They’re burning up the thesaurus over at Deutsche Welle, yet one feels they still have miles to go before they sleep.
They’re burning up the thesaurus over at Deutsche Welle, yet one feels they still have miles to go before they sleep.
Two headlines, one week, Jackson State University.
Oldest story in the book. Football factory knows a guy is off his rocker violent and the guy has a police record to prove it but the school admits him anyway because it loves him because that beautiful violence wins games.
Love is funny, or it’s sad
Or it’s quiet, or it’s mad
It’s a good thing, or it’s bad
But beautiful…
Beautiful to take a chance
And if you fall, you fall
And I’m thinkin’
I wouldn’t mind at all…
Love is tearful, or it’s gay
It’s a problem, or it’s play
It’s a heartache either way
But beautiful…
And I’m thinkin’ if you were mine
I’d never let you go
And that would be just beautiful I know
Mad and bad but beautiful on the field and who gives a fuck about the women who go to school there.
Because [huge] network money has to come from somewhere, we can anticipate more and longer commercials in games that already subject fans’ patience, bladders, and backsides to what amounts to a four-hour stress test. Those who head from the stadium to the local motel instead of fighting traffic and fatigue on the long drive home are almost certainly looking at two-night minimums on rooms at grossly inflated rates. Throw in gas, food, and tickets for a family of four, and your credit card tally will scream of a weekend in Paris, not Clemson.
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James Cobb, Spalding Distinguished Professor of History Emeritus at the University of Georgia, goes on to describe
the sinister contagion of unadulterated commercialism now enveloping college football at every level. Left unchecked, it promises to make exiles of the students, alumni, and loyal fans in general who long saw games, not simply as athletic contests, but the centerpiece of a deeply personal, culturally affirming ritual.
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UD thanks Jim.
“Killer Inside: The Mind of Aaron Hernandez’: Former Pro Football Player Claims the NFL ‘Is in the Violence Business’ in Netflix Documentary”
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Sometimes it even looks as though the whole gig is up. Thank God for our very dumbest states.
Sports are games, but like virtually everything else in this culture, they’ve been transformed by capital into something deeply unfun. [Aaron] Hernandez left high school early to attend the University of Florida, where football is both religion and an industry… [A]n autopsy showed … that he was suffering from chronic traumatic encephalopathy, the degenerative neurological condition the NFL doesn’t want you to think is the logical consequence of playing football… For his crimes, Hernandez went to prison, where he lost his life. The billionaires who pay men millions to damage their brains for television audiences? They’re the ones getting away with murder.
Life of the mind, USA.
On the college level, football players were not exempt from sexual assault allegations. Just look at what women suffered at Baylor University as a result of the “institutional failures at every level” under the leadership of Art Briles and then-school president Ken Starr (yeah, that Ken Starr.) One lawsuit alleged that 31 Baylor football players had committed 52 “acts of rape” between 2011 and 2014.
The university has settled several Title IX lawsuits with sexual assault survivors who accused officials of allowing a “rape culture” and failing to properly act against incidents of sexual assault. That included a Baylor volleyball player who alleged she was drugged and raped by at least four football players in 2012.
We’ve been talking about that forever on this blog; but while everyone else sees it as a problem, we see it as intellectual progress.
Return with us now to those thrilling days of yesteryear, when Eastern Michigan University was arguably the most pathetic of America’s many pathetic football schools. But now. Now! Not only does their quarterback hit out so wildly at opposing players that he clocks the referee; another player gets ejected for spitting on an opponent.
Life of the mind, my beloved country. Life of the mind.
Color UD ambivalent about Christianity Today having spilled the beans.
