Tokyo’s first female governor.

Huh?

A limerick for Baylor University.

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

‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore

A student got raped down at Baylor?
The school’s got a great way to nail her —
You’re a harlot who drinks!
Your immortal soul stinks!
Now who’ll be the next to impale her?

Fearful of losing his base, Donald Trump today insisted his soul is one hundred percent pure white.

When you’re nineteen and you live in America and you’re bummed out about a breakup, you can mosey on down the lane and buy an AR-15 and blow away your ex plus a couple of random people in her vicinity. The shooter was about to be a sophomore at the University of Washington.

Too Many Puns, that is. Already we’ve got

Restaurant Critic Canned After Plagiarizing LA Food Critic Jonathan Gold.

Headline writers may also make use of

shelved
tabled
goose is cooked
in hot water
in a stew
baked
creamed
pulled a double
poached
skimmed…

… because, according to the investigative report in the aftermath of the Miami Dolphins’ Richie Incognito bullying scandal, he

lied to investigators, attempted to convince [the player Incognito bullied] to exonerate Incognito, and [himself] participated in the taunting of players

you might want to be careful. You might want in particular to keep an eye on the coach.

I mean, Manziel was all about bullying plus really disgusting and out of control behavior, all of which the team and the school, from the chancellor on down, not only tolerated but seemed to celebrate… And maybe, you know, it wasn’t such a great idea, reputation-wise, in the immediate aftermath of Manziel, to hire Jim Turner, fresh off being fired from the Dolphins for his apparently very bad behavior with his buddy Incognito.

Another reason you might want to keep an eye on this coach is that he seems rather bitter he’s been forced to lower himself from the big boys to college level ball – he’s filed a big-ass defamation suit against the guy who wrote the report that said bad things about him and Incognito… Seems to be trying to get his own reputation back and maybe ditch his school gig for another professional team. I mean, any school might want to avoid this character…

But Texas A&M, one of this blog’s perennial clown schools, is not any school. Texas A&M is a broad shouldered good ol’ boy football uber alles (though truth be told th’aint much alles there for football to be uber) kinda school and don’t matter to them one bit that they’ve got players like Manziel and coaches like Turner cuz that’s how you win games. Not that the school’s win/loss record looks very good, but, you know, it’s Texas (Rick Perry was an A&M cheerleader) and a boy can dream.

*********

So before I tell you the latest from Texas A&M, it might help to provide a specific example of the kind of guy Jim Turner, recipient of hundreds of thousands of dollars in salary from this school, is.

For Christmas 2012, Turner gave all the Dolphins offensive linemen gift bags. Inside the bags were inflatable female dolls. But Turner, knowing that offensive lineman Andrew McDonald was frequently harassed by other linemen with homosexual slurs, gave the tackle a male blow-up doll to join in on the “joke.”

When Turner was asked about the incident that plenty of others recalled without a problem, he said he couldn’t remember.

You see UD‘s point. You’re going to hire a coach with that bad a memory? UD‘s getting on in years, but she’s confident she could remember giving blow up dolls to offensive linemen for Christmas. Notice that “plenty of others” were able to reach back in time and recall that holiday season…

So anyway Texas A&M’s coach hires this guy, this Jim Turner, and gives him a big fat salary, and I don’t find any record of anyone minding… Like, say, maybe, a woman student or two, or a woman professor or two, might find something a little off about the whole thing… But no. The place is almost entirely a football school, and why bother? Turner in fact worked at the school in years past, before he got raised to the big leagues, and his good buddies there took him back and that’s that.

Anyway, not only did this school’s football coach not keep an eye on Jim Turner; he turned his back and let Jim Turner loose on the football team’s vast Texas fan base. He looked the other way while, at a big public event intended to appeal in particular to women, Turner and another assistant coach presented funny material – the sort of material you’d write if for a special seasonal gift to your friends you share the sexual technology that means so much to you – they’d written about women and football. (More images here.)

