What's next? The beer issue?

Despite having been one once, I find that college kids have come to annoy me.

For one thing, they keep reinventing the wheel, then wonder how humanity ever got along before their brilliance burst forth from the primordial muck. Take my old college newspaper, for example -- though you might wish to wear latex gloves when you do. Just in case.

Today's Daily Reveille at LSU is "The Sex Issue." Basically, this is just an excuse for the paper's male staffers to get their big heads and little heads on the same page . . . and get paid for it. Likewise, it's a way for female editors to think, talk and write about sex without some male-chauvinist hypocrite calling them sluts.

How's that for edgy, kids? And I didn't have to say "penis" once . . . well, crap.

Mostly, though, the stunningly unoriginal sex issue just rehashes stuff most college kids already know, instead of seeking out stuff they don't. Like today's news, for example. Whoever fancied himself worldly, and just a little naughty, after writing a kick-ass story on university budget cuts?

Nobody, that's who.


STILL . . . a sex issue? Really? That might have been edgy in 1975 -- or even 1981. But now? Yeah, what a news flash: "F***ing is fun. Everybody does it. But you might get the clap. Film at 11."

Let's see what's in this thing. Maybe there are some penetrating articles -- Get it? Penetrating? Wink wink, nudge nudge -- in there about the emotional toll of the hook-up culture, or how to successfully transition from "playa" to marriage and parenthood. Maybe there's something in there about being a married student . . . or navigating the college scene as a single parent.

Maybe it's even edgier than I thought, and there's an article in there about. . . . An article in there about -- Can you say this in the newspaper? On the Internets? What the hell, I'm going for it . . . an article on chastity.

There. I said it. I am so cutting f***in' edge. I da man.

ANYWAY, on to Page 2 of the Reveille's special report on poontang. There, one finds a roundup of famous sex scandals, but not even the best ones. How flaccid of them.

Moving right along:

* Page 3 -- Apparently, the university ranks in the top 50 in sexual health. "LSU is getting it up in the rankings," says the article's lede.

Wow. Just wow. "Getting it up" . . . get it? Make sure you put that one in the clips you send to prospective employers, kid.

* Page 4 -- Did you know the social acceptance of sex toys is on the rise? And that some foods are aphrodisiacs?

Money quote: "My mom wouldn't let us eat kiwis because they make you horny." Dadgum, I thought that was baloney what did that.

* Page 5 -- Sexy campus sports figures, with photos. In a shocking development, there are two female gymnasts in the pictorial. Also . . . people think differently about sex in other cultures -- whoa!

Money quote: "I don't like this concept of dating here. Back home, we just have sex and see what happens from there." Yeah, she's from France.

* Page 6 -- Louisiana law bans sex offenders from social-networking websites. Interracial marriage is more common nowadays.

* Page 7 -- "The Daily Reveille's top 10 songs for getting it on." Also, there's a story about how the Centers for Disease Control recommends that males get the HPV vaccine. By the entertainment writer.

Maybe the male HPV shot is just in case you stumble across one of the top "getting it on" songs and then gotta do what you gotta do.

* Pages 8 and 9 -- The measure of a man. Yes, that concerns what you think it does. Also, the editor wants to "talk about sex, baby." And then . . . just see the picture at right.

Meanwhile, someone's contemplating the sexiest ways to die, and he cites real-life tales of death by diddling among the rich and famous. Or infamous, as the case may be. The phrase "boner pill" was written. It's one of the least distasteful things in the piece. Eww.

Speaking of "boner pills," there's a cartoon about a dead man, with one woman, as she gazes upon the sheet-covered corpse, telling another "Your husband sure died a happy man!" And, by God, won't someone just mandate the HPV vaccine for everybody?

* Page 11 -- Did you know a college student can get free or cheap condoms around campus? No word on how to get free or cheap "boner pills." Damn.

AND THAT pretty much does it for the not-so-original, yet "stimulating" sex edition of my old college paper. I don't know why we didn't think of that 30 years ago.

Well, truth be told, we probably did. We also probably thought that we might have better things to cover than the obvious and better journalistic hills to die on than Mount Nookie.

There was one curious thing on the back page of the sex Reveille, though. KLSU, the campus FM station, took out a half-page ad for its Thanksgiving turducken giveaway. I would have though they'd go for the obvious sex-edition tie-in and give away a carton of cigarettes.

For when you're done reading. Or something.

He didn't see that one coming

Noted trends forecaster Gerald Celente, a favorite of Russia Today and American conspiracy theorists, thought he was being prudent by investing in gold futures.

