Chekhov’s nineteenth century directions are in severe need of updating in our time, most potently on view in the ongoing Murdaugh familicide trial. Taking the stand on behalf of his father, who is accused of murdering his wife and son, the surviving Murdaugh son describes hundreds, if not thousands, of guns of all kinds scattered about the three Murdaugh properties.
Buster, who is testifying even as we speak, says no one put guns away properly; all three of these alcoholics (plus Alex has a twenty-year-long drug addiction) constantly used them, played with them, shared them, threw them in unlocked cars, got them stolen, lost them. These are not what you’d have considered irresponsible people – highly educated, influential attorneys from way back in the long family history, they are one of the first families of the state of South Carolina.
But – well – all the details here, if you can stomach them.
Poor Paul Murdaugh, raised by drunken savages. Amazing he made it to 22.
So maybe we rewrite Chekhov for our time like this:
If there are two hundred loaded guns of every imaginable kind lying around the house in act one, scene one, you must kill your family with two different ones (the very likely murderer, Alex Murdaugh, used one gun for his wife and another for his son) by act three, scene two.
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There’s also the Wyoming variant of these directions:
If you have more guns than any other state in act one, scene one, you must also have the highest suicide rate in the country by act three, scene two.
[Mexican] Supreme Court Justice Yasmín Esquivel has been tarnished by evidence a thesis she presented in the 1980s was a near-exact copy of one presented a year earlier…
Duh. One glance at Lady Lara de Bourgh (about whom we have had WHAT to say on this blog) instantly brings to mind Mr Collins’ praise of her precursor in Pride and Prejudice: “What affability! What condescension!”
But if you’re a little slow on the uptake, Tom Nichols at The Atlantic will help focus your attention on this notorious aspect of High Trumpworld, composed of vulgarians like Catherine de Bourgh who look down on vulgarians like Mr Collins.
That Foxworld and Trumpworld have a special horror of the yahoos who gather ’round them/vote for them is hardly surprising: Anxious about their own social standing, they can’t help but watch in dismay/cynicism as an embarrassing rabble tries to touch their hems. A dude like Jared Kushner, who affects aristocracy but in fact hails from the basest money mafias, can’t help but lose his latte when hopeless schlumps sidle up. He’s counting on his new fifty million dollar house on a heavily policed island to keep them out.
Anyhoo we’re focused on this matter again because of new revelations around UD‘s favorite ongoing billion dollar lawsuit, in which Dominion, a voting machine company, seeks damages for having been slandered by Fox broadcasters, who as one denounced Dominion as a malicious part of the Soros-engineered conspiracy to keep DJT from his second presidency. Dominion says all the Fox broadcasters knew they were lying when they assured the rabble the election, with important help from Dominion, had really scout’s honor been stolen. But now that Fox emails from the time have been released, it turns out… Dominion’s right!
Hyping false claims about election fraud was a way for Fox to win its audience back…
The network knew, of course, that Trump’s lawyer Sidney Powell, a chief promoter of Dominion conspiracy theories, was a delusional fantasist. The legal brief reveals that some of her claims about Dominion were based on an email Powell had received from someone who claimed to be capable of “time travel in a semiconscious state.” On Nov. 18, 2020, Carlson told Ingraham: “Sidney Powell is lying by the way. Caught her. It’s insane.” Ingraham wrote back that Powell was a “complete nut.”
… “Respecting this audience whether we agree or not is critical,” Hannity texted on Nov. 24. It’s a version of respect indistinguishable from contempt.
Early studies of Non-Specific Characterological Assholism (N-S CA), originally denominated the AH-Factor, focused on its chromosomal provenance. Later studies have tended to examine particular sociocultural applications, as in the question posed here: How long, and to what effect, do specific instances of N-S CA linger? If, for example, a subject is a notorious asshole in 2014, will he suffer measurable consequences roughly a decade later?
II
A recent tenure denial at Harvard University offers a suggestive case.
In 2014 Benjamin Edelman, an untenured Harvard prof
ordered take-out from Sichuan Garden, a family-run restaurant in Brookline…
[Edelman] also has a consulting business, for which Bloomberg Business reports [he] charges clients $800 an hour.
