This is my trauma
Had it from birth
This is my trauma
Grandest on earth

But this is my trauma
To have and to hold

So maybe it’s a bit of a footnote to the big fat endless domestic abuse story in professional football, but University Diaries remains amazed at the failure of universities to delete webpages boasting about their luck in having recruited men who beat women. Way back in high school, coaches knew Kareem Hunt was bad news; despite his amazing game skills, mainstream universities wouldn’t take him, and he ended up at the University of Toledo, where, judging by his hero’s page, he remains a god.

…the Washington Redskins!

Grijalva attacks Ryan Zinke
Who hits back with G.’s problem with drinky.
Each man is a schlump
In the era of Trump;
It’s hard to say which is more stinky.

UD‘s only on the second paragraph, and already she’s cheering. Thanks, dmf, for the link.

For my own modest contribution to the Leadership thing, go here, here, and here.

Oh, and here.

Central European University, under relentless pressure by Hungary’s popular prime minister to get the hell out, is about to do so. It will probably move to Vienna. Lots of people are upset about it. Hungary’s only world-class university has been chased away by paranoid hyper-nationalist know-nothings.

UD proposes that this might be for the best. The ultimate provincial backwater and proud of it; known, if known at all, for its suicide rate, Hungary, like our own Mississippi, elects chauvinistic dolts and ejects the non-doltish. Mississippi and Hungary are hemorrhaging population, whereas Vienna – precisely the sort of place (despite its own rightish political leadership) to which intelligent Hungarians flee – is growing.

If it is the will of people that the places they call home dissolve into nothingnesses ruled by Ubus, if they want to be places outsiders visit to track the spread of wisteria over Faulkner’s manse, or get soused with the ghost of Gyula Krúdy in his favorite watering hole, eh. It’s their right; precisely because of their “shabby littleness,” these places threaten no one.

Hungarians are the west’s Sentinelese. Really best not to intervene. Sad but true.

Multiple people with direct knowledge of Damascus’ football program have stated “brooming” was an annual event. Suspect Will Smith, for instance, reportedly told police, “’the broom’ started generations ago.”

During a press conference Monday, Montgomery County State’s Attorney John McCarthy acknowledged he too has heard similar claims about a violent, twisted ritual.

… So far no civil lawsuits have been filed against Montgomery County Public Schools regarding the Damascus incident. However, a source has confirmed to ABC7 that two of the four victims have retained a prominent local attorney.

“I think the victims in this case may have some civil causes of action against the school system,” McCarthy concluded.

They seem to take things like this more seriously in Canada.

From the same article:

“There’s this really odd dynamic of ‘I really want to belong, I really want to be part of this team… and at the same time, you have to put up with this assault about something very personal, very private, and very scarring in order to prove your worthiness to be a member.”

Liberals, argue Judith Shklar and Richard Rorty, are people who believe that “cruelty is the worst thing we do.” UD agrees; she has always found the very deep, very twisted, very sexual masochism/sadism of this apparently common child’s play baffling and frightening. But UD has to deal with the fact that all over the globe the human race is cutting off clitorises with dirty knives and lacerating anuses with broken broom handles because …

What’s the cliche? Love is stronger than hate?

Nope. Hate – abundantly obviously – is stronger than love.

And not only stronger. Socially acceptable. If Argentine fans hate opposing teams and try to kill them, fine. If Reuben Foster hates his girlfriend and tries to kill her, fine. My beloved country elected a cruel paranoid as its leader; maybe, to reward him for killing our decency along with our institutions, it will reelect him. We like violence, we like hatred, we like cruelty. Liberal is a dirty word.

Sing it.

To sport the anthem raising,
Sing, children, great and small;
Sing out, all rectums hazing,
Praise Football, one and all!
See how our team this year,
Which now is safely ended,
Hath in its love rear-ended
Our children far and near.

O coach and teammates praising
Whose love and grace abound!
Their wondrous anal grazing
Is sung the whole world ’round.
With digit, broom, and pool cue
They pierce our nether hole;
O football we adore thee
Our country’s heart and soul.

