… something stirred in UD’s headlet, and she searched the name Junod on University Diaries.
Sure enough, back in 2010, she cited Junod’s smart remarks about her beloved Don DeLillo; and one of those remarks has now helped her think about the Black Rifle Coffee/Dallas Cowboys controversy – a controversy that doesn’t seem to be dying down.
No, [DeLillo] has never written about Top Kills and Junk Shots and the odd flutter of hope elicited by the words “Containment Dome.” But in their suggestion of corporatized violence and above all in the violence they do to the language, they are DeLilloesque…
What DeLillo understood, long ago, is the end of the world would be experienced not as the end of the world but rather as a way of thinking and talking about the end of the world. What he understood is that the toxic cloud that has our name on it would be defined by its lack of definition; that we would never have as much information about it as we need to have or that someone else has; that it would turn into a free-floating void, exactly as withholding as it is encompassing; that it would become part of the landscape and that the landscape would become part of it; and that, of course, there would be footage, endlessly recycled but ultimately inconclusive.
Black Rifle, with its bloody brews (Murdered Out; AK-47), is corporatized violence becoming – via the Dallas Cowboys – a way of thinking and talking; a part of the landscape. What Brooks misses in his analysis of the origins and motivations of our teen massacrists is this normalization, this banality if you will, of apocalyptic weaponry and what it is doing to us. Coffee – that most banal of drinks – is now visually (via advertising footage, endlessly recycled) wedded to mass slaughter, to weapons that can literally murder us out.
An AK-47, first encountered by kids on a Jumbotron at a cool, fun, wholesome Dallas Cowboys game, is something that gives you the same vague chemical kick as a cup of Joe or a sports event. Everybody’s doin’ it.
Our violent psychotics do not necessarily, as Brooks argues, regard their AK-47s (often bought for them by daddy — Brooks has far too little to say about the depraved parents/suppliers of our killers) as charismatic icons of power and vengeance. They more probably seem to them utililtarian, normalized (how outlaw can AK-47s be when you get them from daddy, and when everyone’s drinking AK-47 coffee?), parts of the landscape.
Thus when Brooks gets melodramatically Biblical about guns (“The guns are like serpents in the trees, whispering to them.”), I wonder if he’s headed in the wrong direction. How can guns have this effect when dad’s chipped coffee cup has images of AK-47s all over it? When American parents routinely receive marketing pressing them to buy baby versions of AK-47s for their eight year old? When the raffle prize at the county fair is an AK-47?
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Our country’s most outspoken, violent teenager, after all, is famous for having boasted that he could “stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody” and it would only intensify his supporters’ enthusiasm for him. He didn’t know how right he was. Even his reported excitement about the impending death of his vice-president did nothing to dislodge him from his position of undisputed king of the nation’s Republican Party. His sons are even more violent – in word and deed – than he; and his congressional spawn … How surprised are you going to be when Jim Jordan can’t take it anymore and blasts into the January 6 committee room with a – you know – in his grip?
Go ahead. Laugh at this scenario. Go ahead.
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Just as the handgun has become the home appliance of choice when you want to grab something to kill yourself with in this, our massively suicide-ridden land, so the AK-47 is simply there, part of the landscape, the thing you grab (dad’s far too ruggedly independent to lock it up) when your loathing of humanity reaches – let’s go with coffee – the boiling point. “Every country contains mentally ill and potentially violent people. Only America arms them,” and only America goes a step further than flooding the country with guns for absolutely everyone and electing a pathologically violent president: America makes guns cute and sassy and savory, an unremarkable part of our shared corporate advertising world.
From an email UD just received from the dean of GW’s law school.
We … have received requests from some members of the university and external communities that the university terminate its employment of Adjunct Professor and Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and cancel the Constitutional Law Seminar that he teaches at the Law School. Many of the requests cite Justice Thomas’ concurring opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, in which he called the substantive due process doctrine a “legal fiction.” Justice Thomas has been a consistent critic of the Court’s legal philosophy on substantive due process for many years. Because we steadfastly support the robust exchange of ideas and deliberation, and because debate is an essential part of our university’s academic and educational mission to train future leaders who are prepared to address the world’s most urgent problems, the university will neither terminate Justice Thomas’ employment nor cancel his class in response to his legal opinions.
We really know how to pick ’em. Our next-best appointment after this one was plagiarist/madman Rand Paul. Why not ask Jim Jordan and Louie Gohmert to team-teach a course at GW on a subject of their choosing?
I agree that we shouldn’t fire the doodoo; the way to go here is boycott. Recall that both of John Eastman’s classes during a visiting gig at the University of Colorado were cancelled due to virtually no enrollment. Think of the movement at Harvard Law to make the school offer two sections of way-icky theocrat Adrian Vermeule’s course on administrative law. (Apparently the guy’s got a monopoly.) Ignore them, and they’ll go away.
… that at least one, and as many as three, Republican congresspeople plan to immolate themselves inside the Capitol as an act of protest against (in words that some are attributing to them) “Anthony Fauci’s slaughter of millions of innocent people, and Nancy Pelosi’s terror attack on this sacred building.”
