At one point, [the judge] questioned whether the magnitude of opioid shipments delivered to the community might trigger some legal liability.

“Is there some point at which the number would be so great that it would be unreasonable?” [he] asked.

Nah! 81 million opioid pills for a city of 91,000 reflects a heroic dedication to the well-being of its residents — and the proof is in the pudding! One in ten of them is now a full-blown addict.

The only possible verdict in this trial of pill distributors is Presidential Medal of Honor for every CEO who unselfishly opened the floodgates so that Huntington West Virginia could stand as a shining overdosed city on a hill.

The suicide, at 25, of Jamie Raskin’s son Tommy (I’ve met Raskin a few times – he’s my district’s member of congress) prompts a beautiful remembrance essay by his parents.

What to say? UD‘s longtime readers know that her father – an eminent immunologist at NIH who had a good marriage and friends and four healthy kids – committed suicide when he was 58. Ever since that happened, she’s done a lot of thinking and reading and writing about the act, and these words by Elaine Ellis Thomas (her son Seth killed himself) convey a good deal of what UD has concluded about it.

Suicide brings on a very particular and peculiar kind of grief. The guilt and second-guessing and pure horror that someone could end one’s own life cause excruciating pain for family and friends. I have learned more about this than I care to know in the time since Seth died. Although we still know very little about John Miller’s tragic passing [Miller was a music instructor at Yale], I thought it might be helpful to share some of that hard-earned knowledge.

You could not have prevented it. Even if you think that you could have on that particular occasion, there is no guarantee that it would not have happened some other time. If you are wondering why you didn’t go with John or ask him to come over if he seemed out of sorts, don’t blame yourself. Seth’s roommate was in an adjoining room when he died. Having someone nearby made no difference at all.

If you’re trying to make rational sense of how something like this could happen to someone with such talent and such a bright future, you really can’t think about it rationally — there is no rational explanation. Normal people, those who are not sick in some way, do not kill themselves. Our most basic human instinct is for survival, so to cause one’s own demise subverts that in ways our healthy intellects can’t imagine.

If you’re thinking that John made a choice to end his life, I can’t agree. Whatever was tormenting him — depression, mental illness, some event that threw his mental wiring off kilter — that is what took him. As I said before, it isn’t a rational choice. Suicides are committed by people driven by a distorted mental and emotional reality. It isn’t really a choice.

I think a lot of people sensed these truths very strongly a couple of years ago when one of the goldenest of golden boys, Alan Krueger, killed himself at the age of 58 (same age as my father). Brilliant, handsome, courtly and kind, at the very top of his game, Krueger had it all – an Ivy League professorship, high-level positions in the federal government, a seemingly happy personal life, etc. Yet off he went, with not one of his many friends having had an inkling, as they tell it, that something was disastrously wrong inside his head.

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Another thing UD has come to understand about suicide – there are several pretty clearly distinct kinds. We have already referred to two here – suicide among the young (Tommy Raskin), and suicide among the middle-aged (Krueger; my father). A third kind – suicide among the elderly – is the easiest to understand, it seems to me. Consider one such that I wrote about not long ago – my Northwestern University professor, Erich Heller. I gather, from reading about it, that Heller’s life sort of tapered to an end and he just got bored and lonely and sad. His younger life had been pretty heady, conducted among the literary and philosophical elite of Europe and America; in old age, with most of his friends dead and Heller frail, unwell, and pretty much alone, the whole existence thing must not have seemed much of a bargain. When things come to an end but you’re still sort of pointlessly hanging around, it can seem a little de trop to keep going through the (increasingly excruciating) motions.

I’ve written a lot, on this blog about universities, about student suicides. These may seem spontaneous, some sort of psychotic break, and can be dramatically – athletically! – enacted, reflecting in a final dark inversion the vitality and impulsivity of the young. But despite their seeming suddenness, most acts of suicide among the young are, as Camus wrote of all suicides, “prepared within the silence of the heart.” Many youthful suicides are carefully planned, and may feature rational, and very apologetic, suicide notes. Once people become, in Thomas’s words, “driven by a distorted mental and emotional reality,” their life becomes intense daily warfare between psychic pain that wants to kill them and doctors/pills/therapists/loved ones who want to save them. In notes like Raskin’s, which his parents released, the writer acknowledges, with what is left of his rational mind, that the war has been lost:

“He left us this farewell note on New Year’s Eve day: ‘Please forgive me. My illness won today. Please look after each other, the animals, and the global poor for me. All my love, Tommy.’”

