Joe Paterno, the legendary Penn State football coach, has died.
I can’t help but wonder if the travesty of the last few months, with his former assistant coach, Jerry Sandusky, being charged with sexually molesting 10 young boys over 15 years, killed him.
I’m not an alumna of Penn State. (I am, however, an alumna of Syracuse University, with its own scandal of an assistant basketball coach allegedly molesting boys.) Still, I hate to see the storied career of Joe Paterno forever blackened by the malevolent behavior of one man, if that proves to be the case.
Some people argue that Paterno had to know what was going on. They argue that Paterno was so concerned about his legacy, the reputation of his football program and Penn State University, that he was willing to turn a blind eye to the behavior of Jerry Sandusky.
I’m not so sure.
Since the scandal broke in November, Joe Paterno has given only one interview, to Sally Jenkins of the Washington Post. The story was published on January 14, 2012. It characterizes Joe Paterno as unable to comprehend what Sandusky may have done, because it was simply too foreign to the way Paterno himself lived his life. Jenkins writes:
He reiterated that McQueary was unclear with him about the nature of what he saw and added that even if McQueary had been more graphic, he’s not sure he would have comprehended it.
“You know, he didn’t want to get specific,” Paterno said. “And to be frank with you I don’t know that it would have done any good, because I never heard of, of, rape and a man. So I just did what I thought was best. I talked to people that I thought would be, if there was a problem, that would be following up on it.”
Is it possible to be that unaware of the existence of evil? Yes, it is, and we all know it.
While I was uninitiated, meaning, before my direct, personal encounter with a social predator, I never in my wildest dreams thought that I would cross paths with evil. I didn’t know that someone who appeared to be so loving and caring could have a hidden agenda. I lived a life of integrity, and I believed that the people who were part of my life were like me.
But, some may argue, sex abuse of children has been in the news for years—look at the stories about the Catholic Church. Well, my cousin was abused by priests. He received financial compensation many years ago—it was probably one of the first cases to be settled. I heard people in my family talking about it. Still, I did not comprehend what he must have experienced.
I didn’t understand the human capacity for manipulation and evil until it happened to me.
So, yes, I can believe that Joe Paterno was clueless. He grew up in a different era, when although the sexual abuse of children probably occurred, it certainly wasn’t talked about. He was inspired by his father. He believed in education. He believed in turning troubled athletes around. His whole life was about winning with integrity.
So for Paterno to realize, at this late stage of his life, that he may have been hoodwinked by someone so close to him must have been a terrible shock. It probably didn’t cause his lung cancer. But it may have sapped Paterno’s strength to fight it.
Read Joe Paterno’s last interview, on WashingtonPost.com.
Silvermoon,
“How could you say to me that you get more than I do about PSU? Excuse me?”
That is NOT what I said, Silvermoon. I understand that you are upset about the report, about the tarnished reputation of Joe Paterno and of people here saying “I see red flags” of him. But that still does not make a sentence said by someone here into what you interprete it. When I write that saying that your claim of knowing betrayal and disappointment better than any victim here is a slap in the face, then I just mean that and do not imply that we know necessariy better, even if we disagree.
I also have not called you anything, let alone sick.
As for being present: nobody needs to have been present or witness to events in order to understand a situation of the past or even person. If this principle holds then otherwise only direct witnessesses and families and friends could be valid for example to sit in juries. Why do we regard total strangers to be in the possession of being able to judge past situations as well as persons? Because we have empathy, understanding and a brain to reason with. The sole thing to make up your mind are the facts, not someone else’s opinion, whether it’s worship or disgust of someone. The sole thing that matters for a sound judgement are getting to know the facts, not necessarily the person himself. And I agree that not all facts are known to us.
PS, when people use capital letters here, it’s not regarded ‘shouting’ as on forums, but to simply emphasize the words. We cannot bolden or underline or italic words here when we write a comment.
I actually find it more difficult when it regards a person ‘I know personally’ than for a total stranger. Just this week I learned some factual information about two men, one who was a ‘friend with benefits’ for several years (well it was mostly benefits than friends, but we sometimes just went out as friends) and another who was a customer at the bar I worked at and who I slept with once.
