It’s free rein; not free reign (the NYT might have fixed it by the time it appears here).

But, while acknowledging that Times columnists appropriately have very free reign in choosing subject matter and commenting on it as they see fit, I am troubled by the same questions raised here by Dr. Rasmussen.

In response to the Tom Perkins Kristallnacht letter (go here for details), a Fortune writer asks us not to judge his investment firm just because it happens to have been founded by the dude.

KPCB has been subject of numerous media brickbats over the past few years (including some from yours truly), for issues related to both its investment strategy and firm management. Depending on your perspective, most of it either has been deserved or most of it has been overkill by a media that likes to tear down those it first builds up. But no matter your general feelings toward KPCB, the firm in no way deserves to be tarred with the spuriousness sentiments of its co-founder. Hopefully it will not be.

Gevalt. Where to start?

KPCB has been subject of numerous [Use “many”; it’s simpler, less pretentious.] media brickbats over the past few years [Drop “over the past few years”; it’s unnecessary.] (including some from yours truly), for issues related to both its investment strategy and firm management. [Drop “both its.”] Depending on your perspective, most of it either has been deserved or most of it [Get rid of the repetition of “most of it.” And by the way, notice how many of the words in this short paragraph are the deadly ‘it’?] has been overkill by a media that likes to tear down those it first builds up. But no matter your general feelings toward KPCB, the firm in no way deserves to be tarred with the spuriousness sentiments [Right – “spuriousness” makes no sense here. And even if he’d used “spurious,” it would designate exactly the opposite of the Perkins letter. There was nothing fake in the writing – it was a model of sincerity.] of its co-founder. Hopefully it will not be. [The final sentence is classic vacuousness, the equivalent of “Only the future will tell.”]

Scathing Online Schoolmarm has had to occasion to caution you about your comparisons, and – given the now-notorious Tom Perkins letter to the Wall Street Journal – she sees she’ll need to do that again.

Before we quote from the Perkins epistle, let’s review some SOS rules for making comparisons by considering two pieces of writing she’s recently cited on this blog.

Example I: Shall I Compare Thee to a Pus Pocket?

The UNC academic fraud scandal is like a pesky staph infection that just won’t go away for university officials — nor should it. As reporters at the Raleigh News and Observer continue to dig, they uncover more and more dirty little secrets. The latest problems swirl around a pus pocket called the Academic Support Program.

SOS grants points here for an admirable extension of the staph comparison (writing like this often, er, amplifies into mixed metaphors); but she immediately takes the points back when she finds herself, at the end of the paragraph, throwing up. In an effort to find an image worthy of his disgust, this writer burrowed a little too deeply in the bacillus. Ick.

Example II: Ronald Pol Pot McDonald

We all live in a murderous world, as the events in Norway have shown, with 97 dead. Though that is nothing compared to what happens in McDonald’s and Kentucky Fried [Chicken] every day.

This is Morrissey putting Crispy McNuggets in historical perspective. I think we can all agree that there is a difference of scale and value between eating meat and slaughtering children. The comparison therefore accomplishes only two things: It puts the fanaticism of Morrissey in extreme and repellent relief; and it reveals his hopeless narcissism.

Okay, so here’s the world according to Perkins:

… I would call attention to the parallels of fascist Nazi Germany to its war on its “one percent,” namely its Jews, to the progressive war on the American one percent, namely the “rich.”

Let’s pause there, before attempting to assimilate the comparison between anti-rich sentiments in America and slaughtering Jews. Can you make sense of the sentence? All those tos:

to the parallels
to its war
to the progressive war

Me no get it. Can we rewrite?

I would call attention to the parallels between the Nazi war on the Jews and the progressives’ war on America’s rich.

Something like that? Note that SOS has taken out tons of words – you want to simplify, especially in your opening sentence. You also want to remove quotation marks around words when the marks deny that you’re referring to something you are indeed actually referring to. The “rich”? The quote unquote rich? Does Perkins mean that the Occupy people and the like are in fact attacking a group of people who are not rich? Perkins himself is a billionaire. Does that make him “rich” or rich?

