Quick Loop #14
In which we get swampy, from the political to college football
One of the interesting things about publishing on Substack is that I always find typos and grammatical errors (and even very rarely a factual error) in my pieces after publishing them. And when I find them, I correct them, and the only things that I acknowledge fixing are the factual errors. The rest of the changes are known only to myself, God, and anyone crazy enough to compare the current version to the e-mailed version (remember, it’s free, and you get what you pay for!). So the version of each post that is on Substack is almost always going to be better-written than the version you receive in your e-mail. Just to let you know.
The three wings of the GOP
For the reasons I described in Quick Loop #13, I’ve become a little discouraged about posting. I feel estranged from our society, one where so many of my longtime friends — and the GOP in general — have decided to bathe in the Trump sewer (as you can tell from the cartoon on top of this column). I made the point in a private Facebook group recently that, when I was in high school, the GOP had three wings: liberal (including NY senator Charles Goodell, the father of the imbecilic science denier currently running the NFL into the ground, and NYC mayor John Lindsay), moderate (including crooked GOP president Richard “Tricky Dick” Nixon and most of his advisors), and conservative (led for a long time by Ohio senator Robert Taft, a social conservative, but also including Arizona senator Barry Goldwater, a right-libertarian who was crushed in the 1964 presidential election).
It was William F. Buckley’s dream that the GOP would become solely a conservative party, and he and his brother James (who ran on the Conservative Party ticket in NY and upset Goodell in the NY Senate election of 1970), plus their ally Ronald Reagan were a huge part of making that happen. And after the rise of Reagan, the GOP became largely conservative, with the only real division being between the classical liberals (Goldwater’s branch, and mine as well) and the social conservatives (Taft’s branch). It was clearly in our interests to cooperate on issues where we disagreed, because there were so many issues where we agreed. As an article about Buckley and his magazine National Review noted:
Among those considered unworthy of inclusion in modern conservatism were anti-Semites, white supremacists, the extremist anti-communists of the John Birch Society, and Ayn Rand and her ideology of hyper-capitalism combined with hyper-atheism. Buckley was initially sympathetic to southern segregation but then shifted to opposing segregation and supported color-blind racial policies earlier than other public intellectuals. He opposed conservative support for the segregationist campaign of George Wallace for the presidency in 1968. Buckley was also an early advocate of marijuana legalization, a view that only slowly found acceptance among conservatives.
But that GOP is long gone.
Today’s GOP is back to three wings again: (1) a remnant of remaining Buckley-esque conservatives, no longer including me; (2) populists, a seemingly fluctuating group, to which The Former Guy originally pretended to belong, that follows an agenda reacting to economic shocks but seems to be more concerned with redistribution theories ; and (3) bats**t-crazy lunatics, including Marjorie Taylor Greene and her “Jewish space lasers”, election deniers such as Kari Lake, and The Former Guy and his conspiracy theorists. Where did all the people in this third group come from? Were they always part of the GOP but just pretending to be normal until TFG showed that it wasn’t necessary? Or were they simply attracted from both the Democrats and the unaligned because they were so drawn to TFG and his army of con men speaking their language, and then they took over because so many conservatives had left the GOP?
I doubt we’ll ever know. I wish I didn’t know to ask the question. Between the Trump-pets and the Biden Progressives, we’ve turned the “race to the bottom” into an all-out sprint. I don’t know who is going to win, but I know the United States is going to lose.
Jonah’s banana?
Jonah Goldberg of The Dispatch had a great piece Wednesday entitled “Yearning for a Banana Republic”, regarding The Former Guy and his typically insane bleatings in the wake of the FBI search warrant served on Mar-a-Lago. But, even though I linked to the article, it’s mostly behind a paywall. So I want to serve up the central point here:
Again, none of this means that the DOJ or the FBI didn’t make a terrible decision or otherwise screw up. [But] government screws up all the time. That’s one of the reasons we have so many elections. James Madison’s whole vision was to use elections, at every level of government, as a regular and predictable cleansing tide to sweep away stagnant waters. In fact, if the DOJ actually had good reason to search Trump’s home, meeting all of the legal requirements of probable cause etc., we would have moved closer to a banana republic if they turned a blind eye. . . .
