Just because we’re violent unregenerate hazers who reportedly take photographs in our house of members holding AR-15s doesn’t mean we should be evicted! Couldn’t be more proud of Chandler Elmore, owner and transporter of multiple big firearms and a football hero recruited from darkest Ark. How dare Wash U drive us from our home.

“It’s obviously not coincidental that this most recent incident [the AR-15 in the frat house] corresponded with the timing of our permanent suspension. Clearly, this is what caused our removal from campus,” [the fraternity’s vice-president commented]. “We understand the school’s frustration regarding the alleged social events. However, we also have frustrations and complaints regarding the way the school handled the initial investigation (which prompted our original suspension) and subsequent investigations that they conducted.”

We didn’t really haze actually in fact when you look closely. These were just some alleged social events. As for the AR-15, none of us knew anything about that, we promise. I mean, haha, except Chandler! The last thing in the world we’re interested in – after getting wasted and torturing pledges – is playing with big scary guns.

Nothing against your AR-15 or anything… We love frats here at Wash U and have just loved hosting you… And – haha – nothing to do with the whole Parkland thing… But… uh… could you leave?

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

And oh honey.

My lord what a morning.

If American universities actually start checking their fraternities for guns! It’ll be San Diego State all over again, baby! (Hm. Not really “all over again.” Guess it never really stopped.). Drug distribution networks around the country will be bereft, and no one will be able to figure out how to haze.

Fraternities are one of America’s very best places to hide weapons and drugs cuz you know – bright clean-cut lads preparing for the next charity carwash… Last place you’d look for AR-15s…

A Yale student admires the new safety features Yale’s frats have voluntarily introduced. No one has forced them to add bottled water to their beverages. They’ve done it themselves, out of an abundance of caution.

I’m just thinking how they might save money/be more efficient here…

I’m seeing female bartender/bouncers rather than separate third-party bouncers and female bartenders. And I’m seeing the same women with novelty lights and water bottles attached to their clothing.

Assuming the use of Cumby’s Spring Water rather than Acqua di Cristallo Tributo a Modigliani, UD is thinking you could really make this work, and save money at the same time.

Most fraternities are repulsive, and most sororities are too. But fraternities hog the limelight cuz they torture and kill people, while sororities lag behind because they don’t have the nerve.

So UD is pleased to see the attention of the world focused, for a change, on the repulsiveness of sororities.

UD had high hopes for the University of Central Florida‘s Alpha Xi something, but that didn’t go anywhere. It was repulsive, but not repulsive enough. GW’s sorority seems to have met the global repulsion standard.

In response to students stocking up on guns and alcohol, the University of North Florida launches a counter-offensive in which it outlaws tailgating.

… it staggers us, it makes the papers, it’s a big deal.

Sometimes, as in the 2016 case of Ohio State football player Kosta Karageorge, it’s not a mystery: Macho, covering up concussions that are starting to produce symptoms, easy access to a gun, a fight with a girlfriend, a history of depression. What one remembers of Karageorge is not the mystery; it is the unbearable pathos of his having placed himself inside of a dumpster before pulling the trigger.

More typically, the suicides of intense and gifted student athletes – like, most recently, Washington State University quarterback Tyler Hilinski – are indeed mysterious. Most exhibit few to no overt signs of serious mental disturbance; up until the moment of death, they seem genial, social, active in their sport. Indeed, intensely active – and this is something Karageorge shares with many more enigmatic student athlete suicides: All of these people seem too intense about training and winning.

“He was really hard on himself,” a Yale friend said of Cameron Dabaghi, who jumped off the Empire State Building eight years ago. “If he lost a tennis match, it wasn’t because of a blister or a bad line call … He believed in fairness, he believed he had to be better.”

“Madison [Holleran] was beautiful, talented, successful — very nearly the epitome of what every young girl is supposed to hope she becomes. But she was also a perfectionist who struggled when she performed poorly,” writes Kate Fagan about a University of Pennsylvania runner who jumped off a parking garage. Another woman, an intensely competitive track star at Wesleyan, set herself on fire on one of the school’s playing fields.

Hilinski took (without telling him) a friend’s AR-15-style rifle – a much more physically destructive form of suicide than the pistol Karageorge used. Certainly any discussion of young, often impulsive, student suicides needs to note the wide availability of profoundly destructive firepower in the United States.

Hilsinki’s predecessor as WSU quarterback tells Yahoo Sports:

“I feel like at times we feel like we can’t express our emotions because we’re in a masculine sport and him being a quarterback, people look up to you as a leader. He felt like he really probably couldn’t talk to anybody. We’ve got to change some of that stuff. We have to have resources and not have a stigma of people going to that.”