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

There’s an old New Yorker short story titled Man Here Keeps Getting Arrested All the Time. UD thinks of this title when she thinks of the adorably incorrigible men of Texas A&M – men like Manziel and Turner and lots of others (the school has one of the highest arrest rates among university sports teams) who keep getting suspended and arrested all the time. Turner has just pivoted from being fired by a professional football team for being morally disgusting to being suspended by a university team for being sexually disgusting.

And when his two-week suspension is over?

You know the answer.

His $200,000 raise will be announced.

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

Okay. And ladies? A&M ladies who were in the audience for Turner’s performance and complained about it?

You were offended? You tweeted the images and got ol’ Jimboy in trouble again?

Don’t come looking for sympathy to UD. One of the first safety rules you’re supposed to learn is Be aware of your surroundings. Your (chosen!) surrounding is Texas A&M!

Look for a school that isn’t run by people who slobber over Johnny Manziel and hump latex.

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

As always, things only get really good when the local booster press has time to reflect on things and share its thoughts.

[L]et’s … not blow this out of proportion. [Jeff] Banks and Turner showed bad taste, but they meant well. It was a charity event that raised more than $20,000. It happened Wednesday night, with more than 700 women there, and it didn’t go viral until Friday. So 200 women didn’t email Woodward first thing Thursday looking for blood… [The head football coach, Kevin Sumlin,] should be commended on how A&M has remained off the police blotter recently, for the most part. A&M had seven football players arrested from the end of the 2013 seasons until early June, one of them (Darian Claiborne) arrested three times and another (Isaiah Golden) arrested twice.

A&M has had one arrest since the end of last season, wide receiver Speedy Noil, was driving without a license.

So kudos to Sumlin…

The nihilism meme is off and running in this (to quote Leon Panetta) “very screwy” presidential election, and UD follows with great interest the progress of that old warhorse down its latest track.

“Nihilism, American-Style,” Allan Bloom titled one of the chapters in The Closing of the American Mind, but he had something very specific in mind – the infiltration of high-level Nietzschean negation (of religion, values, meaning, knowledge) into the teaching of undergraduates in our universities. What people seem to have in mind when more and more of them, every day, refer to the nihilism to which Trump appeals, or which his personality and rhetoric have evoked in Americans, is something far more down-home – a visceral disgust with the current social/political scene – a disgust so intense it makes people simply want to destroy everything, and therefore makes poopoo-spewing Trump the avatar of choice.

What drives their loyalty to Trump — if not the person, at least the idea of Trump — is a sort of nihilism. As a close friend put it to me this week, “I don’t care whether Trump wins or not, I just want him to f— things up as long as he can.” … The Trump supporters have seen plenty of politicians with important agendas, but few with the zeal to push them through; at this late date, they would apparently prefer zeal without agendas to agendas without zeal.

———–

[T]he voter nihilism that Trump both reflects and stimulates is a symptom of political decay. “He’s not perfect, but anyone would be better than this corrupt bunch,” is the sort of thing many Italians said, once upon a time, about Silvio Berlusconi, or Russians about Vladi­mir Putin, or Venezuelans about Hugo Chávez.

Let’s end the historical analogizing there; it’s enough to show how often the cry of “blow the system to hell” has gone up among peoples living in freedom and democracy, sometimes just before they lost both.

———-

[Consider] Trump’s outrageous accusations of the press, his chronic lying, his glorification of political dictators and strongmen, and his repeated racist/sexist statements, triumphantly delivered at his rallies. These are not meant as arguments in a national debate about serious issues, these are acts of political vandalism delivered with glee and impunity. This is a political performance with the implicit message: See how far I dare to go! This is political behavior that comes straight out of the manual of the Russian nihilist Dmitri Pisarev, the one time inspiration for Lenin: “What can be smashed must be smashed; whatever will stand the blow is sound, what flies into smithereens is rubbish; at any rate, hit out right and left, no harm will or can come of it.”

