Whether it’s the real game, at a high school, or the virtual game, at an entertainment complex, football and Florida go together like Smith and Wesson.

Put America’s most violent game together with virtually universal gun ownership, throw in an open public venue, and POOOOOF! Mass shooting.

The shots and shrieks are recorded by all the dying people, so the soundtrack of America writes itself: Concussive hits from the game; RATATATATATATATATA; fuck they’re shooting run; bodies running; grunts; bodies falling.

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

And Parkland’s only four hours away! The Sunshine State’s full of opportunities – at many of the same locations! – to get killed in a large-scale event.

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

Their flagship university.

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

[E]very country contains mentally ill and potentially violent people. Only America arms them.

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

SEVENTEEN TRILLION

“How many mass shootings in your state will it take for you to do something?” David Hogg tweeted to U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.).

That’s a contemptible statement. It’s like saying Uriagereka supports American democracy and occasionally votes. Now he wonders if he and his fellow Americans – engrossed in their daily lives – perhaps naively took a smooth running executive branch for granted.

No professor who teaches at a Big Ten university can avoid noticing the sickening corruption that runs their school. It’s precisely because it’s so disgusting that almost all professors eagerly look the other way (the exceptions, as you know, are econ professors, who can’t help running the numbers) — until the coaches are caught fucking little boys in the athletic department showers, or they run a player to death one hot summer afternoon. Oh then! We were so naive; after all, university athletic departments are notorious for being run so smoothly…

And that’s why the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill is naming their basketball stadium after the coach.

No one knows how to play the game like ol’ Roy.

Happy to oblige, Andrew; happy to oblige.

No, no, don’t go all Macbethian! Eliot Cohen confuses farce with tragedy; and thing of it is, he knows he’s wrong.

To be clear, these are very different people. Macbeth is an utterly absorbing, troubling, tragic, and compelling figure. Unlike America’s germaphobic president, who copped five draft deferments and has yet to visit the thousands of American soldiers on the front lines in Afghanistan or Iraq, he is physically brave. In fact, the first thing we hear about him is that in the heat of battle with a rebel against King Duncan (whom he later murders) Macbeth “unseamed him from the nave to th’ chops.” He is apparently faithful to his wife, has a conscience (that he overcomes), knows guilt and remorse, and has self-knowledge. He also has a pretty good command of the English language. In all these respects he is as unlike Trump as one can be.

Uh, yeah; and that’s why the play du jour ain’t Macbeth, you silly, but Alfred Jarry’s incomparable travesty of Macbeth, Ubu the King!

King Ubu is a stupid babbling conscienceless coward, a walking abomination of vulgarity, appetite, grandiosity, and paranoia.

The real script is nihilism, mes petites; nothing tragic – or even particularly meaningful – about it. The real script is not with a bang but a whimper.

Creeks, rivers, lakes, bays, and the Atlantic Ocean.

Today, an unusually cool and low-humidity day,
UD explored with her sister Chesapeake Beach.

First, of course, they went to a local tea room.

This one.

Then we walked the
Chesapeake Beach Railway Trail.

A University of Michigan voice professor is accused of rape.

… witches, Mia Farrow, alluding to her most famous film, comes up with the very best meme of all.

pic.twitter.com/UMfnSl7XDm

— Mia Farrow (@MiaFarrow) August 21, 2018

“>

… but in Saudi Arabia, it’s your head.

So calm down and take the knife!

It could be worse.

To judge by his tweets, tantrums and apparent belief that Rudy Giuliani is an appropriate advocate, Donald Trump teeters at the precipice of incoherence and self-destruction, needing only a shove. Who best to administer it but a spouse with her own, separate bedroom in the White House and her own, separate hotel suite when they travel?

She inches ever closer to open contempt for him. She finds increasingly clever ways to show it. And it’s a perfect wedding of patriotism and payback for all the humiliations that he has heaped on her.

… Other first ladies beautified highways, promoted reading, planted squash. This one could abbreviate a nightmare.

And she says it well. Excerpts:

[Avital] Ronell’s [background here] supporters have swarmed to defend her. But rather than expose a hypocrisy or invalidate the #MeToo movement, this has only underscored the point that #MeToo feminists have been making along — about the nature of power and the way it fosters abuse.

… [Avital’s defenders admit] they have had no access to the dossier of claims against Ronell. But they called [her accuser’s] allegations “malicious,” while emphasizing Ronell’s seniority and prestige — precisely what the allegations accuse her of exploiting. The signatories said they have “collectively years of experience to support our view of her capacity as teacher and a scholar, but also as someone who has served as Chair of both the Departments of German and Comparative Literature at New York University.” Later in the letter the group noted, “As you know, [Ronell] is the Jacques Derrida Chair of Philosophy at the European Graduate School and she was recently given the award of Chevalier of Arts and Letters by the French government.”

