… Since leaving government, [Lawrence] Summers took a lot of money from Citigroup. As one of the key architects of the bailout, he was responsible for the decision to prop up Citi with hundreds of billions of dollars of public money and Federal Reserve cheap capital rather than breaking Citi up. As Fed Chair, he will be a principal regulator of too-big-to-fail banks including Citi.
At the very least, this looks terrible. He saves Citi management and shareholders, then he gets a nice pile of money from them for not much work, and now he is regulating them again.
… [At Harvard,] Summers’s questioning of the intellectual capacity of women contributed to his downfall, but in many ways it was the least of his problems. Far more serious were his penchant for overruling the Harvard endowment’s professional money managers with impulsive investment decisions that cost Harvard billions, and his involvement in the Andrei Shleifer affair.
… Summers is also vulnerable for his activities since 2010. Harvard has a strict rule requiring that full-time faculty spend at least 80 percent of their professional time on Harvard business. With all of his extracurricular Wall Street affairs, there is no realistic way that Summers could have met this rule. Either Harvard bent its own rules, or the companies on whose boards Summers served were violating their legal duties by using Summers as a marquee name or paying him in the expectation of future IOUs, but not as a true fiduciary…
There’s a recurrent theme here of personal and institutional greed – get-rich-quick credit swaps that turned out to cost Harvard billions, massively self-serving Wall Street “affairs.” It always seemed bizarre to UD that a man this crass and cynical would be placed in front of the Senate for confirmation. What was the Obama administration thinking?
During the Dominique Strauss-Kahn business, a writer for the New Yorker noted the anxiety with which “many in Paris” are witnessing “the ‘Italianization’ of French life — the descent into what might become an unseemly round of Berlusconian squalor…” Their country after all had not long ago produced (just like Italy) an accused rapist as a leading candidate for political office. Strauss-Kahn came close to being president; Silvio Berlusconi, convicted of tax fraud and sex with an under-age prostitute, was Italy’s longest-serving post-war prime minister.
UD has always been intrigued by the ways in which states fall into depravity, and the way they care about that (the French care, according to the New Yorker writer) and don’t care about that (the Italians don’t care). Italy is so depraved, and so indifferent to its depravity, that Italianization has become a globally portable noun, toted around to designate a national culture’s relaxed descent into moral turpitude.
Richard Rorty, in his philosophical essays about postmodernism, expressed anxiety about the Italianization of the United States. He routinely described us as “rich, fat, tired North Americans,” cynical about all of our institutions, and sinking back, in the absence of belief in the possibility of social improvement, into our comforting consumer goods (Don DeLillo’s novel, White Noise, is the best fictional evocation of this cultural mood).
But that was only our high culture, Rorty was quick to caution; our elites – financial, intellectual – are Italianizing, as in figures like Lawrence Summers, who despite his remarkable moral grubbiness, seems set to become our next federal reserve chair. (Hm. Not so fast, UD.)
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One way to understand the Oklahoma State University story is to suggest that Italianization has now invaded our great plains states, the country’s symbolic center of rectitude.
Look at Iowa’s long-serving senatorial scold, Charles Grassley, and tell me whether, when you look at him, you can think of anything but rigidly upright stands of wheat. Then look at this dude. The expression on President Obama’s face says it all.
So traditionally America – especially America’s heartland – was the exception, the clean place, the corny, cock-eyed optimist of nations, with the corniest locale the plains of Colorado, Iowa, Kansas, Montana, Nebraska, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Texas, and Wyoming. “Blondie and his frau out of the plain states came!” says cruel sophisticated George, mocking the newly arrived wholesome faculty couple in Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
Now that the plains states are epicenters of football scandal (yes, given structural corruption, there are plenty of other football scandal locations), you see the beginnings of Paris-style anxiety about Italianization even on the plains.
From Penn State to the Miami scandal to Johnny Manziel’s autograph saga to alleged violations at top college football programs across the country, the NCAA has never faced more “culture” issues than it does today.
“Culture” here designates not merely the corruption itself (everyone knows college football is rancid), but indifference to it, everyone’s fine Italian hand waving away any embarrassment or shock over the fact that Nick Saban, recipient of $5.3 million a year from one of the poorest states in the union, routinely tells journalists to shut up when they ask about his dirty program. (“Nick Saban, the Alabama coach, stamped out of one news conference last week like a petulant child, all because reporters dared to do their jobs. He would talk about the football game, not the system of big-time college football, the system that made him rich and famous. Never that.”) Just like Joe Paterno, this guy’s got a fucking statue! These guys are our heroes!