Depression, to state what I guess is the obvious, kills most suicides. My father, diagnosed bipolar, died with a full load of anti-depressant medication in him, prescribed by a sympathetic and highly qualified psychiatrist. But the depression won that day. The symbolism of the end of the year spoke – insidiously whispered – to Tommy Raskin on his final day. Enough already. You’ve come to the very end.

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The pathos of early life suicides lies in the irresistable thought that if somehow the lost could have just been – magically? – carried over the worst, if they could have been somehow sustained through the shocks to their sense of life as ongoing that they had to endure, they would have recovered and lived long lives. Heller we pity and understand; Krueger, like my father, presents as someone who was probably lucky to get 58 years, given what might well have been deep-lying, decades-long struggle against an immovably depressive disposition. But in the case of the young, like Tommy Raskin, I can’t help envisioning … I dunno… an Angels in America intervention that shields them until the storms abate.

Anyway. He was wise. See my headline. Hard to be a human. Ain’t it the truth.

… if you’re going to write super-duper-snob prose, get it right or risk being laughed out of the gated community. Here’s the ad copy for a six million dollar house a couple of miles away from ol’ UD in Bethesda, Maryland. Can you spot the problems? Let’s scathe through this, shall we (sniff)?

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Quintessentially luxurious in every aspect, the stunning residence is the perfect retreat nestled in verdant Bethesda, Maryland. [So far utterly cliche-driven, but okay. Nestled, verdant – the writer makes use of every stilted, long-dead upscale real estate adjective, but you don’t lose marks for writing generic prose.] Short drive to downtown Bethesda and less than ten miles away from the hustle and bustle of Washington, it is the idyllic cross between peaceful suburbia and city living. The property is just steps away from the prestigious Burning Tree Golf Club, host to numerous American presidents. [Prestigious – of course we’d make use of this embarrassing term. And be one of the lucky few to catch a peek of Donald Trump grunting through a round.] Regarding quality, the sophisticated residence knows no compromise. Perched atop a hill with two separate gated entrances, the home possesses the distinct architectural quality of an eastern castle with a modern panache. [Which is to say that, like a lot of megaostentatious megahouses in ‘thesda, it reaches out desperately, in any and all cultural directions, for imperial transcendence of its debased democratic surroundings. Some kinda … eastern? … castle? (“Yonda lies my faddah’s castle.”) is what the pile looks like.] Each unique feature of the house compliments the abode’s unparalleled architecture, [The writer means complements. Before trying to impress people with your stunning sophistication, learn to spell.] with Burma Teak windows and solid oak doors, towering ceilings, and a romanesque [Just to add yet another culture.] indoor pool and elevator to accommodate the three story building behind a custom wrought iron fence. [After all the Nicholas and Alexandra flouncing, the proletarian word building is a let-down… Although the house is probably in a gated community, note how many security walls and fences we’re featuring. No one will be able to get anywhere near you behind your modern panache golf view battlements.] The property possesses a stunning [Second use of stunning: At this point, we are knocked out flat.] floating staircase, an enclosed courtyard situated beside a double-level deck, a privately tiered backyard that meets an arbor with hand-carved rosewood corbeling. Bathrooms include a lavish display of marble inlay and a lapis lazuli sink. Furthermore, the property boasts a veranda complete with outdoor fireplace and pillars erected over 150 years ago, which elegantly compliment the state-of-the-art indoor and outdoor amenities of the palatial abode. [There’s that pesky compliment again. And while it’s impressive to contemplate a pillar that has remained erect for 150 years, the writer might have been better off with the word built... Plus: What’s a palace doing in my castle?]

The FDA has stood back and watched proudly as its buddy John Hammergren [scroll down], head of drug distributor McKesson, pockets seven hundred million dollars for ten years of work — but he earned every penny of it, having engineered the distribution, for instance, of five million opioids to Kermit, WV, population four hundred.