After getting waylaid by a trend called Jon Corzine and MF Global, Celente tells the RT anchorette exactly what he thinks the "MF" now stands for. I wonder what that is in Russian.

Hang on. . . .

мать ублюдок. Thanks, Google.


HERE'S a trends forecast that I think Celente might sign off on -- and, I think, already has. Occupy Wall Street is just the first wave, the rash bunch of weirdos, freakazoids, hippies, eccentrics, commies, anarchists . . . and a few normal people.

They're being dealt with by the state security forces -- something the Russia Today producers might know a little bit about.

But if and when the next big economic shock hits -- maybe a financial tsunami of sovereign defaults rolling across the Atlantic from the Eurozone -- people just might be back in the streets. And it won't be the hippies and freaks and weirdos and other unserious folk.

Goodnight America, wherever you've gone.

I don't understand. Not anymore.

The trouble with us Catholics is that we're willing to sell our souls to Eros' pervy cousin so we can keep buying the party line -- so we can keep believing in a God we kind of understand who speaks to us through weaselly little men we can't trust.

I realize it wasn't overly auspicious when Jesus picked a fly-off-the-handle dullard as the first pope, a guy who would go on to deny Him three times when the chips were down. Of course, I also realize that, with Peter, at least there was room for growth.

He turned out pretty OK in the end.

That more of Peter's successor popes and bishops haven't exhibited equal growth potential have contributed to an ongoing crisis of authority in the church. "Do as I say, not as I do" is a better ethos, I suppose, than "do what thou wilt," but it only takes one so far -- especially when one believes, as Catholics are taught, that salvation runs through the church.

13

When Jesus went into the region of Caesarea Philippi he asked his disciples, "Who do people say that the Son of Man is?"

14

They replied, "Some say John the Baptist, others Elijah, still others Jeremiah or one of the prophets."

15

He said to them, "But who do you say that I am?"

16

Simon Peter said in reply, "You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God."

17

Jesus said to him in reply, "Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah. For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my heavenly Father.

18

And so I say to you, you are Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church, and the gates of the netherworld shall not prevail against it.

19

I will give you the keys to the kingdom of heaven. Whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven; and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven."

OF COURSE, in 1517, it became a little hard to take when yet another crooked Borgia pope wielded the keys to the kingdom with a capitalistic flair including not only the sale of indulgences, but also the keys to the kingdom itself. It had to be rather like acceding to the belief that salvation ran through the Corleone family.

When the Reformation blew up in the church's face, things got so bad that Catholics actually had to clean up their own soiled sanctuary. It was too late, of course, but better late than never in the eyes of the God we kind of understand, one supposes.

In our own time, the God we kind of understand tells us that salvation runs not through the Corleone family (yay!) but instead through the National Man-Boy Love Association (crap!).

Of course, that's not what the God we kind of understand actually says through His district managers -- indeed, they will swear up and down that everything's on the up-and-up -- but we're well familiar with the whole "do as I say" deal. Besides, every day we have hammered into our weary brains the sights and sounds of the dirty deeds done by those weaselly little men we can't trust.

JUDGING by appearances, the God we kind of understand is fine with that. Well, at least the prosecutor in Clay County, Mo., must be. The Kansas City Star reports he just gave the weaselly little bishop of Kansas City-St. Joseph a "get out of jail cheap" card:

Bishop Robert Finn today avoided facing a criminal misdemeanor indictment in his handling of a priest facing child pornography charges by agreeing to enter into a diversion program with the Clay County prosecutor.

Authorities have pledged not to prosecute Finn, the leader of the Catholic Diocese of Kansas City-St. Joseph, if he lives up to the terms of a five-year diversion agreement.

Clay County Prosecutor Daniel L. White also said that a grand jury indicted the Rev. Shawn F. Ratigan on three counts of possessing child pornography. The new indictment supersedes a state criminal complaint that charged Ratigan on May 19. Ratigan, 46, also faces a 13-count federal indictment of possessing, producing and attempting to produce child pornography. He remains in federal custody.

The Clay County indictment alleges that Ratigan possessed three images of child pornography on a computer on May 13. White said each of those counts is a Class C felony, punishable by up to seven years in prison and fines of up to $5,000.

Finn’s agreement with Clay County requires him to meet face-to-face each month with White for the next five years to discuss any allegations of child sex abuse levied against clergy or diocesan staff within the diocese’s Clay County facilities. Finn also is to describe what steps the diocese has taken to address the allegations. White would then decide whether to encourage police to investigate any allegations.