[Recall Trump’s comment yesterday about some of the speakers at the Democratic National Convention: “You know what, I wanted to hit a couple of those speakers so hard. I would have hit them — no, no — I was gonna hit them… I was gonna hit one guy in particular, a very little guy. I was gonna hit this guy so hard, his head would spin. He wouldn’t know what the hell happened… I was going to hit a number of those speakers so hard, their heads would spin, they’d never recover. And that’s what I did with a lot of people — that’s why I still don’t have certain people endorsing me. They still haven’t recovered, okay, you know?”]

Just smash the reigning order. It’s all a “jolly laugh” for the nihilist.

… Nihilism feels deeply resentful towards kindness, reason and open-mindedness. Its preferred currency is negativity; it has no positive vision of an even remotely attractive social and political order, and, more importantly, it does not even feel the need to have such a vision. Its preferred mode of communication is not conversation or even negotiation, but agitation, an excited mix of self-justification, accusation, denunciation, and rousing calls to action. It’s preferred political tactic is that of the scorched earth, “just smash the reigning order”. The ideal politician is the cocky hell-for-leather man, who “tells it as it is”, the crowd and the nihilist leader egging each other on in an ecstasy of liberated xenophobia.

… And here is the dilemma that political nihilism presents for the open democracies in which it currently thrives: as it is not about arguments, it cannot be countered with arguments. The register of political nihilism is emotion, symbols, charisma and performance. And performers need an audience. Nihilists like Boris Johnson, Donald Trump, the Dutchman Geert Wilders and the Austrian Heinz-Christian Strache, effectively tap into a miasma of free-floating anger and resentment…

UD thinks Brian Leiter, in the first fifteen minutes of this lecture on Nietzsche, does a very good job of explaining why American culture might devolve into the sort of enervated, self-hating, everything-hating nihilism that would grasp at the mindless charismatic ‘aesthetic’ option – in this case, the stimulating empty destroy-everything performance of Trump – as at least a way of continuing to feel alive. This emergent sensibility is a darker version of what people in earlier decades phrased the society of the spectacle or amusing ourselves to death. It’s where you go when your ‘eighties techno-passivity (tv, computer, film – one rigged-up Truman Show consumer spectacle after another) morphs into an ideology. Too much nothing eventually makes you desperately want something – any something. Zeal. Zeal without agendas. Pure agitation. Cocky hell-for-leather. But America is a very violent country, where millions and millions of people have home arsenals. Trump has a very violent imagination and he is charismatic.

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

Actually, not any something will do. The something can’t be anything having to do with traditional somethings – God, social progress, justice, love of humanity – because all of these, let’s say, have been, or are well on the way toward being, nihilized away… Why did the Democratic convention feature so many love-in, what-the-world-needs-now, lean-on-me performances? Because when all other vitalizing, motivating, foundations give way, you’re left with that one.

Did you watch long enough, last night, to catch that poor reverend at the end of the convention, trying to give the benediction? Did you hear what he said as the room continued to erupt with balloons? “I don’t know how I’m gonna pray in this chaos.” Not that the convention was chaotic; I thought it was great. But the spectacle, if you will, spoke multiple volumes to ol’ UD.

You won’t catch Trump farting around with prayer. He’s transcended it.

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

Nihilism is often hilarious, because it is so pretentious and at the same time such an empty infantile pose. Everyone loves The Nihilists in The Big Lebowski (Ve believes in nossing, Lebowski. Nossing. And tomorrow ve come back and ve cut off your chanson.); and if you were lucky enough to see Robin Williams and Bill Irwin in Waiting for Godot, you know what a laff riot that play is. Before Godot, there was the piss-yourself-giggling Ubu the King. And the nihilistic comedies of the ancient Greeks. Artists have always known that Hillarian moderation is much less stimulating than Trumpian over-the-tops and hysterias and absolutisms and extremisms.

And of course somehow at the same time nihilism has a certain plausibility as a way of thinking about or even feeling about existence. Christopher Hitchens got at this when he characterized what he considered male-tinged humor:

Nietzsche … described a witticism as an epitaph on the death of a feeling. Male humor prefers the laugh to be at someone’s expense, and understands that life is quite possibly a joke to begin with — and often a joke in extremely poor taste.

Nihilism wouldn’t be so funny if it were just pretentious and infantile; it needs the spin on it that a certain philosophical legitimacy gives it.