Hammergren’s the sort of pusher-billionaire the FDA’s in the business of ignoring… ignoring? Nay, encouraging, as he finds and exploits bottomless wells of addiction in this nation’s hollers and thereby does his part to make America the economic miracle that it is. He’s honored everywhere: Arizona State University named him Executive of the Year; he sits on the board of the prestigious Center for Strategic and International Stupefacients… Because we want people like Hammergren setting policy for us, and for the world, China and India having much larger populations than Kermit, and awaiting McKesson’s ministrations…

Well, it’s all been a win-win arrangement, but now the butcher’s bill is really coming due on the whole opioid thing – ie it’s not just no-‘count West Virginians dying anymore, and even the FDA has today felt compelled to murmur a little demur or two…

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

The FDA’s his best friend. Wanna know who his lover is? The DEA.

Seven hundred million dollars over the last ten years in personal compensation! Not bad. This guy makes the Sacklers look like chumps. And all on the backs of poor slobs in West Virginia who took his drugs and destroyed themselves and their worlds. And now the CEO of the most disgusting opioid distributor in the world (“In 2006 and 2007 … McKesson Corp … shipped more than 5.66 million opioid pills to a single pharmacy in a tiny town in rural West Virginia, according to a scathing congressional report released last month.”) has decided that with the eyes of the courts upon his business methods the time is absolutely right to retire.

Time to explore other ways he can make a contribution to society.

One night, in the winter of 2013, crowds of Michigan State University students ripped trees out of the landscape, burned them in the streets, and jumped over the flames. Here’s the Nazi-book-burning-fun image. Close to sixty similar bonfires went up all over East Lansing in response to MSU having beaten Ohio State — another perennially torching and rioting school — in a football game.

You want links? You want links to decades of torching-the-town and scorching-the-earth and torturing-police-horses Penn State, Ohio State, and Michigan State? Sorry. Too fucking depressing. Look them up yourself.

It’s a long tradition: After football games, or after the firing of child-rapist-enabling coaches, or in celebration of holidays, hundreds of drunken shits gather at America’s football factories and attempt to incinerate their neighborhoods.

As if places like East Lansing weren’t bleak enough. Let’s establish a university where we admit hundreds of people who, as one, yank out of the ground all of the saplings planted in an effort to bring some life to our cold terrain.

A university! Maybe East Lansing harbors some gangs we might expect to do something like kill trees and set the town on fire. These are university students. Michigan State University is a university.

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

But, as all of America’s media is madly noting today, MSU has a specific culture. (I’ve just linked you to today’s Michigan State University Google News page. Scroll down. Endlessly.) It’s the same culture Penn State and Ohio State and plenty of other NCAA-favorites (the NCAA’s getting excoriated everywhere too – like – hey – turns out it’s corrupt) exhibit, and it’s a deep culture – the work of decades of abjection in the face of athletics.

At this point, schools like these are basically distilleries. Rape and pillage are what you get when you’re a big ol’ distillery packed with twenty year olds.

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So the depraved people at MSU let a depraved doctor systematically rape hundreds of children. Same thing with a coach-rapist at Penn State. The president of MSU and the athletic director just resigned. And now we’re breathlessly told that this is just the beginning of the massive numbers of sports-related crimes about to be exposed at MSU.

Funny thing: It played out almost exactly the same way at Penn State! And Auburn! I could go on!

The trouble at Michigan State appears to go beyond Dr. Nassar, who was a university employee for decades and the physician to two women’s varsity teams. An ESPN investigation Friday described a pattern in which sexual assault complaints involving prominent athletes, including more than a dozen on the football team and a few in the celebrated men’s basketball program, were handled by the athletic department rather than through regular university channels.

Michigan State insufficiently complied with federal officials monitoring the university under Title IX, the gender-equity law, the report found.

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MSU … will not face criminal charges for [its] part in Nassar’s actions, though [it is] facing multiple civil law suits from over 100 victims of his abuse.

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It’s a culture, see? You don’t dump the prez, bring in a deer-in-the-headlights replacement, and create a new culture.

It is, as they say, what it is. The sadistic, greedy, amoral coaches who, once finally fired, dedicate the rest of their lives to suing the school for four hundred million dollars. The deities on the money teams who sack quarterbacks and women. The brain-damaged ex-football-hero trustees. The student body seething with alcoholic bullies. When they tire of watching pledges die from booze forced down their gullets, they head out to the town saplings.

The school’s too busy dealing with five ongoing high-profile athletic and academic and fraternity scandals to notice the creepy little team doctor or the elderly has-been coach off raping children somewhere. And all the decent people on the faculty, in the administration, and in the student body keep their heads down and do their work and pretend their school’s not a saloon.

