I was in Ann Arbor, Michigan about eight years ago and I was shocked (and more than a little horrified) to see the University of Michigan's football stadium. It was easily the size of a major market professional stadium, and Ann Arbor isn't what any sane person would call a major market. That stadium is the kind of kind of thing you see in Nuremberg, which has a population roughly five times that of Ann Arbor. The only difference is that the monstrosity in Nuremberg celebrates eagles instead of wolverines.
Sure, I had heard about it, but I had never actually seen it. When I did, I looked at the local woman I was fucking at the time and said that it was "the largest publicly financed monument to drunkenness, stupidity and date rape since the Fall of Rome."
In light of recent events at Pennsylvania State University, my Roman reference was actually prophetic. We now know that Penn State tacitly permitted child-rape to occur on the premises. A sixty-eight year old assistant coach named Jerry Sandusky was plowing his way through every male child in sight, and not only was there no shortage of people who knew about it, they allowed it to continue.
The one constant theme in Thursday's Freeh Report is the self-justification of Sandusky's co-conspirators (and they are exactly that, in everything but the legal sense) to "protect the institution of Penn State." You see that over and over in their communications with each other.
Horseshit. They weren't protecting Penn State. How do I know that? Because I know that if a philosophy professor slipped and found himself firmly embedded inside a comely, legally-aged co-ed, that professor would be very publicly bounced out on his ass and find himself unemployable.
Let's be clear about thing: Sandusky's crimes aren't a case of "I think he touched it" molestation. This is hard-core, push-him-against-the-shower-wall-and-fuck-him-in-the-ass rape. This was the kind of shit that you hear about happening in prison, and it was visited upon boys as young as ten. And we now know that the Powers That Be sanctioned it for at least a full decade to "protect the institution of Penn State."
No, these people were protecting Penn State's football program. Period. Because nobody who knew about Sandusky's child-rape marathon presumed to stop him, they explicitly enabled him to continue. Not only did he continue buggering boys; he did so on campus, even after he retired. And he was allowed to do in the name of football. Again, do you think that the school would circle their wagons around the fucking physics department that way? I don't.
If anything, this is worse than the way that the Catholic Church used to deal with their kid-fuckers. At least the One True Church would move their pedophiles around to maintain at least the appearance of propriety. Penn State kept Sandusky right where he was, again, even after he retired. On the other hand, the Catholic Church analogy falls apart because football has always been more of a Protestant sport.
Here's another chilling fact. Law enforcement and academic statistics say that for every sex abuse victim that reports their violation, there are ten that don't. But those statistics are almost exclusively devoted to female victims. I would wager that the margin is far wider for abused men and boys. There are very likely hundreds of Sandusky's victims out there still. Given his age when he was finally stopped, I wouldn't be at all surprised if there turned out to be more than a thousand.
As is true of most men, you would think that the sex drive of pedophiles slows down as they hit later-middle age. Sandusky, on the other hand, was still going strong as he approached seventy. Since I'm not aware of a single instance of a carnal attraction to children manifesting itself during an offender's fifties (when the fables of Sandusky's conduct started to circulate through the Penn State administration,) I'm horrified to think of what this monster may have done during his sexual prime. And all but two of the years of Sandusky's adult life - 1967 and '68 - were spent at Penn State.
I inherently distrust anyone that has statues made of them during their lifetimes. The Bible actually has a few things to say about it, too. The second that statue of you is erected, you become somehow more than human and less than accountable, After all, you have a statue, right?
That's certainly what happened with Joe Paterno. When it became clear that Paterno was at least complicit in Sandusky's savage kid-fucking spree, the university found itself with no other choice to fire his ass. And the townsfolk of University Park responded by rioting. After all, Paterno coached football. And he had a statue.
Americans have a strange tendency to create personality cults that do monstrous evil. I never have heard of a group of, say, Finns, cutting off their own genitals and poisoning themselves in a rented mansion, have you? Combine that with something as populist as football and a shit-ton of money, and you have a recipe for disaster.
Look, this isn't a situation where we can find out "what the market would do" to punish this kind of evil. Having said that, I think that if the Pittsburgh Steelers had a similar scandal, everyone would forget about it almost immediately, too. Within three seasons, they'd be just as popular as they are now.
Penn State is exactly what it's name implies, an arm of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. As such, it isn't subject to the whimsy of the market, but it is liable for torts committed by it. Try as I might, I can't imagine any jury that reads the Freeh Report declining to award civil plaintiffs against Penn State untold fortunes in damages.
Those damages won't be paid off by the football program, or even Penn State itself. The taxpayers of Pennsylvania will be on the hook for every nickle. Sandusky is likely broke from his trial, Paterno's dead, and pretty much everyone else named in the Freeh Report is under indictment, so who else do you sue? The agencies of the state that enabled the almost satanic mess in the first place.
As I said earlier, Jerry Sandusky wouldn't have survived fifteen seconds if he was a physics professor, mostly because there isn't a national cult built around college physics in America and it doesn't print money the way football does. It was only because of cultish devotion and money that Sandusky's evil became the contagion that it did. Absent the football program, you might have one or two incidents. With it, you get at least fifteen years worth of them, and probably many more.
Were I one of Sandusky's victims, I would spend the rest of my life full of a righteous indignation and possessed of a wholly justifiable determination to financially ruin the institutions that knowingly allowed me to be violated that way. I sincerely hope that his victims literally rain holy vengeance down upon Penn State for the insidious ways that they were wronged and sexually tortured. It was deliberate, systematic, and at least tacitly sanctioned by agents of the State.
If you want to argue that Penn State is an isolated incident, I would suggest that you're probably kidding yourself. The cultish devotion to football and the enormous amounts of money it generates is hardly specific to Penn State. That creates a natural atmosphere where people like Jerry Sandusky can't help but worm themselves into. This might be one of the very few instances where the worst case is uncovered first, but there's no reason to believe that it's going to be the only instance.
I don't think this is over. Not by a long shot. And if the states don't get their shit together soon, college football won't exist at all. State budgets are being crushed and, sooner or later, taxpayers are going to tire of paying out tens of millions in judgements because of the criminal sexual habits of some guy that tells teenagers how to throw a leather ball up and down a flat field.
If you think I'm pessimistic about the future, you're right and I'll tell you why. We knew everything we needed to know about Joe Paterno before Christmas. But he still died peacefully, surrounded by a loving family, and with no shortage of devoted defenders.
And most of all, that fucking statue is still proudly standing at Penn State.
And I love how sensitive all the Penn State sycophants got about Joe Paterno criticism. People wanted to lynch me when I went on Twitter and mocked him after he died. There's still a giant statue of him at Penn State, so I wrote, "From now on, anyone raped at Penn State should just tell Joe Paterno's statue. It couldn't help you any less than the real Joe would have." Which I thought was a pretty salient point. Penn State fans, however, thought I was making a point just as an excuse to wrap a cheap joke around it. I guess we were both right."
-Jim Norton
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