SOS has not been able to clarify whether Perkins believes that the German Jews were all rich – this is something the sentence seems to imply, or at least to have room for…

Okay, next:

From the Occupy movement to the demonization of the rich embedded in virtually every word of our local newspaper, the San Francisco Chronicle, I perceive a rising tide of hatred of the successful one percent. There is outraged public reaction to the Google buses carrying technology workers from the city to the peninsula high-tech companies which employ them. We have outrage over the rising real-estate prices which these “techno geeks” can pay. We have, for example, libelous and cruel attacks in the Chronicle on our number-one celebrity, the author Danielle Steel, alleging that she is a “snob” despite the millions she has spent on our city’s homeless and mentally ill over the past decades.

“Rising tide” is a cliche; “virtually every word” is hyperbole. (You call this demonization of the rich? )

This is a very dangerous drift in our American thinking. Kristallnacht was unthinkable in 1930; is its descendent “progressive” radicalism unthinkable now?

Ends with a challenging, scary, question… But are you hyperventilating, or laughing?

Right. Because, like Morrissey, this is a human being some of whose views are so extraordinarily grotesque that we do not need to take them seriously.

If you are chained to extraordinarily grotesque views and you still wish to urge them on other people via prose, take this further counsel from SOS: Don’t try for comparisons at all. Go in some other direction.

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UPDATE: Il miglior fabbro.

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Update: Tom Perkins.

For a man convicted of involuntary manslaughter with his yacht, life imitates art.

“Civilization’s going to pieces,” broke out Tom violently. “I’ve gotten to be a terrible pessimist about things.”

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They were careless people, Tom and Daisy – they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.

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Scathing Online Schoolmarm says: Some very nice writing in this review of the Republican primary in Wyoming. Concise, amusing, and, at times, fierce writing.

It’s a little over the top, but there’s a basically well-written take down of a popular band by Chris Richards in The Washington Post.

[T]his is rock music that lazily presumes life on the digital plane has made us so numb, so unable to feel for ourselves, that the only way to reach our hearts is by applying a pneumatic hammer to our classic rock pleasure centers. Bowie! Springsteen! Talking Heads! Blam-blam-blam! Bludgeoning and vacant, “Reflektor” is an album that both condescends and sells itself short, over and over again, for 76 insufferable minutes.

Again, this is pretty good, but editing it down to make it tighter – and its emotion of disappointment and contempt more focused – would have helped:

This is music that presumes digital life has made us so numb we can only be reached via pneumatic hammer. Bowie, Springsteen, Talking Heads: Blam, blam, blam! Bludgeoning and vacant, “Reflektor” condescends and sells itself short, over and over again, for 76 insufferable minutes.

Yet better examples of the absolute dump review are two from the New York Times that Scathing Online Schoolmarm has already featured on this blog: A 2008 Jon Pareles description of a Sarah Brightman concert, and, in 2012, Alastair Macaulay reviewing Russia’s Eifman Ballet. Click here for hilarious details.

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UD thanks her sister for
the link to the Post review.

As college football stadiums around America get emptier by the minute, we need writers like Dave Bratcher to remind us why we so love those Saturdays in the fall.

As we made our way into the stadium, a few things struck me. These things are applicable to life and need to be mentioned. Across the United States, Saturdays in the fall remind us of what true equality looks like, teach us why keeping score is important, and loyalty is not to be taken lightly.

When fans show up to cheer on their respective teams, discussions about race, religion, wealth, or family lineage do not factor into the discussion. The things which sometimes divide us, even on Sunday morning, are completely irrelevant on Saturday. Nobody cares what color, what church, how much money, or who their parents are. The identifying factors and circumstances of our lives are completely forgotten about when the teams take the field. This is to be praised.

