The humongous lawsuit everyone’s been anticipating against – among others – the people who make and market the military weapon which that teenager used to obliterate twenty one elementary school kids and teachers in Uvalde is announced ($27 billion, if you were wondering).
Daniel Defense is famous for this adorable ad:
I mean the one on the left. Paranoid, fully militarized variations of the one on the right are used by most gun makers, who typically target violent unstable teenagers with them. As Ryan Busse, a former gun executive, notes in my headline, manufacturers don’t even bother playing along with the protection/hunting bullshit anymore. Daniel Defense’s factory address is 101 War Fighter Way.
The ad on the left stands out because it doesn’t just go after insane eighteen year olds like the Uvalde guy; and it doesn’t just go after babies (what age is the babe in the photo? three? four?) but itsanctifiesthe AK-47 wielding toddler with a Biblical verse and a praying hands emoji. It adds Jesus to the mix.
The president of Daniel Defense sits on the corporate advisory board at Georgia Southern University but UD‘s thinking he’s desperately seeking his own consultants this morning.
I’m pretty sure I know what Bain or whoever is telling him. The suit won’t go anywhere but the whole thing’s gonna cost you a shitload of money. The good news is the NRA will pay it all.
… a group of American universities where gun massacres coincide with their homecoming festivities. We’ve already covered Grambling’s celebrations; only a few days later, Fort Valley State in Georgia struts its stuff.
Stay tuned! It wouldn’t be homecoming without a spray of flowers and a spray of bullets.
… I mean… Why isn’t there something in our founding documents that says that if you’re Marjorie Taylor Greene you can’t go out of the house, let alone assume political office? This graduate of the University of Georgia (Anything to say about that, UG?), with her glee over thoughts of murdering much of America’s political class, her obscene conspiracy theories, her…
Ugh. So much more to say about this degenerate. I can’t bear it, so I won’t. Do your own reading.
But let me just say: Shame on us for somehow having produced Marjorie Taylor Greene. I’m going for collective guilt on this one. American scum I get; all countries have scum. That this scum was allowed to rise to national political office is on all of us. We need to do some serious reflection/repentance.
The Acting Secretary of Homeland Security has issued a National Terrorism Advisory System (NTAS) Bulletin due to a heightened threat environment across the United States, which DHS believes will persist in the weeks following the successful Presidential Inauguration. Information suggests that some ideologically-motivated violent extremists with objections to the exercise of governmental authority and the presidential transition, as well as other perceived grievances fueled by false narratives, could continue to mobilize to incite or commit violence.
Fifth-generation Atlantan, handsome, beautiful family, rich, fancy private school (he’s been banned from its grounds for threatening to kill someone who came to speak there), and then the incomparably beautiful Sewanee/University of the South for college, where he got a degree in economics.
Meredith is alsoa “habitual drug user and has a history of mental illness,” plus a history of threats against women (or, in his nomenclature, ‘cunts’), plus a history of general violence. Plus immense numbers of guns.
And ain’t it the beauty of the United States that a man like this, a deeply disturbed and violent man, with the insane political fanaticism and insane conspiracy theories that accompany his profile, has had no trouble at all… will never have any trouble… amassing a personal arsenal more than worthy of the terrifying terrorist that he is.
You can thank the National Rifle Association for many, many of the Cleveland Merediths pissing and shitting all over the Capitol building on January 6, hauling their rifles into the seat of the American government and killing and threatening to kill people. You can also thank Fuckface for enticing Cleveland Meredith out of his cage.
The question is how to put him back in. It’s going to be difficult.
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The January 6 insurrection was better planned and better armed than we first believed. The mob was not a bunch of yahoos, but often middle-class, well-educated professionals, integrated with trained former military and cops.
Because [huge] network money has to come from somewhere, we can anticipate more and longer commercials in games that already subject fans’ patience, bladders, and backsides to what amounts to a four-hour stress test. Those who head from the stadium to the local motel instead of fighting traffic and fatigue on the long drive home are almost certainly looking at two-night minimums on rooms at grossly inflated rates. Throw in gas, food, and tickets for a family of four, and your credit card tally will scream of a weekend in Paris, not Clemson.
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James Cobb, Spalding Distinguished Professor of History Emeritus at the University of Georgia, goes on to describe
the sinister contagion of unadulterated commercialism now enveloping college football at every level. Left unchecked, it promises to make exiles of the students, alumni, and loyal fans in general who long saw games, not simply as athletic contests, but the centerpiece of a deeply personal, culturally affirming ritual.
