On Nick Saban and sportsmanship; Tom and Gisele; China and Iran; politicians and party loyalty; free speech on campus; and more
University of Texas teams are the “Longhorns,” and UT people flash a sign, indicating horns. They do this with their hands, I mean. And their slogan: “Hook ’em, Horns” — sometimes just “Hook ’em.”
Everyone knows this, of course — or most everyone. But you have to keep the uninitiated in mind.
Incidentally, if you flash a “hook ’em” sign in Sicily, they will kill you. If you flash such a sign, you are telling someone else that he’s a cuckold.
Anyway, when people want to put down the Longhorns, they flash the horns, but put the horns down, rather than up. This is known as “horns down” — and University of Alabama football players were doing it the other Saturday after they beat the Longhorns in Texas.
“Don’t do that sh**!” said Alabama’s head coach, Nick Saban, to the offending players. Later, he related what he told the team: “We don’t need to degrade the other team’s traditions. Just go play.”
At this rate, Saban could make me an Alabama fan — which would be an unusual thing for a Michigander to be.
• Did you see this news? “The University of Texas spent nearly $280,000 on the official visit for Arch Manning, the nation’s No. 1 overall recruit, and eight others. The spending spree over 48 hours included a luxury hotel, custom cakes and an ice sculpture.”
(Go here.)
You know, I’d visit UT for like $100. Actually, you could just pay me in Amy’s ice cream.
• Roger Federer, the tennis great, has retired. Let me say something trite but true (not to be confused with “tried and true”): It has been a privilege and a pleasure to watch him play. To live in his era. Plus, he seems to me the model athlete, all the way around.
• You know what I want most in the NFL this year? That the marriage of Tom Brady and Gisele Bündchen — about which we’ve been reading so much lately — endure.
• A report from the Associated Press: “In Hong Kong, public grief over queen doubles as dissent.” In no other place, perhaps, was mourning for Elizabeth II more meaningful.
• This is a very hard story to take, but it is important for the understanding of Iran. The heading: “Woman Who Died After Arrest By Iran’s Morality Police Buried Amid Chants Of ‘Death To The Dictator.’”
Can you imagine the bravery of the people who chanted that chant?
The story, from Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty, begins,
A young Iranian woman who slipped into a coma while in the custody of Iran’s morality police has been laid to rest in her hometown of Saghez in Iran’s Kurdistan Province amid tight security measures.
The story continues,
Hundreds of people reportedly attended the September 17 funeral of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini. She died on September 16 a few days after being taken into police custody for allegedly breaking the country’s hijab rules.
Some more:
Eyewitnesses to Amini’s arrest told journalists that she appeared to have been beaten inside the morality police van while being taken to the detention center. . . .
Police said Amini had suffered a heart attack after being taken to the station to be “educated.”
Finally,
The White House on September 16 called Amini’s death “unforgivable.”
• Now to U.S. politics. As this story tells us, Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin will campaign for Kari Lake, the Republican nominee for governor in Arizona. She is “ultra-MAGA,” claiming that the Democrats stole the 2020 presidential election from Donald Trump, etc.
The incumbent Arizona governor, Doug Ducey, has endorsed Lake. As I mentioned in a piece the other day, Senator Rob Portman of Ohio has endorsed the GOP nominee to succeed him, J.D. Vance. Vance, like Lake, is “ultra-MAGA.” He is proud of his indifference to Ukraine’s fate. He is proud of a lot of things.
“Sometimes party loyalty asks too much,” said JFK. I agree. But most people, it seems, disagree. It’s hard to find anyone who says, “No. Enough.”
• Vance rallied with Trump last Saturday. Trump was pretty blunt: “J.D. is kissing my ass, he wants my support so much.” No doubt. Trump introduced his candidate as follows: “Yeah, he said some bad things about me, and then he fell in love. Remember I said that about Kim Jong-un? ‘He fell in love.’”
Doesn’t every candidate dream of being introduced by a backer that way? Trump, Vance, Kim — how sweet.