Guess ol’ Dave missed the $100,000 per box luxury seating! Look up, Dave! See the rich people up there, divided behind glass enclosures from the yahoos? Only the rich people in the stadium get to drink alcohol, Dave! These things are applicable to life and need to be mentioned.

… nihilism. Everyone’s calling the Tea Party nihilistic. Do a TEA NIHILISM Google search and see.

Scathing Online Schoolmarm is thrilled. She loves the word, its soft insidious feel… The middle H adds a dying breath to its barely-there sound…

A beautiful mysterious letter-set, n-i-h-i-l-i-s-m. The movement of the mouth in saying the word maps the regress of nihilism itself —

A strong initial sound at the outset as if you’re headed somewhere: NEE…!

(Note: You can do it NIGHilism if you prefer.)

Then a catch of the breath on the H as you remember it’s pointless.

A final collapse into the enervated quietude of LISM..

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Europeans (Nietzsche, Dostoevsky) long ago cornered the market on nihilism. Finally America – perennially dismissed as too youthful, optimistic, and pragmatic for nihilism – gets its chance. You go, girl.

… is upon us, which is why, you might notice, UD‘s been covering one story after another about spectacular turnouts at these all-important early games. Georgia State University, for instance, has 32,000 students.

A few minutes before the start of the game, there were less than 70. Overall, I would estimate less than 300 showed up.

Scathing Online Schoolmarm says: Fewer than, not less than.

But that’s but a trifle here.

Tis the song, the sigh of the weary, as Stephen Foster put it. The guy in this post’s title wants to know why he can’t just love his Vikings and not have to think about being one of millions of Minnesota taxpayers who’ve given hundreds of millions of dollars to the team’s racketeering owner, Zygi Wilf.

Zygi is one of Yeshiva University’s most honored trustees. He is part of the Yeshiva University tradition of having its trustees called “evil” by judges. First Bernard Madoff and now Zygi have inspired some of America’s finest jurists to rise to this rhetorical occasion…

(Update: Yeshiva’s main campus is named after the Wilf family. Yikes.)

But back to our headline. Like it or not, your sports news – university sports, professional sports – will always be saturated with – imbricated with (to use an English major word) – criminal news. This being the case, UD proposes that MFA programs at sports factories offer not just instruction in Minimalism, but also instruction in Criminalism, a prose style in which you entertainingly interweave afternoons at the arena with evenings in jail.

There is a good deal to study here. UD has been a student of criminalist prose for years and has accumulated a syllabus-full of methods, approaches, points of view. She’s particularly intrigued by the style she calls Coacha Inconsolata, a mournful account of the sufferings of coaches who through no fault of their own recruited drunks and flunkies to the team and of course to the school. Here’s a very recent example. The trick is to focus not on the totally foreseeable stupidity and criminality of the recruit, but rather on the shocked and hurt coach.

Here are some excerpts, with commentary from Scathing Online Schoolmarm.

U Conn [basketball] center Tyler Olander has put Kevin Ollie in a difficult position … [This is the beginning of the first sentence of the article. Start right off not with the player, but with the coach. It’s unseemly to dwell on jailed players — too many of them, doesn’t look good, challenges alumni to keep loving the team — so dwell rather on the sacrificial agonies of the coaches.] Legendary coach Jim Calhoun had already left Ollie with a underwhelming and thinning front line. Now, calling that front line “thinning” is like a bald man using the comb over. It’s approaching nonexistent. [Next move: Recall the impossibly big shoes into which the coach must step. Legendary Jim! You only have to watch this famous clip to understand how beloved, how amazing, Calhoun was… Poor Ollie! Left only with thinning hair.] Olander was UConn’s only big man left on the roster with any sort of real experience. The Huskies had already lost veteran Enosch Wolf, who had his scholarship taken away for his own legal issues… [If you’re not blubbering by this point, you’ve got a heart of stone. What is this good and great man, this Job of the jocks, supposed to do?]