In a 2015 article with the amusing title Is the Era of Abusive College Coaches Finally Coming to an End? a Sports Illustrated writer totes up the butcher’s bill, to which we have most recently added University of Maryland football player Jordan McNair. “Our [false] conviction that hostility works is encouraged by a culture that makes legendary figures of [Bob] Knight and Steve Jobs,” says the writer, who goes to great lengths to argue that you catch more flies with honey. Maybe he should have held tight until the results of the last presidential election.
Meanwhile, they’re beating the shit out of high school football players too.
[P]ractices [at Grayson High School in Georgia] featured “full-force hitting in shorts.” Although no players were injured this year before the [team walkout over sadistic coaching], they were “concerned for their health heading into the season.”
Once the coach is done with you, there’s avoiding anal rape by your teammates. (I’ve linked you to only the latest anal rape story. Google anal rape football and go to town.)
If you survive all that, it’s off to a homicidal fraternity in that big state school that recruited you. And get ready for your new best friend, Richie Incognito!
Concussions? Ha. Concussions are nothing.
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Oh. The whole does it work or doesn’t it controversy? Way off-point. Look closely, please. Some coaches love violence for itself, the way most human beings do. Look at the game to which coaches devote their lives.
Most human beings won’t kick or kill other people the way some coaches do; they’ll go to violent movies and football games and watch violent porn, etc. Life won’t afford them the opportunity to physically (and psychologically) brutalize actual human beings. Coaches get that opportunity.
… reminds ol’ UD to talk about a trend among prospective students and faculty at our country’s universities.
Krugman points out that
our madness over guns [is] just one aspect of the drive to turn us into what Thomas Hobbes described long ago: a society “wherein men live without other security than what their own strength and their own invention shall furnish them.” And Hobbes famously told us what life in such a society is like: “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.”
There are larger and larger areas of this country where
[people regard any] public action for the public good, no matter how justified, as part of a conspiracy to destroy our freedom.
This paranoia strikes both deep and wide. Does anyone remember George Will declaring that liberals like trains, not because they make sense for urban transport, but because they serve the “goal of diminishing Americans’ individualism in order to make them more amenable to collectivism”? And it goes along with basically infantile fantasies about individual action — the “good guy with a gun” — taking the place of such fundamentally public functions as policing.
Anyway, this political faction is doing all it can to push us toward becoming a society in which individuals can’t count on the community to provide them with even the most basic guarantees of security — [including] security from crazed gunmen…
We’re beginning to see evidence of some faculty leaving, and some students not applying, to universities in these frontier settings. Bullets, rapists, and riots, oh my…
Many such locations are already cultural wastelands; some are also beginning to look like shooting galleries.
Why, for instance, would anyone with a choice want to live – even for a few years – in Waco, Texas, home of armed cults,armed motorcycle gangs, and Baylor University? Why would a non-Hobbesian want to work there, live there, go to school there, teach there? It’s not as if there’s any cultural compensation to living in the Wild West. It’s guns and strip malls and megachurches where you beg divine protection.
Why would you go to Hammond, Louisiana and attend Southeastern Louisiana University, famous for being the last school in America willing to take Jonathan Taylor? Can anyone be surprised that at 3 AM yesterday a fight broke out on campus and a bunch of people got shot?
These schools are part of America’s Hobbesian wastelands, where you grabs your AR-15 and you takes your chances. The idea that a university could thrive under these conditions is hilarious.
Trying to teach or learn in these settings is like deciding to take your family vacation in Beach Blanket Bloodbath Myrtle Beach. Why? Unless you’re a Hobbesian and you enjoy that sort of thing?
UD anticipates a militarization of certain campuses – having been abandoned by civilization, they will become weedy tracts patrolled by open-carry paranoids offering Active Shooter Response seminars.
If you’re in the wasteland, and you can leave, you should. Get out while the getting’s good.
… when she sees scathe-worthy writing, she rises to the occasion.
Here’s the SEC commissioner trying to get Mississippi university leaders riled up against the overwhelming passage, in that state’s House, of legislation clearly paving the way for conceal carry folk to bring their guns to football games. He intervened in the very same way when Arkansas tried to get guns in the hands of football fans; now he’s sticking his nose in the business of the good people of Mississippi. Here’s what he wrote to the chancellor of the University of Mississippi.
