that George Effing Will has been taken over by not particularly bright visitors from the Planet Zontar whose rudimentary instruction in Earthling apparently was disrupted by a solar flare. At least, back when he was writing climate-change denial stuff, he could toss around scientific terms as though he knew what the hell we was talking about. But, over the weekend, whatever being has taken over his body lost whatever passes for its mind

College football became a national phenomenon because it supposedly served the values of progressivism, in two ways. It exemplified specialization, expertise and scientific management. And it would reconcile the public to the transformation of universities, especially public universities, into something progressivism desired but the public found alien. Replicating industrialism's division of labor, universities introduced the fragmentation of the old curriculum of moral instruction into increasingly specialized and arcane disciplines. These included the recently founded social sciences — economics, sociology, political science — that were supposed to supply progressive governments with the expertise to manage the complexities of the modern economy and the simplicities of the uninstructed masses.

Will has run this rap before. In Men At Work, a book that accomplished the not inconsiderable feat of being the most boring book ever written on baseball, he blamed football, and the cookie-cutter stadia that accompanied it in the 1970's, on the excesses of the '60's. This, of course, was profoundly stupid on many levels; the 1960's counter-culture rejected football — "Too militaristic, man." — and embraced baseball. Now, though, whoever's working the levers in Will's head is doubling down, although you have to admire an wandering space being who tries to pin college football on "progressivism" because Woodrow Wilson once was the student manager of his college team.

Rather than parse the whole seriously demented business, I would offer space-alien George Will a challenge: Go down to Oxford, Mississippi, on next Saturday afternoon, stand in the middle of the Grove before the Rebels play Texas, and explain to the assembled tailgaters how they are actually there for the purposes of "training managers for the modern regulatory state." I have never seen a man beaten with turkey legs before.

Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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