Long considered one of the best places to live in America, Damascus, Maryland – a short drive from UD‘s Garrett Park – has big houses and good schools and pretty landscaping. And (yawn) it has teenage anal rapers galore.

Yawn because do you know how many teenage anal raper stories I’ve covered on this blog? So many high school football teams in the country seem fiercely devoted to jamming broomsticks up the asses of new players as a kind of Welcome Wagon gesture… If I wanted, I could blog every week about pool cues, broomsticks, and pretty much anything else being jammed up the anal canals of newbies.

Why? Why? Why?

Oh, who gives a shit. It’s a thing, a major thing, part of the university fraternity hazing continuum, only I guess more intense because of the very small closed absolutely brutal world of the football team.

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TO THE DESPOILERS GO THE SPOILS!

If anally raping junior players is the key to success, why mess with a good thing?

With a victory Friday [this was the Friday just before the rapes were discovered], Damascus will pass Urbana (1998-2001) for Maryland’s longest winning streak of all time and add onto the country’s longest active winning streak.

Yes, with its patented broomstick-up-the-ass technique, Damascus has formed a truly unbeatable team bond!

Scathing Online Schoolmarm notes, however, that the experience of reading the Washington Post’s breathless pre-rape article about the school’s amazing achievement is a little different now, with the eye landing hard on certain words, the mind automatically altering certain words…

‘Over Damascus’s 50-game winning streak, Coach Eric Wallich has searched for new ways [LOL] to motivate his team.

… With a victory Friday, Damascus will pass Urbana (1998-2001) for Maryland’s longest broomstick [haha make that winning streak] of all time…

… Damascus (8-0) has become the premier team in Montgomery County this century — winning six state crowns since 2003 — by relying on a rape-heavy [ahem! run-heavy] system.

… Kids look on and dream of donning the green, gold and white jerseys, even as high school football participation has dropped nationally because of concussion and health concerns, among other reasons. [Like anal rape.]

… The Urbana teams that set the state winning-streak record also featured a savvy run game and deep-threat ability. [Turns out you can go to jail for deep-threat ability.]

… [One of the players] said Damascus players are also viewed highly at school and in the community. Handling that attention has helped them manage the spotlight in crucial games. [Managing the spotlight just got a lot more pesky.]’

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Hey but wait but oh oh oh says the school’s principal: It was the JUNIOR varsity team, not the big boys with the new state record!

A commenter on this article speaks for UD:

In all the media reports the emphasis from Principal Crouse about this not having anything to do with the powerhouse varsity team is a little disturbing and I question her priorities.

Correct. You might have noticed that football everywhere has a (cough) culture problem. You don’t get to break up the team when something like this happens. You don’t get to suddenly chuck all your language about how everyone’s part of the team, we’re all a unit, blah blah. You don’t get to claim in your official statement that the group rape is “unrelated to the varsity football team.” First of all, we don’t know that yet. Second, this is the varsity team in a very short time. And if you’re trying to convince us that the event was a bizarre one-time, Halloween-night grotesquerie etc. etc. good luck with that.

Another thing: UD knows of virtually no group teenage anal rape these days, football or non-football, that doesn’t include someone recording the thing, texting about the thing. If the Bixby Oklahoma case is anything to go by, parents are currently trying to buy the evidence (!) and everyone’s madly erasing tapes and texts. Damascus has a state-wide record to protect… IOW: get ready for the investigation.

Is it a coincidence that this happened days after they featured University Diaries in their pages?

Just saying.

… the real,” wrote Harold Brodkey, days before he died, in his memoir This Wild Darkness: The Story of My Death. In Saul Bellow’s novel, Herzog, his main character desperately wants to

live in an inspired condition, to know truth, to be free, to love another, to consummate existence, to abide with death in clarity of consciousness – without which, racing and conniving to evade death, the spirit holds its breath and hopes to be immortal because it does not live …

And in his poem, Note to Reality, Tony Hoagland, who has died, says much the same thing as Bellow and Brodkey, though in the wandering pastiche of poetry:

Without even knowing it, I have
believed in you for a long time.

and the smell of fresh bread
makes the mourners salivate against their will.

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Nothing concentrates the mind like life-threatening illness; or so you’d think, but like most of us the poet’s “mind will never be clear for long,” so he must “speak now,” when his mind clears enough for him to write a poem. He addresses a love/hate note directly to what UD has always, in her own private lingo, called Mama Reality, that thing Bellow and Brodkey yearn toward, dream of, want to wake themselves from their dream of, so they can enter “clarity of consciousness” and leave the half-life their fear of death has settled them into.

