FLOHPA, Romney, and the Imminent Dusk

Conventional wisdom has it that whichever Presidential candidate wins two out of three of Florida, Ohio, and Pennsylvania is really likely to win the election. In fact, the last candidate to win the Presidency without winning FLOHPA was named John F. Kennedy.

This is not good news for Mitt Romney. The numbers will vary a little from day to day, but as I write this, Nate Silver is predicting all three states for President Obama, with likelihoods of 97% in Pennsylvania, 83% in Ohio, and 68% in Florida. Those aren’t close. If Obama wins every state where Silver gives him an 80% chance, he wins. If he wins every state Silver says he’s got better than a 2/3 chance, he gets 329 electoral votes. He’s closer to winning North Carolina (39%) than to losing Florida (68%), his weakest current win.

But the news gets worse for the challenger: there are remarkably few undecided voters. This isn’t to say that it’s impossible for Governor Romney to make a comeback, but he needs help. Even a series of excellent debate performances is unlikely to be enough. Obama needs to do something stupid, either in the debates or in his job, per se. And Romney needs to avoid the foot-in-mouth performances of recent weeks. Good luck with that, Mitt.

Here’s the thing: Huffington Post’s analysis of a host of polling data gives Obama over 50% in Pennsylvania. That means that a fair number of people who have already made up their minds will have to actually change their minds if Romney is to win the state. In Ohio, it’s currently 49-43; Florida is 49-45. That means that if no one currently intending to vote for the incumbent actually switches sides, Pennsylvania is off the table, and Romney would need to win 88% of the undecideds to take Ohio, and 83% to win Florida. The chances of that happening: well, certainly extant, but not great. The Quinnipiac/New York Times/CBS News poll (shown above): well, it’s all over but the shouting.

Of course, it is possible to lose two out of three of the trio of battleground states with the most electoral votes and still pull out the election. If President Obama were to win only those states HuffPo describes as “Strong Obama,” he’d win Pennsylvania and Ohio and lose the election, with 265 electoral votes. By HuffPo’s calculus, there are seven states that will decide the election: if Obama wins New Hampshire, he’s guaranteed at least a tie; if he wins any of the others—Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Nevada, North Carolina, Virginia—with or without New Hampshire, he wins a second term. Of these, Obama currently leads in all but North Carolina… actually, he leads there, too, but by a miniscule margin well within the margin of error. Obama is currently running at 49% in five of the swing states, 48% in one, and 47% in the other. Romney has a 47, five 45s, and a 44.

Talking Points Memo tells an equally if not more grim story for the challenger, with Obama currently at 49.9% in Pennsylvania and 49.8% in the other two FLOHPA states. Romney needs over 99% of undecideds in the Keystone State, 97% in Ohio, and 96% of Floridians. That’s a Herculean task for a candidate who isn’t exactly playing the game flawlessly.

True, there’s the Rasmussen poll, the most right-leaning survey that anyone takes even a little seriously. But even that gives Obama 237 “safe” electoral votes to 181 for Romney, with 15 votes leaning towards Romney and 105 toss-ups. 76 of the 105 show Obama with a lead. In other words, if the Rasmussen poll were precisely accurate (and it has traditionally over-estimated Republicans), Obama would cruise to a comfortable 313-225 victory.

It’s no wonder the Romney team is clinging to fictions about polling samples and such. According to this silliness, Romney in fact has a comfortable lead. Look, Rasmussen (!) has it 313-225 for Obama, albeit with some of that margin a little uncertain. The Fox News (!) poll has Obama/Biden with a 5-point lead nationally. I can’t find a state-by-state analysis from them, but their overall polling fits right in with everyone else’s, all of which show Obama with a small-to-moderate, not insurmountable, lead. The NBC/Wall Street Journal (!) poll gives the President a five-point lead among registered voters and a six-point lead among likely voters. Everyone… well, virtually everyone, agrees.

If you need a dentist or a plumber or a mechanic, you go to a professional. We can argue about which one is best, but when every single one of them tells you that you need a root canal or a new toilet or a carburetor, I really don’t care what your friend Bob down the street says, especially if he’s a restaurant manager or a football coach or an insurance salesman. Things could change in this election; they have in the past. John Kerry made a late run, for example, although it turned out to be not quite enough. But to say that Romney is currently ahead by 6-10 points is lunacy. Period.

This whole affair does fit remarkably well with recent trends in Republican thinking, however. They don’t trust economists about the economy, scientists about science, teachers about teaching. And whereas the Pentagon has certainly earned our distrust over the years, there are those Congressional buffoons (cough… cough… Paul Ryan… cough) who accuse the military brass of lying when they say they need less money down the road. So it’s no wonder they don’t trust professional pollsters, either. Many things that used to be true have been turned on their head in the last half-generation of politics; foremost among them: Republican recognition of the notion that experts know whereof they speak. But global climate change really exists, teaching to the test doesn’t really educate our children, and waterboarding really is a war crime… and it doesn’t matter what the preachers and the political hacks have to say about it.

Still, it’s a minority of the GOP that gives this particular silliness any credibility. Even the chronically if not acutely moronic Erick Erickson gets this one right. Sure, he’s skeptical that his guy is as far behind as the polls say he is, and it’s easier to rally the troops for a close race than for one in which your candidate is getting crushed. But his commentary leaves no doubt that whereas he may be guilty of a little wishful thinking, he’s not in the tin-foil hat brigade on this one:

I do not believe the polls are all wrong. I do not believe there is some intentional, orchestrated campaign to suppress the GOP vote by showing Mitt Romney losing. I actually believe that Mitt Romney trails Barack Obama. I think Republicans putting their hopes in the polls all being wrong is foolish.

I do understand Republicans’ frustration. After all, Obama ought to be eminently beatable, and the GOP chose the most electable of their bevy of second-teamers… well, not counting Jon Huntsman, who is actually a grown-up, but who, predictably, was gone by February. Of course, we’ve been here before, in the other direction. George W. Bush’s first term was even worse than Obama’s, but the Dems chose the “electable” John Kerry, a stinking rich Massachusetts pol who, unlike his primary opposition, didn’t have much in the way of core values. And they lost. Perhaps, Gentle Reader, you might notice something interesting about that description.

We’re left with two major points. 1). This race has shifted, largely because of Mitt Romney’s ineptness, from being about the incumbent’s record to being about what an utter disaster the challenger is. That’s good news for Mr. Obama. 2). It isn’t over. That’s good news—the only good news—for Mr. Romney. I unabashedly steal the closing reference from a piece by Jason Linkins and Elyse Siegel on the Huffington Post: for the Romney campaign, to quote Bob Dylan, “It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there.”

Mitt Romney and the 47% Comments

I got a few hundred words written about the two Presidential candidates’ responses to the situation at the American Consulate in Benghazi earlier this month (well, that incident in particular among several). On the one hand, we had the Obama administration’s absurd claim that the crisis was created, or at least catalyzed, by a hack movie-maker whose amateurish effort had been on-line for months. On the other hand was the incompetent and narcissistic posturing of Candidate Romney, whose allegations, even had they been true (which, of course, they weren’t: this is Mitt Romney we’re talking about, after all) would have been ill-timed, ill-considered, un-presidential, and dangerous.

Before I had a chance to finish, however, came The Leak. You know the one: about how Romney can’t win the support of 47% of the population because they don’t pay taxes. A friend posted a status on his Facebook page: “So...after Mitt's Libya debacle last week, and the now-famous ‘secret tape’ release on Monday...is anybody else wondering what David Axelrod's gonna do with his third wish?” Yeah, pretty much. The scary thing is that this revelation had virtually no effect on Romney’s prospects: the bottom line is that independent voters (by which I include myself, along with other members of either party who are honestly willing to consider a candidate from across the aisle) 1). have largely already made up their minds, and 2). are voting for either Not Obama or Not Romney.

Stated otherwise, the fact that Nate Silver still gives Governor Romney a reasonable chance of winning in November (albeit that chance dropped from better than 1 in 5 to less than 1 in 6 in the couple of days it took me to write this piece) is attributable almost in its entirety to President Obama rather than to the GOP nominee himself. Obama’s positive/negative ratings throughout the campaign season—dating back to last November—have been largely even or negative… until recently, when those of us with cynical dispositions might be thinking not so much about his performance per se as how he compares to the other guy who wants the job.

Somewhat predictably, the President’s lowest ratings (42/50) occurred in December, when the posse of Republican candidates were all making headlines with their own spin on why the country was circling the bowl. The bad news for the Romney campaign—other than the fact that their candidate is Mitt Romney—is that Obama now has not merely an overall positive rating (50/44), but that for two consecutive weeks he’s hit the 50% plateau, where he hadn’t been for a very long time. Yes, the timing corresponds to that of the Democratic convention, so there’s probably a bump from that: his favorables went up 6 and his unfavorables down 3 during convention week. By contrast, Obama took a two-point favorability dip during the GOP convention—but there was no increase in his unfavorability rating, and Romney gained virtually no ground as a result.

What all this means is that Romney’s only hope is to keep the attention on Obama. I’m not sure I agree with Peggy Noonan that this is a year in which “Republicans couldn’t lose” (but are losing), but I think there’s no question that there is (or at least was) a greater opening for a GOP challenger now than there was 12 years ago, when George W. Bush was nonetheless elected. (And to my friends on the left who think Bush and his minions “stole” that election: it shouldn’t have been close enough to steal. Shut up and move on.)

