Two Young Women...

This week was marked by a number of stories of more significance, but Curmie is drawn to the tales of two young women, one 23, the other 18, taking a stand. Under normal circumstances, that would be an inherently good thing. But this time… well, Curmie isn’t so sure. In both cases, there is no little ethical ambiguity, but Curmie finds himself agreeing with The Man. Let’s take them in order…and in the order I’m more confident of my response. 

 

On May 26 (OK, that’s over a week ago, but Curmie didn’t read about it until Tuesday), women’s tennis star Naomi Osaka announced on Twitter that she would not speak to the press after matches at the French Open. Such “media conferences” are specifically required of athletes competing in Grand Slam tournaments:

Unless injured and physically unable to appear, a player or team must attend the post-match media conference(s) organised immediately or within thirty (30) minutes after the conclusion of each match, including walkovers, whether the player or team was the winner or loser, unless such time is extended or otherwise modified by the Referee for good cause. In addition, all Main Draw players must participate, if requested, in a pre-event press conference to be arranged during the two days before the start of the Main Draw. All media obligations include, but are not limited to, interviews with the host and player’s national broadcaster. Violation of this Section shall subject a player to a fine up to $20,000.

That’s pretty clear. Ms. Osaka concludes her announcement by declaring,

…if the organizations think that they can just keep saying, “do press or you’re gonna be fined”, and continue to ignore the mental health of the athletes that are the centerpiece of their cooperation then I just gotta laugh. Anyways, I hope the considerable amount that I get fined for this will go towards a mental health charity.

As might be expected, this caused no little turmoil in the world of professional tennis, and indeed in the world at large. The list of athletes and celebrities weighing in on the issue is lengthy, including the Williams sisters, the McEnroe brothers, Stephen Curry, Michael Phelps, and a host of B-list actors. Most of them recite the obligatory mantra that Ms. Osaka needs to prioritize her mental health, that she’s sooooooo brave, and that the tennis federation shouldn’t enforce their own rules. (Mats Wilander’s take that she should “reconsider or don’t play” was something of a voice crying in the wilderness, although she did, with yet more self-promotion, drop out of the tournament.)

Look, mental health is, indeed, important. Answering the same stupid questions—and there are few of a different description—from reporters must be annoying in the extreme, and if you happen to be introverted or anxious in these situations, it can be stressful. But Curmie would make a few points: 

1. These interviews are part of the job. You get the benefits that accrue to the sport in general because of that press coverage (things like prize money and fame, for example). Equally importantly, especially if, like Ms. Osaka, you make literally tens of millions of dollars a year from endorsements, part of your job is to sit there on camera sporting your Nike jacket or whatever and act like a human being. (The fact that most if not all of Osaka’s sponsors are rushing to her defense means only that they think they’ll profit more from this action than by holding a star to the terms of her contract. They’re probably right.) 

2. Every f*cking job in the world is stressful. Naomi Osaka netted over $55,000,000 last year, counting prize money and endorsements. Invest that money at 6% (6% over inflation is regarded as the standard long-term return on a well-managed portfolio), without ever doing another thing that makes money, and she’ll make more money every year in perpetuity than Curmie, a PhD and full professor at an accredited university, will make for his entire career. I have job-related stresses, too. So does the 16-year-old girl working the counter at McDonald’s. So do you, Gentle Reader, even if your job is stay-at-home parent. Yet we’re all still expected to fulfill all of the duties we’re contracted or otherwise obligated to do. Osaka is acting like an entitled brat: lessons learned, no doubt, from the aforementioned tennis-playing siblings of both genders. 

3. In a fit of hypocrisy that would make even a politician blush, Osaka granted an on-court interview after the one match she did play, and also spoke to Wowow, described by the New York Post’s Phil Mushnick as “a Japanese broadcaster that pays her for her time, access and words. Hmmm.” 

4. Curmie really doesn’t like humble-bragging. Wow, how munificent of you, Naomi, to risk paying a “considerable” fine amounting to 0.0027% of your annual income. Other players probably get stressed out at those media conferences, too, but they can’t afford the fine, so they soldier on. Then dropping out of the event altogether because you “didn’t want to be a distraction.” This is either world-class disingenuousness or you are truly dumber than dirt. You had to have known—or at the very least your media consultant had to have known—that this would be a huge distraction. You’ve never won a clay-court championship, and you’ve never made it to the quarter-finals at Roland Garros, but now you’re the top story of the tournament, hailed for your “bravery.” Ironic, huh? 

Let’s be fair: few athletes in team sports, especially from the losing side, are required to do post-game interviews. And of course most major team sports have active players’ unions to take up just this type of cause. So team-sport athletes are already given some cover; others are allowed to be prickly—football fans may remember that presser with Marshawn Lynch in which every question was answered with a variation on “I’m only here so I won’t get fined.” 

That said, in the same way Democrats want to eliminate the Electoral College and Republicans want to eliminate mail-in ballots, the time to make changes is now for the future. Perhaps changes would improve the game. But Donald Trump won and then lost the Presidency according to the rules in place, and Naomi Osaka was rightly fined and admonished. 

The other young woman to talk about is Paxton Smith, who completed her studies at Lake Highlands High School in Dallas with a 104.93 average. (Grade inflation? What grade inflation?) She’s certainly now the most famous valedictorian in the state of Texas… well, at least the most famous for being a valedictorian (just in case there’s a sought-after basketball or football player who also happens to be a good student). Why? Because she didn’t give the speech that had been approved by the powers-that-be, but instead pulled a different speech out of her bra. Yes, really. 

And this isn’t like the case Curmie wrote about nine years ago, in which a valedictorian in Oklahoma substituted “hell” for the pre-approved “heck” in her speech. This wasn’t about a single word; this was a completely different topic. What had been approved was a speech about the way media shape our perceptions. What was delivered was an excoriation of Texas’s newly signed “fetal heartbeat law.” 

OK, let’s stipulate three things: 

1. Curmie has long despised the idea that schools think they have the right to censor student speech. I wrote in 2012 about the “troubling… 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.” Of course, this episode is likely to be exactly what such censoriousness was intended to avoid. 

2. Many, many politicians, religious leaders, and corporate bigwigs have injected controversial political views into graduation speeches. It could legitimately be argued that such people have less right to do so that would an exceptional student from that school. 

3. The “fetal heartbeat law” is indeed abhorrent. It criminalizes abortion after a mere six weeks of pregnancy because there’s a “heartbeat.” The bill’s proponents casually ignore testimony from obstetricians and gynecologists who say there can’t be a heartbeat without a heart, which hasn't yet developed. (This in addition to other logical inconsistencies in what passes for their rationale, since “punishing women because we can” still hasn’t found its way into the rhetoric.) 

