I Don't Even Own A Television: 'Those Who Trespass'

Ordinarily I'd assume that I did a good enough job last time selling you on my friend Jay W. Friedman's podcast. And I would likewise assume that the new page for podcast appearances I put up would be a sufficient resource for finding out where and when I'd droned on and on like an asshole about something. But this time I joined Jay to talk about Bill O'Reilly's Those Who Trespass, and nothing about O'Reilly comes easily. Except his women.

Here's the thing about Bill-O: despite Jay and I spending an hour busting on his godawful prose, his sexism, his casual racism, his uncritical love of police strong-arm tactics, his bunkum facts about David Dinkins and Rudy Giuliani, his racialized image of crime, his historical clunkers, his incredible vanity, his stereotypical straight-outta-suburbia Irish-American fawning over the Ould Sod and his bad sex scenes, we could have gone on for another hour without breaking a sweat. Because he's really that awful in his fantasyland version of reality, too.

Jay touched on something in Those Who Trespass that I wanted to supplement with a bit from real life. In it, O'Reilly's Gary Stu character has a black friend named Jackson Davis, one who Bill's narration takes pains to describe as articulate. He's one of the good ones basically for no other reason than that he behaves like Bill O'Reilly's vision of a good white guy. And I really don't want anyone to walk away with the sense that this was an accident of bad writing.

Let Them Eat Pussy: The Moveable Feast of Rob Ford

I feel conflicted about Rob Ford. On the one hand, it's impossible not to feel a wrench of pity and also a sense of self-loathing creepiness at bearing witness to someone's total self-destruction. On the other hand, Jacobin neatly outlines all the ways in which Ford is a civically and socially destructive asshole of the first order. If he's going to do his damnedest to blow everything else up, the motherfucker might as well take himself with it.

Then we also have to admit that everything about Rob Ford is strangely awesome. Not in the approving, "Rad, dude!" sense of the word, but in the original sense of inspiring a kind of bewildered awe. Beyond any sense of body-shaming, Ford is awfulness writ large. He has the decency to do gross things grossly, where there's no chance of anyone arguing inference and insinuation on the part of critics. You couldn't find a lustier representation of the I-enjoy-now, you-pay-later schtick of modern conservatism. Someone gave Falstaff a city, and all he had to give up in exchange was his brain. It's fun.

Maybe this is just me. I remember basically enjoying everything about Marion Barry. He was with a prostitute; who cares? She got paid, and she was an adult. He was doing drugs; big deal, everyone I knew admitted to having done drugs. I enjoyed the fact that he was pissing off a bunch of Reagan Democrats who spent the sixties smoking grass and the seventies taking Seconal. Meanwhile they were threatening to sue teachers who used harsh language at Caitlin or Brantley, while sporting huge hard-ons for high school principal Joe Clark because he was threatening black "thug" kids with a baseball bat. Not that this was about race.

Remembering 9/11, 2011

I never seem to do anything for 9/11. I know I should. Call some friends, agree ahead of time to get together, have some kind of blast for 18 or 19 of us, but it always escapes my mind. I used to be better organized.

I can never seem to remember where I was on its anniversary, either. Take two years ago: I'm pretty sure I was at a ballgame, but I couldn't tell you one way or the other. I know I published this piece at two in the morning; after that, I'm unsure. The only "where I was on 9/11" piece I've ever read worth a tinker's damn was David J. Roth's, and, aside from that, all others read like the works of self-aware wannabe talking heads who cast their eyes at a burning hellscape and said, "Memorize where you were at this moment, precious voice, because this can be your generation's JFK assassination."

I know I was at a ballgame somewhere around September 11, 2011, because last night, purely by accident, I found an old note I'd dictated on my iPhone for myself, and it immediately brought back the circumstances surrounding it. I was standing in line at a Tampa Bay Rays game, waiting to go to the bathroom.

GAWKER: A Salad Bar of American Dread

Sometimes you just can't think of one "big idea" essay. Thankfully, every day, the United States commits so many individual acts of social, judicial and political horror that you can effortlessly pile them all together into a grab bag of nightmares.

I had no choice but to go that route earlier this week. Topics ranged from Arizona's cultural eliminationism, the snobbery of American colleges, the totally fucking insane Allen West, and the Supreme Court's ruling that you have the right to stay still as the police (legally!) finger your creamy white asshole without probable cause or even dinner.

