Michelle Goldberg calls it “plutocratic rot,” yet another instance (didn’t we just finish washing the taste of Paul Manafort out of our mouths?) of “a deep corruption among mostly male elites across parties, and the way the very rich can often purchase impunity for even the most loathsome of crimes.” (Cue The Great Gatsby.) Speaking of which, we “can expect the feds to add child-pornography charges” to Jeffrey Epstein’s sex-trafficking indictment. Great.
As longtime readers know, UD‘s go-to international source of truly madly deeply necrotically fulminating all-male plutocratic putrescence is FIFA, world’s most gangrenous gang; but there’s so much more (can you imagine what underage orgies are like in female-slave-state Saudi Arabia)? “Epstein successfully wielded his nearly incomprehensible money and power to influence the decision at the highest levels,” and the Saudis and the soccer boys are similarly financially incomprehensible.
So now all the bad boys go crying to the wings, Acosta, Dershowitz, Mountbatten-Windsor, Clinton (the title of Christopher Hitchens’ book about Clinton – No One Left to Lie To – turns out to have been premature. Plentymore people to lie to!), etc., etc.
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Keep your mind in hell and do not despair, says St. Silouan, and these are fuckin wise words, okay? OKAY????
… b – b – b – but… how do we live them, UD?
Oh, stop blubbering. It’s different for everyone. I can tell you what works for me, but it might not work for you.
Fifty minutes of brisk aqua jogging per day, immediately followed by v. hot whirlpool and then sauna; obsessively listening to Pavarotti singing A Te, O Cara; careful perusal of The Onion; daily readings from the Gospel of Cioran.
From a link to an article a reader, John, sent me about how fatal violence outside and racist violence inside Italian soccer stadiums mirrors “darker developments in a broader segment of the Italian and indeed the European body politic,” UD was easily able to jump to other similarly appalled analyses of the increasingly unworkable business of putting on a football match in many of the world’s countries (scroll down). Africa, North Africa, South America, the Middle East — ain’t only Europe where the world’s most corruptly run game is also the most violent. Football, “a sport with a deeply tribal nature and a large captive audience full of disenfranchised working-class males, and thus in many ways the perfect arena for the unscrupulous populist and his macho, nativist fantasies,” has an important “function in the rise of global far-right populism.”
Global football thugs are in some intriguing ways the haredim of Europe:
Their potential for violence is … so strong that pacifying them has been a matter of public order.
Punishment is as half-hearted as Israel’s efforts to deal with its mobs of violent tribal male ultras – the ultra orthodox – and for the same reason. Violent-Corrupt-People-Is-Us. Absurd moves like making players compete in empty stadiums (there are more and more of these Beckettian theatrics across the globe), allowing only one team’s fans to attend (The Sound of One Side Clapping), or identifying ringleaders and denying them admission to games (guaranteeing violence on the streets — exactly where a nation’s women and children are cowering in an effort to get out of range of fascist gangs) accomplish nothing. Leaders like Viktor Urban want it that way. Even as tribes become smaller and smaller (“[S]tadium attendances [in Italy] plummet every year as people decide it’s better to watch games on TV rather than amid the violence and hatred of the terraces. In Serie A, stadiums are less than 60% full…”) their political and social violence, often stoked by governments, intensifies.
[T]he problem when a multibillion-dollar entity is tasked with regulating itself [is that] there’s little motivation for engaging in any meaningful action; all that matters is damage control. Executives are tasked with quelling negative PR while keeping the business running profitably and effectively. We saw the same problem with the international governing body of soccer, FIFA, whose anti-bribery expert resigned in frustration two years before a massive corruption scandal sparked a wave of executive arrests.
… The swift dismissal of Kareem Hunt doesn’t look quite so swift when you realize his misconduct had been an open secret for close to ten months.
… sets itself up as a moral arbiter of Greek soccer fans.
On this side, ladies and gentlemen, FIFA – arguably the world’s current most corrupt high-profile organization – and on the other side, waves of psychotic Athenians. Will FIFA expel the Greeks for their years of gunplay and bloodshed and bombings?
Now this is impressive. This UD must share with you; and in addition UD must bow to the Greek people.