Of course, many women don’t know, or even suspect, that they’re pregnant until after six weeks. Add to this the fact that there are no provisions for the victims of rape or incest, and the bill is truly horrific. Governor Abbott’s proclamation that the bill was “bi-partisan” is, as usual with anything emanating from that particular slimebag’s mouth, well short of the truth. There are a total of 80 Democrats in the Texas legislature; 1 voted for the bill. That doesn’t sound like bi-partisanship to Curmie.

All this said, Curmie still thinks the deception involved outweighs the positives of hearing a young woman claiming the right to be heard on a matter which is far more likely to affect her than it would any of the overwhelmingly male politicians who made the decision. If, ten years ago, Curmie objected to the hijacking of a Louisiana graduation ceremony by a student who co-opted a “moment of silence” to turn it into the Lord’s Prayer, he can’t now countenance a similar action by a Texas student today just because Curmie is an agnostic progressive rather than an evangelical reactionary. The moral and ethical concerns are the same. 

Was Ms. Smith “brave”? Perhaps, although she not unexpectedly got a whole lot of personal attention out of her three-minute speech. And her assertion that she was speaking on “a day where you are most inclined to listen to a voice like mine, a woman’s voice” is, alas, probably true.  But she also de facto violated the trust placed in her by her school. I can’t call her a heroine just because I think she’s right on the issues.

A half dozen short takes...

A series of short takes… not topics I want to spend my usual 1000 or more words on, but worthy of comment. 

1. Students will know my politics. 

A Facebook friend I’ve known for roughly half a century recently posted a meme stating that “If your students know your political affiliation, you have failed as a teacher. Teachers are there to help students think for themselves, not think like you.” The second sentence is true… sort of. The first sentence is utter crap. 

Let’s start with the latter idea: if “think like you” means “agree with your conclusions,” then I wholeheartedly agree. I always want students who will argue, politely but emphatically, with each other or with me. We’ll get nowhere, either in the classroom or in society, if everyone agrees all the time: we would be reduced to choosing policies based on who speaks first rather than on what’s the best idea. 

If, however, “think like you” means that a teacher should model logical thinking, a pursuit of truth, a skepticism about likely partisan sources… well, in that case, I very much do want my students to “think like [I do].” 

But that first sentence is amazing in its over-simplified arrogance. In my current summer-school class, I have two (that I know of) non-binary students. If I respect them enough to use their chosen names instead of the “dead names” that show up on my role sheet, if I refer to them by their chosen pronouns instead of those applicable to someone else with their physical characteristics, those students—and the others—will know my politics. 

If, given the fact that in 1847 over ten shiploads of food a day were exported from Ireland to England, I refer to the mid-1840s in Ireland as “the Great Hunger,” as my Irish friends do, rather than “the Great Famine,” as many of the textbooks would have it, students will know my politics. 

If, in a different class, I make sure to point out that Congressman Joe Starnes famously asked Hallie Flanagan, the head of the Federal Theatre Project, if Marlowe and Euripides were communists, students will know my politics. 

If, in that same class, I suggest that Anatoly Lunacharsky may have had the coolest job title in history—Komisar of Education and Enlightenment—but one of the worst-ever jobs—serving as liaison between Josef Stalin and the Russian arts community—students will know my politics. 

If, in still a different class, I discuss the process of choosing a theatre season and emphasize the importance of having enough good roles for women and for people of color, students will know my politics. 

Most importantly, when I am honest enough to tell students my political opinions so they can factor that information into their decision as to whether or not to agree with my conclusions, rather than pretending to an objectivity that is ultimately impossible to achieve, students will know my politics. If that’s failing as a teacher, so be it. 

2. Taiwan is a country. 

Curmie is old enough to remember when then-President Gerald Ford proclaimed in a debate with Democratic challenger Jimmy Carter that “There is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe and there never will be under a Ford administration.” It’s probable that he misspoke, that he meant to argue that despite the USSR’s military and economic domination, the people of, say, Poland, proudly maintained their national identity. But that’s not what he said, and he was portrayed, not unreasonably, with failing to recognize the political reality of Eastern Europe. Many historians believe that single line cost him the 1976 election. 

A similar moment played out recently involving a considerably less important figure than the President of the United States. This time the offender was wrestler and B-movie actor John Cena. There’s a twist, though, and not merely in the status of the speaker. You see, in a promotional spot for an upcoming movie, Cena had the audacity to call Taiwan a country. Yes, it’s a country, but the fine folks in Beijing—you know, the ones whose lies about the coronavirus exacerbated the pandemic—were sore offended, because despite… you know... reality, Beijing still regards the island as their territory. Absurdly, organizations like the United Nations have allowed them to perpetuate this fraud. 

But whereas American diplomats might need to tread carefully around a vexed topic, there’s nothing to prevent an apolitical celebrity from speaking the truth. Well, there is something: money. Cena wants his movie to sell in mainland China, so his tough guy image melted faster than ice cream in a Texas summer when confronted with angry tweets from Beijing. Cena immediately apologized—in Mandarin, no less—to “China and the Chinese people,” deploring his “mistake,” and groveling rather embarrassingly. 

The good news is that his renunciation of the reality that he himself had described was met with derision from across the political spectrum. When, after all, was the last time Keith Olbermann (who called the apology “shameful”) and Tom Cotton (who declared it “pathetic”) agreed on anything, including that grass is green? The almighty dollar still reigns supreme, even in the communist world, but maybe we’re coming to understand that there might be some circumstances in which it shouldn’t? Baby steps. Baby steps. 

3. Calling out hypocrites is a good thing. 

Curmie is no great fan of President Biden (“lesser of two evils” isn’t high praise), but I do appreciate skill at political gamesmanship, and it doesn’t get much better than pointing out the fact that a goodly number of GOP legislators have been claiming credit for various provisions of the American Rescue Plan, a.k.a. the second pandemic package: the very bill they had voted against. And he read out their names! In a just universe, none would be re-elected; this is, alas, somewhat less than a just universe, but embarrassing the hypocrites can’t be all bad. 

4. Lying with statistics. 

President Biden gets credit for what Curmie just described, but he also gets called out for crass political posturing. Whereas any attempt to reduce hate crimes, especially violence, is a good thing, exaggerating the extent of, in this case, anti-Asian activity is a good way to look silly. So the hype surrounding the need for new anti-hate legislation, much of it coming from the White House, is really so much balloon juice. Left-leaning news sites breathlessly report some 6603 “hate incidents” in the year between March 2020 and March 2021. That figure is drawn from the report of an organization called Stop AAPI Hate. And there are… let’s see… a little over 23,200,000 Asians and Asian-Americans in the US. So 1 in 3514 Asians experienced some kind of bias in that year. Oh, and over 83% of those incidents weren’t crimes: verbal harassment and shunning may be despicable, but they’re not criminal. So let’s amend that number to 1 in over 20,000 who endured violence, civil rights violations, vandalism, etc. 

