The problem with menstruation is that it means you’re exercising too little and eating too much. We all know this. You wouldn’t have to spend so much time bleeding out of your vagina if you maintained a healthy workout regimen and an appropriate 900-calorie daily diet, and you wouldn’t have to shit so much, either.
On the other hand, shitting less would present fewer opportunities to joyously lose a lot of weight at once. We do weigh-ins in this business.
Bela Karolyi often comes to mind as the one making straight the path for Larry Nassar, himself infamously straight. Lawrence of the Labia didn’t have to hang out a shingle to lure in victims; he had Karolyi’s gymnastics program to channel victims into his “care” and pay him a reliable salary to molest them. As they say in certain ethnic neighborhoods back east, this don’t a speaka wella Bela.
This is our daily shitposting, which is good and is its own defense against the scolds, but it’s more than that. Bela and Marta Karolyi were savvy, politically astute operators who defected to the United States at an extremely auspicious time for what they were selling.
They were perfect made-for-TV redbaiting material, landing on our shores in the heady nationalistic months following the Miracle on Ice, ready to show the world that even old commies were game to help us kick commie ass. It was then and still is now an embarrassment to Ronald Reagan’s hardline right-wing hagiographers that he was a preeminent diplomatic president; letting the Gipper grip and grin with these assholes helped take other assholes’ minds off his much more famous, and cordial, working relationship with the rather decent Mikhail Gorbachev.
Meanwhile, neoliberalism was turning in earnest from what it had been under the Carter Administration, a mild reformist balance to the sclerotic, inefficient central management of national industries, into the virulent, wantonly cruel, radical governing philosophy that it has been ever since. Reagan did his grandstanding in the tacitly Christian God’s name about how we were done with Jimmy Carter’s killjoy practical Christianity as a national touchstone, all that concern for others and the vulnerable and shit. There are those who say that these were just the lines his movement conservative handlers were feeding him, and as I’ve noted before, Nancy was astrological enough to help the Burmese junta site their next capital city, but Visions of a Sunset was by now getting old and a bit senile, and he was never particularly reality-based in his rhetoric or the thinking that informed it. (This makes the lucidity of his talks with Gorbachev all the more impressive. The guy was only sometimes shitting his diaper with a vacant look in his eyes while Oliver North and Alexander Haig fought over the launch codes.)
In concert with neoliberalism, although in theory diametrically and angrily opposed to its right-wing expressions, identity politics rose throughout the 1980’s. The timelines did not align neatly; explicit forms of identity politics had been nationally prominent since the 1960’s. One of the gross curiosities of the eighties, however, was that right-wing extremists, disingenuous as ever, started to adopt the id-pol frameworks they denounced women and racial minorities for using and apply them to their own allegedly beleaguered status as conservatives and Christians, both sic enough that you’ll need to grab your own barf bucket and allow me the exclusive use of mine, in the selfish spirit of our age.
The contrast can be hard to hear through the noise, but it’s there. For MLK, Jimmy Carter, and Fred Rogers, Christianity was a moral calling and guiding light that they strove to follow or, if they failed, to seek and find forgiveness through God’s grace. Mr. Rogers, Protestant Franciscan, preached the Gospel at all times, through words about anything but God. The ascendant Christian zeitgeist under Reagan was something else altogether. Once and in some circles still a moral beacon, as Sundown in Simi Valley himself proclaimed in his speechifying about America as the city on the hill, Christianity was now ever more explicitly and brashly a tribal identity. It was a cause to complain about ridicule from godless liberals and demand official intervention to protect their feelings, not to refrain from strongarming meatpackers’ unions on behalf of corner-office cokeheads and do anything lame like paying laborers their due wages.
The Karolyis were secular figures, but they shrewdly exploited the morally relativistic postmodern zeitgeist of their new home, these mores holding that we should celebrate our differences because diversity is our strength. Here they were: scrappy, plucky outsiders; immigrants coming to revitalize a moribund American athletic business. Hell yeah, another trend to get in on before it’s cool.
All the fucking stars aligned for this couple from hell. They were sticking it to the commies back home. They were standing up for the American Way and chasing the American Dream. Those who objected to their rage and brutality were ingrates ignorant of their own immense privileges as Americans, living in this greatest nation on earth where, unlike Communist Romania, a child had no need to sacrifice her own childhood and body to gymnastics to get out of an economically dead society and seek a better life. Critics were ignorant of the differing cultural norms animating the Karolyis, norms that might teach us a thing or two as Americans.
