Moneyed interests

 I once covered a high school football game at a venue so humble you had to climb a ladder to reach the press box.

I wasn't entirely sure a good clap of thunder wouldn't send the whole thing tumbling to the ground, and me with it. Non-fans of my work would no doubt have said, "At last, no more snooty Civil War references."

On the other hand ...

 On the other hand, I've also covered high school football games in gleaming palaces that would put a Division II college program to shame. So I guess you could say I've seen the yin and the yang of what the Friday night lights will illuminate in places that don't have money to burn, and in places that do.

Let's talk about the latter.

Let's talk, specifically, about Buford High School in Buford, Ga., where the school system just unveiled new digs for its powerhouse football program. This quaint little joint seats 10,000, features a 3,500-foot video board and includes 15 luxury suites and a two-story fieldhouse with locker rooms. Total cost: $62 million.

Now, I get it. Southerners love football the way a couch potato loves a party-size bag of Lay's Cheddar and Sour Cream chips. There are high schools in Texas, for instance, who have football stadiums even more over-the-top than Buford's. It's the sort of in-your-face conspicuous consumption people indulge in when they have with more money than sense, and think Andrew Carnegie was a putz for investing his pile in libraries.

Aw, HELL, no. Bring on the luxury suites, baby! 

I say this, of course, not knowing just how much dough circulates through Buford, a leafy Atlanta suburb. And if there was money left over from Go-Route Versailles to also fund (suck on this, Andrew!) a spectacular library.

Perhaps, just perhaps, the well-heeled Buford citizenry belatedly realized the football program was attached to a school, and so all that education junk had its place, too. As long as it didn't get in the way of Billy "Phasers On Stun" Beauregard carving up the two-deep on Friday night, why not?

So, yeah, I'm sure there are legit scholars at Buford, and I'm equally sure they aren't lugging around textbooks held together with duct tape or using school supplies their teachers had to burn a couple paychecks to buy. That's the reality in too many places -- and it will only get worse as legislators continue raiding the public schools to subsidize huckster charter schools, and to ensure Bentley J. Bentley III won't have to touch the principal to keep young Chip or Skippy away from the public school riffraff.

(He said, as the son, nephew and cousin of public-school educators, and as a public-school kid myself. Just so you know where I'm coming from here.)

Anyway, moneyed interests will spend their money on what interests them, and in Buford, Ga., that's football. You can say it's outlandish and self-indulgent and an almost comic misplacement of priorities, but no one ever said folks with eff-you money were known for their taste, self-awareness or restraint. 

For instance, check out that gilded monstrosity of a ballroom Our Only Available President wants to attach to the White House. It would ruin the intended austerity of the grounds, but what the hell. It's not as if the Prez and his missus haven't already paved over the Rose Garden, and infested the Oval Office with so much tacky gold leaf it looks like a Turkish brothel now. All that's missing are the under-age harem girls.

But I digress. If only a little.

Point is, the good folks of Buford can pour all the money they want into an extracurricular activity, simply because they can. And I can be the scold who'll always wonder what some cash-strapped public school system could do with that $62 mill -- and also if the  pressbox in the new stadium will come with a ladder.

If so, it better have gold leaf. I have standards, too, you know.