To be so supremely gangrenous, so suppuratingly pus-ridden, as to face expulsion from arguably the world’s most infected body (FIFA!!); to be so persistently, so top-to-bottom violent — from gun-wielding team owners who rush the pitch and threaten referees, to alcoholic fascists in the stands who beat the shit out of everyone — is truly to have accomplished something grand.
But of course the expulsion will never happen. Did Hitler expel Goering from the party because he was too anti-semitic? In world football, you can’t be too corrupt or too violent.
Tunisia’s sports minister coins the term “stadium terrorism.” The FIFA representative reviewing the situation in Greece (he’ll be lucky to get out of Athens alive) calls it “unbearable that people are scared to go to a stadium.”
You never see women or children at many world soccer games. Before (on transportation to the games), during (at the games), and after (on the streets; in the pubs), the host city is on fire with drunk, rioting, gun-bearing men. Despite the measures governments have introduced (games played in empty stadia; tv blackouts; massive police presence and massive arrests; physical separation of opposing fans; targeting of known thugs and gangs) everything’s getting worse and worse and unbearably worse.
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Only it isn’t unbearable. Scores die after games, and cities are torched; armed black-shirted gangs rush the pitch during the game and go after referees. So what. FIFA – a virtually all-male, ridiculously corrupt organization – will do nothing about the latest atrocity in Greece. It’s bearable. It’s all bearable. It’s all boys incorrigibly and escalatingly being boys.
And when it gets even worse – when players and referees are beaten to death during games televised all over the world – FIFA will still do nothing. Unfathomable amounts of money are being made, a lot of it by that organization’s corrupt officials. No one’s going to mess with a good thing.
No one cares that people routinely get beaten and killed in and around world soccer matches.
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The whole thing: FIFA, club owners, fascist fans — it’s just pigs happy in the swill, and no one wants to interrupt the fun because if you do these people will blow your fucking head off.
But Walter’s so crazy that eventually his mad pistol-whipping ways get him in a little trouble, just like his real-life equivalent, eminent Russian statesman Ivan Savvidis. Ivan doesn’t go anywhere without serious personal weaponry and several heavily armed guards, and when a Greek team he owns ran into some trouble with a referee yesterday, he stormed the field along with his armed guard and with his hand on his gun and informed the referee “You’re over.”
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What a pretty picture. Look at this (scroll down): Proud fascist enforcers, all of them dressed in black, swagger fully weaponized onto the field of play to kill the referee. It takes you back.
And forward. Nihilist kitsch again becomes the way of the world. You can see its most naked return on the fields of FIFA.
… FIFA’s association with corrupt behavior now runs so deep that [one observer suggests] the 113-year-old Fédération Internationale de Football Association should consider a name change.
“Why not? … They need to get bright thinkers to repackage the whole thing. There’s just too much baggage to carry. It’s just an absolute mass of information about corruption wherever you look. The word FIFA globally has got just the worst image in the world: If you are trying to sell the FIFA brand, if anything those four letters stand for absolute total corruption and it’s so unattractive.”
UD says go completely the other way: Transparency. Embrace who you are. Become who you are.
Jose Maria Marin, the 85-year-old former president of the Brazilian football federation, is out on bail during the [FIFA] trial and is living under house arrest at his $3.5 million apartment in Manhattan’s Trump Tower.
Just read through this update on FIFA
And I’m sure you will want to shout vifa!
Its governing body
Can be a bit naughty.
It’s the moral equiv. of a queef (ugh).
It was perhaps inevitable, in the intellectual life of our nation, that when one university rose above all others to express the essence of higher learning for so many of our citizens, it would happen on a basketball court among the scholar/athletes of the University of Alabama.
Their triumph was so intense that my own paltry rhetoric fails me. I will defer to one of countless chroniclers who, this morning, are celebrating this great academic institution.
A SPORTING EVENT FOR THE AGES: ALABAMA FIGHTS BACK AGAINST MINNESOTA WITH THREE PLAYERS
… In a match-up that was primarily seen on Facebook live, the 25th ranked Alabama basketball team played in one of the most incredible sporting events I’ve ever watched against the 14th ranked Minnesota Gophers… [After a huge on-court brawl,] the entire bench got ejected from the game, leaving Alabama with five eligible players for the rest of the game… That’s when the game truly started getting incredible.