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

Yet our most Beckettian humorists have also always known that – in the words of Beckett himself – I can’t go on I’ll go on is the reality on the ground.

This is why, for UD, the realest moment of the Democratic National Convention came when Joe Biden, alluding to the death of his son, said

As Ernest Hemingway once wrote, “The world breaks everyone and afterwards, many are strong at the broken places.”

… goes viral.

Melania [Trump] claimed for years that she had an undergraduate degree in architecture from the University of Ljubljana. But reporters have long known that she dropped out after her first year to model — no shame in that; some shame in lying though. Now her personal website has been totally scrubbed and just reverts to The Trump Organization’s website. In a tweet yesterday, Melania claimed the website was removed because “it does not accurately reflect my current business and professional interests.” Because fake architecture degrees are so last year.

… in Dublin yesterday, with a friend
who’s visiting from the States.

Flagging.

UD has never gotten gated communities. She was interviewed years ago for a job at William and Mary and was quite put off when in order to attend a faculty dinner near campus she had to get past two guards at a highly secured gate.

She was also baffled. Suburban Williamsburg? Surely this couldn’t be about crime.

Then what? Why would you choose to live – pay a premium to be – gated off from the world?

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

Anyway, now maybe that very same gated community gracious enough to have allowed UD in for the evening after interrogating her is facing the sort of quandary that seems to UD, er, endemic to such places. The quandary is based on a simple principle: Gated communities are, for way obvious reasons, attractive to criminals. White collar criminals (hell, any kind of criminal if he can afford it) are people who don’t want to be found. At least they’d like to make it as hard as possible to find them. What better place to live than a location where guards (armed?) make it really hard to get in?

(Urban Dictionary: Gated Community: “An amiable term describing a prison for white collar criminals.”)

So chances are that the gated community you’ve paid through the nose for because you only want to be among the best people, the most affluent people, houses more than a few folk currently being pursued by the Justice Department or creditors or tax collectors or whatever.

I guess they might be classy people. Bernie Madoff (who – I wonder why? – lived in a cozy community “hidden behind 20-foot-tall ficus hedges and steel gates“) was certainly presentable.

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

Anyway. If you were John Hinckley, who comes from a very affluent family and has just been released from prison, where would you go? You’d rather not be bothered by reporters and sundry gawkers, and you’d like to live in the style to which you had become accustomed before you destroyed the life of James Brady and almost killed the president. Hinckley’s mother – presumably no more eager to deal with the curious – has lived in gated Kingsmill for years. And now, as a resident of this snug little enclave, you get to be thrown in with John Hinckley in a very special intimate way – in the way of small village life.

If you follow University Diaries, you know that her response to the recent spate of banning confessionals is why did it take you so long. But anyway.

Our theme today is the way our universities’ love of football leads them astray, breaks their hearts, and damn near kills their students.

Mad about the boys, some universities import major league bruisers to campus, encourage their violent tendencies (Sign in the football players’ cafeteria at the University of Oregon: EAT YOUR ENEMIES), and even teach them to attack people as a team.

Of course the attack-objects the universities have in mind are opposing players, but ol’ UD has been following university football long enough to know that some players – some groups of players – have vision issues and cannot distinguish between on-field behemoths and skinny twerpy fellow students. If they’ve got a violent coach (we read about one of these about every two weeks) these players are going to be that much more inclined to just go ahead and beat the shit, en masse, out of everybody.

I mean, take a notorious head case coach like Mike Leach. (I’m not gonna rehearse his disgusting history of coaching violence here cuz I ain’t got the stomach for it. Put MIKE LEACH in my search engine and go to town.) Apparently six or more of his Washington State University players last Saturday started throwing lit fireworks at fellow WSU students at a party, and when some students objected, Mike’s guys – teamwork again! – sent all their jawbones flying and brains concussing (Leach himself has quite the history with player concussions).

SING IT WITH ME!!

Too many broken jaws have fallen on the pavement
Too many concussed sons have sued the school for millions
You lay your bets and then you pay the price
The things we do for love, the things we do for love.

