Headline of the day.

We’re only four months into this year’s Golden Handcuffs competition, but it’s never too soon for an update.

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Tradition remains important. In time-honored style, one arrestee wears instantly legible clothing.

Just to make sure he could be identified, [Adrian] Magee wore a pair of No. 73 LSU Nike shorts that matched his jersey number.

A lower caste being named Merkel
Dressed neither niqabal nor burqal.
Quick! Someone grab
At least a hijab!
The woman’s gone downright berserkal.

… has a hell of a football coach too.

Twenty players started a huge brawl on campus. All have been arrested for assault. The coach has made a statement.

“Anybody who has been a football player or a student on campus knows things like that happen,” he said. “It’s no problem. We’re going to handle that. The University did a great job putting out a statement on it. So we’re just going to take it and wait until they get done with their process.”

… beside a wall of kisses
at Budapest’s Anker’t nightclub.

She hopped over to Hungary for
the weekend. You can do that
sort of thing when you live in
Ireland.

He seems to be under the impression that these women (and girls – some are put under the burqa at eleven, twelve, years old) are able to make this decision for themselves. Maybe some are.

But UD finds it odd that Nawaz addresses not a word to the many men who make their wives and daughters wear burqas.

[W]e have no assurance that Muslim women put on the burqa or don the veil as a matter of their own choice. A huge amount of evidence goes the other way. Mothers, wives, and daughters have been threatened with acid in the face, or honor-killing, or vicious beating, if they do not adopt the humiliating outer clothing that is mandated by their menfolk.

It’s kind of like telling eight year old girls that they really should think twice before getting their clitorises removed and labia sewn up. Or fourteen year old girls that they probably shouldn’t get married. It might be better to address your concerns to their parents and guardians.

Walking along the side of the house
just now (taking out the trash), UD

encountered what she takes to be a
Southern Black Racer making its way
into her azaleas and vinca. Here
is her way-amateurish effort to
photograph it.

It trumpets the gloriousness of Piero Anversa, dumped in disgrace from Harvard for fraudulent research, to which he reportedly admitted; and then, to round out the contemptible behavior, he went ahead and sued Harvard anyway for having damaged his career by, um, having discovered and acted on his lab having – at huge federal government expense, by the way – committed research fraud. (His case against Harvard was dismissed.)

Harvard has to repay the government ten million dollars because of Anversa.

Apparently people in various labs at Harvard knew for over ten years about the guy. Maybe SDSU’s web editors are on the same schedule.

Sometimes events are too bizarre for us to assimilate directly, and that is where literature comes in. “We have art,” said Nietzsche, “in order not to perish of the truth.” And in order, he might have added, not to perish of confusion in the face of certain outcomes. When one of this country’s Super Bowl heroes is a killer who scrawls a bible verse on his forehead with a red marker (not with his own blood, as first luridly reported) and then hangs himself from his jail cell window, we need a little assistance.

Flannery O’Connor’s 1965 tale, “Parker’s Back,” helps point us, in the oblique way of art, toward some of the underlying truths, I think, of the Aaron Hernandez story. No one explored the links between violence and piety better than O’Connor.

Like Hernandez, O’Connor’s main character, O.E. Parker, is a big, vain, restless, bellicose, substance-abusing, tattoo-blanketed young man with a weird relationship to religion. He lives in a very Christian environment (this is paralleled in the real world by all the coaches – Urban Meyer at the University of Florida in particular – who tried to Christianize Hernandez) , and everyone’s always trying to draw him to the revival tent; but though he’s willing to listen, and though he marries a starkly fundamentalist woman, he stays aloof. He thinks he’s smarter than everyone else, except in one instance: “It was himself he could not understand.”

Parker’s tattoos are all-terrain manifestations of obscure furies: “His dissatisfaction [was] acute, and raged in him. It was as if the panther and the lion and the serpents and the eagles and the hawks [on his skin] had penetrated his skin and lived inside him in a raging warfare.” When his mysterious rage really acts up, he inks another predator on himself, lets that do the talking, and somewhat calms down: “Whenever Parker couldn’t stand the way he felt, he would have another tattoo.” By now, he’s running out of room: “With the aid of mirrors [an] artist had tattooed on the top of his head a miniature owl.”

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Aaron Hernandez’s tattoos were more varied than his fictional doppelganger’s: Mom and Dad; symbols of the gang to which he belonged; abstract designs. But in one crucial respect O’Connor’s character and Hernandez were aesthetic twins: Both men sported large images of Jesus on their backs. Parker has his done after a particularly intense bout of typically enigmatic destructive rage. Among a panoply of Jesus images to choose from in his tattoo artist’s book, Parker is irresistibly drawn to “the haloed head of a flat stern Byzantine Christ with all-demanding eyes.”

Looking, with the use of mirrors, at the completed tattoo, he remarks on the way “The eyes in the reflected face continued to look at him — still, straight, all-demanding, enclosed in silence.” He’s thrilled with the tattoo, and can’t wait to get home to his wife, who, with her pious Christian ways, will, he’s sure, be just as thrilled (she’s appalled at his idolatry). But because he’s so excited, Parker also wants to get rip-roaring drunk, so he delays his return in order to spend some time in a bar/pool hall, where his friends insist on seeing his latest tattoo.

