Saint Patrick’s Day 2016.

An American Tragedy.

After last year’s broad daylight beach rapes, confiscation of huge numbers of illegal fire arms, and mass shootings, Panama City Beach was finally shamed into enacting some liquor and crowd control laws.

“People are falling off balconies, going home dead, going home paraplegic. Is that the community we want to be?” [one resident] asked. “Panama City Beach had depended for decades on this revenue, and to [enact new laws] overnight, that’s a big thing to do. But how do you continue when people are getting raped, shot, killed?”

The obvious answer was for Panama City Beach to think of spring break in a new way… To think of it as like a demolition derby or like the climbing of Mount Everest: Of course there will be … some… unpleasantnesss… but no great and noble enterprise is without its risks.

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But no. PCB went ahead and outlawed drinking on the beach and lots of other stuff that makes crowds of people murderous. And this year spring break at PCB barely exists. Everyone’s gone somewhere else.

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And that’s the ecstasy part! If you’re Daytona Beach, take a bow!

Quite true, and this Tablet writer captures the real scandal at Oberlin, which is similar to the real scandal at Florida Atlantic University, and at the University of Colorado: How do hiring committees at American universities end up appointing vicious ideologues? What sort of hiring committee says We want to expose our students to sadists and knaves, and this is a sadist and a knave? How can we account for the regular emergence among the American professoriate of liars and moral idiots?

UD thinks the outcome only seldom has to do with what you might call fanatic affinity. It seems unlikely to her that there are other people on hiring committees who think the Sandy Hook massacre was a government-created charade intended to destroy our gun rights, or that the people killed on 9/11 deserved it, or that the 9/11 plotters were Jews. It seems far more likely to UD that colleges and universities end up with cretinous conspiracy theorists because their hiring committees, for some jobs, are lazy. They don’t read applicants’ writing (including blogs) with any care, or, if they do read, they don’t understand what they are reading.

At some universities, no one much cares who teaches the soft stuff – ethnic studies, communications, composition. Internal standards in these sorts of fields may be as low as they are in the courses designed for football and basketball players. Indeed, some of these are the fields into which the jocks are herded – especially communications. No one should be surprised when actually examining what some of these people write uncovers the political grotesque.

But what are you going to do? FAU and Colorado are big jock schools; it’s as important to them as it is to Auburn and the University of North Carolina to keep the course scam going one way or another. They’re not exactly going to start scrutinizing content and instructor.

As for Oberlin — damned if I know.

How they learned to stop worrying and love Donald Trump.

[Professor] Tom Ferguson met [Professor Lloyd] Shapley … through their mutual interest in Kriegsspiel, a variation of chess where a player only sees his or her pieces on the board, but not an opponent’s. Acting as a referee, a third person provides information about the legality of each move as the game progresses.

Christopher Hitchens, who wrote that sentence in an essay about Jerry Falwell, would have been fascinated by the brotherhood on view at Donald Trump’s latest rally, where Trump’s warm-up bigot, a loud-mouth diploma mill graduate (not Trump University; another diploma mill), shrieked that Bernie Sanders doesn’t believe in God and must be made to come to Jesus.

I wish Hitchens were here to describe this man.

We manage to stick them occasionally for insider trading.

FORMER GOLDMAN SACHS DIRECTOR [RAJAT GUPTA] COMPLETES PRISON SENTENCE

….

But the big boys at Goldman seem to have some sort of immunity.

…. ROBERT RUBIN WAS TARGETED FOR DOJ INVESTIGATION BY FINANCIAL CRISIS COMMISSION

Rajat Gupta’s Goldman Sachs crony was targeted… But nothing happened. Strangely, it didn’t go anywhere.

And you wonder why ol’ Bern is doing so well.

[Sing it.]

Free Harvard/Fair Harvard
Their innocent title is
We know how vital is
Beating them down!

They want to make Harvard
Completely tuition-free
Since it’s got $40b
Sitting around …

“These devilish horses
Diminish our resources!”
Warns the director
Of financial aid.

“Our 39 billion
Will tumble to 30
If we should succumb to this
This villainous raid.”

“Fair Harvard/Free Harvard!
You’re all just like Bernie!
Expect our attorney
To sue you but good.”

Er, I mean blood.

Spring Break is quite the American tradition. We bring to it our nation’s own very special way of celebrating the renewal of life.

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.

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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.