We also see that “Anti-Asian hates crimes increased by nearly 150%, mostly in N.Y. and L.A.”. That sounds bad. But if we’re going to call out Tucker Carlson for using statistics to deceive, we need to do so here, too. Yes, New York and Los Angeles saw significant increases: from a total of 10 cases in those two cities in 2019 to 43 in 2020. Curmie is having trouble disentangling numbers for the city and county of Los Angeles, and isn’t sure which is being referenced in the increase of 7 to 15 cases there, so let’s just look at New York: 28 cases for a total Asian population of a little under 2,000,000 (apologies that the best source I can find is Wikipedia). The East Asian population is just under 750,000; that’s probably the more relevant figure, but if the case numbers say “Asian,” then perhaps the larger number is indeed more accurate. Even limiting the population figures to just four East Asian nationalities: Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese, the average East Asian would go for roughly 27 years without experiencing a 1% chance of a race-inspired crime. This is not exactly cause for panic. 

5. You can’t make this stuff up. 

(Alleged) serial sexual predator Kevin Spacey will appear in his first acting role since the proverbial fecal matter interfaced the whirling rotors some four years ago. The role: “a detective investigating a false claim of paedophilia.” Bloody hell.

6. It’s actually OK to produce No Exit.

Students—it’s unclear exactly how many—at Western Washington University sought to cancel the production of Jean-Paul Sartre’s No Exit, claiming it ignores matters of gender and sexuality (among other things).  Curmie is, shall we say, unconvinced.  

I first read about this incident on Ethics Alarms; I e-mailed that site’s proprietor, Jack Marshall, saying I would be responding, but I might be writing more than would qualify as simply a comment.  He suggested I send him my commentary and he would post it as a Guest Post.  I agreed.  So, here’s my post; I do suggest that you read Jack’s earlier post on the subject (and follow the links he includes) to be better able to understand what I’m talking about, since my remarks were intended to be read by people who were already familiar with the basics of the story.

Thoughts on the First Anniversary of the Death of George Floyd

Curmie makes no promises, but it may be that he’ll be returning to writing more blog pieces in the future.  He’s teaching a single course this summer, and it not only has no meetings on Fridays, but it ends in late June.  He’s officially retiring effective August 31, although he’ll be teaching a couple of courses as an “adjunct” in the fall, will keep the small cadre of advisees he now has (but add no more), and will supervise a student production of a play he acted in several years before the student director in question was born.  <Sigh.>  I hope to maintain at least my current level of scholarly activity—there’s a book chapter awaiting my revision, two conference presentations for later this summer, and at least two conference papers that I’d like to turn into articles.  And I’ll continue my presidency of a national honor society for another year or two, at least.

But it’s already clear that giving up the multitudinous service activities undertaken for the department, college, and university will free up literally dozens of hours of time; taken in conjunction with the required reduction in teaching load, I’ll definitely be able to devote myself to some other things.  A friend who retired from university teaching some years ago  remains a more active scholar than I’ll ever be; he describes his current life as “less of the same, and without the boring bits.”  I’m hoping for a similar experience.  One of the manifestations of such an eventuality would be at least a weekly blog post.  On y verra, as they say en France.

So, where to begin after such spotty blogging activity for several years?  There are a lot of potential topics vying for attention right now, but what comes first to Curmie’s mind is the anniversary earlier this week of the death of George Floyd.  I approach this topic, curiously enough, in the spirit of moderation. 

Here, it might be valuable to tease out the differences in meaning between two often conflated concepts: vagueness and ambiguity.  The former suggests that there is no clearly identifiable meaning; the latter implies that different, perhaps even opposed, implications might exist simultaneously.  The George Floyd case is vague only in terms of details we don’t yet know and probably never will.  It is ambiguous or even multivalent in virtually everything else.  Of course, it’s sometimes difficult to disentangle the strands.  In Curmie’s world, a B student might have gotten there with 3 B’s, or with 2 A’s and a D, etc.  In the Floyd case, as with that hypothetical B student, what is difficult to find is anything approaching a complete picture.

What we see in most of the “mainstream” press coverage of both the death of Mr. Floyd and its aftermath—the BLM protests, the trial, etc.—is a sort of gasping idolatry of a petty criminal, for that’s what Floyd was.  (Curmie gets it: he wasn’t only that.)  We barely hear about the medical examiner’s report that drug use and an underlying heart condition were contributing causes of Floyd’s death, albeit his ultimate conclusion was that the restraint by police, specifically by Derek Chauvin, was the primary cause.  And the presumed racial motivation of Chauvin’s actions has been taken as given from the outset, without any evidence, let alone proof.

Nor is it possible to deny that some of the literally billions of dollars of damage from riots was caused by those who used BLM as a justification—or perhaps as a cover—for their actions.  (Note: Curmie was seeing the catch-phrase “Black Lives Matter” long before the death of Mr. Floyd, but it didn’t achieve the spotlight until last year.)

So let’s get this straight.  Were Chauvin’s actions appropriate?  No.  Criminal?  Yes.  Murder 1?  Doubtful at best.  Felony murder or Murder 2?  Maybe.  Manslaughter?  In all likelihood.  Was Chauvin a bad cop?  Yes.  Should he have been removed from the police force long before this incident?  Apparently so.  Was the system that kept Chauvin on the job racist?  Somewhere between “perhaps” and “probably.”  Did Floyd’s race have anything to do with Chauvin’s actions?  Maybe, but there has been literally no actual evidence adduced to support that conclusion.  Let me repeat that: none. 

The fact that Chauvin is white and Floyd was black might, of course, be relevant, but it strikes me that this is ultimately a problem one encounters early in a course in formal logic: the fact that A implies B does not mean that B implies A.  That is, all racists are inherently bad cops, but not all bad cops are racists.  (Spare me the “all white people are racist” dogma.  It gets us nowhere.)  And, as Curmie noted in the aftermath, cops across the country, presumably aware of increased scrutiny, responded not by toning down the violence against black people, but evening the score by abusing a few white folks.  The problem is bad cops, and a system that covers up for them; many, but nowhere near all, manifestations of these people’s unfitness involve racism.

So, were the protests legitimate?  Yes, in the sense that the widely viewed video seemed to tell us everything we needed to know (although it now appears that perhaps it didn’t).  Yes, in the sense that racism certainly exists in this country and police forces are particularly rife with it.  Yes, in the sense that protests are nearly always legitimate, using that term to mean legally, morally, and ethically responsible.  No, in the sense that this was not the event that should be the watershed moment.  (Had it been the killing of Breonna Taylor or the death of Sandra Bland, Curmie would be more on board.)  No, in the sense that not all of the protests were non-violent.  Which leads us to…

Was a good deal of the violence and property damage resulting from protests that turned into riots perpetrated by BLM activists, or at least by those claiming that affiliation with no denials by BLM leaders?  Yes.  Was a good deal of that violence and property damage perpetrated by white racists seeking to undermine the credibility of the BLM movement, or simply by violence-prone assholes using BLM as an excuse?  Yes.  Was a good deal of the violence in particular initiated by the toxic masculinity, arrogance, and irresponsibility of police forces… and in at least isolated cases, by federally-funded mercenaries?  Yes.