Obama has had some successes that we can all agree on: the fact that Osama bin Laden and Muammar Qaddafi aren’t around anymore is a good thing. We can argue about how much credit should go to Obama, and about the downsides of those successes (further strained relationships with Pakistan, for example) but those are certainly victories that happened on his watch. The American automobile industry is in better shape now than in many years. Still, whereas many of us are glad DADT is a thing of the past, Obama’s leadership on the issue made him as many enemies as friends. Same for the Affordable Care Act, and for, in fact, the majority of what I and others might think of as accomplishments.

Moreover, the left is unsatisfied. I’m no Socialist (although I confess that I am somewhat disappointed that I have yet to be called one by an idiot right-winger), but the fact that a single-payer health system was never on the table even as a bargaining chip boggles my mind. Guantánamo is still open; DOMA is still the law of the land; Obama’s Iraq and Afghanistan policies are virtually indistinguishable from Bush’s.

More fundamentally, whereas Romney is surely disingenuous in many of his attacks on Obama’s policies—he’s hardly the first candidate to run against an incumbent with that strategy—there are some things that aren’t so good right now, and about which we can all agree. The unemployment rate, especially for minorities, and the deficit are unacceptably high. Yeah, yeah, I know: the GOP-led House won’t pass any jobs bills, and they are petulantly refusing to do what any rational person would do and raise taxes. They claim their Infallible Leader is Ronald Reagan, but it’s really Grover Norquist. I get all that, and I agree with the overwhelming majority of it. But the sign on Truman’s desk didn’t read “The buck stops with the Speaker of the House.”

Luckily for the Obama campaign, Romney is nothing if not hubristic. All he had to do following the events in Benghazi, for example, was to do precisely what he did after the shootings in Aurora: express condolences and look serious. “Much as I disagree with President Obama on many issues, I trust that all Americans blahdeblahblahblah…” Then, wait a few hours and do an interview where you’ll surely be asked about the situation. Respond by starting with sympathy and then allow as how the situation might possibly be avoided, and that you hope the rumors you’re hearing turn out to be false. Nope. He had to get out there with a statement that was rightfully interpreted as an attempt to score political points off a tragedy. Way too soon, and way too inaccurate. By the way, is anyone else a little bemused by those who grudgingly admit the “apology” was issued well before the attack, but whine that it was not taken down soon enough afterwards… after all, it’s not like those folks had anything else on their minds but updating their fucking website, right?

But, revenons à nos moutons. The Leak. Let’s stipulate two things: 1). the tape was attained through inappropriate means, and 2). what candidates—all candidates—say to supporters would probably shock and appall most of us. But this isn’t a law court. There is no evidence that the tape was edited, nor have I seen any claims from the Romney camp that it was. In other words, whereas making and distributing the tape was unethical by those who did so, using it as a means of learning more about candidate Romney by the rest of us is thoroughly reasonable.

So here’s the transcript of that now-(in)famous section:

There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe that government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you name it. That that's an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what. And I mean, the president starts off with 48, 49, 48—he starts off with a huge number. These are people who pay no income tax. Forty-seven percent of Americans pay no income tax. So our message of low taxes doesn't connect. And he'll be out there talking about tax cuts for the rich. I mean that's what they sell every four years. And so my job is not to worry about those people—I'll never convince them that they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.

Sigh. I mean, really, where to begin?

With the fact that people who pay no federal income tax still pay taxes: state and local taxes, including the notoriously regressive sales tax, property taxes (directly or indirectly: if you don’t own your home, your rent pays for the landlord’s taxes); the also regressive payroll tax (I’d say “don’t get me started on this one,” but it’s too late); various excise taxes; etc.?

With the recognition that the 47% in question is comprised substantially of active duty service personnel, students working to pay their way through school, the elderly? With the intriguing statistic that 96% of Americans (including, say, Paul Ryan) have received direct government assistance? (That’s not counting things like roads and schools and police: things from which all of us benefit.)

With the fact that the states with the highest percentage of folks not paying federal income tax are overwhelmingly red? Of the 14 states with the highest rates of non-payers, Romney will win 11, including the top 3, even in the event of an Obama blowout.

With the blithe and condescending portrayal of half the population as self-described victims unwilling or unable to take responsibility for their lives?

Or is it with the face-melting chutzpah that suggests that Romney will somehow win over 94% of the remaining 53% in order to win? Those are Josef Stalin numbers.

The claims in Romney’s speech are, in short, substantively preposterous and politically inept: not merely because, as Meghan McCain (among others) points out, you’ve got to assume that there’s a camera-toting mole somewhere in your operation, but more importantly because you’re begging for money to help you win and essentially conceding defeat at the same time. It almost makes it worse that there’s a legitimate observation under all the camel dung of Romney’s rhetoric: too many people don’t pay federal income tax, because our wealth is so unevenly distributed that nearly half the population doesn’t make enough money to have to do so.

The fact that Romney is making political arguments I disagree with will shock you, Gentle Reader, precisely as much as my suggestion that the sun will rise in the east tomorrow. But that he would be this utterly incompetent as a candidate is really mind-boggling. Because here’s the deal: either Romney actually believes the drivel he’s spewing (possible, but unlikely), or he thinks his audience doesn’t know any better (really insulting to a carefully selected hoity-toity crowd), or there’s a nudge-nudge-wink-wink schtik happening here, with the candidate and his (imminent) donors engaging in a rather disturbing coded intercourse (a term I choose quite consciously) replete with disingenuous claims which are actively twisted into a particularly nasty truthiness. I’m not sure which of these scenaria is the most disturbing.

Mitt Romney is an arrogant buffoon, a self-entitled jerk, and a pathological liar. And even after all that has become obvious to anyone paying even a modicum of attention, he’s still got about a 1 in 6 chance of becoming the leader of the free world. Not the biggest endorsement of Mr. Obama, is it?

Breast-Feeding Brouhaha

Among the pieces I want to write over the next couple of weeks are several nominations for the 2012 Curmie Award for educator most embarrassing to the profession. But one thing I’ve noticed is that relatively few nominees are people like me, i.e. college faculty. There are teachers, but they tend to work at the elementary or secondary level; there are people who work at universities, but they tend to be administrators. Whether this phenomenon is a function of college faculty actually being less profoundly stupid than others in the education field, or of less media coverage of their transgressions, or of my own biases, I cannot state with confidence.

What I can say is that we now have a nominee who is indeed a faculty member: Adrienne Pine (right), an assistant professor of anthropology at American University. She is now at the center of a minor kerfuffle after breastfeeding her daughter in front of her Sex, Gender and Culture class… no, not as a subject for discussion, but rather as a matter of course, or at least of exigency. Contacted by a writer for the student newspaper, she first responded to an e-mail inquiry, then got snotty in a face-to-face interview. She first asked the school paper not to publish the article. The editor offered her anonymity, at least, saying the editorial board hadn’t yet decided whether to proceed with publication. She asked him to “hide [her] name”… and then proceeded to identify herself in an article on the Counterpunch website.

Her piece was subsequently described by a supporter as “pedantic and needlessly defensive,” with “garbled and unconvincing arguments about why she breast-feeds.” I’d be a little more blunt. Her often incoherent screed is even more pompous than it is illogical, and that’s a pretty high threshold. She can trot out commentary about “a slippery slope of biological determinism” or “gendered essentialism” or similar jargon-laden gibberish, but she seems incapable of either saying “no comment” or understanding the way any journalistic operation works. She’s all about liberal principles, but don’t dare call her “Ms.” instead of “Dr.”: that’s a gendered derogation, apparently, even coming from another woman. I’m not exactly sure what it means, then, when my students call me “Mr.” (For those who don’t know me personally, I’m a professor with a PhD.)

I found about about this incident from Lela Davidson’s piece on the Today Moms page on the NBC News site. Knowing I wasn’t going to have time to write up my commentary immediately, I forwarded the link to Jack Marshall of Ethics Alarms, suspecting (with reason, as it turns out) that 1). he’d be interested, 2). he’d get to it before I would, and 3). his take would be very similar to mine.

I yield to both these writers on a number of matters. Here’s Davidson on one of the central considerations:

This is not about breast-feeding. It’s a matter of professionalism. And, yes, sometimes we all have to make very difficult choices between our families and our jobs. The truth is Pine’s daughter could have waited until after class to eat. Had she not been ill, she would have been in childcare during class, presumably either being bottle-fed or not eating.

Oh, yeah. But I’d suggest that this story both is and is not about breast-feeding. The real transgression was bringing a sick child to class at all. The daughter is too sick to go to day-care, but it’s OK to drag her into class, where her presence is at best a distraction, and where she is likely to infect students? (Note: Pine herself said she “caught and improved upon [her] baby’s cold.” Translation: the girl was contagious.) And don’t give me the “no other choice” nonsense. Of course there were other choices. If the TA can’t handle syllabus-distribution day, get another TA. There are friends and colleagues who can look after the kid for less than an hour. Or hire a student to keep her out of trouble: after all, a student had to alert Pine that the girl had a paper clip in her mouth, meaning that the attempt to parent and teach simultaneously wasn’t exactly going so well. Were I of a snarky disposition (perish the thought!), I might note that years of intensive study have shown exactly what processes lead to the whole baby-having thing, and that doing so is a choice.