This celebration of the Karolyis raised some questions that mostly went unanswered. If America was so free and prosperous, why on earth were these terrors in a position to physically and verbally abuse minors in do-or-die pursuit of athletic excellence? Why were they allowed to bring their inhumane Eastern Bloc training regimens to the United States and impose them without being enjoined by the courts or having their athletes removed by child protective services? They acted execrably, even in public, after they came to the United States; if they acted similarly as gymnastic coaches in Romania, their behavior would be an exceptionally strong indictment of competitive athletics in the Eastern Bloc and the socioeconomic conditions driving young people into athletic training programs. Romania exported maybe not the best-in-class transit buses to shitlib-heavy local governments in the West. The buses weren’t yelling bloody murder at their passengers for eating a square meal. The Karolyis didn’t speak well for Romania as its expatriates.
The aura around them was suffused with pathetic Near-Orientalism. We’d be out of our place to judge them for practices that we might find unduly harsh but whose cultural context we did not understand. We’d be out of line to impose our chauvinistic child welfare standards to Mr. Karolyi, this John Paul II of the Pommel horse. It was a totally Orwellian public relations and peer pressure campaign to preemptively rehabilitate both of these thugs while they continued to abuse American athletes on US soil, in loco parentis and under official competitive auspices up to the level of the teams representing the United States in the Olympic Games. They benefited from a chameleonic double standard that shifted constantly to their favor as they needed a good word to cover for their bad behavior.
It was some classic All-American shit. In the longue durée of Anglo-American history, it dated back not to Plymouth Rock, but to Holland, where Puritan parents were deeply offended and scandalized to see their children turn into proud little Dutchmen (and women!) and to hear their Dutch neighbors complain about their “loose hands,” the local term of art for habitual child battery. Before that it dated back to the Puritans’ uncomfortable time in the original old country, jolly old fucking England, whose civil authorities distrusted them as subversive religious zealots. Covering for that nasty son of a bitch and his cunt of a wife was as American as not summarily detaining Bobby Knight with all necessary force for disorderly conduct. One does not stand up to such authority figures around here just because they’re out of control and need an immediate Chill Cullen. It’s unseemly to do that. It’s scandalous.
As immigrants, Bela and Marta Karolyi were akin to Wernher von Braun, not to the refugee owners of some pho joint. (In the interest of full disclosure, I must admit that I’m more a House of Noodle and, God help me, Golden Town partisan, and that I rarely darken the door of Sam City, The Pho King of Albany.) A particularly conspiratorial take, probably unsupportable but at least fun, is that their defection amounted to a DIY Mariel airlift, that the Romanian authorities were secretly relieved to be free of these criminal undesirables, even at the expense of a Western propaganda coup for capitalism and the American Way. My quick and dirty research found that, per Wikipedia, Bela often clashed with the Romanian authorities. It’s conceivable that some of these clashes were with officials troubled by his brutality and admonishing him to tone it down. This is likelier than everybody else in a position of leadership in Romania finding him perfectly normal and appropriate, every bit as much the vicious son of a bitch as any other Romanian.
Americans have always had spotty, heavily distorted understandings of the USSR and the Eastern Bloc. The Karolyis immigrated from a part of the latter that was especially obscure to Americans. East Germany and Poland made modestly accurate impressions on the US media and public; we knew less about Romania, the Karolyis’ geopolitical homeland, and Hungary, their ethnic homeland prior to the modern realignment of European borders, than we knew about outer space. The potential for bullshit, misdirection, falsehoods, and propaganda in general was huge. Under our state of popular ignorance, there was no reason for them not to be Romanian culture personified, or universal Eastern Bloc culture for that matter. It was a fucking live-action bildungsroman for a nation growing too soft for high-impact sports, not an ethnography or even a collection of reputable, reasonable amateur observations.
