Sonny?

…..

Sonny Boy? ….

…formal sculpture comes.

Purdue sits ceremonious, a tomb –-

Beyond whose rich and gilded door

Lie dead and dying customers — a score

Whew! Long list. At least the world’s largest democracy hasn’t forgotten to keep its women terrified and enslaved.

With today’s Dutch burqa ban, Europe collectively asserts a vision of civic life, personal freedom, and gender equality which our country will want to examine as it faces its own eventual reckoning with the burqa. Most European countries now have partial or full bans, and of course many other countries, in other regions, also ban it.

As UD predicted, bans are now coming so fast and furious that organizations opposed to them aren’t even bothering to issue their boilerplate about religion or personal choice or extremely peculiar philosophies of liberation or whatever the hell they think they are dealing with. Instead one ban after another flies by without complaint, and as they do girls and women smothered by cruel ideologies begin to have a fighting chance to get out from under.

In the matter of the more than ordinarily mysterious suicide of the young (he was only 21) Washington State University hero quarterback, most people are talking about the recent autopsy finding that Hilinski already showed CTE. He had the brain of a sixty-five year old, the doctors said.

Which means scads of university football players in their twenties are probably running around with some degree of CTE. Hilinski after all was a quarterback, a position which typically receives less cerebral punishment than many others.

Et alors? Virtually no one in this country cares; they love football too desperately to give much notice to the early gruesome deaths of their gridiron heroes. People only noticed Hilinski because he wasn’t a mentally eviscerated former pro in his sixties, but still a kid. Same age as Owen Thomas.

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

No, ol’ UD is more struck by Hilinski’s father’s comment up there in my headline. Hilinski’s father thinks it’s pretty fucking weird that his kid’s buddies in the dorm had an AR-15 style rifle. Handy, simple, 110% deadly – just the thing for an impulsively self-destructive guy who’d barely hit legal drinking age. (Almost all very young suicides are impulsive.) Hilinski had never handled a gun, but his clueless buddies were happy to give him some pointers, shortly after which he stole the AR-15 and – with this powerful weapon of war – blew his brains out. An incredibly violent bloody suicide, this one.

“We’re always going to have suicide,” [one researcher says,] “and there’s probably not that much to be done for the ones who are determined, who succeed on their 4th or 5th or 25th try. The ones we have a good chance of saving are those who, right now, succeed on their first attempt because of the lethal methods they’ve chosen.” … The element of impulsivity in firearm suicide means that it is a method in which mechanical intervention — or “means restriction” — might work to great effect.

Hilinski’s father’s intuition is absolutely correct; had his son’s demise been more difficult and less absolutely certain than a firearms death, things might have turned out differently.

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

It looks as though no one in any way saw Hilinski’s appalling act coming. His suicide note, which will not be released, apparently revealed little or nothing of his motive (UD‘s going to guess that this means its content was pretty short and simple: Goodbye. Sorry.). FWIW, here’s a possible scenario.

Always very strong and healthy, he had begun to experience troubling symptoms: Some mental confusion, maybe some occasional trembling in his hands. Given his lifelong intense devotion to football, this would have panicked and horrified him and made him wonder about his future in the sport, not to mention the future of his general health.

Further, plenty of people who knew him have commented that he exhibited the macho stoicism typical of football guys: If you’re suffering, you don’t tell anyone.

Throwing a convenient big ol’ killing machine into that mix is just asking for it.

Too much of nothing, or too much of less than nothing: However you slice it, intellectual life at your basic jockshop is, er, a bit off.

Courtesy of Charlie, a reader, there’s this local yokel update on Oklahoma University, long ruled by Gotta Love Em! David Boren, and absolutely drowning in sports revenue..

But now they’ve got a new president, and he seems to have decided that the next step is to move toward creating an actual university on the campus, where “OU is bleeding money while Sooner athletics swims in it.”

Bleeding how much, you ask? After all, the more successful the front porch of the American university, the more successful the university, and it doesn’t come more successful than OU’s athletic programs, so OU must be…

One billion dollars in debt.

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

The yokel struggles with this. How can it be? His final line says it all:

We will wait and see what [this spectacular disparity] means, but it would seem to mean something.

I think we can do better than that. I think we can specify quite precisely what it means. It means OU is a football team with some sort of shabby deadbeat school attached to it somewhere. It means that, as a witty long-ago OU president once said of his school, “We want to build a university our football team can be proud of.”

But we don’t really want to, or at least David Boren didn’t want to. He wanted to soak his students for higher and higher tuition, and deny raises to his faculty, while paying top dollar – over the top – to coaches and their minions. Even as OU’s new president began making noises about how this wasn’t a great way to run a university, OU announced they’d just given the football coach a $1.7 million raise.

The only word for it is surrealistic: “[A]s the academic side of the institution finds itself in dire straits, Sooner sports sits pretty.” Academically, although OU designates itself a university, there’s no there there. The whole place is football. And if you think you can reverse that winning, nothing-but-football record, you’re nuts. The new president is about to discover what the word “culture” — make that cult – means.