By all means, vote Biden out of office. I don’t think he’s up to the job and I think most of his policies have been bad. Bring on the cleansing tide.
But what I can’t get my head around is the idea that the solution to our allegedly bananifying regime is to put that browning, mealy, giant banana back into power.
The Former Guy as a “browning, mealy, giant banana.” Perfect. Or, as John Lennon might have put in at the end of “Revolution” had he known about Trump back in 1968:
But if you go singin' the praises of Donald Trump
Who plotted a coup and failed like a chump
Don't you know you're gonna be lo-sers? (pronounced: loo-sirs)
Don't you know you're gonna be lo-sers?
Don't you know you're gonna be lo-sers?
Lo-sers! Lo-sers!
Lo-sers! Lo-sers!
Lo-sers! Lo-sers!
Lo-sers!
All right.…
Big Ten . . . Eleven . . . Twelve . . . Fourteen . . . Sixteen . . . ???
So for the rest of this article, I could write about upcoming legal issues, including The Former Guy’s . . . or I could write about the changes of college football as we know it and about the first recordings on 16-track (which I alluded to in a prior column when I wrote about The Beatles and The Zombies recording on 7-track). I’d much rather write about the latter right now, in the middle of summer.
The Big Ten Conference was originally formed as the Western Conference. Yes, back in 1895, the American west was still wild terrain, and the Mississippi River was considered “west” and then later midwest, before we all came to agree in the 1970s that everything east of the Mississippi was in the East. In this era, the heads of six “western” universities and one “western” college met to discuss setting up their own body to regulate college athletics; the participating schools included four from the Greater Chicago area: University of Chicago; Lake Forest College; University of Illinois; and Northwestern University. The other three were nearby: the Universities of Minnesota and Wisconsin and Purdue University. A few months later, when they got together again and decided to move forward, Lake Forest College had been replaced by the University of Michigan, one of the national football powerhouses of the day as well as an excellent school academically. And so the 1896 original membership of the Big Ten was the three Chicago schools (Chicago, Northwestern, and Illinois), plus Minnesota, Wisconsin, Purdue, and Michigan. Three years later, the Universities of Iowa and Indiana were added, and the conference became popularly known as the “Big Nine.” Nebraska then applied but was turned down.
But the driving force behind the formation was not athletic competition but rather an incipient national scandal about the dangers of football (which has changed little about 120 years later) and other college athletics — but mostly football. Major colleges faced tough choices about getting rid of football. In that environment, Michigan was kicked out of the Western Conference in 1907, supposedly for putting too much emphasis on winning football, and both Ohio State and Nebraska wanted to join in its place; the Western Conference picked Ohio State in 1912 to return to being the Big Nine. But Woodrow Wilson, the otherwise-awful president beginning in 1913, had been a college president and firmly supported football. And so the conference decided to re-admit Michigan in 1916 and became, for the first time, the “Big Ten”.
And so it stayed for 23 years, dropping the “Western Conference” moniker, until the days just before WWII. The imminent World War II had roiled American academia, bringing a huge number of brilliant Europeans here. In 1939, the University of Chicago, one of the main beneficiaries of that trend, decided to drop football at the end of the season. This decision had many consequences, but one that football fans might not know: it made space available for two European émigre physicists — (1) an Italian experimental physicist who had already won the Nobel Prize (Enrico Fermi), who had fled Italy in 1938 because his wife was Jewish and Italy had just adopted racial purity laws, and who had come to the University of Chicago to continue his work on radioactive elements, and (2) an Austro-Hungarian theoretical physicist (Leo Szilard), who had previously fled Germany in 1933 and then the U.K. in 1938 (convinced, correctly, that Germany would soon attack it), who had conceived the idea of a nuclear chain reaction in 1933, and with whom Fermi wanted to work — to use the empty racquetball court under the University of Chicago football field to build the world’s first artificial nuclear reactor in 1941. And their research led directly to the Manhattan Project. There is a Henry Moore sculpture called “Nuclear Energy” at the University of Chicago (on the location of the former Stagg Field) to commemorate it; from some angles, the sculpture looks like a football helmet, but from others, it looks like a mushroom cloud.
