This is not the way to bat cleanup. This Sports Illustrated column on the massive drug bust at Texas Christian University – featuring plenty of football team involvement – is the first of what will be many attempts at damage control.

This writer’s prose is the functional equivalent of someone in a crowded room waving madly away at marijuana smoke because it’s so thick everyone’s choking on it. A polite gesture, but futile.

Let’s take a few tokes of this guy’s prose and see what went wrong.

His basic moves are two:

1. Aw shucks.

2. I’m shocked. Shocked.

To get us to the point where we actually believe that big-time university football is made up of clueless saintly coaches and adorable lunk kids who sometimes do the darnedest things, the writer must throw deep into platitude territory. His prose must evoke an Americana that would embarrass Edgar Guest. Let’s see how he does it!

The coach has created a winning team

the right way by recruiting guys who were a step too slow or an inch too short. Patterson persuades his players to use those slights — real and perceived — as motivation to maximize their ability. [Start with the hard-luck, overcoming obstacles, come from behind, motley crew that shows up the sports machine schools — the whole motivational enchilada. Ignore the fact that the investigation began when a recruit rejected a TCU offer because of notorious drugging on the team. Ignore that. Don’t ask why some random recruit knew about this and the coach didn’t. Just keep reading. And keep your hankie ready.]

That’s been the foundation of Patterson’s success, which has ultimately resulted in TCU achieving its dream of being in the Big 12 and becoming, you know, one of the big boys. [Achieving its dream. Maximize their ability. Keep the cliches coming. They feel so damn good.]

In one day, four knuckleheads — linebacker Tanner Brock, defensive tackle D.J. Yendrey, safety Devin Johnson and offensive tackle Ty Horn — destroyed much of the program Patterson has built. [Knuckleheads! Cue the Three Stooges! Adorable! Clowns!]

Having shooed away the dealers on the team, the writer will concentrate for the rest of his piece on the clueless sainted coach.

[W]e can only imagine the cauldron of emotions that must’ve been bubbling within him.

After all, he must’ve felt dumb that so much illegal activity seemed to be hidden in plain sight. And he probably felt betrayed by the players and disappointed because he let down the parents who trusted him with their kids.

Kids is always a good choice for stories like this one. The basic dynamic the writer’s going for, after all, is familial – the coach is the fond, too fond, dad, incapable of imagining his kid a dealer; the player is… just a kid!

And oh lord the churning, churning cauldron of emotions he must be experiencing as it hits him so hard out of thin air that the kid sells drugs…

Knucklehead v. Dumb: The sad sorry story of our sports family… But the coach and the team “will survive this shameful day.” We will survive!

[TEXAS CHRISTIAN UNIVERSITY FOOTBALL]
PLAYER DENIES ENTIRE ROSTER FAILED
DRUG TEST

Serious, big-time, cartel-type drug business is pretty rare on American campuses, but as San Diego State (a school with many and varied scandals over the years – sports, drugs, presidents with, er, money issues) showed back in 2008, with its guns and brass knuckles and cocaine and all, it does happen.

I suppose it’s marginally more embarrassing when your school has the word Christian, rather than State, in its name, but no matter: Texas Christian University, as its chancellor notes, is, just like SDSU, simply going to have to tough things out until they settle down.

And speaking of tough, the TCU football team is gonna have to be Ram tough. The coach did a surprise drug test “after a prize recruit told him that he would not attend TCU because of drug use by players.”

TCU has not released results of any drug tests, but [one player] told an undercover officer that 82 players failed.

Far out!

… is as I write circling and circling the White House – which is unusual. I have no idea why. Landing trouble? There’s no wind – it’s a gorgeous day out there: bright blue skies and puffy white clouds. Maybe the President – or whoever’s in there – wants to stay aloft in this remarkable sky. Enjoy the sights.

“Are you saying the athletic department is fully paying its entire expenses, including salaries, and the university is not contributing?” asked chemistry professor Dvora Perahia.

“We are part of the university,” Hill said. “We are what is called an auxiliary enterprise, which by definition produces its own revenue and pays its expenses.”

Hill said reports on how self-sustaining athletics departments are will vary depending on accounting definitions. Clemson, for instance, grants in-state tuition to athletes so that the scholarship dollars stretch further — a savings of about $2.5 million to the athletics department. This and the student fee, though it provides tickets to students, are considered subsidies in some reports.

