… nothing makes you happier than scandals involving religious universities, places that often wear their piety on a very self-righteous sleeve. Obviously it’s more fun when those places (rather than yucky secular schools like the University of Miami) turn out to be fraud-ridden hellholes run by sordid people of the cloth. Think back over our posts covering Yeshiva University, Baylor, Seton Hall, St. John’s, St. Louis, Southern Methodist…

Schools that have never hidden their trashy nature – Liberty, for instance – don’t make the list because they’re so overtly icky that they don’t even qualify for hypocritical. (Put the names of any of these schools in my search engine for wonderfully stomach-churning details.)

Wheeling Jesuit, or whatever the wreck is calling itself these days, has a real place of honor on the Gruesome Godly list, having for years been run by a dissolute cabal headed by jacked up jesuit AND HEAD OF THE ENTIRE WEST VIRGINIA CATHOLIC CHURCH Michael Bransfield. The details of his depravity – in the article I just linked to – are, even by church standards, pretty remarkable. But as I’ve endlessly pointed out, whether it’s Jewish Yeshiva or Catholic Wheeling, you don’t get there without large all-male incredibly parochial boards of trustees and boosters making the world safe for the very vilest among us.

… spray.

… to the land of pumpkin-eating squirrels.

… Rehoboth Beach is Delaware’s most overrated destination mainly due to the cost of parking and its exuberant enforcement of parking meters.  

At least they ticket joyfully.

[T]here are now signs of a new secular wave breeding in the Muslim world… [W]e are speaking of a bottom-up trend, coming from society, from people fed up with all the ugly things done in the name of religion.

Yes, it did. Certainly some European countries are stepping up efforts to throw parents who do this to their children in prison. But that action against a long-established global assault on the youngest and most vulnerable can at best, in an end-of-year roundup, be said to be gathering pace is its own sort of scandal.

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.

… Trubu Show.

[Joe] Lockhart … said Trump should add Michael Avenatti to a defense team of Rudy Giuliani and Alan Dershowitz for the “Three Stooges defense.”

… Tatte, in Harvard Square. Les UDs are on their way back home to ‘thesda.

UD‘s Christmas thoughts, as she wanders thro’ each charter’d Boston street thinking of the dead (who said – was it Saul Bellow? – that at a certain age every other thought should be of the dead?) — thinking, that is, of people whose efforts to understand themselves and the world are over… UD‘s thoughts are all about the pretty unliftable fog we move in forever. Love Lifted Me goes the great gospel song, and it’s pretty to think so.

Truly pretty are the great stories – our greatest stories – that settle us deeply into the fog, right in the thick heart of the cloud – and let us abide there: John Cheever’s “The Swimmer,” whose drunken-boat drunk, Neddy Merrill, gets his name from Merrily merrily merrily merrily life is but a dream. Kafka’s “The Judgement,” whose main character knows nothing of his appalling fate until seconds before he peremptorily carries it out. Kleist’s baffled Marquis of O, or the dreadful demented brothers in “Saint Cecilia, or the Power of Music” – these are characters who struggle to exist at all inside the wall of Kleist’s endless discursive paragraphs. John Marcher’s mind-forg’d frigidity and fear finds itself similarly barely situated within the thick masterful paragraphs of Henry James.

O Lost.

Lise Ravary, a writer for the Montreal Gazette, makes the simple, crucial argument UD‘s been making since Blog Day One: Despite Katha Pollitt’s lazy claim that “religion is what people make of it,” religion actually isn’t anything people might claim it is. All sorts of acts, ranging from socially destructive to barbaric, are routinely defended as religious, and secular societies have an obligation to scrutinize these acts and when appropriate call them legally out of bounds.

“When she wanted to get the party going, a very progressive lawyer friend of mine liked to argue that female genital mutilation is none of the state’s business and should be allowed under the Charter [of Rights and Freedoms],” notes Ravary, who shares UD‘s incredulity that any self-respecting state would let this progressive lawyer have her way. Few things are more subject to state concern than large-scale physical assault against children.

States similarly have the right – again, I’d say the obligation – to respond to the desire of the people to sustain their secular identity in social places where this seems important. Thus, the bill Ravary talks about, which forbids religious symbols, “applies only to public service workers in positions of authority, including teachers, police officers, prison guards and Crown prosecutors, while they are at work.” So this means no, you cannot wear a niqab and teach at the same time; and if you are unable to imagine life in the social world without your niqab on you at all times, you are going to be unable to teach in the Quebec public sector. This is of course true of many other localities, including France and England.

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!

*****************

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.

… to frigid, dreary Boston for the holidays.

Though now that she checks the weather, maybe the old joint will crank out some sunshine for a change.

Blogging continues undaunted.

Les UDs finally discovered the precise boundaries of their property; their landscaper had a surveyor do the deed. Turns out we own a good deal more forest than we thought we did, so yesterday UD created a path through the woods, connecting one of our established paths to the new boundary marker. This involved raking up leaves and dirt, plus pulling and tossing dead branches – work UD loves for itself, and also for the way it shapes the land and gives the dog and me more walking space.

It was a clear cold day, full sun, and it took UD very little time to forge a nice wide walkway.

At one point she raked up an old lp.

Why would someone toss/bury a record in the woods? She and Mr UD speculated. An unwanted gift? Did it fall out of a trash bag? But then how would it end up a half acre away, at the very top of the property? What animal would find it worth picking up or nudging?

Something emotional? A favorite track, associated with a love affair gone sour, hurled in rage or sorrow into the void?

***************

Short of sending it to the FBI forensic lab, there was certainly no way of identifying the record. Right?

Wrong. Take a look at the lp’s center, where I’ve focused a light. All it took was deciphering the printed and written language there, and then checking a discography.

VAN GELDER appears on part of the curve; that would be the recording studio; PRLP is I suppose the record label: Prestige. 2934A (I think that’s the written number) is, according to the Prestige Records Discography for 1961, “To Rigmor,” a piece Joe Newman (the whole album is the Joe Newman Quintet, Good ‘N’ Groovy) wrote for his wife.