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| Face of a Hero or an Enabler? |
It
is difficult for people who only knew Joe Paterno through the lens of football
to use other language to describe him.
And
in a way if that was all he did with his prestige and power, then football is
all he would want or deserve to be remembered for now. But he enabled Sandusky and any accomplices
he had, to systematically glean the countryside for boys without fathers to
befriend victimize and rape these children for decades through the Second Mile tax free charity.
What
Joe Paterno knew was more than the “I am innocent, he was a saint “ statements
coming out the mouths of his family at present, a family that benefits from the
millions of hush money Joe demanded from the Penn State Board of Trustees and
got to take the truth to the grave with him.
His wife’s church on campus is a chantry, a
place with masses will be said forever for the soul of a corporate bastard that
cared only about himself, his job and his phony reputation as a nice guy. Tell
the families of all of Jerry Sandusky’s rape victims that Joe Paterno was
basically a nice guy. Yeah right. Bastard!
His
statue at Beaver Stadium is the last vestige of the innocence of the public and
the public’s interest in football and the myth of Joe Paterno. That is why it is so hard to scrap the statue
at a junk yard where it now belongs.
That and the fact that the fat cat donors coming into home games in
their private and corporate jets want the myth of Joe Paterno to surround the
surrealistic feel good world of Saturday afternoon college football. They don’t want to hear about victims. They
don’t care about victims.
That fat cat rich donors, some of them, are just as guilty
as Jerry, Joe, and the Board of Trustees for letting child rape be something
that poor boys had to endure at the expense of the corporate greed, power and
prestige reality of American College Football.
In
a sense the scandal, as a mild term or descriptive, the crime of child
trafficking of the Second Mile Charity for Sandusky and possibly his friends and
rich Penn State donors, is a criminal matter in secular terms.
It
is difficult for people also who have only known their parish priests as
patriarchs, mentors or even friends but the bottom end of a hierarchical ladder
that claims monopoly on the divine, to recognize that in the ranks, some
priests are rotten apples and that the whole institution to protect itself will say anything, do anything, spend anything in order to protect the prestige of the religious
institution.
That
is why the American Bishops are trying to reopen the contraception matrix, to
change the subject, in order to hide the
ongoing buggery behind the scenes in the Church that the Bishops refuse and or
are incapable of dealing with in human terms, not institutional terms.
I
think that a lot of people are cowards that cannot give up the myths and fantasies
that hurt others while they gluttonize on their favorite desserts of Football or God.
Football is nothing more than a game. But Sandusky raping young boys is a matter of life and death, of innocence lost.
In the aftermath of Sandusky's arrest, Paterno was treated as a victim, a man who was caught up in something he wasn't aware of. Now we know that was a lie.
Freeh produced the documents showing Paterno, his family and his legion of supporters lied in order to protect Paterno's name. All he cared about was breaking the all-time record set by Grambling State head coach Eddie Robinson.
Paterno, and the other Penn State lackeys, had to know that turning Sandusky in could prevent "JoePa" from breaking that record. So they all stayed silent, and all the while young boys suffered in their own silence.
When it's time to name the great coaches of college football, Robinson, Bear Bryant, Amos Alonzo Stagg and Knute Rockne will certainly be mentioned. Prior to the Freeh report, Paterno would have been on that list. But his actions in the Sandusky affair destroyed everything he accomplished in his career.
Great coaches make the tough calls. When Paterno failed to make the toughest call of his life -- to the police to turn in his longtime friend -- he did more than cost his team a victory. Young boys lost something they can never recover.
That's what cowards do, and Joe Paterno was a coward.
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