So, is the introspection precipitated by the reaction to the Chauvin/Floyd case a good thing?  Yes, in that honest self-evaluation is an inherent positive.  Yes, to the extent that it brought about in unprecedented ways an examination of the power structures in American society and the extent to which that hegemony is exclusionary along racial lines.  No, in that what started as a positive desire to recognize and celebrate diversity has morphed into witch hunts, quotas, and frankly Stalinistic thought control. 

Lest you think Curmie is exaggerating the last point, allow me to direct your attention you to “socialist realism,” a policy which required Russian artists not merely to avoid saying or doing anything critical of the USSR or the Communist Party, but to actively advocate for those entities.  How is that different from universities which now base hiring and promotion/tenure decisions to a large degree not on proven abilities as a teacher or researcher, but on demonstrated, active, commitment to the Great Gods Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion?

At the very least, faculty are expected to participate in “workshops” on these issues.  Curmie has endured dozens of variations on this theme on many topics over the years.  There are two constants: there is never any useful information, only opinion masquerading as fact; and Curmie always leaves far more angry than enlightened... and actively resistant to the propaganda he's just withstood.  (Side note: many of the voluntary programs have, in fact, proved valuable.  I did a weekend-long workshop in Rape Crisis Intervention 30-ish years ago, for example.  I've only used it twice in the ensuing time... but I’ve used it twice in the ensuing time.)

Thirty years ago, Curmie got into trouble for saying that whereas there is much to be gained by applying a feminist lens to texts, not all feminist arguments are good arguments.  The cause du jour has changed, but the expectation of ideological compliance has not.  Alas.

Concentrating for a moment on the professional world Curmie inhabits: this enforced singularity of vision runs through universities and professional organizations alike.  Case in point: there’s an organization Curmie has belonged to for decades.  The committee structure has always worked like this: committee chairs are elected by the membership, subcommittee chairs are appointed by the chairs, and committee members… wait for it… simply volunteer to serve; no one is turned away.  Anyone willing to work is given a task.  But it turns out that a couple of committees have an “under-representation of people of color”… so white people, some of whom have specific expertise, are now being denied access to those committees on which POC folks have expressed no interest, and the organization is denied access to their skills, in the name of “diversity.”  We have to make those percentages work out, after all.

Of course, other power structures—state legislatures, boards of trustees, and the like—are reacting in precisely the opposite way: forbidding discussion of race-sensitive issues and attempting to enforce their own monomaniacal vision, in which American exceptionalism is to be taken as a given, but curricula must otherwise be “apolitical.”  One group wants Critical Race Theory to be mandatory; another wants it completely expunged.  The idea that it might be available, possibly required in certain specific disciplines in the sense of knowing its tenets, but with no expectation of having to agree with its conclusions: this doesn’t seem to be acceptable to the ideologues on either extreme… and it appears at first glance that virtually everyone indeed positions themselves at those opposing poles.  Curmie doubts this is actually true, but those positioned at both extremes demand absolute fidelity.

All of this messiness, this swirl of competing ideologies, this series of simultaneously “yes” and “no” responses, never seems to all come into focus at the same time in the same commenter.  On the one hand, we have the majority of the center-left news agencies and Democratic pols applauding George Floyd as some sort of messianic hero, the noble if accidental progenitor of Racial Justice, the Second Coming of MLK.  On the other side, we have the rightwing press and the GOP condemning all things BLM-related, labeling anyone remotely affiliated with the movement as thuggish, communist (!), anti-American, and probably responsible for the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby.  OK, maybe not that last one, but give them time.

At the moment, universities are more interested in pandering to leftwing claptrap than to rightwing claptrap.  That will probably change, especially in state institutions in red states, before long.  But the glorious concept of the university as the testing ground for opposing ideas, as the site where disputants recognize in each other the desire to seek the truth, as the vigilant guardian of intellectual curiosity and freedom of expression: this vision, the one Curmie believed in when he started out in the profession 40-odd years ago… this noble cause lies in the ICU, gasping for what may soon be its last breath.  

Do black lives matter?  Indubitably.  What about Black Lives Matter?  Sort of.  Any full-throated endorsement or condemnation will forever leave Curmie saying, “yeah, but…”

A Response to the Cruz Amendment

Over at Ethics Alarms, Jack Marshall excoriates Senate Democrats for not supporting an amendment by Senator Ted Cruz that would deny federal funding to any college or university which “discriminates against Asian Americans in recruitment, applicant review, or admission.” Jack closes his piece with this: “There is no persuasive argument to be made in defense of those 48 Democrats. I challenge any reader here to present one.” 

The following started out as a comment to his post, but sort of kept going long past comment length.  I won’t clutter his page with this missive, but perhaps the following may be at least a partial response to his commentary...

I’ll take up that challenge, Jack. Sort of. 

That is, I would suggest a couple of reasons to be skeptical of this proposed legislation. They require a little more abstract reasoning and a little more knowledge of the way admissions operations work than the average politician is likely to be able to muster. I hasten to add that I am not defending the rationale that diversity is such an inherent good that it overrides all other considerations, but (for example) discussions of The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World or Fires in the Mirror in my Advanced Play Analysis class have always benefited enormously from the presence of students with different demographic profiles. 

But to the matter at hand… First off, it’s difficult to assert with any authority that discrimination is actually taking place, since no one can agree on what elements of a student’s record ought to be weighted more heavily: grades? class rank? standardized test scores? extra- and co-curricular activities? recommendations? interviews with admissions personnel and/or alumni? Should legacies count? Should the ability to pay tuition without institution-funded financial aid? Should the inability to do so count? All of these elements are part of the admissions evaluation process at universities, especially those at the elite level. (At my university, a student with a certain class rank and/or board scores is automatically offered admission. But we’d ultimately end up accepting probably 95% of the students rejected by Harvard or Yale.) 

Grades are “objective”; except of course, they aren’t. Students take classes with different degrees of difficulty. Someone who gets a 90 in calculus and a 75 in phys ed is a better student than one who gets a 95 in phys ed and an 80 in algebra, but will have a lower average. Moreover, it almost goes without saying that the #20 student in a class of 400 at School X might be better or worse than the #1 student in a class of 40 at School Y. Using sports as an example: I happen to live in the small city where one of the top half dozen soccer players in US history went to high school. He was, of course, all-conference, etc. But an all-conference player in that league today might be lucky to get a scholarship to a Division II university, let alone even hope to become a star for the national team. So how do we compare, if all we know is “all conference”? 

