Penn State as Metaphor

A man high up in the chain of Penn State football is caught buggering a 10-year-old boy in the showers by a 28-year-old man, an assistant coach with Penn State football, who doesn't stop the man, doesn't call the police, but does report what he saw to someone presumably with some power to do something, being another link in the chain of Penn State football.

The matter is handled internally. In a similar fashion to the way the Catholic Church handled and continues to handle such problems. In a similar fashion to the way our financial system polices and smoothes out its more grotesque excesses that end up buggering the relatively innocent for life.

It's the rare individual, the rare program, that is brave when there is much to lose for being so. Better to sweep the mess under the rug than risk a noisy, unwieldy fuss. In the case of Penn State, one can imagine certain questions being wrestled over: Are we really going to risk bringing down a program we've spent years building just because one of our coaches has a predilection for buggering young boys? A man like Joe Paterno is going to live out his twilight years in shame over something that random and bizarre and, let's face it, just plain sick? No, that would be unthinkable. What we need to do is manage it as best we can, keep a close eye on Jerry, pay off those we need to—everyone has a price, especially the families of 10-year-old boys we have to hope—and not screw up what the rest of us have worked a lifetime to achieve. We will not let this unfortunate incident, nor any of the rest, or those in the future, compromise the program.

One can almost see the tears welling in the eyes of those coming to the conclusion they almost always do as they wrestle with their cowardice in the face of losing everything dear to them, as they come bit by bit or perhaps all at once to a decision to save themselves.

One can understand the difficulty of the struggle. The Church, before choosing to save itself from their minions of pederasts, had to save itself from other difficult messes. During World War II, for instance, ten or so years before Joe Paterno began his career with Penn State, The Church could have spoken out when it was known within their ranks that Hitler was slaughtering Jews, and many others. Why didn't they say anything? it is often asked. Why didn't they encourage the reluctant democracies that the Jews of Europe trusted to not let them down to do something, sooner? Could it be that the great Catholic Church established nearly two thousand years earlier was afraid of what Hitler, and Mussolini, would do to their world, and their Swiss guards, and their remarkably rich and lovely enclave, if they did? Yet what other reason is plausible, for the original Christian faith to not speak out when masses of humanity, not to mention the Chosen People, are being slaughtered?

And what about the United States? And Great Britain? And all those powerful Jewish And Swiss Bankers that supposedly ran the world? What up?

One can imagine the hand-wringing. But ... to risk the program for a few million Jews, and gypsies, and homosexuals? Rather, let's pray, all of us—and thank God there's a Heaven for those poor souls. Yes, we'll pray for their souls, and wait for this hell on earth to end. A few million Jews and other heathens aren't worth a Sisteen Chapel. And the Americans have already blown up a monastery.

Similarly, the banks in Europe and America—the great churches of our modern commercial times—who have lent their money foolishly to people and nations with low FICO scores and to otherwise untold numbers of greedy schemes that haven't worked out as well as they'd hoped are not going to risk the future of their organizations for the sake of some quaint principle known as free enterprise, where risks are taken and sometimes rewarded, sometimes not. No, the days of manning up to such silliness are long gone, and besides, many of their own are fine, mostly dedicated people, many of whom have families and are generally thought to be decent, some of whom donate money to good causes, to the symphony, the opera, outfits that would be in a real fix without them—yes, good people, not unlike many of the Nazi officers who were merely carrying out orders, like certains priests who couldn't help themselves or their natures, like Mr. Sandusky, surely, who says he's no pedophile, though admits to "horsing around."

Good people. Our own. Taking care of each other with all their power, regardless of the consequences, principle, Christian decency or any other kind, for as long as they can, until they can't anymore. Until the jig is finally up.