They interviewed the father of one of the injured.

[A]fter police make an arrest, he intends to file criminal and civil charges against the individuals responsible for his son’s injuries.

“It’s obviously an unfortunate event. The irony is that my son has always been a WSU football fan. He ran the field when they beat Oregon last year,” Rodriguez said. “When somebody is down on the ground and you kick them in the face, that’s a huge character flaw and it shouldn’t be tolerated by any football program.”

Tolerated? The capacity to kick people in the face when they’re lying unconscious because you sucker punched them is … well, it’s Job #1 at big-time university football, ain’t it? I mean, ain’t that just the kind of guy you’re after when you’re recruiting? Do you think Nebraska had no inkling of psycho Richie Incognito’s … tendencies? They recruited him for them.

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

So. Let’s compare pricing. UD‘s friend John sends her word that the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill (already a shining example of what football can do for your school) is going to have to pay about a million dollars in damages and expenses because of their most recently concussed student … and to make things worse, the four guys involved had to sit out one game!

What will WSU – which is willing to pay scary Mike Leach millions and can have no qualms about peeling off more bills on behalf of his violent squad – what will WSU have to choke up to make this go away while keeping the firecracker guys on the field? We’re told at least six players (the WSU newspaper says “between five and twelve“) were involved in one way or another, and there’s also apparently lots of video of the event available to police and lawyers … I’m gonna say about a million even for each of the players, so let’s say seven million… Then there’s WSU’s own attorney fees… And the humongous raise Leach is going to demand for having recruited such amazing players… so make that another two million directly arising from these events…

UD‘s going to predict that WSU will spend another few million on a radical revision of its student orientation program. WSU cannot help but have noticed that at certain other football schools students do not sue when players fuck them up. These students understand that physical injury is part of the price you pay for a really strong football program. Whether rapees or concussees, they understand that you must sacrifice for the team. At schools like WSU, where the word has not yet gotten through, change must start with new students. As part of their introduction to the culture of the school, and to the expectations the school has of them, they need to meet with students from violence-tolerant schools to understand the basis of tolerance, and ultimately to sign pledges releasing their university from any liability that might arise from a player rampage.

UD will close with the most important question of all: If seven of your football players – and maybe some of your best football players – have been suspended from play, what effect will this have on your win/loss ratio?

Here’s what UD has learned about this issue from prior cases. At its worst, a multi-player setback can indeed allow you to lose games. But it’s just as likely to inspire the sort of solidarity and sympathy that make your remaining guys play all the more fiercely.

———————-

Update: The real fun is when the details come out!

For every weapon used, add a hundred thou to Coach Leach’s raise this year.

So – fireworks, yes. But here’s another:

[T]he group had been causing trouble – prying off pieces of a wooden railing…

You gotta figure they used those pried-off slabs as blunt objects as they beat the Washington State University students senseless. Another hundred thou for Leach.

*********

From the comments section on one of a thousand articles about WSU’s football players:

So why don’t your players go six on one against another college kid who was just asking them to not throw fireworks at people…

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

This incident spells nothing but trouble for the WSU football program. Not only is it likely that players will be criminally charged for the assaults, it is also likely that other players will be called as witnesses regarding what led up to the assaults and who participated in inflicting the injuries. This can only create turmoil within the program, disrupt team unity, and divide loyalties. A poisonous atmosphere that will make coaching the team more difficult and success on the field more problematic.

[Yes, but UD is optimistic that the lawyer for the player who sucker-punched a student then repeatedly kicked his head while he was unconscious will successfully argue self-defense. Those Washington State juries do love their football.]

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

[Still, some of the locals do have a solid sense of justice.]

Whoever kicked the kid on the growned and who ever broke the kids jaw should probably be kicked off the team.

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

Hopefully we’ll see a reprise of Leach’s punishment tactic of locking players in closets.

[Yes, Leach is famous for having done that. The player was concussed at the time.]

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

Leach is famous for recruiting that kind of player.

[Yup. Also famous for doing that.]

*****************
UD thanks John.