In my column at Taki's Magazine this week I use the Oklahoma U incident (the incident of white frat boys singing a naughty song on a bus, not the incident of the black football player smashing a girl's face) as an excuse for some idle reminiscences about the days before puritan schoolmarms in steel-rimmed spectacles and woolen stockings attained despotic power in Western society.

As for group singing of tasteless songs on buses, where do I start? Circa 1962, that’s where. At that point in the history of the English-speaking peoples, or at any rate of that subset of them who played rugby for their all-boys secondary schools, it was the usual thing when riding the hired bus to an away game for the team to sing its way through a repertoire of traditional songs to which the adjective “tasteless” really doesn’t do justice.

An actual singing rugby team named the Jock Strapp Ensemble put out a couple of LPs of their favorites, but I can find only unsatisfactory fragments on YouTube. The great Jim Croce caught some of the flavor with his solo version of “The Ball of Kerrymuir,” although Croce’s last verse is a cop-out. I remember it as:

"The village conjurer, he was there,

Doing his usual trick . . ."

Read the whole thing at Taki's Magazine.