We might as well have declared Bobby Knight the personification of American culture. The same people who consider the Karolyis’ behavior acceptable consider Knight’s behavior acceptable. We’ve got some sick fucks, and they get mighty sore when any of the rest of us challenge their efforts to dictate the national culture by, for example, limiting their influence over physical education curricula and athletic programs in the schools. At press time, they’re shitting bricks over California’s new legislation, due to be implemented in 2023, to overrule the NCAA’s thoroughly sleazy and ulterior amateurism rules and allow student athletes to personally and directly profit from their names, images, and likenesses. The usual spectator shitheels always get their panties into a bunch when the entertainers get uppity.
The difference between Knight and the Karolyis is that Americans are oriented enough in American culture to form independent opinions about what and whom Knight represents with his history of disgraceful outbursts. We’re pretty disoriented, deracinated, and narcotized, but we aren’t too far gone to decide for ourselves whether Bobby acts just on his own behalf or lives in accordance with our treasured national folkways. We’ve never known shit from Shinola about whatever mishmash of newfangled Comintern programming and legacy Austro-Hungarian culture produced the Karolyis, or at least was ambient around them when they became special just the way they were.
Culturally, the timing of the Karolyis’ defection was next to perfect. They didn’t just have our combination of ignorant exoticism and off-again, on-again Bircher paranoia to exploit; they also had our proliferating interest in multiculturalism, and an unusually unexamined claim on one of the cultures making up the cultural quilt covering the salad bowl that had replaced the melting pot. Some of this may be my early upbringing in Palo Alto. My memories from Walter Hays Elementary School circa 1990 include a talk and demonstration by an Ohlone mother and son, both rather fat and visibly poor for Palo Alto, about being Indian, and a lecture by a depressingly morose blind guy about what it was like to be blind. Cool, I guess that sucks, but why is the district more eager to teach us about that than about negative numbers?
For all I know the chinks who now own the town may have put a stop to that horseshit. No Palo Altan ever raised me to use language like that, but I do notice that it is very often property owners whose precious feelings we are admonished to consider. For that matter, I left town before middle school, so it’s hard to say for sure what hidden coarseness I missed.
What I very much remember from my childhood years in Palo Alto is the emotional energy emanating from athletic cultures that I participated in or observed from outside. This is a valid form of analysis, even retrospectively. It’s batshit to assert that children are unable to emotionally read the adults in their lives; they depend on such readings for their survival and welfare, and the more accurate, the better.
I abhorred football back then, as we all should now. It’s Robert Speed’s thermos at Dennis Geyer’s hands to all available heads all Sunday afternoon, and I’d say that doesn’t Sound so smart. *Most brameworthy on-duty neurosurgical voice* Calm down, Dennis, it’s just a game. On the other hand, I often caught glimpses of major league baseball games, and the players always appeared healthy and well-adjusted. The contrast I perceived between these professional ballplayers and competitive gymnasts could not have been starker. I got a pretty uneasy vibe off figure skaters, too, although I don’t think I was as uncomfortable watching them as I was watching gymnasts. The Bay Area produced some impressive local skating talent (Boitano, Yamaguchi), and I didn’t discern an aura of barely suppressed mood disorders in skaters in general. I must, of course, offer the caveat that it became hard to recall my prior feelings about figure skating very vividly a couple of years after we moved to Pennsylvania, in the thick of the Buttafuocan Era, when Tonya Harding fucked Nancy Kerrigan up. I’d never heard of either of them prior to the attack, but my immediate reaction was that Kerrigan looked like a diva-ass bitch and Harding was a badass grownup in a sport not overflowing with maturity.
I don’t think I could have named, placed, or identified either of the Karolyis until a few years ago, probably sometime in my thirties, but I could tell by the 1988 Olympiad that competitive gymnastics were a bad scene doing bad things to girls who should not have had a thing to do with them. These memories are nonspecific but emotionally vivid. I remember nothing verbatim and couldn’t have reconstructed any comments the same evening I’d heard them, but I absolutely without a doubt remember comments by American adults about Eastern European coaches and athletic programs that I construed as attempts to terrorize American children and whip us into shape, and I can swear that I perceived these same American adults to deliberately and very selfishly be letting American children down to make a point and provide for their own entertainment.