After WWII ended in September 1945, the University of Chicago decided to drop out of the Big Ten completely as of 1946, technically reducing it back to the Big Nine again (although it did not change its name). But not for long. The favored school to take the vacant spot was Michigan State University, and it was indeed added as of 1950. And once it became the Big Ten again, it became the model for university associations for the next 40 years. Most of the universities were founded as “land-grant” schools, who were provided with federal funds during Abraham Lincoln’s term (and then his successors) to expand their programs and provide agricultural education. Land-grant universities tended to be huge, and the ones in the Big Ten (Ohio State, Michigan State, Purdue, Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota) were no exception. But for the benefit of the non-land grant schools (Michigan, Indiana, Northwestern, Iowa . . . and Chicago, which was still a part of the administrative structure), all of the Big Ten universities were also members of the Association of American Universities (“AAU”), the premier organization for American research universities.
Even though the factor that led to the organization of the Big Ten was college athletics, about ten years after it was formed came the National Collegiate Athletic Association (“NCAA”), which took over that role. One of the things that the NCAA did was negotiate sports contracts on behalf of all of its members and then control how many times their games could be shown on TV, so that all teams, not just the best, would get some national attention without saturating the airwaves with college football. But the world changed in the 1980s, after the larger universities (except for the Big Ten and the Pac-10) formed their own organization (the College Football Association, or CFA) to sell their TV rights and reached a deal with one of the TV networks, only for the NCAA to threaten to ban those schools from all intercollegiate competition if they played a game under that deal.
Accordingly, two of the CFA schools, the University of Oklahoma and the University of Georgia, sued the NCAA over both the TV plan and the banning threat . . . and they won 7-2 in the Supreme Court, in one of the last cases decided by the Brennan Court. The Court held that the NCAA’s actions violated both the Sherman Antitrust Act and the Clayton Antitrust Act. From then on, college football teams and leagues were free to negotiate their own TV contracts.
The two dissenters in NCAA v. Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma were the same two dissenters as in Roe v. Wade: Justices Byron “Whizzer” White, a former star collegiate and pro football player, and William Rehnquist. White, who authored the dissent, began by quoting a recent book, which said "While it would be fanciful to suggest that colleges are not concerned about the profitability of their ventures, it is clear that other, noncommercial goals play a central role in their sports programs." Quoting a recent case (references and footnotes omitted), White then noted that NCAA regulations represented a desirable and legitimate attempt
to keep university athletics from becoming professionalized to the extent that profitmaking objectives would overshadow educational objectives. . . . The collateral consequences of the spreading of regional and national appearances among a number of schools are many: the television plan, like the ban on compensating student athletes, may well encourage students to choose their schools, at least in part, on the basis of educational quality by reducing the perceived economic element of the choice; it helps ensure the economic viability of athletic programs at a wide variety of schools with weaker football teams; and it "promot[es] competitive football among many and varied amateur teams nationwide." These important contributions, I believe, are sufficient to offset any minimal anticompetitive effects of the television plan.
As in Roe, their opinion was prophetic. The Big Ten and Pac-10, who weren’t members, were able to sell their rights on their own to CBS and ABC, respectively. The CFA schools were locked in until 1994, but each conference really wanted to negotiate its own TV deals. But what did that mean to the independent universities that weren’t in a conference?
Joe Paterno, the head football coach at Penn State, wondered about that very question. He thought that the major football independents, most of whom were located in the East (Penn State, Pittsburgh, Boston College, Syracuse, West Virginia, Rutgers, etc.) needed to form their own conference. Of course, most of these schools thought of themselves more as basketball powerhouses these days, and they rejected Paterno’s plan and instead joined a new basketball-oriented conference called the Big East. And the Big East rejected Penn State because it was primarily a football school.
Except . . . if it was primarily a football school, and it was also a large land-grant college, and it was also a member of the AAU, then shouldn’t it qualify to join the Big Ten, who had the most lucrative TV contract out there? So, after the proposed eastern conference fell apart, it applied. And it was accepted in 1990 (with the Big Ten adopting a logo that showed the hidden number “11”). And the floodgates opened, as the “tail” (TV rights) began to wag the conference dog.
