People v. State

Highlights from an article by Jeff MacGregor at ESPN about the death of Notre Dame student Declan Sullivan:

Let’s all take this election week as an occasion to celebrate our obsessions and delusions. To map our national madness and to make plain our insanity. To point out our perfect hypocrisy and remind one another that what we say and what we think and what we do might mean the very opposite of what we do and what we think and what we say.

. . .

Poor Declan Sullivan is dead because he fell into the gap between the real world and the fairy tale of college football. He was killed because big-time, big-money football takes no account of the weather and makes no measure of common sense. Because big-time, big-money college football exists outside the forces of nature or reason. Because nothing must impede its progress or its profitability.

Poor Declan Sullivan is dead because big-time, big-money college football builds men and character and endowments, so it must never be interrupted.

But don’t let that signage in the locker room fool you. Those hackneyed bromides about teamwork and taking responsibility are window dressing, a little sloganeering for the rare parent who might ask about the true costs of it all.

Like the stories of Rudy or Knute — or the principle of in loco parentis — it’s just more mythological sugar to pour on the rubes when they start to ask awkward questions.

Because not only do big-time, big-money sports no longer seem to build character but they seem to actively undermine it, spectacularly so, across entire institutions.

That’s why I’m not shocked that no one at Notre Dame has been fired. Firing creates more legal liability rather than less, and every bureaucracy from the beginning of time has existed only to fight for its own survival.

But I’m a little surprised that, as part of a high-profile global franchise claiming 2,000 years of moral authority, no one under the Golden Dome thus far has offered to resign.

Those offers should have come Thursday morning from Notre Dame coach Brian Kelly, Notre Dame athletic director Jack Swarbrick, Notre Dame provost Thomas G. Burish and Notre Dame president Father John I. Jenkins.

Those resignations would have made great sense if any of the relevant parties took seriously the very principles of community and sacrifice and accountability they insist that big-time, big-money football teaches.

Raising again the question: If this is the kind of character we build with our character-building programs, why bother?

. . .

Thus does the gulf widen between who we are and who we say we are, between what we do and what we imagine ourselves doing.

We will measure and record this distance yet again on Election Day.

What is most alarming, I suppose, to those of us who can still feel anything is that these institutions have come to mean the very opposite of what they say they mean. Notre Dame football doesn’t build character; it negates character. Politics doesn’t build bridges; it burns them. Government isn’t a way to help your neighbors; it’s just another way to punish them.

Nineteen kinds of irony now boomerang back on us all until no one anywhere is sure what’s real and what’s a punch line. And the day we can no longer tell the difference is the day the bill for our selfishness at last comes due.

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