Thoughts on Penn State, the sanctions and what is and is not defensible

I suppose there was no way I was ever going to approach the Penn State/Jerry Sandusky case with any dispassion.

In November 2011, when Jerry Sandusky was indicted, I was the father of a one-year-old. Four months later I was a new father again. The thought that anyone could do anything to harm a child- much less than others would stand idly by while they did- was so vile and indefensible to me that it filled me with anger like few other news stories ever have. Sure, I’d be angry about other sex abuse scandals, the Catholic Church ones included- but because I wasn’t a father yet, it didn’t quite hit me. Of all the awful things in the news the last five years, not much of it has kept me up at night- but Sandy Hook did, and so did Sandusky.

I was very angry at Penn State when the story came out, and I got really angry again when Penn Staters rioted and overturned news vans- not because they heard about a decade-long sexual abuse coverup, but because their beloved football coach was fired, one game before he would have stepped down anyway. This went way beyond typical college-student idiocy- it was an absolute moral failure.

I continued to follow the case over the last three years, through the Freeh Report, Sandusky’s trial, the various lawsuits and investigations, the scandalous, totally indefensible decisions by the Today Show to broadcast interviews with both Sandusky and his rotten wife, and the various times that reporters- women especially- were harassed on social media for expressing the “wrong” opinion about the case.

Let’s just say this is a sensitive subject, in few places as much as Philadelphia, where I live, with its high concentration of PSU alums. When I’ve written about the subject- especially when I reviewed the utterly repugnant “Framing Paterno” documentary two years ago– I got more hate mail and comments than on any topic I’ve ever written about in my career, even stuff related to race, presidential politics, Israel/Palestine, parenting, feminism, Donovan McNabb and various other third rails.

At risk of sounding like I’m doing a #notallpennstaters… I have a lot of friends and family members who are Penn State alumni and/or football fans, people whom I care about deeply. I’ve had loud, passionate arguments about this topic with most of them. And I’ve said angry things, some of which I didn’t mean, about the school, its fans and its team.

But despite that, I truly believe in my heart that the vast majority of people associated with Penn State University are good people, whose love of their school and football team is genuine and heartfelt, and who grasp the gravity of what happened, even if they reach different conclusions than mine about the NCAA, Paterno’s culpability, the “culture of football” and other such issues. And besides, if sports fandom has never moved you to positions beyond rationality, then you’ve probably never been a sports fan.

My favorite athlete growing up was Kirby Puckett- an unimpeachable hero for years until suddenly he wasn’t, until suddenly he was dead. So in a way I could sort of relate to the reactions of Paterno loyalists to that whirlwind of events in 2011-’12.  But the lesson I took from the sad fall of Kirby was a clear one: To worship and revere sports figures at your own risk- because they’re human, and they may very well let you down. My sons, young as they are, are sports fanatics already, and I’m not especially looking forward to imparting that lesson.

I can understand the impulse of the NCAA lifting the sanctions early- they didn’t want to continue to punish the school when everyone who committed the violations was long gone. But that’s how it always works with NCAA sanctions, which most of the time are handed down years after the fact, when there’s a new coach, new athletic director and all new players. The sclerotic bureaucracy of the NCAA- not to mention, let’s face it, its full-on corruption- is a whole other subject for another time.

But I opposed lifting the sanctions for one reason: What Penn State did was the worst thing any college sports program- or possibly any university- has ever done. This once-in-a-lifetime penalty was totally earned and deserved to remain in place. Reducing it sets a terrible precedent, and even even worse message.

What the NCAA did Monday was look Sandusky’s victims in the eye and tell them- “sorry, football is more important than you.” Which, come to think of it, was the attitude to which they were subjected all the way up until November of 2011. One of “we take your abuse seriously- as long as it doesn’t affect our favorite football team.” A few months earlier, Roger Goodell had made a strikingly similar decision.

This led to remarkably strange juxtaposition Monday afternoon: The NFL, in suspending Ray Rice, was sending a scandalously belated yet clear message that abuse will not be tolerated, and that’s a principle that’s more important than football. About 30 minutes later, the league’s college counterpart sent another message: That abuse that we said won’t be tolerated? We’ll tolerate it enough that you can go to a bowl game this year.

I’ve often heard the “why punish those kids?” argument, “those kids” referring to players on the Penn State football team who wouldn’t get to go to a bowl game. Yea, I’m much more concerned about a different subset of “those kids.”

Meanwhile, I have nothing but contempt for the students who had a full-on celebration on campus Monday night, chanting Joe Paterno’s name and demanded the return of his statue. They also completely misunderstood the NCAA’s decision- it was a reward for Penn State’s current leadership for compliance with the original penalty and “good behavior,” not an exoneration of Paterno or any type of feint towards restoring the coach’s wins or statue. Neither should ever happen, and neither ever will.