I don’t recognize the Karolyis from childhood memories, but I must have seen them on television, and I very much remember their type, as something untoward that should not have been allowed around children in positions of authority, anywhere or ever. Casually watching or just being around Olympic gymnastics broadcasts gave me some of my first inklings that the foreign nationalities and upbringings of bad actors were being used by American enablers as justifications for their bad acts. Gymnastics had a similar energy to child beauty pageants, which I think I first consciously learned of some years later but whose existence astonished and horrified me. Everything about these spectacles screamed out about adults who should have known better deliberately failing to read unmistakable cues of distress from girls under their care. negligence and mistreatment of a gravity that, had I personally witnessed it, I’d have been tempted to report to a trustworthy adult.
In retrospect, I gave gymnastics and the Karolyis much too generous a benefit of the doubt. I thought I might be overly sensitive and overreacting to stressors that other children were resilient enough to handle, even if they should have objected and stood up for themselves. Knowing now what shitbaggers there are in USA Gymnastics–at the very least, the Karolyis unwittingly allowed a shockingly prolific pervert to serially molest girls and young women under color of medicine on their watch–I now figure that I was right to perceive red flags. There were responsible adults at the time who called out red flags in the Karolyis’ behavior; the tragedy was that they got shouted down by amoral cultists for being killjoys and not respecting all the culturally appropriate hard work that the Karolyis and their athletes had done to get to where they were.
My instincts about child beauty pageants were vindicated by JonBenet Ramsey. Like, come on, the only person to get murdered in Boulder is a six-year-old girl who had been involved in that creepy shit? Lube up your glove hand and finger-fuck me, Larry; if her parents weren’t good for the deed, they had friends (‘friends”) on the pageant circuit who were. One of the highlights of my trip to Michigan for my cousin’s wedding a few years ago was a drive-by of the Ramseys’ blufftop mansion in Charlevoix, the one where her brother lived through high school. There are those who say that he did it; I’m agnostic about this, and just looking at how his sister was prodded by their parents to dress up like a fucking tart at the age of four or five, I can’t expect anything good out of the grown men who watch that shit, or, if I think about it, of the women.
It’s almost indescribably offensive to have it so much as insinuated that we, as American peons, are unqualified to judge the Karolyis by the cultural or legal standards of the United States, our land and the land where they chose to defect and do business coaching child gymnasts. They’re hunkies? Well, Christ on the Cross, Mindszenty, what in all hell has that got to do with child abuse? Nasty son of a bitch and his harridan of a wife got on the outs with good old Nicolae and Elena, moved here to be celebrated on the sports pages for abusing American girls in the name of athletic excellence, and we are disrespecting various Eastern European cultures by criticizing them?
Fix my neck pain through my bussy, doc. This is the kind of shit that provokes people to report their own siblings to CPS. They had their athletes working out on untreated broken bones. They had some of the most physically active adolescents in the country on starvation diets. The US Government learned of Nazi and Imperial Japanese officials committing such atrocities and tried them for war crimes. 900 calories a day as the competition diet for physically active juveniles who were still growing? How stunted did these shitty freaks want their girls to be? This is the kind of shit we hear about from the ass end of Hemet, over in that trailer that the neighbors refuse to discuss with visitors. They could take this shit out to Pervert’s Flat in Rural Antioch. It’s not like they’ve never associated with a sex offender.
Spartan athletic culture of the Austro-Hungarian Empire my fat white ass. I can’t make it through the buffet at Novak’s without at least one waitress passing by the mound of sausage and spaetzli on my plate and heartily encouraging me by all means not to deny myself seconds. I’m well aware of the differences between ethnic festival ethnics and ethnic ethnics, in ways that most Americans apparently are not, but are we really saying that the gym camp food Nazi is like that because he’s a hunky? Were Dahmer’s, uh, tastes representative of all krauts? I assume Rader’s one of us on that side of my family, and Wettlaufer obviously is. There have been sexier nurses, but even though foreign languages just about could have been one of my majors, I always took Lynn for an Anglo-Saxon-Celtic sort of mix.
A foreign visa applicant found to have a background like Bela Karolyi’s would be deemed criminally inadmissible to the United States. There’s no getting away with that shit and not also being a member of the Saudi royal family. Defections are handled differently, for compelling enough reasons, but these reasons do not prevent the authorities in the United States from intervening to stop foreign nationals present here from engaging in ongoing patterns of criminal activity against minors under their care and authority.