Of course, pols of both parties seem enamored of standardized testing as the ultimate arbiter of student (or teacher) success. The closest thing to an objective means of comparing students is to give them exactly the same test under exactly the same circumstances. But even such an endeavor is problematic, even apart from such considerations as recognizing that Student X is fighting off a cold, or student Y’s mother just got diagnosed with cancer. Someone, a mortal, designed that test, and the questions are almost by definition going to favor someone who knows precisely those concepts, terms, or formulas over someone who may have mastered different, but equally important, material. I remember a question on one of those tests that asked me to figure out the Earned Run Average of a baseball pitcher. The question provided the formula, but because I knew baseball and statistics, I could glance at the multiple choice responses and determine the right answer in perhaps two seconds. Someone fully as adept at math but who didn’t know baseball would have spent a lot more time, and perhaps been rushed at the end of the exam, omitting questions or not having time to really think them through. 

So it’s perfectly possible that a student taking a standardized test would score better or worse, perhaps even appreciably so, were they to take the exam a week earlier or later. But this isn’t even the biggest problem. Those who argue for significant weight for SAT, ACT, GRE, LSAT, MCAT (etc.) scores do so based on a fanciful belief that performance on standardized tests measures skill or intelligence. It does not. In fact, they measure test-taking ability. To provide just two examples from my own personal experience as a standardized test-taker: 

I was pretty good at math when I was in high school, so in my junior year I was among the 15 or 20 students who took a standardized test under the auspices of the American Mathematical Association, or some organization like that. The test was difficult; no one could be expected to finish it in the appointed time. And it was scored like Jeopardy: harder questions were worth more points, and you literally lost points if you answered a question and got it wrong. I got a negative score! Still, I was asked back the following year, after several months of taking a class with the worst math teacher I ever had, and a couple of months with the next-worst. I adopted a different strategy… and got the highest score in the history of the school. Was I as bad as my junior year score? Nope. Was I the best math student in however long my high school had been administering that test? Not even close. 

Skip ahead a few years. I took the GRE some five or six years after the second of the two freshman-level math courses (Calculus I and Intro to Finite Math) I took in college. It was 8:00 a.m. on a Saturday. I’d had about four hours of sleep, and I was more than a little hungover. Perfect conditions, right? I got a perfect score in math. Is it plausible that I deserved such a score? I suppose so. The test I took, unlike the subject exam in math, didn’t really test anything past algebra and a little introductory probability. But no rational person would think that my math skills exceeded my verbal skills (my verbal score was good, but not perfect). 

But, as they say on the late-night infomercials, wait, there’s more. There are studies that show there is little correlation between board scores at one level and performance at the next. More to the point in the current discussion: I remember reading about (as opposed to reading) studies which concluded that the average African-American student with a certain board score would outperform the average white student with that same score. I forget the exact figures, and I’m not sure I could find them now, but the following provides the general idea: on average, a black student with a 1080 SAT score would get better grades in college than a white student with an 1100. I don’t recall that Asian-American students were included in the findings, but I would suspect that the same principles would apply. So should we be comparing the scores themselves, or their predictive value? 

Of course, multiple studies have shown that these tests tend to privilege affluent white males: precisely the stereotype of the GOP pol. Were I of cynical disposition (perish the thought!), I might be tempted to suspect that the Republicans are using Asian-American rights as a front for their attempts to codify white preference. Wait, Republicans being as virtue-signaling and contemptuous of actual reality as the Dems? Surely not! 

Be it noted: for all my distaste for standardized tests to measure, well, anything, I still use them in considering whether a particular student should be admitted into our program or receive some of our sparse scholarship money. This is different, however, from believing that a higher score on the SAT or ACT makes for an inherently better student. Taken as part of an overall assessment, a good score will do a student more good than a bad score will, but by itself it’s merely a statistic. Another sports analogy: the best shooter in the NBA will never have the highest field goal percentage, because he’s shooting a lot from 3-point range, where 40% is excellent, but there are centers and power forwards shooting well over 50% because they never take a shot from more than 5 feet from the basket. 

So if the question is whether discrimination is a good idea, the answer is of course not. But the phrasing of the amendment opens up a lot of questions without answering any of them, especially about what, exactly, constitutes discrimination. Catch phrases and gotcha politics on either side of the aisle aren’t going to solve any problems. An admissions policy which privileges class rank over SAT scores would probably benefit African-American students over Asian-Americans, but it is not inherently discriminatory, any more than a strategy that reverses those priorities would be. And certainly a procedure which attempts to predict success at the collegiate level rather than judging success at the high school level doesn’t seem to me to be problematic, although it could be called discriminatory, I suppose. 

I don’t want some federal judge to decide how my alma maters, my employer, or indeed any other college or university runs its admissions process, absent clear and convincing evidence of actual discrimination as opposed to simply that which could be construed that way. I’m not suggesting that we ought to break existing laws to advance a cause. There are no doubt cases in which the disparity in qualifications between accepted applicants of Group X and rejected applicants of Group Y is so profound that racial discrimination (against Asian-Americans, perhaps against whites) is the only plausible explanation. In such cases, the legal system does indeed need to be employed. 

What I am suggesting, however, is that the Cruz amendment smacks more of politics—“look, we got the Dems to vote against equal rights!”—than of ethics. It seems too broad a statement to ensure just administration without further clarification. In something like collegiate admissions, one person’s discrimination is simply another person’s (ethically legitimate and comprehensible) difference in priorities. 

As a career educator at the college level, I’d probably have voted against the Cruz amendment, too… although I’d be fully aware I was walking into a trap.

Intentions Matter (except when they don't).

Curmie thinks a lot about the notion of intention. Part of that, of course, comes from being a theatre director. One of my most common notes to actors is to clarify intentions: to make clear what a character wants to accomplish, whether s/he succeeds in achieving it or not. 

But there have been three specific moments in the last week that have brought the concept to the forefront. The first was the annual discussion in Advanced Play Analysis class of the intellectual underpinnings of the absurdist movement in dramatic literature, specifically existentialism’s emphasis on prioritizing existence (the individual ego) over essence (the labels applied by others). 

I talked about how this concept is very similar to traditional conservative ideology (not to be confused with what passes for conservatism in contemporary politics). I also discussed how the manifestations (although not the rationale) of existentialist thought comport with those of Ancient Greece: Oedipus may have been attempting to avoid a horrible prophecy, but his actions bring about his downfall in a manner that is simultaneously inevitable and deeply ironic. Jean-Paul Sartre’s Les Mouches (The Flies) serves as an excellent means of linking the two philosophies, as he treats the matricidal Orestes as an existential hero. 

Finally, I contrasted the emphasis on individual responsibility with little regard for context or demographics and more traditional Judeo-Christian thought. Whether founded on a concept of pollution, as in the case of Shinto and (largely) Ancient Greece or upon a Nietzschean or Sartrean conception of the role of the authentic self within the universe, this emphasis on actions rather than intentions runs counter to the dominant Western belief system of the past two millennia. I should note here that concern for context is not an exclusively Western idea. Confucius, for example, distinguishes between murder (which cannot be condoned), self-defense (in which killing is excusable), and protecting one’s lord (in which failing to kill, if necessary, is punishable). 