In virtually any other profession, this situation would simply not happen. Imagine an ill infant trotted along by a Walmart cashier, a bank teller, a defense attorney… a high school teacher, for that matter. Babies do not belong in the workplace, period. I should note that it is fine to have the child in your office when you’re preparing the next day’s lecture or whatever, but in the actual public performance of your professional duties, I expect you to devote yourself to the task at hand: teach or be a mom, but you can’t do both at once. I’d also note that if you’re really afraid that missing the first day of class because of a sick child will imperil your tenure chances, you need to find a new employer ASAP: you’re either looking for an excuse for your imminent failure, or you’re going to be a lot better off working for people who aren’t schmucks.

But I do think that the breast-feeding angle does matter, too. If Dr. Pine is really so cloistered that it is inconceivable to her that someone in the class would be made uncomfortable by her “giving her baby her boob,” to use Andrea Marcotte’s expression, or that someone on a college newspaper would think the incident worthy of a short blurb on the feature page, then maybe some of those stereotypes about ivory-tower academics aren’t so silly, after all. It sure as hell would raise an eyebrow or two on my campus, whether it should or not. If you want to argue that breast-feeding in public, or even on the job, ought to be unremarkable, go right ahead. But if you don’t understand that there’s a difference between reality and utopia, I really do pity your students.

And the self-righteous riff on how other cultures aren’t subject to the same Puritanical self-repression as Americans doesn’t change the fact that the chances of encountering someone who thinks that breast-feeding your kid while you’re supposed to be teaching is a bit outré are pretty damned close to 100%, even in a “feminist anthropology” course at one of the nation’s artsy-fartsiest universities. But Dr. Pine aspires to professional victimhood: everything that goes the slightest bit wrong in her world is attributable to “anti-woman implications” or some such twaddle. She crows in her ultimately hubristic article about how she was rude to the (female) student reporter, whom she identifies by name, whose questions she derides as “biased and sophomoric,” and who is accused of “passing the buck” about whether the article will be published to the editor whose job it is to make those decisions. Forgive me if my irony meter just lurched past “extreme.” Way to stand in solidarity, there, Professor.

Really, this should and could have been a non-issue. But Dr. Pine, and no one else, chose to make it otherwise. What could have been a blip, easily defused by a simple recognition that not everyone thinks the same way Pine does and a pro forma apology for unspecified distractions of the first day, metastasized into a public internet harangue that manages to be simultaneously vicious and paranoid, and ought, in a just universe, to be the last nail in her tenure coffin.

One thing that student artists share with journalists (and with athletes) is that their work, unlike that of, say, anthropologists, is public. Or, rather, it is when the work is done. If you come to opening night of my upcoming production and immediately take to the Net to criticize my female lead, I’ll do nothing to stop you. But if you do so based on a rehearsal, I’ll rip you a new one before you can say “Countess Aurelia.” That student reporter is, after all, a student reporter. The article apparently still isn’t published—and at this point, why should it be? But you’re going to eviscerate her for what she might have been thinking about saying?

Bringing your sick kid to class is unprofessional; breast-feeding her during class aggravates the situation. But getting sufficiently exorcised about an unpublished article that you’d publicly defame the student whose perfectly reasonable questions rendered you “shocked and annoyed”: that’s way over the line. We can be grateful for the breast-feeding incident, at least. It, or at least its aftermath, revealed Dr. Pine’s true colors.

And earned her a Curmie nomination.

Pre-approving Freedom of Speech

The brouhaha coming out of Prague, OK recently gives me a chance to talk about a case in Fullerton, CA that I’ve wanted to write about since last spring, but that had never seemed to make it to the top of the stack. I’ll get to what they have in common—other than idiot administrators—in a moment.

Let’s start with the earlier case. At Fullerton High School, there’s an annual “Mr. Fullerton” event, a sort of variation on the theme of beauty pageant: it’s unclear to me how much is serious and how much is parody. Anyway, one of the elements of the contest is a question-and-answer session. There seems to be no exact transcript of what contestant Kearian Giertz (left) said, but his after-the-fact description seems to be universally accepted as catching the gist:

I said, ‘Hopefully, in ten years’ time, I’ll be winning Emmys, Oscars and Tonys’—just, you know, the typical answer—and, then I added, ‘But, more importantly, I’d really, really like to sit on the couch with the person that I love and say I’m married to them. And my case, that is a male. And, I hope that, in ten years’ time, gay marriage would be legal.

Cue the idiot Assistant Principal. (As usual, Gentle Reader, Curmie apologizes for the redundancy.) Onto the stage trots one Joe Abell, ordering Giertz’s microphone turned off (“Cut him! Cut him! Cut him!”), ushering him backstage, and disqualifying him from the festivities for “going off script.”

Considerable brouhaha ensued, with student protests, public and private apologies by Abell, statements by school board members, the whole nine yards. The official (i.e., Cover Our Ass) statement from the district (I can’t find the original, complete text) said that whereas Abell’s actions were prompted by “what the Assistant Principal believed to be a statement that was off script and not pre-approved,” “the student’s statement… regarding… future plans and hopes did not violate any school rules,” and “[the] District believes that the matter should have been handled privately….” Abell was briefly suspended, then returned to his job. He will be re-assigned to classroom teaching in another school for next year: a move he had apparently already requested long before this incident.

Shift to Oklahoma. There, in the tiny town of Prague, high school valedictorian Kaitlin Nootbaar (right) was denied her diploma because she used the word “hell” in her valedictory speech. Yes, really. Ms. Nootbaar, like many teens, has changed her mind not infrequently about her long-term goals. According to her father,

”Her quote was, ‘When she first started school she wanted to be a nurse, then a veterinarian and now that she was getting closer to graduation, people would ask her, what do you want to do and she said how the hell do I know? I’ve changed my mind so many times.’”

He said in the written script she gave to the school she wrote “heck,” but in the moment she said “hell” instead.

Nootbaar said the audience laughed, she finished her speech to warm applause and didn’t know there was a problem.

That was until she went to pick up the real certificate this week [in mid-August].

“We went to the office and asked for the diploma and the principal said, ‘Your diploma is right here but you’re not getting it. Close the door; we have a problem,’” Nootbaar said.

He said the principal told Kaitlin she would have to write an apology letter before he would release the diploma.

She has (quite reasonably) refused to do so. As with the California case, there has been great hoopla, with even a little more spice in the mix: an appearance on the “Today” show, accusations from Papa Nootbaar that Principal David Smith “constantly picked on” Kaitlin throughout her senior year, and the inability of Smith or Superintendent Rick Martin to comprehend the fact that they’re embarrassing themselves and their district with their fit of censorious petulance.

It’s pretty clear in all this that no one is exactly without fault. The substitution of “hell” for the approved “heck” seems to have been deliberate, even if not planned from the beginning. David Nootbaar’s “stand your ground” rhetoric is at least one step past the line into libertarian arrogance. But the school’s conniption over a word that, used once, doesn’t even change a movie rating from G to PG, is positively absurd. Sure, “hell” is a stronger expletive than “heck,” but not by much. Songs like “Highway to Hell,” “Hell’s Bells,” and “Hell Is for Children” blare across public airways. Not so coincidentally, “heaven” songs often contain the word hell: “If you want to get to heaven, you’ve got to raise a little hell”; “If there’s a rock and roll heaven, you know they’ve got a hell of a band.” Plug “‘how the hell’ lyrics” into a Google search and you’ll get 154,000,000 hits.

The word most often linked with “hell” on the scale of potentially offensive language is part of one of the most famous movie quotations ever, from a G-rated movie… or did someone change that line to “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a darn” when I wasn’t paying attention?

More to the point, withholding a student’s diploma for such an offense, even if it were premeditated from the very beginning, is simultaneously overkill and a particularly good example of administrative impotence. It’s the former because the transgression, if it even qualifies as such, merits at most a private reprimand. It’s the latter because Ms. Nootbaar is by now already attending classes at Southwest Oklahoma University, and it’s only a matter of time before that piece of paper from her high school—if and when she gets it—will be shoved into a drawer or a box… or perhaps discarded altogether. One suspects that she’ll earn at least a BA or BS, and quite likely an advanced degree, as well. And nothing Prague High School attempts to do about that will matter in the slightest.

No, they chose to piss into the wind for no apparent purpose other than asserting one last time that they’re in charge. As virtually anyone who knows me personally will attest, one of my personal mantras is, “If you have to tell me, it ain’t so.” If you’re directing a play and you have to tell your cast that you’re in charge, you’re not. If you’re teaching a class and you have to tell your students that you’re in charge, you’re not. If you’re a high school principal and you’ve got to tell your recent graduates (and Ms. Nootbaar is, apparently, an alumna, even if she doesn’t have a piece of paper that says so) that you’re in charge, you’re not.

Both these stories feature over-reactions by school administrators: not just making mountains out of molehills, but constructing the entire Himalayan range out of an adolescent mole’s first attempt. But what I find fascinating is the “sticking to the script” trope. Notice that the students in question had to submit their commentary to school officials prior to being allowed to speak in public. Yes, I know that’s both legal and prudent. It’s also creepy… in two ways.