Just continue like that if you want to write Coacha Inconsolata criminalism: The writer here goes on to talk about the coach’s “major headache,” the way he’s “scrambling” to do a good job, and how “This is not what he had to have in mind when he laid out his plan” for greatness. Do not touch on the question of how it is that anyone entering a major university sports coaching position lays out non-criminogenic plans for greatness. Do not ask how anyone could possibly be that stupid. Just go with the Job thing.

And he ain’t even gotten to sports yet!

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Thomas Frank’s hit piece on the American university is swell (I’m still reading it), but Scathing Online Schoolmarm would caution against sentences like this one:

When the board forced the president to resign last June, they cloaked the putsch in a stinky fog of management bullshit.

Mixed metaphors are bad enough (cloaking your putsch in a fog?) but when you bring in bullshit… When you make the fog’s composition the shit of a bull… No.

Note that the sentence in my headline also mixes metaphors.

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Pointless money-drains like a vast administration, a preening president, and a quasi-professional football team should all be plugged up.

Finally he gets to football.

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Ours is the generation that stood by gawking while a handful of parasites and billionaires smashed [the American university] for their own benefit.

The problem with Frank’s cri de coeur resides in sentences like this one. Too much cri, too much coeur. Not enough compelling, rational analysis. Phrases like a handful of parasites and billionaires are a major target of George Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language.” Orwell rightly notes that in our time “political writing is bad writing.” And bad writing fails to persuade.

Flaunting? The writer flouts all standards of good writing by flaunting his ignorance.

And doesn’t the Washington Post have editors?

But Forbes should be much more ashamed for having published the mindless POS the principal plagiarized.

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Scathing Online Schoolmarm is impressed with one wrinkle here. The plagiarizing principal personalized the stolen material:

[The original author] wrote in the Forbes column about Lori Garver’s rise to deputy administrator of NASA,: “Like so many other successful people, Lori has always been driven more by what inspires her than what scares her. She’s always been willing to challenge assumptions, and push the boundaries of possibility.”

[The plagiarist] switched the focus to herself, writing: “Like so many others, I have always been driven more by what inspires me than what scares me. I have always been willing to challenge assumptions and push the boundaries of possibility.”

SOS suggests that for her next plagiarism (as you know if you read this blog, plagiarists almost never stop at one), the principal aim higher. Make Edward Kennedy’s famous eulogy for Robert Kennedy your own!

I saw wrong and tried to right it, saw suffering and tried to heal it, saw war and tried to stop it.

Aim even higher!

I am a woman, take me for all in all. You shall not look upon my like again.

Higher!!

For I the Lord thy God will hold thy right hand, saying unto thee, Fear not; I will help thee.

… a West Virginia newspaper.

It begins with a July 6 letter from good ol’ Wade Gilley, president of Marshall University (background on Marshall here) in the ‘nineties. Wade went on to head the University of Tennessee but had to leave onaccounta he did a few things that seem like they didn’t sit well with other people there. Yeah, ol’ Wade had to scoot.

Now Wade’s letter is a model of its type. What you got here is the good ol’ boy reminiscing bout the good ol’ days when men was men and Marshall was a beautiful paradise of football, football, and football.

I … remember being invited to a national meeting of 20 university presidents and 20 Fortune 500 corporate CEOS in the late 1990s and hearing many positive remarks about Marshall. In fact, Father Malloy, the president of Notre Dame at that time, approached me at a reception and said, “Wade, some of us were just talking about the success of your football program and we were wondering just how it happened.”

And that’s just one story about rich important people flocking around me wanting to know my secret of success!

After sharing more stories about how fantastic football is for universities, Wade concludes:

And there is no doubt that football, which is largely self-supporting, has been and will be a positive factor in promoting Marshall’s national image.

A little nay-saying (“Self-supporting? Hardly.”) does pop up among the commenters, but a July 13 opinion piece from a Marshall finance professor really puts the kibosh on the thing. Dallas Brozik is a hard-nosed guy and he ain’t having any of it.