When it comes to university presidents looting their schools, America lags well behind Greece, where the chancellor of Pandio University set the standard by leading (he was only found guilty of failing to note the illegal removal of ten million dollars of university funds, but he seems to have personally benefited from said removal) an extensive conspiracy of robber-administrators. The Greek state gave the school money; the school’s leadership took the money – that seems to have been the straightforward approach – and bought the stuff listed in this post’s headline.

Here in the States, the business of leaders draining millions and billions of university funds is more subtle, more complicated. President Lawrence Summers’ mad insane interest rate speculation cost Harvard one billion dollars but I mean … you know … he meant well. Yeshiva University’s trustees no doubt thought they were enriching the school as much as themselves by their extensive conflicts of interest coupled with avid investments in pieces of work like fellow trustee Bernie Madoff. In the event, they cost the school $1.3 billion.

Not that we don’t boast a few Greek-style university presidents. Karen Pletz, while president of Kansas City University of Medicine and Biosciences, allegedly paid for her Lexus convertible and a series of amazing foreign trips by the simple expedient of removing what these things cost from the university’s reserves and placing those sums in her private account.

*********

James Ramsey, now routinely described as the disgraced ex-president of the University of Louisville, stands somewhere between high-minded removalists like Summers and flat-out Ferrari larcenists. UL let him, over the years, grow to a big strapping tyrant with his fingers all over every money source available at this public institution in one of America’s poorest states.

I say let him, but as Pandio and other examples suggest, it takes a village to pillage. Ramsey surrounded himself with what one retired UL professor, reviewing the school’s sordid history, calls fellow pirates – people who took as much pleasure in pillaging as he, and who of course had no cause to expose his piratical deeds.

Dennis Menezes, who spent almost forty years at the U of Smell, takes a sentimental journey through some highlights:

Robert Felner, the former education who ended up doing jail time for misappropriating millions of dollars; Alisha Ward siphoning of hundreds of thousands of dollars from U of L’s Equine Industry Program; “Sweetheart contracts” at the College of Business, where administrators continued to receive their significantly higher salaries even after stepping down from their administrative positions, a practice rarely seen at other universities; the disappearance of hundreds of thousands of dollars stolen by Perry Chadwyck Vaughn at the School of Medicine…

At some point the leadership of a university gets so notoriously filthy that career criminals like Felner make a point of applying to work there, thus amplifying the pirate-load. I mean to say that when Menezes tries to puzzle out what makes a university a criminal enterprise, he fails to land on the obvious: Once your university is known to tolerate – nay, encourage – piracy, pirates from all over the world get on board.

The journey to just awful is smoothed by other campus assets, in particular — natch — sports. Let me suggest how this probably works at places like U of L, where, you recall, an entire sports dorm was transformed into a whorehouse for the use of recruits and their fathers. The pattern at sex-crime-crazed places like Penn State, Baylor, and Louisville is for the president to be invisible while the AD, the actual president of the school, does whatever the fuck he and his massive program like. At criminal enterprises like U of L, a president like Ramsey actively takes advantage, let’s say, of all the big scandalous sports noise in the foreground to quietly do his removalist thing.

More than that, enormous sports programs tend to bring quite a few truly scummy and twisted people to a campus and reward those people with enormous salaries and enormous respect (if they win games). Over time the powerful and often scummy sports contingent defines the ethos of the whole university, as in: Jerry Sandusky was EMERITUS PROFESSOR Sandusky at Penn State, I’ll have you know. UD attended a Knight Commission meeting in DC where a coach at a local university stood up and insisted that athletic staff at American universities should have professor status. “They’re educators as much as anyone else. It’s elitist to think otherwise.” So athletics, at many universities including Louisville, certainly does its bit to vulgarize and corrupt everyone, making it much easier for already sketchy people like Ramsey to assume they’re living in a sleaze-friendly world.

UD ain’t saying you must have a big sports program for endemic corruption, but it sure doesn’t hurt.

Anyway. This post is long enough. We’ll be following U of L as they try to decide whether it’s worth suing Ramsey and his pirate crew to get back some of the many millions they removed. We’ll also follow U of L’s difficult effort to find a new president. Would you want to preside over a school suing your predecessor for millions of dollars? Hell, the thing could even end up in criminal court.