Finn also agreed to visit all Clay County parishes to outline new programs the diocese is implementing to protect children. In those meetings, Finn will be accompanied by the diocesan ombudsman and its newly appointed director of child and youth protection.

ON THE other hand, Finn's treatment at the hands of the Clay County prosecutor is far harsher than anything he faces from the long arm of the Lord. The one we understand, because He's been explained so thoroughly to us these days by weaselly little men.

No, so far as I know, what Finn faces from his Catholic Church superiors would be . . . nothing.

I hope I'm wrong, but somehow I doubt that.

That would be close to the extent of what I know about anything anymore -- particularly my church. I do know this: I am sick of being repeatedly sickened by the institution that's supposed to help me get to heaven.

I also know this: I no longer believe in the God we kind of understand. The God who reminds one, more than anything, of the Mighty Oz. Pay no attention to that pederast-protecting bishop behind the curtain.

What I want to believe in is the God we don't understand at all.

Flannery O'Connor once wrote that a god we understood would be less than ourselves. Minimalist bishops -- those whitewashed sepulchers who helped get us into this mess -- understand that one quite well. To hell with it, and them.

I want that other one. I want the God who flummoxes me, yet gives me life.

I want my church to want Him, too. And I want "shepherds" like Robert Finn to get the hell out of His way.

It's all hell and agony at the Daily B-Word

Today, The New York Times gives us a delicious account of the latest bloodletting -- this one high-level -- at the off-off-Broadway production that is Newsweek / The Daily Beast, starring Tina Brown and a cast of . . . dozens?

If this were sometime back in the day, and if we had the luxury of this production being some sort of experimental cinema, surely there would be some small ad in the back of The Village Voice going something like "YOU'LL LAUGH! YOU'LL CRY! TINA BROWN IS SOMETHING ELSE. -- Vincent Canby, The New York Times."

Of course, the unabridged, unedited version of what the famed film critic wrote would have gone more like:

"You'll laugh! You'll laugh at your foolish notion that this piece of drivel was worth $2.95 of your hard-earned money. You'll cry! That's because there are no refunds at the box office. But this can be said with confidence: Tina Brown is something else. You just don't want to know what it is."

FOR THIS production -- sadly a real-life one -- there will be no Vincent Canby review. He died in 2000, leaving the dirty work of recounting the awful fate of a once-proud weekly and its beleaguered staff to a new-generation Times scribe, Jeremy W. Peters:

Ms. Brown cast the moves, which coincided with a meeting of the Newsweek-Daily Beast board on Monday, as a restructuring. Mr. Miller will run the operational side of the newsroom while Ms. Rosenthal will help steer the news report. Ms. Brown also recently hired an outside consultant, Lisa Benenson, to help with the restructuring of the magazine.

“I see Newsweek constantly evolving and improving,” Ms. Brown said in an interview on Monday. Describing what effect she hoped the changes would have, she added, “I think it will make it much more nimble.”

Monday’s departures were just the latest moves for a company that has experienced substantial upheaval in the last year. As Newsweek was put up for sale by The Washington Post Company and bought by the audio magnate Sidney Harman, its senior editing team was replaced and its business management turned over. Then in April, Mr. Harman died after a bout with leukemia and his wife, former Representative Jane Harman of California, assumed her husband’s responsibilities on the board.

Staff members at Newsweek and The Daily Beast said the environment there had become difficult in recent weeks. People who work there, who did not want to publicly criticize their bosses, say morale in the newsroom has sunk as Ms. Brown has had more frequent outbursts in front of her employees. “It’s all hell, it’s agony,” she has been overheard telling staff members about the quality of their work, according to one of them.

NOW WE KNOW why the 99 percent drinks.

It's because the 1 percent is bat-s*** crazy . . . and in charge.

Flush with 'victory' in Iraq

I said, war, huh
Good God, y'all
What is it good for?
Absolutely nothing. . . .

-- Edwin Starr,
1970

Norman Whitfield and Barrett Strong wrote War for Motown in 1969, and it became a No. 1 smash in 1970 for the label's Edwin Starr.

Commercial and artistic success, however, is not the guarantor of absolute truth.

And as the United States' recent experience tells us, sometimes war is good for something. Sometimes you get a stainless-steel sh*tter out of the deal.

There's a certain logic to that, and in this Reuters report from the soon-to-be abandoned Camp Irony Victory Base.

The U.S. military is vacating Saddam Hussein's ornate palaces at its war headquarters in Baghdad and will turn the property over to Iraq next month, but Saddam's prison toilet is leaving with the Americans.