UD’s pretty confident that Saban’s statue will meet the same fate as Paterno’s… But maybe not. Maybe by the time the massive Alabama scandal hits, the process of Italianization will have advanced to the point where no one gives a shit.
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Anyway, my point is that the plains were our last bastion. Now it’s pomo meh. Meh. Rape at Montana, rape at Colorado, pimping at Oklahoma, drugs at Iowa, meh. The plain-spoken plains have spoken. They’re on board. Benvenuto!
Why should a Pickens who is healthy and strong,
Blubber like a baby if his team goes astray?
A-weepin’ and a-wailin’ how they done him wrong,
That’s one thing you’ll never hear me say!
Never gonna think that the men who squeal are the only men among men.
I’ll snap my fingers to show I don’t care;
I’ll buy me some brand new boots to wear;
I’ll scrub my neck and I’ll brush my hair,
And start all over again.
Many a new face will please my eye,
Many a new love will find me;
Never’ve I once looked back to sigh over the bromance behind me;
Many a new day will dawn before I do!
Many a light lad may kiss and fly,
A kiss gone by is bygone.
Never’ve I asked an August sky, “Where has last July gone?”
Never’ve I wandered through the rye, wondering where has some guy gone;
Many a new day will dawn before I do!
Just like the Reverend Sun Myung Moon, who in his heyday would pick which Moonies would marry which Moonies!
Things are getting weirder and weirder at Oklahoma State University – not just pimping coaches, but matching coaches.
OSU does their schoolwork for them, escorts them to class, lets them have their drugs, and takes care of their sex life. Football players might not have gotten any money (oh wait a minute; they did get money) but when it comes to being radically, totally, amazingly infantilized UD doesn’t think you can do better than being admitted to Oklahoma State University. Did Les Miles change their diapers for them too?
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Oh, and while the OSU admissions office is scrutinizing the academic qualifications of recruits, is it also reviewing the tits of female applicants… I mean, hostesses?
Hostesses: If you want to be admitted to OSU, you know what to do.
On a mild sunny Saturday morning, UD has gone out to her deck to discover a two-foot long, fully intact (except for a vertical rip near the head) garter snake skin.
Looks kind of like this.
I found the image here.
She’s drying it now (big storm yesterday) on the same outdoor table that holds a massively thriving spider plant UD picked up hours after it had been abandoned at Garrett Park’s last plant swap. She had no idea what it was – just a sad green potted thing – but she thought she’d haul it home and water it and see what happened. Five weeks later it looks like this. (Scroll down to the fourth photo.) Or, you know, not quite that amazing, but getting there. And of course UD is particularly solicitous of this plant because she rescued it, because it was a foundling.
Next up, on the Sports Illustrated hit parade:
Around 2007, Joel Tudman, an [OSU] assistant strength-and-conditioning coach who is also the team’s chaplain and carries the title of Life Issue/Social Development Counselor for the football program — a mentoring position that has become more common within athletic departments — was put in charge of the drug counseling program for football. Tudman is also founder of Net Church, which he started in 2006. The congregation has grown quickly, and Sunday-night services were moved from Bennett Chapel to a student union auditorium, where Tudman’s sermons are delivered to an audience that often includes 40 or more football players.
Tudman, however, has no formal training in drug counseling. While Tudman’s bio on the athletic department website indicated that he had received a “double masters in health and counseling” from Texas A&M-Commerce, he in fact has only a single master’s degree, in Health, Kinesiology and Sports Studies. (Tudman’s bio on the Net Church website also erroneously stated that he had master’s degrees in Health Promotions and Counseling. After Tudman was interviewed by SI the bio was corrected.) His Oklahoma State bio said that he was twice honored by the Lone Star Conference as a running back and was a “3 time All-American sprinter.” In fact, that conference recognized him once (honorable mention in 2003) and he was an All-America sprinter only in 2004. (After SI began investigating Tudman’s background, the school pulled his bio from its website.)
Tudman says because he took courses in health and counseling while at Texas A&M-Commerce he “thought it was a double masters.” He produced a transcript that showed he completed five counseling courses, but none of them dealt with substance abuse and he never enrolled in the two courses Texas A&M-Commerce offered in that area. Tudman concedes that his athletic accomplishments were also embellished. “That’s [a mistake] on my part,” he says. “I take full responsibility.”
