In secular France, it would seem,
We all have the right to blaspheme.
If you’re worried that’s gone
Listen up to Macron:
It’s the heart of what makes France supreme.
On a long soggy walk today through Garrett Park, the town I grew up in and moved back to twenty-five years ago, I come upon four police cars and a dump truck. The authorities are once again forcibly removing large abundant junk from the front yard of a man I’ve known since elementary school. Indeed, one of the cops routinely sent out for this abatement procedure is also an old school friend of both mine and the junk guy’s — the police dispatch him hoping a familiar face will make the operation less ugly. Less threatening to the junk guy.
Who, given the complexity of human beings, turns out to be a lot of things besides an angry (KEEP OUT signs are everywhere on the lawn) white male. For decades he’s been the town handyman, circulating in his rusted gray pickup and mowing lawns, repairing machinery, whatever. Although his appearance is a little unnerving – à la late-stage Howard Hughes – he is the soul of sweetness and does much of his work around Garrett Park for free (even though almost everyone here is wealthy). He did quite a bit of raking and mowing for us ten or so years ago and we’re still waiting for the bill.
Garrett Park is a very small town and I’ve known it intimately forever. My old friend Bennett’s mother still lives across the street from the handyman, who helps her out with everything all the time. The house on one side of the junked place burned down a few years ago, and a remarkably large number of townies donated money to get the family in it back on their feet. Rebuilt in a chic woody eco sort of way, it recently sold for about a million dollars, and UD figures the new owners would dearly like to see the end of the handyman.
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And how does ol’ UD, notorious for energetically picking up trash on her walks, feel about this town eyesore, kept by a belligerent old acquaintance?
I always say to Mr UD, “When you get old, everything about you gets worse.” He disagrees, in his pollyannish way; but you know what I mean. The pack rat the junk guy used to be is now, age 65, a mad hoarder, made madder by what he sees as neighborhood and police harassment. When you stand in front of his small house and really contemplate his junk (cars, car parts, mowers, trash cans, plant containers, tables, chairs, rakes, snow shovels, radios, tires, piles of jumper cables, loungers, a trampoline, fake flowers), you perceive the expressivity it represents. None of it is placed arbitrarily. This is an aesthetic gesture — something to do, I guess, with his life work — the gathering up and staging of his accumulation, over many years, of unwanted objects from all of us. We’d walk by its display in MOMA with a shrug.
Ja, ja, of course I want the police to take it away. It makes you laugh, but after the giggle subsides you’re basically appalled. No one should have to look at that.
Like a lot of aesthetic gestures, it has plenty of aggressivity against the world behind it. But it also expresses that thing all of us are desperate to express. I. Exist. Here. This is my private history, my personal truth, my hard-won, hard-salvaged ship.
They never wanted him as president at Jackson State; but students, faculty, and alumni were overruled and had him forced on them, no doubt for many corrupt reasons, this being public education in the state of Mississippi. But of course they were right not to want him, and now, after his arrest for soliciting a prostitute, giving the police a false name, and possessing marijuana, JSU must yet again search for a president. It has had a long string of these; all flame out quickly, though none as dramatically as this latest guy.
This latest guy presents himself in every possible forum as so jesusy there’s no one more jesusy. It’s all God God God God God from this guy; and UD wishes – she really wishes – people would begin to intuit a possible connection between excess jesusism and bein’ bad.
Guns of course are ubiquitous at frats, but they’re an adjunct to the frat’s extensive drug dealing operation (see pages and pages of guns and frats here), or they’re AK-47s that the lads like to photograph themselves holding, or they’re be-well-son-and-take-care-of-yourself goodbye gifts from Maw and Paw as the little guy heads off to school. And of course they’re notoriously handy when suicide is in the air. All routine American gun use.
Real powpowpow, however, has been thin on the ground. Stuff that draws pledge-blood has been… anemic.
Yes, this Oklahoma State guy (an inter-fraternity council secretary)
used a loaded gun to scare two new fraternity recruits. The victims say (Owen) Hossack pointed the gun at their heads and asked if they would take a bullet for their brothers. Then, police say, he fired the gun …
But I mean big deal nobody got hurt and loyalty is an important value…
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See, if you ask UD the omnipresence of guns, alcohol, drugs, teenagers, secret guys-only events, and loyalty tests should mean that America’s budding Stephen Paddocks begin routinely manifesting themselves at our fraternities. By national standards, shooting a gun at two guys’ heads but not killing them is, uh, kid stuff.
