Me Too

"Show me the person and I will show you the crime"

The "Me Too" movement shows no signs of abating. In fact, it has grown to the level of an industry.

Locally, the football coach at MSU was accused by a woman of having an improper phone-call with her. She claimed that he was a pest and asked impertinent questions and self-gratified (without her permission) while she was conversing with him.

Mrs ERJ's take on the matter is that the woman should have hung up the phone and blocked his number.

The plot thickens. The football coach is in a unique economic situation. The university gave the coach a very long-term contract that pencils out to about nine-million dollars a year. That might have made sense if the coach was as successful on the field as the last coach (Dantonio) but the performance of the MSU football team has been mediocre and has been getting worse every year.

"Long-term contract" implies that there are very few conditions that will trigger an early termination. For example, there was no talk of terminating the coach when a group of his undisciplined players assaulted a football player from another team after a game (which MSU had lost). I guess that if you cannot beat the other team on the field during the game it is OK to beat them in a tunnel under the stadium afterward.

One plausible scenario is that the woman and the coach had a conversation. The woman then put the squeeze on the coach demanding money or she would go public. The coach refused (he might get many of these demands, who knows). She went public. The coach's lawyers (he can afford them) issued statements challenging the evidence (the conversations were private) which implied that she may have recorded the conversations without the coach's permission making them shaky evidence in a court-of-law.

Continuing scenario: The university saw a gold-plated opportunity to unload a financial embarrassment. "Don't let the door-knob hit you in the azz on the way out, coach."

The tin-foil crowd wonder if the entire skit was contrived and orchestrated by unhappy alumni who want a more successful coach.

A few take-aways

• Nothing succeeds like success. 
• Nothing fails like failures. 
• Contracts are paper.
• Regardless of how much/little you get paid, you still need to deliver more "value" to the enterprise than the cost of your employment.
• If you get paid a metric shitton of money then you better deliver at least one-point-four metric shittons of value.
  
• Pain can be avoided by keeping your mouth and your trousers zipped
• Unlike most Me-Too claims, this one played out in near-real-time
• Most Me-Too claims pop up long after the fact after the ravages of time make the discernment of facts difficult. That is, they violate the right to a speed trial.
• Me-Too has the unfortunate outcome of reducing all women to powerless victims with no agency. The actresses who slept with directors did so with the hope of trading something-for-something. They were trading favors for lottery-tickets. They wanted exposure. They got it.
• Another kind of Me-Too that is lurking out there are the children who were pawns in the hands of their parents who sought fame by pushing their kids into gymnastics, figure skating, cheer-teams, women's sports and summer camps. When the parent's primary role should have been protecting their children they looked at the top of Maslow's Hierarchy and said "My seven-year-old daughter needs to be in boot-camp".
  

I don't have a dog in this fight but it would be nice if the local university was not known for thuggish behavior after losing a game.

Note: I am not condoning rape or sexual assault. There are venues for addressing those issues. The Me Too movement is not that venue.