Still, in terms of the way laws and ethical systems are constructed in the US and in countries like it, it’s the Judeo-Christian ethic that prevails. Thus, whereas Sartre’s Orestes strides unflinchingly into the swarm of flies, symbolic of both the chthonic Furies of Aeschylus’s Oresteia and the niggling doubts about the legitimacy of his regicide and matricide, even a lapsed Christian like W.B. Yeats can close The Countess Cathleen, the title character of which has sold her soul to the “demon merchants” in order to redeem the souls of her subjects, with the Countess’s ascension into Heaven and the Angel’s observation that “the Light of Lights looks always on the motive, not the deed, The Shadow of Shadows on the deed alone.” 

Donald G. McNeil, Jr.

What all this means is that in our society, existential thought notwithstanding, intentions and context matter. Usually. Which brings us to the second relevant event: the controversy surrounding the compelled resignation of now-former New York Times reporter Donald G. McNeil Jr. McNeil was forced out for using a racial slur while leading a Times-sponsored student trip to Peru in 2019. As is often the case, the details of the incident are unclear. 

According to a late-January article in the Daily Beast, “McNeil repeatedly made racist and sexist remarks throughout the trip including, according to two complaints, using the ‘n-word.’” But according to McNeil himself, he had used the term only in the context of quoting a student who had asked “whether I thought a classmate of hers should have been suspended for a video she had made as a 12-year-old in which she used” the slur. The “repeatedly” and “sexist” parts of the allegations seem to have disappeared from the discussion, with the furor concentrating on the utterance of a single word. 

After an apparently lengthy internal investigation, the Times reprimanded McNeil for “extremely poor judgment” (really?) but determined that his intentions were neither “hateful or malicious,” citing in particular “repeating a racist slur in the context of a conversation about racist language.” (Curmie can’t help thinking about the “Jehovah” scene from Monty Python’s “Life of Brian.”)  Within a few months, McNeil was the paper’s lead journalist on COVID-19, even being nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. But then the situation went public, and some 150 Times staffers signed a letter demanding further review. The bosses promptly ousted McNeil, declaring “We do not tolerate racist language regardless of intent,” despite having used the inexcusable term as recently as February 2 of this year in a feature story on classicist Dan-el Parilla Peralta. Its use in that story, by the way, is completely appropriate. 

Busted for the inanity of the comment, Executive Editor Dean Baquet subsequently walked back the business about intent. Mediaite quotes him indirectly, citing “comments obtained” about “a staff meeting”: “In our zeal to make a powerful statement about our workplace culture, we ham-handedly said something you rightfully saw as an oversimplification of one of the most difficult issues of our lives…. It was a deadline mistake and I regret it.” If you, Gentle Reader, believe the “deadline mistake” part (there are deadlines for staff e-mails?), then Curmie has some ocean-front property in Kansas you might be interested in purchasing. 

The story took on even more “legs” when the Times higher-ups spiked a column by Bret Stephens in which he criticized the paper’s handling of the situation, especially the whole “regardless of intent” part. Whether the piece was axed by publisher A.G. Sulzberger (as Stephens claims) or by opinions editor Kathleen Kingsbury after consultation with Sulzberger (as she claims) really doesn’t matter. But the column found its way around the offices, and was apparently sent by someone (not Stephens) to the Times’s crosstown rival, the New York Post. The Post, of course, is as conservative as the Times is liberal (both to rather an extreme, alas), and their decision-makers were happy to publish the piece in full. 

Curmie urges you to read what Stephens has to say in its entirety, but for the purposes of brevity, Curmie will quote only two short passages. He opens with this: “Every serious moral philosophy, every decent legal system and every ethical organization cares deeply about intention.” A little later, he makes his thesis clear:

This is an argument about three words: “Regardless of intent.” Should intent be the only thing that counts in judgment? Obviously not. Can people do painful, harmful, stupid or objectionable things regardless of intent? Obviously. Do any of us want to live in a world, or work in a field, where intent is categorically ruled out as a mitigating factor? I hope not.

Curmie can’t improve on any of that, noting only that there’s a lot less mitigating context to Baquet’s inanity (which, being written, intrinsically allows time to reconsider before hitting “send”) than to McNeil’s utterance of a clarifying question. Somehow Curmie doubts that Baquet will be booted for violating a core principle of journalism. 

Full disclosure: Curmie has directed two plays (that he can think of) which include the word “nigger.” One of them, “Master Harold”… and the boys, is one of the most profoundly anti-apartheid scripts ever written, and the use of the term by white character—one we in the audience have come to like, in part because of his close relationship with the two black men in the play—shocks us, precisely as it was intended to do. Curmie has also said the word in class, choosing to quote texts accurately instead of dancing around specific words. And yes, there were complaints from the Woke Folk. So be it. Curmie will never use the term in his own voice, but will do so in citing a source if (and only if) the situation demands it. 

So: intentions matter. But, of course, they are sometimes insufficient justification for actions. Which brings us to event number three. Like many Republicans with political aspirations, Nikki Haley has been walking a tightrope of late. Having no core values (like many if not most politicians in both parties), she has found the purely pragmatic need to negotiate her distance from the sociopath who appointed her to the UN Ambassadorship, all the while trying not to alienate the Trumpian base. Suddenly, after it became clear that all Trump’s huffing and puffing wasn’t going to change the election results, she has come to the conclusion that perhaps, just perhaps, Donald Trump might not be the answer to all our prayers. 

After a couple of years as a Trump toady although she clearly despised the man and everything he represents, she’s now come to the shocking realization that “We need to acknowledge he let us down. He went down a path he shouldn’t have, and we shouldn’t have followed him, and we shouldn’t have listened to him. And we can’t let that ever happen again.” In other words, she’s just as crass, self-serving, and ethically compromised as a host of other pols on either side of the aisle. Imagine Curmie’s surprise. 

But what really fascinates me about this otherwise mundane case of amoral political ambition is not so much Haley’s unwillingness to tell the truth to Trump, but rather that she presents as a defense for him the assertion that “to his core, he believes he was wronged. This is not him making it up.” There is, to be blunt, no conceivable way that all of those election officials, secretaries of state from both parties, and judges at all levels—including Trump-appointed members of SCOTUS—could all be part of a gigantic conspiracy to end the Trumpian regime. There may have been a minor glitch here or there, but there is literally no evidence (not to be confused with claims of ultimately illusory evidence) that Joe Biden wasn’t ethically and legally entitled to literally every electoral vote he received, or that Donald Trump was within hailing distance of a popular vote victory. Ah, but, you see, he really thought he’d won. 

There are three possibilities here. 1). Trump knew better all along, but is sufficiently narcissistic and traitorous that he just didn’t care. 2). Trump surrounded himself with a gaggle of sycophants who actively (or in Haley’s own case) passively withheld the truth from the President of the United States. Shouldn’t there be penalties for that? And, of course, Trump would have to be stupid enough to believe in the “alternate facts” spun by his yes-men (and -women). 3). Trump is so distanced from reality that he really does believe, of his own accord and without the fawning support of his minions, that he won the election. Ambassador Haley would have us believe this version. I’m willing to do so, but only if she’ll call it by its proper name: the insanity defense. 

