Things have taken a sinister turn at Boston College, where despite raking in huge yearly sums simply by being in a big-time league, the entire university, starting with its president, is suffering from ACCedia – the dark night of the soul in the Atlantic Coast Conference.

Unlike its sister affliction, acedia, which refers to a “gradual indifference to the faith,” ACCedia involves a gradual indifference to being a fan. The money’s still coming in, the games are still being staged, but no one cares, and almost no one shows up in the stands.

Allow UD to draw from her years of experience writing about university football and basketball in order to suggest some reasons for this strange turn of events.

The big glaring reason is this one: You’re either willing to give your full soul over to football, or you are not. You’re either fully committed to your completion percentage, or you are not. You’re either willing to spend most of your school’s money on athletics, admit academically unqualified players, and wrest all control over sports decisions from the school’s president, or you are not. Boston College languishes in a limbo of less than thorough football fervency.

To be sure, BC is doing some things right: It has appointed as the highest-paid person at a Catholic college a man whose every other word, on national television, is fuck. “[The football coach’s] profane sideline behavior [was] most damaging [during] a nationally televised loss to Notre Dame at Fenway Park, first when a camera focused on Addazio shouting the F-word, then when he received an unsportsmanlike conduct penalty for berating the officials.” You want a Christian role model at the very top, a signal lesson in how to behave if you want to earn the lord’s rewards, and Steve Addazio fits the bill.

And you want to schedule hard-hitting games.

In one of BC’s most embarrassing episodes last season, the Eagles defeated a stunningly inferior team from Howard University, 76-0, the game shortened by 10 minutes because of the mismatch.

That’s the kind of gladiatorial combat that puts butts in seats. Another way Addazio is earning his money.

But utter spiritual alignment with football does not end here. “God does not want you for a fair-weather friend,” as Marilla says to Anne at Green Gables farm, and the Boston College community has not yet learned this lesson. Being a fan is not merely about cheering on wins; it is about cheering on losses as well. If you cannot maintain enthusiastic faith in a team that loses most of its games, you are demonstrating a fundamental incapacity to perceive the divinity of sport.

The solution must begin in the soul – the collective soul of Boston College. UD suspects, for instance, an insufficiency of gridiron liturgy during public worship at BC. At every possible point during the mass and other sacred occasions, football (and basketball, if there’s time) should be invoked. BC has much to learn from Notre Dame here. And from Florida State.

The word of the day is “thuggery.”

Check Google News and you’ll see that large numbers of journalists, cultural observers, and opinion columnists are using it to describe Donald Trump, and in particular the violence he’s whipping up at his rallies.

So how did the conservative movement turn into thuggery?

I

Then out of his big triplex snuggery
Crawled America’s captain of thuggery.

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

UD‘s talented readers have augmented the uggery. (SOS has done some very light editing.)

IV

His fans, full of loutery and luggery,
Meet the oppo with to-the-nose sluggery.

V

Our UD for this deserves huggery.
Trump no more can flaunt out all his smuggery.

… she took a copy of The God Delusion from her niece’s shelves – a little light reading for her train trip.

As it happens, she hasn’t yet glanced at it, even though we’re now pulling away from New York City. She has put it on her shared table – something to stick her tickets in.

And as we leave Penn Station, here come two young priests (one of whom has just crossed himself as we pick up speed) who ask if they can join UD‘s table.

“Sure,” says UD, “as long as you don’t mind my book.”

One of them looks at it, laughs, and sits down next to UD.

“As long as you,” he says, “don’t mind sitting next to someone delusional.”

As pants Ann Hart for extra green
Beyond her package here
So longs her soul for U DeVry
And its free bucks so dear.

For Thee, DeVry, her living God,
Her thirsty soul doth pine;
Oh when shall she behold her check
Thou Majesty Divine?

Why restless, why cast down, Ms Hart?
O let your critics rant;
For thou shalt sing the praise of Them
The bills for which you pant.

Capella, Phoenix, and DeVry
The Gods whom you adore,
Be glory as it was, is now,
And shall be evermore.

Where UD has gummed
up the works by ordering a
ton of salads and baked goods
(at this hour of the morning
you’re only supposed to order
a brioche). UD loves to walk
cluelessly around cities on
sunny mornings, picking up
goodies as she goes.

… but you have to admit that, given the context, it’s pretty brilliant.

MP Amna Nosseir, professor of comparative jurisprudence at [Egypt’s] Al-Azhar University, who has backed [a niqab] ban, said that wearing the [full face] veil is not a requirement of Islam and in fact has non-Islamic origins. She has argued that it is a Jewish tradition…

Whatever works.

… to be with her relative who’s recovering from surgery. She will blog all along the way. She will in particular try to say something meaningful about professors who say outrageous things and professors who say outrageous things.

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

Somewhere north of Philly. I seem to have said what I wanted to say in this post’s comment thread.

Uterus transplant.

Jonathan Chait writes:

Trump has … exposed [a] deep insecurity among right-wing intellectuals: the fear that their movement appeals to rubes. The conservative movement’s tightening grip over the Republican Party has coincided with its elevation of leaders incapable of explaining their policies cogently. Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, and Sarah Palin all drew the disdain of liberal elites for their reliance on simplistic aphorisms and poor grasp of detail, humiliating conservative intellectuals, who defended the keen minds of their heroes. Whether or not Donald Trump the human being is intelligent, there’s no question that “Donald Trump,” presidential candidate, is not. His entire campaign operates well below the level of rational thought — it’s all boasting, absurd promises, repetitive sloganeering, and abuse. Just as email scammers intentionally salt their messages with typos in order to weed out anyone educated enough to see through their swindle, allowing them to focus on the most gullible, Trump seems to consciously repel anyone possessed of a brain.