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

A former Clemson player:

“Especially a male athlete, and a football player in such a physical rough sport, you never want to be the guy that’s having to admit that something’s wrong. You get that mindset of always pushing through. Nothing’s wrong. I’m good to go.”

An Iowa State University fraternity received a sanction for indecent exposure on Tuesday …

FarmHouse Fraternity, which stands for Faith, Ambition, Reverence, Morality, Honesty, Obedience, Unity, Service and Excellence, was sanctioned, or penalized, for indecent exposure, which according to the university’s code of conduct, is defined as intentionally exposing genitals or other intimate areas in a public place where others are present. The exposure must take place where it is “reasonably likely” to offend, annoy or alarm another person…

… The organization received another sanction in December 2015, also for indecent exposure.

UD‘s been telling you for years about the spectacular synergy between online courses and filthy university sports programs. When it comes to anonymous online courses, it’s so easy to fall in love! It’s so easy to fall in love! It’s so easy (so easy) … yeah yeah yeah its so easy (so easy).. yeah yeah yeah…

… comes from this Penn State student-run blog:

Grand Jury Appalled At University Marketing Of ‘Fun, Party Atmosphere’

For that’s the real story. Other news outlets are content to quote high-voltage words and terms from the “scathing” report on the lurid, protracted, public, death of frat pledge Timothy Piazza: fraternities are a cancer; Penn State showed shocking apathy in regard to large groups of sadists on its campus.

The Penn State student journalists correctly focus on the cold calculation schools like Penn State and West Virginia (read this; it tells you all you need to know about the death of Piazza) make – to market their schools as almost nothing other than places to drink and go to football games.

Quoting from Karen Weiss, a WVU sociologist, here.

[T]he party school is itself a business, and alcohol is part of the business model. Schools lure students to attend their schools with the promise of sports, other leisure activities and overall fun. Part of this fun, whether schools like it or not, is drinking. Thus, even as university officials want to keep students safe, they also need to keep their consumers happy.

Of course, we could adopt, for the frats, the same model we adopt for university football. We could say that every year we will sacrifice the mind and body of a certain number of our players for the sake of everyone’s amusement. We could say that every year we will kill a certain number of our frat pledges for the sadistic pleasure of people who’ve chosen to attend our school in order to enjoy sadistic pleasure. Party schools could try being honest, and just saying Football’s a violent sport; some fraternities house gangs of sadists. We think a few student brain injuries and deaths each year represents a small price to pay to keep our enrollment numbers steady.

The Flumo Center at the University of Wisconsin Madison advertises itself as a great place to hold retreats, but I’m gonna guess there’s a noise issue. And noise ain’t the half of it.

The situation has gotten so bad that the Fluno Center, a nonprofit conference center with guest rooms affiliated with UW-Madison that is located across the street from the bars, has added extra security and patrols, general manager Andy Abelman said.

Abelman said it’s just a matter of time before the fist fights [among hundreds of gun-toting gang members] turn into gunfights. “I think there’s going to be one or multiple fatalities,” he said.

On the up side, a local reporter notes that “[n]obody has been shot in the area this year.” Which is great. Great. Massive brawls, yes; pretty constant gang warfare… And gang members seem to like to “pick fights with drunken students”… But so far everything’s just fine! UW students can breathe easy.

UD applauds Daniel Muehring, a Southern Methodist University student, for posing the crucial question about pledgicide.

What’s the principle of brotherhood behind torturing, humiliating, and killing your brother?

I think the answer to the question is implicit in Muehring’s mistaken use of the term “constructive.” He assumes that the pledgicidal motive is constructive, when of course it is destructive. This is the reason Andrew Lohse correctly identifies ritual behavior in many fraternities with “a biker gang.” Both cults like to hurt themselves (body scarring, alcoholism, reckless driving, gun-play, fights) and to hurt others; both constitute a brotherhood of mutually voyeuristic sadism. For both, women represent fuckable or non-fuckable scags. In time, both typically drift toward organized crime (several frats over the last few years, with San Diego State’s frat system the standout, have been found to be running high-level, heavily-armed, drug distribution businesses).

Hyper-masculine, hyper-ritualized, sadistic, homicidal, secretive, criminal subcultures are unfortunately common in America; what’s shockingly uncommon is their placement and certification in universities.