I know you’ve been waiting for an update on the fate of this guy. We covered his legal argument that because of something having to do with the history of the post office he lies outside the jurisdiction of American courts.

He also represented himself in the case.

Apparently these approaches to his problem did not solve it.

1. Resolved: There are no holidays.

Our text this evening is “Holiday,” a short story by Katherine Anne Porter (she began writing it in the 1920’s but put it aside for decades until finally publishing it in 1960). We will follow this story closely as we gather into this uncharacteristically lengthy post the wisdom of the ages.

Yes. UD now shares with you, on this long drunken night, the truths of being, all of which are handily packed into this obscure little tale. “Holiday” is a meandering narrative, the sort of thing hyper-connected millennials have trouble reading, because in order to read “Holiday,” you have to settle into a very very slow cud-chewing state of mind, or mindfulness, or mindlessness, as if you were seated on a thin cushion in a room in which someone is taking their sweet time with a dharma talk. Porter’s stories “read as if they were composed at one sitting, and they have the spontaneity of a running stream,” writes an admirer, and indeed “Holiday” flows real and true, but you have to stay afloat, you have to keep faith with it and nothing else, or you’ll drift over to familiar dry banks.

So relax and work with me here as we start with the title. In this story, an unnamed young woman, tense and exhausted by unspecified personal problems, takes a one-month holiday to the Texas countryside, where she rents a room in the house of a large hard-working prosperous German-American farming family. She thinks it will be therapeutic to get away from herself, but – as the saying goes – wherever you go, there you are. And this is the first great truth with which the narrator begins: “[W]e do not run from the troubles and dangers which are truly ours, and it is better to learn what they are earlier than later…” Porter had a very settled sense of our entrapment, each of us, in our particular nature – the form of being which is truly ours – and she regarded a meaningful life as one in which you come to know, to face, to accept, the contours as well as the inescapability of your particular being. In an interview, she recalls a friend of hers who “was not able to take care of herself, because she was not able to face her own nature and was afraid of everything.”

So although this may sound like a counsel of despair – sink into the hopeless business of being who you hopelessly are – it’s not that at all. Once you’ve assumed the intellectual and emotional burden of your radically limited identity, once you’ve “walked the length of your mind,” as Philip Larkin put it, you are free to embark on the courageous project of – in Porter’s words – taking care of yourself.

2. Resolved: “Human life itself is almost pure chaos.”

The narrative begins and ends with a farcical wagon ride. The family member who picks the woman up at the train station to take her to the farm has brought an old rickety vehicle for the journey:

The wheels themselves spun not dully around and around in the way of common wheels, but elliptically, being loosened at the hubs, so that we proceeded with a drunken, hilarious swagger, like the rolling motion of a small boat on a choppy sea.

At the end of the story she herself ineptly drives a similarly ridiculous wagon:

We careened down the road at a grudging trot, the pony jolting like a churn, the wheels spinning elliptically in a truly broad comedy swagger.

Where are you getting in this narrative? You started on a set of vaudevillian wheels and you’re ending on the same. If you insist on the payoff of satisfyingly rounded events – resolutions, if you like – instead of the ridiculously elliptical stuff real life throws at you, you’re not going to get anywhere actual. You’ll stay on the evasive holiday everyone tries to stay on.

And Porter really pours on the chaos. The main family member with whom her unnamed heroine interacts, Ottilie, seems to suffer from severe cerebral palsy.

Her face was so bowed over it was almost hidden, and her whole body was maimed in some painful, mysterious way, probably congenital, I supposed, though she seemed wiry and tough. Her knotted hands shook continually, her wagging head kept pace with her restless elbows.

The wheels are really falling off the world of “Holiday.” Even the seemingly well-ordered routines of the family’s all-consuming maintenance of the farm – “the repose, the almost mystical inertia of their minds in the midst of [their] muscular life” – is a facade about to be torn apart by a violently destructive storm, and by the sudden death of their beloved mother.

3. Resolved: And yet, and yet.

We struggle, strangers to ourselves amid a world in turmoil. Yet (see Resolution #2) it’s only “almost” pure chaos. The wheels don’t actually fall off, and, grudgingly, they get us there. Ottilie’s physical chaos seems complete, yet she turns out to be perhaps the most ordered and essential mainstay of the family, since she is capable of cooking and serving excellent meals. She sustains them all.

