The University Where Children Are Raped

Getting through the coverage of Saturday’s Penn State – Nebraska game was difficult enough for a cynical old bastard like me, but Sunday morning brought a new wave of nausea.  Some dweeb on TV introduced a story about the game by saying “The healing has begun at Penn State.”

My rear end.  Not by a long shot.  This thing is just getting started.  The surface has barely been scratched.

First, there was the disconnect of ESPN’s “College GameDay” show, which prompted my friend John Roach to describe in a Facebook status update as “tone deaf”.  Not surprisingly, the premiere collegiate football show entirely missed (or deliberately avoided) the essential truth of what apparently happened at the Pennsylvania State University: young boys – God knows how many – were raped, in college athletic facilities, and grown men turned a blind eye and deaf ear.

The man who is accused of doing the raping, Jerry Sandusky, was “one of the boys” in the Penn State Athletic Department, which, along with apparently the highest level of officials at Penn State, conspired for years to cover these crimes.

Then there was the obscene spectacle, captured in the copyright photo above, taken by Gene Puskar of the Associated Press, of the Penn State and Nebraska players gathering and taking a knee at midfield to devoutly pray for the victims.  It was enough to make me puke.  “Everything’s OK now; we prayed to Touchdown Jesus, and everything is forgiven; now, let’s play some ball for Joe Pa!!!”

Then, the trifecta of media excess, the Sunday morning TV news programs, most similar in tone to the ABC report that stated “the healing has begun” at Penn State.

If you don’t believe my assertion that this thing is just getting started, ask the Roman Catholic Church what happens when you look the other way when young boys are sexually assaulted and there’s a conspiracy to cover it up.  The capo and his crew in Rome have spent the last decade selling off hard assets and bankrupting parishes to compensate the victims, and there is still no end in sight to the stream of victims and the flow of cash to compensate them.

This Penn State thing is not even comparable to the crap pulled by Ohio State or Miami.  It’s a completely different and infinitely more disgusting.  But, as in the cases of the Ohio State and Miami, the idiotically blind Penn State partisans are hoping that “football will help the healing process”, when football is the problem itself.

This is “too big to fail”, athletic version, and it’s just getting started.

It Looks Pretty Bad for Penn State

A quick read of the criminal complaint leads me to believe that this case is going to be a stunner, and it may take down a lot of people.

It appears that one of the former Penn State coaches, Jerry Sandusky, ran some sort of foundation for young men which he used to troll for boys he could fondle (taking showers with, touching, etc.), and that a lot of people looked the other way.

There is a lot of “looking the other way” in big-time collegiate sports.  But this case, which has been smoldering for a dozen years, burst onto the public consciousness this weekend, and already Penn State Athletic Director Tim Curley is on administrative leave (by his own request, late Saturday night), and one of the school’s Senior VP’s, Gary Schultz, decided after the case broke that he’d go back into retirement immediately.  Curley and Schultz face charges they lied to a grand jury about the case.

Sandusky faces 40 counts of abuse, including 21 felony charges, for abusing 8 boys between 1994 and 2009.  Many of the incidents allegedly happened in a Penn State athletics building.

As is so often the case, the initial news reports lead to more questions than answers.  Why is this just coming to light now?  How much did Joe Pa know, and when did he know it?  Why haven’t the parents of the boys who were alleged victims said something sooner?

Sandusky was on Joe Pa’s staff for 32 years, and the jock world saw him as Joe Pa’s successor.  Except, of course, Joe Pa hasn’t retired.  Joe Pa is now 167 years old and has been head football coach at Penn State since 1871.  Joe Pa is expected to still be head coach of the Nittany Lions when they play the Badgers at Camp Randall on November 26^th.

Unless, of course, he suddenly retires and disappears.  Stay tuned.