Catskill High School and the Great American Insanity Machine

During rehearsals for a school performance, Catskill High schoolers were talking. Stop it or I’ll tape your mouths, Choral Director Michelle Storrs-Ryan said, brandishing some scotch tape. One student briefly taped her own mouth while still talking. Everyone had a laugh.

Then someone, it seems, registered a complaint.

Thrusting Catskill High into the merciless jaws of America’s Insanity Machine. Where the watchwords are “zero tolerance,” and “cover your ass” — and common sense is banished. Often such cases have some political context. But not even that is present here. It’s hard to fathom what anyone could get their knickers in a twist about.

Yet The Great Scotch Tape Abomination has received multiple days’ coverage in the Albany newspaper. School Superintendent Dan Wilson — rather than telling the complainant “Get a life” — declared (in the name of “safety” and “protecting students”) an “ongoing investigation,” and that “there is a process that must be followed.”

Must be.

Storrs-Ryan, apparently well beloved by the school community, has meantime been suspended. So has the principal, Junait Shah . . . because he should have done . . . what?

There’s been a huge backlash against these suspensions, with protest marches, class boycotts, and calls for Wilson’s ouster.

Talk about tempests in teacups. But maybe I’m overblowing it myself, and this is merely a case of a single asshole (Wilson).

Meanwhile I’m surprised there haven’t been demands to change the school’s (and town’s) name — I mean, cats kill?

But the kind of zero tolerance insanity seen there has taken hold in many aspects of American life. Look at so many folks totally demonizing President Biden. I criticize him plenty myself but, people, have some perspective please. I recall conservative satirist P. J. O’Rourke in 2016 saying Hillary Clinton “is wrong about everything — but wrong within normal parameters.” Of course alluding to the alternative. That dichotomy obtains too in our 2024 choice.

Part of why so many are so down on Biden (mindful of his age) is Kamala Harris. And why, exactly, is she so unpopular? Being both female and nonwhite is a factor. But in today’s foul American mood, there seems to be no way any actual political figure could inspire general approval. Meantime I remember a 2019 David Brooks column rhapsodizing so about Harris’s great attributes that I thought he’d fallen in love.

At least Harris has done nothing like paying off a porn star to hush up adulterous sex — or stealing classified documents — or trying to overthrow the government.

So at least there’s one person in America who’s immune from the zero tolerance madness. Having said he could even shoot someone and lose no votes.

Speaking of that guy, and immunity — and shooting someone — our august Supreme Court has done him a massive favor by keeping his insurrection trial on hold while it spends months judiciously considering the preposterous claim of presidential immunity from prosecution for any crime. During lower court arguments, one of his attorneys, when asked if that included ordering a political foe killed, answered yes. (The immunity claim was there laughed out of court).

By the way, presiding over his stolen document trials is Judge Aileen Cannon — whom he appointed to the bench. How does she not recuse herself??*

For that flouting of judicial ethics I have zero tolerance.

* In 1973, being sued for libel, I came before a local judge (Arnold Proskin) who’d merely been politically active on the same side as me. That alone made him instantly recuse himself.