He told [one player], in front of the team, he should transfer to a “transgender league,” multiple players said.

At some universities, basketball coaches just go ahead and call players cunts or fags. At UD‘s GW, the coach allegedly goes that extra mile, lifts his comment above cliche, looks for a fresh way to say it…

Speaking of saying, though… Faced with some pretty persuasive evidence that GW’s got a real angry paranoid at the helm (don’t make his daughter cry), pulling down one of the highest salaries on campus (Don’t know how much. Will guess. Around $500,000? With this and that, could be a lot more.), UD‘s institution is abundantly not talking.

[GW’s Title IX coordinator] did not return an email, and a school spokesman said he was not available to comment. Interim Provost Forrest Maltzman declined to comment through a spokesman. Despite repeated requests, the school made no officials available for interviews. The school declined to answer questions about its inquiry into [Mike] Lonergan, or even acknowledge it, saying it does not comment on personnel issues as a matter of policy.

——

Brian Sereno, the executive director of athletics communications, did not immediately return the [GW] Hatchet’s request for comment.

——

Hokay! Get the message!

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Gets a bit colorful now, and UD knows that her readers are sensitive souls. So – SELF-ABUSE WARNING.

Five current and former players said Lonergan told players [GW Athletic Director Patrick] Nero requested the practice tapes so he could masturbate while viewing them in his office. The players said Lonergan also told them Nero had engaged in a sexual relationship with a member of the team. Players said they found those comments to be shocking and offensive, with no grounding in reality.

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You’re expecting some concluding words of wisdom?

Oh, go ask Bobby Knight and Mike Rice and the rest of them. They’ll tell you what it takes to win.

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

Actually, UD does have some words of comfort for GW, as this story rapidly goes viral.

You know you’re one of the big boys when a whacked out scandal about your allegedly whacked out coach hits the mainstream media. You cannot buy the sort of publicity the school is about to get. Think of what that Saturday Night Live thing about Mike Rice did for Rutgers (start at 1:00)…

(Lonergan recently turned down a job offer from the selfsame Rutgers. People there seem to think they, uh, dodged a bullet. A second bullet.)

But okay look let’s take that last bit out of its parenthesis so that UD can share with you the following thought. This country is close to hiring as head coach a man just like Rice and Knight (Knight was in fact invited to speak at the Republican convention) and (allegedly) Lonergan and the scads of other abusive and twisted university coaches UD has followed over the years of this blog.

Every time Donald Trump steps on the brutality gas he wins more votes. Every time coaches step on the brutality gas they win more games.

It is quite obviously the way you win.

Because for every one sadist, there’s apparently one million masochists.

I have no idea what to do about it. Just noting it.

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

Here’s a tweet:

Don’t know why coaches and schools refuse comments in these situations.

So yeah it’s odd and dumb to say nothing even as the story goes really really big. UD will tell you, if, like this guy, you don’t know why there’s this initial silence, what’s going on.

Think lots of moving parts. As we speak, an extremely large and complex institution is gathering and consulting with amazing numbers and types of people. Lawyers. Public relations experts. Players. University spokespeople. Administrators. Coaches. Trustees. Boosters. Atlantic 10 people. NCAA people.

You better believe that Lonergan is also lawyering up like mad. People like Lonergan are not in the business of losing. Lonergan is just like the Ur-Lonergan, who says

“We’re going to win so much. You’re going to get tired of winning. you’re going to say, ‘Please Mr. President, I have a headache. Please, don’t win so much. This is getting terrible.’ And I’m going to say, ‘No, we have to make America great again.’ You’re gonna say, ‘Please.’ I said, ‘Nope, nope. We’re gonna keep winning.’

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

And all of this is taking place in the typical university context of interim provosts and ever-rotating deans and presidents who have just announced they’re leaving. Yet you need one strong singular voice in crises like these. It’s gonna take a bit of work.

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

But wait, UD! Wait!

How did it happen?

Okay, so here’s the drill. Ambitious university is all agog because it’s got a respectable basketball team that brings in fans and revenue and attracts media attention. Sure, they’ve heard reports that suggest the coach may be el mayorly crazed motherfucker, but what coach isn’t? Bobby Knight threw chairs at people and today he’s an elder statesman. Florid complaints start to come in from the players, but it’s just a few malcontents and anyway when they get truly pissed they leave the program. Problem solved.

And now the new amazing contract with all that money, and the wins, and the adulation, have, let’s speculate, made the coach feel his methods are brilliant and he can get away with anything (see Coach Trump). His behavior maybe becomes so bizarre that a critical mass of players finally goes public with the problem.

The university now desperately needs a run and gun game, but because they’ve been in denial all they can do is dribble while Rome burns.

… choices…

First sentence of a great short story in search of an author.

Hope Hicks, a spokeswoman for the Trump campaign, said in a brief statement that “Mr. Trump and the campaign do not agree” that Clinton should be executed for treason.

A German politician has resigned her seat in the Bundestag because she lied – extensively – on her cv.