Those fans sent a clear message of their own:  Everything is back to normal, let’s play football, and we’re going to proceed with a clear conscience as though the Jerry Sandusky scandal never happened. It was fans of a team enthusiastically celebrating the slight reduction of their school’s penalty for a child sex abuse coverup. And that was disgusting- it was like Ferguson, only for undergraduate shitheads.

But if only Monday night’s revelers were the worst actors in this whole drama.

I reserve that particular dishonor for the community of Penn State truthers, who are truly among the ultimate scum of the Earth. These repugnant trolls have moved far beyond advocating for Paterno or Penn State football- they are actually flacking on behalf of Jerry Sandusky himself, claiming his innocence and proclaiming every last one of his child sex abuse victims opportunistic liars.

This position seems to be based entirely on several of the victims having vouched for Sandusky, or continuing to have relationships with him, at first before ultimately testifying against him and/or suing.  But as any abuse-related professional could tell you, this sort of thing happens in abusive situations all the damn time, that of Ray Rice included, and in no way whatsoever exonerates the abuser. The Sandusky jury saw it the same way, convicting him on 45 separate counts.

I realize that this is a relatively small group of people, who don’t represent anywhere close to the majority of Penn Staters or necessarily even Paterno defenders. But they’re loud,  some of them are media savvy and like it or not they’re part of the conversation.

Make no mistake about it, though: These people are evil, they are human garbage, and they are open apologists for child rape. They need to stop. And media outlets who have given them a microphone need to stop doing so, today.

I can understand the actions of Paterno’s sons, striving to clear the name of their father, and If I were in their shoes I may very well be doing the same thing. Someone like Franco Harris has said a lot of regrettable things about this case in the last two years, but I can understand that he’s acting out of loyalty to his coach, a man who made a strong difference in his life. Lifelong fans of the team, who have taken it as a bedrock principle their entire lives that Joe Paterno is the world’s leading paragon of moral virtue? I don’t quite sympathize, but I understand.

But the NCAA, reducing a deserved penalty for an unspeakably evil act? A bunch of drunken 18-year-olds who were freshmen in high school when it all went down in 2011, treating the lifting a child rape coverup-related ban like it was Mardi Gras? A group of sociopathic freaks, who spend each day slandering sex abuse victims, threatening female journalists on Twitter and seeking the rehabilitation of a monster like Sandusky? My sympathy for those people is less than nonexistent.

So how long will this go on? Will we still be arguing about the Penn State sanctions decades from now? Another legendary coach, one who had a fatal weakness for beating up college students, Bob Knight, was fired from Indiana 15 years ago- and they’re still arguing about it there now.

Two more years of sanctions or not, I’ve got a feeling these arguments are far from over. For all I know Penn State ends up a perennial national power under James Franklin, one that behaves impeccably as a program from this day forward. But I’m never going to forget about what happened in the Sandusky case anytime soon.

Jerry Sandusky, John Ziegler and the Shame of “Today”

This week’s Philly Post column is about the Today Show interview with Jerry Sandusky, brought to the show by the noted bottom feeder/con man John Ziegler. There was quite a bit I had to say that didn’t fit in the column, here’s some of that below:

– Sandusky probably has the least credibility of any man on planet Earth. His word is worth dirt, probably less than dirt. It doesn’t matter what he said. And if that one minute was the best they could come up with from three hours of interviews, I don’t feel too hopeful about the rest of the footage.

– Perhaps NBC’s biggest misstep of all was getting into bed with a hack like Ziegler, who showed, like Andrew Breitbart and his various imitators, that the quickest way to get prominent media coverage is to constantly denounce the media. The media hates John Ziegler so much that they can’t stop inviting him onto their shows.

– The interview uses the words of a man who is definitely lying- Sandusky maintains his innocence, when he is not innocent- in order to impeach the credibility of the witness against him who we have no reason to believe is lying. It’s hard to imagine a single person on the planet watching that interview and coming out of it more sympathetic to Joe Paterno- or Jerry Sandusky, or John Ziegler- than they were at the start.

– The Sandusky interviews are supposedly from an upcoming, feature-length version of “Framing Paterno,” Ziegler’s scummy little YouTube mini-movie, which heavily borrowed both its structure and musical cues from the 9/11 Truth conspiracy genre. I reviewed it here last November; among numerous faults in its argumentation, the biggest was that not a single person interviewed on camera could spare a single word of sympathy for any of the children abused by Sandusky, or acknowledge that maybe this saga has victims who aren’t named Joe Paterno.