… (Tudman remains unlicensed to treat drug users.)
When asked about Tudman’s qualifications and background, [OSU] athletic director Holder said, “I didn’t look at Joel’s résumé” …
What Holder looked at was whether Tudman was a sufficiently pathetic blowhard to be controlled by Holder. Answer: Yes.
The school superintendent who plagiarizes, word for word, his heartfelt personal welcome to students at the beginning of the school year is never embarrassed. He explains that he happened to have found on the web a heartfelt personal welcome to students at the beginning of the school year that said exactly what he wanted to say, so he used that. If you insist he contact the original author, he’ll do that, but he assures you that the guy’s gonna be flattered; what he has done, after all, is an homage.
The poet who plagiarizes the work of better poets who say exactly what he wants to say but say it ever so much better so why not take their words is similarly shocked when people act as if he’s some sort of villain. It’s a postmodern pastiche, for fuck’s sake, an appropriation art comment on the death of originality in our time. If you’ve got a corncob up your ass and can’t get with the program it’s not his fault.
… have been announced.
UD‘s favorite:
Probability prize
Bert Tolkamp, Marie Haskell, Fritha Langford, David Roberts, and Colin Morgan, for making two related discoveries: First, that the longer a cow has been lying down, the more likely that cow will soon stand up; and Second, that once a cow stands up, you cannot easily predict how soon that cow will lie down again.
Reference: “Are Cows More Likely to Lie Down the Longer They Stand?” Bert J. Tolkamp, Marie J. Haskell, Fritha M. Langford, David J. Roberts, Colin A. Morgan, Applied Animal Behaviour Science, vol. 124, nos. 1-2, 2010, pp. 1–10.
Mr UD liked this one:
Psychology:
Laurent Bègue, Brad Bushman, Oulmann Zerhouni, Baptiste Subra, and Medhi Ourabah, for confirming, by experiment, that people who think they are drunk also think they are attractive.
Reference: “‘Beauty Is in the Eye of the Beer Holder’: People Who Think They Are Drunk Also Think They Are Attractive,” Laurent Bègue, Brad J. Bushman, Oulmann Zerhouni, Baptiste Subra, Medhi Ourabah, British Journal of Psychology, epub May 15, 2012.
… has died. Here’s a good remembrance.
“[W]hy should a people want to know modern art?” Berman asks in a review of Orhan Pamuk’s Snow. “What can it give them? Pamuk doesn’t offer a single ringing answer, but here’s a start: A global horizon and an expansive flow of empathy, a feeling for irony and complexity, a capacity to embrace contradictory ideas and believe and love them both.”
Berman’s one of those rare writers whose style, in almost everything he writes, is as much cheer-leading as arguing. You can always feel his tumbling excitement for the ‘sixties modernism he lived, his unapologetic nostalgia for the wraparound avant-gardism of post-war American cities:
As an ironic result of the flight of capital from American cities after World War II, every city gained grungy low-rent neighborhoods that could incubate bookstores and art studios and modern dance groups, experimental theatres, venues for jazz and folk music and performance, and the sort of shabby clubs and coffee houses and music stores and cabarets that nourished Lenny Bruce and Nichols and May and Woody Allen and Bob Dylan. New York’s Village (first West, then East) is what I knew, but there were neighborhoods like this all over America. Late in the 1950s, they started to fill up with kids from all over metropolitan areas who could read the little magazines and the Grove Press paperbacks in the bookstores, hang out in streets and play their guitars in parks, hear sounds of music that carried from clubs they couldn’t afford to go to, find intense people like themselves to walk and talk with through the night, and maybe to grope and love.
Grungy, shabby, grope: This is the loose-limbed prose that accompanies Berman’s perpetual enthusiasm for the intense, generative, experimental life that modernity’s secularity and freedom, and urbanism’s moment-to-moment dynamism, allow. Few wrote as evocatively, as convincingly, as he did about the importance of cultivating a critical consciousness and a rebellious life (Isaac Rosenfeld could match him, I guess — though Rosenfeld brought much more jaded eyes to the scene; and there’s the Henry Miller of Tropic of Cancer…).
Like anyone writing with seriousness and commitment in this Blakeian tradition, he was easy to mock. But Berman held aloft a certain comprehensive modernist ideal, and it’s the same ideal that a postmodern writer like Don DeLillo, in a novel like Underworld, with its long Lenny Bruce soliloquies, is exploring. And pursuing.