The authorities drop the ball in child abuse cases worse than the Karolyis’ on a regular basis. What’s exceptionally rankling in theirs is that they got handled with kid gloves for being coaching hotshots who immigrated in the early years of celebrate-your-heritage posters as elementary school homework. Those of us who are morally clearheaded and alert know goddamn well what they are doing and what it has to do with their coming from the Magyar fringes of Ceausesculand. They’d be no less out of line to come here and act like that if they’d grown up on Mars. This is yet another situation, among the countless, in which Fred Rogers proved himself practically the only bleeding-heart liberal on the boob tube who didn’t descend into a swampy,, ethnically inflamed pit of moral relativism. Mr. Rogers believed in universal human truths and moral absolutes. In his neighborhood, a child could always turn to a trusted adult. Always look for the helpers.
Bela and Marta aren’t fucking helpers. This was one of the amazing things about USA Gymnastics and Michigan State University. Every mandatory reporter on that whole scene turned out to be a total derelict covering for predators or personally a predator. Who would a victim tell? The coaches who are starving her and ordering her to work out on broken bones? The crooked university president? The dean of the medical school, who was sexually coercing medical students?
One of the bizarre details about the Nassar scandal that I’d missed until I started skimming Karolyi materials was that he had groomed gymnasts for his sexual advances by sneaking them food. That pervert played the good cop by secretly bringing his victims snacks. He was a fucking medical doctor.
The moment I read about that, I knew that Bela would have been more upset with Lawrence of the Labia for helping his girls violate his strict feeding regimen than for sexually assaulting them under color of medicine. That’s exactly his character. Larry was an unbelievably gifted liar and actor, and Bela was an angry, possessive martinet. There’s no way this wasn’t a case of Eichmann pulling a fast one on Hitler. The cold-blooded, mild-mannered doctor who was able to talk to mothers about theodicy while digitally raping their prepubescent daughters in the same room lied to the emotionally volatile control freak coach with the interest in compulsory anorexia about why the bitches on his team were so fat. The guy convinced women in their late teens and early twenties that all medical procedures were conducted through the vagina. He probably got the same thrill by keeping secret his smuggling of contraband food into girls’ hotel rooms.
I should see if he can’t fix my head through my ass. He’s certainly screwy enough to be a psychiatrist. Just don’t ask me to explain why the Arab here has the Radovan Karadzic energy and the Hungarian-Romanians have the Nidal Hasan energy.
Speaking of coaches, I learned maybe 24 hours ago that Felicity Huffman discovered as a child that she is the product of cuckoldry. If it was good enough for Kenneth Fitzhugh to find his wife’s lifeless body at the bottom of the stairs, only to find himself in an even bigger house, ruing that blood told, as it always will, it may explain some of the Muffman family’s parenting strategies. He came from a solidly middle-class family that settled in Cumberland, Maryland; she came from a family of Money Wasps in fancy-pants Westchester, where Mother had a friend. That’s what one’s traditionally got in Pennsylvania, but so it goes.
As is so often true, prostitution would have been an improvement. The wages of sticking one’s dick in crazy is, well, that. Look at that sorry bastard, standing by his woman throughout their public humiliation for her quite superfluous striver scam, that over-the-top effort to ensure that their daughters would grow up not just rich and privileged but eminently presentable. He’s so often said to be impressively down-to-earth for a movie star, and that profoundly embarrassing social climber is the love of his life. The aura of henpecking from behind the scenes is strong. It’s what he gets for not sticking to* working girls. (*And in. #Giggity.) As Charlie Sheen explained in that dispiritingly majestic interview comment, you’re paying them to go away.
While we’re at it, here’s a cursed prophecy: Filliam H. Muffman are not breeding into a Darwinian dead end. Their lineage is not in our time to go the way of Abraham Lincoln’s, Mark Twain’s, or Luther Burbank’s. The Muffman girls are being raised with too much solipsism and self-esteem to be so self-loathing, or so crunchy bachelor with such a pretty young lady inquiring about his possible interest. Other chains may break; this one, like Billary’s and those binding the United Kingdom’s prolifically useless royal shitheads to their storied pedigrees, shall hold strong. These ones operate with a guile and a depravity that Bristol Palin cannot fathom.