UD thinks we should spend less time agonizing about the motives and deep meanings of fraternities and more time asking the following question: Why do American universities allow tribes of undergraduates to reduce the universities themselves to the status of pledges, to whipped and whimpering bodies?

For those who dismiss university fraternity life as simply WASP eighteen-year-olds killing WASP seventeen-year-olds, where have you been? Pi Delta Psi beat one of their pledges to death, and they’re an Asian fraternity.

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

And hey – GIRLS — we’re just on the brink! The University of Central Florida’s sadomasochistic sisters, Alpha Xi Delta (‘[s]ome of the pledges said things like they “couldn’t wait to be hazed.”’), have been told to stop trying to kill their pledges through the forced consumption of alcohol.

They’re complaining bitterly about their temporary suspension.

But take heart. Once that’s lifted, it’s only a matter of time before you, just like the boys, will be able to kill someone.

Ohio State, Florida State, Penn State, the University of Michigan, Texas State, and many other schools are either suspending their entire Greek system or suspending many fraternity chapters. The butcher’s bill is getting a wee bit too high, so time to take a breather before resuming the carnage.

As we wind down toward December, this year’s fraternity-death totals are coming in, and they’re – as usual – awesome. Nothing kills eighteen year old American men in search of friendship and a college education faster than a night with the Sweethearts of Sigma Chi, professional sadists who have, over the long storied years of their chapter, perfected the art of murder by forced alcohol intake. Nothing bonds brothers like working together over many hours to make sure someone who’d like to join their club chokes to death on his vomit – unless it’s the scary manslaughter case that follows, a shared experience of adversity that brings together the boys, their adoring parents, and their supportive community, in another one of life’s tests of blood loyalty and the Greek way.

After a century packed with dead pledges, everyone agrees there’s not really anything our country can do about the Geertzian “deep play” of massive insane drunken football staging area universities like Penn State as they stagger from serial child rapist coaches, to post-game riots, to jock-on-jock homicide in the frat houses. The whole wild synergy put Penn State’s last president in jail, but this seems to have been viewed as the ultimate test of the school’s commitment to destroying the life of everyone who studies or works there without regard to status.

There are scads of universities like Penn State. There are scads of universities that make Penn State their role model.

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

Because the blood and the violence in these football/frat cultures are beautiful. Remember what Professor Murray Siskind, a character in White Noise who teaches a seminar on car crashes in the movies, says about these ever more violent collisions. He is talking to one of his colleagues.

“All that blood and glass, that screeching rubber. What about the sheer waste, the sense of a civilization in a state of decay?”

… “I tell [my students] it’s not decay they are seeing but innocence. The movie breaks away from complicated human passions to show us something elemental, something fiery and loud and head-on. It’s a conservative wish-fulfillment, a yearning for naivete. We want to be artless again. We want to reverse the flow of experience, of worldliness and its responsibilities. My students say, ‘Look at the crushed bodies, the severed limbs. What kind of innocence is this?'”

“What do you say to that?”

“I tell them they can’t think of a car crash in a movie as a violent act. It’s a celebration. A reaffirmation of traditional values and beliefs. I connect car crashes to holidays like Thanksgiving and the Fourth. We don’t mourn the dead or rejoice in miracles. These are days of secular optimism, of self-celebration. We will improve, prosper, perfect ourselves. Watch any car crash in any American movie. It is a high-spirited moment like old-fashioned stunt flying, walking on wings. The people who stage these crashes are able to capture a lightheartedness, a carefree enjoyment that car crashes in foreign movies can never approach.”

“Look past the violence.”

“Exactly. Look past the violence, Jack. There is a wonderful brimming spirit of innocence and fun.”

Look past the teenager on life-support to the high-spirited innocent fun of the postmodern American campus, where advances in recording technology and a booming liquor industry promise Americans years of morbid viewing pleasure.

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

For those who consider this a “problem,” which must be “solved,” UD says: Wisconsin. Concentrate the behavior in one state. Designate one American state whose universities may, with impunity, pick off their freshman males.

Why Wisconsin? It is well-located, right in the middle of the country, for ease of access. The state has a long glorious tradition of drunkenness, and is full of jock-centric state university campuses. All universities outside of Wisconsin would shutter their Greek houses, and they would make life so difficult for the remaining illegal off-campus fraternities that the lure of Wisconsin would become irresistible.

… case, as the deleted video of Timothy Piazza being handed 18 drinks in 82 minutes is, with the help of the FBI, undeleted. The tape has yielded a whole hell of a lot more charges against the group that killed him.