Inspired by this iconic Buddhist monk, Rep. Jim Jordan and Sen. Rand Paul (these are apparently the most likely names) will set themselves aflame in the center of the Senate, in an effort, also, to distract attention from the ongoing testimony of policemen present at the January 6 insurrection.
Louie Gohmert, rumored to be a third self-immolater, has, according to some sources, said that he “no longer wants to live in a world in which Jake Ellzey beats Susan Wright.”
Obviously, if this rumored event actually happens, it will be an unprecedented trauma for the country, the ultimate twisted act of fidelity to Donald Trump. Whatever your politics, you’ve got to hope that their families and colleagues are able to dissuade these men from this grotesque act.
In “I Alone Can Fix It,” Washington Post reporters Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker write about a phone call between [Liz] Cheney and Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in which the Wyoming Republican describes a confrontation she had with Jordan during the riot, CNN reported.
“That f—— guy Jim Jordan. That son of a bitch. … While these maniacs are going through the place, I’m standing in the aisle and he said, ‘We need to get the ladies away from the aisle. Let me help you.’ I smacked his hand away and told him, ‘Get away from me. You f—— did this,’” Cheney reportedly told the general.
Must make Jordan nostalgic for his all-male wrestling days.
Or maybe not.
… toddles along, universally lauded as financially and reputationally enriching, healthy for mind and body, and an epicenter of mainstream all-American manhood in a world gone mad. Massive incessant scandals involving psychotic team doctors, ancient horny ex-coaches in rut, and rampagingly rapist players discourages this nation’s enthusiasm for big-time college athletics not at all. Such things happen, to be sure; but they could happen anywhere – so why not at an institution of higher learning?
The current appearance on the scene of Jordan and Gordon – an ex-coach and an ex-jock school president (Gordon’s currently head of hopeless-drunk West Virginia University) – takes us yet again on a trip down memory lane as we revisit the notoriously sicko programs they oversaw.
Gordon Gee is of course famous for having said, when asked, as president of Ohio State, if he would fire the corrupt football coach: “I’m just hopeful the coach doesn’t dismiss me.” He remembers nothing of any sexual abuse scandal involving athletics when he led that school. Jim Jordan similarly remembers nothing of Ohio State’s psycho team doc when he coached there, even though eight players have come forward to say Jordan knew all about the sexual abuse of players, not just from their doctor, but from random members of the Ohio State community who’d jam into the team sauna to masturbate at the sight of the guys.
Yes, it’s a kinked-up world, and the kinkmeisters go on to other presidencies and other leadership positions and nothing happened and away we go.
Ohio State University (OSU) is currently investigating the actions of Dr. Richard Strauss over claims he sexually abused male athletes at the university while he was team doctor for the school’s wrestling program, and other athletic teams, between 1978 and 1998. Strauss [killed himself] in 2005.
OSU have stated that they have received allegations of sexual misconduct by Strauss from 14 sports teams and from patients of the school’s student health services unit …
Mark Coleman, the UFC’s first heavyweight champion, wrestled at Ohio State in the 1980s and 90s…
Coleman is one of [seven] former wrestlers who have come forward in recent days to not only claim Strauss molested them, but that U.S Representative Jim Jordan, a Republican who represents Ohio’s 4th congressional district, had knowledge of these types of accusations regarding Strauss.
A big [Republican] majority has embraced a figure whose life’s mission is to disable government, including its system of justice…
Jordan has not passed a single piece of legislation in his 16 years in Congress. John Boehner, a former Republican Speaker whose career Jordan helped to end, called him a “legislative terrorist”… A Jordan speakership would be the most troubling sign of US democracy’s declining health since the January 6 2021 storming of Capitol Hill. Jordan spoke extensively to Trump in the lead up to that failed putsch and ignored a subpoena to testify to the committee that investigated the assault…
Jordan has tried to overturn a US presidential election. Some might consider it reckless to give control of the people’s house to a counter-revolutionary.
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“The Kamikazes on America’s Capitol Hill”
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“A vote today to make the architect of a nationwide abortion ban, a vocal election denier, and insurrection insider the speaker of this House would be a terrible message to the country and our allies,” [Pete] Aguilar said…
[Jim McGovern said:] “[Jordan] is like—rock bottom of who they could have picked to be their nominee.”
[S]upporters of [Jim] Jordan have been sharing Federal Election Commission [FEC] documents around Washington D.C. showing that [Steve] Scalise has spent more than $500,000 through his congressional campaign account [on steaks] at Capital Grille since 2011.
For the Twitterverse, which spent the past week snickering at “#GymJordan,” the “King of the Sauna,” the obvious explanation [for his total denial of knowledge of sexual abuse of wrestlers at Ohio State University], of course, is that [Jim] Jordan is covering up his own hidden homosexuality or, far worse, that he may have participated in the abuse himself. There’s no evidence of either – but Jordan should have known he was opening himself up to practically everyone on Earth suspecting it.
