Sometimes, not often, I write something and then sit back and relax...and then I read something I could have written:
"Over the coming weeks, much energy will be devoted to the attempted closure of the Penn State scandal; to the isolation of Jerry Sandusky...to the alleged dereliction of duty by Penn State administrators...and to the renewal of a university now home to the worst scandal in the history of American sports."
"While Sandusky must stand alone, responsible for his individual choices and pathologies, the answer to why he was allowed access to kids, why no one stood up to stop him, why so many people felt it necessary to make phone calls to everyone...but not to the police, is simple: Joe Paterno and Penn State football. There is no other reason."
"Acting against Sandusky would have negatively affected the program,...Paterno,...the big institution in the small town...No community likes to challenge its false notions of itself."
"Only the permanent destruction of that sort of deferential treatment...will prevent a repeat."
"The question of why will stay with Penn State long after Sandusky is gone to prison..."
"...[I]t is up to us to decide whether once and for all to crush the runaway culture of the coach, the outsized elevation of mortal institutions, and to demand accountability and responsibility."
"It is the price of power."
-Howard Bryant, ESPN. http://espn.go.com/college-football/story/_/id/8087426/jerry-sandusky-crimes-failure-stop-hang-penn-state
"The searing and unforgettable testimony from Sandusky's victims, testimony that rocked seasoned veterans of courtroom drama, should remind us of the monstrous deceits that allowed Sandusky to operate, all in the name of protecting what was supposed to be a model football program."
"The verdict and the incarceration of Jerry Sandusky should remind us of what Grantland writer Charles Pierce said after the scandal broke: "It no longer matters if there continues to be a football program at Penn State.'"
"If they persist in their claims of innocence, the trial is likely to produce evidence of a systemic cover-up of Sandusky's actions, a cover-up that extended into the higher echelons of the university and makes Watergate look benign. The trial will present a picture of people at the highest level acting at the lowest level."
-Lester Munson, ESPN. http://espn.go.com/college-football/story/_/id/8087666/jerry-sandusky-guilty-verdict-produces-no-closure-healing
"Throughout Sandusky's trial, I've thought back to the crowds of students angrily defending Joe Paterno. It's not that those students were particularly monstrous...on the contrary, it is the normalcy of their behavior, the humanity of it, that amazes."
"The impulse is to be horrified by people defending Penn State's handling of this, because, at the end of the day, it's only football. But when football becomes your identity, when football raises buildings on your campus, when you so much relate to the players on the field that their affairs absorb your weekends, then it's no longer 'just football.' You take on aspects of the religious and the national."
Of course I am the first to recognize that there is a common psychological product to these harmonic convergences, something like "My God, we have arrived at ontological truth!"
And we have.
Necessarily in America, a criminal trial isolates the accused from context. Only he is on trial, only evidence relevant to his guilt is admissible, only that evidence is considered by the jury. This is to protect his rights. That is the way it will be if Tim Curley and Gary Schultz have trials.
Yet they're connected. They are inextricably intertwined, Jerry Sandusky, Tim Curley and Gary Schultz--and Joe Paterno and Graham Spanier. And Penn State. There's one more "and" but let's stop there for a second.
Penn State must be investigated with the aim of criminal prosecution. I have previously suggested that Penn State could be criminally prosecuted under racketeering laws. I am familiar with the racketeering law, I reviewed it again albeit only in the time it took me to finish the previous post on this subject, it seems to fit to a tee, I don't see any way that it does not fit. Or, I suggested, the various tax laws, but those I am completely unfamiliar with. It just seems to me, but it really does seem to me, that with tax dollars flowing to a university, with tax exemptions bestowed upon a university, that this university's conduct somehow violated its legal entitlement to that beneficence. If, in Mr. Bryant's words, there is to be "permanent destruction," if we must "once and for all crush the culture" here, as indeed I agree that we must, then Penn State as an institution must be prosecuted if legally possible.
Penn State must be investigated with the aim of criminal prosecution. I have previously suggested that Penn State could be criminally prosecuted under racketeering laws. I am familiar with the racketeering law, I reviewed it again albeit only in the time it took me to finish the previous post on this subject, it seems to fit to a tee, I don't see any way that it does not fit. Or, I suggested, the various tax laws, but those I am completely unfamiliar with. It just seems to me, but it really does seem to me, that with tax dollars flowing to a university, with tax exemptions bestowed upon a university, that this university's conduct somehow violated its legal entitlement to that beneficence. If, in Mr. Bryant's words, there is to be "permanent destruction," if we must "once and for all crush the culture" here, as indeed I agree that we must, then Penn State as an institution must be prosecuted if legally possible.
The one more "and" that is inextricably intertwined with the rest is Penn State people, Mr. Coates analogizes them to a "nation." An appropriate analogy, sports fans commonly refer to themselves as such, there's a "Penn State Nation," a "Miami Heat Nation," there's a nation for every team. Mr. Coates' article immediately brought to my mind China (but then everything reminds me of China). Recently my writing on China has focused on the Chinese people not just their rulers. I quoted the Chinese economist Mao Yushi who said that the ordinary people of China bear responsibility, along with Mao Zedong, for the Cultural Revolution because the ordinary people of China supported it. The Chinese people support the present fascist regime, the people supported Mao Zedong's Communism, they supported Imperial rule. All of those governments have brutalized the Chinese people, but those governments had--and have--the support of the people. There is, as Mr. Coates says, a "religious" as well as "national" character to Penn State fandom, as there is to Alabama fandom, Oklahoma fandom, sports fandom generally. As there certainly was to Mao fandom. If I don't see quite "the human impulse to squelch the rights of individuals for the greater glory of a nation" in Penn State Nation protests on behalf of Joe Paterno, I see Coates' point with that imperfect analogy. As I see with perfect clarity in the Chinese nation. I have written that the Chinese people are responsible for their past and their present and that however China is to be in the future is also their responsibility. So it is with Penn State people. I have written that if future China is to be different the "soul," the animating principle," of the Chinese people must change. So too with Penn State people. And I have made the melancholy prediction that the Chinese soul will not change. So too I predict with the soul of Penn State Nation. "We Are Penn State."
