A Pennsylvania school board president was sworn in holding a stack of banned books, rather than the Bible.

… this article. About frats, of course.

I was a Zeta decades ago: 1. The ‘charity’ ‘work was a joke, 2. Lots of alcohol poisoning, 3. Study groups …maybe, but the more effective groups were formed in the classes, 4. Leadership? I was VP of the House and I was on the ‘Panhellenic Council’ – waste of time (lots of pearl clutching but not much else)… Oh, and I was raped at Frat parties, got an STD, crushing hangovers, lots of ‘DUI-ing’…. Big 10 school, graduated Summa but by the time I went to Law School, a lifetime pattern of alcohol dependency had set in. Sober now, feel much better!

UD likes the zingy quirky energy of this comment – it’s a superquick, highly representative life summary, ain’t it?

— at the Georgetown Neighborhood Library this Saturday at 2:00. Here’s the poem.

Our original focus for Saturday was James Merrill’s “Santorini: Stopping the Leak,” and I’ll talk about that too.

Plus they’re a nest of thieves.

And your problem is…?

Michelle Cottle, NYT.

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

‘The fact that these young men engage[d] in this behavior, talked about it the way they did, treated it as some big fun game … The thing I’m trying to say is, these aren’t exceptional young men, right?

In a lot of ways, they’re just ordinary young men. And the fact that this didn’t seem to be remarkable to these ordinary young men is, I think, evidence of the actual state of American culture as it relates to the treatment and dignity of women, and as it relates to how serious[ly] we take sexual assault and sexual violence.’

Jamelle Bouie, NYT.

Suddenly, finally, everyone’s talking about fraternities. Good moment to revisit my post about a wonderful essay by Laura Kipnis.

So much of the Cornell 7 thing is bloody obvious. Schools with heavy drinking cultures stand a chance of approaching, attaining, or even exceeding Cornell-level orgiastics.

‘Many people are taken completely aback by some of the disturbing details of this case. As someone who lives in this space, I want to specifically underline something:  This story doesn’t happen without substance abuse. The case is an extreme outlier in terms of alleged severity; I’ve not encountered another case in my career involving ketamine, or with four or more alleged assailants over the course of multiple hours. (Though I must note: Despite the prominent use of the chilling phrase the “Cornell Seven,” the lawsuit accuses four of the defendants of having sex with Doe; one of kissing her; and two of snorting drugs off her body.) But the case is par for the course in the sense that everyone on both sides of the allegations was abusing substances, which is a factor in nearly every case I’ve worked on.’

Brainless drunk sports and frats schools will always have rape and plunder. Brainy drunk sports and frats schools will often have it too. Remember the University of Virginia’s lacrosse players, one of whom murdered his girlfriend, also a student there. The killer was a brainless drunk legacy admit.

LOL. An insanely obvious shocked to find that gambling is going on in here moment has occurred at U Arizona in regard to its ahem fraternities. They’re shutting them all down! Turns out they’re bad bad bad bad bad!

And why now (that first link includes not only sadomasochism at UA, but at several other fraternal Arizona hotspots)? Why act against them now? Fraternities have been DÉGUEULASSE iniquity dens since the establishment of American universities. The drill is the schools look the other way cuz boys will be boys and ain’t that great.

Current events at UA are of course about carnal esclavage far above Cayuga’s waters, as in poor Cornell has been – God knows why – designated the school where it all breaks out on a national scale, where schools like UA get all scared, where the cocks hit the fan and the prez gets fired and huge protests roil the campus etc. Lots of other frat-run schools might have been nominated for this award, but my guess is that their non-Ivy status has allowed them to sleaze by…

The question is whether, given the massive news coverage of the Cornell gang rape, all the other drunk druggy cocksmen striding this great land’s schools will have to keep it in their pants for awhile.

LAST SATURDAY, WE VISITED THE GHOSTLY ISLAND OF CIBOUX. JOIN US THIS COMING SATURDAY, OCTOBER 10, AT 2:00, FOR A VISIT TO THE GHOSTLY ISLAND OF SANTORINI.

THE LECTURE WILL BE ABOUT JAMES MERRILL’S GREAT POEM, “SANTORINI: STOPPING THE LEAK.”

3260 R St. NW

This is why UD reads the New York Times. Not so much because they have hugely long articles (I haven’t gotten to the end of this one) about crypto criminals and their heaps and heaps and heaps of dirty money. Rather, UD reads the NYT because they know that when you are listing three things, you use AMONG rather than BETWEEN.

So few publications care about this rule.

As for the billionaire bandit’s luxe life in Abu Dhabi – UD has so far failed to be impressed by the insane degeneracy of his daily emirate existence.

But hold on – she will read the piece to the end in hopes of discovering a new wrinkle on capitalist excess.

16 year old high school students in Arizona sell guns to the nice men in Sinaloa.

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

For El Flaco, 18, the path to gun dealing began shortly after he started high school. He was 14.

Owning a gun, he said, was extremely common among fellow students at his high school. Boys posted photographs of themselves posing with pistols on Instagram and TikTok. Some brought the firearms to school, leaving them locked inside their cars during class and flaunting them after school, he said. Sometimes they brought them into school, he said.

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

From the NYT reporter in the comments section:

One of the most striking things I encountered while reporting the story was just how deeply embedded gun culture is in Arizona, and how much it shapes and influences these teenagers’ choices, along with the sheer availability of firearms and how easily they can obtain high-caliber weapons, through both legal and illegal means.

… before UD gave a talk at the Georgetown Neighborhood Library about Elizabeth Bishop’s “Cape Breton.”

… you must be Pakistan. And while it’s all well and good to treat us like shit in Taxila, Texas is going to be a little trickier.

A Pakistani rich guy resident in Texas decided to dump his arranged wife. He did the Sharia three-step, figuring that’d work fine ‘round those parts, but the Texas Supreme Court ruled hey women in the United States have rights. You can’t just declare she’s over and take $100 million in community assets for yourself. If you want to do that, you’ll have to move back to Pakistan, where you can be a perfectly legal asshole.

The fight against woman-loathing Sharia law has to happen here. Good on you, Texas.

‘“How are the Saudis?” I asked.

“Very nice,” he replied. “Very understanding.”

A senior Saudi figure had approached the Israeli dentist, he said, congratulated him for saving the pilot, and thanked him. Then the Saudi took the dentist’s hand and walked with him.

The passenger tried to explain the gesture to me. Holding hands, he wrote, was a local expression of warmth.’

Well, UD wouldn’t be quite as explicit as The New Republic about the nature of most of Paxton’s scandals… But they are definitely… mounting scandals.