Given the intense atmosphere surrounding athletic events, adding weapons increases meaningful safety concerns and is expected to negatively impact the intercollegiate athletics programs at your universities in several ways… If HB1083 is adopted to permit weapons in college sports venues, it is likely that competitors will decline opportunities to play in Oxford and Starkville, game officials will decline assignments, personal safety concerns will be used against Mississippi’s universities during the recruiting process and fan attendance will be negatively impacted.
Yes, SOS hears you. ‘SEC Commissioner’ describes a position of dignity and gravitas. The SEC Commissioner is not in a position to say
I’m shitting bricks thinking about your wasted frat boys whipping out their AR-15s and blowing everyone away.
But he could still have done a better job of writing to the chancellor. Let’s consider how he could have issued his warning more eloquently.
There’s a stiff bureaucratic feel to the whole thing, isn’t there? And given that he wants above all to convey a sense of urgency, dead language of this sort does the opposite. Notice that he begins all bass-ackward, backing up to his point rather than stating it right out.
Given the intense atmosphere…
No. Start right off with guns. Guns make football games more dangerous, and they’re already somewhat dangerous. In other words, the whole intense atmosphere thing begs for clarification.
I mean, having for a long time read coaches and fans talk about university football games, UD would have thought ‘intensity’ in their regard referred simply to wholesome fellowship and partisan fun! No? Ok, then don’t leave me hanging: Is there something else intense going on at football games?
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Well, think about it, UD. Look around an SEC stadium during a game. Did you ever see so many police? Why do you think they’re there?
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But of course the commissioner doesn’t want to specify the nature of pre-addition-of-weaponry football game intensity, because there’s a large athletics industry supporting him and his family, and that’s nothing to fuck with.
So, along the same lines, he goes for the unbearably ugly negatively impact to try to delicately gingerly ever so lightly skip around …
Skip around what? Good writing is more direct than this. You’d have to be insane to add guns to crowds of drunk agitated immature males.
And now for the windup, which of course features a second use of negatively impact. Finds it so nice he uses it twice.
… it is likely that competitors will decline opportunities to play in Oxford and Starkville, game officials will decline assignments, personal safety concerns will be used against Mississippi’s universities during the recruiting process and fan attendance will be negatively impacted.
I wonder why football players, specially in the south, might not be happy to play in front of tens of thousands of Mississippi university students with big ol’ guns at the ready??? Hm. Hm. That’s a real poser.
But anyway… Let’s redo this final clause, shall we?
Pads and helmets can only do so much. Bad enough you’re concussing your head. You’re also putting yourself out there in a huge open shooting gallery with armed angry drunk southern males. Ditto for sitting-duck game officials. People get real angry at officials. In the pre-technological world of high school sports, you have to get up, run onto the field, and beat officials to death with your own fists. With guns, it’s a piece of cake.
Georgia will not hesitate to tell recruits trying to decide where to play that they definitely could get their asses blown off in Mississippi. As for your fan base: Though the lads’ aim might be wobbly from a few hundred feet, they’re for sure not going to miss the nice broad back of the guy two rows ahead who just called them a motherfucker. So your attendance numbers aren’t going to be enhanced. Unless you add all the new fans who are there to shoot off their guns.
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Yes, yes, SOS knows that she has slipped into the sort of language incommensurate with the moral stature of an SEC commissioner. Sorry.
Get ready to hear a lot about Premature Tackle Syndrome (PTS), where a just-signed football recruit starts beating up women after signing his letter of intent, but before enrolling.
[Dantne] Demery’s next stop [player-arrest-ridden University of Georgia has dropped him after his arrest for pummeling his girlfriend], assuming he takes one, might not be another SEC school: The conference passed a rule last year prohibiting any school from accepting a transfer with a history of sexual or domestic violence.
However, it’s not clear if that rule applies to Demery, who had signed a letter-of-intent but had not enrolled at Georgia. A request for clarification has been sent to the conference office for comment.
Herein lies the tragedy of PTS. If you can just wait a few days after the letter of intent – if you can just hold on until you’re enrolled – you can maybe do all the woman-beating you want.
For most of us, that doesn’t sound like too tall an order: Just wait say 48 hours until your next woman-beating. But for those with PTS those 48 hours loom like an unscalable mountain. PTS sufferers simply must knock the shit out of their girlfriend, and they don’t do things by the clock. Let’s hope the SEC understands this.
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“People are angry with me,” [said his girlfriend, who went to the police,] but … she didn’t understand why.
Answer #1: You bet your ass they’re angry. He was a hell of a player, hotly recruited.
Answer #2: Absolutely, if and only if he can also hit quarterbacks.
