The wins get taken away, so where are you? One after another cheater university gets its wins taken away, so what does that make all the effort to play and win the games?
As with the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, which will almost certainly vacate yet more victories once its slow-moving academic scandal picks up steam, it makes the effort either a sick pathetic joke, or it makes it performance art.
UD thinks it’s more healthy to think of it as performance art, à la Dada. Our football program is shit and then we die. Let’s do the rhumba around a Paterno statue and then blow it up. Let’s turn our victory banners into burqas and wrap them around our labrador retrievers.
Far better to adopt the absurd, says UD, than wallow in the bathos all the boys are in at the moment. The boys need to evolve. They need to see the possibilities.
Take this guy, with his anguished questions, his incredulity, his Blanche Dubois Ah see the world ah wanna see thing:
We tend to believe what we want, and since my sister graduated from UNC-Chapel Hill and loved the school so much that she still lives nearby, I didn’t want to believe this school — her school — could be so shameful.
Impeccable reasoning, wouldn’t think of criticizing this way of understanding the world, but it takes him to this grim panicky place:
[This might be] the ugliest academic scandal in NCAA history.
UD would ask him to calm down and recall what the great landscape designer Gertrude Jekyll once said:
There is no spot of ground, however arid, bare or ugly, that cannot be tamed into such a state as may give an impression of beauty and delight.
Go toward the ugliness; bring to it the same pep and pageantry you used to bring to game day, and you will find that laughter and fellowship will not be far behind.
August 14th, 2012 at 6:23PM
The caption reads: “This is not a football game.”
August 14th, 2012 at 7:11PM
“The wins get taken away” What does that mean? Did one retroactively lose? Has the other team retroactively won? Has the game disappeared down the memory hole?
The game was played. It happened. There was a result. That the NCAA now covers its eyes and chants. “la-la-la we can’t see you!” doesn’t alter the actual fact, just the record of it.
What is absurd is that we care more about the record of the event than the event.
September 13th, 2012 at 7:44AM
[…] all guys, he’s basically Blanche Dubois: Ah see the world ah wanna see. Like her, he deserves our effort to understand, and our […]