Still, Hill said, Clemson athletics pays the salaries of every staff member and coach, covers all its buildings’ utilities, pays for all team travel, and raises all the money for $8 million in athletics scholarships.

“We charter jets?” American literature professor Susanna Ashton said.

“Of course,” Hill said.

“Sorry, I don’t do sports. The word ‘jet’ caught my attention. That’s cool,” Ashton said.

“We’ve got a football team with out-of town games, and we have to get them back for class,” Hill said.

It’s by Jack Gilbert. In this poem, he’s mourning the death of his wife – a lot of the poems in his book The Great Fires are about her, Michiko Nogami, a sculptor who died young.

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

I imagine the gods saying, We will
make it up to you. We will give you
three wishes, they say. Let me see
the squirrels again, I tell them.
Let me eat some of the great hog
stuffed and roasted on its giant spit
and put out, steaming, into the winter
of my neighborhood when I was usually
too broke to afford even the hundred grams
I ate so happily walking up the cobbles,
past the Street of the Moon
and the Street of the Birdcage-Makers,
the Street of Silence and the Street
of the Little Pissing. We can give you
wisdom, they say in their rich voices.
Let me go at last to Hugette, I say,
the Algerian student with her huge eyes
who timidly invited me to her room
when I was too young and bewildered
that first year in Paris.
Let me at least fail at my life.
Think, they say patiently, we could
make you famous again. Let me fall
in love one last time, I beg them.
Teach me mortality, frighten me
into the present. Help me to find
the heft of these days. That the nights
will be full enough and my heart feral.

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

The poem is a small dialogue with the gods who, given the anguish they put him through with Nogami’s death, have by way of compensation offered to grant the poet three wishes. The gods seem to think he’ll want the obvious ones – fame, wisdom – but he wants absurdly tiny and trivial ones. I want to see squirrels again (the poet lives on a Greek island and doesn’t, I guess, see them); I want that feeling of happiness I had years ago when, although practically broke, I was able to afford to eat a little of a delicious roasted hog… His wishes point to part of Gilbert’s philosophy: happiness lies in the little things. The big things will break you. You don’t want to bite off too much of the great hog Life; you want just a little, as in Little Pissing Street. Or in the happy-making Street of the Bird-Cage Makers (a not terribly important but possibly beauty-making activity, like poetry). Or the Street of Silence – words being another thing you don’t want to overdo. (Gilbert has produced very few books of poetry.)

Or let’s see… Gilbert tries on various other wishes he might like granted. They’re very particular things. It’s always bothered him that when he was very young he was afraid to take up the timid sexual invitation of a beautiful woman in Paris. Let that thing have happened; let me have gone into her room. Maybe I would have been a flop in bed, but “let me at least fail at my life.” Let me have tried; let me have pursued the plot of my life here, good or bad.

You can see developing a sort of theme here which involves wanting above all reality – tactile, emotional actuality. Wisdom and fame are abstractions; what the poet wants granted is the conviction of fully existing here and now. So here’s the Valentine’s Day thing:

Let me fall
in love one last time, I beg them.
Teach me mortality, frighten me
into the present. Help me to find
the heft of these days. That the nights
will be full enough and my heart feral.

Grieving, he’s disengaged from the real and now, floating above his own pain. So his real wish is to love again so that he can reassume his position in the human story. Only through love do you learn – do you feel – mortality – here understood as the glorious truths of embodied existence and as the end of embodiment. Frighten me into the present – make me love another person so that I can feel, instead of this affectless suffering, the real ground of human being, suffering and bliss and all. Only then will the days become weighty again with the heft of an actual life, and the nights wild with visceral passion.

A joke.

But a dangerous one. I wouldn’t be laughing if I lived there.

Can this be true? I mean the part about the top professors. Because Udemy has chosen your bloggeure, UD, for the Faculty Project.

UD is currently emailing back and forth with Udemy, asking a lot of questions… UD very much likes the democratizing element here – teaching people all over the world, for free… And – I dunno – she feels a very strong affinity with the name…

A couple of economists go there.

[M]any prominent universities would lose their main claim to fame. Alabama and LSU produce a large amount of revenue and notoriety from football without much in the way of first-rate academics to back it up. Schools would have to compete more on academics to be nationally prominent, which would again boost American education.

