When the frats kill – or destroy – a particularly young one, I post this variant I wrote of Randall Jarrell’s The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner.

From my mother’s sleep I fell into State U.
And I drank in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Miles from home, loosed from my parents’ love,
I woke to black vodka and the nightmare brothers.
When I died I was 0.486 booze.

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Don’t read how they destroyed him if you lack a strong stomach.

As with extreme gun enthusiasts, frat killers consider the death or almost-death of teenagers to be a perfectly okay price to pay for their pleasure.

Their obnoxious interruption of a debate on campus warranted immediate condemnation. But these are timid times. At least she came out with it.

“If you take away those two shootings, which of course are major, then it [is so far] vastly improved over 2021,” said resident-activist Matthew Gultanoff…

Police chased and caught a man who they said threw a 9 mm handgun into some shrubbery. The man told police he fired in self-defense. Video surveillance seemed to support his claim and Derrick Antonio Mitchell, 19, was charged only with three weapons violations, carrying a concealed firearm, tampering with physical evidence and possession of an altered firearm.

The “only” is priceless. Miami Beach has declared martial law. I mean a state of emergency/curfew.

UD certainly expects college football players to fuck themselves up during spring break. This usually involves alcohol, and certainly does not feature hyper-clean-cut West Pointers. Nah.

And yet there they are, stretched out on the palm-edged front yard of their rental house, having fentanyled themselves almost to death. Policemen administer Narcan to their fine ripped torsos, while other attractive young people stand around being upset and useless.

During a feminist theory class in my sophomore year, I said that non-Indian women can criticize suttee, a historical practice of ritual suicide by Indian widows. This idea seems acceptable for academic discussion, but to many of my classmates, it was objectionable.

The room felt tense. I saw people shift in their seats. Someone got angry, and then everyone seemed to get angry. After the professor tried to move the discussion along, I still felt uneasy. I became a little less likely to speak up again and a little less trusting of my own thoughts.

I was shaken, but also determined to not silence myself. Still, the disdain of my fellow students stuck with me. I was a welcomed member of the group — and then I wasn’t.

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Try saying we can criticize people who cut off Dawoodi Bohra Indian girls’ genitals! That’ll make your UVa classmates even angrier.

Have I ever. UD has been circling this thing for a few days, waiting for more information to be released before she blogs about it.

The much-laureled U Penn student’s last name – Fierceton? – was the first thing that seemed strange to ol’ UD. No one else has it – the only mention of it I can find appears in a translation of the ancient Chinese Classic of Mountains and Seas – a book of myths whose translator puts the name “Fierceton River” on an obscure location.

Mackenzie’s last name used to be Morrison. Here her mother, Dr. Carrie Morrison, talks about breast density. Mackenzie dropped Morrison and added the dramatic Fierceton, which is fine, even fantastic, if you want to mark your separation from your roots, your own free fierce identity or whatever.

Fierceton’s roots are what you’d expect for someone born to a prominent physician: Private schools, horseback riding, cool vacations. But she has garnered all sorts of university goodies (scholarships, awards) reserved for underprivileged people, her argument being that her mother abused her, and in her teens she ended up in foster care. So she’s arguing that this means her background is foster care/abuse/underprivilege. Which a certain chapter of it is, but qua formulated humanoid she’s much more privileged than not, which puts into question the legitimacy of her underprivilege-based goodies.

Further – it certainly matters whether her claims of maternal abuse, amounting to broken bones, blocked breathing passages, and other nightmares, are true. All of the charges against her mother were dropped, and it looks as though hospital records list injuries much less nightmarish than the ones Fierceton claims.

*******************

One thing Fierceton has going against her is America’s really rampant culture of self-aggrandizing fakes, like UD‘s erstwhile colleague, Jessica Krug, an upper middle class Jewish woman from Kansas City who got all sorts of academic goodies by pretending to be a poor black person. Thanks to scads of identity scammers, we all have a vivid category into which to place Fierceton, whether this placement is in fact fair. Institutions are also hypersensitive – given this cultural background of scamming – to the possibility of being exploited by fakers, and in the case of Fierceton they have indeed started to come down hard on her. She is suing in response, so we will eventually know where at least some of the facts lie.

… but the ignominy lingers on. The University of Michigan just sits there refusing to acknowledge/apologize for its craven abandonment of Bright Sheng. The faculty is getting restless; seven hundred professors have written to the school to say what the fuck.

Of course the school had to suspend its grotesque “investigation” of an eminent composer who made the mistake of showing his class Olivier’s Othello; but now there’s the matter of setting things to rights and getting Sheng back in the classroom.

Sixty music department students have also written the school asking for their professor, and their school’s reputation, back.

But the school is still scared shitless, and must be pondering the truth commission one segment of the faculty proposes, where Sheng would publicly admit his centuries of injustice and beg forgiveness.

… where Big Murderers torture pledges and then make them drink themselves to death has been cut back a bit with the closure of one of the fraternities at BGSU; but never fear! Your eighteen year old has many other campus houses from which to choose his agonizing demise, so look forward to a life haunted by guilt and rage for simply having sent your son off to college. Good on Bowling Green for continuing to hold high the banner of the American Abattoir.

And – hint! – you haven’t drawn upon your ever-reliable fraternity system in a long time. Make that your next move.

***************

And it looks as though USC’s long, happy relationship with the now-suspended Mark Ridley-Thomas will shine a bright light on the institution for some time to come.

Sing a song of dead men,
Stomachs full of rye.
Four and twenty freshmen
Baked in a Phi.

When the Phi’s indicted
The killers start to sing:
College life would be so dull
Without some poisoning.

Former Secretary of Education Arne Duncan asks whether the latest dead eighteen year old – this one at the University of Kentucky, a grody football school whose frat system is exactly as disgusting as you’d imagine – might finally shame the nation into shutting down its collegiate slaughterhouses.

************

UD thanks Mondo for telling her about the latest.

Because America loves its fraternities, especially in l’Age de Trump, where it’s all about bullies and booze and Berettas. Identifying a loser and making him drink whiskey til he dies in agony is as American as apple pie, a rite of passage into manhood or into the beyond. When it gets so bad that 2,000 students rally against the Greek system, schools okay right well yeah we’ll look into the situation… Slap a wrist here and there for sure, and if much of the nationwide system features sophisticated drug operations protected by firearms, rampant rape, and the singling out of losers – people desperate to belong to our club – for death by poisoning, so be it. These boys represent the best of America.

**********

Now down south they got that famous frat/football nexus, and that’s a hell of a thing to watch in action.

… a fraternity house. But you do have to bother to hide it.

[Maxwell] Berry graduated in May from Ohio Wesleyan University, where he received a values in action award from the Greek life community for being a “perfect role model” and for leading “the fight to dismantle fraternity stereotypes.”

BWAHAHAHAH

But you owe it to yourself to put today’s national news about Washington State University in context. With its $120 million athletics debt, its beloved twisted (ex-)football coach, its strikingly violent athletes, its indifference to actual education, and a whole lot of other shit, WSU is arguably at the moment America’s most scandalous campus.

Add ineptitude/corruption in local law enforcement, and you get the scandal everyone’s covering today – not merely another death by alcohol/neglect of some poor teenager just trying to join a fraternity, but the fact that it took almost two years for criminal charges to be filed.

Which means the serious – amply justified – charge of hazing had to be dropped.

The kid’s family is not happy, and you also owe it to yourself to read their full statement, which reviews the long vicious history of this fraternity.

The family makes the reasonable suggestion that the butcher’s bill for each fraternity should be public knowledge before yet another family lets its clueless nineteen year old enter these abattoirs.