The stainless steel commode and a reinforced steel door have been removed from the cell where the dictator spent two years before his 2006 execution and is destined for a military police museum in the United States.

"We're not taking anything that the Iraqis had. We are only taking stuff that we put in, we utilized, and when we didn't need it any more, we took it home," Lieutenant Colonel Jerry Brooks, a U.S. military historian, said on a tour of the site on Monday.

The villa where American troops built a maximum-security jail for Saddam and his henchman Chemical Ali sits on a U.S. complex near Baghdad's airport known as Victory Base, which is scheduled to be handed over to Iraq's government in December as U.S. forces withdraw completely by year's end.

Surrounded by 42 km (27 miles) of blast walls and razor wire, Victory, the largest of the 505 bases the U.S. military once operated in Iraq, housed over 40,000 soldiers and up to 25,000 workers. Only 4,000 troops remain there.

I KEEP wondering how to sum this all up -- "this" being America's whole disaster of a new millennium. How can we distill, say, the Iraq experience into something concise enough to fit on a T-shirt?

I think I got something:

We came to Iraq,
got 4,483 troops killed
and 33,183 wounded,
spent a trillion bucks . . .
and all we got was this lousy toilet

THAT'S what I call a legacy.

Did I mention that, as it turns out, the MP museum at Fort Leonard Wood, Mo., doesn't even want the crapper? Gee, I guess Whitfield and Strong were right after all. My apologies to them.

This pretty much covers it

You says you don't learn anything from TV?

Why, just this past weekend on Saturday Night Live, we learned that even Satan has his limits.

I'll tell the man to turn the jukebox way down low

When I was back in the homeland, I took the opportunity to retrieve some old LPs from a hall closet in my childhood home, where for years they'd been sitting, absorbing the smell of cedar.

These are among the buttons on the jukebox of my musical formation -- eclectic selections that once spun on a 1948 Silvertone, that or a 1962 Magnavox. They spin still in my memory . . . and now on a couple of turntables in my Omaha studio.

There's a date on the back of this Jim Reeves album -- 6-9-1962. It seems to be in my mother's uneven hand. She was 12 years younger than I am now, and she lived in a different world. Different worlds, actually.

So did we all then.

THERE'S STILL a price tag from D.H. Holmes on it . . . several of them.

In 1962, D.H. Holmes department store -- D.H. Holmeses to Mama, Irene Reilly and half the people in south Louisiana -- was all that and a Dixie 45. D.H. Holmeses was where we bought our TV sets and records and other cool stuff . . . and, of course, your macaroons and tea cakes.

D.H. Holmeses ain't dere no more. The one on Canal in New Orleans now is a hotel, but Ignatius still waits under the clock in front for his mama. He's a good boy -- not at all like them "gamblers, prostitutes, exhibitionists, anti-Christs, alcoholics, sodomites, drug addicts, fetishists, onanists, pornographers, frauds, jades, litterbugs and lesbians, all too well protected by graft" that New Orleans is so infamous for.

The big Holmeses in Baton Rouge -- our Holmeses, which still was little in relation to the big, old Holmeses some 80 miles south -- now is a ghost in the middle of what used to be the Bon Marché shopping center, which now is the Bon Carré bidness park.

And if you listen real hard, you can hear the new Jim Reeves album playing in the record department. Close by, Mr. Ruffino is selling a 21-inch Magnavox black-and-white console TV to my old man.

But not the color set. Color television is just a fad.

Might even be communiss. You never know nowadays.

He seemed like a real nice guy

Coach Paterno will go down in history as one of the greatest men. Most of you know him as a great football coach. I've had the privilege and honor to work for him, spend time with him. He's had such a dynamic impact on so many, so many — I'll say it again — so many people and players' lives.

-- Tom Bradley,
Penn State interim coach

President Clinton was so darling to me, and as loyal and faithful a man as you can find. I remember he was so sweet about a blue dress I used to have. Before it was evidence. He said I was so pretty in it. He was always considerate of others that way.

-- Monica Lewinsky,
former White House intern

Richard Nixon was always concerned about the law. Also, he was such a faithful and religious man. He was always talking about God and Jesus. I remember how it'd just pop out of the depths of his soul -- like, he was always telling me "Jesus Christ, Henry!" Or, "Goddamn it to hell!" He was always eager to see more divine justice in the world.

Once, in the Oval Office close to that unfortunate day, he even begged me to pray with him. Such a spiritual and holy man, he was.

-- Henry Kissinger,
former secretary of state

Dolphie is a great, great man. He makes the trains run on time . . . and the autobahn! It's to die for.