The food cost $4 more than he had calculated, because prices on the website had not been updated. The professor complained in an email. Ran Duan, whose family owns the restaurant, apologized and ultimately offered to return $4.
Widely reported at the time, the incident generated strikingly negative attention, and two limericks.
III
Professor Edelman, in suing Harvard for the tenure denial, identifies as root cause the 2014 incident.
In a civil lawsuit against Harvard filed Tuesday in the Suffolk County Superior Court, Edelman alleges that the 2014 email correspondence — for which he later apologized at the Business School’s request — resurfaced when he was being evaluated for tenure, among other concerns of misconduct…
Edelman said he believes the negative publicity from the Sichuan Garden incident was a key reason for his tenure denial, adding there is “some fundamental truth to the centrality of that media disaster.”
“Had it not been for those stupid restaurant emails, I would have been just fine,” he said.
IV CONCLUSION
Evidence here points to the possibility that, in particular institutional settings, and under particular rule-bound circumstances, fulminating N-S CA may indeed impede personal advancement over the course of a lifetime. These results however are very preliminary and somewhat vitiated by their association with Harvard, unusually sensitive to being perceived as full of assholes.
Kentucky is one of our stupidest states, a fact reflected in its long list of terrible colleges and universities. I don’t know what this blog would do without the astonishingly, enduringly, scandalous University of Louisville; but UK and a bunch of other schools with “Kentucky” in their name are also real scum buckets. As a blogger dedicated to writing about what’s worst (and sometimes of course best) about American universities, let UD take this opportunity to say to that state THANK YOU. I believe the applicable cliche is The Gift that Keeps on Giving.
And now that Kentucky makes its benightedness official by banning abortion under all circumstances, it’s time for non-demented women to make it official and strike the entire state off their college-choice list.
Amid the sewage, though, there’s Berea, a deeply inspiring, profoundly impressive institution marooned in the swamp. As the state of Kentucky joins Mississippi and Alabama at the bottom of all quality of life lists, one hopes there’s some way to keep Berea afloat.
The local loon who killed sixty and wounded for life hundreds and hundreds and hundreds six years ago didn’t shut down the place. Most of the killed were tourists at an outdoor concert; maybe if his ultrapowerful weaponry had shredded people strolling residential Henderson, there would have been a bit of an exodus. But big metropolitan areas are incredibly resilient. Look at the slow-mo daily murder/wounding rates in Oakland, Balto, etc. The core of the city of UD‘s birth has indeed lost population, but just outside the city, in bedroom communities, population rates seem steady.
Universities are different. True, current applications at Virginia Tech are up; but it’s been fifteen years since its massacre, and the campus, in the wake of the event, has become one of the most highly secured in the world.
The Va Tech massacre occurred before America began experiencing daily mass murders, before certain locations became notorious carnage hubs. Only a fucking idiot, for example, would wander into a hookah bar late on a weekend anywhere in the States or Canada; and more and more of us know this.
As for universities, most remain insanely open locations – unlocked doors, large milling crowds, young heedless people, a massacrist’s delight. This is why essays about Michigan State this morning have titles like Requiem for the Spartans; people know that at least for awhile that show’s over.
Many students are leaving campus – who knows for how long. Everyone assumes universities are, in Bartlett Giamatti’s words, free and ordered spaces, but the free part begins to bite the dust as every hopelessly insane paranoid in America is issued an arsenal.
A Michigan State student who spent hours terrified, hiding in the dark, while one of many Americans working out his personal issues via mass slaughter killed people around her, registers her loss of innocence. Oh. Here too.
Here there everywhere. Everything everywhere all at once.
Also perhaps that particular American accounting: We only lost three. Virginia Tech was 32.
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Her partner rejected Va Tech because of the unbearable pathos/enduring stigma. You can’t forget the way that 76 year old professor died for his students… Or the sickening gun-toting photograph of the madman – mad boy – who did it… Maybe you know enough to know about yet other murders and lockdowns on that campus.
Enough already. Who needs it. Go someplace with at least a lower body count. Better chance to get out after four years alive, or not critically wounded. It’s like figuring out your chance of getting out of Baylor not raped.
