Category: The Current Situation

To my friends and family who are members of The Tribe — Happy New Year!

Recommended reading

Athletic scholarships are common in the United States,
but in a majority of countries they are rare or non-existent.

— Wikipedia

College sports are a gigantic entertainment business that have nothing to do with the missions of the schools. Frequently, the highest-paid employee of a school is the football or basketball coach, and the athletics budget is hugely subsidized by fees paid by financially strapped students. Players who read and write at a middle-school level (if even that) are recruited to help teams win, but the academic work they do is laughable. Schools rack up big debts trying to win glory on the gridiron or court, even if it means scrimping on faculty salaries and building maintenance.

— How College Sports Turned into a Corrupt Mega-Business, James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal

FanBuzz: In 40 States, Sports Coaches are the Highest-Paid Public Employees

Perhaps they haven’t filled it in because they’re color-blind. Or more likely, color-fearful.

Recommended reading

The graphic essay About Face — worthwhile reading again, given that protests these days have a body count — has this observation on the merchandising of mostly-black-and-white U.S. flags:

Also worth checking out:

• The Marshall Project: The Short, Fraught History of the ‘Thin Blue Line’ American Flag
  The controversial version of the U.S. flag has been hailed as a sign of police solidarity and criticized as a symbol of white supremacy.
• Standard-Examiner: Standard Deviations: Flag desecration is flag desecration, no matter who does it
  Here’s a conservative take:

  “I get why liberals might turn a blind eye to altering the U.S. flag — what with them being just this side of commies and all. But how is a flag like this even remotely acceptable among all of the patriotic conservatives out there who believe that our star-spangled banner is divinely inspired? How is this not desecration of the flag?

  Where are the people who popped veins in their necks over millionaire athletes quietly kneeling during the National Anthem because they thought THAT was disrespecting the flag? And yet they’ve got no problem with a protest that turns the nation’s beloved red, white and blue symbol into one that’s black, white and blue.

  Listen, if the Black Lives Matter movement were to create an all-black American flag with black stars and black stripes set against a field of dark gray, you can bet Republicans would try to ram a flag-desecration bill through Congress faster than you could say ‘Colin Kaepernack wasn’t all that great of a quarterback.’

  And I’ll bet you a gazillion dollars if the LGBTQ community gave each of the stripes in the American flag a different color of the rainbow, Republican heads would quite literally explode.”