Der Führer is such und sweethearten, auch! He always tells me, "Eva, Sie werden nie haff to worry at alles about beink senten to den Konzentrationslagern. We will be together for as long as we live."

Und he likes puppies, auch.

-- Eva Braun,
Reichsmistress
(March 1945)

'We are . . . Penn State!'

Oh, goody.

I think I've just located the one generation s****ier than my own.

That would be my generation's children. As a Baby Boomer, I'm so proud . . . not.

If we had any honesty and shame about us, we'd clothe ourselves in sackcloth and cover ourselves in ashes at the sight of the Neanderthal darlings we've so carefully taught on the prowl at Penn State, rioting against the reappearance of rectitude in its besoiled halls.

Of course, The New York Times has all the news that's fit to weep over, as America dies a little more every day:

“I think the point people are trying to make is the media is responsible for Joe Pa going down,” said freshman Mike Clark, 18, adding that he believed Mr. Paterno met both his legal and moral responsibility by telling university authorities about Mr. Sandusky’s alleged 2002 assault on a boy in a school shower.

Demonstrators tore down two lampposts, one falling into a crowd of students. They also threw rocks and fireworks at police, who responded with pepper spray. The crowd undulated like an accordion, with the students crowding the police and the officers pushing them back.

“We got rowdy and we got maced,” Jeff Heim, 19, said rubbing his red, teary eyes. “But make no mistake, the board started this riot by firing our coach. They tarnished a legend.”

An orderly crowd first filled the lawn in front of Old Main when news of Mr. Paterno’s firing came via students’ cell phones. When the crowd took to the downtown streets, it’s anger and intensity swelled. Students shouted “We are Penn State.”

Some blew vuvuzelas, others air horns. One young man sounded reveille on a trumpet. Four girls in heels danced on the roof of a parked SUV and dented it when they fell after a group of men shook the vehicle. A few, like Justin Muir, 20, a junior studying hotel and restaurant management, threw rolls of toilet paper into the trees.

“It’s not fair,” Mr. Muir said hurling a white ribbon. “The board is an embarrassment to our school and a disservice to the student population.”

(snip)

Greg Becker, 19, a freshman studying computer science, said he felt he had to vent his feelings anyway.

“This definitely looks bad for our school,” he said sprinting away from a cloud of spray. “I’m sure Joe Pa wouldn’t want this, but this is just an uproar now, we’re finding a way to express our anger.”

As the crowd got more aggressive, so did police officers. Some rioters fought back. One man in gas mask rushed a half dozen police officers in protective gear, blasted one officer with spray underneath his safety mask and then sprinted away. The officer lay on the ground, rubbing his eyes.

Paul Howard, 24, an aerospace engineering student, jeered the police.

“Of course we’re going to riot,” he said. “What do they expect when they tell us at 10 o’clock that they fired our football coach?”

OF COURSE they're going to riot, for they're a bunch of overindulged, self-centered moral black holes. Just like my generation raised them to be.

Because the board trying to clean up a child-molestation scandal "is an embarrassment to our school and a disservice to the student population." And because it's important that collegians find "a way to express our anger.”

Not only do we find that in a world without God, "everything is permitted," but that it most certainly will happen if you take away people's false gods as well. Like Joe Paterno and Nittany Lion football.

The narcissistic little goons of Penn State are the spawn of my narcissistic generation, which majored in idolatry back in the day and called it "the New Morality." We were looking for hope, but settled for peacesexdope, then raised a Millennial tribe poised to settle for even less.

How very devo -- D-E-V-O -- is the over-educated mob that's not only become living proof of de-evolution, but also has made prophets out of a kitschy New Wave aggregation from the late '70s and early '80s. Naturally.

Jocko homo, y'all.

Here's more proof of our present de-evolutionary state. The parents of Penn State's precious little Visigoths used to do this kind of stuff to protest a bloody and unnecessary war in Vietnam. Their children, however, do this kind of stuff to protest trustees firing a football coach who cared more about keeping up appearances than about stopping an alleged child-rapist when he had the chance. A man who loved to talk about "character" but lacked the guts to exhibit even a little of it when it counted.

"We are . . . Penn Rape!"

That would be truth in advertising for the barbarian hordes of Happy Valley.

HOW FITTING that the carefully constructed illusion of Penn State as some sort of honorable, model institution would come crashing down along with the carefully constructed illusion that was the man who built it -- Joe Paterno.

Cry me a river, you little bastards. More tear gas, please!

From garbled to Gaga

One o'clock. Time for Wednesday's much-hyped national test of the Emergency Alert System.

