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.

The United States of America fraternity system.

This tweeter expresses surprise (smh: shake my head) that one of America’s most violent campuses – Virginia State University – features violence. It was homecoming; there was a hiphop concert; the evening featured gunfire, injury, and a bunch of fights.

… and a Lubbock insurance blogger.

[TT]:

With the Las Vegas shooting happening so far away from here, it’s easy to separate ourselves from the idea that [a nineteen year old Texas Tech freshman – Hollis Daniels – could be a cold-blooded murderer].

[IB]:

The FBI recently released 2016 data for crime in the United States. Lubbock was ranked as the 2nd most dangerous city in Texas with 825.4 violent crimes reported per 100,000 residents.

[TT]:

It feels like our little West Texas world has been darkened by the threat of a shooting.

[IB]:

[T]he violent crime rate in Lubbock is 88% higher than the average across Texas.

[TT]:

[A]s Red Raiders, we are closer than ever and will continue to support each other.

That’s the spirit of Tech and everyone associated with this university, and that will never fade away.

[UD]:

Everyone?

There are a couple of things you need to know if you’re going to survive a culture where huge numbers of people – some as young as nineteen, a rather volatile age – carry and, at the drop of a hat, shoot, guns.

1. If you are loving parents who worry that your drug-addled, illegal-gun-toting nineteen year old is becoming suicidal, do not call the university he attends and ask for a welfare check. Things could get dicey, and he could pull out his gun and shoot off the head of one of the people checking on him. Then you get to spend the rest of your life and all the money you have trying to keep your pothead kid from graduating to the harder stuff (“An anesthetic such as sodium thiopental or pentobarbital is used to induce unconsciousness, pancuronium bromide [Pavulon] to cause muscle paralysis and respiratory arrest, and potassium chloride to stop the heart.”) In order to avoid this outcome, call the local SWAT team, not the campus cops. SWAT teams are better at approaching babies with berettas.

2. This is directed to university staff: As the Scientologists put it, Go Clear. Shake your head of cobwebs and understand with piercing precision where you are and what’s going on. Situational Awareness is another way of putting this.

Let’s start with where you are. You are in the state of Texas, where people start sucking glock about the same time they start sucking teat. Guns are in the DNA. They are in the bloodstream. Concepts like “minimum age,” “legal,” and “illegal” are quaint nothings. For your own protection, assume that everyone, as soon as they can walk on their own, carries. Under no circumstances assume that the skinny, well-dressed, tow-headed little freshman from a prominent family in Seguin who is standing just to your right while you type up his report does not carry.

Unless you want to die, you will have to adopt a new attitude toward college freshmen at NRA Blue Ribbon schools like Texas Tech. You will have to deal with them as the cold-blooded killers that some of them are. Protecting yourself against the freshman class of Texas Tech University is a matter of life and death. That’s the new reality of legal and illegal, infant, baby, toddler, pre-teen, and teen (“Snap, Crackle, Pop Pop Pop Pop Pop Pop Pop Pop!!”), campus carry.

And a word to Texas Tech professors: …. : ….

Ah, forget it.

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 .495 booze.

Sure.

I mean … I guess by Texas gunny standards
a nineteen year old university freshman who
– left alone with a random policeman –
takes out his weapon and shoots the man’s
head off — and before running away
coldly removes the body cam from the
corpse he just created — is absolutely
normal.

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

He really told that guy, huh?

Don’t mess with Texas.

Member of the freshman class,
Texas Tech. Smiling cop-killer.

Don’t mess with our young ‘uns!

They’ve got guns and some of them will
blow your head off and lock down the campus.

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

Time to dust off Amazing Grace one more time.

That song is getting a real workout.

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

And it’s true what they say! More guns really do make us safer!

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

Cut the little one some slack.

According to the warrant, [the shooter] told … officers that “he was the one that shot their friend.” He also told officers he “f***** up” and he “did something illogical.”

Texas Tech does offer logic, but the wee lad with the gun hadn’t had a chance to take it yet. Maybe next semester.

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

Great timing, by the way. Yesterday, Texas Tech’s president gave a big ol’ speech on how great the school’s doing, but it can do even better! Today one of its new admits kills a campus policeman in cold blood. Talk about stealing someone’s thunder.

