Regular readers of Thursday blogs might know that the University of Montana has hit a rough patch. Enrollment at the Missoula campus has dropped 20% since its peak in 2010, a five-year skid that neatly coincides with the tenure of President Royce Engstrom. Last year, budget cuts forced him to eliminate the equivalent of 192 full-time positions—187 of them from instruction, as it happened, and only five from administration. Meanwhile, Montana State got more money than UM from the regents for the first time in history.

Last week, Engstrom delivered his long-awaited 2016 state of the university address. I would have bitten my nails in anticipation of his enrollment plan, if I were uncouth. As it is, I sat with my hands neatly folded and looked forward to his articulation of a bold, specific strategy.

That strategy turned out to fit into two catchphrases. The first is the University’s new slogan, “Let’s go there!” which does addresses the problem of declining enrollment head-on. The second was Engstrom’s call for better “customer service.” That sounded promising, too, at first—until you realize it is the vaguest of businesspeak, and whatever it means, it isn’t more classes and better teachers.

If we’re going to talk about the university as though it were a business, how about we sell a better product? That seems more likely to win back our market share than improved customer service. “Customer service” sounds like justification for a ballooning administration. Engstrom’s plan seems to reflect the same mindset that directed 96% of its cuts toward instruction last spring—which is no surprise, since it’s a product of the same administration those cuts spared.

What we have here is a feedback loop. You can read all about it in this week’s column for the Missoula Independent. We’ll be back tomorrow, probably, with Friday links.

There is one weather pattern in Montana I did not grow up with: smokey. Missoulians are busy as bees right now, but it’s the kind of bee that does its work under a blanket of the beekeeper’s soporific smoke. Damn the beekeepers, I say, and among them I include the rangers of the North Fork District, who started the controlled burn now curing Missoula on Sunday. It’s dark now, and it smells like Phyllis Diller. I have been steadily churning out denouement and comments on college essays all day, and Combat! blog has fallen by the wayside again. Don’t blame me. Blame those goddamn rangers, who think not once in their management of the forest that some of us might not care to feel sleepy. That’s the vanishing West for you. Anyway, while I bang out the prose equivalent of that leaning fall marathoners do across the finish line, how about you read Sam Kriss on the dubious idea that our politics are post-truth? That doesn’t sound right to him. He doesn’t always sound right to me, but he thinks at a finer grain than Slate generally offer. I’m invariably pleased to see his byline. We’ll be back tomorrow with more moaning and excuses.

 

Goddamn, I am so close to finishing this novel. The project is organized on virtual notecards, and I am writing the one labeled “denouement.” Instead of thinking about things that are definitely important, I am thinking about a space monster. “Good, how are you?” I said to the cashier at the bistro, in response to “good morning.” I haven’t eaten since. I go into the kitchen and I can’t remember why. I remember minutely the mechanics of imaginary accidents. I’m also still making deadlines and shit, so once again, I turn to Combat! blog late in the day, nigh emptied of words.

Fortunately, the non-space monster issue most striking today allows for little elaboration in response. It’s just bad. Late in this story on fundraising during the 2016 campaign, USA Today drops this sweet factoid:

The USA TODAY analysis identified the 156 individuals, corporations and organizations that have donated at least $1 million to super PACs since Jan. 1, 2015, and reviewed their month-by-month giving…Those donors, some of the richest people in the country, account for nearly 60% of the record $969.2 million that has flowed to super PACs through the end of July.

The news here arrives in two parts: Super PACs took in record amounts of money this year, and a majority of it came from a group smaller than the graduating class at your middle school. It’s a good thing those organizations can’t coordinate with political campaigns, or we would appear to have radically restructured campaign finance law to the benefit of one half of one millionth of the American people. That would be bad. This news appears to be bad, if you assume money significantly influences politics. It looks like a step toward oligarchy, and I can say nothing more nuanced about it. Not until I’ve eaten some Triscuits, anyway.

I’m so close to finishing that damn novel it’s killing me. It’s definitely killing this blog. In addition to a couple thousand words of fiction, today I wrote a record review and a column for the Indy, recorded a new episode of MasterTweet Theatre,  on the Co-Main Event Podcast, and sent out a couple of pitches. Monday is the busy day. That used not to matter to Combat! blog, because I wrote it first thing. Now I wake up every morning and obsessively elaborate a funny story about a space monster. But if this blog has done nothing else over the years, it has trained the reader to be patient. I’m totally going to finish the first draft of a 70,000-word novel, like, Friday. No, you cannot read it, because it sucks. You can read it later, when it’s good. In the meantime, read this alternately delightful and frustrating profile of Norm Macdonald in the Washington Post. One answer to the question of why we don’t see more of him turns out to be lax management of his own career. But then he lays that truth on you, and you must concede it’s his to dispose of as he will. We’ll be back tomorrow with a real post, instead of fruitless complaining.

About two months ago, Donald Trump replaced campaign manager and occasional woman-grabber Corey Lewandowski with Paul Manafort. Manafort’s resume reminds you that Trump used to be friends with Roy Cohn. Before he took over the Trump campaign, Manafort advised the campaigns of Ronald Reagan and Bob Dole. He also worked with some exciting foreign leaders, including Ferdinand Marcos, Mobutu Sese Seko and Ukraine’s pro-Russian former president, Viktor Yanukovich. That last gig appears to have been pretty lucrative. According to the New York Times, Yanukovich’s pro-Russian political party secretly paid Manafort $12.7 million in cash between 2007 and 2012.

That sets off a fun chain of implications, considering Yanukovich was an ally of Vladimir Putin, for whom Trump has expressed admiration and whose actions—if we are to believe Russia really hacked the DNC—have benefited the Republican nominee’s campaign. If you want to believe Trump is a Manchurian Muscovite candidate, his campaign manager’s multimillion-dollar deals with a Russian stooge in the Ukraine are kind of a smoking gun. It seems just as likely that Manafort will simply work for anyone who pays him enough, and he feels no more loyalty to Putin than to any other oligarch whose budget contains eight-figure consulting lines. But it’s thrilling story nonetheless, and it ads another convincing argument to the case that 2016 is the craziest US election of our lifetimes. I might be willing to put it ahead of the nutso election of 1824 for craziest of all time.

You’ll have to decide for yourself, because Combat! blog is taking a hiatus this week. Astute readers may have noticed the large number of days off we’ve taken recently. I’m on the verge of finishing the first draft of a novel, and I’m inundated with deadlines for other projects. Also, it’s summer, and no one wants to stay inside and read my groundless opinions anyway. So we’ll come back next Monday, by which time Trump presumably will have called the Pope a drug addict and killed a child in a duel. Good luck, fair reader. Good luck.