in Del Rey Oaks, California when he saw a man beating up a pregnant woman. So he did what any normal, ethical person would do: he intervened. Here’s Mr. Young’s own description of the events:

Every few seconds he would turn around and push her and then he actually kicked her. I told him to calm down and he was just irate. I saw no one was intervening in the situation and I just became afraid for her safety and also other customers safety. The guy was out of control and pretty much lost it in there.

Is it heroism simply to do the right thing? When there’s risk involved, I’d say yes. But at the very least it’s a net plus.

So what does Safeway, in its infinite wisdom, do? Why, suspend him without pay, of course! There’s apparently some rule—no one will really come out and say so—that the correct thing to do is to call security or a manager. Morons. These people are the enemy. I mean that. They were the ones sniping at Columbus, at Galileo, at John Hancock. Pythagoras probably had to endure them. You know Confucius did. And Einstein. And Nelson Mandela. And James Joyce. And Susan B. Anthony.

These are the people who can’t wrap their head around the idea that we need to be smarter than the rules, that sometimes you have to act, and that a young and apparently strong employee like Mr. Young might well be better suited to controlling a violent batterer than a pudgy middle-aged manager would be. More to the point, Mr. Young took action because it was necessary. Sure, if there was a threat of violence, he should get someone in authority on the scene. But this wasn’t some “gee, wouldn’t it be awful if…” scenario. This was real. And it was right now.

Everyone on the planet—except the buffoons at Safeway, of course—seems to understand that Young acted appropriately. The police chief thinks so. The witnesses think so. Even the store’s loss prevention manager thinks so. There is Internet outrage. There’s a fund-raiser. There’s a change.org petition with a whole lot of signatures (I was #149,605). Meanwhile, the Safeway silliness squad execs have dithered for over a month, while Young, an expectant father, languishes without a paycheck.

Safeway is a definition by example of the Peter Principle, the idea that every employee rises to the level of his own incompetence. In any sane universe, everyone who contributed to Mr. Young's suspension, from enacting it to begin with to not over-turning it when given the opportunity to do so, would not only be fired—not suspended, fired—but be paraded through the streets in stocks and pelted with eggs bought at one of Safeway’s competitors. Any pregnant woman would be allowed to punch and kick every one of these idiots, preferably in the groin. Mr. Young’s own pregnant wife may also use a crowbar. The woman who suffered the beating in the store: a sledgehammer.

But this isn’t a sane universe, as you know all too well, Gentle Reader. I am, if nothing else, reminded of the sage advice I once received from a dear friend when an employer terminated me without following their own rules, let alone due process. She said, and I can quote it exactly although it was long ago, “You could sue them, and you’d win, but then you’d have to work for those assholes.” Yes, it would be good for Ryan Young to get his job back, and the company had damned well better pay him for his extended leave of absence while they tried unsuccessfully to extricate crania from anuses.

But what should happen, what would happen if I managed a competing grocery store, would be a conversation like this:

Telephone rings.

Ryan Young (into phone): Hello?

Me: Hello, Mr. Young?

RY: Yes…

Me: This is Curmie, the manager of Curmie’s Grocery Store.

RY: Yes?

Me: I’d like you to come work for me, in the same job you had at Safeway. I’ll pay you half of the money you lost by getting suspended at Safeway as a signing bonus, and I’ll pay you 10 cents an hour more than they were paying you. You interested?

RY: Of course!

Me: There’s one catch. I want you to do an ad for my store. I’ll pay you for that, too, but you’ve got to agree to it now or there’s no deal. OK?

RY: What do I have to say?

Me: Here’s the script: “Hi, my name is Ryan Young. A few weeks ago, I stopped a man from beating up a pregnant woman. Safeway suspended me without pay for it. Curmie’s hired me because of it. So… who would you rather have make a profit from your grocery purchases?” Deal?

RY: Deal.

Me: See you at 8 o’clock tomorrow morning. Wear a tie; you’re gonna be on TV.

Game, set, and match.