Jim Souhan asks, “What would young Joe … have said about JoePa, the legend who waved cheerfully to doting fans after being revealed as an enabler of child rape?”
Many of my peers are choosing to remember young Joe today. They’re using the sadness of his death and the enormity of his accomplishments to obscure his crimes of omission. This is sports sentimentality at its worst, and nowhere does sentimentality run amok the way it does in the bastion of school fight songs and mascots.
One man had a chance to preserve, even enhance, young Joe’s reputation as a great leader. That man was old Joe. Presented with eyewitness accounts of child abuse in his own locker room, and surrounded by years of rumors about one of his most important assistant coaches, Paterno shrank.
With great power comes great responsibility. Paterno wielded more influence than anyone else in Happy Valley. When he could have used it to protect children, he passed the buck like a cowering bureaucrat.
Whether we like it or not, the failure of Paterno to do more than the bare minimum is a more important part of his legacy than the cute coke-bottle glasses he wore, the way he led his team onto the field in a ratty sweater, and any football game won. Football is a game. It does not affect life. The abuse of a child is an act that affects the victim for life and can lead to self-hatred and suicide. I, for one, know of no football player who committed suicide because he threw a last-minute interception or missed a game-saving tackle.
Even before Paterno’s death Sunday, the travesty of Penn State was already veering away from the countless acts of sexual abuse Sandusky allegedly committed against minors, not to mention all the indications of a cover-up by the top echelon of the university, including Paterno. Instead a new steam engine has been in motion, questioning whether Paterno had been treated fairly by the trustees when he was fired. The chorus was growing louder, forcing board of trustee members to go on a public relations blitz to The New York Times and the Philadelphia Inquirer to make their case they had done the right thing. Which they did. Artful, no, because of the way he was notified, with a phone message to call a board member. Necessary, yes.
My guess is that the death of Paterno will pump that steam engine even more. Those who loved him—and there are many thousands, and they have every right to love him—will push him more and more into the sanctity of the martyred because of his death.
“When I think back on Joe Paterno’s legacy, the events of the last two months won’t even cross my mind.”
“If we’re going to have a real discussion about the place of public religion in our public spectacles, then let’s have one instead of some mushy, Wonder Bread platitudes about how great it is that Tim Tebow talks about Jesus and doesn’t get caught doing strippers two at a time in the hot tub. If religion comes into the public square, it is as vulnerable as any other human institution to be pelted with produce. Ignorance does not become wisdom just because you gussy it up with the Gospels. If we keep faith with those American values, then we might just let him off the hook enough to see if he simply can become a better quarterback than Andy Dalton.”
Tea Party Emotional Paradox of the Day: Ronald Reagan Says Being in a Union is a Basic Human Right
That’s pretty ironic coming from the guy who fired the Air Traffic Controllers and essentially helped begin the end to the power of the strike for unionized workers.
Oh, for fuck’s sake … even the goddamn Super Bowl isn’t going to be free from the continued fawning over this rotting corpse.
Hey, remember when most Americans largely credited the Soviet Union’s collapse to Mikhail Gorbachev? And Jimmy-forever-remembered-by-the-term-“Malaise”-without-ever-actually-saying-it-Carter was viewed more favorably? What the hell happened?
How the myth gets started is that memories get softer and you have one group that gets very aggressive in pushing this notion that it was all Reagan’s doing, that it was because of his defense buildup. The other thing is, during the 1990s, it was a great time economically — probably better than it should have been because of the dot-com boom. At least among one class there was a lot of affluence in America — and there were improvements that reached down to lower income. Black unemployment, for example, dropped during Clinton’s presidency. It created this feeling that America had been on a roll and people forgot the recession of the early 1990s and how bad things had been and their anger with Reagan. They were more willing to say, “Well, this all started with Reagan,” forgetting all those bad things that happened in the ’80s and ’90s.
It’s no accident that the push to glorify Ronald Reagan started in 1997, because it was the year that Bill Clinton started his second term. He had just defeated Bob Dole overwhelmingly and things looked bleak for the broader conservative movement. They didn’t seem to have anybody on the horizon to be a leader of the party, so there was this very conscious and calculated effort to look back. Something else that you can’t overlook is that in 1997 Reagan was still alive and he announced with a lot of class and dignity in 1994 that he had Alzheimer’s, so the public hadn’t actually seen Reagan for three years. And the public impression of Nancy Reagan softened quite a bit, for good reasons — she was out there pushing for stem cell research and other things. It would have been very difficult to criticize Reagan because of his health, a situation that engendered personal goodwill.
And that was something else conservatives could use as they launched this campaign to build up the Reagan legacy. They call it the Ronald Reagan Legacy Project, started in 1997 by Grover Norquist. It was this aggressive push to rename as many things as possible across the country for Reagan. It started with the airport in Washington, which they successfully renamed Reagan Airport. And it’s funny to see news from that time, because a lot of Democrats were biting their tongues because they had no good memories of Reagan’s presidency, but because of his health nobody was going to vote against renaming the airport for Reagan. Not all of the ideas have been enacted. We still don’t have Reagan’s picture on a $50 bill, or alternating on the dime with FDR, as some people proposed. But there are an increasing number of Ronald Reagan statues across the country, and you can almost drive across the Sun Belt continuously on some sort of Ronald Reagan boulevard or freeway or highway. Not surprisingly, the push to rename things for Reagan has been more successful where conservatism is the most popular.
“They can’t say government is too big if they’re saying hands off defense. It’s not responsible to say government is the problem when you’ve embraced 95 percent of the dollars.”
Veken at Hyperallergic just alerted me to the fact that the federal government is still stuck in the 1980’s (surprise, surprise!) and, although he’d like to donate blood, he can’t:
Senator John F. Kerry of Massachusetts called today for the Food and Drug Administration to lift a “discriminatory” ban on gay men donating blood…“Not a single piece of scientific evidence supports the ban,” the Democratic senator said in a statement. “A law that was once considered medically justified is today simply outdated and needs to end, just as last year we ended the travel ban against those with HIV.”…The FDA defended the ban.
Reagan would be proud.
This is the song I think of every time I see this photo.
“If the Government took over a thriving business and placed it in the hands of a young, inexperienced technocrat, I’d be enraged. But since GM was already dying, the harm from this is negligible. (Sadly, in the age of Obama-sized deficits, tens of billions of wasted taxpayer dollars are negligible.) Indeed, I think this could actually be good for the country. It should serve as a test of whether Government can run businesses in a competent and fair manner. I hope we have the good sense to await the results of this test before we nationalize health care.”
It is kind of scary how easily we can throw around a few billion dollars these days, which I thought Krugman also addressed yesterday when he was blaming The Gipper for the mess we’re in:
The immediate effect of Garn-St. Germain, as I said, was to turn the thrifts from a problem into a catastrophe. The S.& L. crisis has been written out of the Reagan hagiography, but the fact is that deregulation in effect gave the industry — whose deposits were federally insured — a license to gamble with taxpayers’ money, at best, or simply to loot it, at worst. By the time the government closed the books on the affair, taxpayers had lost $130 billion, back when that was a lot of money.
Just look at those Reagans.
(via 2 or 3 things)
“Kick off your shoes and relax, Nancy. We just gave some fellow named Osama half a billion dollars a year to beat back the Russians and Rummy’s got a guy to help us deal with Iran. What could possibly go wrong?”