Her muteness seemed nearly absolute; she had no coherent language of signs. Yet three times a day she spread that enormous table with solid food, freshly baked bread, huge platters of vegetables, immoderate roasts of meat, extravagant tarts, strudels, pies — enough for twenty people. If neighbors came in for an afternoon on some holiday, Ottilie would stumble into the big north room, the parlor, with its golden oak melodeon, a harsh-green Brussels carpet, Nottingham lace curtains, crocheted lace antimacassars on the chair backs, to serve them coffee with cream and sugar and thick slices of yellow cake.

… Her face was a brown smudge of anxiety, her eyes were wide and dazed. Her uncertain hands rattled among the pans, but nothing could make her seem real, or in any way connected with the life around her. Yet when I set my pitcher on the stove, she lifted the heavy kettle and poured the scalding water into it without spilling a drop.

Strangers to ourselves, we perceive others as equally strange. Untouchable, unreachable. Nothing can make them seem real. Yet in time the chaos that seems to reign in ourselves and others begins to hint of an underlying order. The wheels get us there; the heavy kettle gets held and the scalding water poured.

4. Resolved: Greet the world’s overtures, especially the ones that scare you, because they may reveal the truth.

Ottilie shows our heroine a photograph of herself, taken before she became misshapen.

The bit of cardboard connected her at once somehow to the world of human beings I knew; for an instant some filament lighter than cobweb spun itself out between that living center in her and in me, a filament from some center that held us all bound to our unescapable common source, so that her life and mine were kin, even a part of each other, and the painfulness and strangeness of her vanished. She knew well that she had been Ottilie, with those steady legs and watching eyes, and she was Ottilie still within herself. For a moment, being alive, she knew she suffered…

There’s a strikingly similar scene in Don DeLillo’s early novel, Great Jones Street, when a handsome, charismatic rock star who is undergoing some sort of nervous breakdown encounters a physically misshapen boy:

I must have seemed a shadow to him, thin liquid, incidental to the block of light he lived in. For the first time I began to note his embryonic beauty. The blank eyes ticked. The mouth opened slightly, closing on loomed mucus. I’d thought the fear of being peeled to this limp circumstance had caused my panic, the astonishment of blood pausing in the body. But maybe it was something else as well, the possibility that such a circumstance concludes in beauty. There was a lure to the boy, an unsettling lunar pull, and I moved my hand over the moist surface of his face. Beauty is dangerous in narrow times, a knife in the slender neck of the rational man, and only those who live between the layers of these strange days can know its name and shape. When I took my hand from his face, the head resumed its metronomic roll. I was still afraid of him, more than ever in fact, but willing now to breathe his air, to smell the bland gases coming off him, to work myself into his consciousness, whatever there was of that. It would have been better (and even cheering) to think of him as some kind of super-crustacean or diabolic boiled vegetable. But he was too human for that, adhering to me as though by suction or sticky filaments.

The truth is human, all too human, and UD figures it’s pretty clear in these sorts of encounters that what’s being met with is one’s sense of one’s own impossible twistedness, one’s own frightening unworkability. This is reality; this ain’t no holiday. Both characters are in fact drawn to these badly damaged, seemingly alien creatures, even as they’re frightened by them. They sense that here lies the felt truth of human suffering, and they won’t get anywhere with themselves until they get up close and personal with it. For this is precisely the graphic entrapment in one’s own peculiar nature Porter was talking about, and until one perceives both its reality and the possibility of somewhat transcending that reality, one’s self won’t be very workable. Recall that both the DeLillo and the Porter plots are propelled by the close-to-nervous breakdown of the main character.

5. Resolved: Anyway, most of life will remain incomprehension – of oneself and others… But! If you are willing to keep risking being ridiculous and uncomprehending (if the fool would persist in his folly…), you will experience certain incredibly important rewards. Certain meanings will begin to glimmer; other people’s humanity may cease to feel so alien and frightening to you; and out of the felt, shared, burden/joke of everyone’s suffering may come – curiously – a nourishing sense of the delight of existence itself.

The family has gone off to the mother’s funeral, leaving Ottilie, who after all is a member of the family, behind. Our heroine hears her crying and assumes she’s in despair at having been left at home.