First, let’s look at the utterly dishonest pragmatics of the whole charade. This entire rationale is a scam. I spent a good share of the last week in auditions for a play I’m directing. I know some of the monologues students presented, and I can say with certainty that there were some paraphrases up there. At callbacks, by definition limited to those most likely to be cast, actors with scripts in their hands didn’t get everything word for word correct. And that’s actually OK. Sure, I want everything to be word perfect when we open. But I’ve been around the block a couple of times in my career: I know—don’t just suspect, but know—that someone will drop a line or say something at least as different from the text as “hell” is from “heck.”

I know for a fact that I both paraphrased and added a line when I gave a scholarly paper at a conference last month, despite the fact that I had the written text in my hands. And that made the paper more effective rather than less so, despite the fact that I’d spent a considerable amount of time crafting the presentation to say exactly what I wanted it to. Because I was making eye contact with my audience rather than burying my face in my text, I could sense where clarification was needed, when two examples instead of the three I’d scripted would suffice, and so on. There are two, and only two, differences between what I did and what Mr. Giertz and Ms. Nootbaar did: my variations from the script went unnoticed because no one else had seen the text (and because the audience was comprised largely of people who’d done precisely the same thing with their presentations earlier in the conference), and, well, I’m older.

In other words, using “going off script” as an excuse to punish someone is disingenuous simply because it happens all the time: it’s the equivalent of firing someone because they use the office computer to check Facebook during their lunch break. “The rules are clear. You can’t use the office computer except for official business.” Except that everyone does it, and singling someone out for doing so is always a stand-in for something else. One suspects that had Nootbaar inserted her current interest in marine biology into her speech, or had Giertz recently entered into a relationship with a girl and burbled that he hopes to marry her someday, there would have been no repercussions, despite the obvious deviations from scripted remarks.

More troubling, however, is the implicit assumption that it’s any of the school’s business to censor students. If you don’t trust your valedictorian not to say something offensive, don’t have her speak. It’s not a requirement—there was no such speech at either my high school or college graduation ceremonies. (Or at least I don’t remember them… that was a while ago.) As noted above, I understand the rationale. But I also reject it. If you’ve done your job as a school, you’ve instilled at least a modicum of responsibility in your students: tell the valedictorian or the participants in a light-hearted contest they need to stay on track and the chances are pretty good that they’ll do so.

That doesn’t mean that you won’t occasionally wish some student had done something else. But the ones who earned the right to speak deserve the right to do so without administrative interference. Conversely, those who seek naughtiness for its own sake will say what they want when they want, whether they’ve submitted a script or not. Trusting students to do what they’re supposed to do isn’t easy. It is, however, a risk worth taking, and ultimately the right thing to do. But that would require abstract thought and faith in someone other than themselves: the two things the average high school administrator lacks.

Parsing the Palaver of Todd Akin

Todd Akin, the Missouri Representative and Senatorial candidate, is an idiot. This is not news to, well, anyone who has paid the slightest bit of attention to the news for the past few days. Congressman Akin would come in third place in a battle of wits with a corn dog and an anvil. Whereas it’s true that his face-meltingly stupid remarks about “legitimate rape” are probably no more inane than the drivel spewed by Steve King or Louis Gohmert or Michelle Bachmann on a daily basis, his comments did have the special bonus of being remarkably offensive to anyone with a vagina and to a goodly number of those of us without one.

This gaffe could, of course, have very significant consequences in political terms: Akin has no doubt reduced his chances of unseating Claire McCaskill, considered by many to be the most vulnerable Democratic incumbent seeking re-election to the Senate this November. It is not out of the realm of plausibility that McCaskill could hold on, and that her victory would keep the Senate in Democratic hands. Polls which had shown a slight lead for Akin now show a more substantial but not insurmountable lead for McCaskill. By energizing the state’s progressives, moreover, Akin may even have put Missouri into play at the Presidential level, although Nate Silver, whose analysis of the 2008 election was essentially spot on, still says there’s a 79% chance that Mitt Romney will win the state.

But I’d like to concentrate on four (or possibly five) ways, only a couple of which have received much attention, in which Akin’s comments really run up the points on the stupidometer. Let’s start with the Congressman’s exact words:

Well, you know, people always want to make that as one of those things where how do you… how do you slice this particularly tough sort of ethical question. It seems to be [“me”?], first of all, from what I understand from doctors, that’s really rare. If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down. But let’s assume that maybe that didn’t work, or something. You know, I think there should be some punishment, but the punishment ought to be on the rapist, and not attacking the child.

There’s a lot there to chew on, but most of it will make you gag.

Let’s start with what isn’t offensive: his final answer to the question asked of him. I disagree with his conclusion, but I respect it: when, after all, does a collection of cells become human, and therefore to be granted rights? At birth? (What about Macduff, who was “from [his] mother’s womb untimely ripp’d”? [That’s Macbeth, Act V, scene viii, for those of you playing along at home.]) At viability? (And how can even the most skilled of doctors determine that with precision?) At conception? (Are we concerned that this de-legitimizes certain standard forms of birth control?) Or do we just believe that ”Every Sperm Is Sacred”?) The fact that Representative Akin comes down in a different place on this philosophical spectrum than I do isn’t the problem: it’s how he gets there.

Let’s start with the term “legitimate rape.” No, I’m not going to get all snippy about contrasting the term with “illegitimate rape.” That’s a red herring that distracts too many of Akin’s critics from the real jackassery of what he said. People misspeak. I know what he meant, and none of us will ever be able to say anything if we are in constant fear of stumbling over words even a little bit, even when the intention is clear (“you didn’t build that,” “I like to be able to fire people,” etc.). No, I don’t think Congressman Akin believes that rape is ever “legitimate” in the sense of “appropriate.” Even he isn’t that moronic. He meant that calling it rape is legitimate.

But this raises not one, but two problems. First, as I’m by no means the first to say, rape is rape. There may be a difference between forcible rape, statutory rape, and rape when a victim is unable to consent (under the influence of drugs, for example). Indeed, the legal definition of rape is different in different jurisdictions: sometimes not requiring penetration, for example. But if Mr. Akin shouldn’t be criticized for something he clearly didn’t mean, neither can he get off the hook for something else he didn’t mean: he wasn’t parsing the term, but suggesting that only forcible rape somehow ought to qualify for the exception he won’t grant, anyway.

Secondly, please allow me to go Grammar Nazi on you, Gentle Reader. What Representative Akin meant to say was “legitimately rape.” In this construction, the adverb “legitimately” modifies the implied verb “termed,” and the meaning is clear. “Legitimate,” however, is an adjective, and can modify only a noun or pronoun: hence the confusion. In other words, Mr. Akin doesn’t know what I routinely demand of first semester freshmen: a comprehension of the basics of English grammar and syntax.

I confess that as soon as I read the transcript of the remarks, I Googled Akin to see if he was a proponent of one of those English as official language bills that come around with dreary inevitability. Someone unable to tell an adjective from an adverb is, of course, more likely than someone with basic language skills to demand that the language he really doesn’t understand should be concretized as “official.” In other words, Akin just seemed to me like the type to be holding a sign reading “Your in America, speak are language.” Sure enough, he’s a co-sponsor of something called the English Language Unity Act. You know, I wouldn’t be so cynical if the idiots weren’t so predictable.

Point 2 isn’t necessarily true, which is fitting, because it’s that Akin may well have been lying. I don’t mean that his “science” is so much bat guano—that’s for another paragraph. No, I’m talking about the phrase “from what I understand from doctors.” Now, I do recognize that there’s a built-in escape hatch here: what a certifiable imbecile like Todd Akin understands is, of course, quite likely a considerable distance from reality. But I want to concentrate on the word “doctors.” It’s plural.

So far, I’ve seen only one member of the medical profession who is on the record supporting Akin. One. Out of some 850,000 licensed physicians in the country (not counting the ones who can still claim to be doctors but have left the profession), that’s not a remarkably high percentage. The one is Jack C. Willke, the founder of the International Right to Life Federation. Willke is one of two doctors (the other is Fred Mecklenburg) generally cited as the progenitors of the notion that forcible rape generates what the Dredd Blog rightly mocks as “Magic Teflon Vagina Juice,” which presumably… erm… “[shuts] that whole thing down.” That no other doctor than the guy who thought up the silliness a few decades ago will support Akin’s claim—as opposed to his conclusion—is, or at least sure ought to be, telling. Willke, after all, is not exactly a spring chicken. Curmie is old enough to have had a draft card in the Vietnam era. Willke graduated from med school over seven years before I was born. He appears to have been batshit crazy for most of the interim.

All of which leads us to #3, the actual evidence, of which Akin has precisely zero. The official statement of the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, a group of folks I personally would trust a little more than I would the average Congresscritter on this matter, describes Akin’s comments as “medically inaccurate, offensive, and dangerous.” The statement continues, “There is absolutely no veracity to the claim that ‘If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to shut that whole thing down.’” Indeed, Drs. Swati Schroff and Tiffany Chao report on ABC News that research published in the 1990s in the Journal of American Obstetrics and Gynecology suggests that there are over 32,000 rape-related pregnancies in this country every year. By contrast, Willke says 225-370. Guess which set of statistics anyone with an IQ over room temperature thinks is more persuasive?