Or those schools might become what UD predicts (economists aren’t the only people who can make predictions!) the University of Massachusetts will become: Exclusively online institutions.

———————

UD thanks Dave.

Presiding over thug-ridden sports teams.

Picking up other universities’ conflict of interest discards.

Sucking up to people currently in prison.

Taking big bucks to be on boards of trustees that compromise your position and your university.

Put it all together, it spells Donna Shalala’s University of Miami. After the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, America’s most corrupt university.

First it was this guy, who kept evading capture. Now it’s these guys, who gathered at a student’s window to watch her having sex with one of their teammates. Just like the first pig, they got caught, and now they’re squealing.
——————

UD thanks Andre.

Yes, medical “practice is informed by biased evidence summarized for us by people who have financial relationships with companies set to profit from alterations to our practice.” Yes indeed, industry-funded ghostwriters write articles promoting industry’s drugs and then place the articles in high-profile research journals where they’re read by unwary practitioners who duly prescribe them. Yes. But here’s one thing I’ll tell you for damn sure: If most of your journal’s advertising budget comes from industry, you’re not exactly going to resist the situation. You’re going to make yourself as comfy as you can in your favorite comfy chair and then you’re going to pour yourself an excellent scotch and then you’re going to accept the situation.

——————————–

See, it’s just like this Australian guy with his anti-depressant du jour, Valdoxan, which he’s touting in The Lancet. He has financial links to Servier, Valdoxan’s manufacturer. His paper’s been torn apart by scientists the world over, with one of them noting that “publication of this flawed paper will undoubtedly validate marketing of Valdoxan, and we are curious to see how many paid Valdoxan advertisements will be published in Elsevier journals.”

With anti-depressants as with sausages — You really don’t want to see how they’re made.

A special report on Duke University’s enthusiasm for Anil Potti.

A community in Maryland has suspended negotiations over a sister-city agreement with Beit Shemesh following violence in the Israeli city against women by haredi Orthodox residents.

Montgomery County, which is home to a large Jewish population, was at the end of the process to ink the sister-city arrangement with the Jerusalem suburb when disturbances by haredim outside a Modern Orthodox girls’ school and other assaults on women in the area were reported internationally.

Negotiations over a sister-city relationship began in 2007, according to the Washington Post.

Gevalt. Who knew that UD‘s own Montgomery County, Maryland, was after linking arms with the most woman-phobic city this side of Kunduz!

Think of the sister-city events she’ll miss because of the suspension of negotiations: Stoning women wearing half-sleeves, forcing women to sit in the back of buses, erasing images of women from public signage, making women worship behind blind walls, AND (UD was looking forward to this most of all) spitting on eight-year-old girls as they walk to school and calling them stinking whores! Where the hell else but in UD‘s almost-sister-city can you get fun like that? Subsidized by the government?

Philosophers have taken to the pages of the New York Times in an effort to justify themselves; but Paul Shaffer’s comment (it’s this post’s headline) after Whitney Houston’s death does a better job of this than all of their efforts.

Shaffer’s comment has concision, modesty, and beauty; it acknowledges the existence of a philosophical (and aesthetic, and spiritual) tradition within which people have long thought and written about the almost-inexplicable disparities at war within us:

In me there are two souls, alas, and their
Division tears my life in two.

Faust’s famous complaint can be seen as the beginning of philosophical wisdom, whether we imagine that insight in terms of Platonic darks and lights or Freudian death- and life-drives … UD likes the way Shaffer says “some kind of sense,” because philosophy cautions against the possibility of making fully satisfactory sense out of this latest event in the history of human vitality/self-destruction. We all lead some variant of this energized and then at times totally-flopping-into-nothingness-and-defeat life; but when icons of vitalism, intensity, and creative energy (Houston, David Foster Wallace, Amy Winehouse, and, farther back, Lenny Bruce – our most powerful artists) run through those two currents of vivacity and void all their lives, right in front of us, and then ultimately (and early in the race) collapse, they rivet our attention to human bondage.

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

Les UDs were finishing dinner last night at Indian Ocean restaurant on Connecticut Avenue, with their friends Steve and Di Elkin, when La Kid called Mr UD about Houston. She was walking back from a charity event at which she and her George Washington University a cappella group, The Sirens, had performed. As UD watched Mr UD listening to her, she felt that weird maternal helpless thing where you understand how your kid feels and it’s bad but you can’t do anything about it.