Notre Dame, which had an “out” clause in its deal with the CFA, exercised it in 1990 and signed its own deal with NBC. But the bigger deal was that the largest conferences still wanted to realign themselves to increase their TV footprint, as the Big Ten had already done. The Southwestern Conference (“SWC”) was an 8- or 9-school conference (due to penalties to Southern Methodist University, which was given the “death penalty” by the NCAA until 1990) located entirely in Texas, except for the University of Arkansas. So the Southeastern Conference (“SEC”) offered membership to Arkansas in 1990, and it accepted. It also offered membership to South Carolina. That made it obvious that the CFA was going to be dead once its existing deal expired, because the now-12-team SEC would get its own deal. The football schools that went into the Big East decided that they also needed their own football league and formed a football division in the Big East, which included Miami (Florida), a recent national champion.
And then came 1994. The SEC signed a huge contract with CBS, effective the next year. The four largest schools remaining in the SWC quit and joined the Big 8, which changed its name to the Big 12. The SWC folded. Fairly quickly, the CFA itself also became a casualty. And then, as TV pushed for a college football championship playoff, that meant that leagues wanted to add what the 12-team SEC already had: an extra conference playoff game to boost their resumes (which, under NCAA rules, required a 12-team league). And everything broke apart again. The Big Ten brought in Nebraska from the Big 12 (about 100 years later than Nebraska’s first attempt to join!) to get to 12, and the Pac-10 added Colorado from the Big 12 and Utah from the Mountain West Conference to get to 12, which had the effect of dropping the Big 12 down to 10 and meaning that it couldn’t have a conference playoff. And the 9-team Atlantic Coast Conference (“ACC”) added three schools from the Big East — Virginia Tech, Miami, and Boston College, which forced the Big East to add four new football schools: Louisville, Cincinnati, South Florida, and Texas Christian (surely a suitable school for the Big East, no?).
But the instability wasn’t done, and this time it was driven by the fact that the conferences were setting up their own TV networks. The Big Ten soon added Maryland from the ACC and Rutgers from the Big East, making 14 teams, primarily to expand the audience for the Big Ten Network, a joint venture with Fox TV. Rutgers was not only the site of the first college football game in 1869, but it was part of the New York City TV market, the largest in the country, while Maryland covered both Baltimore and Washington D.C. The SEC reached a deal with ESPN to set up its own rival network and added Texas A&M and Missouri (which had desperately wanted to join the Big Ten, but the fact that Missouri had been a slave state about 150 years ago worked against it!) from the Big 12, bringing it to 14 teams as well and adding Texas, St. Louis, and Kansas City to its market. Although it lost Maryland, the ACC expanded from 11 to 15 teams, adding three more Big East schools in Pittsburgh, Syracuse, and Louisville, plus Notre Dame (which had never wanted to join its neighboring schools in the Big Ten (although it is a Big Ten member in a sport the ACC doesn’t sponsor, men’s hockey!) . . . plus, it isn’t a member of the AAU, which all full Big Ten members have been when admitted) in all but football. Texas Christian decided to leave the Big East as well and fill one of the Big 12 vacancies, and West Virginia from the Big East filled another one, bringing the Big 12 back up to 10 . . . and the Big East then collapsed.
Everyone knew that the shuffle would resume when the next TV contracts were up for negotiation, especially the SEC (with ESPN) and the Big Ten (with Fox). And sure enough, in 2021, the two powerhouses of the Big 12, Oklahoma and Texas. announced a move to the SEC, which would now be 16 teams. To replace them, the Big 12 added four schools to get back up to 12: Cincinnati, formerly in the now-defunct Big East; Houston, formerly in the now-defunct SWC; and two schools that hadn’t been in major conferences before: Central Florida and Brigham Young. But the next shoe would drop when the Big Ten needed to renegotiate and probably expand to 16, and it did just recently; the two powerhouse Los Angeles universities, Southern California and UCLA from the Pac-12, jumped to the Big Ten, which was now bicoastal, from New Jersey to Los Angeles. (And yes, they both belong to the AAU). Apparently this move was triggered by an enormous deficit in UCLA’s sports budget, and USC elected to move with it to get the best possible deal out there, which of course was the Big Ten.