On the other hand, there’s evidence that things are escalating to the serious mass shootings UD keeps expecting. New Mexico State University (feast your eyes) is exactly the sort of walking abortion of a school you’d expect to be a first-adopter here, and sure enough they did manage to draw blood at a recent hazing event.
Dozens of students, including Jonathan Sillas, attended the Kappa Sigma fraternity’s initiation event.
As Sillas was leaving, another student, Miguel Altamirano, pulled him to the side and told him to turn around, according to a criminal complaint.
Altamirano pulled out a .40 caliber handgun, held the firearm against Sillas’ leg and pulled the trigger, the complaint states. The bullet went through Sillas’ leg.
Gun-friendly states always use the passive voice. The bullet went through. The shooter did not put the bullet in Sillas’s leg; the bullet decided to go through Sillas’s leg. And note the other thing going on at hazing events: Sadistic tyranny. Pulled him to the side and told him to turn around. Right out of The Story of O. Frat hazing (and sorority hazing) reeks, my dears, of S&M.
Duh. We all know that. It’s about torturing people pathetic enough to be willing to be tortured in order to join your club.
I mean, datz why I keep wondering why no mass killing at Sigma Alpha Epsilon yet! You know they’ve got guns galore, but no one’s gonna confiscate them because that would initiate a massacre of free Americans by the federal government. Little by little, a pledge shooting here and a pledge shooting there, we’re inching toward mass murder at an American university fraternity. Just be patient.
UD (over breakfast): Caroline from across the street asked me the names of various plants in our new garden, and I had to explain that I mainly relied on the landscaper and didn’t know what was there on a … granular … level…. GRANULAR! I think this is the first time I found granular while conversing! It just came out. GRANULAR!!
MR UD: Very nice.
UD: It’s like orthogonal. (Snobby Brit accent:) That matter is orthogonal to the point in question… ORTHOGONAL… Wait. Wasn’t there some hilarious Supreme Court back and forth about orthogonal?
MR UD: ?????
UD (Checks cell phone.) Here it is! (Reads.)
MR. FRIEDMAN: I think that issue is entirely orthogonal to the issue here because the Commonwealth is acknowledging –
CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: I’m sorry. Entirely what?
MR. FRIEDMAN: Orthogonal. Right angle. Unrelated. Irrelevant.
CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: Oh.
JUSTICE SCALIA: What was that adjective? I liked that.
MR. FRIEDMAN: Orthogonal.
CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: Orthogonal.
MR. FRIEDMAN: Right, right.
JUSTICE SCALIA: Orthogonal, ooh.
(Laughter.)
JUSTICE KENNEDY: I knew this case presented us a problem.
(Laughter.)
MR. FRIEDMAN: I should have — I probably should have said –
JUSTICE SCALIA: I think we should use that in the opinion.
(Laughter.)
MR. FRIEDMAN: I thought — I thought I had seen it before.
JUSTICE SCALIA: Or the dissent.
(Laughter.)
Oldest story in the book. Football factory knows a guy is off his rocker violent and the guy has a police record to prove it but the school admits him anyway because it loves him because that beautiful violence wins games.
Love is funny, or it’s sad
Or it’s quiet, or it’s mad
It’s a good thing, or it’s bad
But beautiful…
Beautiful to take a chance
And if you fall, you fall
And I’m thinkin’
I wouldn’t mind at all…
Love is tearful, or it’s gay
It’s a problem, or it’s play
It’s a heartache either way
But beautiful…
And I’m thinkin’ if you were mine
I’d never let you go
And that would be just beautiful I know
Mad and bad but beautiful on the field and who gives a fuck about the women who go to school there.
A hedge fund investor named Hodge
Had dummies he had to massage
To get into schools
That weren’t even cool
And now he is locked in une cage
… (see post just below this one) — way to kill your kid.
She has a bunch of other kids. If the state has any function at all, it is to remove innocents from depraved caretakers. Take them away.
