Pray for Curmie.
by Curmie
[ JM here: I want to let Curmie’s Conjectures stand on their own, so I apologize at the outset by intruding with a brief introduction. Lest anyone be dissuaded from reading the whole post because the author’s scholarly tone and apparent focus at the start suggests that this will be a narrow discourse on topics rather more relished by Curmie and me than by the majority of EA readers—theater and the performing arts—fear not. The tags on the article will be “Canada, censorship, the Hamas-Israel War Ethics Train Wreck, and political theater.” The post also involves some of the same considerations as one of mine two days ago. ]
There is a theory, one to which I subscribe, which suggests that the Dionysian Festival of classical Athens began not really as a religious observance in honor of a demi-god but rather as a means of consolidating the political power of the tyrant Peisistratus. Whether or not this is true, there is no doubt that by 458 BCE Aeschylus’ Oresteia, widely acclaimed as “the world’s first dramatic masterpiece,” offers commentary on the reforms of the Areopagus enacted by the strategos Ephialtes some three years earlier.
There is no question that since that time the theatre has often—not always, but often—been political. The 20th century offered more than a few examples of playwrights and production companies who, often at personal risk, critiqued the power structures around them: Jean-Paul Sartre took on the Nazis; Lorraine Hansberry, racism in the US; Athol Fugard, apartheid; Václav Havel, communism in Eastern Europe.
Not all such efforts were for causes most of us would endorse, of course. Socialist Realism was a Stalinist policy under which all art had to support The Revolution: not just avoid criticism of the regime, but actively and explicitly endorse it. More recently, the Freedom Theatre of Jenin (on the occupied West Bank) has been in the news. A few weeks ago, one of the student organizations at my university posted an encomium to the company, which they described as “an example of creating liberating theatre and serving communities through theatrical pedagogy and profound performance.” I remembered having written about that theatre a dozen or so years ago. If I might quote myself for a moment: “Turns out that the Freedom Theatre was pretty damned proud of having turned out alumni who engaged in armed insurrection, and at least one of whom, a suicide bomber, richly merited description as a terrorist.”
So no, propagandistic theatre isn’t always a good thing… but engaging with the world is. Even subtle messages matter. Under normal circumstances, Aunt Eller’s wish that “the farmer and the cowman can be friends” doesn’t amount to much. But Oklahoma! hit Broadway after the declaration of war against the Axis powers and before D-Day. “Territory folks” need to put aside their petty grievances when there’s a guy with a funny mustache who’s far worse than any of your neighbors will ever be.
by Curmie
The title for this two-part edition of Curmie’s Conjectures refers to a song by the Irish punk band the Boomtown Rats, “Don’t Believe What You Read,” which includes not only the title admonition but also lines like “I know most what I read will be a lot of lies / But you learn really fast to read between the lines.” Part I of this exercise attempted to suggest something of the parameters of the problem. As Jack suggested in his introduction to that piece, it’s not an exhaustive list of the various forms of journalistic chicanery, but I hope it served as a representative sample.
Here in Part II, I’ll attempt the daunting task of examining strategies to “read between the lines” and come at least a little closer to the truth of what happened in a given situation. So, what to do? How do we determine if that less-than-objective source we’re reading actually has this one story right, especially if it’s the only source about a particular story? Boy, do I wish there was an easy answer to this one. That said…
The most effective means of ascertaining the truth, of course, is to get different perspectives on the issue. I think I’ve mentioned both here and on my own blog that when I was in England doing my MA (at the time “Don’t Believe What You Read” was released, as it happens), I’d alternate between reading the Telegraph, which leaned right, and the Guardian, which leaned left. If the former said “X but Y,” thereby suggesting that Y was the more important point, the latter would likely say “Y but X.” But whichever paper you read, you’d know that X and Y, though perhaps seemingly in opposition, were both true, and both worth knowing about.
Of course, both the Telegraph and the Guardian were, whatever their political perspectives, both reputable news sources. That’s a statement that would be difficult to make about many of the most prominent news media in this country in the 2020s. Equally importantly, as suggested in Part I, the problem is often that we hear only from one perspective.