So we’re back at intentions, again. Donald Trump isn’t really lying, you see. “He believes it” might be a good enough rationale in Haley’s mind for Trump’s outrageous and seditious behavior, but such a claim requires… wait for it… context. And the only context that gets the former President off the hook for seriously damaging the integrity and, nearly as importantly, the perceived integrity of the electoral system is the assertion that he’s batshit crazy. He can think he’s a butterfly for all Curmie cares: there is, after all, as much truth to that belief as there is to the claim that he won the election. But if Trump honestly believes that he was acting to protect democracy, he needs to be kept away from sharp implements and housed in a nice room with padded walls. 

It is perfectly possible to great harm with the best of intentions. It is also possible to do great harm by ignoring the context of an action. Curmie finds himself grateful to Confucius, whose disdain for generalities is vindicated yet again.

Of Assholes, Social Media, Idiot University Administrators [apologies for redundancy], and Victims

Curmie is a little late to the party—but not as late as is his wont—regarding the escapades of one Jimmy Galligan. Curmie first heard the name when a former student—a Social Justice Warrior as only a middle-class het white Christian male can be—applauded Galligan in a Facebook post. So Curmie broke out the Google machine and learned about the case. Turns out that Galligan is … what’s that word, again? An asshole. Yeah, that’s it.

Mimi Groves: because she’s the victim here

OK: here’s the story. Four years ago, then 15-year-old Mimi Groves got her learner’s permit and posted a three-second video to a friend via Snapchat: “I can drive, niggers!,” echoing language she had heard repeatedly in music she liked. Three years go by, and we come to the quite legitimate furor over the killing of George Floyd. Groves posted on Instagram that people should “protest, donate, sign a petition, rally, do something” in support of the Black Lives Matter movement. Ironically, it was this gesture of support for BLM that may have catalyzed her being labelled a racist. 

Someone she didn’t know responded to her post with “You have the audacity to post this, after saying the N-word.” Somewhere along the line someone had sent the Instagram post to Galligan, who then—get this—waited to post it publicly until Groves had been accepted onto the cheerleading squad at the University of Tennessee, her “dream school,” so he could “get her where she would understand the severity of that word”: in other words, when he could do the most damage to her reputation, and get the most publicity for himself.

Galligan claims he initially brought the video to the attention of school officials “without gaining any response.” Does Curmie believe this is a complete and accurate description of what happened? Well, his response starts with “n,” and isn’t the word that got Groves into trouble. But even if this claim is true, and even if Galligan had been subjected to racial slurs directed at him by other students (a plausible enough allegation), why lash out so viciously against someone who hadn’t done that?  The only plausible answer is that he could.

Social media having long since displaced quicksand pits and piranha pools as the most dangerous place to hang out, Snapchat, TikTok, and Twitter were soon abuzz, complete with links to UT’s cheer team and admissions pages. 

Groves was immediately dropped from the cheer team and pressured to withdraw from the university. Whereas Curmie believes she is better off not subject to the whim of an athletics department and an admissions office (and, no doubt, an administration) more concerned with kneejerk virtue signaling than with intent, context, or proportion—the very essence of a university education—she understandably does not agree. 

Points to consider: 

Groves was 15 when she said the word, once. She was a kid. No one, and Curmie does mean literally no one, should be judged based on a single, frankly rather minor, lapse of judgment at age 15. Hell, Curmie did some remarkably stupid stuff when he was considerably older than that, and he’s betting you did, too, Gentle Reader. Much as Curmie thinks the term “cancel culture” is over-used, the concept does exist, and this is a prime example. 

The University of Tennessee behaved appallingly, their absurd over-reaction probably a function of trying to divert attention away from real incidents of racist activity by their already-enrolled students. If Groves had applied the epithet to Galligan (or anyone else) in her senior year, or used an equivalent term towards the LGBTQ+ community, or to members of a different religion, then withdrawing her admission might be appropriate. 

But it’s clear that she has grown up considerably in the last four years. If only the same could be said for UT’s cheerleading coach, athletics director, and director of admissions. A competent person in any of those positions would say to the screeching mob: “This young woman made a mistake when she was 15. If you say you didn’t, too, you’re either a saint or a liar, and we’re betting it’s not the former.” Instead, they adopted an especially perverse variant of the heckler’s veto in a gesture of appeasement that will become the new normal for them. 

Groves’s lawyer says, the “University of Tennessee caved in—in a panic, to a lot of hysteria, a lot of social media going on—and they didn't give her a meaningful investigation—which would have revealed that this happened years ago, and would have revealed the context of it.” Yeah, that’s about right. 

None of this, alas, is terribly surprising. Curmie’s politics are to the left of 85% of the US population, 95% of Texans, and 98% of the congressional district that re-elected Loony Louie Gohmert by a landslide. But he’s well aware that the biggest threat to his speaking his mind comes from that sliver to his left… well, them and the hand-wringing invertebrates (yes, Curmie knows that’s not good zoology) who make up the majority of university administrators. 

It’s extremely important to recognize that Groves did not (apparently ever) direct the term at an individual, nor use it as a term of disparagement at all, but rather she repeated an expression she had heard in her music. She is openly supportive of the BLM movement, and seems genuinely contrite at her past actions, not merely, à la a long list of politicians (for example), that she got caught. This is not the right scapegoat to choose. 

But Galligan doesn’t care: he got written up in the New York Times and had his 15 minutes of fame notoriety. Karma will return, however, as no responsible employer is going to trust him not to pull a similar stunt—and Curmie chooses that word carefully—in the future. Well, not unless he takes responsibilities for his actions. 

Moreover, “a few years ago,” Galligan’s own father, who is white, used the “n-word,” which he had heard his black in-laws use repeatedly, “prompting Galligan and his sister to quietly take him aside and explain that it was unacceptable, even when joking around.” A grown man can be “quietly taken aside”; a 15-year-old girl needs to be publicly humiliated years after the fact. And we need to wait until just the right moment, to maximize the damage. Even more problematic: Galligan is proud of the destruction he has wrought. 

Ergo: Jimmy Galligan is an asshole, and he will remain so in Curmie’s books until he expresses genuine remorse for his reckless, cruel, and unwarranted behavior. Curmie was about to say that whereas Mimi Groves is welcome in his classroom at any time, Jimmy Galligan is not. But that isn’t true. The teaching profession is one in which you play the cards you’re dealt, and Jimmy Galligan isn’t an unfamiliar figure. 

Curmie has known literally thousands of post-adolescents over his lifetime; he has been a student or a faculty member at a college or university for 93 of the last 95 semesters, and is about to start on semester 94. A lot of 19-year-olds have been part of that universe, and a lot of them turned out to be a lot better people as adults than they were as post-adolescents. It’s called growing up. Jimmy Galligan, like Mimi Groves, deserves the chance to do that. That doesn’t mean he isn’t an asshole right now.