A couple minutes later, [an Alabama player] picked up his fifth foul, leaving Alabama with only four eligible players for the final 11 minutes of the game. Less than a minute later, freshman John Petty landed awkwardly and needed assistance getting to the bench with an ankle injury. Alabama was down to THREE eligible players [who] fought back valiantly to make this a truly incredible game.
… I’m usually not glued to my screen during an early season college basketball match-up but this was a sporting event that I’ll never forget. Anyone who wasn’t lucky enough to watch this live should definitely check out the highlights.
The only thing UD can think of that would make this set of events more valiant and incredible would be if someone in the arena – or, hell, on the team – had a gun, and there had been an incredible and valiant massacre. It will happen. But we will have to wait. Meanwhile, anyone who has been watching higher education in America knows that the University of Alabama, in all its splendor, would be the place where this incredible breakthrough in the life of the mind would occur.
Plus: If you want to keep up with the global bloodbath, a suggestion: Type FOOTBALL BRAWL into Google News.
If you’re interested in how the organizations that run all of these teams are completely corrupt, type FIFA corruption for international; for national, read University Diaries.
UD could care less about sports of any kind (exception: competitive Scrabble), but she’ll say this: Her need to read about athletics for this blog at least led her to Deadspin. Who knew some of the best writing in America would come out of this funny, subversive, knowledgeable, source? Deadspin has taught UD much of what she’s learned about the lingo and lunacy of the jock shop, and along the way it has delighted her not only with its literacy, but also its amused embrace of the ultra-loucheness of this thing that has taken over – of all places – our universities.
Nobody notices or cares when professional soccer, football, and basketball are disgusting. We only pay attention at the very grossest margins, as when an NFL player tortures his dog to death. Moral monstrosity on the level of mere money registers not at all, as in the failure of the FIFA story, or the related story about the apparently universal tax evasion of international soccer players, to get anywhere at all. Who cares. Put a bunch of guys together with a lot of money and surprise.
But the university. Ah the university. Little streamers of seriousness continue to flutter ‘pon it. Wilted garlands of gravitas shake aloft their dying buds. The Sacred Groves of Academe! When a university reveals its true rot, as in the moral desert of (in effect) all-male Baylor, the extremity of response – A new woman president! Who, asked why she took the job, says “I love Jesus.” – tells you all you need to know about the effort required to keep stray wisps of legitimacy flying.
So people do indeed tend to notice the truly debauched campus. Whorehouse-for-teens-and-their-parents proprietor University of Louisville is the higher ed scuzz-meme of the moment, cited in a kind of shorthand in many articles about other athletic scandals; indeed, it’s mentioned in a wonderful Deadspin piece about Hugh Freeze, a guy who has a lot in common with the miscreants at Baylor, being both a superduper Christian and a (reportedly) twisted piece of shit.
Ole Miss, ex-haunt of football coach Freeze [background here], has many advantages when it comes to ultra-louche supremacy on a university campus, the most important of which is its location in the most corrupt, most benighted, state in America. Nobody much cares what goes on down there, and this includes the people who run the state. So the tired business of boosters giving impermissible benefits to players, and similar venerable forms of corruption, continue to thrive at Ole Miss, which means the NCAA’s always sniffing around. The general air of loucheness in a steamy south that time forgot, plus William Faulkner having lived in Oxford, means that people often reach in the direction of his novels (with special attention to the Snopes family) to, er, contextualize some of the goings on, as Deadspin notes in a wonderful summarizing paragraph:
The revelation of Freeze’s possible sex-having brought its fair share of confused hilarity [to observers], but did little to outline the future of either of Ole Miss’s ongoing, convoluted [legal] cases with [former former Ole Miss coach suing Freeze for defamation Houston] Nutt and the NCAA. There were (are) still a number of questions to be answered — namely, how Nutt and [his lawyer Thomas] Mars knew exactly where to look [for dirt on Freeze]; whether anybody comparing this case to a William Faulkner novel actually read a William Faulkner novel; how long Freeze was possibly using school technology and school funds to maybe fuck; how far back into his career Freeze’s general misbehavior extends; whether Freeze was even the one doing the fucking; whether Ole Miss know about Freeze’s extracurriculars beforehand; and how Nutt’s legal team will use this information moving forward.