[I]t is because of the hooligans that many regular fans stopped going to the stadium. Dinamo Zagreb are a good example of this. Their Maksimir stadium is the largest in Croatia, with a capacity of 35,000, but their average attendance is a shade over 4,000. Their hooligans, the Bad Blue Boys, occupy three tiers of one stand behind a goal, but the rest of the ground is empty. Their dedication has driven everyone else away.

… When fans go to the stadium, they are corralled by police in riot gear, herded into the stadium and body-searched. Police treat football matches as a riot waiting to happen and often seem as if they want one to occur, if only to break up the boredom – in Germany, they get paid more when they are forced to wear their riot helmets, which many fans feel makes them prone to starting and exacerbating trouble rather than stopping it. The situation that created the Hillsborough disaster – that is, a total breakdown in trust between the police and football supporters – is recreated again afresh. The old adage that treating people like animals makes them act like animals is played out everywhere.

… For many of those involved with violence, their club and their group are the only things that they have to hold on to, especially in countries with failing economies and decreased opportunities for young men. Ideas of bruised masculinity and masculine alienation filter heavily into this argument as well. It is rare that young, successful men with jobs and families go out of their way to start fights on the weekend at football matches.

“Violence has no place in football.” This is the sort of thing people always say after violence has broken out in a way that would appear to prove the opposite, and it seems to me that anyone who says it is either lying or missing the point. Of course violence has a place in soccer. It has a place — a deep, foundational, ineradicable place — in every sport. Proximity to the roots of violence is not the only thing sports offers us, but it’s such an essential part of the enterprise that without it, I’m not sure what we’d be left to watch, or whether we’d want to. “Passion should not equal violence” is a meaningless statement in this context, because passion in sports is mingled with violence at its source. When you let in the one, you let in the other. We are a species that regularly longs to burn each other’s castles to the ground.

… Screaming for a goal, laughing at a player fight, punching a wall after a loss, dressing in the colors of a team — I imagine we’ve all done all these things. We’ve paid to do them, and we didn’t pay to do them because we are such gentle and peace-loving souls but because standing near the threshold of violence feels amazing. Watching the membrane that separates you from real insanity go translucent for a few hours is an exhilaration that can see you through the mundanity of any number of Tuesdays.

I wonder if it will occur to Damascus High School, located a few miles from UD‘s house, to remove the sign – a proud reference to the school’s football mascot, a hornet – that greets you as you drive through the school’s front gates. I wonder if they know the smutty jokes people are making about the stinger that dangles between the hornet’s legs in the image that accompanies the sign; if the school is on to the lord of the flies allusions that occur to people when they see the word swarm. When your school has managed to spawn a gang of broomstick-up-the-ass rapists on the football team, everything takes on new meaning.

It’s all national and international news now, and the story of the boys who trapped other boys in the locker room and shoved a broom up them will get bigger as details of the depravity (and its almost-certain recording/photographing by someone) emerge.

The passing the buck story has already begun: Defense lawyers blame it on the school, as if the rapists (who also beat their victims) didn’t do it. (Though if what one Washington Post commenter alleges – that football powerhouses like Damascus do “special” transfer of talented players to their schools – then of course the Montgomery County system does have much to answer for.) The school has – bizarrely – blamed whatever its principal means by social media. Each participant (given the nature of the charges, they’re being tried as adults) has blamed another participant. I’m sure we’ll hear attacks on the parents, attacks on football, attacks on peer pressure, attacks on hazing culture. I mean, we know how the story goes because of Bixby and Steubenville and all the other high school football gang rapes. The blame lies with the people who are going to go to prison.

This blog focuses on universities… but after all, these are the sports heroes coming to your campus in a year or two.

And after that, it’s off to the Redskins!

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

NO meaningful comment, as the story goes viral, from the school’s principal. Her twitter feed stops around Thanksgiving.

An we ain’t kiddin.

Uh… football stands.

It used all them guns to kill itself. And others.