Spencer’s Fair Queen

More than most, Fair’s full of the living fire,
Kindled within to make the nazi feare:
No feare of noise to make while he perspires,
Not loath to spit upon his training gear.
Through your disdain blindsided guest
Denies his name and utters not a sound.
But you will not allow mad minds to rest
In fascist hopes on race war futures bound.
You stop his thoughts and pinion him within,
You stop his tongue, and teach his gym to freake,
You quick’n the storme his passion did begin,
Strong through your cause as you your vengeance wreake.
Dark is the world, where your rage shined never;
Sad is he borne, that may behold you ever.

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

“In 1932, some German people were probably saying between bites of wiener-schnitzel, ‘this is some fucked up shit,’ and then didn’t do anything.”

Christine Fair

… when big ol’ macho men accused of plagiarizing counterattack. Rand Paul drew himself up to his full Randian height and spat the following out to the “hacks and haters” who exposed him:

“I take it as an insult, and I will not lie down and say people can call me dishonest, misleading or misrepresenting — I have never intentionally done so and like I say, ‘If dueling were legal in Kentucky, if they keep it up, you know it’d be a duel challenge.’”

Here he is in all his finery up against Rachel Maddow. (Gets a little gross at the end.)

But now there’s David Clarke, and you just know this dude is also going to challenge someone to a duel.

So far he’s only done ye olde it’s a political smear thing. UD predicts his next move will up the ante and thrill her right down to the ground.

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

UPDATE: YES!! Calls guy who outed him a “sleaze bag.”

Things are coming along nicely, and UD pants for Clarke, like Rand Paul, to upgrade to direct threats.

Could Clarke take it one step further than Paul’s mere fantasies about duels? Be still my heart…

… for awhile. Blogging
continues throughout.

Abolition is the only answer. All social fraternities — alongside the sycophantic sorority life that they exploit — must go. They must go permanently and forever, at Penn [State] and everywhere else. Reform is simply not possible.

… Reform is not possible because the old-line, historically white social fraternities have been synonymous with risk-taking and defiance from their very inception. They are a brotherhood born in mutiny and forged in the fire of rebellion. These fraternities have drink, danger and debauchery in their blood — right alongside secrecy and self-protection.

They cannot reform.

Abolition is “… impossible,” [people] say, their [incredulous] faces a testament to the power fraternity men still wield.

Fraternities may no longer decide who’s in the yearbook, but they still exert control. The proof is in the knee-jerk insistence that they are too formidable to fight. But we must push through this sense of impossibility. What happened to Timothy Piazza was a predictable tragedy, and there will be more unless we end Greek life for good. I make no claims that it will be easy. Fraternities have dominated campuses, defied authorities and rebuffed efforts at suppression for nearly 200 years. But in that time we have ended slavery, given women the vote and put men on the moon. Of course we can get rid of fraternities. College presidents, administrators and trustees just have to muster the will to do it. As for the rest of us, we need to keep pressure on them to do so, and keep counting the bodies until they act.

She’s right that abolition is the only answer. With some exceptions, frats are utterly lawless and defiant and cannot be controlled.

But I’m afraid she’s wrong that we can push through and make presidents, administrators and trustees — many of them rah-rah frat/sorority people — shut them down. First of all, there are large swathes of universities in this country – many of them our big public institutions – that are little more than fraternities and variations on fraternities (athletes are of course one of the variations; as are still almost entirely male groups of trustees, etc., etc.). On-campus or off, formal or informal, male cults and the – what was the word? – sycophantic sororities they exploit are these universities. Abolish the raison d’être of your institution and watch everyone apply to another school.

The second reason is one I noted in an earlier post. The character formation generated by fraternities – cynical, hypocritical, conscienceless, sadistic, status-obsessed, rigidly loyal to the group – is precisely tailored to the American hedge fund. We couldn’t have Bernard Madoff, Dick Fuld, T. Boone Pickens, and Steve Cohen without them.

Well. That’s refreshing. A French academic admits that there are women in countries like France and Austria (Austria just joined the long list of counties banning the burqa) forced – forced – to wear a burqa in order to leave their house.

Now I ask you. Is that a nice thing for a democracy? That women are treated like that?

UD also likes the way the article’s writer rapidly softens what Alouane just said. Haha those pesky “more traditional” families – not flat-out traditional, not that, but just, like, more traditional than other French and Austrian families… Wouldn’t want to get anywhere near a word like reactionary for a man who forces his wife to cover her mouth and her eyes and every digit on her hands before she can go outside. No it’s just one of many diverse traditions, like female genital mutilation. And although Alouane clearly says “forced,” our cleanup crew hastens to use the word “reluctant”…

Sooooo… The argument here is that we should oppose burqa bans because the men who are currently threatening their wives with violence if they don’t wear them will, under the ban, threaten them with violence if they go out of the house at all.