Next up, #4: the beginnings of an assertion that goes too far, even for Willke. Even if we accept the lowest of Willke’s lowball numbers, there are still a couple hundred women getting pregnant as a direct result of being rape victims. Still, it looked for a moment as if Akin was going to suggest that those women didn’t count, somehow. Ah, but there’s the possibility that the rape-avenging spermicidal secretion won’t work, and… it doesn’t make any difference. So Representative Akin’s argument in this particular aspect is not fallacious, merely rhetorically incompetent.

Finally, #5, there’s the apology. Faced with a fecal whirlwind, Akin released an ad with the following message:

Rape is an evil act. I used the wrong words in the wrong way and for that I apologize. As the father of two daughters, I want tough justice for predators. I have a compassionate heart for the victims of sexual assault. I pray for them. The fact is, rape can lead to pregnancy. The truth is, rape has many victims. The mistake I made was in the words I said, not in the heart I hold. I ask for your forgiveness.

What’s notable here is the this member of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology didn’t apologize for propagating crap science. No, his mea culpa was limited to the most easily excused of his transgressions, bad phrasing. It was apparently all a big misunderstanding, you see: he really doesn’t like rape, and he’s just a peachy kind of guy. So everything is all better now, right? Well, no; no it isn’t. You want me to take you seriously, sir? Stand up on your hind legs and proclaim that the idea of “shutting that thing down” is as medically fallacious as it is interpersonally offensive. You’re welcome to maintain your opposition to abortion, regardless of the circumstances, but you need to drop the pseudo-science and admit that the only reason for your political stance is that you want to impose your religio-political views on the rest of us.

GOP Representative Peter Roskam of Illinois is on record as declaring, “There’s nobody who is saying Todd Akin is unworthy to serve. There is no one saying he is immoral or incapable. He’s not; he made a poor decision. The question is: Can he win in November?” Roskam is (predictably) wrong. Well, #1, I am somebody, even if I’m not a Republican shill, and I am indeed saying that Todd Akin is unworthy to serve. He may or may not be immoral. He is certainly incapable: incapable of handling the English language, incapable of recognizing that theories long discredited ought to be discarded, incapable of even understanding the nature of his own error. Can he win in November? Probably. People are stupid, and a lot of them will vote for one of their own. But whether Claire McCaskill deserves re-election or not, Todd Akin is demonstrably worse in about every conceivable way. Moreover, that electability is the only apparent criterion in Roskam’s world is a sad but no doubt accurate commentary on contemporary politics, GOP style.

But Akin just won’t go away, and that will hurt the Romney/Ryan ticket. It’s not just energizing the Democratic base. There’s the problem of losing momentum heading into GOP convention (assuming it happens, which now appears likely again). But there’s also the fact that Akin’s position on abortion is discredited by his inept defense of it… and it’s precisely the same conclusion as that of Paul Ryan, with whom he co-sponsored the “No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act,” a bill which in its original form limited federal funding for abortions to victims of forcible rape. There’s the fact that Mitt Romney slobbered all over Jack Willke, described by the Los Angeles Times as a “Romney surrogate,” in 2008 and was preparing to do so again.

In short, the Romney/Ryan ticket can be as righteously indignant as they want, and it will be just as disingenuous as the rest of their campaign. They’re not really mad at Akin for what he said. They’re not mad that he spewed forth copious quantities of unmitigated hogwash with faux sincerity. They’re not even mad that he egregiously misrepresented reality: they do that a dozen times before breakfast. No, they’re pissed off that he got busted: that his assertions weren’t simply inane but downright moronic, that his anti-intellectual tirade could be perceived as such not simply by thinking people, but by the other 80% of the population, too. They don’t like being associated with people whose intellectual gifts are suspect and whose every political position matches their own.

Well, except for the Tea Party, of course.

Putin and the Pussy Rioters

The American media loves its “rising star” narratives. They loved Barack Obama; they love Paul Ryan. And, in the late 1990s, they loved Vladimir Putin. Here, they trumpeted, is a serious-minded politician, not an unsteady, often inebriated buffoon like Boris Yeltsin. I remember talking with my friend and mentor Masha Kipp, who had grown up in what was then called Leningrad. Somehow the conversation turned to contemporary Russian politics in general and to Putin in particular. Her comment was succinct and cogent: “once KGB, always KGB.” She was right, of course. Masha is like that.

I encountered an online petition (you’re more than welcome to sign it, by the way) a day or two ago that linked together three discrete events which nonetheless all link to Putin and his Machiavellian antics: the inane decision to outlaw Pride marches in Moscow for 100 years (upheld by the city court this week), the $10 million lawsuit against Madonna for “moral damage suffered by St. Petersburg residents” (i.e., suggesting that gay people are, indeed, people), and the conviction and two-year penal colony sentence for three members of the feminist punk band Pussy Riot for “hooliganism motivated by religious hatred.”

The linkage is apt: all suggest a manifestation of Putin’s power to influence decisions that are technically but not pragmatically out of his purview. And Putin is certainly both a repressive homophobe and an amoral tactician. But this sentence also hints at fairly profound differences between the two gay rights-related events and the Pussy Riot fiasco. First off, whereas the silliness—or, rather, what would be silliness if not for the profound consequences to civil liberties—of the Pride march ban and the Madonna lawsuit are clearly a threat to free expression, they may at least grounded in an apparently honest if misguided homophobia. Moreover, while Putin’s political clout is considerable, and he undoubtedly created a climate wherein barbarities can occur in the name of law and order, he cannot be linked directly to the autocratic imbecility of the Moscow city government, nor to the mercenary acquisitiveness of a gaggle of Petersburgian shysters and their falsely pious clients.

The Pussy Riot case is different. For one thing, homosexuality is actually legal in Russia: it’s just talking about it that has somehow become criminalized. The kind of protest mounted by Pussy Riot, however, was intended to cause turmoil. Perhaps the three women involved did not go to Moscow Christ the Savior Cathedral with the intention of being arrested, but surely they’re not stupid enough not to have considered the possibility, perhaps even likelihood, of such an eventuality. There is a level at which arrests generate publicity, and that is often precisely what they seek. We see this phenomenon manifested in the band’s own YouTube release, which joins what was actually essentially a mime show at the cathedral with a musical overlay to make the event seem more disruptive than it actually was (and which, of course, required a videographer who knew what was going to happen). What caught the interest of the Western world was not the arrest per se, although that certainly caused ripples, but the frankly ridiculous nature of the specific charge. Had they been charged with simple trespass, or some variation on the theme, it is extremely unlikely that you and I, Gentle Reader, would ever have heard of the case.

Of course, what Pussy Riot (or, rather, some of them—there are a dozen or so members) did is completely in line with what musicians and other artists have been doing for a very long time. John Lennon. Pete Seeger. Joan Baez. Woody Guthrie. Johnny Clegg. Or, in my field, the Living Theatre, Athol Fugard, Václav Havel, and a host of others dating all the way back to Euripides (at least). Using art to make a point, risking or even encouraging arrest: this is in a very real sense what it is to be engaged in the life of a society, which is, after all, a reasonable prerequisite to making art about it.

This would be a good time, too, to rebut the drivel by one Vadim Nikitin, published by the New York Times. Nikitin’s argument seems to be that we shouldn’t support Pussy Riot’s anti-Putin display if we aren’t equally willing to support their “incendiary anarchism, extreme sexual provocations, deliberate obscenity and hard-left politics”: to do otherwise is “pure opportunism” that “is not only hypocritical but also does a great disservice to their cause.” After all, these women are “not liberals looking for self-expression. They are self-confessed [!] descendants of the surrealists and the Russian futurists, determined to radically, even violently, change society.” Doesn’t that sound erudite? Too bad it’s crap. Nikitin would have us believe that a self-consciously feminist organization is the demon spawn of two artistic/cultural movements very much in opposition to each other, both of which were misogynistic, one of them virulently so. See how that works? Neither do I.

Nikitin’s argument is utter nonsense for a variety of reasons, not least of which being that it is entirely reasonable to support the notion of free speech without supporting the content of that speech. Indeed, it is the only reasonable application of the principle. In other words, I don’t support Pussy Riot per se; I support their right to protest without being charged with a crime they clearly didn’t commit. It is not opportunism to say so, even if we dislike Vladimir Putin, nor is it incumbent on me or anyone else to qualify our antagonism for the verdict in their case with diffident mumbles about how Pussy Riot really is, you know, kind of unladylike. It doesn’t matter whether they are or not.

I don’t care if they’re liberals or anarchists or suburban Republicans. They were convicted of “religious hatred” when they clearly hold no grudge against the religious belief system of the Orthodox Church itself or its parishioners. What they object to is the unholy alliance between Putin and the Church hierarchy, as manifested by Putin’s government throwing two billion rubles (about $100 million) at the Church while seeking also to restrict activities by evangelical Christians. In return, not to say as quid pro quo (necessarily), Orthodox Patriarch Kirill described the twelve years of Putin’s reign as “a miracle of God.” There is no question that the Church’s areligious promotion of Putin as both man and politician has been and continues to be central to his political success.