[S]he howled with a great wrench of her body, an upward reach of the neck, without tears. At sight of me she got up and came over to me and laid her head on my breast, and her hands dangled forward a moment. Shuddering, she babbled and howled and waved her arms in a frenzy through the open window over the stripped branches of the orchard toward the lane where the [funeral] procession had straightened out into formal order.

And so our heroine decides to take the creaky old wagon that’s left in the barn, place (with great difficulty) Ottilie in it, and take her to the funeral. And this is what happens.

Ottilie, now silent, was doubled upon herself, slipping loosely on the edge of the seat. I caught hold of her stout belt with my free hand, and my fingers slipped between her clothes and bare flesh, ribbed and gaunt and dry against my knuckles. My sense of her realness, her humanity, this shattered being that was a woman, was so shocking to me that a howl as doglike and despairing as her own rose in me unuttered and died again, to be a perpetual ghost. Ottilie slanted her eyes and peered at me, and I gazed back. The knotted wrinkles of her face were grotesquely changed, she gave a choked little whimper, and suddenly she laughed out, a kind of yelp but unmistakably laughter, and clapped her hands for joy, the grinning mouth and suffering eyes turned to the sky. Her head nodded and wagged with the clownish humor of our trundling lurching progress. The feel of the hot sun on her back, the bright air, the jolly senseless staggering of the wheels, the peacock green of the heavens: something of these had reached her. She was happy and gay, and she gurgled and rocked in her seat, leaning upon me and waving loosely around her as if to show me what wonders she saw.

Drawing the pony to a standstill, I studied her face for a while and pondered my ironical mistake. There was nothing I could do for Ottilie, selfishly as I wished to ease my heart of her; she was beyond my reach as well as any other human reach, and yet, had I not come nearer to her than I had to anyone else in my attempt to deny and bridge the distance between us, or rather, her distance from me? Well, we were both equally the fools of life, equally fellow fugitives from death. We had escaped for one day more at least. We would celebrate our good luck, we would have a little stolen holiday, a breath of spring air and freedom on this lovely, festive afternoon.

… and broad sculpted staircases with immense stained-glass windows at the landings. I glance through a window and catch the ghosts of liberals past – Arthur Schlesinger and John Kenneth Galbraith specifically – chatting on either side of the stone wall separating their big dreary Cambridge gardens.

A few yards behind these summoned luminaries looms the campus whose iconicity-to-actuality ratio UD has always found lopsided. The world dreams about Harvard, while Harvard itself stands in an almost-permanent bad weather snit, many of its major buildings brutalist and its central quads a dispiriting brickyard.

UD has always found these sorts of grandeur-to-ground-level gulfs bracing, refreshing, happy-making, as when she discovered that Phillip Larkin was a pissy old masturbator.

Hers is a common enough reaction. The most-praised portrayals of Winston Churchill show him as a shambling ass.

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At the darkest, coldest time of the year, I am in an old house, beside an old campus, in a very old city. The operative words are dust and dusk. Weak sunlight gives out at around two o’clock by the brooding grandfather clock in the hall, and the already-drifting house settles into true REM sleep. Across from the clock, a fine empaneled library is a museum on its way to being a mausoleum. The bound words of the prolific JKG maintain, on its shelves, a stunned silence. What happened to the world?

Such is the delicacy of this preserved interior that whenever UD spills some tea or dislodges one of the ruglets on the stairs, she smiles and thinks I am UD, destroyer of worlds. But there is a praiseworthy piety – world historical, filial – that wants to keep things as they are. The servant-summoning technology still works: Press the Library or Third Hall button on the Clark and Mill Electric Co Cambridge and Boston panel, and out comes a chirp.

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

Ghosts, and catastrophes. You think less about the grandeur and more about the ground-level grief when you’re actually here: The young son whose death threw Galbraith into a tailspin. The gruesome public assassination of Benazir Bhutto, guest of honor at one of his celebrated garden parties. Galbraith’s son Peter spends his life pacing the aftermath of global atrocity.

You could say UD currently sits (she’s in the library at five AM) at the pinnacle of elitism; you could say she ain’t climbing any higher than atop this soft leather chair resting on one of the gargantuan rugs Galbraith or Galbraith junior brought back from India or Afghanistan. But it’s only the trappings. What’s been able to be held in amber. This place is the genuine Henry James (Harvard Law, 1872): The affluent society, expansive, sedate; and the cry of pain almost out of earshot.