Great headline. The piece is pretty good too.

Scathing Online Schoolmarm sees it all the time: When people find their beloved institution – with which they strongly identify themselves – in the swill, they defend it by turning on their grandest, haughtiest, most auspicious, rhetoric. Our Glorious Penn State is a Bright and Shining Light! We must do battle with the barbarians who distort the record of our heroic coaches! That sort of thing.

The problem is that this approach makes you look like Blanche DuBois defending her virtue and rhapsodizing about Belle Reve.

Grand and glorious Baylor University has fallen on hard times. It sold its soul to football victory at any cost (just like Penn State) and is currently, er, reaping the whirlwind. There’s a new gang rape allegation almost every week. What to do? What to say?

Well, this is what people are saying. Many people are saying that Baylor is a solid candidate for the death penalty. Some say the regents should resign. Some say Baylor should be kicked out of its conference. Some say withhold federal funds. Here’s a typical comment:

Shelving the football program for a few years would send a needed message in college athletics that enabling criminal behavior for the sake of maintaining a program’s national ranking and economic power won’t be tolerated.

And then there’s C. Stephen Evans, a Baylor professor who grandly implores people in and around Baylor to shut up.

I implore those continually criticizing Baylor in a public way to cease and desist. You are doing serious damage to Baylor’s reputation and demoralizing those of us who work to make Baylor a great place for students. Perhaps those of you who are not on campus every day do not realize how dispiriting it is to read such diatribes in the daily paper several times a week.

The reason this sort of writing makes you a laughingstock is that now everyone knows precisely how great a place Baylor has been for students.

[A] student-athlete told her coach that five football players had raped her at an off-campus party. The coach then took a list of names to [football coach Art] Briles, who said, “Those are some bad dudes. Why was she around those guys?”

Baylor’s the kind of place where students need to know before they get there that there are bad dudes on the football team and that it is the student’s responsibility to stay out of their way. There’s Belle Reve, and there’s reality. That’s the Baylor reality.

Critics of Baylor’s criminal disregard of its students are not doing damage to Baylor’s reputation. The regents, the president, the people with power at Baylor who paid Art Briles six million dollars a year to protect very dangerous people who could catch footballs did the damage.

Ο stars:  No sense of humor; no grasp of free speech.

When the Dallas News even bothers posing the death penalty question for Baylor University, you know fans of the Baylor Rapists are allowing themselves to wonder whether their football heroes really deserve their full measure of devotion. “If there was ever a case that warranted a college football program getting the death penalty, this sure is it,” says one sports site in response the latest team-bonding-gang-rape-on-film allegation. Did the lads even stage dog fights? Did they drug the women?

Oh, pish. Not to worry. I defy you to conjure a scenario that would draw a serious NCAA penalty of any sort. Let alone the death penalty. Cuz we just love our brain-battered boys to death.

Veteran UD readers know that UD finds in her favorite play, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, many lines and sentiments applicable to current university events, and that one up there, about abomination awards, went through my mind when I read of the latest exploits of that most abominable American campus, Chico State.

One of its fraternities went to a national forest and as part of its hazing procedure cut down 32 trees.

This is the sort of thing that raises everyone’s game. Any fraternity can make a vulnerable young person, eager for acceptance, drink himself to death. It takes genius to realize that there’s a whole world of vulnerable nature out there too.

Animals? Fraternities have been torturing animals since forever. But unless UD is mistaken, chopping down a national forest is – well – the cutting edge.

When new campus abomination awards are handed out, Chico State University almost always gets them.

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

Sustainable Chico! Making room for new trees in our national forests!

Found a cicada shell on the front
steps last week. And now, a cicada.

So say lots of people today, with the double whammy of the Baruch College and the Penn State death squads. Turns out “fraternities … embody some of the worst behaviors of American men.”

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

Nothing like ridding ourselves of them will happen. Ever. Nothing remotely like ridding ourselves of them will happen. Fraternities are structural to American capitalism. Fraternities are where boys get psychopathologized in ways useful to Goldman Sachs. Frats are where youthful “superficial charm, conning, and manipulative behavior, lack of empathy and remorse, and a willingness to take risks” is matured and deepened in a communal setting. Watch Last Days of Lehman Brothers. (That’s brothers, see.). Crash Kappa Beta Phi’s drag show. Frat culture’s ultimate reward, in our time, is the American presidency. We won’t get rid of fraternities because fraternities is us.

… on UD‘s lawn.

UD was patting down some mulch
when along came a snake.

Inches from the door, a
wren has built its nest
in some potted ferns.

UD has watched it collect
moss for its nest from our
topiary bulls full of sphagnum.

Wrens don’t mind our interrupting
them all the time; they seem to
like people. And along with a
handy nest-building material nearby,
there’s a water-source very close.