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

And then there’s also massively indebted Rutgers – though here the debt in question is athletics itself. Rutgers economics professor Mark Killingsworth, after immense efforts to uncover the actual numbers from a most unforthcoming university, concludes that

the real deficit for 2016-17 … comes to a total of $35.4 million plus $11.9 million, or $47.3 million — the largest deficit in the history of Rutgers athletics. Despite [President Robert] Barchi’s oft-expressed pious hopes for athletics self-sufficiency, the program has now blown through a grand total of $193.1 million in deficit spending since he arrived in New Brunswick.

Killingsworth concludes by stating the obvious – obvious to everyone but the president and trustees of Rutgers:

[A]thletics deficits take money that could have been spent on academics, and shamelessly raise fees and costs for students.

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

Rich jockshop; poor jockshop. Don’t make no never mind.

This morning’s walk took UD to
the United States Botanic Garden

where she took this picture of the
Capitol dome framed by a palm tree.

… has died. UD thanks Van, a reader, for telling her. She will expand this post with some comments on Hall.

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

Donald Hall loped through poems, rather like the laconic farmer he was, loping through fields of New Hampshire hay. His strongest emotions appear in the volume Without, an extended effort to understand his condition of rage and loss after the leukemia and death of his wife, the poet Jane Kenyon (“pain vomit neuropathy morphine nightmare”), but this condition of being too overwhelmed for tempering commas and capitals does not produce his best poetry, UD thinks. His strength was in all that laconic loping through life, in an earthy egoistic uprightness that kept him going until 89. In his calm long stretchy verbal reach, he was the anti-Rilke.

He was most himself in poems like “Closings,” in which he brought his characteristic precise observation, empathy, and conversational simplicity to the violent suicide of a close friend and fellow poet, Liam Rector. In nine stanzas of short-lined free verse, he moves from Rector’s flamboyant physical appearance (“Liam the dandy/ loved Brooks Brothers shirts, double-breasted / suits, bespoke shoes, and linen jackets.”) to his membership in the community of too-soon-dead poets (“T.S. Eliot turned old and frail at sixty, pale, preparing for death. / Then poets of new generations / died — Frank O’Hara first, then Jim Wright / with throat cancer in a Bronx hospice, / Sylvia Plath beside the oven, / Thom Gunn of an overdose…”), to memories, now that Rector’s life has “closed,” of his very open intensity during most of his life (“erupting with gusto / as he improvised his outrageous, / cheerful, inventive obscenities.”).

As he moves toward the end of his in memoriam, Hall notes that when Hall became an important cultural voice in America, Rector sent him a list of projects he might undertake, including

“Urge poets to commit suicide.”
His whole life he spoke of suicide
lightly …

Lightly, and like a lot of people who get very debilitatingly sick, practically. It was a solution to intolerability.

Hall closes where he opened, with Rector’s flamboyance – a flamboyance he expressed to the very end, dandily dressed and dancing with his wife.

[O]n August fifteenth Liam pulled
the shotgun’s trigger. The night before,
wearing a tux over a yellow
silk shirt, he danced with Tree once again,
before bed and the morning’s murder.
He left Tree alone and desolate
but without anger. Tree knew Liam
did what he planned and needed to do.

It is a blunt and matter-of-fact conclusion to a poem that urges, in the case of suicides like this one, an acceptance of the integrity of the choice.

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

And by the way, all you have to do is read Rector’s wonderful “This Summer” to see why he and Hall were buddies. There’s the laconic morbid material:

I roar out of the Farber Clinic

in the silver sports car I sport
during this debacle…

Sport/debacle: great stuff. You see Rector jauntily/dreadfully keeping his head above water through the worst… He smokes tons of marijuana through chemo and radiation, and praises it highly – lightens the pain, clarifies things. The praise brings on several stanzas of unabashed delight at the memory of his hippie summers of love past – the joints, the music – and somehow the awareness that he delightedly lived that free life makes death okay.

This summer
I have conversed with death every minute

and found out I have the talent
to submit, to leave, even to flee…

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

In a wonderful phrase, he describes his existence as

a late century life afloat on a sea of loans.

And then he ends the poem brilliantly, hilariously, with his sixteen year old daughter’s prim dismissal of the drug that has meant as much to him in his youthful exultation as in his aging agony:

[I] hear over the telephone my sixteen-year-old
daughter in Virginia saying she now thinks

she will never ever smoke marijuana
because it is, after all,
just another “gateway drug.”

This is laugh out loud stuff if you ask old UD; and since Rector has, earlier in the poem, written about the gates of heaven —

I think I may die without god,
my single comic integrity

that I have remained
an atheist in the foxhole,
though I am ready

to roar through the gates
if there are gates.

— we get the terrific payoff of those two kinds of gates – one doubted, profound, mysterious, beckoning; the other flat as a pancake.

Sing it, Donovan.

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

They will bring haredim in a bag
They will take off late with the pious blind
And apart from that they’ll be so kind
In consenting to blow your mind.

Fly El Al Airways, get you there past time.
Fly El Al Airways, get you there past time.