– I may not agree with much of what the Paterno family has done in the past year or two, but to their credit, they’ve been out front on the issue of sexual abuse prevention. And, also to their credit, they’ve loudly distanced themselves from Ziegler’s dubious injection of Sandusky into the debate.

– Ziegler, more recently, has taken to defending and advising the football coach in the horrific Steubenville rape case, an old buddy and book subject of his. I can only assume that, in 1988, Ziegler went to see the movie “The Accused” and rooted out loud for the acquittal of Jodie Foster’s assailants.

– More news since I filed: Ziegler named Victim 2 on his site, kept it up for eight hours, claimed he was hacked, and then published perhaps the least sincere non-apology apology in recent history.

And finally, here’s a great piece by Tim Baffoe, that really gets to the heart of Ziegler’s loathsome M.O.:

“He’s a hell of a lot smarter than the people who slobber all over him because he’s their last glimmer of hope twinkling off of Coke-bottle glasses that JoePa Claus is real. In taking an argument concerning a dead guy, he’s found an angle in which he can’t exactly lose, and that’s how many arguments, nefarious as they may be, are “won.” See, logically Paterno deserves blame, but Ziegler’s is an emotional appeal to the slackjaws, and reason always loses to makin’ the willfully ignorant feel good. He knows this, just as any televangelist knows this. Now go on and hand over your money for the Lord… I mean, help fund his documentary, Framing Paterno. The film is in perpetual infancy due to people not forking over money (can’t imagine why), but certainly it will crack open the truth that the bad people are keeping from those who really believe Paterno pooped jellybeans and sunshine.”

Things I Learned This Week

Joe Paterno knew nothing. Also: Barack Obama was born in Kenya, 9/11 was an inside job, vaccines cause autism and HIV doesn’t cause AIDS.

Don’t ever give any of your money to anyone who alleges any of the above.

The JoePa Movie: One More Thought

A great comment on my Philly Post piece, left anonymously: 

As Wallace pointed out in “Host”, sometimes Ziegler says things that even he’s not sure he believes himself. He’s a huckster who is playing Paterno loyalists the same way he played Palin fans. 99% of everyone familiar with the case has drawn their conclusion that Paterno was guilty of inaction, of not caring about Sandusky’s victims, of placing the football program and his own glory above the safety of children. But, that tells Ziegler that 1% out there will agree with him , attend his low-budget shlockumentary, and will make him some cash. Make no mistake about it, John Ziegler doesn’t care about Joe Paterno, Jerry Sandusky, Gary Schultz, Graham Spanier, Tim Curley, Mike McQueary, or any of the children who were victimized by Sandusky. He cares about one person, and that is John Ziegler. Consummate huckster, carnival barker, and manipulator of the feeble-minded. Contemptible is the word. If there is a more despicable bit-player in the Penn State scandal than John Ziegler I have yet to see him.

As an aside, DFW was one of my favorite writers ever, and he’s still very much missed. Sounds like he had Ziegler exactly right.

If Not For That Damn Shitting Weatherman

My article yesterday is the #2 most-read story on Phillymag.com, a list dominated on most days by articles from the Birds 24/7 Eagles blog. I don’t feel too bad, though, about what it lost out to:

The Case Against the Paterno Birthers and Truthers

I wrote a column for The Philly Post Wednesday in which I reviewed “Framing Paterno,” a new mini-movie which argues that Joe Paterno did nothing wrong. In the film neither the director, John Ziegler, nor any of the people he interviews express the slightest bit of outrage or anger that numerous children were molested. It’s all about JoePa.

I’m generally content to let what I wrote speak for itself, but answers to a few questions I’ve gotten so far: I’ve reviewed hundreds of movies over the years, and never felt the need to call the director before writing my review, yes I read the Freeh Report, yes it contains “damning emails,” no, I was not as good a football player as Franco Harris, yet I’m confident that I’m right here and he’s wrong.

To those who contacted me, I quote George Orwell:”To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.”

I have donated the fee I was paid for writing the article to RAINN (Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network), and I encourage others to support that worthy cause as well.

Quote of the Day

These people are birthers. They are 9/11 “truthers.” They live under rocks and wear tinfoil hats. They will eventually disappear, with most grumbling and muttering madly as they connect on message boards, exchanging all-caps rants. Harris’s bizarre behavior can likely be chalked up to football-related deterioration, and his brain will be in a Boston University bell-jar sooner rather than later

– Dan Bernstein, of CBS in Chicago, on the Joe Paterno dead-enders. Much more on that later this week.