Since I just came back from a visit to Michigan and since I lived there at one time, the Game of the Week is – what else – Michigan State vs. Ohio State. Ohio State is undefeated and last year’s NCAA football champion and Michigan State has lost one game this season, thanks to a very bad officiating call in a game against Nebraska. Both teams have under performed however, despite their records. When I was a boy I was an avid Buckeye fan, but now that I’m a man, the Spartans and all things Michigan command my loyalty. The game is in Columbus, making a Spartan victory uphill. Nevertheless, (and here’s too hoping), Spartans squeak out narrow victory 27-24 as Buckeyes under perform once again.
Little surprises me these days — I don’t know if it’s age, or what. But the long quote below from a recent post in Jacobin has me shaking my head.
“We need to understand this point well if we want to make the most of the opportunities presented by the Sanders campaign, especially if Bernie follows through on his plans to give a “major speech” about socialism. [This] will be a great occasion for the Left to debate our own meanings of socialism — but only if we silence our inner Anderson Coopers and discuss Bernie’s ideas on their own terms without worrying about how they impact his electability.”
The Good: The coalition of students, graduate students, faculty, and football players that forced University of Missouri President Timothy Wolfe to step down. Wolfe had become an obstacle to addressing issues of racial justice and other student concerns in a timely and robust way.
The Bad: The Republican Party presidential debate. Instead of attacking each other as happened in earlier debates, each of the candidates offered solutions to today’s problems and crises that ranged from the outlandish to the ridiculous. Wage cutting was a universally popular prescription among this motley, but very wealthy bunch.
The Very Ugly: The vicious killing of innocent people in Paris. So far 160 are reported dead, according to the Washington Post. Time to “give peace a chance.” Don’t see any other solution to the cycle of violence and counter violence that is gripping and crushing our interconnected and increasingly fragile world.
I said in an earlier post that the entrance of the football players was the tipping point in the struggle on the University of Missouri campus over racial justice, but also mentioned that was part of a wider process of struggle. And surely the police murder of Michael Brown and the ensuing and protracted struggle that followed in Ferguson last year had to loom large in the thinking of many, including the political class in that state, and factored into the outcome.
Just finished listening to a remarkable press conference with Mack Rhoades, Athletic Director, and Gary Kinkel, football coach, at the University of Missouri on ESPN. Both supported the refusal of the university’s football team to play in this weekend’s game with BYU as an expression of solidarity with the student hunger striker Jonathan Butler. Butler, along with other students and faculty, who had been protesting racial injustice and other incidents on campus, had called earlier to no avail for university president, Timothy M. Wolfe, who had become a cause of and obstacle to resolving racial and other tensions on campus, to step down. But it appears that entrance of the football players in this struggle that had gained broad support across the campus and was a continuation of wider process of struggle going back to Fergurson, turned into a tipping point (and not only because of the money lost – 1 millions bucks – if this weekend’s game was forfeited) forcing Wolfe to do today what up to now he had resisted: resign as president.