They will force favors from the ladies
The hours will pass in excellent style
“Would you please move your stinking impiety
To the section of unclean aisles?”

Fly El Al Airways, get you there past time.
Fly El Al Airways, get you there past time.

They will bring joy to criminal bigots
And sorrow to law-abiding women
Who, disgraced, degraded, finally give in
For the sake of other passengers
Who sit for hours while El Al assholes
And haredi assholes scream at each other.

Well, if you read this blog’s coverage of Washington State University, you’re not as surprised as this New York Times columnist. Because you would never call jockshop WSU an institution of higher learning.

Leach talks like someone who can see the fading, wavy outlines of the system he wants to criticize, but because he doesn’t understand where he lies within this political conversation, he mostly comes up with nothing but empty words and sentences. He’s woefully and painfully undereducated on the topics that are upsetting him, and seems confused about what kind of conversation he even wants to have.

And that’s why he’s the highest paid person at a major public American university!

Leach’s own ideology is hard to pin down because he doesn’t really know what he’s talking about; his four-hour Twitter rant and response in this Q&A mostly come down to denial and steering things back towards himself. It’s all honestly impossible to parse, because there’s mostly nothing there.

In other words, a spectacular model for our students!

Background on Leach here.

… UD catches sight, for the hundredth thrilling time, of the New York skyline from her Northeast Regional.

She’s spending three days in Boston. Blogging continues throughout.

Viva Lezhneva.

… their massively overcompensated, violent, nutso football coach – the Roseanne Barr of the Gridiron – blasts out a hoax tweet, is informed it’s a hoax, and tells everyone who told him it was a hoax to fuck themselves.

[A doctored video] has been circulating for about four years among extreme right-wing conspiracy theorists; [it] splices elements of a speech [President] Obama gave in Belgium in 2014. The words are edited to make it seem like Obama told a European audience that “Ordinary men and women are too small-minded to govern their own affairs, that order and progress can only come when individuals surrender their rights to an all-powerful sovereign.”

In fact, as the unedited video and transcript of the speech shows, Obama was saying the exact opposite, discussing two visions of power in the world and arguing that authoritarianism was a threat to the international order.

Actually, the version where Obama’s saying the opposite is also doctored. Here is the actual original, from a speech Baylor president Ken Starr gave at Baylor when the rape scandal broke under coach Art Briles:

American universities are too intellectual to win football games; athletic victory can only come when professors surrender their rights to mentally retarded football coaches.

But giving the stupidest person in the state the state’s highest salary is only Step One.

The winning coach must also be a moral cretin, happy to recruit so many bad actors that WSU football boasts more arrests than any other team (here’s a loving defense of the goofy adorable lads).

He must be embroiled in endless expensive lawsuits against his former university football employers so that his current employer is afraid to fire him (lawsuits and buyouts and bad publicity oh my!).

Did I say afraid? Unable.

… Leach’s newly signed five-year, $20 million [WSU] contract means they have no power to coach up their head man on anything and have no financial resources to buy him out if push came to shove — which it most certainly would if they tried to rein in The Prickly One. Moreover … this episode ensures that no other Power 5 school would consider hiring Leach away.

He must contribute to the school’s already appalling overall deficit by adding a $67 million athletics deficit.

He must, ideally, be the foreman at so demoralized a football factory that students must lecture professors, at the end of every semester, on their responsibility to give them final exams.

He must coach at a school that responds to massive sports scandals by appointing new presidents who can say huh? Dunno. Just got here.

And if you’re Leach’s Washington State, which happily scooped up the notoriously mad bad Leach cuz it doesn’t give a shit about anything except football (even sportswhore Texas Tech fired Leach after he tortured a player), you’re going to show your keen sense of irony by hiring a new leader whose main life accomplishment is this:

President [Kirk] Schulz chaired the NCAA board of governors, the NCAA’s highest-ranking committee, from 2014-2016. The board ensures that each division of the NCAA operates consistently within the basic purposes, fundamental policies, and general principles of the association.

When UD read that, she almost peed herself laughing.

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

Commentary coming in, and as usual Deadspin’s got some of the best:

[The] irony of a guy whose entire career has been spent at the public trough JAQing off about government power is a thing of beauty.

This one has a country music song twang to it:

[H]e’s every aging white moron …

(Mammas, don’t let your babies grow up to be…)

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

Sing it, Carly.

The concussed player you left in your office
The sound of you tormenting the kids
The look in your eyes like a nutcase
Your moronic conspiracy vid

Guess it’s our fault what you brought us
Our reputation’s dead on the floor
Why does your ghost still haunt me?
Cuz I can’t get rid of you no more

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

Another Deadspin winner.

I think we can all agree that tweeting racist memes about our first black President is an excellent way to recruit black athletes.

… learns the hard way that sliming good people for fun and profit can really cost you.

SPLC Pays $3.3 Million Settlement to Counter-Extremism Group It Called ‘Anti-Muslim’

The Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors hate groups, has apologized for including the Quilliam Foundation, a counter-extremism group, and its founder, Maajid Nawaz, in its Field Guide to Anti-Muslim Extremists.

Background here.

… caliber.