Click the mystery box to go to the Gawker piece:


I'm posting the mystery box here, because I don't want to give away Jim Cooke's awesome art for the piece, which is absolutely hysterical and well worth the click on its own.

Also, this grab-bag format was poached from our own Idi Amin's Briefs Rodeo. So if you enjoy the Gawker update, please come back and read some of Idi's work.

GAWKER: The Sad Familiarity of Trayvon Martin

The same week that the Trayvon Martin story finally broke into the national consciousness also saw NYPD officers dislocating protesters' thumbs and smashing heads into windows in yet another scouring of Occupy groups. Automatic contempt for certain people and styles of dress, as well as assumptions of their unlawful conduct is neither restricted to the south nor any race. But that isn't why what happened to Martin is so familiar. That familiarity has its roots in Florida's Stand Your Ground laws as well as an incident that happened years ago in Texas.

Click on the gun-wielding thug to continue to the Gawker article.

GAWKER: Andrew Breitbart's Dead

Good. General Ze'evi and I take a moment to look back comprehensively on a life that the media either mistakenly, squeamishly or warily summed up as mostly benign. You know, one or two regrettable bits, but otherwise a gauzy, sunny family portrait — like what Madison Avenue thinks wheat and beaches look like when you're menstruating.

Click on the dead fraud's impression of John Lithgow from Third Rock from the Sun to be taken to the article.

VICE: Ron Paul, Hacked to the White-Supremacist Bone

In the last two weeks, we've learned from Ron Paul's own former staffers that he was fully aware and in control of his own newsletter operation. That removes the desperate Paulestinian rationalization that somehow millions of dollars worth of racist newsletters were sold for decades without Ron Paul's awareness.

"But, that was in the 1990s!" counter Paul fans. And there another inapplicable, inapposite and unpersuasive argument might have lain, if it weren't for a recent hack by members of Anonymous, who exposed connections between Ron Paul and white-supremacist groups. Connections that exist today, rather than back in 2008. As if there were a freshness date on courting racism. As if there were a time-stamp on being worthless.

Click the wrinkled, lecturing, race-baiting goblin to read more at Vice:


For more on Ron Paul, in order:

• Ron Paul: Reactionary Racist Leprechaun

• The Ron Paul Political Report: Special Issue on Race Terrorism

• I'm Not Mad at Ron Paul, I'm Just Disappointed

• Scans of Over 50 Ron Paul Newsletters

Ron Paul (Never) Made Money from and Used Hate

Today, thanks to an article in the Washington Post entitled "Ron Paul signed off on racist newsletters in the 1990s, associates say," people can finally affirm, with confidence, the exact same things most people have been claiming for months:

[People] close to Paul’s operations said he was deeply involved in the company that produced the [racist] newsletters, Ron Paul & Associates, and closely monitored its operations, signing off on articles and speaking to staff members virtually every day.

“It was his newsletter, and it was under his name, so he always got to see the final product. . . . He would proof it,’’ said Renae Hathway, a former secretary in Paul’s company and a supporter of the Texas congressman.

The Paulite rationalization has always been that he didn't mean these things published under his own name. And, more importantly, he didn't know.

Yet a review of his enterprises reveals a sharp-eyed businessman who for nearly two decades oversaw the company and a nonprofit foundation, intertwining them with his political career. The newsletters, which were launched in the mid-1980s and bore such names as the Ron Paul Survival Report, were produced by a company Paul dissolved in 2001.

The company shared offices with his campaigns and foundation at various points, according to those familiar with the operation. Public records show Paul’s wife and daughter were officers of the newsletter company and foundation; his daughter also served as his campaign treasurer.

GQ: Obama Dumb!

As part of their DEATHRACE 2012 coverage, the good people at GQ.com asked me to talk about the frequent Republican refrain — and sometimes dog-whistle racist appeal — that Barack Obama is essentially stupid.

Even when they don't have the stones to make the case directly, GOP candidates run to old lines about "the teleprompter" (a device every politician uses), or echo the sighing smug-fuck paternalism of someone like Mitt Romney, who says that Obama is a "nice man" who's just "in over his head." Barack Obama's being dumb is an empty claim that explains everything and requires no actual intellect or analysis.


Click the aw-geez Obama to be taken to GQ.