It has indeed been strange, over the years, for UD to read impassioned defenses of people like Sarah Palin from people like Joseph Epstein:

Here is a woman raising five children who is able not only to have an active hand in the life of her community but actually win the highest political office in her state. As the governor of Alaska, moreover, she took on the corrupt elements in her own party, which requires courage …

Once a Northwestern University literature professor, once editor of American Scholar, Epstein of all contemporary essayists has prided himself on his own high literacy and his championing of only the most cogent and brilliant of writers (Henry James in particular). It was remarkable to UD — who knew Epstein when she attended Northwestern and found him as scrupulous a speaker, writer, and cultural critic as most of his published work suggests — it was remarkable to find him, in 2008, employing his pellucid writing in service to Palin.

If the founder of Trump University becomes the Republican nominee, as seems likely, it will be interesting to see which Epsteins step up to spend their intellectual capital on him.

The reporter tells the story straight, without a hint of irony: Football and basketball success has created a $1.2 million deficit for the obscure, already-struggling, school. SOU didn’t figure their teams would actually win games; it has no reserve fund; it overlooked the fact that almost no one buys tickets to its games; and it seems to have forgotten to budget for team travel. SOU also forgot that the school is located in a state whose constant economic turmoil means constant cutbacks at its public universities. Whoops!

No, no irony detectable in this article about it from a local booster rag; and certainly no derision, which is abundantly deserved…

Paging Bernie: How are you planning to sell America on your free public university tuition plan when this is the way public universities spend our money?

Will the New York Times take action against the plagiarist?

No.

Why not?

Well, if you ask ol’ UD (she’s grateful to a number of readers who have linked her to this innovative form of plagiarism), the whole thing’s just too measly. Pursuing a lawsuit about crossword puzzles would be like crossword puzzles themselves:

1 ACROSS: SEVEN LETTERS, OF LITTLE IMPORTANCE
1 DOWN: PHRASE, ELEVEN LETTERS, THREE WORDS, POOR USE OF ONE’S MORNING

Trump-Hitler Roundup: Here’s Who Compared Donald Trump to Hitler This Weekend

… becomes a serious
kick boxer.

All UD
can think about,
looking at her
done up like
this, is how
much we spent
on her teeth.

“I’ve gone door to door,” said Marshall Cohen, the campaign manager for Jamie Raskin, the state senator, “and people ask, ‘What’s your cash on hand?’ ”

Scathing Online Schoolmarm says: When you’ve been saving up a lot of anger, and you want to spend it stylishly and well, listing is your best friend. Listing allows a writer to organize and compress her many grievances instead of spewing them about and making herself, like Sarah Palin, an object of satire.

Listing makes you look rational, and your grievances plausible. Inside you’re raging, but your calm and systematic prose suggests that your rage is not composed of inchoate superficial and personal stuff; rather, what’s bugging you amounts to a coherent indictment of something real, with large and shared implications.

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

Consider some introductory paragraphs from David Remnick’s recent New Yorker piece on Trump. SOS will highlight each list.

It was all so funny once. For a long time, Trump, with his twenty-four-karat skyscrapers, his interesting hair, and his extra-classy airline, was a leading feature of the New York egoscape. The editors of the satirical monthly Spy covered him with the same obsessive attention that Field & Stream pays to the rainbow trout. Trump never failed to provide; he was everywhere, commandeering a corner at a professional wrestling match, buying the Miss Universe franchise and vowing smaller bathing suits and higher heels. You could watch him humiliate supplicants on “The Apprentice” and hear him on “The Howard Stern Show” gallantly describing the mystery of Melania’s bowel movements (“I’ve never seen anything — it’s amazing”) and announcing that, “without even hesitation,” he would have had sex with Princess Diana. As early as 1988, Trump hinted at a run for the White House, though this was understood to be part of his carny shtick, another form of self-branding in the celebrity-mad culture.

And now here we are. Trump is no longer hustling golf courses, fake “universities,” or reality TV. He means to command the United States armed forces and control its nuclear codes. He intends to propose legislation, conduct America’s global affairs, preside over its national-intelligence apparatus, and make the innumerable moral and political decisions required of a President. This is not a Seth Rogen movie; this is as real as mud. Having all but swept the early Republican primaries and caucuses, Trump — who re-tweets conspiracy theories and invites the affections of white-supremacist groups, and has established himself as the adept inheritor of a long tradition of nativism, discrimination, and authoritarianism — is getting ever closer to becoming the nominee of what Republicans like to call “the party of Abraham Lincoln.” No American demagogue –– not Huey Long, not Joseph McCarthy, not George Wallace –– has ever achieved such proximity to national power.

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

List, list, O list! Lists within lists (re-tweets conspiracy theories and invites the affections of white-supremacist groups, and has established himself as the adept inheritor of a long tradition of nativism, discrimination, and authoritarianism)!

And how does Remnick avoid turning this essay into the dreary recitation of one list after another? He varies the way he presents them. He breaks them up with humor (trout), anecdotes, quotations. He packs each of his paragraphs with all sorts of things – history, neologisms (egoscape), fresh similes (as real as mud), and fun alliteration (mystery, Melania, movements, amazing).

Indeed, if SOS could take Melania’s bowel movements out of that parenthesis and propose a simile of her own:

Good writing is like Melania’s feculence. It is the product of someone who has gone to the trouble of secreting herself in a private room and thoughtfully shaping what must be expressed into something solid and not off-putting.