Month: January 2026

On High School P.E. and Fake Scholarship

In my Denton, Texas high school years, not belonging to an actual sports team, I had to endure, along with the other losers, something called “Physical Education,” taught by an instructor who was burdened with the task as a condition of their real job, coaching football. In my sophomore year that instructor was the beloved Coach Collins, for whom a high-school football stadium was later named. This would have been the 1974-1975 school year.

There was a physical aspect to Physical Education. On any given day we might be issued a badminton racket, or directed to run around a field. But I would say the educational element was basically absent.

But one day we were instructed to “write a report” on some sport. I don’t know why. It was probably a state requirement. What this meant in practice was that you went to the school library, looked up the entry for, say, “basketball” in the World Book Encyclopedia (which was basically the same as the Encyclopedia Britannica, except for idiots), and copied a page or so of text by hand onto a sheet of paper. Then on the appointed date you’d stand up in front of the other kids and read “your” “report.”

But it occurred to me that this was all a charade. No one was really interested in whether or not we actually did research, or in learning something. So I decided to just make something up, and have some fun with it.

And going through a box of old letters and scribblings some fifty years later, I found my “report” (thanks, Mom!). Here it is, in its entirety.

Basketball was started in 1897 by William Johnson, son of a cantaloupe plantation owner. While tossing one of his father’s fruit [sic] into a wastepaper basket, suddenly the idea of what is now basketball popped into his head. Although he was soon punished by an angry father, his friends started a now popular game. Five years later a plastic ball was substituted for the cantaloupe, because constant dribbling made it rather soggy and hard to handle, and also made it taste bad. It was also rather expensive, as that particular species of fruit was fairly rare at that time. Two years later, in 1904, a basket, with no bottom, was substituted for the wastebasket, thus freeing the latter for trash.

But the really basic origins of basketballs go back much further than this. Descriptions on walls of ancient Mayan temples reveal a ball-through loop rite for fertility. It had many sexual implications, and one historian hints that “It was a sort of primitive girlie show.”[1] [Yes, I included an actual (bogus) footnote.] The basketball itself (which was not named a “basketball” until its incorporation into that sport in1902) has had many other earlier uses. Many prominent historians contend that it was not a pumpkin that Cinderella’s famed fairy godmother changed into a coach (despite popular belief) but what is now called a basketball. The coach she rode in she thus named a basketball coach. The social gathering she went to was also called a basket-ball, as the fashions of the time dictated that all dancers dance veiled in fine, net-like baskets.

[1] Nightclubs through the ages, vol. 1 pg. [illegible] by John Sorcy.

I did in fact get up in front of the class and read the above. I made no outward indication that it was satirical. I think I was a little nervous. No one laughed, no one cracked a smile. I don’t think anyone was really listening. I was the egghead of the class, it was totally expected that I would actually go to the trouble of doing serious research and come up with a long (or at least longer than necessary) paper. In fact, I think I heard another kid who hadn’t even bothered to consult World Book quote my report in his completely improvised lecture later on in the hour. I was a trusted source, after all.

Coach Collins was in the audience too, of course. What did he think? Well, you can see from the photo the grade he assigned it. If he thought anything funny was going on…he never let on.

America the Ridiculous

Once upon a time, or rather, several times from 1995 to 2011, Italy had a prime minister named Silvio Berlusconi. He was a preposterous choice as leader for a modern democratic nation. Immensely wealthy, right wing, nationalist, buffoonish, corrupt to the gills. He privately admitted that he had entered politics mainly to stay out of jail. He had already cornered the Italian private media sector, turning it into a personal propaganda machine. He became infamous for arranging sex parties that included underage girls.

But there was a silver lining to Silvio, at least for us Americans: he was Italian.  He fit nicely into several American stereotypes of Italians: the corrupt politician, the easy-going Latin lover, the large-living playboy. Jon Stewart had a brilliant skit on The Daily Show that skewered not only Berlusconi, who had been recently charged with statutory rape, but those tired stereotypes as well. Olivia Munn, for example, played an imaginary mother to Berlusconi. Dressed in a black shawl, Munn wrung her hands and pleaded to the camera, “My son, he’s a good-a boy! He no rape-a no statue!”

