cheese it, the cops!

popes and paternos

douthat argues today that there are parallels between catholic priests' sexual abuse of boys and the cover-ups of it and the penn state case. and folks on espn have been describing it as "the worst scandal in the history of college athletics." now let me say why i don't think these things are right, exactly. now, almost any institution - in particular any institution that deals with children - might harbor a pedophile; i guess there's a little segment of the population that is sexually configured this way; lord knows why. but the catholic church, i believe, more or less actively encouraged homosexual pedophilia for centuries. really 'celibacy' amounted to misogyny: the basic idea was not to touch women. and the idea of celibacy attracted many people who were disgusted - often for extremely good reasons - by their own sexuality. i actually think the altar boy was conceived to be a way to keep priests celibate: which is absurd, but there it is. you had thousands of abusers, layers and layers of concealment, and i think actual institutional encouragement. i don't know much about big-time college football, and it has its amazing corruptions, but it would surprise me if it had anything like that going on. what you have is one predator, and one extremely disturbing cover-up.

the worst scandals in college football are scandals that infect the whole thing routinely: those are the scandals that are peculiar to, characteristic of, the institution: scandals involving, say, cash or sex used to lure high school players to commit to a school: the way usc has conducted its program for decades, e.g. or academic scandals that amount to relieving players of their status as students. or judicial-type scandals where player misbehavior is forgiven or concealed over and over. these are the corruptions that are characteristic of the institution, as homosexual pederasty is characteristic of the catholic church. now it's probably true that sandusky was protected by a kind of culture of impunity around big-time college athletics. but it's not, i think, true that child sexual abuse is any more rampant in this environment than in any other. you'd be likelier to find that in children's charities, like sandusky's foundation, and maybe that's a place where we might focus more attention.

[let me acknowledge a little streak of homophobia in what i just wrote. and let me say that i also think that the extreme repugnance with which many people have greeted the sandusky revelations also has such a streak. 'anally raping a ten-year-old boy' causes about as severe a disgust reaction as i am capable of. and let me say: i was sexually abused by one of my step-brothers, and as an adolescent i was incessantly chicken-hawked by men: the guy on the bus who just puts his hand on your crotch; the guy who picks you up hitch-hiking and asks whether you like to masturbate etc etc. i kind of had to fight for a heterosexual identity. well obviously girls have to put up with shit like that from heterosexual men. but if that turned them against heterosexuality, you might understand it. but the homosexual element is intrinsic to the catholic situation (though of course there might be an occasional girl abused by a priest). reason tells me it's just as bad either way. nausea tries to tell me something else. no doubt further therapy is recommended.]

 

ai

iverson rocked, brian. electrifying. representing the little guy everywhere. that crossover! the speed, the intensity, the skill. 

jopa

i have to say i hope that the penn state board of trustees allows joe paterno to retire with some dignity at the end of the season, and doesn't fire him tonight. i think he didn't do nearly enough when a graduate student came to him and told him (apparently) that he saw jerry sandusky anally raping a 10-year-old boy in the penn state football showers. but on the other hand, he has done inestimable good for that school. one time the chair of the philosophy department at the main campus told me that various of his programs were secretly funded by paterno. and i don't think you will be harming anyone by allowing him to persist a few more weeks. he was not the perp. and his statement of regret was about as deep and sincere as anyone could hope for,

i'm even a bit sad to see the pres, graham spanier, go. when i was teaching at penn state harrisburg, i did an op-ed for the philly inquirer defending alan iverson (my fave b-ball player ever) after he was arrested for driving a hundred miles an hour through virginia with a gun on his passenger seat. i said: yesterday i got saved from a ticket when a guy coming the other way flashed his lights at me. so i flashed on the other side. we commonly help each other evade the law, a beautiful sign of human unity. well, spanier apparently got barraged with demands to fire me etc. but he didn't, though he did draft a reply, which he asked me to approve, saying 'crispin sartwell does not endorse breaking any law.' i made him re-cast that sentence, as i recall. but he was good about the whole thing.

creative naming strategies

again this season, i'll be collecting names of college basketball players. just to say it: black folks are applying ever-more creative naming strategies (it's not like, looking at these names, you're wondering about the players' race). so how about these freshmen from st. john's: God'sgift Achiuwa and Sir'dominic Pointer. also i feel that the apostrophe is only the beginning of the incorporation of punctuation marks into the human name. i'm thinking of throwing a few question marks into mine.