In the last few days, further defenses of Ronell have appeared online from well-known figures in cultural studies and literature like Chris Kraus, Lisa Duggan, and Jack Halberstam. Duggan … dressed up harassment in the guise of sophisticated theory. The language of Ronell’s emails must have baffled the investigators, she asserted, because they could not understand the sexualized language that passes between queers (Ronell and Reitman are both gay). “The nature of the email exchange resonates with many queer academics, whose practices of queer intimacy are often baffling to outsiders,” she wrote. This reasoning echoed the philosopher Colin McGinn’s denial that he sent sexual overtures to one of his graduate students, saying he referred to masturbation in an email only to teach her the difference between “logical implication and conversational implicature.”

Yes, I know it’s getting funny. That’s why, in an earlier post about this scandal, I used the term “tragicomic.” Another Ronell defender, Slavoj Zizek — a person in all ways indistinguishable from Chauncey Gardiner — believes he has disposed of the power-corrupts essence of the case in this way:

To explain the accuser’s participation in the game with Avital through her position of power is ridiculous. If he effectively felt oppressed and harassed, there were ways of signalling this, which would have definitely not hurt his position.

This is the vacuously oracular Chauncey Gardiner with Lady Augusta Bracknell thrown in – the comedy lying in the clueless conviction that anything asserted by a person of … magnitude? … becomes true.

Livingstone again:

Furthermore, other former students have accused Ronell of abusive behavior, with one anonymous student accusing her of a variety of unethical practices on Facebook, including breaking her students’ self-esteem, humiliating them in front of others, then using the newly malleable student to do menial tasks for her, like folding her laundry. Andrea Long Chu, who was at one time Ronell’s teaching assistant, wrote on Twitter that the accusations track “100%” with Ronell’s “behavior and personality.”

So how surprised can we be by the obvious parallel with the brutal coaches also in the news lately? Same hierarchy, same closed ranks, same self-pleasuring abuse of subordinates. As I said in an earlier post, whether it comes from the most reactionary or the most revolutionary arm of the university, abuse of power would seem to be the constant, the name of the game. On the field of corrupt behavior, the coach, the Continental, and the cheering squad meet.

“If even one-quarter of what [Ronell’s accuser] describes … is true, it suggests a more intense, more extreme, more abusive instance of a pervasive imbalance of power in academe,” concludes Corey Robin.

Last Sunday night, UL’s tight ends coach

swerved on Interstate 64, nearly struck a barrier wall multiple times and drove through a construction zone where workers were present.

… Sheriff’s deputies had to pull [him] out of his car after he refused to comply with their orders to exit, according to the citation. Deputies then attempted to run field sobriety tests, but [he] walked into the interstate, “almost being struck by a truck pulling a horse trailer,” before deputies pulled him to safety. [He] had multiple open containers in his vehicle as well as multiple empty beer cans in the passenger seat.

He’s been hitting the bottle ever since they closed the on-campus whorehouse.

Though you’d think he’d find some consolation in his $600,000-plus salary AND a monthly $500 car allowance.

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

Hey! They’re paying this guy to drive his car into construction workers! What a deal.

Words from a University of Maryland student to emblazon on all of their advertising, yes? Come study at our university. Why? Just listen to wide receiver DeAndre Lane: I felt like I was the only one who cared about my brain.

Meanwhile, amid the heat deaths and concussions, it looks likely that the disgusting state of the football program at Maryland will take down a whole bunch of people, including the president.

It would appear the Board also believes the AD and President either knew about what was happening with the football program and failed to report it, learned of it and didn’t react accordingly, or simply didn’t do enough to prevent it from happening in the first place.

Of course, you’ve also got the Board of Trustees… Trustees, you know… AKA Regents… They’ll feed us some horseshit about having been kept out of the loop (this narrative plays out so often, there’s a game plan they all use) and, satisfied by the humiliation and possible criminal culpability of the big guys, we’ll let it go.

But mes petites. You and I know that the rah-rah trustees bear just as much responsibility for the abattoir. If any of them have any decency, they will quit the Board.

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

UPDATE: The larger picture.

UD is grateful to a reader for linking her to this Guardian article about university football player deaths. Excerpts:

The sport is needlessly and heedlessly killing athletes…

Athletes are asked to do too much, too fast, for too long, performing workouts that are untethered from both the sport’s demands and basic principles of exercise science. Too many college coaches use offseason workouts as a tool for developing mental and emotional toughness – as a way to inflict physical pain and suffering, the better to push the limits of what their players are willing and able to endure.