This is the leadership class that we peons have disappointed so grievously being so overeducated, underemployed, and unaccomplished. This is what we fail to match in our failure to adult. I frankly don’t care to hear one fucking word out of the mouths of anybody associated with these crooks and creeps about the Millennial maladjustment of young people who are not personally pimping out their own children to such abusers for their families’ advancement. This is the class of absolute scumbags that gets us to loathe ourselves for not being more successful, prosperous, and accomplished.
The problem is that youngsters spend too much time and money on avocado toast and not enough on sexual favors for Brett Michael Kavanaugh. Ooh, yeah, Amy, show me how to tart myself up, mama! Hamana hamana, this big pussy, she gon’ purr! We just need to suck it up (ew, what’s “it?”), buckle down (not sure I like that one, either, given some of the neighborhood paraphilias), study hard, and recognize that Larry Nassar’s chronic employment at MSU had nothing to do with a dean of the medical school, who employed Larry Nassar, totally being exactly the pushy quid pro quo sex pest who would employ Larry Nassar.
Think about any of these characters or their associates criticizing students for getting poor grades. Fuck them for that. Fuck them all. Bitch-ass Tiger Mom was telling us that we weren’t studying hard enough for success, and meanwhile she was telling her students that they weren’t dressing sluttily enough for a sitting federal judge, now a sitting justice on the US Supreme Court subsequent to his livecast tantrum before his interview committee, all of them members of Congress. #LeanIn, bitch, and wear a low-cut top when you do.
This is ever so much worse than what I suspected as an extreme scenario when I was an undergraduate or a high school student and regarded some, but by no means all, of my school assignments as bullshit. We’re doing an abrupt reexamination of the shady “scientific” “research” done by purportedly reputable scholars using Jeffrey Epstein’s largesse, on the basis that Jailbait Jeff is problematic (who knew?), and it turns out that a lot of these guys were abject charlatans and quacks. It’s an inscrutable mystery of neuroscience how any of these men (and, in this case, very much not women) were disreputable when their patron was the sex island registered pervert with the Bang Boeing who sought to impregnate the world’s womanhood with his seed and have both of his heads, big and little, cryogenically preserved for future Jose Canseco sci-fi-style reanimation.
Let the team doctor molest your college wrestlers over their stated objections and you might make it into the House of Representatives; do the yeoman’s work at the high school level and you might make Speaker. Put out for me, Coach! I mean, put me in Coach! I mean, mercy, what DO I mean? This is why we stay in school, to learn success, and get involved in sports, to learn character.
Our national leadership class is the NAMBLA edition of Dr. Tobias Fünke. J. Denny Dundiddly is one of the least blatantly predatory of these creeps, and Lord knows he did some damage with his downhome prairie companion version of the DENNIS Method. Keillor was all right sexually, but God what a twee, smarmy, wheezing blowhard.
Be well, Be best. Show me where he kept in touch with you on the doll.
That Karolyi-Nassar symbiosis, though. Holy shit. The gentlemanly child molester who snuck his girls food in a league with the chaste starvation ranch meathead who barked at them that they were fatties. Isn’t it just fucking beautiful? These men saw something in one another. That something was the providential enabler of their worst personal vices. And the *A-Yagshemazh-Ma* wife was cool with this shit because she found it gratifying to abuse girls herself. Damn, that’s another American cultural movement that the Karolyis adeptly exploited to their advantage: shit-tier feminism, based on the premise that bitches never give each other stitches.
I can Harding believe it.
On the plus side, and to Ali G’s satisfaction, Tonya looks like she may have tried feminism a time or two, but not the fart-sniffing kind that produces you-go-girl horseshit like Title IX Sports. That is so not how the world works unless we make our small corners of it work that way. Because at the other end of Christine Blasey-Ford’s emigration journey, we know who’s cutting another line of Daddy’s Courage and humming the Bobby Sox Song on his way from the Court to the court.
There’s no bottom to this depravity, and there’s no telling how long the simmering popular rage will continue to barely tolerate it. This might be, for our elites, a good December to remember the words of that ancient and venerable Romanian proverb, reputed also to be popular in parts of Soviet Russia, and to step into Christmas before Christmas steps into YOU!
And just like that the weekend is upon us, providing us (huh?) the additional time to contemplate these teachings. Have a good Friday.
Murica Derp 