Burn in Hell, Christopher Hitchens

Note: For discussion of Middle Eastern affairs, we, the good people of Et tu, Mr. Destructo? turn for insight to General Rehavam "Gandhi" Ze'evi, former Israeli Minister of Tourism. Having faked his assassination in the Mt. Scopus Hyatt Hotel, the General has been in deep cover, in Judea and Samaria, posing as an American goy pursuing graduate studies in the Middle East. He last joined us for Bela Lugosi's Dead, Part III: Killing the Bastard Bin Laden, Stage IV of the American Fever Dream.


Reflections in a Gimlet Eye
by GENERAL REHAVAM "GANDHI" ZE'EVI

"To the living we owe respect, but to the dead we owe only the truth."
— Voltaire

Hitchens was human trash, and his corpse should be interred in a grave worthy of his towering legacy, an eternally burning garbage fire, rising as high as a Baghdad sunrise, a smoky immolation of all the worthlessness that could be crammed in his "contrarian" paunch.

Even this dream, of the phoenix never rising from the ashes, preserves that peasant’s megalomania more powerfully than any embalming fluids currently coursing through his veins. Formaldehyde's more potable than his lifeblood's cocktail of lies and booze, a tincture only the diseased imbibe. Hitchens was strictly for suckers, a mouse that roared, a VH1 I Love the 80s panelist with a fancy accent, a rap sheet and cirrhosis. "Rationalist," "skeptic," "contrarian," "public intellectual" — court jester. He plied that ancient trade for the deadliest predators on Earth; his was the reflexive, suck-up, kick-down cruelty of the British madding crowd. That’s all, folks.

To cite an author he hamfistedly emulated (more or less successfully), Hitchens was Squealer the pig, a silver-tongued correspondent to the middlebrow, flattering of power, contemptuous of the weak, the bashful, the foreign — the sincere. He was a kept man to the bitter end, the part-time iconoclast. As Norman Finklestein recalled, "'The last thing you can be accused of is having turned your coat,' Thomas Mann wrote a convert to National Socialism right after Hitler's seizure of power. 'You always wore it the 'right' way around.'" Hitchens afflicted the weak and comforted the powerful, an abnegation of any public service a gadfly could perform. Though his Oxbridge accent and erudition were crucial in fleecing the provincials he knew the USA was composed of, it was his more American qualities that endeared him to the terminal-stage Republic.

The multiple comparisons to Lord Byron that Hitchens received are so disturbing as to deserve no response. I'll try anyway. Byron — a superhuman defender of the voiceless, an impossibly good-looking sex machine, the noble son of "Mad Jack" Byron and sole voice in excoriating the destruction of Ireland, a Bengal tiger capable of ripping apart any of Wordsworth's reactionaries in verse or in person, a man disgusted by the fatuous, self-satisfied corruption of the Tory elite and the once-radical Lake poets (who should "change their lakes for oceans"), a man contemptuous of an imperial masculinity defined by cruelty and weakness, fled that stinking island — died a hero's death in Greece, fighting empire.

Hitchens died in Houston, Texas, headquarters of Halliburton.

Game Over: Scans of Over 50 Ron Paul Newsletters

For a certain segment of the Ron Paul fanbase, no evidence of his disseminating hateful, paranoid material will ever be enough. Citing James Kirchick's piece in The New Republic wasn't sufficient, because Kirchick could have just been "making everything up." Then, when I and others posted copies of "The Ron Paul Political Report Special Issue on Race Terrorism," that too wasn't convincing.

"Proof that he said/endorsed racist things? Hardly. Doing it repeatedly in one document isn't enough to prove that he did it. Now, if there were many documents..."

Well, now there are many documents. Over fifty. Right here.

As I said in my rundown on the Paul platform over at Vice, reasonable fans of Dr. Paul now must accept that

there's no way Paul could have been ignorant of the content [of] 8-12 page newsletters published under his name for over ten years. Paul supporters face three losing propositions:

• He lacks the competency to control content published under his own name for over a decade, and is thus unfit to lead a country.
• He doesn't believe these things but considers them a useful political tool to motivate racist whites, which makes him fit to be a GOP candidate, but too obvious about it to win.
• He's actually a racist, which makes him unfit to be a human being.