Wyoming, McDowell, and Boone, and Mingo:
These four no-count hollers all add up to… BINGO!
Get set for a lesson
From Mr McKesson
America’s greediest chairman, by jingo.

Shipping oodles and oodles of Oxy
To the poor and defenseless takes moxie.
While they die addicted
From what I’ve inflicted
I’m hoarding my bucks from the proxies.

Let’s toast West Virgina, my friends!
Let’s toast my obscene dividends!
And thank-you to the villagers
From our “most rapacious pillager” —
Your trustee, John H. Hammergren.

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

[UD thanks Dirk.]

The company’s drivers expressed safety concerns that FedEx trucks were being stopped on the road by online pharmacy customers demanding packages of pills and that the delivery address was a parking lot, school, or vacant home where several carloads of people were waiting for their drugs, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office.

… chronicled in this book, are entertaining places, and no doubt this new year we’ll continue following them at their most efficient, at the nation’s for-profit colleges.

But this country’s Centers for the Absorption of Corporate Funds deserve equal attention. Indeed these are arguably even more entertaining places, because while the federal government simply acts the well-meaning idiot as it dispenses hundreds of millions of dollars to hedgies pretending to run schools, corporations are often brilliant operators with bad motives — and it’s always more fascinating to watch the strategic villain than the bumbling good guy.

UD doesn’t claim that corporations looking for academic respectability in order, for instance, to hook America on opioids, always exhibit strategic brilliance. Crucially, they must identify research units within American universities able to balance compromised data (papers and presentations must uncover the urgent necessity plus the safety of massively increased pain pill intake) with the continued appearance of scientific integrity, a scheme fraught with difficulty. It’s not uncommon for reporters, and even politicians, to notice that a place like the University of Wisconsin’s Pain and Policy Studies Group is an almost wholly owned subsidiary of pharma, as it stashes away more and more OxyContin money while pumping out more and more Oxy Rocks! research.

Coca Cola, fast food, over-prescribed anti-depressants, over-prescribed anti-psychotics for toddlers, Dr. Shkreli’s Miracle Elixirs… All of these substances need whitewashing, and the university is where that happens. When things get too obvious, or when from the start they’re mishandled (remember what brought down Virginia’s last governor), the Centers suddenly shut down, or suddenly announce they’ve decided to stop taking corporate money…

“[Martin] Shkreli has become the Wolf of Pharma Street — he’s basically come to represent everything … bad and wrong with pharma,” Art Caplan, a medical ethicist at New York University, said by phone. And while Shkreli may be reviled, said Caplan, “he’s not doing anything in terms of prices that other companies haven’t done.”

This blog, dedicated to universities, has over the year pointed out the ways in which America’s predatory pharmaceuticals industry has compromised our academic institutions. Some of pharma’s corruptions are crude and overt: Med students have been so hounded by pharma (and other health industry) reps – med students, right? not even docs yet, but people who will at some distant point be docs – that to defend themselves their organization (the American Medical Student Association) established its now well-known Conflict of Interest Scorecard (UD‘s own George Washington University languishes near the bottom), which ranks such delicacies as GIFTS, MEALS, and of course GHOSTWRITING (a category all its own here at University Diaries).

Several of the best-compensated professors at American med schools are walking around with the names of the very dirtiest companies (GlaxoSmithKline Distinguished Professorship). Quite a few professors are themselves little more than pharma shills, given the riches they’ve accepted from the industry. Because of pharma, academic experimental protocols and published results are often tainted; because of pharma, research subjects may be treated unethically. Because of pharma, the fifteen-million page Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (At Least One Billable Diagnosis For Every American!) has become a joke.

Some of pharma’s academic depredations are more covert. For instance, on the board of trustees of the University of Chicago sits Gilead’s John Martin, a far more powerful and destructive icon of greed than measly little Shkreli.

Everyone who ever had anything to do with pill empresario Martin Shkreli is bailing bailing bailing. We don’t want your filthy money!

Leaving Hunter College and its affiliated high school (which the man himself attended) with a problem. He just gave the high school a million dollars. That’s a lot if you’re a high school. Plus they’re plastering his name all over the endowment. Some lucky scholarship student will enjoy a lifelong association (Shkreli Scholar?) with the man everyone’s calling America’s biggest asshole.

What to do?