 

 

turn and fire

i'm not really into a left-right shooting war, since i don't know which side i'd be on, and i don't want to get caught in the crossfire. but let's get andrew breitbart and matt taibbi shoot it out on national television. thanks, tom.

compromised

i have to say that in my head 9.11 is quite polluted by nationalism. they just unfurled an exactly-football-field-sized flag at the ravens-steelers game. at least budweiser will never forget.

she's unique

sarah palin rocks.

bye, flanny

it's weird how you can feel like you know someone without ever meeting him. i've got to say i was shocked by the death of mike flanagan, the orioles pitcher/exec/announcer. i saw him pitch many times, particularly in the o's world championship season of 1983, when i lived a few blocks from the old memorial stadium. he was a sort of neighbor, or at least he lived (and died) rural halfway between here and baltimore. i loved him as a color man on o's broadcasts; he was very funny, laconic, low-key but also sharp. one sad fact about us people: a lot of times you really can't see that anything's wrong. he shot himself in the face, making the body hard to identify, and apparently was in despair about money. fuck.

there is too much death.

sports center

asks whether brian wilson has the biggest beard in the history of baseball. near thing, but i givin it up to the house of david. they didn't wear spandex tuxedoes, though, as far as i know.

snitchin

so one might still be a bit disappointed, though hardly surprised, that lance armstrong used performance-enhancing drugs. but i also have to say that the network of tattle-tales and informers is not exactly wholesome, either. that's one problem with this and various other kinds of drug enforcement (and public education, for example): there are very good reasons that no one likes a snitch, and very good reasons to not try to create a society of snitches by pressuring people to become turncoats, or to manifest loyalty (under pressure) to authorities or institutions rather than to the people in their immediate vicinity.

man the women's championship, won by the magnificent aggies, was as great as as the men's championship last night was lame.

sydney colson:

speaking of women's college hoops: the game that just finished between texas a&m and stanford - an major upset by a&m accomplished with a furious comeback and a series of clutch shots in the last minute - was about as good a college basketball game as you'll ever see. 

you've got to groove on the names of women's college hoopsters. how about glory johnson (tennessee), sugar rogers (georgetown), and special jennings (xavier). additions: odyssey sims and destiny williams (baylor).

and watchin two great guards tonight: the lovely skylar diggins (notre dame) and courtney vandersloot (gonzaga).

 

you know the black-eyed peas' halftime show was amazing, with all those people drenched in led lights and the swirling lasers, a cast of thousands of robo-people and stuff. but looking back on it i just have to say it was excruciatingly tasteless. the music, if any, couldn't have mattered at all no matter what it was, and if 'love' was the logo they etched onto the field in light, it sure looked a lot more like 'money.' will.i.am made some sort of half-assed appeal to obama or something, but it didn't mean anything; he'd have done better to say something about egypt. but tahrir square vs dallas stadium yesterday would have been an exquisite contrast between meaning and meaninglessnes. and it really was meaningless: aesthetically and in every other respect empty. and when you get down to it what the hell was will.i.am wearing? a chrome toupee? and what really is the point of that body-armor thing? it looked like a convention of pudgy armadillos. i actually kind of like the black-eyed peas, but maybe they have no confidence that their own musical or performing abilities can actually keep people watching.

the whole look and sound is very 'post-human': you know, robotic, technological &c. but the post-human is turning out to be all-too-human: at the center of the gargantuan prostheses there's just this flawed little human body furiously working itself like a puppet. all the same glitches are there even more obviously because blown up to giant size: the twinned egomania and self-loathing, the infinite aspirations and the little-bitty actual reality. you know, start with will's little vocoder thing: it's robotic! it's cutting edge! it was ubiquitous in...1975. what fergie has done to make herself sort of seem like a beauty - even vast glowing shoulder-pads - hasn't actually worked. i don't think we should push on to the post-human until we can muster a little more dignity or self-awareness as humans.

 

it's not easy to root for a team that sucks, such as my redskins. however, there is a certain pride in it as well, and when i was a kid the redskins sucked beautifully, with players such as sonny jurgensen, with the beer belly and the arm of gold. (i had a pet named 'sonny gerbilson.') for one thing, you've got earn the pleasure of victory, and 'fans' that hop on when the team's winning and off when not are worth nothing. so when the skins were good in the george allen era or under joe gibbs (also an eminent nascar owner and classic rock steady record producer (har har)), one felt vindicated. but some ways of sucking are just hard to deal with, and that would be the redskins in the dan snyder era. you know, the league's highest payroll and a 4-12 record; offensive futility on a historic level; $100 million dollar free agents who pause in the middle of a play to get a nap and commit random assaults; an owner who sues when citicized on the grounds of anti-semitism, etc.) i find myself unable to hop off, but i would if i could.

this is an astonishing and inspiring story.

why would i be linking to a profile of randy edsall, the new university of maryland head football coach? it gives you really good flavor of where i live out here, and where edsall is from: glen rock, pa. while you're at it, you might check out the glen rock book of the dead.