Despite the fact that one of his students, on Rate My Professors, says Dallas doesn’t like English majors, Dallas writes really well. Let’s see how he does it, step by step. Scathing Online Schoolmarm will interrupt his piece with comments in parenthesis.

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Wade Gilley’s recent letter concerning the ongoing discussion about the Marshall University budget was quite interesting. [Now usually SOS complains about the profoundly uninteresting word interesting. But Dallas here’s going to use it slyly, in the manner of Oscar Wilde…] Just as a magician uses sleight of hand to mislead the audience, those who wish to keep the university budget a black hole keep spreading misinformation.

I have no doubt [Brozik will repeat the formulation I have no doubt throughout his piece.]   that Dr. Gilley met with folks at all levels who commented on our football team, which at the time had a winning record. Sports always makes good small talk. I have no doubt that we had the best athletes and coaches despite the legal and criminal records of some of these individuals.  [Note how slyly Brozik has already gotten two points across:  Gilley’s a maundering fool; and the teams he’s teary-eyed about were pretty smelly.]

I have no doubt that Dr. Gilley met a person whose daughter had chosen to go to law school at a certain university, supposedly because of the school’s athletic program. I also have no doubt that I would not want this person to represent me in a court of law unless it is about sports law.  [Brozik’s calm, reiterated I have no doubt is wonderful.  It signals a kind of elaborate emotional self-control, a determination to be gentlemanly and long-suffering about Gilley.]

Dr. Gilley has no doubt that the football program has been an important factor in the increase in enrollment at Marshall. Dr. Stephen Kopp became president on July 1, 2005. For the academic year 2005-2006, the official enrollment of the university was 13,920. The official enrollment for 2012-2013 was 13,708. This implies that the football program, or whatever, created negative enrollment growth.  [Oh, don’t confuse me with numbers!  And that or whatever is wonderful too  – another sly polite little suggestion that Wade is somewhat whacked out.]

Dr. Gilley has no doubt that the football program has been a very positive economic growth factor for Huntington. Since Dr. Gilley’s time, the population of Huntington has decreased and many businesses have closed. The 2012 State of Well-Being Report from Gallup-Healthways ranks Huntington as 188 out of 189. Check the want ads section of today’s paper to see how many job openings exist and at what levels. There has been no economic miracle in Huntington over the last several decades, football or not. [You can see ol’ Wade putting a hand over each ear at this point and saying LALALALALA I can’t hear you I can’t hear you…]

Wade Gilley left Marshall under his own cloud [We won’t even go into his University of Tennessee cloud.]; why he wants to get involved in this discussion is strange. He has no dog in this fight. He is old news. He admits he has little insight into the current budget situation, but he has no doubt that a football program which is not self-supporting promotes Marshall’s national image. Dr. Gilley is entitled to his opinion, but opinions are like bellybuttons; everybody has one but very few should be aired in public.  [SOS would drop the way down-home belly button thing.  Brozik doesn’t need it; and it breaks his terrific tone of restrained contempt.]

Dr. Kopp promised “transparency” in April.  [Only in his last paragraph does Brozik turn to Marshall’s current football-concussed president.  Nice move.  It puts MU’s latest loser squarely in the company of Gilley.]  He still has not opened the books for review, even though state law requires him to do so. The current problem is one of accountability for state funds and the tuition and fees paid by students. Those who try to frame this as an anti-sports question are either misled or trying to be misleading. The budget for Marshall University is important to the entire community, and that budget should be examined. The time for opinions is over. It is time for action. It is time for Dr. Kopp to live up to his promise of transparency and open the books.

When you get a wild and crazy sentence like this, a truly mad mix of metaphors, you perceive the intriguing connection between lazy cliche and hyperactive metaphor. Let’s first look at this remarkable sentence more closely. I’ll highlight its images.

Though skyrocketing tuitions and a growing anti-government tide are seemingly swimming against traditional university education, the true educational bubble forming is in the online space.

We set out here with skyrockets in flight. The rockets are up in the air with a tide. Together the rocket and the tide appear to be swimming. The actual mixed water and air action, however, is a space bubble.