Having overcome, for the moment, his customary half-awareness, the poet now sees that he has long “believed in you” – or he has at least believed in those manifestations of Mama Reality that involve the sheer pulsating amorally-triumphant proliferation of nature: cancerous blood cells overcoming the immune system; high grass overcoming January snow. Not abstractions, or even loud alarms, but the particularity of beetles (dung beetles, featured in Kafka’s Metamorphosis, represent another natural force that feeds on death) and honeycombs “persuade” the poet that reality exists, that life is not sheer dream, evasion, longing. Life is mad, often sweet and beautiful, but uncertainly meaningful, proliferation, as in the honeycombs, or in the piles of postcards of their work that the prolific artist-bees Picasso and Matisse generate.

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And now we shift to a little narrative, a little memory, still in the key of morbidity and uncertain meaning:

When my friend died on the way to the hospital
it was not his death that so amazed me

but that the driver of the cab
did not insist upon the fare.

I note for the record, Reality, that to be grounded in you is to be hopelessly grounded in life – so much so, that once he died my friend was instantly less real to me than an anonymous, gratuitous, cabbie. That gratuitous gesture – not insisting on the fare – is all of us blindly driving forward to the next event, veering right away from the face of death. So here the poet is back to thinking about our customary half-sleep, our mainly unclarified consciousness:

Quotation marks: what should we put inside them?

Shall I say “I” “have been hurt” “by” “you,” you neglectful monster?

Why have you abandoned me to unreality, to the distancing abstractions of quotation marks rather than the direct expression that, as Herzog says, would allow me “to know truth”? You’re monstrously guilty of neglecting my yearning to be close to you; and at this late date I’m terribly ill – terribly hurt by your amoral proliferating processes – and I’m therefore very angry with you.

“For my heart is tangled in thy nets;
my soul enmeshed in cataracts of time…”

Here is another quotation. The poet draws upon biblical? Romantic? poetic traditions in another form of complaint: I can make this pretty if you like, but the obdurate outraging fact is my powerless implication in your unaccountable story of killing proliferation.

And now we end with brief present-time (real-time?) orientation:

The breeze so cool today, the sky smeared with bluish grays and whites.

The parade for the slain police officer
goes past the bakery

and the smell of fresh bread
makes the mourners salivate against their will.

Well, smeared. ‘Fraid we’re not making much progress out of unclarity, though, as with our response to all those Picassos, we retain aesthetic – painterly – responsiveness to the world. The earlier police siren, alarming us to danger, is now the accomplished death of the police officer; and, as in the narrative of the cab, reality seems to be that thing that hastens us on to the next fresh event, even in the immediate face of death. Rather than mourning, the paraders salivate at the smell of fresh bread.

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It is an interesting question, you know – the extent to which our superior human consciousness can really lift us into a realm significantly higher than that of worker bees, enmeshed in cataracts and compelled – against our will – always to freshen and sweeten and proliferate our world until those compulsions turn morbid.

For Psycho, you want Tony Perkins;
For Chopin, select Rudolf Serkin.
But do not approach
As your next football coach
The problem from hell, D.J. Durkin.

… Rutgers-style.

Now, as Mr UD says, it’s time for the board of regents to go.

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Deadspin:

It’s obviously the right move, but Maryland deserves exactly zero credit for making it. They did everything they could to avoid moving on from Durkin—a lousy, losing coach whose players and former assistants describe as a bully and a tyrant—and are only doing it now because they’ve had their asses kicked non-stop since yesterday afternoon.

… I was over the top sometimes.

The University of Maryland is located in Prince George’s County, and Baker has had an excellent working relationship with the school’s president, Wallace Loh, who was dumped by football interests. From Baker’s statement:

Throughout this situation, Dr. Loh displayed a level of candor and courage that are a testament to his character. I applaud him accepting moral and legal responsibility for Jordan McNair’s death. It was a sign of true leadership, guts and integrity. It is unfortunate that instead of rewarding him for his courage, Dr. Loh was punished for doing the right thing.

Protests over the reinstatement of Maryland’s appalling football coach begin. The student government is organizing a rally for this Thursday afternoon (Mr UD plans to attend); there may also be a protest before this Saturday’s football game.

How long will the carnage at this university continue? Are there any rational people in leadership there? If so, they might be able to stop the bleeding. If they act fast.

Sometimes a headline gives you special access to the lives of girls all over the world.

Five months and one day after Jordan McNair collapsed at a Maryland football practice, D.J. Durkin, the head coach who oversaw the system whose failure led to the offensive lineman’s death, was reinstated to his job. That decision was made over the reported protests of university president Wallace Loh, who didn’t mention Durkin’s name at a Tuesday press conference and was told he’d be fired if he didn’t follow the regents’ recommendations…

[One of the football program’s trainers] allegedly used homophobic slurs and threw everything from food to weights to vomit at players, while other unnamed coaches forced them to watch graphic videos of “serial killers, drills entering eyeballs, and bloody scenes with animals eating animals.”