… “Pick a stakeholder or constituency group [in college football],” [one observer] says. “I’ve had conversations over and over with them about conditioning and preventing deaths. And it’s not just me. Others have been involved as well. It just hasn’t resonated as a point of priority within the culture, period … Because it happens so often, there gets to be a little bit of acceptance of things…‘Well, football players die of heatstroke. That’s just a risk.’ I’m kind of wondering what body count we’re waiting for before we take some action.”

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

And back to Maryland:

[University of Maryland football player] Jordan McNair died because his humanity was secondary to the egos of the members of the Maryland coaching staff. He died because he was physically abused in the course of what was supposed to be training for the upcoming season. He was a victim of both workplace violence and of domestic abuse.

… The death of Jordan McNair opened up a chamber of horrors for all to see. ESPN’s subsequent reporting has produced tales of almost inhuman abuse under the guise of coaching, and a reckless disregard for the health of the athletes in the name of “coaching.” Players forced to eat until they vomited because coaches thought they were fat. Verbal abuse more suited to the SERE training given to Navy Seals than to young football players in a college weight room. The Maryland football family was an abusive family, like so many others around the country. The essential dynamic is there for all to see. Jordan McNair is the kid who gets beaten to death in the third-floor walk-up after which everybody stands back and wonders how it all happened. They seemed like such a nice family.

**********

UPDATE: Details, kill rate.

You know how many kids NCAA football coaches have killed with conditioning drills in [the last seventeen years]? Twenty-seven. I say “kill,” because that’s what it is, when tyrants force captive young men to run themselves to death, out of their own outdated fears of weakness. Why is the NCAA tolerating this kill rate, which is unmatched at any other level of football?

… Only the NCAA tolerates – and refuses to regulate – unhinged dictators who think football has to be conditioned with sadistic extremes.

“They get to dictate these things, and we get to keep burying athletes until we make definitive changes to the culture,” said Dr. Douglas Casa, a kinesiologist who serves as CEO of the Korey Stringer Institute at the University of Connecticut.

The top-to-toe burka, with its sinister, airless little grille, is more than an instrument of persecution, it is a public tarring and feathering of female sexuality. It transforms any woman into an object of defilement too untouchably disgusting to be seen. It is a garment of lurid sexual suggestiveness: what rampant desire and desirability lurks and leers beneath its dark mysteries? In its objectifying of women, it turns them into cowering creatures demanding and expecting violence and victimisation. Forget cultural sensibilities.

More moderate versions of the garb – the dull, uniform coat to the ground and the plain headscarf – have much the same effect, inspiring the lascivious thoughts they are designed to stifle. What is it about a woman that is so repellently sexual that she must diminish herself into drab uniformity while strolling down Oxford Street one step behind a husband who is kitted out in razor-sharp Armani and gold, pomaded hair and tight bum exposed to lustful eyes? (No letters please from British women who have taken the veil and claim it’s liberating. It is their right in a tolerant society to wear anything including rubber fetishes – but that has nothing to do with the systematic cultural oppression of women with no choice.)

The reference to rubber fetishes in connnection with the burqa is interesting. UD will admit to wondering about the darker jouissance (presumably having to do, as rubber fetishes do, with full-body constraints) possibly in play for some burqa wearers…. As in that “demanding and expecting violence” thing Toynbee touches on…

In a 2015 article with the amusing title Is the Era of Abusive College Coaches Finally Coming to an End? a Sports Illustrated writer totes up the butcher’s bill, to which we have most recently added University of Maryland football player Jordan McNair. “Our [false] conviction that hostility works is encouraged by a culture that makes legendary figures of [Bob] Knight and Steve Jobs,” says the writer, who goes to great lengths to argue that you catch more flies with honey. Maybe he should have held tight until the results of the last presidential election.

Meanwhile, they’re beating the shit out of high school football players too.

[P]ractices [at Grayson High School in Georgia] featured “full-force hitting in shorts.” Although no players were injured this year before the [team walkout over sadistic coaching], they were “concerned for their health heading into the season.”

One parent explained … that concerns have been raised about [the coach] since he took over the program in 2017 because of “multiple ambulance trips for heat-related issues” as well as broken bones and body cramps suffered during practices.

Once the coach is done with you, there’s avoiding anal rape by your teammates. (I’ve linked you to only the latest anal rape story. Google anal rape football and go to town.)

If you survive all that, it’s off to a homicidal fraternity in that big state school that recruited you. And get ready for your new best friend, Richie Incognito!

Concussions? Ha. Concussions are nothing.

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

Oh. The whole does it work or doesn’t it controversy? Way off-point. Look closely, please. Some coaches love violence for itself, the way most human beings do. Look at the game to which coaches devote their lives.

Most human beings won’t kick or kill other people the way some coaches do; they’ll go to violent movies and football games and watch violent porn, etc. Life won’t afford them the opportunity to physically (and psychologically) brutalize actual human beings. Coaches get that opportunity.