One night, in the winter of 2013, crowds of Michigan State University students ripped trees out of the landscape, burned them in the streets, and jumped over the flames. Here’s the Nazi-book-burning-fun image. Close to sixty similar bonfires went up all over East Lansing in response to MSU having beaten Ohio State — another perennially torching and rioting school — in a football game.

You want links? You want links to decades of torching-the-town and scorching-the-earth and torturing-police-horses Penn State, Ohio State, and Michigan State? Sorry. Too fucking depressing. Look them up yourself.

It’s a long tradition: After football games, or after the firing of child-rapist-enabling coaches, or in celebration of holidays, hundreds of drunken shits gather at America’s football factories and attempt to incinerate their neighborhoods.

As if places like East Lansing weren’t bleak enough. Let’s establish a university where we admit hundreds of people who, as one, yank out of the ground all of the saplings planted in an effort to bring some life to our cold terrain.

A university! Maybe East Lansing harbors some gangs we might expect to do something like kill trees and set the town on fire. These are university students. Michigan State University is a university.

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But, as all of America’s media is madly noting today, MSU has a specific culture. (I’ve just linked you to today’s Michigan State University Google News page. Scroll down. Endlessly.) It’s the same culture Penn State and Ohio State and plenty of other NCAA-favorites (the NCAA’s getting excoriated everywhere too – like – hey – turns out it’s corrupt) exhibit, and it’s a deep culture – the work of decades of abjection in the face of athletics.

At this point, schools like these are basically distilleries. Rape and pillage are what you get when you’re a big ol’ distillery packed with twenty year olds.

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So the depraved people at MSU let a depraved doctor systematically rape hundreds of children. Same thing with a coach-rapist at Penn State. The president of MSU and the athletic director just resigned. And now we’re breathlessly told that this is just the beginning of the massive numbers of sports-related crimes about to be exposed at MSU.

Funny thing: It played out almost exactly the same way at Penn State! And Auburn! I could go on!

The trouble at Michigan State appears to go beyond Dr. Nassar, who was a university employee for decades and the physician to two women’s varsity teams. An ESPN investigation Friday described a pattern in which sexual assault complaints involving prominent athletes, including more than a dozen on the football team and a few in the celebrated men’s basketball program, were handled by the athletic department rather than through regular university channels.

Michigan State insufficiently complied with federal officials monitoring the university under Title IX, the gender-equity law, the report found.

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MSU … will not face criminal charges for [its] part in Nassar’s actions, though [it is] facing multiple civil law suits from over 100 victims of his abuse.

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It’s a culture, see? You don’t dump the prez, bring in a deer-in-the-headlights replacement, and create a new culture.

It is, as they say, what it is. The sadistic, greedy, amoral coaches who, once finally fired, dedicate the rest of their lives to suing the school for four hundred million dollars. The deities on the money teams who sack quarterbacks and women. The brain-damaged ex-football-hero trustees. The student body seething with alcoholic bullies. When they tire of watching pledges die from booze forced down their gullets, they head out to the town saplings.

The school’s too busy dealing with five ongoing high-profile athletic and academic and fraternity scandals to notice the creepy little team doctor or the elderly has-been coach off raping children somewhere. And all the decent people on the faculty, in the administration, and in the student body keep their heads down and do their work and pretend their school’s not a saloon.