Oh, weren’t those the days, when American moral superiority felt so…superior! If America is still exceptional today, it’s only…exceptionally ridiculous.

What else can you say about a man who is delighted quite literally by bright, shiny trinkets? A man who pleases himself by naming public monuments after himself? A man who publicly proclaims himself to be a smarter military tactician than any general, who changes public health policy because he’s smarter than the scientists? A man who saw the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, and reacted by planning a bigger, “better” one for himself, in our nation’s capital?  (He literally has a Napoleon complex!) You would have to call that man ridiculous, a buffoon, a clown. And we Americans chose him, of our own free will, to be the one to take charge of us, twice. And that makes us even more ridiculous than him.

There are much worse things one can do besides behaving like a clown…and Donald Trump is doing all of them, too. But what I want to discuss here is the shame, the humiliation, the embarrassment we feel or should feel for ourselves and our country. It’s deeply embarrassing to be an American right now. God forbid I find myself trying to have a serious debate about anything with someone from, say, Denmark. Or France. Or Ukraine. Or Italy. I don’t know if I could even look them in the face right now. I feel so…ridiculous!

And I have to say, the late Berlusconi is looking better every day. True, he was a corrupt megalomaniac and a sexual predator. But (and I am not an expert on Berlusconi; I invite my Italian friends to correct me) I do not recall that Signor Silvio ever blew up helpless crews of small motorboats in the Mediterranean, or sent the Italian army to put down peaceful protests by brute force, or used the Italian criminal justice system to wage war on his political opponents, or renamed Constantine’s Arch to “Arch of Silvio”, or made himself the director of La Scala. Or tried to annex Malta. Or changed maps of the Mediterranean to label it “Mare Italiano.” We should be so lucky!

Like many of you, I am horrified and frightened by the man leading our country and the thought of what he might do next. I have no good answer to a foreigner who asks, “why?” I am also deeply embarrassed. I can only hope that some if his less diehard supporters are at least starting to feel the same way.

We’re All Domestic Terrorists Now

Yesterday afternoon I found out I could be a domestic terrorist. Reader, so could you.

My discovery came from watching a clip of Kristi Noem, the person in charge of the safety and security of the United States and its people, describe a woman named Renee Nicole Good as having committed “domestic terrorism.” Noem explains that Good was “trying to kill” a police officer with the vehicle she was driving, as part of a “coordinated” nationwide scheme to “train” terrorists to “run over” anyone who gets in their way as they “try to disrupt peace and public safety.” Noem declares that she will prosecute such acts as terrorism, although in Good’s case it’s hard to see how that will happen, since she’s already been executed.

Good, a 37 year-old poet and mother of 3, including a 6 year old child, would seem to make an unlikely terrorist. She was an unarmed U.S. citizen, was not a criminal, and was not being sought by authorities.

Federal officials have accused her of “weaponizing” her own vehicle in order to kill ICE officers. I invite you to watch the videos taken at the scene here, and come to your own conclusion about that.

It appears to me that Good was not remotely trying to run over anyone, or even trying to scare an officer with her vehicle. It looks like she was deliberately trying to avoid hitting anyone.  In any event, no one was struck by her car, and she was shot at even after the officer who opened fire was out of her path. She may be guilty of deliberately blocking the street with her car, and of making the dumb (and probably panicky) mistake of trying to drive away from ICE officers shouting at her to “get out of the fucking car.” And she’s guilty of being in the wrong place at the wrong time: her hometown, on a Wednesday afternoon.

But it’s permanent “opposite day” in this country, where the vigilantes who injured police officers In Washington, D.C. on January 6, 2021, are “patriots” and (until they were all pardoned by President Trump) “hostages,” and a peaceful citizen like Renee Nicole Good is a “domestic terrorist.” Evidently anyone in this country or in this hemisphere might be a “terrorist,” either for the purposes of justifying their murder before the fact (as with alleged drug smugglers in the Caribbean) or afterwards (as with Ms. Good).

No actual terrorism required.