This conflation of Church and state under the leadership of a man who once sought to enforce the very atheism that now so repels him may be hypocritical in ethical terms, but it absolutely understandable pragmatically: Putin is nothing if not pragmatic. Pussy Riot’s antagonism to this linkage is, in short, completely comprehensible. They claim that they meant no disrespect to practitioners, only to the elites of Church and State. I have no reason to doubt their sincerity in this regard. Neither did the judge at their trial, who nonetheless sentenced them to a couple of years in Siberia, basically because Putin said to.

Or at least that’s the charge being leveled by a lot of people who know more about the Russian judicial system than you or I do, Gentle Reader. Here are four such statements:

Here’s Alexey Kudrin, a former finance minister who, according to Miriam Elder of The Guardian remains a close ally of Putin:

The verdict in the case against the Pussy Riot punk band isn't only a fact in the lives of three young women; it is also yet another blow to the justice system and, above all, Russian citizens' belief in it.

Here’s Nikolay Petrov, a former Soviet government analyst in the 1990s who is now chair of the Carnegie Moscow Center's Society and Regions Program:

It looks like [Putin] feels personally humiliated and personally involved and the rumour is that it was his personal order to put them in jail…. There's only one and the same branch of power in Russia; it's executive power led by Putin.

Here’s Boris Akunin, a popular Russian author:

Putin has doomed himself to another year and a half of international shame and humiliation. The whole thing is bad because it's yet another step toward the escalation of tensions within society. And the government is absolutely to blame.

.And finally, here’s Michelle Ringuette, chief of campaigns and programs for Amnesty International USA:

The decision to find guilty Maria [Alekhina], Ekaterina [Samutsevich] and Nadezhda [Tolokonnikova] amid global outrage shows that the Russian authorities will stop at no end to suppress dissent and stifle civil society…. From the initial unjustified arrest, to the questionable trial, to this outrageous verdict and sentencing, each step in the case has been an affront to human rights…. It's a bitter blow to freedom in Russia. Amnesty International will not allow these women to be silenced. They will not be forgotten…. President Putin took office in May as hundreds of thousands of Russian citizens demanded an open and participatory society. Rather than heed their call, Putin has further entrenched his already tight fist on freedom of expression.

What is interesting here is the unanimity of opinion that seems to point in a single direction: that righteous indignation about attacks on the Orthodox Church masks the real source of the outrage, namely criticism of Putin.

Musicians and other artists around the world have also rallied to the cause. Some, like Vratislav Brabenec of The Plastic People of the Universe, Mark Knopfler, Yoko Ono, and Patti Smith might be considered predictable. But I personally wouldn’t have expected Paul McCartney, Sting, or Pete Townshend. Maybe that’s my blind spot.

It’s important to remember two things, however. First, the events that precipitated this contretemps were planned by the people who now are cast in the role of victims. Their actions would have resulted in arrest anywhere in the world. It’s the over-reaction of the authorities, not their legitimate desire to maintain law and order, that is in question here. Secondly, PR (Pussy Riot) has good PR (public relations). These women are important not because they’re special, but because they’re not.

They’re not fighting solitary and lonely battles for the sake of a higher mission. They’re exploiting their notoriety. The result is that we, especially those of us in the West, who don’t necessarily understand the cultural differences between our perceived universe and theirs, risk missing the forest for the trees. That is, as Joshua Foust of The Atlantic argues, what happened to the Pussy Riot trio is not what happens to female punk bands. It’s what happens to those who make Vladimir Putin look bad. We need to remember that there are many other dissidents whose plights are no less harrowing and whose deeds are no less heroic for the fact that we haven’t heard about them.

While the Democracy Index now describes Russia as an “authoritarian regime,” ranking it below the likes of Nicaragua, Mozambique, and Haiti, all of which are classified as “hybrid regimes” (the Philippines, Sri Lanka, and Mongolia are all a step higher still, “flawed democracies”), Vladimir Putin nonetheless retains considerable popularity in his homeland, based in large part on nothing but personal charisma. He cynically embraces the largest religious denomination in his country although he feels no real affinity for it. He sees oil wealth and nuclear energy as the path forward. He brutally suppresses dissent. He cultivates an image as a macho badass. The WikiLeaks documents reveal, in the words of Luke Harding of The Guardian, that “Russia is a corrupt, autocratic kleptocracy centred on the leadership of Vladimir Putin, in which officials, oligarchs and organised crime are bound together to create a “virtual mafia state.”

That’s what this is all about. If Pussy Riot are the good guys in this case, it’s primarily because they’re presented in contradistinction to Vladimir Putin. Their right to protest would remain whether they were “right” or not, but it does really matter that absurd and probably flagitious sentence imposed on them has as much to do with the object of their attention as with the manner and location of their demonstration. They were convicted of showing too little respect for one half of the perverse symbiosis between the Orthodox Church and the Putin administration. The truth is, though, it was the other half of the equation that really mattered.

The Ryan Nomination, Part I: Deflating the Myth

I realize that I’m late to this party, but I wanted to spend a little time discussing the imminent nomination of Paul Ryan as Vice President. The main reason for this, apart from the writing process itself and the accompanying necessity of organizing one’s thoughts, is to argue that yet again the corporate media is too lazy to do its collective job. Instead, we get warmed-over platitudes first uttered over cocktails by a “source.” Actual analysis? Forget it. Facts? Are you kidding? Anyway, today’s piece is on Ryan as man and myth.

True, much of what I’m about to say has already been written or spoken by the independent press and/or left-leaning commentators, but the folks at the networks, the news magazines, and the major newspapers haven’t necessarily caught on. The standard mantra was, à la CBS, “Romney surprises with Ryan as VP nominee.” There are also literally dozens of variations on the theme of “Mitt Romney Goes Bold” (Boston Globe). Charlie Mahtesian of Politico parrots with apparent approbation Representative Ted Poe’s remark that “The vice presidential debate between Paul Ryan and Joe Biden will be like Einstein debating Forrest Gump.” (That would be Biden as Forrest Gump, a role he apparently usurped from the last GOP veep nominee.) Even the Daily Kos credit Ryan with “conviction and raw intelligence.” He’s a “deficit warrior” (The Hill). Romney even earned “Ethics Hero” status from the usually astute Jack Marshall for the Ryan selection “because it makes an unequivocal statement about the priorities in the election and the years ahead: close the deficit, reduce the debt, and take the United States off the road to Greece and inevitable insolvency.”

OK, I’m saying this once. BULLSHIT.

Anyone really surprised by selection of Ryan should be required to STFU until after the election. Plutocrats stick together. My money was on Ryan all along. Nor was this anything like a bold choice. Any other potential candidate—I mean among the legitimate contenders, not the Michelle Bachmann types—would have brought an equivalent though not identical package of assets and weaknesses. Yes, selecting Ryan foregrounds the economy as the central issue for the Romney/Ryan campaign, but where else were they going to look? The trajectory of the economy may be a whole lot better than it was when President Obama took office, but both unemployment and substantial deficit spending remain serious problems.

Remember, too, that the announcement followed closely on Governor Romney’s disastrous foreign tour in which he managed to piss off the English, the Palestinians, and a fair number of Israelis (he didn’t, however, alienate the Poles; an aide did that). And there’s not a lot to run against: there are some legitimate questions about Mr. Obama’s prosecution of the War Powers Act, but those aren’t likely to be raised by a Republican without sounding shrill and partisan. Beyond that, the Iraq War is winding down, there has been a steady and relatively uncontroversial (whether it should be so or not) policy with respect to Afghanistan, Libya and Syria, and—whether he deserves the credit or not—Mr. Obama oversaw the assassination of Osama bin Laden. Moreover, whereas the Bush administration did considerable chest-thumping about how there were no terrorist attacks on the United States (except, you know, that one) the Obama administration has no need of the qualifier: there have been no successful attacks, period. So, there’s not a lot of room for Mr. Romney—not a specialist in foreign policy—to mount a campaign in those terms. It’s much easier to complain about the deficits that no Republican cared a whit about while George W. Bush was in the White House.

Paul Ryan is a corrupt, prevaricating, hypocrite. He thinks rules are made for other people, and he smirks about his self-perceived superiority. In this way, of course, he is essentially indistinguishable from virtually any politician of either party, especially his own. But Ryan has a reputation: as an intellectual, a policy wonk, a deficit hawk. He is, of course, none of these things. He is, to use a term that has apparently been trotted out by Senator Chuck Schumer since I started working on this piece (Schumer wasn’t the first, of course), a fraud.

I’m not saying that Ryan is an idiot. He isn’t. He’s certainly got a lot more on the ball than Sarah Palin, and let’s be real: Joe Biden isn’t exactly a genius. Ryan is smart enough and amoral enough (he learned those Ayn Rand lessons well) to be scary. But he’s no intellectual giant, either, even if he has long been touted as such by the right-wing punditocracy. I was reading a blog piece the other day by Dan Bauer, the managing editor of the school newspaper at Allegheny College. In analyzing the methodology employed by Newsweek to determine its list of “most rigorous schools,” Bauer points out that the “rigor” in question amounts to a ratio of self-perceived workload to student aptitude. In other words, “The ranking isn’t saying that Allegheny is rigorous because it’s difficult; it’s rigorous because the Daily Beast thinks it’s too much for your low test scores to handle. In short, according to Newsweek, we’re nothing but whiners of average intelligence.”