There are three possibilities for why this should occur. One, which is (alas!) probably the least likely, is that both X and Y editors make an honest decision that a story is or is not newsworthy. Or X media outlet knowingly runs with a story that is either grossly distorted or fabricated altogether. Or outlet Y, knowing the story casts their team in an unfavorable light, ignores it, hoping it will just go away. At some point it becomes untenable to try to ferret out the true motives; the truth of the story may be a little easier to discern, although there are no guarantees.
by Curmie
[I am particularly grateful for this installment of Curmie’s Conjectures because it assuages my guilt a bit. As longtime readers here know, I occasionally promise posts that never show up, or do, but so long after the promise that it’s embarrassing. Years ago, I promised a post defining and examining all journalistic tricks that I classify as “fake news,” and I use the term broadly to include misleading headlines, burying the lede, omitting key information that undermines the writer’s agenda, poisoning the well and other techniques. I started the thing, got frustrated and overwhelmed, and never finished it. Here Curmie doesn’t exactly present what I intended, but he touches on much of it, and as an extra bonus, he wrote it more elegantly than I would have (as usual). JM.]
I doubt that this blog has ever before turned to punk rock for ethics advice, but Boomtown Rats composer/frontman (and Live Aid impresario) Bob Geldof had it right in a song that’s probably more relevant today than it was 40+ years ago: “Don’t Believe What You Read.” Well, not uncritically, at least. At our host’s suggestion, I’m about to enter the fraught territory of trying to decide if a story published by an obviously biased media outlet might, this time, just be accurate.
It’s difficult of late to find a news source that only leans in one direction or the other, rather than proselytizing for the cause. The news networks and major newspapers have carved out their market shares based on feeding their viewers and readers what they want to be fed. Whether the advent of Fox News was a trigger or a reaction is up to individual interpretation, but there’s absolutely no doubt that we’re now in an era in which news as reported is determined largely by editorial positioning, rather than the other way around.
It’s inevitable that, to steal a line from another of my favorite musicians, Paul Simon, “a man hears what he wants to hear, and disregards the rest.” Fighting our own biases is not made easier by the knowledge that learning from experience and confirmation bias are opposite sides of the same coin. If a story appears only on Fox News and the Drudge Report, or only on AlterNet and MSNBC, there’s an excellent chance that the indignation is feigned and the actual events are something of a nothing-burger.
But “usually” is not “always.” As a society, we’re well aware of the tale of the boy who cried wolf and the miraculous last-second basket from well past half-court. We nod and smile at the suggestion that stopped clocks are right twice a day.
There are a few variations on the theme of biased journalism. The first, editorializing in a news story, is generally the easiest to spot and the easiest to counteract. If there are words like “communist,” “Nazi,” or “un-American” to describe a US politician, or phrases like “unborn children” or “reproductive freedom,” you’re reading an editorial, whether the article identifies itself as such or not. There’s nothing wrong with editorializing; it’s what I do here and on my own blog, after all. But I also try to not to suggest that what I write is completely objective.
Another variation on the theme, and a personal pet peeve, is what I call a Schrödinger sentence, because it is simultaneously true and not true. For example, I’ve seen a whole lot of conservative commentary on this blog that “progressives want X.” (“X” in this context, of course, has nothing to do with what Elon Musk renamed Twitter.) True, there are enough progressives who advocate for X to make the noun plural, but I’m a progressive, and I’m a big fan of not-X. The implication—or, rather, one possible implication—of the sentence is that in order to be a progressive, one must want X. That is no more true than suggesting that all conservatives believe in Jewish space lasers. And I really resent being told what I believe.
by Curmie
[It turns out that Curmie and I were writing about the same issue more or less simultaneously. Shortly after I posted “The Great Stupid: Child Abuse Edition,” Curmie sent me this installment of his periodic column, expressing concern that it was redundant. It’s not, and I’m putting up Curmie’s take for several reasons: 1) I love his writing and style; 2) he approaches the incident from some different angles than I did; 3) I believe this incident is an important one that involves many critical ethics problems: the public school disaster; hypersensitivity to racial offense, real or imagined; the indoctrination and intimidation of children; and more. The plight of J.A. is not just the metaphorical canary dying in the mine, but strong evidence of just how badly our society’s air is poisoned. It is worth more than one post. Finally, I especially want this essay read after Curmie commented recently that he disagreed with my analysis on “countless” topics. In fact, I find that his values and ethical navigation equipment are closely aligned with mine. If they weren’t, he couldn’t have dissected this story so expertly.—JM.]