Are you trying to picture this? To make the picture make sense? That tends to be how we read – we’re not only reading for an argument; we’re enriching our sense of the emotional and intellectual meaning of the writer’s claims by assimilating his various figures into our reactions, by allowing his images to ground and dramatize what might otherwise be mere abstract statement. But excess and confused figures – coupled here with modifier-madness (skyrocketing, growing, seemingly, traditional, true, online – no noun is left unaccosted) – just produce a confused mess. They make thinking harder, not simpler. And they tend to happen when your argument is little more than a string of cliches. Here are some, from this Forbes piece.

… [C]ollege students tune out during their four years on campus; that, or they memorize what’s needed to get As on the tests… [T]eens go to college with an eye on a fun four years, after which they hope the school they attend will open doors for a good job… [W]hat’s learned in college is irrelevant to what’s done in the real world. … [C]ollege is not about learning much as we might wish it were… [W]hen parents spend a fortune on their children’s schooling they’re not buying education; rather they’re buying the ‘right’ friends for them, the right contacts for the future, access to the right husbands and wives, not to mention buying their own (“Our son goes to Williams College”) status. …Parents and kids … aren’t buying education despite their protests to the contrary. Going to college is a status thing, not a learning thing. Kids go to college for the experience, not for what’s taught.

Note how a weak argument full of overstatement relies on a repeated pounding of the reader by means of cliche. It should not surprise us when a robotic redundancy insisting that American university education represents status obsessives and their bad seed eventually produces nutty sentences like this one.

Nice ambiguity there, huh? To what does “they,” in Joe Nocera’s sentence refer? The teams or the universities?

I guess he means it to refer to the teams; but, if so, should he not at least have reversed the order – between the universities and the teams, and stop pretending they have any ‘educational’ value (and why put educational in quotation marks?)? Nocera presumably believes some universities have either educational or ‘educational’ value…

Consider too the content of his claim. Nocera’s one of many writers who, faced with the superscummy world big-time athletics has brought to America’s universities, urges that we “create some real separation” between athletics and universities.

Easy to say, Joe. What the fuck, pray tell, might you mean? When two people who can’t stand each other but find themselves married decide to really deal with that, they separate. Real separation means you live in different places and have little to nothing to do with one another. But I doubt Joe has in mind this clean a break.

I mean, plenty of people are calling for universities whose campuses are routinely trashed — literally and figuratively — by their sports programs to spin them off, to have a merely symbolic association with a local professional team that continues to carry the name of the university. That’s one way to go. But there are many more people, like Nocera, who seem to think that universities and big-time sports can be separated and yet reconciled, can have broken up and still live together under the same roof.

There are many reasons why this is impossible, prominent among them the simple dynamism of the phenomenon itself: Every year, unstoppably, scandals get more lurid, more expensive, more absolutely disgusting. Every year, coaches and players get more out of control, gain more power. Every year, the shreds of academic integrity these schools have managed to maintain shred yet more. Every year, more and more classes are cancelled to make way for games and for the dictates of the media conglomerates that now run the university show. Etc. Nocera’s column happens to be about university presidents destroyed by their athletic programs, but that’s only one of countless corruptions intrinsic to the decision to import professional sports — whose even more repulsive scandals (the latest being baseball boys and their steroids) Americans really seem to get off on — to universities. So you can put the smell over there, as it were, but it’s always going to work its way deep into your nostrils.

And I’m afraid absolute separation won’t fly either. I mean the idea of spinning off the teams, professionalizing them, but keeping University of Georgia in their name. Let me explain why.

Think of alum fandom as a delicate and nuanced perfume. It has a note of nostalgia, a bouquet of beer, a hint of hazing… studded about with the scent of sorority and the fragrance of frat. Alum fans are connected to their team through memories of sadistic initiation rituals, drunken stumbles into lakes, and other cherished keepsakes. Pack up the team and send it across town and you rip those memories from their moorings. Won’t work.