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Chicago Trib:

[For the University of Maryland,] being guided by the memory of a 19-year-old whose death was wholly and completely preventable means that the football coach who oversaw a program built on — among other things — demeaning players should be welcomed back. So here comes the inconceivable: DJ Durkin, back on the sidelines…

[T]he University of Maryland — in its entirety — is delusional…

“Greetings, mothers of prospective Maryland football players. Come in. Have a seat. Let me flip on this video of animals disemboweling each other, just to get you in the right frame of mind. Oh, sorry, is there puke in that trash can? Allow me to fling it across the room. That should do it. Would you like a candy bar? No? I insist. Seriously. Eat this &$%@#! candy bar!!!!!!!! Or else!!!!!!!!!”

… That DJ Durkin remains the football coach at the University of Maryland defies common sense and common decency. That Damon Evans remains his boss as the athletic director means Maryland has installed a leader who is defined more by his mistakes than his successes. And the entire university system has exposed itself.

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It’s all chaos, degradation, and continued danger, and the whole world is watching. Take a look at today’s Google News page for the University of Maryland.

A Forbes writer gets it right: Unless you’re Clemson and Baylor and Nebraska and the other total-football-and-nothing-else schools, you’re eventually going to find yourself deep in the same sort of shit Maryland’s in right now.

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The hot mess in all its glory.

Two things almost for sure:

1. Durkin will go.

2. This entire episode will end up costing the university at least ten million dollars, plus endless further costs arising from multiple lawsuits.

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Headline on this one: IN AN AGE OF REFORM, MARYLAND SAYS IT’S FINE WITH SLIME

President Loh …. advocated that Durkin be dismissed. Instead it’s the president who’s leaving. The coach, beggaring belief, gets to stay. Unknown is whether he can find anyone willing to play for him, now or ever again.

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The Maryland head football coach, who in the very best-case scenario, was so incompetent at overseeing a program that he allowed it to turn into one so toxic and so physically dangerous to players that it killed one, but who was so competent at instilling a culture of “fear” that players and subordinates were too afraid to speak up with their concerns, was reinstated on Tuesday, along with everyone else who bears responsibility for Jordan McNair’s death.

… As for why the board of regents appears so committed to Durkin, well, look no further than his contract. The coach is in the third year of a six-year contract that pays him about $2.5 million annually. If he were to be bought out, it would cost the school $5 million. If he were to be fired without cause, it would cost 65 percent of his remaining salary, or, again, about $5 million. If he were to be fired with cause, there would likely be an expensive and protracted legal battle. It is no wonder, that at just about every program, a football coach has more job security than a university president: He makes more money.

Maryland football does not turn a profit. It had run, for years, at a multi-million-dollar deficit, but believed that moving to the Big Ten would make it the money-printing machine it always believed it could be. But so far, by all reports, it’s barely breaking even, and has committed to years of serious expenses paying off its fancy new football facilities. The board of regents appears to believe the program cannot afford to take the hit of paying off Durkin to leave, and the likely accompanying loss in donations from insane boosters, on top of the inevitable lawsuit from McNair’s family. The regents announced yesterday, in so many words, that doing the right thing would cost too much money.

One does wonder how many more articles like this one Oxford’s leadership will read before it decides it’s tired of the publicity.

It’s not the sort of location you want to visit often; but it’s important to remind ourselves of the bizarre fate of the academy’s iconic homeland.

Most recently, the Athens Bar Association released the following desperate statement:

“The prevalence of lawlessness in [our universities], due largely to the total indifference of the state, not only humiliates and devalues public higher education in our country,” but is an affront to the state itself …

Because of the country’s absurd asylum law, under which police can’t enter universities, campuses have become graffiti-ridden organized crime hotspots. “[D]elirious or half-dead addicts” abound. Violent anarchism against professors and students is also a biggie:

On Wednesday morning, professors and students of the School of Philosophy gathered at the entrance of the campus in order to prevent [anarchists] from entering the premises. Nevertheless, the anarchists entered forcefully and took over classroom 516 again, just as they had done the previous two Wednesdays.

Greek universities have been sordid and comatose for many years. Soon they’ll just be dead.

How dare anyone insinuate that the niqab is restrictive and oppressive. What nonsense!

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The racist political ads the article goes on to describe are disgusting. But they have nothing to do with clothing commercials using the hideous niqab as a way to make an obvious point about preferring self-expression to self-erasure.