If this had been an actual national emergency, fjoeifjwf oisjfeo wp pwidp qw of eoijr qyuqw wqlkd pt wot tjwaki JK ksdt jlsa bah fleekum.

A nuclear atta . . . O doeiujf wqi djk you gottqa OSIFD dke eommd ss woww jkdp . . . all going to die, according eo al jdsa j New York Times:

At 2 p.m. Eastern time on Wednesday, during the first nationwide test of the Emergency Alert System, all television channels and radio stations in the United States were supposed to be interrupted by piercing emergency tones. Not a song by Lady Gaga.

But as tests often go, there were some failures, with viewers and listeners in many states saying they saw and heard the alerts at the scheduled time, while others did not. Some DirecTV subscribers said they heard Lady Gaga’s “Paparazzi” when the test was under way. Some Comcast subscribers in northern Virginia said their TV sets were switched over to QVC before the alert was shown.

The federal agencies charged with testing the alert system found that there were flaws, particularly in the system’s connections to cable and satellite distributors. In some cases, the test messages were delayed, perhaps because they were designed to trickle down from one place — the White House in this case — to thousands of stations and distributors.

In Los Angeles, some viewers said the alert, intended for 30 seconds, lasted for almost half an hour; in New York, some viewers didn’t see it at all. But many others reported that the alert arrived right on time and ended right away.

HERE IN OMAHA, otherwise known as Ground Zero with U.S. Strategic Command headquarters just south of town, the national EAS test started late and the audio was horribly garbled, like an aural Tower of Babel of static and overdubs. If this is technological progress in attack warning, perhaps it's time to resurrect Conelrad.

Conelrad, the nation's first broadcast-warning mechanism, at least passed several national tests, the first coming in 1953, shortly after its implementation. Here's a Sept. 21, 1953, Broadcasting-Telecasting account of the previous week's initial test of the warning system:


SURE, FM or TV stations couldn't stay on the air under the Conelrad system, but then again, the last sound you heard before being vaporized wouldn't be Lady Gaga, either.

That's not nothing.

JoePa knew. They don't care.

JoePa knew.

In 2002, according to a Pennsylvania grand jury, a graduate-assistant coach, then 28 years old, told Penn State's living-legend football coach, Joe Paterno, that he saw former defensive coordinator Jerry Sandusky anally raping a little boy in the locker-room shower. That sounds bad -- anally raping. A little boy, maybe 10 or so.

It's not nearly as ugly as the reality of such a thing. If I were more explicit, this post would be pornographic and you would be right to run screaming into the street and never to this cyberspace return.

JoePa knew.

JoePa's reaction? He kicked the matter upstairs. He didn't call the cops or any other civil authority to report what he'd heard. He then, apparently, washed his hands of the matter.

Paterno spent the next nine years doing nothing as the alleged raper of little boys kept an office in the football complex. Participated in youth football clinics. Ran a foundation devoted to at-risk youth (little did parents know how at-risk their youth might have been). Kept showing up at Nittany Lion practices with little at-risk boys he was "mentoring."


SO THAT'S what they call it now. "Mentoring."

JoePa knew. JoePa washed his hands of the matter. You know, like Pontius Pilate washed his hands of that little Jesus Christ matter and sent Him off to Golgotha. Beaten. Scourged. Mocked. Crucified.

But at least no one ever anally raped the Savior of the world and left Him to live with the aftermath.

At the Pennsylvania State University, Pontius Pilate could be a reformer -- a change agent.

This is what Joe Paterno obviously did. This is the man Penn State students in the above videos are rallying to save. It's like a pep rally for evil.

"We have no king but Caesar! We have no god but football! No savior but JoePa!"

The idiotic mob outside the Paterno home -- the ones wilding across campus and through State College, Pa. -- are nothing more than idolaters, violators in extremis of the First Commandment:

I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. You shall have no other gods before me. You shall not make for yourself a graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth; you shall not bow down to them or serve them.3

It is written: "You shall worship the Lord your God and him only shall you serve."

TO THE chanting rabble of much education and no perspective, Penn State football is a modern-day golden calf. The idol pushing not only God out of their hearts, but also justice and rightly ordered compassion.

JoePa knew. They don't care.

Back in the day, the Lord had a game plan for dealing with those who forged the golden idol and fell down before it while Moses was otherwise occupied receiving the Ten Commandments. God was going to kill them all and start over, bringing forth a new chosen people out of Moses himself.

Moses argued and pleaded on behalf of his unfaithful charges, and the Lord ultimately withheld His wrath.