Dramatically, as in O’Neill’s great play and a zillion others like it, it’s only fun to watch until someone… you know… coughs it up. Until that moment at the very end (“I… am… George… I am…”) when the obvious truth everyone’s been lying about gets very flatly stated, we sit and watch in delighted suspense, in excited anxious awareness, in a tense condition of enlightenment, astonishment, pity, euphoria, dread, amusement, fear…
When Mitt Romney wrote his beautiful editorial spilling the beans, UD felt a dramatic let-down. When Christianity Today did the same thing, she felt the same onrush of flaccidity. You know how everyone loves to quote Have you no sense of decency? Blah. Play up! Play up! And play the game!
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UPDATE: Trubu Roi’s Run Far From Over!
The long-running American version of Jarry’s Ubu the King (UD‘s posts about The Trubu Show go way back: put Trubu in my search engine) runs on. As UD suggests above, the citizen in her desperately wants the show to end, while the aesthete can’t help lovin this seniors gone wild caper, this Hangover franchise for mature audiences. Every time hoary Rudy Giuliani loses his shit and slobbers that “Soros is hardly a Jew. I’m more of a Jew than Soros is,” every time naughty octogenarian Alan Dershowitz describes the New Yorker’s editor as a neo-Nazi-friendly fraud, the girl can’t help it: She’s giggling in the wings, she’s having a grand time, she doesn’t want it to end. She doesn’t want Trubu psychiatrist Keith Ablow to lose his license; she floods with excitement when she sees the names Mike Huckabee, Michelle Bachman, Jerry Falwell Jr. and Ralph Reed lined up together in a cast list. She’s watching her very own, her native, La Grande Bouffe, where eventually one of Trubu’s Grand Old Men will sit at a piano, play a few chords, and fart himself to death.
… having finally written a letter to that school’s president about their dirty sports programs (tennis, basketball, and particularly basketball), they would have done better to band together a few years ago and try everything to keep basketball player recruiter Kevin Broadus from being hired.
The New York Times refers to his time at SUNY Binghamton as the “scandal-ridden Kevin Broadus era.” Dude gets his own era and ever so serious Georgetown University not only scoops him up, but does a whole 1984 on his corrupt record and simply expunges it from his university About page!
Where do you think the sort of players who land your school in the scandal sheets come from? They come from recruiters like Broadus, whose apparent indifference to the danger some recruits might pose to the campus community was fully known to Georgetown when they hired him.
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PS: Don’t forget that Georgetown’s scandal plate runneth over: They are revoking Varsity Blues student degrees as well.
… is one of UD‘s favorite (translated) literary titles; despite its sad content, the words themselves have a lilting poetic something (say them out loud a few times), with their thrice-invoked or…er…or…
And everyone knows that sorrow is a beautiful word, sounding the dignity of its emotion in its soft open letters. Give a title sorrow and watch it soar: I Am a Maid of Constant Sorrow. The Sorrow and the Pity. The Sorrows of Young Werther. The Sorrow of Love. Infant Sorrow.
Give sorrow words: the grief that does not speak whispers the o’er-fraught heart.
Every bond is a bond to sorrow.
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UD often thinks of Disorder and Early Sorrow as she follows our collegiate football players into the big leagues. Plenty of them escape disorder and early sorrow, but some do not, as the media’s current disordered darling, Antonio Brown, abundantly demonstrates. A non-graduate of appalling (feast your eyes) Central Michigan University, the man is an absolutely brilliant athlete. Tens of millions of dollars in professional contracts have been thrown at him, and he’s pissed virtually every cent of it away. These two commentators may disagree about whether he should be allowed to keep playing football, but they seem to agree that something’s wrong with the guy’s brain.
And yet, and yet. This writer notes that in one of Brown’s many rageful Trumplike tweets he makes “an interesting point.” Brown bitches that our old friend Richie Incognito remains in the game even though he appears to be violently demented; why shouldn’t Brown, who rolls the same way, continue to play? “AB is not wrong, is something I never thought I’d say. It was absolutely confounding when the Raiders signed Richie Incognito…”
It admits virtually everyone who applies; it has a 20% four-year graduation rate. Solution? Spend huge amounts on athletics.