Soccer Update...Psych!

Illest fashion news to come out of Milan since Beckham's transfer went through officially.

Today, a short essay on hazing with intermittent Tenacious D songs.

I never played on a girl's varsity sport team, so there was never any utilization of the pysch on game day; sure sometimes we used to wear ties and nice shirts, but that was mainly so we could look slightly respectable. I can recall every level of interscholastic sports, from the earliest middle school soccer clubs to Oberlin College Women's Lacrosse, finding some sort of inspiration through like-minded gift giving/banner making. In reality, I find this act of kindness from teammate to teammate rather endearing and, in general, good form.


Men's sports teams often engage in what is known as "hazing"; though generally harmless in nature, these rites of passage foment a culture of shame. Websites such as bad jocks, have been a source of entertainment and occasional outrage for many web denizens. To put it plainly, men of approximately the same age molest and harass each other to create a hierarchy and, often times, to amuse those with that inkling of power. There is an glint of cultural transmission, the recent unveiling of some particularly bad hazing incidents is not all that shocking in its historical context, that leads me to believe that Obama being in the white house doesn't do shit for youth sports; even if everyone with an outlet is writing lists and essays as to just what BH "Overdrive" Obama will do about how fucking fat a nation we are. Let me also say, that women's sports teams are often culpable of ridiculous initiation rituals; this isn't a gender issue per se.



In Fyodor Dostoevesky's last great novel, The Brothers Karamazov, the, perhaps, bastard child of noted buffoon Fyodor Pavlovich, Smyerdakov enumerates reasons why god as his opposers see it, cannot exist. Smyerdakov is the product of both a society and, concordantly, a family that has no use for him; his awareness of his seemingly expendable nature seeps over in to his ideas on theology, among other things. He is weak and powerless, but he is given a context by which to express great power; the power to hurt others, something that all human beings have. I believe many athletes have a certain "Smyerdakov" take on the nature of hazing; that it is an outlet for frustrations, both personal and professional(in the case of the student-athlete, often times their profession is more the latter than the former).



If we take a Hobbesian standpoint towards the act of hazing, that it is our nature to be horrible, selfish beasts, then perhaps it's better for us horrified moralist observers to let it be. Is it natural to coerce another human being in to drinking till he/she vomits while a group of individuals exercise some bizarre bukkake variant? I'm gonna say, unless you're Japanese, or had to put up with a Freshmen class as annoying as the Oberlin College Men's Baseball team of 2004-2005, the answer is most definitely no. I don't know where the pictures went of a much fatter me d-boing a tiki torch, but let me just say that our hazing was actually hilarious and so well deserved that I am a better man for it. So tell Thomas Hobbes we got another failed attempt, and remember that if you're gonna abuse somebody for no apparent reason, you might as well get paid to do it (Hello US Marine Corps!).



Now, time to casually masturbate to this.