German publications “Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung” (WAZ) and the “Neue Ruhr Zeitung” (NRZ) reported late on Tuesday that contrary to what her CV said, [Petra] Hinz had never acquired a higher education entrance qualification nor completed university studies in law. The lawyer for the Essen politician also confirmed that Hinz had never taken any legal exams.

In a statement published on the politician’s website, the 54-year-old’s attorney said that “in retrospect, Ms Hinz is unable to discern which reasons … compelled her at the time to lay the foundations for further inaccurate claims about her legal education and activities with the false indication about her high-school diploma.”

***********

UD thanks Chris.

A rock band is performing in Cleveland, and it drew some conventioneers to its show.

They booed when the band leader talked about gay rights and stuff.

“You can boo all you want, but I’m the motherfucking artist up here,” [the lead singer] told his audience…

[At one point the singer] asked [the crowd:] “Who here believes in science?”

So much booing.

With the revelation of plagiarism, Trump stands to lose the significant support he enjoyed from academics and journalists.

Ryan D. Enos
Political Scientist
Harvard

… “the life blood of this and almost all other nations,” UD always refers her readers to its explanatory urtext, The Great Gatsby. Gatsby is the great American novel in part because it captures better than any other literary work the entirely engineered, shabby dreamweaver thing that is the modern self-made – or rather made-self – American.

If you cry for poor James Gatz/Jay Gatsby at the end of that novel, dead in his pool, spare a tear for Melanija Knavs/Melania Knauss/Melania Trump/Melania whatever last name she takes after Trump divorces her… because it’s not really her fault that she read a plagiarized speech written for her (she’s not well-educated — like Gatsby, who advertises himself as “an Oxford man” but who had only a glancing acquaintance with that school, Melania claims to have graduated from college when she did not) instead of an original speech written for her. F. Scott Fitzgerald already gave us her shiny bogus world, which she had every reason to believe was shiny and bogus all the way down.

Is there a scammy, crime-tinted, er, aspect to that world? Has her husband, like Gatsby, been a little less than legit in his dealings? Well he didn’t graduate from Wharton for nothing and it’s a big bad dirty world out there, etc., etc. etc. but the main thing is that it all looks good and no one’s floating in a pool. Keep the aspidistra flying. Brazen it out.

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

Yes of course there’s an ugly under the pretty. Slave Michelle provides the labor; Master Melania and her Manipulators exploit it. But after all “the Obamas don’t really belong in the White House, i.e., they didn’t legitimately achieve their current status.”

Not everybody, in other words, gets to play the Gatsby game – like say if you were really born in Kenya.

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

Has damage been done to Trump’s campaign, as some observers suggest?

No. Trump’s followers are people who do not mind that their candidate correctly characterizes them as “the poorly educated.” Melania would have done damage had she attempted to disentangle, in the minds of her listeners, Slovenia, Slovakia, Slavonia, Slobodan Milošević, and Lower Slobbovia.

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

UD thanks Dave.

The Washington Post introduces us to our very… unusual next first lady, who once composed part of a communist state, and who (at least Mr UD read it this way) used to smoke factory chimneys.

By all means share with me everything horrible that you know about Donald Trump. But don’t overdo it.

After many years during which he could have done a Mea Culpa, the guy who ghostwrote The Art of the Deal suddenly, on the very verge of the Republican convention, announces he’s all torn up about it.

He has launched his Remorse Tour with a New Yorker interview.

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

The magazine refers to Tony Schwartz, in one of the article’s headlines, as Trump’s Boswell. The cutesy ironic reference means to flatter the magazine’s readers’ sense of themselves as highly educated and all, but really what’s the point? Does anyone think Trump was ever a wise kind literary genius for whom someone like Schwartz would act as a Boswell? Did Schwartz think that?

He must have thought something like that, since he describes himself (before remorse set in) as shocked and disappointed by Trump’s lack of a discernible inner life.

Really? And why did this guy, who describes himself as at one point in the distant past a legitimate writer, pen a book full of Trump-aggrandizing lies?

He knew that he would be making a Faustian bargain. A lifelong liberal, he was hardly an admirer of Trump’s ruthless and single-minded pursuit of profit. “It was one of a number of times in my life when I was divided between the Devil and the higher side,” he told me. He had grown up in a bourgeois, intellectual family in Manhattan, and had attended élite private schools, but he was not as wealthy as some of his classmates — and, unlike many of them, he had no trust fund. “I grew up privileged,” he said. “But my parents made it clear: ‘You’re on your own.’ ” Around the time Trump made his offer, Schwartz’s wife, Deborah Pines, became pregnant with their second daughter, and he worried that the family wouldn’t fit into their Manhattan apartment…

There are sob stories, and there are New Yorker sob stories. (And Atlantic sob stories.) How could he resist doing one of the scummiest things a writer could do? He was desperate. Although his parents paid for elite private schools, he was somehow “on your own.” While his classmates at these schools came from, let’s say, billionaire houses (like Trump’s), he came, let’s say, merely from millions.