Further, you can't dismiss this in the name of higher political or socioeconomic aspirations. Since Paul has no chance of winning — seriously, no chance at all — his only value is as a voice, a conduit for principles. And if your only hope is to change the discourse by amplifying ideas, you can do that via many voices and avenues. As I said in my Vice follow-up, acknowledging some of Paul's good ideas,

when you opt to support anti-imperialist and civil liberties ideals by supporting Paul the Candidate, you end up supporting everything else about him. That includes those newsletters and the unambiguous message to those who enjoy them: You can write these things and succeed; this works. The other good ideas to which he's signatory can't erase the fact that he put his name to those words printed above. The moral weight of those newsletters drags down even the most high-minded aspirations he has about civil liberties, and everything crashes down on all of us.

It's fine to have convictions about things he believes in. But when you voluntarily whitewash his record or choose to ignore it and champion him anyway, you are complicit in supporting the idea that racism and homophobia are morally inconsequential to the process of running for President of the United States. And, while many Paul supporters consider racism a social injury subordinate to extra-legal military conflict, there are just as many who disgustingly handwave at racism because it's an inconsequential burp on the way to more tax cuts, Free Markets, Free Money, Free Black Peop — stuff for me!

And still, for the faithful, this will not be enough.

Below, I've tried to give helpful general (bold) titles to each excerpt of the various Ron Paul newsletters available. These come courtesy of a zipfile of scans sent to me by reader Heresiarch, who, along with others, compiled it from various sources — although the lion's share, if not all, come from James Kirchick, who wrote the original, big Ron Paul story in The New Republic, in 2008. (You can see many of his highlights on the scans.) I have omitted the over 65 pages of scanned federal earmarks Ron Paul requested for his district, in a fit of States' Wants pique. I have also omitted the scans of Von Mises Institute brochures about a Secession Conference at which Paul spoke.

No attempt has been made to organize these via topic, since pages of each newsletter are apt to feature mini-articles on multiple topics, making organization futile. (My summaries don't indicate all that go on in the scans, so please click away.) Finally, below some of the scans, I've offered some comments in plain text. Those within quotation marks are direct quotes from the text appearing in the newsletter scans. Those without quotation marks are my own observations.

Ron Paul Is Dead, Miss Him Miss Him Miss Him

Note: unlike many guest pieces on Et tu, Mr. Destructo? today's article comes from a real, live person: Mornacale, a serious journalist and Brusly High School and Louisiana Campaign for Liberty's 2011 Douchebag of the Year. Despite showing all outward signs of an intelligent human being, he's still a fan of the Pittsburgh Pirates. He has yet to be seriously accused of killing anyone. You can follow him on Twitter.


How I Became Douchebag of the Year
by MORNACALE

Ron Paul died on the night of December 12, 2012. I know because I killed him.

I won't insult you by explaining who Ron Paul is, or detailing the extent of his fame/infamy across the internet. Nor will I expect that you aren't aware that Dr. Paul is (as far as I know) as healthy as ever; I understand he even gave an eerily good showing in the debate last night. This is a story about a hoax. Well, no. This is a memorial of a joke, a celebration of how a few bored strangers can unite the world in mourning over the tragic death of a living man.

Ron Paul was murdered by a Twitter hashtag. It was a nice, quiet one; its neighbors never suspected a thing. But in the evening of December 12, 2011, #MakeRacistJokesNotRacistAnymore began trending. Unable to think of any racist jokes of my own to respond to the amusing ones on my timeline, I chose to slightly re-interpret "joke" and tweeted, "Ron Paul died." (Note: all images below link back to the original tweet.)

The Ron Paul Political Report: Special Issue on Race Terrorism

One of the most entertaining aspects of yesterday's Ron Paul rundown is watching comments and Tweets roll in declaring that it contains no proof of Ron Paul's racism and everything of my perfidy or incompetence. In many cases, much of this outrage seems to be the product of a complete unfamiliarity with how links work. ("He didn't even prove that thing he said in blue words!") But most of it probably extenuates from the need to rationalize away all criticism of His Auric Eminence.


Thankfully, most of the rationalization is dumb. Let's take a look:

VICE: Ron Paul—Reactionary Racist Leprechaun

This week, the good people at Vice.com asked me to write about Ron Paul, because we both thought Newt was just too tiresome, and, "Please, God [we're] sick of Herman Cain. No more Herman Cain."