I don't know about you, but I don't see a Moses amid that whole wicked bunch in State College. I don't see one anywhere else across the fruited plain, this vast land of countless false idols.

And as JoePa's little pagans dance around the golden calf of Penn State football, that inconvenient truth is something the legendary coach won't be able to wash his hands of.

Autumn, it is

Hot coffee. Old pot.
Sweatshirts and the threat of snow.
Fall has settled in.

November. Nebraska.

Sure, it's damp and it's chilly out. And it rained all night.

And we're gonna get a little snow. It's early November in the Cornhusker State, after all.

But my sweet Lord, look what's just outside my back door. This is one of the reasons a Southern boy stays put in the Gret White Nawth.

The Big Game vs. the budget game

Jeré Longman of The New York Times, by my reckoning, was seven years ahead of me at Louisiana State University.

He was a working-class kid from Cajun country. My daddy worked long decades at the Esso refinery and Enjay Chemicals in Baton Rouge -- now Exxon-Mobil but forever Standard Oil to my hometown.

We both worked on The Daily Reveille at LSU. He went all the way to the Times. Me, not so much.

But in a wonderful essay in Friday's newspaper, he speaks for me and for God knows how many other alumni for whom the Ole War Skule opened up worlds that were closed to our parents, and did it at a price good country folk and Baton Rouge plant workers could afford.

SOMETHING had to be said, and bless Longman's heart for saying it to the world:

I am forever grateful to L.S.U. for the opportunities given to me and countless other rural children, many of us the first in our families to attend college or graduate. Yet, 35 years after leaving campus, I worry that football success has obscured L.S.U.’s escalating academic ambition and its struggle to maintain excellence over the past three years in the face of about $50 million in state appropriation cuts and the loss of a tenth of its faculty.

“If we sent the football team out with only 10 players, how would people feel?” said John M. Hamilton, L.S.U.’s executive vice chancellor and provost.

Let’s be clear: budget cuts are not the football team’s fault. L.S.U. has one of the few self-sustaining athletic departments. It does not use state tax dollars or student fees. Instead, the athletic department contributes 5 percent of its budget to the university annually — about $4.25 million at this point — and has spent millions to help finance a band hall and business school.

There is nothing like Saturday nights at Tiger Stadium. Tailgating summons the best of Cajun culture — geniality, cooking and storytelling. And football success buoys a state sagging under the weight of poverty, educational lethargy and high rates of cancer, obesity and infant mortality.

“When we’re No. 1, it’s usually for something bad,” an L.S.U. fan named Rudy Penton once told me.

DO GEAUX NOW and read the whole thing.

All in all, it's just another brick from the wall

There's a thread tying together the events, large and small, that make for a narrative of the world I was born into almost 51 years ago. It can be expressed in a single word -- delegitimization.

The only world I know is one in which the center has not held. Our institutions are bankrupt. Our heroes have clay feet. Our legal, economic and political systems, we find, comprise a gigantic craps game, and the swells are shooting loaded dice.

We no longer can depend on jobs that will support our families. The family itself is less an societal cornerstone than a demographic moving target. Equal justice under the law is just another Ponzi scheme. Afflicting the comfortable and comforting the afflicted have, in these times, become sure signs of a communist plot.

And judging by the corruption and decay surrounding -- indeed, engulfing -- us, you have to wonder whether singer-songwriter Don McLean was onto something in "American Pie" when he wrote, "the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, they caught the last train for the coast."

As we sit here, more than a decade into the new millennium, let me ask you something. Whom do you trust? Really and truly.

Really and truly, what do you trust?

Are you sure about that?

WHAT institution in your life -- in our lives -- do you really trust? Would you trust it with your life?

Do you really trust your government? Do you really trust you'll get a fair shake under the law? Do you really trust you're not going to get screwed by your bank . . . by the free market . . . out of a job?

Do you really trust the church with your soul anymore? Do you trust the church with your kid? Would you let Junior go on a youth camping trip organized by Father Dan?

Would you let your prep-star son go play football for Penn State? Would you let your junior-high kid go to a Penn State summer sports camp? Do you think that local group of do-gooders is there to help your at-risk child . . . or do you suspect some of those do-gooders are just helping themselves to your at-risk child?

If you can't trust Joe Paterno to call the cops when an ex-assistant is allegedly raping 10-year-old boys in the football shower room, whom the hell can you trust?

When you can't believe in college football -- and that was about the last thing we Americans did believe in -- what's left but the abyss?