***
A few days ago, I commented on Jack’s post on the high school principal in Sherman, Texas who declared that the musical Oklahoma! contains “mature adult themes, profane language, and sexual content” “would come in third place in a battle of wits with a sack of hair and an anvil.”
I hereby retract that characterization. It appears that Sherman Principal Scott Johnson was merely a good soldier, enforcing the dictates of a superintendent and school board that can’t decide if the Victorian age was a little too permissive. So… Johnson appears capable of giving that anvil a run for its money.
The good news is that the international attention this case received resulted first in a decision to re-instate the original student cast but in a shortened “kids” version of the musical that would have cut the solo from Max Hightower, the trans student at the center of the controversy, and finally—when the students and parents wouldn’t accept that utterly stupid “compromise” or the notion that Oklahoma!, of all plays, ought to be bowdlerized—a return to the original version with the students the director cast.
More to the present point, when compared to Jeff Luna, the principal at Muirland Middle School in La Jolla, California, even the folks who did make the idiotic decisions that led to the kerfuffle would appear to embody all the best attributes of Solomon, Socrates, Confucius, Albert Einstein and Leonardo da Vinci rolled into one. We do sorta know what Ado Annie means when she laments her inability to “say no,” after all.
I was about to say that what Luna did surpasses credulity, but, alas, it does not. There are a lot of adjectives that do apply—”boneheaded,” “irrational,” and “unconstitutional” come to mind—but unfortunately “unbelievable” has no place on the list.
Last month, a Muirland 8th-grader identified as J.A. attended a high school football game, looking like he does in the photo above. That is, he wore eye black, just as he’s seen countless football players (and not a few baseball players) do; I won’t bother you with the literally dozens of photos of players of all races doing so. Now, whether eye black has any direct practicality is a matter for debate. It started as a means of keeping glare out of the eyes. I have no idea whether it actually does that, and even if it does, it doesn’t require the amount used by J.A. But that, of course, is irrelevant.
by Curmie
One of my favorite lines from the late singer/songwriter Warren Zevon is “Just when you thought it was safe to be bored / Trouble waiting to happen.” That lyric came to mind when I happened across an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education titled “Hamline President Goes on the Offensive.”Well, that lyric and one of my most oft-used phrases, “Oh, bloody hell!”.
This rather lengthy article—over 3000 words—deserves to be read in its entirety, even if it involves a registration process for free access to a limited number of articles per month, but I’ll try to hit the highlights here. The author is Mark Berkson, the Chair of the Religion Department at Hamline University. His was for a very long while the only voice, or at least the only audible one, on the Hamline campus to come to the defense of erstwhile adjunct art history professor Erika López Prater as she was being railroaded by the school’s administration on absurd charges of Islamophobia.
You may recall the incident. Jack first wrote about it here; my take came a little later, here. Dr. López Prater was teaching a course in global art history, in which she showed images of a couple of paintings depicting the prophet Muhammad. Recognizing that there are some strains of Islam in which viewing such images is regarded as idolatrous, she made it clear both in the course syllabus and on the day of the lecture in question that students who chose not to look at those particular photos were free not to do so, without penalty.
Ah, but that left too little room for victimhood. So student Aram Wedatalla blithely ignored those warnings and (gasp!) saw those images… or at least she says she did, which is not necessarily the same thing. Wounded to the core by her own sloth and/or recklessness, she then howled to the student newspaper and, urged on by Nur Mood, the Assistant Director of Social Justice Programs and Strategic Relations (also the advisor to the Muslim Student Association, of which Wedatalla was president), to the administration. The banner was then raised high by one David Everett, the Associate Vice President of Inclusive Excellence. (Those folks at Hamline sure do like their pretentious job titles, don’t they?)
