OLE MISS NEEDS A SNAP SESSION

We won't assume much, other than to say that Hugh Freeze will have to do something about his freshman football players taking an active role in heckling a production of "The Laramie Project" this past Tuesday night. That heckling included homosexual slurs and general asshattedness, all delivered in the direction of a play about the murder of Matthew Sheperd.

The suck extends in a lot of directions here. It sucks for the actors involved, since football player heckling isn't even quality heckling in the best of environments, much less in something as somber as the play concerned. Think "seven year old Borat jokes," and we'd be talking about the upper end of the joke spectrum possible here. It sucks for the rest of Ole Miss that wouldn't do this, because now they have to explain why Ole Miss really isn't like this anymore, despite what you just read on the internet to the contrary. It sucks how wrong and how right they are about that at the same time.

It sucks that Hugh Freeze won't do what we want him to do with any of his players who might have been involved: put them in an interrogation room with a really mean Southern gay man for five minutes, the kind who survived growing up in Shitkick Hollow only by developing a wit capable of cutting a man's throat in three words, and perhaps by leaving Shitkick Hollow as quickly as possible for some other place where he once yelled at your dumb ass, and made you cry tears you didn't know you still had:

Oh where, where do I start, honey. Your ashy knees? They look like Pompeii fucking an armadillo.  You wore workout shorts in public? Might as well have put on your uniform, since it ain't like you got it dirty after the Alabama game on Saturday. Those uniforms look like a fireworks stand threw up on a TJ Maxx. God stole the teeth off a meth-head woodchuck and slapped 'em into your head when he made you out of parts he found behind the bootleg taxidermy store. Your mother's the cable company because she's coming between ten and two when your dad's at work. Your father's the UPS man because he lives in a van and gives his package to anyone who'll sign for it. Go tell Bo Wallace he's got so many split ends he should be called for illegal formation.

And oh ha ha ha, would that would be mean-spirited fun for a minute. Then you would remember just what made that man so mean and indestructible in the first place, and that by the numbers there's probably at least one gay player on the roster at Ole Miss right now. That player might have been in the theater on Tuesday night, trying to pick between schools of petty cruelty in order to survive. We hope those football players realize that: you really shouldn't have to make either choice in order to live your life happily. Shitkick Hollow has a steady, stubborn habit of following people wherever they go, though. It does not wash off easily, and it stains practically anything. (Yes, even the sparkling table linens of an Ole Miss tailgate.)