Deviance, destruction, dysfunction and distrust are the four horsemen of legitimacy's apocalypse. And legitimacy's apocalypse will become our own soon enough. When every institution we used to trust -- in which we used to believe -- has been bulldozed by corruption, what fortress (or offensive lineman) will stand between us and the devil himself, once he rounds on us?

JUST SINCE 2001, Americans have found that they were manipulated into a pointless, devastating war in Iraq. That the one in Afghanistan has, by negligence and hubris, quickly become just as pointless. We have found that we learned nothing from the pointless Vietnam travesty, four decades earlier.

Likewise, you can't even depend upon entire swaths of the Catholic Church to evidence belief in a righteous God, much less fear Him. Or bet that many Protestants are any better in that respect.

You can't even trust conventional wisdom -- that if we let priests marry, they wouldn't be having sex with kids. Too many married clerical and non-clerical perverts have been getting on the molestation merry-go-round for that one to fly.

Also in the last decade, we have learned that you can't trust a sure thing . . . or your too-big-to-fail bank. Or Wall Street. Especially Wall Street. We've learned the hard way that if you keep your nose clean and play by the rules, all you're likely to get is poorer -- and, ultimately, the shaft.

Oh, and there we were all in one place
A generation lost in space
With no time left to start again
So come on Jack be nimble, Jack be quick
Jack Flash sat on a candlestick
'Cause fire is the devil's only friend
And as I watched him on the stage
My hands were clenched in fists of rage
No angel born in hell
Could break that Satan's spell
And as the flames climbed high into the night
To light the sacrificial rite
I saw Satan laughing with delight
The day the music died

ALL MY LIFE I have watched the pillars of society crumble. The lesson seems to be this: If you believe in something, if you put faith in a person or an institution, you will live to regret it. You ultimately will feel like a chump.

Amid the wreckage of institutions and society, our "Do Not Trust" list has expanded to encompass God and country. Amid the general carnage of the last decade, and amid the particular carnage within the Catholic Church, I battle despair to agree -- still -- that McLean's lyric, "the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, they caught the last train for the coast," remains among the most cynical words written in the king's English.

Yonder lies nihilism, after all. The ongoing collapse -- the onward march of institutional decay -- catechizes us in unbelief and alienation. Such is the nature, and the toll, of delegitimization.

The end result of corruption is also the mechanism of corruption -- a feedback loop of alienation and atomized commonweal . . . a disordered sense of radical self-interest.

When an athletic department like Penn State's can receive allegations that prepubescent children had been anally raped on university property by a former coach and -- allegedly -- decide that suppressing a scandal was a greater priority than stopping a predator, you have just witnessed the death of the common good. You have just witnessed the return of tribalism.

The ethic holds that outsiders -- for example, little at-risk children -- are of no concern relative to defending the PSU Athletic Department tribe's status quo . . . and financial bottom line. Ditto the robber barons of Wall Street. Ditto the sort of clericalism that hushed up sex abuse in the Catholic Church at the expense of the faithful's children.

It sucks not to be One of Us. There's no "I" in "team," but there's no "you" in it, either. The center will not hold, and any expansive sense of society cannot long endure.

This was supposed to be a post about the sex-abuse scandal engulfing not only Penn State football, but the university itself. But this latest horror show is just an old story told in a new context. It's just one more institution brought low by the individual and collective wretchedness of this (and every) age.

Scandal-ridden Penn State is just another brick knocked out of the wall. The real story is that, lacking many bricks, the wall slumps precariously.

Why did the Bammer cross the road?

Because he was trying to run away from The Hat.

Fear The Hat . . . because he's coming for you.

Geaux Tigers!

3 Chords & the Truth: Back in the saddle again

I'm back in the saddle again, out where a friend is a friend.

Where the lonely DJ feeds on some lowly MP3s . . . back in the saddle again.

Ridin' the 'Net once more
Huntin' an RCA 44
Where there's 3 Chords & the Truth
And the music shakes the roof
Back in the saddle again

Whoopi-ty-aye-yay
Rock is here to stay
Back in the saddle again
Whoopi-ty-aye-oh
Vacations come and go
Back in the saddle again

I'm back in the saddle again
Out where a friend is a friend
Where the lonely DJ feeds
On some lowly MP3s
Back in the saddle again

Ridin' the 'Net once more
Huntin' an RCA 44
Where you sign on every day
And there's great tunes here to play
Back in the saddle again

Whoopi-ty-aye-yay
Jazz may come your way
Back in the saddle again

Whoopi-ty-aye-oh
Vacation, why'd you go?
Back in the saddle again

It's 3 Chords & the Truth y'all. Be there. Aloha.

Pardner.

-- Apologies to Gene Autry