A lot of this Paul information isn't new. That's because Ron doesn't change. Time lumbers on, indifferently, into a bigger future, and he remains, hiding behind his 18th century battlements, picking lice off himself, rubbing coins fervidly and wearing a special kind of hat that says, "You can't force me to be a bowman if we fight France."

Unfortunately, Paul fans don't change much either. They see "no more War on Drugs" and "let's stop fighting in the Middle East," and everything else about the man goes unresearched or becomes a kind of meaningless hum. Which is why every now and again, you need to slap them. Hopefully this helps. Click the smilin' Ron Paul below to be taken to Vice:


By the way, the nice fella in the picture with him is Don Black, founder of Stormfront.org, America's #1 white supremacist site, which endorsed Ron Paul in 2008. (Even now you can find great information about him there, like, "All Republican candidates are Jew tools except for Ron Paul," which, perversely, is a fair reading of the GOP establishment's Israel policy.) The Paul campaign spent weeks pretending the endorsement and Stormfront's donation weren't an issue. That might have had something to do with not wanting to alienate supporters, like campaign coordinators who are Klansmen and neo-Nazis, or campaign volunteers like neo-Nazi Holocaust Museum shooter James van Brunn.

VICE: 'Herman Cain—One of the Good Ones!'

If Herman Cain knew his greatest value to the GOP was providing distracting cover for "reliable" candidates, he definitely overdid it. Too hardworking and Republican. If only he'd been a "liberal black" about it—lolling his stupefied, unemployed head in squalor and super-fertility, in between compulsively voting for Clintons—he might still have only one sexual harassment allegation and a weird campaign ad starring Joe Camel's sickly cousin, Joe Weasel.

Instead, he apparently tried to grope everything female in the United States, up to and including those so designated only after gender reassignment surgery. So now he's only got one real use: race-based tokenism!

Click the Herm below to be taken to Vice:

The Fall Classic and 'What Is a Classic?'

I don't think the tenth inning was even halfway over when Joe Buck started referring to Game Six as a classic. I don't know if that's true. A moment after Game One ended, writers praised it as a cerebral masterpiece, but the eagerness to make these games into metaphor and referenda probably overlooks what they've actually been.

Game Six does seem hard to top. This surprising, infuriating series demands a lot of energy even from spectators. In the ninth inning, I yearned for it to end, just to stop the frustration. I suspect the Texas Rangers might feel similarly. It would shock no one if both they and the Cardinals were unequal to the task of playing like they did last night.

Luckily for the Cardinals, they can feel buoyed by a thundering positive crowd and by the fresh memory of overcoming two different two-run leads in deciding innings. The Rangers must confront blowing those leads, blowing Josh Hamilton's redemptive moment, then come back to try it all again under a blanket of hostile noise.

Al Davis and the Media's Poison Jobs

Oakland Raiders owner Al Davis died yesterday at 82. For most of you, that means the end of the scabby creature who ran the Raiders and leavened seasons of humiliating losses with employee firings suffused with Nixonian paranoia and loathing. Skimming Twitter reveals pretty much exactly what you expect from the internet: "jokes" linking Davis to Lovecraft monsters, fantasy monsters, sci-fi monsters, other permanently arrested-development genre monsters.

I can't claim to have done much better. Years ago, I wrote out a kind of silly thought-experiment likening Davis to Hitler. I didn't mean to sincerely equate the two, nor to rehabilitate Hitler in any way. At the time, it was funny to compare the Raiders' hermetic and endlessly back-biting front office with Hitler's last ten days:

Davis' ending has yet to be written, but it's currently playing out with the same drama of palace intrigue.... Messages go out from the Davis bunker: this is the year!—we are winning! Like Hitler's movement of paper armies in the face of the Soviets' overwhelming forces, the gestures are empty and futile. Conflicting reports emanate from underground: this one is out of favor. This one shall be the successor. No!—we were presumptuous: the leader has not named a successor. Davis has taken to issuing public comments to pressure head coach Lane Kiffin to resign...; the gestures echo Hitler delusionally promoting Paulus to Field Marshal to drive him to suicide.

This wasn't an obituary, though, and was never meant to be. This was clowning around with gossip and strange newsbites.

I still feel a little ashamed of it, because it sounds like a slightly less boneheaded version of the "he was a crazy skin-cancer goblin who sucked!" narrative I've spent the day reading on message boards and the last few years pushed by a lazy and easily sated media. I felt like I was re-pimping an already cartoonish pimp job offered on behalf of Paul Tagliabue and Roger Goodell in exchange for ample buffets and token opportunities for "access."

