I Waited Just Long Enough For This to be Irrelevant

I wanted, as best I could, to give my take on the Joe Paterno thing after a little time has passed, because I think that public opinion suffers from heat-of-the-moment passions; the Great Unwashed does not think straight when emotion clouds their view.

Just about everybody thought that firing Paterno was the right thing to do, because, as popular opinion went, the stakes were too high to just report an incident to one's superior.  It needed some sort of undefined, nebulous further follow-up, as if a phone call two weeks later would have magically checked the right boxes and Paterno could be said to have done the right thing.

Then when he died, most of those same Great Unwashed pronounced it a pity - even a shame - what happened to Paterno, that he was deprived of the only thing that kept him going, that he was scapegoated and railroaded, and that he died of a broken heart.  He did not die of a broken heart; he died of lung cancer, but I will re-visit that later in this post.

Now normally I'm one of the first kids on the block to spot and mock the ever-changing vicissitudes of the Great Unwashed, but this time, I'm going to give them a pass.  Because this time I understand why it went down the way it did.

I think that the world, or that part of the world that cared about this, was a little horrified at the callous, bureaucratic way that Paterno handled the situation.  The behavior was relayed to him; he notified a superior and let the matter drop. And that was deemed not enough, especially for someone who is charged with safeguarding children and shepherding them through the dark tunnel to adulthood.

This scumbag Sandusky was not only buggering young kids but was doing so while exploiting a position of authority and trust.  It made a heinous act absolutely demoniacal. And the Great Unwashed screamed for blood. And when the trustees of PSU fired Paterno, the general consensus was that it was a shame but it was the right thing to do.

Then came the diagnosis, and with shocking suddenness, the death watch.  And then, thanks to the lung on the right of the above picture, came the end, early in the morning on January 22. Joseph Vincent Paterno was 85.

Many, many things are forgiven in death.  It was said that, when John Wilkes Booth was shot and paralyzed by a Union soldier who was trying to roust him from a tobacco barn that was on fire, the other soldiers in the company comforted the dying Booth as best they could, speaking soothing words to him and promising him they'd deliver a message to his mother.

So it was with Paterno.  The prevailing opinion, overnight, from the Great Unwashed was that Paterno was scapegoated, that the wrong person was railroaded insofar as he immediately reported the activity in question to his nominal superior. He did the right thing and did it timely, and his reputation was unnecessarily tarnished.

And I get that too.  You don't speak ill of the dead.  This is a guy who not only touched the lives of thousands of kids, but who himself had a family, a son who loved him dear and a wife to whom he was devoted for over fifty years.

That's why I needed to cogitate on this one for a few days, to let his death sort of wear off.  Because I suspect the truth of the matter lay somewhere in the middle. Paterno did sort of take a detached, bureaucratic approach to reporting Sandusky's malfeasance, and should have done more.  The trustees did sort of make a knee-jerk decision regarding his firing, and should have done less. And he didn't die of a broken heart; he died of lung cancer, which would have happened no matter what his reaction to the crime, or the trustees' reaction to Paterno's reaction to the crime.

In the end, and from every angle, it's just a shame. Broken trust, resulting in kids in lifelong pain; an otherwise sterling legacy tarnished; a family bereft of husband and dad. The only character that did what  was expected of him, who did his job efficiently and thoroughly, was the fucking cancer.