Britbox, PBS, and Pusillanimous Prissiness

Tony Robinson as Baldrick and Rowan Atkinson as Ebenezer Blackadder
in “Blackadder’s Christmas Carol”

Curmie and Beloved Spouse have watched “Blackadder’s Christmas Carol” at least once every December for well over a decade. Often the “ritual viewing” takes place on Christmas Eve, as it did this year. Needless to say, we know the roughly half-hour show pretty well. We have two versions of the piece on DVD. One is a stand-alone which we always seem to forget is configured for British players and won’t work on ours (we could play it on a computer, but we’d naturally rather have the larger screen of the television). 

We couldn’t immediately find the other one (it’s in a box set of the entire Blackadder series), so we decided to stream it on Britbox. A couple minutes in, Ebenezer Blackadder’s dogsbody Baldrick is describing the workhouse nativity play, for which the infant scheduled to play the baby Jesus had died, leaving the players no choice but to have the role enacted by Spot the dog.

Ebenezer: Oh, dear… I’m not convinced that Christianity would have established its firm grip over the hearts and minds of mankind if all Jesus had ever said was “Woof.”

Baldrick: Well, it went all right until the shepherds came on. See, we hadn’t been able to get any real sheep, so we had to stick some wool…

Ebenezer: …on some other dogs.

Baldrick: Yeah… and the moment Jesus got a whiff of them, he’s away! While the angel’s singing “Peace on Earth, Goodwill to Mankind,” Jesus scampers across and tries to get one of the sheep to give him a piggyback ride!

Ebenezer: Scarcely appropriate behavior for the son of God, Mr. Baldrick. Weren’t the children upset?

Baldrick: Nah, they loved it. They want us to do another one at Easter—they want to see us nail up the dog.

But Baldrick’s last speech in this sequence, which we knew well and indeed anticipated, never happened. Apparently there are multiple versions out there—some with and some without the line. (Hey, if you can’t believe Wikipedia, what’s the world coming to?) It seems a strange thing to cut a single line in an often darkly humorous piece of satire, which is what appears to have happened. And why do so at all? Are there a lot of Victorian-era urchins who will rise up in righteous dudgeon at the affront to their true humanitarian natures? The joke is funny, or at least Curmie and Beloved Spouse think so, and even if it weren’t, where’s the problem? It’s not like kids are the series’ target audience. Or are the offended spectators animal activists? Curmie loves dogs as much as the next person, but he knows a joke when he hears one. Either way, how is this line more problematic than Queen Victoria’s calling Prince Albert her “little German sausage”... or Jesus mounting a sheep from behind, for that matter? 

Moreover, it’s hard to believe that Rowan Atkinson (who played the title character) or Stephen Fry (not in this scene, but in two others), both of whom have become somewhat controversial for their ardent defense of free speech, would be very pleased at having their work thus edited.  

It’s also strange that the line is included in some versions and not in others. If it were deemed offensive (or whatever), surely the rights holders would allow the distribution of only the Bowdlerized version. Note: this may have happened, as it’s apparently been some time since the short film has been available in its uncensored form; our copy is several years old. 

But this situation also brings to mind another variation on censorial idiocy. We’re members of the local PBS station, and thereby we have access to a lot of archived material from PBS. It’s important to understand that we’re not talking about over-the-air broadcasts: you have to pay extra to be able to watch this stuff, and membership is specific: it’s not a bundle of things of which the PBS archives are only a single part. But apparently PBS has adopted a policy that those “seven words you can’t say on television” are verboten even on shows that can be viewed only by a self-selecting membership. 

This is especially disturbing for three fundamental reasons. First, they have unartfully clipped out all sound in those moments. Shifting from ambient noise (traffic sounds, almost but not quite inaudible background conversations, the TV on in the next room…) to none calls attention to the omission. If you’re going to censor content, at least don’t advertise the fact. Because you know what offends Curmie, PBS? It’s not when a character mutters an expletive when something goes wrong. It’s your pusillanimous prissiness. 

Which brings us to another point. PBS tries to position itself as a representative of the best in television: “where else can you see [fill in the blank]” is a standard marketing ploy for their fund-raisers. If anyone should be demanding artistic integrity and supporting the aesthetic choices of script-writers, it’s PBS. But they’ve been taken over by a gaggle of hand-wringers who fear that a little old lady from Dubuque might keel over if a character mutters an expletive derived from the Anglo-Saxon when frustrated. You know, like people do? 

Finally, PBS, I’m paying you to present me with authentic work. I expect you to provide me with that. Within the context of a script, it may be perfectly appropriate to have a character use scatological or “obscene” language, or even to use a slur based on race, gender, sexual identity, or the like. That’s a call for the writers, not you, to make, and for me, not you, to decide whether to hear what the writers wrote and the actors said. All of these shows, by the way, include a warning about adult content. You don’t watch one of these programs without the expectation of… well… adult content. 

My particular favorites, by the way, are the shows in another language. The ubiquity of the English language comes into play here. Sometimes European characters swear in English; those words are bleeped by PBS. Sometimes they swear in French or German or Swedish or whatever; these lines are censored only in the subtitles. Pssst: nobody tell PBS that a lot of Americans know what “va te faire foutre” means without needing the subtitles, or that a lot of these terms have cognates in English.

Exactly why Britbox (presumably, or maybe the BBC) and PBS see fit to censor their own material from the likes of us eludes me. And don’t get me started on why the bots that control Facebook won’t allow Curmie (or anyone else) to link to a post on this blog: some unspecified “spam” offense, which, of course, never actually happened. Of course, there’s no actual appeal process or indeed a real person to complain to, just sanctimony and self-congratulation. Such is the way of censorious asshats. (The usual nod to Ken White of Popehat for this felicitous phrase.) 

It’s important to note, I think, that these concerns operate on a different axis than the traditional left/right continuum. Rather, this is on the sequence from authoritarianism at one terminus to libertarianism on the other, using the latter in its original sense, which differentiates between actual personal freedom (and unwillingness to be defined by group status) on the one hand and simple selfishness on the other. (Refusal to wear a mask in a pandemic is a function of arrogant stupidity, not libertarianism.) Objections to Blackadder’s line likely come from the left, to those naughty words on PBS from the right, to Curmie’s blog from irrational technophilia. 

I can comprehend a rationale for shutting down objective lies or conspiracy theories (the Republican governor and secretary of state of Georgia conspiring with the ghost of Hugo Chavez to keep Donald Trump from being re-elected, that sort of crap). But, as Oscar Wilde reminded us, the pure and simple truth is rarely pure and never simple. Curiously, however, subjective truth is easier to define than objective truth: it’s whatever the creators decided it to be. That includes a cop muttering “shit” when the bad guy gets away.