That one about whether Freeze was actually doing the fucking: There’s a theory that the calls on his phone to an escort service might have been on behalf of a recruit…
UD does think the Faulkner comparison works, since he wrote convoluted stories like this one, about vague imperishable grudges among unsavory people, like these people.
The phrase about how far back Freeze’s misbehavior extends: The Deadspin piece includes some way-twisted testimony about the way Freeze behaved when he coached a women’s high school basketball team.
One woman [says that] Freeze forced her to change shirts in his office, claiming her Grateful Dead shirt violated the school dress code because it “represented drugs.” At the time, [she] was in eighth grade; according to her, Freeze did not leave the room while she changed.
“Coach Freeze pulled me in his office and told me that my shirt represented drugs. … I said, ‘I’ll go change in the bathroom,’ and when I said that he said, ‘No, you’re going to change in here so I get the (Grateful Dead) shirt and you can’t have it back.’
He didn’t do anything sexual. But I stood in the corner and faced the wall when I did it and I changed out of my shirt. No privacy.”
Another student, remaining anonymous, claimed Freeze was “hyper attentive” when it came to making sure the girls’s skirts adhered to school policy. She also claimed that on one occasion, when she was late getting back to class from her lunch period, Freeze obliged her request to be paddled rather than sit in detention; instead of fetching a female administrator to complete or at least proctor the punishment, Freeze paddled her himself.
“(Freeze) did some bizarre warm-up taunt before actually making contact,” said the woman, who spoke to USA TODAY Sports on the condition of anonymity because she said she fears reprisal. “I was humiliated that he didn’t have a female in the room. I don’t know if the acts were intentionally sexual or if he was really that oblivious to the inherently sexual nature of his approach to discipline.”
There were opportunities to stop [Trump], early on. Possessed of a crack team of researchers, the Republican Party did not turn its resources on investigating this man’s record of falsehoods and business failures. When struggling families worry that their children’s American dream will be obscured behind a mountain of college debt, even a passing reference to the scam that is Trump University would surely have resonated many months ago.
Yes, now that people are truly desperate, they can’t say enough about Trump University. (Here at University Diaries, we’ve been writing about that peculiar institution since 2010. ) People want that school to be the key to the scummy scammy Trump gestalt and therefore – once this resonates – a significant part of his downfall. Here’s why this is false reasoning.
For more than a decade a firestorm of fraud involving hundreds of taxpayer-supported for-profit universities has raged freely throughout this country. Since very few Americans seem to care, and since there’s huge money for politicians from the for-profit school industry (an industry in which Goldman Sachs has a huge investment), almost nothing of significance has been done to regulate or shut down the scam. Even the fact that accreditors for these schools are almost all former executives at the same schools gets a rise out of exactly no one.
This is an incomparably more destructive scandal than Trump’s little academic foray into sucker-scamming, but no one cares. If Americans are content to let the rigged, filthy, for-profit schools continue to bankrupt them and make Goldman rich, what makes you think they’re any less content to ignore Trump University? In a vast landscape of corruption, Americans maybe have time to notice, say, massive athletics organizations like the NFL (America’s FIFA); but even there they don’t care. They’re spectators, not social activists. There are games to be watched.
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All institutions, starting with all government institutions, are corrupt as far as many of Trump’s supporters are concerned (this is an attitude now known to all as Tea Party Nihilism), and at least Trump is defiantly, amusingly, attractively, even flamboyantly, corrupt. At least he is, in the words of Florida’s current governor, “fun to watch.”
We can say of Trump what John Ashbery said of avant-garde art:
Most reckless things are beautiful in some way, and recklessness is what makes experimental art beautiful, just as religions are beautiful because of the strong possibilities that they are founded on nothing… [Take Pollock, and Rothko:] Does their work amount to anything? There’s a possibility that it doesn’t although I believe in it and want it to exist.
Trump gestures recklessly toward nihilism (“founded on nothing”) or toward a New Wave, or toward both. Millions of Americans find this beautiful.
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Like Chauncy Gardner, Americans like to watch. In particular, we like to watch us being us. You don’t get any more us than Donald Trump. Americans instinctively recognize that he is radically of their moment, radically of their time, and they feel comfortable with him as a candidate. Little Trump U will have no effect on that.