What comes next? Will the conferences expand beyond 16 teams? How will the Pac-12 fill its two huge holes? Can it survive? Can the Big 12 survive with its four new members? And how does the ACC survive when its main rivals are grabbing scads and scads more revenue, but it’s locked into its disastrous 20-year TV deal with its now-enemy ESPN until 2035?
Money talks. Justices White and Rehnquist saw it, but the Brennan Court was, once again, disastrously wrong. Basically, if the Brennan Court ruled on it, the decision was probably a blunder.
The Long Arm of History
While writing this on Friday, Salman Rushdie was stabbed several times before speaking at the Chautauqua Institution. Having been there (because I grew up only a little over an hour away), I can say from experience that there is no place more peaceful or more typically American that Chautauqua Lake (heck, Teddy Roosevelt called the conferences named for the lake “the most American thing in America”), which actually looks like the perfect venue — filled with a crowd full of NPR-types — to pull off an actual act of terrorism. As I write, the New York Times is informing us that Rushdie suffered severe injuries, is on a ventilator, and, if he survives, will at least lose an eye.
And then the Times and the Associated Press both have the audacity to disinform us that the attacker’s “motive was unclear”. Really? I guess the late Iranian leader Ayatollah Khomeini could not be reached for comment. He issued his fatwa calling for Rushdie’s death all the way back in 1989. In 2022, 33 years later, we let our guard down and it may have come to pass. Shapour Bakhtiar only survived two years under police protection in France after being targeted by Khomeini, so I guess we in the U.K. and U.S. did better, but is anyone actually feeling that way right now? Oh, and a semiofficial Iranian agency is still offering a $3.3 million bounty for Rushdie’s death.
One more time: despite the loony crowd of NPR listeners insisting that “words are violence”, they are not. Violence, like what the terrorist did to Rushdie, is violence. When a large part of a society starts believing nonsense like “words are violence”, real violence can flourish unmolested. And so it did.
For those of you who fail to understand this, I recommend Bari Weiss’ essay, “We Ignored Salman Rushdie’s Warning”. Despite all this, the increasing senile American president is apparently still pursuing peace initiatives with Iran. Maybe his staff will get him some ice cream instead of telling him about Rushdie; he might get nightmares. His possible opponent, the insane American ex-president (whom I’ve already targeted in this column), is still blustering about 2020 and how he is going to get his revenge on Liz Cheney. The curse, “May you live in interesting times,” has come true for the United States.
Bari Weiss captures this perfectly at the end of her essay:
The words are violence crowd is right about the power of language. Words can be vile, disgusting, offensive, and dehumanizing. They can make the speaker worthy of scorn, protest, and blistering criticism. But the difference between civilization and barbarism is that civilization responds to words with words. Not knives or guns or fire. That is the bright line. There can be no excuse for blurring that line—whether out of religious fanaticism or ideological orthodoxy of any other kind.
Today our culture is dominated by those who blur that line—those who lend credence to the idea that words, art, song lyrics, children’s books, and op-eds are the same as violence. We are so used to this worldview and what it requires—apologize, grovel, erase, grovel some more—that we no longer notice. It is why we can count, on one hand—Dave Chappelle; J.K. Rowling—those who show spine.
Of course it is 2022 that the Islamists finally get a knife into Salman Rushdie. Of course it is now, when words are literally violence and J.K. Rowling literally puts trans lives in danger and even talking about anything that might offend anyone means you are literally arguing I shouldn’t exist. Of course it’s now, when we’re surrounded by silliness and weakness and self-obsession, that a man gets on stage and plunges a knife into Rushdie, plunges it into his liver, plunges it into his arm, plunges it into his eye. That is violence.
And that warning is the proper note to end upon. I’ll have to let the story about the first musical group to record on a 16-track tape recorder wait until the next column, because there is nothing more serious than the threat to “Pax Americana” posed by the attack on Rushdie at a place that epitomizes American values the way Chautauqua does.
Be seeing you.