Plus no trust fund!

Yes, he was able to live in Manhattan… but would his girls have to share a bedroom?

Given the success of their first outing, Trump approached Schwartz about a second writing project.

Feeling deeply alienated, [Schwartz said no, and] instead wrote a book called “What Really Matters,” about the search for meaning in life. After working with Trump, Schwartz writes, he felt a “gnawing emptiness” and became a “seeker,” longing to “be connected to something timeless and essential, more real.”

There’s so much bullshit here that at this point it’s tipping over into something good about Trump – an encounter with him is guaranteed to launch you on your journey of Awakening.

Tony Schwartz cashed in on Trump once; he’s cashing in again, enabled by a media culture that’ll use anything.

“There’s this idea, primarily coming from alumni and boosters, that you can put enough money into a team and turn it into a powerhouse success story,” Andrew Zimbalist, a professor of economics at Smith College, said. “But that becomes more and more unrealistic with each passing year. It’s a fool’s errand, but people are crazy about football, so they keep trying.”

The trend, Zimbalist said, is predominantly located in the southern United States, where the “culture is very football dominant.”

… In its first season as an FBS team, Georgia State won zero games. The following year, it won one. Last season, the team won six of its 13 games… [A]verage attendance plummeted from the previous season’s 15,000 to 10,000.

… “I think we’re right where we should be from a competitive standpoint,” [said Georgia State’s AD].

… “It’s almost impossible to make this leap [to big-time football],” Zimbalist said. “It’s not rational to think otherwise. But if rationality was all that was at play here, this would have stopped a long time ago.”

… “[In the South, there’s the feeling that] if you don’t have a football team, then you’re somehow not a real campus, [said Mark Nagel, a sports management professor at the University of South Carolina,] and you are not on par with other schools. That emotion takes control.”

[M]any of the usual suspects just cannot bring themselves to join this year’s [Republican National Convention] — either out of principle, self-preservation, or an overwhelming sense of nausea.

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

‘Saturday the children were playing ducks and drakes and, like them, I wanted to throw a stone into the sea. Just at that moment I stopped, dropped the stone and left. Probably I looked somewhat foolish or absent-minded, because the children laughed behind my back. So much for external things. What has happened inside of me has not left any clear traces. I saw something which disgusted me, but I no longer know whether it was the sea or stone…

… I wanted to vomit. And since that time, the Nausea has not left me, it holds me…

… I was nowhere, I was floating. I was not surprised, I knew it was the World, the naked World suddenly revealing itself, and I choked with rage at this gross, absurd being. You couldn’t even wonder where all that sprang from, or how it was that a world came into existence, rather than nothingness. It didn’t make sense, the World was everywhere, in front, behind. There had been nothing before it. Nothing. There had never been a moment in which it could not have existed. That was what worried me: of course there was no reason for this flowing larva to exist. But it was impossible for it … not to exist. It was unthinkable: to imagine nothingness you had to be there already, in the midst of the World, eyes wide open and alive; nothingness was only an idea in my head, an existing idea floating in this immensity: this nothingness had not come before existence, it was an existence like any other and appeared after many others. I shouted “filth! what rotten filth!”‘

‘I work for United Airlines, and I’ll take your fantasies about killing powerful women up up up and away.’

… Backed Out.

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

But – good news! They’re still going to be able to keep it in the family: The attorney who put Ivanka’s husband’s father in jail will be speaking.

John McCain’s Republican challenger in Arizona, a woman named Kelli Ward, has long believed in a federal plot to poison Americans with the chemical trails some aircraft leave in the air.

Yet Ward’s keen sense of the endurance of certain visual effects fails to extend to the traces old attack ads leave in the mediasphere. Maybe Ward thought Mitt Romney’s 2008 attack ads against McCain had vanished into the Celestial Contrail and become fair game… Whatever her motives, her campaign simply, er, repurposed them…?

Kelli Ward, one of U.S. Sen. John McCain’s three Republican primary challengers, may have found a way to overcome her campaign-funding struggles: just tack her name at the end of an old Mitt Romney attack ad against McCain from the 2008 presidential race.

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

Stealing and signing with your own name is a gesture quintessentially postmodern, an instance of Appropriation Art, in which artists like Sherrie Levine re-photograph canonical early twentieth century photographs and sign them with their own name. But just as Sherrie had to deal with a bit of copyright static, so Kelli is in receipt of legal correspondence from a Romney rep. Something about “blatant infringement” of “protected work”…?

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“How could anyone do anything so dumb?” asked Mr UD this morning when I told him about it. “Didn’t she know she’d be caught?”

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

Without wanting to get too conspiratorial (in this UD defers to Ward and her man Donald Trump), UD will point out that if you reshuffle the letters in KELLI WARD you get (roughly)

LIKED RAWLS.

I.e., Ward is a secret John Rawls lover. John Rawls! The famous left-liberal political philosopher! Could Ward’s inner struggle between right and left account for her otherwise unaccountable behavior?