Anyway, Everett proclaimed in an email sent to literally everyone at Hamline that López Prater had been “undeniably inconsiderate, disrespectful and Islamophobic.” To be fair, he didn’t identify her by name, but there weren’t a lot of folks teaching global art history. Everett was just getting warmed up. He subsequently co-authored, or at least jointly signed, a statement with university president Fayneese Miller that “respect for the observant Muslim students in that classroom should have superseded academic freedom.” Not at any university worthy of the name, it shouldn’t. Anyway, López Prater was de facto fired, because destroying the careers of scholars for even imaginary offenses has become a blood sport for administrators (and, in public colleges, for politicians).
by Curmie
It would seem that prevarication has supplanted baseball as the national pastime. Name a politician you’d trust to tell you the truth if a lie would be more convenient. I can’t, and if there’s one out there, it sure as hell isn’t one of the frontrunners in the next Presidential election.
My most recent post concerned getting lied to by the post office, and their subsequent bewilderment that I didn’t appreciate their mendacity. It’s not just those with ties to the government, though. Companies feel the need to get in on the act, too. So, here’s Part II of my rant.
We’ve been in our current house a little over 22 years. The garage door opener wasn’t new when we moved in. A few days ago, the chain snapped. So I went to the local Lowe’s, checked out the possibilities, came home and discussed the options with my wife, and ordered a new opener online. So far, so good.
by Curmie
Jack’s posts about his experiences at local CVS, 7-11 and McDonald’s outlets have emboldened me to discuss my own recent dealings with respect to a couple of recent purchases. I’ve experienced two separate incidents over the past few days. What they share is not simply that someone failed to provide a service they were obligated to provide, but that they lied about it and showed literally no remorse for having done so.
So… here’s incident #1; more next time.
Although I’m retired from teaching, my university has a provision that <i>emeritus</i> faculty are entitled to an office if one is available, and one is. Because I’m still doing some academic writing, I’m grateful for the workspace, the use of a computer, access to a printer and scanner, etc. We’re now back in the building we occupied from the time I came here until the summer of 2020, when we were displaced to across campus while renovations and expansions were happening to our “home.” (We were told we had to move out by the end of May 2020 or we couldn’t move back in the fall of 2021; we couldn’t move in at all until August of this year, and the building won’t really be ready for at least another few months. But that’s a rant for another day.)
The problems are two-fold. First, my new office is less than half as big as the one I moved out of three years ago. Second, it was designed by an idiot, or, more likely, a committee of idiots. The desk, made of cheap but heavy material, is far too big for an office of that size. There are permanently mounted cabinets above the desk, but no place for files. I could go on. The biggest annoyance is that the offices on my side of the hallway (the smaller ones, with windows offering a view of the convenience store across the street) got only a single bookcase. I seriously doubt that whoever decided that has ever as much as met a faculty member in the humanities, let alone listened to one.
by Curmie
I had a post about half-written, talking about the fact that SCOTUS justices are nominated and confirmed (or not) primarily for their adherence to certain political principles rather than for their integrity, judgment, legal expertise, or temperament.
‘Twas not ever thus. In my lifetime, five SCOTUS Justices were confirmed by a voice vote and three others received all 100% of the votes. Another seven received at least 80% of the votes. But of the current members of SCOTUS, only Chief Justice Roberts received majority support from Senators of both parties… and that was by a single vote. Justice Thomas, who’s been around the longest, is the only currently-serving member of the Supreme Court to have been confirmed by a Senate controlled by the party not in the White House at the time.
This, I was about to argue, makes the process depressingly predictable: liberals over here, conservatives over there, with Roberts as the closest thing to an unreliable vote for “his side.” I was getting around to talking about the allegations against Justice Alito: did he really do something wrong, or is furor mostly partisan in nature? Answer to both questions: yes.
But then, despite the predictable split in the two Affirmative Action cases, we also see Gorsuch writing a scathing dissent on Arizona v. Navajo Nation, Barrett and Kavanaugh voting with the liberal bloc on Moore v. Harper, and Jack saying pretty much what I would have said about the Alito case. I may want to return to the general outline of my half-written essay at some point in the future… but the timing isn’t right, now.
So let me go off in a different direction and talk about a faculty member dismissed from an elite university for her political statements. The headline on the FIRE article begins “Yale shreds faculty rights to rid itself of professor…” Certainly we’ve seen a fair amount of that kind of fare here on Ethics Alarms. What’s different is what follows in that title: “…who called Trump mentally unstable.” Well, that sure goes against the whole “universities are cesspools of Woke indoctrination” mantra, doesn’t it?
Ethics Alarms 