…dies… If the football player actually kills the dog…
But that’s East Carolina. Maybe Baylor would have kept Zamora on even if he’d killed his dog rather than just beating him to within an inch of his life. Baylor’s special.
The ECU dog-killer is a typical American higher education story, a glorious tale of the life of the mind in our country. He was dismissed from Georgia Tech after multiple conduct violations. Instantly thereafter, East Carolina found itself uncontrollably attracted to this scholar/athlete, whose presence on campus, ECU was sure, would be a great boon for everyone involved.
Which university will now bid on the dog-killer? Recruitment coaches all over the country are eyeing his stats even as we speak.
“There’s this idea, primarily coming from alumni and boosters, that you can put enough money into a team and turn it into a powerhouse success story,” Andrew Zimbalist, a professor of economics at Smith College, said. “But that becomes more and more unrealistic with each passing year. It’s a fool’s errand, but people are crazy about football, so they keep trying.”
The trend, Zimbalist said, is predominantly located in the southern United States, where the “culture is very football dominant.”
… In its first season as an FBS team, Georgia State won zero games. The following year, it won one. Last season, the team won six of its 13 games… [A]verage attendance plummeted from the previous season’s 15,000 to 10,000.
… “I think we’re right where we should be from a competitive standpoint,” [said Georgia State’s AD].
… “It’s almost impossible to make this leap [to big-time football],” Zimbalist said. “It’s not rational to think otherwise. But if rationality was all that was at play here, this would have stopped a long time ago.”
… “[In the South, there’s the feeling that] if you don’t have a football team, then you’re somehow not a real campus, [said Mark Nagel, a sports management professor at the University of South Carolina,] and you are not on par with other schools. That emotion takes control.”
Arrests and apologies… Losing much of your university football team because your recruitment staff is incentivized to bring people with a propensity toward violence onto college campuses has become so much part of the story of American life that sports writers are getting downright poetic about it.
… even when we know a lot, we know very little, UD still wants to pay attention to the suicide of 24-year-old University of Kansas football player Brandon Bourbon. It reminds her of Ohio State’s Kostas Karageorge’s suicide, and Derek Boogaard’s, and the suicides of some other super-macho way-young heroes of violent sports.
I know there are many differences among these deaths. Some of them seem to have, in part, physical causes – brain trauma, mainly. Boogaard’s might have been an accidental overdose, while Bourbon and Karageorge hid away and shot themselves in the head. Some of these men were always troubled, always struggling in life, while others – Bourbon – fell from a very great height.
Still, there’s a common plot line here having to do with sports-obsession…
Start with Bourbon’s funeral service being held on his local football field. Because he played football in a part of the United States (Missouri) where football is worshipped, “I don’t want to say he was looked to as a god,” [a friend] said, “but he was idolized.” Americans are baptized on high school football fields. Grieving Americans scatter ashes on university football fields. Young men who play football are high priests.
Bourbon did not merely grow up in a part of the world where football is very important. He grew up in a place where the very passages of life – including his own funeral – may take place on football fields. He grew up understanding that few things are more important than football.
Intelligent, handsome, genial, he was offered a football scholarship to (among other great places) Stanford, and he originally accepted Stanford’s offer, but ultimately turned it down for Kansas, where he studied a typical jock thing: sports management. UD wonders if this initial step – 100% football over a school that takes its big-ticket athletes seriously as students – already hurt Bourbon, one of whose friends reports that he was “struggling with his spirituality” at the time he died. Serious studies in the arts and sciences are about (among other things) broadening one’s perspective and giving one ways to think productively about existential questions. UD isn’t claiming that a capacity to think more broadly about life in a way that might have helped Bourbon survive would necessarily have been the outcome for him of a good university education. But it might have been.
And then there were the injuries. Bourbon spent most of his Kansas years with broken this and torn that, which kept him out of play, and one can only imagine his frustration. Eventually he had to transfer out of his Division I school to obscure Washburn (Div II), a move that must have been crushing for someone who had been recruited at the highest levels. When Washburn was over, Bourbon was back in his little home town, bedeviled by former worshippers who wanted to know why he wasn’t in the NFL by now. “He was just struggling to figure out who he was and what he ended up really wanting to do with his life.” Well, yes. He was only twenty-four years old after all. But his football path had been set very early, and he seemed unable to step out of it even a little.
Suicide, says A. Alvarez, reflecting on his own youthful suicide attempt, is one of the things some people do when they feel really really trapped.
UD figures Bourbon himself might have been rather sardonic at the sight of his football field funeral. Born to it. Died to it.
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.
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.
