My Sunday Feeling

 It is Saturday afternoon as I put down this deathless prose.  I don’t fool with this blog like I used to.  Maybe it’s the heat.  Maybe it’s because I am lazy.  Maybe it is because when I started this I did it to relieve stress from work which is a stress I no longer have. But here I am making another cameo appearance.

Anyway, it is a Saturday afternoon and the Deacon and I are going to see “Barbie.” We’re going to a matinee.  I prefer matinees mainly because you get out at supper time and for me half the fun of going to the movies is talking about what you and your companion have seen over an adult beverage as you peruse the menu.

Secondly, “Barbie” has offended the sensibilities of- as far as I can tell-pretty much the same strata of people that are offended by the children’s fare (or what they perceive to be the children’s fare) at any public library around here.  I figure that I am less likely to get gunned down in broad daylight in a mass shooting by a triggered angry white guy who has got it in for, in this case, women.  That’s another reason I like the matinee for some movies.

I don’t get the mostly faux outrage over “Barbie.”  As I have gleaned from the reviews I have read “Barbie” is a send up of her idealized female form brought to life by a perfectly cast Margot Robbie who is not only beautiful but can do physical comedy as well as anybody.  It is a send up of the suits at Mattel along with the concept of male patriarchy.  As if that weren’t enough Ryan Gosling’s Ken supposedly manages to steal the movie.

Sounds like great fun to me.

Not so much to some folks.  I noticed a post on social media the other day bemoaning the fact that “Barbie” was not a fun innocent movie that she could take her kid to and was yet another sign that this country is going to Hell in a bucket.  And as for her she wasn’t going.

Good for her.  Don’t go.  That is her right.  To spend her money, or not spend her money, anywhere she damn well pleases for whatever reason suits her.  And to her everlasting credit, unlike some of the fools that are raising Cain about the libraries, she is not urging that the movie be banned. At least she didn’t in her post. God Bless.

And she probably shouldn’t take her daughter anyway.  I haven’t seen that “Barbie” has any sex in it (a lack of boy and girl parts would preclude such activity in any event) and there’s very little cussing.  At least nothing most kids haven’t heard already.  But it deals with provocative, adult themes.  Even though its protagonist is based on a beloved doll played with by millions of little girls it is not a children’s movie.  

Or at least that is what I’ve read.  

I guess the thing that mildly irritates me about people that oppose movies like “Barbie” on moral grounds (for lack of a better phrase) is the negative pregnant in much of that criticism that anybody that goes to see movies such as “Barbie” are themselves immoral.  Or worse giving into “woke” culture whatever that means.  That’s ridiculous.  

Me? I’m irredeemable. But without being a pain in the ass about it, my spouse is a moral and upright person who has raised the Hell out of a daughter.  She also would not take a swing at anybody who might accuse her of being a feminist.  Like Me the Irredeemable, she has an open mind, is not put off by different ideas and so, wants to get a look at this particular picture show to see what the fuss is all about.  

Besides it will be cool and dark inside the movie house.  What better way to pass a 102 degree afternoon?   

And afterwards we will discuss what we saw over a glass of wine for her and my Saturday night martini somewhere.  

I mean for God’s sake.  What is wrong with some people?

It’s just a movie.  

My Sunday Feeling

Just when you think that you no longer have the capacity to be surprised by anything that happens in DI athletics, you get unpleasantly surprised. 

I suppose that I have been to Evanston, Illinois 3 or 4 times.  I like Evanston.    Think of a larger version of Hillcrest with a major university in the middle of it.  I could live in Evanston but for the property values and the taxes.  Maybe I could live there under the statue of Civil War general Phil Sheridan for whom main drag Sheridan Road is named.  But I couldn’t afford to buy any real estate there.

Speaking of said major university, I’ve been on campus at Northwestern on most of the occasions I have been in the Chicago area.  Beautiful campus.  I’ve seen the Northwestern Wildcats play there in Ryan Stadium.  I saw them the year they went to the Rose Bowl of all damn things.  They were led by a couple of All-Americans: running back Darnell Autrey and a local boy linebacker Pat Fitzgerald.  After his playing days Fitz joined the Wildcat staff and eventually took over as head man when Randy Walker unexpectedly dropped dead from a massive coronary.  

In his 16 years on the job Fitz wrung a .500 record out of a team once derisively known as the “Mildcats.”  Along the way, he took them to 10 bowl games including another Rose Bowl.  It was widely thought that Fitz had them playing as well as they ever could play given the fact that Northwestern ain’t that easy to get into, being an “academic school” as Wally Hall might say, or has said in regards to Vanderbilt and Rice, and that they play in the Big Ten. Or 15. Or whatever they are now with the addition of perennial Midwestern powerhouses USC and UCLA.  

Well, Pat Fitzgerald got canned the other day after the student newspaper, the Daily Northwestern, printed a story in which former players complained of acts of hazing in the football locker room.  Really grim stuff.  Serial “dry-humping” of a victim in a darkened room.  Nude quarterbacks being forced to take snaps from an equally disrobed center.  And that’s all I can remember.  Or care to. 

Fitzgerald says he knew nothing about this stuff.  Some of the victims said he had to know about it.  Anyway as the story got worse and worse, the two week suspension originally laid down was ripened to a termination, the university’s position being it was his job to know what was going on.

Still you don’t think of this stuff going on at a world class academic institution like Northwestern. Then again, you didn’t think of little boys getting molested by a member of the coaching staff at Penn State either.  

And it makes me wonder.  If this kind of brutality was going on at an Ivy League level institution like Northwestern, you wonder where else it could be happening?  

I guarantee you that college presidents nationwide broke out in cold sweats when this news got out.  And I also guarantee you that ADs are being instructed to get the word out to their coaches reminding them that there is zero tolerance for hazing of any kind.  

Because if hazing could erupt behind closed doors at Northwestern it can be, and most likely is, happening elsewhere.

And it cannot be tolerated.  

But stay tuned.  I bet we haven’t heard the last of this issue.