• On Monday, Liz Cheney delivered the Walter Berns Constitution Day Lecture at the American Enterprise Institute. I admired Professor Berns enormously. I have nearby a copy of his collection In Defense of Liberal Democracy. He was a great, sterling American conservative. The selection of Cheney to give the Berns lecture was inspired.
Liberal democracy needs all the defenders it can get. It has no end of foes, on left and right. And arguments for liberal democracy won’t make themselves. They need to be made by flesh-and-blood human beings, over and over.
I keep saying: Don’t leave the field to the illiberals on either side. (They amount to the same.) If you do, you are finished.
• FIRE — the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education — has ranked colleges by the measure of free speech. No. 1 is the University of Chicago. No. Last is Columbia.
That Chicago is first is unsurprising. It is the home of the Chicago Statement, which articulates the Chicago Principles, which address free speech. The chief author of the statement, and the principles, is Geoffrey Stone, of the Chicago law school. I interviewed him a couple of years ago (here).
The president of Purdue University, Mitch Daniels, told me that he had “xeroxed” the Chicago Principles for his own university. Purdue is ranked No. 3 on the FIRE list.
Don’t you think Columbia should get busy? Or less busy or something?
• A long while ago, I wrote a book about the sons and daughters of dictators. I begin that book with a man who claimed to be Hitler’s son. Rather, his mother told him that he was, and he came to believe it. Almost certainly, he was not Hitler’s son. But that wasn’t the point, or my point: He believed it — so what effect did that have on him? (Bad.)
I thought of him when reading about, and looking at, this fellow. He is a “January 6 defendant.” And he has made himself look a lot like Hitler. You know who else looked like Hitler? The Frenchman with whom I open my book.
Creepy.
• A news article begins,
An emotional Attorney General Merrick B. Garland addressed new citizens on Saturday at Ellis Island . . .
During a 10-minute speech in which he repeatedly stopped to collect himself, the attorney general recounted the tale of his grandmother’s flight from antisemitism in what is now Belarus before World War II, and the narrow escape to New York made by his wife’s mother, who fled Austria after Nazis annexed the country in 1938.
“My family story is what motivated me to choose a career in public service,” said the typically stoic attorney general, his voice dropping to a husky whisper. “I wanted to repay my country for taking my family in when they had nowhere else to go. I wanted to repay the debt my family owes this country for our very lives.”
Garland also said this: “My grandmother was one of five children. Three made it to the United States, including my grandmother, who came through the Port of Baltimore. Two did not make it. Those two were killed in the Holocaust.”
• “Maximilian Lerner, Whose Espionage Skills Helped Win a War, Dies at 98.” The subheading of that obit is “An Austrian immigrant, he was one of the so-called Ritchie Boys, who were trained at a secret Army intelligence camp to serve in World War II.”
Let me quote a sentence: “On the day that he and the other Jewish students at his high school were expelled, they were forced to scrub the streets outside the school with toothbrushes.” That is the kind of detail that stands out.
Let me also quote this:
. . . during the denazification process . . . Mr. Lerner was dispatched to Wiesbaden, Germany, where prisoners were being held at a local jail. One of those imprisoned was Julius Streicher . . .
“I made sure,” Mr. Lerner wrote, “that he and others I arrested knew that I was a Jew.”
Good.
• Have an AP report: “Cheetahs make a comeback in India after 70 years.” I don’t like Narendra Modi’s Russia policy. But I like his cheetah policy.
• Did you see this? “Maggots key to crisis-time fertilizer for Ugandan farmers.” (Article here.) In all my days, I have never seen maggots get a good press — till now.
• A fabulous sentence from George F. Will — who is speaking of Joe Biden: “The apogee of his career has not coincided with the peak of his personal abilities.” That is in this column. Another GFW column begins, “Although mediocrity is as rampant as usual, this is at least the golden age of the grovel.” True, true — as Will goes on to illustrate.
• “Gen Z Never Learned to Read Cursive.” That is the title of an article by Drew Gilpin Faust, the history prof who until recently was president of Harvard. I had a sense that young people aren’t learning to write cursive — but they can’t read it either? The revival of cursive: One could do worse for causes.
Thank you for joining me today, my friends, and I’ll see you later.
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