When they laugh at what a religious fanatic he’s become (Parker objects that he hasn’t a religious bone in his body), he “lunge[s] into the midst of them and like a whirlwind on a summer’s day there [begins] a fight that rage[s] amid overturned tables and swinging fists” until he gets thrown out.

“Parker sat for a long time on the ground in the alley behind the pool hall, examining his soul. He saw it as a spider web of facts and lies that was not at all important to him but which appeared to be necessary.”

Aaron Hernandez’s back-tattoo was far more benign than Parker’s, a kitschy meek and mild thorns-bearer who gazes up at sympathetic doves and angels.

While Parker seems to have wanted to carry the weight of a permanently judgmental Jesus on his back, Hernandez’s tattoo seems to have been more of a Jesus-has-got-my-back number. Indeed, during his murder trial, prosecutors made much of another religious tattoo of his, a smoking gun on whose muzzle GOD FORGIVES appears. The biblical verse Hernandez wrote on his forehead in death also goes to salvation.

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

So what can we say of these actual and fictive macho men, unable to understand or accept their physical nature (reports are emerging that fear of his bisexuality becoming public motivated Hernandez to commit murder), equally unable to take on the reality of a soul, and so desperate in their muteness to express something that they raked their skin with messages?

“My father believed that man by nature was a mess,” writes Norman Maclean in A River Runs Through It of his preacher father, “and had fallen from an original state of grace.” Pretty much all of Flannery O’Connor’s characters are a mess, grappling with the quandary of having been born a human being in a world riddled with physical and metaphysical traps.

In the world of O’Connor, the existence of a salvific god is not at all good news, since it simply oppresses most of us with a sense of failure relative to the obligations a serious religious life demands. (Parker’s soul “was not at all important to him” but “appeared to be necessary.”) Aaron Hernandez came up in the pagan world of gangs and made a smooth transition from that reviled violence to the venerated violence of football (his family thinks most of his problems can be traced to concussions he got on the field), but, as with Parker, he absorbed the idea that although he didn’t seem to have one – or at best, he had a flimsy web of facts and lies – having a soul was as necessary as having a body.

Neither of these men, let us say, had a soul, or even wanted one. Neither had any of the stuff we associate with a soul – like a conscience. Neither could even conceptualize such a thing as a soul, even when they sat down, bloodied after a fight like Parker, and really thought about it. The best they could do was acknowledge the importance of soulfulness to other people and therefore try to mimic the condition. Please the coach, please the wife. The pathetic literalness of their backside Jesuses was the best they could do; it was an offering to a world of believers from a world of pagans — pagans miserable and belligerent at having been expelled from their idolatrous world.

… wow.

Oakland University [business school] professor Joseph Schiele is charged with seven different counts including possession with intent to deliver, felony firearm and operating a drug house.

… [T]ips from Oakland University [in Rochester Michigan] students started to pile up in January 2016. Students were reporting something suspicious was going on at the professor’s home.

An array of drugs was on offer, including ketamine.

“Oh my goodness … ketamine? I was thinking like Adderall or weed, or something. That’s a big jump. Wow,” said student Nichole Hill.

The coverage includes a way scary mug shot. Professors typically do not look this scary.

This story is shocking on many levels, but the most shocking appears in the headline. A B-School professor is Giving Drugs to Students.

Not selling drugs to students?

The main defendant is [Jumana] Nagarwala, 44, of Northville, who is charged with conspiracy, genital mutilation, transporting minors with intent to engage in criminal sexual activity, lying to a federal agent and obstructing an official proceeding. If convicted, she could face up to life in prison on the transporting minors charge. According to the indictment, Nagawala told federal agents that “she has never been present” for female genital mutilation — or FGM — on “any minor children” and that she has “no knowledge” of it ever being performed.

“Nagarwala then and there well knew she had performed FGM procedures on numerous minor girls,” the indictment states.

Yes, yes, wait for the outcome of the trial. But while she’s on trial, JHU, one of America’s preeminent medical schools, should issue a statement expressing its shock and disgust that one of its graduates has been indicted for these brutal acts, utterly at odds with any form of human morality, let alone medical ethics. And once she’s convicted, JHU should rescind her degree.

It’s gotten so nasty for Gorka
That he’s taken to wearing a borka.
Once a tough alpha male,
He now meekly sets sail
For a hideaway hole in Majorca.

Because there’s no “I” in theft.

Mr UD‘s grandfather.

… the New York Times (scroll down to the Celia Duggar statement) will now refer to this practice as Female Genital Reaccommodation.

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

A thoughtful review of terms.

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“You were born into a female body which automatically labeled you a defect[ive] human being in need of reconstruction.”

Fascinating, lengthy, follow-up in the Atlantic to a cultural relativist’s take on don’t-call-it-mutilation.

I feature the above comment because it reminds us that in many pro-mutilation cultures, it’s not just removing the clitoris and tying up the labia of three year old female bodies; it’s about hiding those bodies under burqas and punishing their misbehavior with honor killing.

Honor killing is too brutal a term for it, though, isn’t it? It will only alienate these communities. UD proposes honor cutting.