Oh well. Enough of that. Back to the Murdaugh trial.
In this interview, he blames the shutdown of the basketball program, plus a purge of its coach and others, on a total lack of leadership at the school. No one’s home. Because no one’s home, someone recently hired a shitty clueless coach who probably doesn’t even see what’s wrong with hazing; because no one’s home, the lame duck chancellor let a university sports team full of gunnies and hazers form itself.
Eventually the gunplay and sexual assaults on fellow teammates (with the team watching) just got to be too much sleaze, even for bigtime university sports.
Plus they can expect a LOT of lawsuits, from players and coaches. Expensive.
The guy also pointed out that what with the loss from the roster of
*the guy who recently shot and killed a UNM student he’s been fighting with,
*the two guys who are leaving cuz they can’t take the sleaze anymore,
*and the three hazers who are leaving cuz they’re expected in court (court; not basketball court),
the team doesn’t have enough players to play the game anyway.
The remaining democrats in Israel – those who haven’t given up on the mess and moved to Bethesda, Maryland – gather in droves to protest the destruction of their judiciary.
Dr. Bernard Carroll, known as the "conscience of psychiatry," contributed to various blogs, including Margaret Soltan's University Diaries, for which he sometimes wrote limericks under the name Adam. New York Times
George Washington University English professor Margaret Soltan writes a blog called University Diaries, in which she decries the Twilight Zone-ish state our holy land’s institutes of higher ed find themselves in these days. The Electron Pencil
It’s [UD's] intellectual honesty that makes her blog required reading. Professor Mondo
There's always something delightful and thought intriguing to be found at Margaret Soltan's no-holds-barred, firebrand tinged blog about university life. AcademicPub
You can get your RDA of academic liars, cheats, and greedy frauds at University Diaries. All disciplines, plus athletics. truffula, commenting at Historiann
Margaret Soltan at University Diaries blogs superbly and tirelessly about [university sports] corruption. Dagblog
University Diaries. Hosted by Margaret Soltan, professor of English at George Washington University. Boy is she pissed — mostly about athletics and funding, the usual scandals — but also about distance learning and diploma mills. She likes poems too. And she sings. Dissent: The Blog
[UD belittles] Mrs. Palin's degree in communications from the University of Idaho... The Wall Street Journal
Professor Margaret Soltan, blogging at University Diaries... provide[s] an important voice that challenges the status quo. Lee Skallerup Bessette, Inside Higher Education
[University Diaries offers] the kind of attention to detail in the use of language that makes reading worthwhile. Sean Dorrance Kelly, Harvard University
Margaret Soltan's ire is a national treasure. Roland Greene, Stanford University
The irrepressibly to-the-point Margaret Soltan... Carlat Psychiatry Blog
Margaret Soltan, whose blog lords it over the rest of ours like a benevolent tyrant... Perplexed with Narrow Passages
Margaret Soltan is no fan of college sports and her diatribes on the subject can be condescending and annoying. But she makes a good point here... Outside the Beltway
From Margaret Soltan's excellent coverage of the Bernard Madoff scandal comes this tip... Money Law
University Diaries offers a long-running, focused, and extremely effective critique of the university as we know it. Anthony Grafton, American Historical Association
The inimitable Margaret Soltan is, as usual, worth reading. ... Medical Humanities Blog
I awake this morning to find that the excellent Margaret Soltan has linked here and thereby singlehandedly given [this blog] its heaviest traffic... Ducks and Drakes
As Margaret Soltan, one of the best academic bloggers, points out, pressure is mounting ... The Bitch Girls
Many of us bloggers worry that we don’t post enough to keep people’s interest: Margaret Soltan posts every day, and I more or less thought she was the gold standard. Tenured Radical
University Diaries by Margaret Soltan is one of the best windows onto US university life that I know. Mary Beard, A Don's Life
[University Diaries offers] a broad sense of what's going on in education today, framed by a passionate and knowledgeable reporter. More magazine, Canada
If deity were an elected office, I would quit my job to get her on the ballot. Notes of a Neophyte