Does that description sound like Paul Ryan to anyone but me? Did he go to Allegheny? (Actually, he went to Miami of Ohio, considerably larger than Allegheny, but very much like it in history, orientation, and—dare I say—academic rigor.) There is, in fact, nothing in Ryan record that suggests extraordinary intellect. Even the thoroughness with which he is routinely credited is an illusion, as I’ll discuss in a moment. For now, let’s just admit that if you spend your time surrounded by the likes of Jon Kyl and Louis Gohmert, the average guy on a barstool is going to look pretty smart by comparison. Hell, my money’s on the stool itself in a battle of wits against those guys.

Let’s face it: there are few really smart Republican elected officials. ‘Twas not always thus: in my youth there were Everett Dirksen, Barry Goldwater, John Lindsay, Jacob Javits, Mark Hatfield, and James Buckley. Lamar Alexander, John Sununu and John McCain qualified before they, to quote the sage political guru Charles Barkley, “lost their damned minds.” I didn’t agree with those guys all the time (or, even often), but you knew you were dealing with a grownup with some savvy that extended beyond the merely political. Who’s left? Dick Lugar, who was defeated in a primary run this year. And… um… uh… Seriously, I have trouble naming another Republican currently in office (and Lugar is about to not be) whom I’d describe as both sane and intelligent. Maybe Marco Rubio? Chris Christie?

Importantly, Ryan’s budget, his signature piece of work, is deeply flawed. I’m not talking about its priorities, which I think are dead wrong (even Fox News admits it would result in a tax increase for the poor and a huge windfall for the rich), but which for the moment are beside the point. I’m not even talking about the fact that it doesn’t actually cut the deficit: Howard Gleckman of Forbes (Forbes!) writes that “CBO’s March, 2012 baseline projects a deficit in 2022 of about 1.2 percent of Gross Domestic Product. Ryan’s ‘Path to Prosperity,’ which became the framework for the House budget, brought the 2022 deficit down to exactly the same 1.2 percent.” (Note also that Ryan himself “hasn’t run the numbers” to predict when there might be a balanced budget.)

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No, I’m really talking about the Ryan plan’s gaps, its assumptions, its unspecified new revenues totaling $5 trillion (!), its projections based on the wildest of speculation. I’m no economist, but I do know something about methodology, and to say that this document is grounded in fairy dust is probably to give it too much credit. Paul Krugman is an economist. Here’s his analysis: “None of this has any basis in reality; Ryan’s much-touted plan, far from being a real solution, relies crucially on stuff that is just pulled out of thin air — huge revenue increases from closing unspecified loopholes, huge spending cuts achieved in ways not mentioned.” In short, I suspect the famous cartoon by Sidney Harris (at left) may well have been drawn with the Paul Ryan budget in mind.

There’s the reduction of non-Social Security and non-Medicare spending as a percentage of GDP to a point below that of current military spending, which Ryan pledges to actually increase. There’s the projection of ridiculously low unemployment: 2.8%! For his numbers to work at all, in other words, Ryan must assume an unemployment rate lower than it’s been in half a century… lower, indeed, than the 3% “optimal” rate I learned about in Economics 1. But, hey, that wasn’t Ryan’s personal number: Rachel Maddow reported when the budget was first released that the unemployment projection came from the Heritage Foundation, the fun folks who projected enormous job growth as a result of the Bush tax cuts. Yeah, that worked out great. The projection, of course, suggests two fabulous if illusory advantages: more workers means more taxable income, fewer unemployed means fewer expenditures on unemployment compensation, welfare, etc. Maddow derisively but, alas, accurately, described the Ryan plan 18 months ago as “this magic Republican budget” founded on one essential principle: “belieeeeeeeeve.” She added that:

I doubt that actual numerically-based, fact-based information will penetrate the smoochie-smoochie love bubble surrounding Paul Ryan right now. He has done a remarkable job of romancing the Beltway media. There’s this little cult of him being brave and bold, and doing a very difficult workout every morning. But what Paul Ryan has just introduced is not a feature on “Grit vs. Glamor” in today’s GOP. It’s the official Republican Party Budget for 2012. And the numbers in it are so wrong they are occasionally funny. The Beltway media says Paul Ryan should be taken very seriously. Since this is the official Republican Party budget for 2012, taking him seriously should also include taking seriously his numbers, which in many cases make no sense.

I hate it when she’s right.

There’s another myth that Representative Ryan is, unlike the guy at the top of the ticket, consistent. That may be true, but not in the way the fawning Beltway types mean. He is indeed consistent: not in terms of real fiscal conservatism, balanced budgets and such, but in terms of advocating for the corporatocracy. It’s not just the Ryan budget that’s as phony as a three-dollar bill: it’s the pretense that he gives a damn about the deficit. He does not. A charitable description would be to say that he became a born-again deficit hawk on January 20, 2009. A more cynical one would be to suggest that his personal chance for advancement is predicated on the gimmick of debt control. This is the guy, remember, who voted for unfunded wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, voted for the prescription drug mandate, voted against allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire. His proposal to privatize Social Security would have cost $2.4 trillion over ten years, and even the Bush administration called it “irresponsible.”

Ryan’s goal isn’t a balanced budget. His “holy grail,” as Gleckman describes it, is “low taxes and small government, not fiscal balance.” That is, of course, an intellectually honest position—one with which I disagree, but it’s honest—or, rather, it would be if Ryan believed in even that. He doesn’t. It’s not “small government” to increase military spending. (This is the guy, you may recall, Gentle Reader, who accused the military brass of lying when they agreed that their budget could be cut by a little less than half a trillion dollars over ten years.) It’s not “small government” to intrude into personal, legal, medical decisions, as he has often advocated. It’s not “small government” to increase taxes on those who can afford it least without concomitant increases on the more well-to-do.

Paul Ryan is, in short, neither a deficit hawk nor a libertarian. He is, as Nate Silver’s analysis points out, a partisan hack, plain and simple. He is, by Silver’s calculus, the single most ideological vice presidential nominee of either party since (at least) the beginning of the 20th century: he’s more conservative than Dick Cheney or Dan Quayle, far more conservative than the most left-leaning Democratic nominee, John Garner, was liberal. By contrast, Joe Biden is only the 11th most liberal candidate of the 18 Democrats on the list, and the 17th most ideological of the 31 candidates. (Not all candidates are listed for either party, by the way. My suspicion is that those listed served in the House or Senate, those not listed were governors, mayors, etc., but I’m not sure of that explanation.) The DW-Nominate scale puts Ryan well into the conservative wing, even relative to other Republicans: more conservative, in other words, than Louis Gohmert, Darrell Issa, and Eric Cantor, and in the same general ideological position as Michelle Bachmann.

Having a budget is an accomplishment. Having one that doesn’t make sense is not. Again, I’m not arguing its priorities; I’m arguing its math. If Paul Ryan were an academic, there’d be a word for him: sloppy. His positions are so abstracted by a presumed faith in unsupported (if not unsupportable) hypotheses that his conclusions are meaningless at best. He is the pseudo-scholar, the one who starts with a conclusion and searches frantically for supporting evidence. He’s the guy whose infomercial shows up on the cable stations at 2:00 a.m. (or perhaps on public television during pledge week). To say that he is all smoke and mirrors is to give him too much credit.

The choice of Paul Ryan as vice presidential candidate, in other words, is crass, cynical, and absolutely what we would expect from a supercilious jackass like Mitt Romney. The pretense of a solution is far worse than no solution at all, whether we’re talking about cyber-bullying or the ballooning national debt. Ryan may, however, be the best available Republican for the job. That tells you all you need to know about today’s GOP.

Next up (well, maybe not next, but soon): how the Ryan candidacy will affect the election. Hint: not much.

Thoughts on the Ethics of Performativity

There’s a song by Tom Robinson from [mumble mumble] years ago called “You’d Better Decide Which Side You’re On.” The lyrics leading into the title phrase are “if left is right, then right is wrong.” Catchy enough. More importantly, the lyrics point out the dual antonyms for the word “right.” I need hardly say that this blog leans a little left, but I try very hard, no doubt not always successfully, to ensure that it leads away from wrong.

This is not an ethics blog per se. If you’re looking for one of those, you’d be a lot better off checking out Ethics Alarms or Ethics Bob. But I’m always intrigued by issues of fairness, and I’d rather the idiots would agree with the other guy so my side doesn’t look stupid. Moreover, ethical questions within my own field are of course particularly interesting to me.

Here’s a dilemma occasioned by the conference I just attended. Regular Curmiphiles, whether they know me personally or not, will have discerned by now that I teach theatre at a university; some will have ascertained that I have been for well over two decades a member of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education. The organization just had its annual meeting in Washington, DC. What follows comes from a conversation at that conference with a long-time friend. Since I am relating the gist of a private conversation and since his identity is irrelevant to the issues under consideration, I won’t identify him further.

Here’s the deal. The keynote address at the conference was delivered by Dael Oerlandersmith (right), the Obie-winning and Pulitzer-nominated playwright and actress. She was engaging and entertaining, certainly one of the more interesting keynotes we’ve had, and I’ve seen at least 20 of them. But there was something about her presentation that troubled my friend and something else that bothered me. Both of us acknowledged that the other might well have a point while at the same time professing ourselves undisturbed by what upset the other.

I’m not going to say here (I will at the end) which of us was disturbed for which of the following reasons. Let me just spell out the problems… if, indeed, problems they be.