Idi Amin's Briefs Rodeo: Fracking-Free for You and Me

Note: every week, news aggregators address hundreds of worthwhile stories or opinions that never catch on, either because they lack an obvious follow-up or because sites that live off ad revenue would rather bang high-traffic drums over and over. Idi Amin's Briefs Rodeo provides a summary of good stuff you might have missed. He has a Bachelor's degree in political science, the rank of Field Marshal and was the last ruler of a free Uganda. He has not eaten anyone since 1980.


The Lamb Lies Down on Wall Street: Selling America by the Pound
by IDI AMIN DADA

• Kelly and Gil Bates, good friends of the Duggars and similarly creepy quiverfull evangelical Christians, are expecting their 19th child. The Quiverfull movement believes that husbands and wives should have as many children as God wants them to, and as such, do not use birth control and have over a dozen kids. Apparently miscarriages aren't God's way of saying "no more," as Kelly Bates is undergoing hormonal therapy to repair her uterine wall. This is something that doesn't seem appropriate to joke about, even with the inconsistency in ideology and the idea of reducing the purpose of children to arrows made for casting in theological warfare, until you consider that the quiverfull movement is inherently misogynist and has liberal sprinklings of white supremacy.

• Republicans in Virginia are one State Senate seat away from having total control of the State's legislative process. They have twice as much cash on hand as Democrats, and Democrats need that money more: 12/16 Republican Senators face no opposition, while 16/20 Democratic Senators have a Republican opponent in the fall's elections. Their sales pitch is completely intangible and non-specific:

"The focus of our race is on jobs and the economy,” Mr. Black said. "The Democrats under the Obama administration have drawn us to where our economy is near collapse, and Republicans are going to have to bring it back."

It's also the exact same strategy which gave the party a stunning victory in the 2010 Congressional elections, so hopefully Virginians are ready for more of the same great pro-citizen victories passed since the beginning of the year, only on a state level.

• It's an especially exciting time for Virginia's elections with not only the upcoming complete Republican takeover of the State Senate, but famed Republican George Allen running for the Senate on the bigger level, after a humiliating defeat in 2006. While some attribute Allen's 2006 loss to his use of a racial slur when calling on a reporter (one he would later claim to be a "made-up word" that just happened to correspond with the poor guy's race), it's highly doubtful that, as the Washington Post bizarrely claims, his baggage this time around will be his intensely close ties to the coal industry.

Derrick Mason Isn't Helping

Thursday night, the NFL Network aired part one of Bill Belichick: A Football Life, a two-part documentary of the New England Patriots 2009 season, whose primary appeal is seeing the season through head coach Bill Belichick's eyes and hearing him mic'd for every game, practice and coaches meeting.

During the Week Four game on October 4, in which the Patriots went on to defeat the Baltimore Ravens 27-21, Ravens wide receiver Derrick Mason trash talks at the Patriots sideline, prompting Belichick to fire back in kind: "Oh, fuck you, Mason, just fuck you. Why don't we talk after the game, all right? Just shut the fuck up." Mason laughs and pulls a quasi-"u mad, bro?" face, at which Belichick notes that the Pats have the lead by adding, "Can you look at the scoreboard?"

Here's the thing: none of this mattered for almost two straight years. Nobody commented about it; Mason didn't complain or consider it worth putting on the record in any serious way. So it's seems doubly asinine that he tweeted this yesterday:

Scholarships and Compensation: The Intercollegiate National Lie

Aside from reminding Americans for the next 15 minutes that history has actual value, Taylor Branch's devastating article, "The Shame of College Sports," finally fully legitimized the discussion of paying college athletes for their performance. It certainly didn't approve the notion by fiat, but simply allowing it to enter the conversation as an equally reasonable proposition was triumph enough.

Prior to its publication, it sometimes it took actual effort to find someone willing to entertain the idea. Proposing that college players take home paychecks usually provoked reactions that ran the gamut from mocking laughter to intense moral outrage. It's hard to explain why. In a country where you can monetize your Twitter feed, exploit your pop-star child, and have people applaud the commodification of virtually anything, college football has nestled in a protective embrace of absurd reverence for amateurism, swaddled in flimsy excuses for innocence.