Killing-field fraternities, like massive numbers of big guns in the hands of people like Stephen Paddock, are simply part of the wonderful world of many American males, and nobody gets to mess with frats or guns.

Mr. Horras, quoted in this post’s headline, is charged with defending frats in the wake of yet more torture and slaughter, but, as Caitlin Flanagan notes, he’d do a better job if he, like, knew anything about what he was defending.

Yet why bother checking the narrative – straight out of the Marquis de Sade – of Tim Piazza’s death, when Horras knows that no one will ever do anything about sadistic, homicidal, fraternities in American universities? It’s like asking how many ten minute long massacres of scores of people the country can tolerate before it enacts gun restrictions. Answer: There is no upper limit.

So let us now imagine all the forces arrayed against 19-year-old Tim Piazza as he gets dressed in his jacket and tie, preparing to go to his new chapter house and accept the bid the brothers have offered him.

He is up against a university [the drenched-in-shame Penn State] that has allowed hazing to go on for decades; a fraternity chapter that has hazed pledge classes at least twice in the previous 12 months; a set of rules that so harshly punishes hazing that the brothers will think it better to take a chance with his life than to face the consequences of having made him get drunk; and a “checking system” provided by a security firm that is, in many regards, a sham. He thinks he is going to join a club that his college endorses, and that is true. But it is also true that he is setting off to get jumped by a gang, and he won’t survive.

… who, when UL president, allegedly speculated away up to $100 million of school money. He will be sued; he will have to spend the rest of his life paying lawyers to draw out the suits against him until he expires in sunny splendor in one of his Florida mcmansions.

Meanwhile, though, the school ain’t got much money left over for anything but what matters most to it – football – and as a result, it’s no longer able to provide much-needed advertising revenue to the local student newspaper.

The withdrawal of those advertising dollars threatens the existence of the paper, which is why UD just gave it some money. You might consider making a donation as well.

The controversial poem titled “avenidas” can be translated as following: “Avenues / Avenues and flowers / Flowers / Flowers and women / Avenues / Avenues and women / Avenues and flowers and women and an admirer.”

… The Berlin college Alice Salomon Hochschule … painted [the poem] in large lettering on the south facade of the college …

… In April 2016, the general student committee (AStA) wrote an open letter to the rectorate of the college, criticizing the prominent position of the poem.

“A man who looks out into the streets and admires flowers and women,” wrote the students. “This poem not only reproduces a classic patriarchal art tradition in which women are exclusively the beautiful muses that inspire masculine artists to creative acts, it is also reminiscent of sexual harassment, which women are exposed to every day.”

The controversial lines will soon be painted over.

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

One German observer argues that a school which cannot recognize how a lyric poem works “should cease to award a poetry prize.”

UD agrees. You have to think prophylactically. The chance of any future poem chosen for the prize being a species of sexual harassment is very high. Better avoid the problem altogether.

Scott Karsten, who represented the [Wesleyan] fraternity in …negotiations [toward going co-ed], testified this week that the chapter was at a disadvantage in complying because Wesleyan provided only vague descriptions of what it meant by coeducation and never specifically defined its expectations.

[The president of Wesleyan] said he never felt an explicit definition was necessary.

It’s the details that get to you. One of the Penn State students on trial for manslaughter and a bunch of other stuff tried, at one time, to leave the deadly fraternity he had just joined. He was, one assumes, disgusted and humiliated by the hazing he’d undergone.

The president of the fraternity – himself facing the same array of charges in the long squalid death under his care of pledge Timothy Piazza – talks him out of it.

Too bad. The guy shoulda gone with his gut and gotten out. Now Gary DiBileo gets to have his life ruined, along with his frat brothers.

… as well they should, since it’s not every day that a fraternity enters a national forest with a gun and hatchets and starts chopping (shooting?) it down.

The lads continue to try to lie their way out of it, but the evidence against them seems to be overwhelming.

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

A good lawyer, though, might say something like this to the court.

Your honor: This was Chico State. This was a fraternity. These people had firearms and hatchets. Did they use the secrecy of tree cover to murder and behead their pledges? They certainly could have. Others might have. But these young men held back, instead channeling their aggression into the far less anti-social flattening of a forest.