The principal at Robert E. Lee High School, Mark Rowicki, dressed for school on Monday – Halloween – as Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump.
School secretary Stephanie Corbett dressed as Hillary Clinton.
Rowicki’s Trump was straight up: suit, tie, hair, “Make America Great Again” hat.
Corbett’s Clinton was … an interesting take. The costume was an orange jumpsuit with a “Department of Justice” name tag reading “Hillary R. Clinton.”
With a chain around her wrist.
Hardee, har, right? A photo of the two briefly appeared on the school website, though by Wednesday afternoon, when it had come to the attention of local media, it was gone.
A parent had by that point copied the photo and posted it to her own Facebook page, and helped ignite an odd controversy involving cries back and forth about how the school employees should be fired, from one side, and from the other, that the first set of people need to lighten up, because free speech.
First, to whether this is a firing offense: I wouldn’t go quite that far. The costumes, as a whole, were in poor taste. Rowicki, as a straight up Trump, is, on his own merits, in the clear, and honestly, to me, Corbett, as the jailbird Clinton, on her own merits, is in the clear as well.
We are talking about Halloween here, and all manner of celebrity, political and sports types get our attention in terms of costuming choices on this weird little holiday we’ve created for ourselves.
Where the costume choices of the two people in the photograph cross the line is in the assumed coordination that a posed photograph seems to imply.
The effect of one portraying Trump in his glory, the other playing to a grossly exaggerated partisan stereotype of Clinton, is to suggest a joint political statement.
Which we’re all entitled to offer, of course, because, glory be to God, this is the United States of America, land of the free, home of the brave, and the rest.
But then again, this is also the United States of America, where our interest in protecting the rights of people to express their political views is the source of endless back-and-forth recriminations.
It’s not hard to imagine, for instance, that had Rowicki dressed as Trump with a pointy KKK hat, or oversized prosthetic hand attached to a stuffed feline, and Corbett had dressed as a straight up Clinton, it would be the partisan loyalists on the right, not the left, calling for their heads, with those on the left, of course, naturally, on the other side, defending their rights to free speech.
The role that educators play in the lives of young people is a complicating factor here. It hasn’t been that long since the parent of a student at Riverheads High School, about 10 miles down Route 11 from R.E. Lee, raised issue with a classroom lesson in a world geography class on the religion of Islam, to the point of calling Fox News to report on what she assumed was an effort by a teacher to indoctrinate her students into supporting Sharia law.
You might remember that generated controversy, how it led to the county school system shutting down schools just before the scheduled Christmas break, because of death threats being called in from outraged alt-rightists.
It didn’t matter that the lesson was from a respected world geography textbook used locally and nationally for more than two decades. What mattered was that it seemed to one parent that her child was being led astray politically by someone entrusted with the awesome responsibility of providing education, or at the least making sure that the students in her care could pass their SOLs.
The nonsense at Riverheads quickly blew over, relatively quickly, anyway. So, too, this nonsense at R.E. Lee will pass, and it likely does so before the cable-news trucks park themselves outside the high school to report on the latest developments, though that’s only going to be the case because the cable-news trucks have the presidential race to drive ratings, and this sideshow, as enticing as it might be to gem up for the sake of viewers, is way, way, way down the list with the FBI and the Clinton emails, Trump and Russia, Trump and his grabbing, Clinton and WikiLeaks, et cetera, et cetera.
That said, you have some folks proclaiming loudly that the principal and secretary should be sacked. As I said above, I disagree, though not for anything resembling the reasons their partisan backers are offering, most involving free speech.
At least a few of those same partisans using free speech as a defense for Rowicki and Corbett were calling for the heads of various people at Riverheads High School several months ago. More of them would be calling for the heads of Rowicki and Corbett had their costume choices reflected well on Clinton and poorly on Trump.
There’s a fair amount of hypocrisy on both sides of this issue, and honestly, on both sides of our great political divide, to provide a sort of what you could call BS balance.
A conversation on this general topic came up in, of all places, the media shuttle taking a group of fellow sports writers and broadcasters to a UVA football game last month.
One of the writers asked me about how I cover sports and politics, and the differences and similarities to the two.
One obvious similarity, I said, is that both have scoreboards, and thus winners and losers, not just in elections, but in votes in state legislatures, Congress, what have you, on policy issues.
The other, not so obvious, similarity, is in the consumers of sports news and politics news. I talked about how I was asked by a friend a couple of years ago to stop by their pregame tailgate party to chat with a group of fans who wanted to get my take on the big game, and I obliged.
My analysis, it turns out, wasn’t welcome. I thought Virginia Tech would have UVA’s number again that day, and in sharing my thoughts, I unwittingly unleashed a torrent of abhorrent comments from the group of fans with personal criticisms of coach Frank Beamer and several players, most of whom deserved to be in jail for one alleged transgression or another.
I quickly got the sense that me offering my unbiased view of that game had resulted in me becoming a persona non grata at this tailgate party, so I headed off to the stadium, a little wiser.
Politics fans are not all that different from football fans. If you root for UVA athletics, then Virginia Tech, UNC, Duke and the rest are the enemy, subhuman, satan incarnate, worse.
If you root for Democrats, if you root for Republicans, the other side is … well, you get where I’m going with this.
I tell you that story to tell you this: simply offending the other team is not a firing offense.
Somebody in a position of authority needs to have a come to Jesus meeting with Rowicki and Corbett, and soon, because this whole thing is just dumb, and that they couldn’t foresee this blowing up in everybody’s faces, making the school system look bad, making the City of Staunton look bad, doesn’t reflect well on them.
But firing them achieves … what?
Column by Chris Graham
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