Ms. Oerlandersmith started her talk in character, playing two of the roles from her show, Black n Blue Boys / Broken Men. This is a solo performance in which a single actor (Oerlandersmith herself, in this case) plays a variety of characters of different ages, races, and genders in a series of monologues. The script is specifically designed to allow performances by actors whose demographic profiles are radically different from her own.

The performance piece in question deals with child sexual abuse—certainly a hot topic today in the light of various scandals involving the Catholic Church, plus, of course, l’affaire Sandusky. The first character Oerlandersmith portrayed was a young man who had been sexually assaulted by his mother; the second character was an uncle describing his own molestation of his young nephew. It’s difficult, even dangerous fare, and Oerlandersmith negotiates (successfully, I think) a treacherous path as both playwright and performer. The writing is taut, realistic, and often funny (yes, funny); Oerlandersmith’s compelling acting relies on an outstanding vocal range, nuanced characterization, and powerful choices in physicality.

Anyway, after these two monologues, Oerlandersmith talked to the audience in her own voice (literally and figuratively), took questions, and in short behaved like virtually every other keynote speaker I’ve ever seen. So what’s the problem?

Charge #1. As an African-American woman who both writes and performs using the monologue as her medium, Oerlandersmith follows in the footsteps of the better-known Anna Deavere Smith, who employed the same techniques—including playing all the roles, regardless of race, gender, and age—to great effect in such works as Fires in the Mirror and Twilight: Los Angeles. There is one fundamental difference, however: whereas Smith conducts interviews which she then transcribes, Oerlandersmith creates her work on her own. In other words, Smith employs and edits the words of others, and Oerlandersmith writes fictional characters based on reality but without a clear and specific correlative in real life.

Given the audience—one almost certain to know Smith’s work but considerably less likely to know Oerlandersmith’s—this can be problematic. That is, people who think they know the form (as practiced by Smith) are essentially being misled by an implicit claim to authenticity. Oerlandersmith is neither transcribing the actual words of assault victims nor even describing actual people. She creates fictive personae, but her work is structurally suggestive that the characters she presents are in fact real, which makes her work sensationalist.

The defense: Oerlandersmith never says that her characters are biographical, only that they are inspired by real life. Any artist would say the same. That a crowd of theatre educators would expect an artist to subscribe to the stylistic choices of another performer is very strange indeed. It is particularly troubling that the comparisons to Smith can be shorthanded to suggest that all female African-American monologists follow (or ought to follow) the same strategies. There is no assumption that the characters created by a playwright are “real.” In fact, quite the contrary is true: it is a reasonable surmise that we are watching a fiction that reveals the truth, not an attempt to re-create quotidian existence.

Charge #2: There was no introduction to the material itself, and people in the audience had no opportunity to remove themselves from the space before the monologues began. In a group of two or three hundred people, the chances are extremely high that someone in the group has been a sexual abuse victim, and that more than a few are dealing with real-life issues right now, if not in their own lives, then in those of loved ones. I saw two spectators bolt for the door when the content of the monologues became clear: both looked stricken.

A couple of points need to be made. First, there is no legitimate argument about the content of the monologues themselves. The sexual abuse of children is, alas, a very real part of our world, and as such is a perfectly reasonable topic about which to make one’s art. That said, the objection here is not to the portrayals themselves, but to the recklessness with which fresh wounds were opened.

As a sometime teacher of acting and not infrequent director, I use emotional memory and sense memory exercises with some regularity. I learned very early on how dangerous such strategies can be, however, and I am now scrupulous about making sure that any actors engaging in these activities take care of themselves. Yes, tapping into a moment of sadness in the past can help an actor find the appropriate emotions on stage, but doing so with an incident that is too recent or that the actor has not yet worked through can lead only to the inability to control one’s feelings—the worst possible fate for an actor. That is, I’m ready to deal with discussions of cancer and Parkinson’s although those diseases killed my parents, but I’m not quite ready to think about fatal motorcycle accidents of the kind that claimed the life of a 25-year-old former student less than a fortnight ago.

The point here is that under normal circumstances, theatre audiences are self-selecting. The “let’s go see what’s playing” mentality of some movie-goers doesn’t really apply as much to theatre. Yes, I go to everything—some 30 productions a year—my department presents. Sometimes I don’t know exactly what a play is about (that’s going to be less true from now on, but it’s not relevant to this discussion), but the publicity is always clear about making sure that what happened last week in Washington, DC doesn’t happen on our campus. In other words, if I were grieving for a child killed in an accident, I’d likely have skipped last fall’s production of Rabbit Hole and my colleagues and students would have understood.

The defense. Art gets its power from its ability to touch us. I used to have a t-shirt that read “Art can’t hurt you.” I know what it intended to say, but I finally threw the shirt away, because the best art can hurt you. It makes you feel: feel joy, feel sadness, feel pain. It is no linguistic fluke that, etymologically, “aesthetic” and “anesthetic” are antonyms.

Moreover, surprise is very much a part of the effectiveness of any artwork, especially those—like plays, poems, and musical compositions—which play out over time. An artist can’t control what part of a sculpture catches a spectator’s eye first, but the second five minutes of a monologue always follows the first five. It does indeed heighten the experience of watching those monologues from Black n Blue Boys / Broken Men to be led skillfully into a position of developing a fondness, for example, for the pederastic uncle before we realize that he is, indeed, a pederastic uncle.

A warning takes that away. I know the part of promoting a production I hate most is writing a “content advisory.” I doubt that this will astound you, Gentle Reader, but Curmie is not easily shocked. He’s witnessed real violence as well as the staged kind, heard all manner of verbs of Anglo-Saxon origin, and seen the complete array of body parts of both sexes. But, for better or worse, we issue a warning (or perhaps an enticement?), explaining to prospective audiences not merely that they might be offended or disturbed, but why.

Some of these rationales make sense. For example, whereas some plays absolutely require cigarette smoking, telling the audience that there will be smoking on stage is unlikely to give away a crucial plot device: it’s simply a kindness to tell prospective patrons with a severe aversion or allergy to smoke that this might be a good show to miss. The same goes for warnings about the use of a strobe light, which can trigger epileptic seizures among those susceptible.

But think of, say, “Master Harold”… and the boys, the brilliant three-hander by Athol Fugard which I was fortunate enough to get to direct a few years ago. There is a moment in which the sole white character, a teenaged boy, literally spits in the face of the man who had essentially raised him. The black man responds in an angry outburst that includes dropping his pants to show his “nigger’s arse.” Disturbing? It had damned well better be. It grieved me to write up an “advisory” about the ending of this play. I did it, but I wouldn’t have done so if I were in charge of my own company (at least until the angry letters started pouring in and the subscription base dried up). Rather, I’d have issued a general statement to be included in all our publicity:

We don’t do shock for its own sake, but that’s sometimes the result. We’re not going to tell you what happens in these plays except in the cases of smoking, extremely loud noises, and strobe lights. Some plays will have nudity. Some will have realistic-looking violence. Some will use language you might consider “obscene” or “profane.” Some will have drinking, or sexual situations, or homosexual characters, or any of a hundred other things that are part of life but might discomfit someone in the audience. Some of our plays will have several of these things; some won’t have any. If you ask specific questions about content, we’ll try to answer them as honestly as possible, but we’re not volunteering any information. If you choose not to attend because of this policy, we respect your choice, but we humbly suggest that you’re short-changing yourself.

It is impossible to predict with much accuracy what might offend or disturb an individual audience member, and in this sense, at least, that’s what we’re talking about: a collection of individuals. Issuing a content warning to protect the sensibilities of the few at the expense of the aesthetic experience of the many is not a trade-off worth making.

The verdict. So, which part bothered Curmie and which his friend? Curmie levels Charge #2. That theatre audiences would need to be told that characters are fictive strikes me as silly. (Indeed, I hear the voice of a former mentor insisting that all characters are fictive, even in cases when an actor is literally “playing himself.”) But whereas there is a slight cost to warning an audience about what they’re about to see, I’d suggest the circumstances dictated that a quick acknowledgment of the subject matter would be appropriate. Whereas in Oerlandersmith’s regular experience, audiences would come to see a specific show, presumably having at least a general idea of what they were about to experience, ATHE members came to hear a keynote, not expecting a performance at all. True, few spectators were disturbed, but it strikes me that this is more a qualitative than a quantitative problem: it will be a long time before I forget the face of one woman as she headed hastily for the exit.

I hasten to add that I accuse neither Ms. Oerlandersmith nor her introducer of any ill will. It’s quite clear from her subsequent remarks that the former is one of the “good guys”; I’ve known the latter for a decade or more, and I have the highest regard for him. Perhaps there was a breakdown in communication. Perhaps neither of them anticipated a situation which under normal circumstances (a performance advertised as a performance) wouldn’t have posed a problem at all. Perhaps they underestimated the power of the medium: talking about molestation is different from hearing the words of (even fictive) abusers and victims enacted.

I freely grant, of course, that in the grand scheme of things this is pretty unimportant stuff. The people who were taken aback will, I am quite confident, be fine. But even seemingly minor events give us an opportunity to wrestle with larger concepts. And that’s a good thing.

I am, by the way, particularly interested in readers’ commentary on this one—either here on the blog or on the link from the Facebook page.