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you know, i often feel kind of guilty for being a football fan. sometimes it's a spectacle of pain, and there's delay after delay in the game as they deal with the knee injuries and concussions. but the violence is also a necessary condition for the beauty. i hated to see the saints lose yesterday, and i'm rooting for the city of new orleans. but the saints lost on one of the most intense and beautiful football plays i have ever seen: marshawn lynch of the seahawks running through, over, around virtually every player on the defense, breaking eight or nine tackles. you can't have this in ballet or something; it has to be improvised on the spot to deal with the real extremely volatile situation; and it can only arise in the context wherein everybody is trying to stop, smack, crunch the runner. it's like jazz music in which your body is at stake.

the technical term for what just happened during the arizona/minnesota game on fox just now is that we were heidigamed. the nfl is going to get scads of hate mail; they cut out of a game during overtime! i was watching back in '68. it was hsysterially comical even for a 10-year old!

thank god i'm not a sportscaster so i don't have to say aloud the name lee dong-gook (south korean striker). neither nyjer morgan (nationals' center fielder).

cristiano ronaldo is going to be less happy to have scored the meaningless 6th goal against north korea after they publicly execute the goalie.

been watching a bunch of world cup. for one thing i like sports that start at 7am, since pathetically i am asleep at 10 and up at 5. but anyway, how come every national anthem sounds like it was written in england? shouldn't brazil have a samba anthem, argentina a tango, nigeria highlife, usa something by duke ellington, korea a funny-sounding pentatonic thing or something etc? where's your nationalism?

people are so confused about sports. tiger doesn't deserve to win the masters? that makes no sense. he deserves to win the masters if he has the lowest score: that's all that desert can possibly mean in this context. 

i'm at 93 out of hundreds of thousands on the nyt ncaa bracket contest. better look quick though because when the next set of games ends in an hour and a half i'll likely be fucked.

just gonna crow a second: on my ncaa bracket i had 14 of the 16 teams that advanced yesterday, including a bunch of upsets. my rank is 144 on the nytimes contest, which i figure probably is out of some tens or hundreds of thousands. i rock, beeches! now on the other hand i had marquette in the final four, so that loss ramifies throughout. and no doubt today will not be as fortunate. however, if the md terps win it all i'm golden.

just gonna crow cause my university of maryland terps just won a thrilling game in double ot over the virginia tech hokies. the incomparable greivis vasquez had 41 points.

watchin the women's long program, and the description of the background of cheltzie lee, the australian champ, is kind of emblematic of our moment: 'her mother is an african-american from louisiana; her father is of chinese ancestry, from bangladesh. like many aussies, she likes to surf.'

i've been grooving on olympic figure skating. but one thing i don't understand. how come every single man is wearing sequins, in outfits that range from the merely tasteless to the pointedly excruciating? one would think in an activity that has such pronounced elements of art that one would occasionally run across someone with some rudimentary taste, or someone who wanted to manifest some sort of dignity, or someone who wanted you to watch what he was doing and not the way his day-glo epaulettes were shimmering.

now you may well say that this response is homophobic. true, true, and probably you're also not going to find me listening to techno or broadway show tunes, or sobbing about the tragic fate of judy garland. but is every single one of these dudes gay? or are they only playing gay on television? and really it seems possible even for a gay man to appear in public in a way that emphasizes his art.

i ain't even gonna give you a picture of johnny weir in his glittering hot-pink corset etc, because after all he is johnny weir.

oh i don't know.  i'm a lot less worried about a professional athlete being assaulted by a tiny blond person than i would be about a tiny blond person being assaulted by a professional athlete, like i'm more worried about bigotry against black people than bigotry against white people. the kneejerk reaction is always: what if it were the other way round? well, if it were the other way round, it'd be different, because not all persons and situations are the same. you know bad things can happen in gender-inverted abuse: i knew a couple once where she hit him with a car and pinned his hand to a counter with a steak knife. but there are kind of overall actual differences between men and women, etc.

as a lifelong redskins fan, i am kind of relieved about this, not to mention this. 'redskins' might kind of be a racial epithet, or maybe there's no 'kinda'; on the other hand, people name sports teams after things/people/beasts because they admire those things for their ferocity etc.