“Shamima Begum should not be banished – banishing people belongs in the dark ages, not 21st-century Britain,” complains a person who thinks keeping Begum – a veteran ISIS member – out of England is a bad idea. But the British courts have now ruled unanimously that she can’t come back; she has a right to Bangladeshi citizenship, they point out, and should go and claim it. That ain’t banishment.
And anyway – England’s full of sharia law councils, and their decisions are way dark ages — at least for women! The more power England gives sharia courts, the darker the ages right in your own home town, hon. So no lecturing us about 21st-century Britain. To be sure, we ain’t in the ninth century – the century in which Begum opted to live – but, as the Council of Europe notes, we’re definitely backsliding.
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UPDATE: And here’s how not to argue that Begum belongs back in England. Let’s take a close look at Aina Khan’s argument.
Headline: Shamima Begum is a product of Britain. She should face justice here.
What’s the logic of this? In an ecstasy of violence Begum repudiated England and joined the Islamic State. Just because the origins she rejected were British, she has to be tried in Britain? No. No reasonable trial can in any case be conducted, since no records exist of her activities in ISIS territory.
She’s a victim of child grooming by a death cult. And her banishment tells all ethnic minorities that they’re not seen as fully British.
Who says? Pure speculation, the bit about grooming. I mean, so she was a teenager. That doesn’t mean she was, in Khan’s word, “naive.” Richard Loeb was 18 when he murdered Bobby Franks. He wasn’t treated like a naive victim of grooming. The bit about her fate sealing the dire fate of all ethnic minorities in famously tolerant Britain is just bullshit. Fear mongering.
Khan says the public was “dismayed” when in an interview Begum boasted of feeling nothing when she saw severed heads. Let’s look at some sentences from the Cambridge Dictionary which use the word dismay.
She discovered, to her dismay, that she had locked her keys inside her car.
They enjoyed the meal but were dismayed by how much it cost.
She discovered, to her dismay, that her exam was a whole month earlier than she’d expected.
We discovered, to our dismay, that the ISIS member was fine with severed heads.
Last one doesn’t quite work, does it? Not quite strong enough.
[W]e need to know why a straight-A teenager from east London would willingly leave Britain to embrace a death cult.
Richard Loeb was a brilliant, straight-A teenager at the University of Chicago. Like straight-A Shamima, he felt great curiosity about/attraction to sadistically killing people. Smart doesn’t necessarily make you a good person, does it? Is it possible Aina Khan doesn’t know this? Is it also possible she’s unaware of the contradiction involved in arguing that Begum was super-smart and au même moment so sub-basement stupid as to find an ISIS come-on irresistibly seductive? Weawy?
The rest of her opinion piece is more insistence that the Begum precedent means that if Khan, as a minority, jaywalks, she could be sent back to the country where her grandparents were born. Gevalt.
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It gets worse. At least Khan bothers arguing her case. This dude doesn’t even try. Way to come across like a scolding, arrogant, elitist.
… I’ll just rerun this post from 2015.
I’ll also point you here.
And I’ll ask you, as you review footage of the latest brawl, to notice that there is virtually no one in the stands.
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UD thanks tp.
The decision [at one university] includes the entire female academic staff, in addition to the medical staff and nurses who… teach classes and… lecture.
The decision was taken “based on a recent court ruling by Egypt’s Supreme Administrative Court and following reports presented by managers of the university’s teaching hospitals and deans of faculties who claimed they frequently received complaints from students against having to deal with fully veiled female members of staff or workers at the university,” Ain Shams University President Mahmoud al-Metiny said in a statement.
He stressed that the decision was also made to ensure the rights of patients, and for the best interest of university work.
Let’s unswaddle that highlighted bit, okay? Frequent complaints from students about “having to deal with fully veiled…”
Naughty Islamophobes. Boo.
Okay, let’s move on and try to understand what possible objection people trying to learn things might have to invisible professors inside fanatics’ clothing. Or to doctors and nurses they can’t see. Hm… hm…
The Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch is one thing; blessing nuclear subs another.
Russian priests have long appeared in images sprinkling holy water on submarines, ballistic missiles, Soyuz space rockets and other pieces of hardware …
Reminds Mr UD of the Corpus Christi story.