For me the first may not have been a guy I was emotionally attracted to, but I knew of no wrong or disresect by him in any way, and he has always been empathically supportive and just a plain nice guy whenever we met. The image of the second guy is that of an overly sweet and tender and happy guy who had a bit of a crush on me for a while and I suspected to have an issue with alcohol, because he didn’t leave my tequila bottle alone, not even the morning after when I had already put it safely away again in the bar.
Anyhow, I have some image of these guys in my head that is not stellar, but absolutely not bad. Years ago the girlfriend of the ex-friend-with-benefits met me at a party at the bathroom and once she fit my name to my face she blurted out instantly that I should never trust the guy and that he was a compulsive liar. I told her that whatever him and I had had over the years it was almost a year between when I last saw him and he told me he was starting to see her. I know they broke up, and I have seen her a few times since then with a new boyfriend… I’ll confess I wasn’t sure who to believe, because she could behave so dramatic (when she ‘warned’ me) and later around the new boyfriend too. And I didn’t ‘know’ her so well as the man she was warning me about. I do sometimes still chat over facebook with the guy, chats he initiates and I’m quite reluctant about. It’s more of a polite chat to me. Last chat last week was about this woman’s father having died and whether he should go to the funeral or not, and I ended up suggesting that he could say his goodbyes to the father while he was laid in a state without disturbing the family, because he claims the break-up with that girlfriend was a bad one.
On Monday I’m visiting my former colleague-friend at a bar and she ends up bringing up a friend of hers (the ex-girlfriend) and her father’s funeral, and I tell her that the ex-boyfriend had been talking about exactly that. My friend responds disgusted and vehemently and says, ‘That crazy guy who stalked her for 3 years!?” And she also told me he had cheated on her a lot. I fear I might be one of those, since him and I disagree over the time period when we were friends with benefits. So, one account is of him being a compulsive liar, serial cheater and stalker and it does not fit in any way with what I have witnessed of him personally. Part of me finds those accounts completely jarring with the image I have of him in my head. But I’m pretty sure that it will get alarm bells ringing to anyone here who reads what I’ve told about him. And I’m pretty telling my own mind not to question the damning info I received about this man.
Now, this ex-colleague friend of mine at the bar ended up having a relationshit with the second guy who I slept with once. That he was an alcoholic was never much of a surprise to me, and I thought this was mostly the relationshit at the time. But towards the end of the relationshit she confessed he used to beat her up and once broke her ribs. She gave me more details this week. This extremely violent abuser is completely jarring with the tender guy I remember. They are two completely different persons. One cannot possibly be the other. And of course my mind would very willing to believe him to be the tender person I shared one night with once, because that is my personal experience with him. But I cannot discount the completely devestating Mr Hyde experience my friend has had, and since the two sides of the same man must exclude each other out, my rational part of the brain tells me the Dr. Jeckyl was but a facade, a mask.
Even now, despite having experienced a relationshit with a spat myself, I experience it’s partly difficult to regard these two acquaintances of mine in the light of the damning information I have on them, while they have had no important impact on my life and at present are totally unimportant to me and were never seen as heroes by me. And the biggest reason imo for the difficulty of that memory part of my brain to fit the damning info about them with the image of the past about them is imo because I never knew them well enough, never lived through the shit with them, never had my happiness depend on them. Unfortunately I know them just well enough to believe their masks to be their real personality. It makes it near impossible for me to see them in the same evil light as the ex-spath, except with my factual and rational mind. And the rational part of my brain is telling me now that I evidently brushed with two spaths before the spath I did get involved with, and that I should consder myself to be damn lucky to never have known these two men better than I have known them. It also reveals to me that getting involved with a spath was inevitable, because of how open minded I was to how people mask and represent themselves, how I accepted the presence of personality at face value, and how non-judgemental I used to be. It basically tells me that any positive judgement I ever made about anyone in my life is up for further scrutiny if I get contradicting information about them.
It’s really difficult to differentiate between yelling and EMPHASIZING, on the internet.
There have been many times that someone comes to LF and describes their experience and asks, “is that a spath?”
Often, we will say, “YEP! THAT’S A SPATH!” or “based on what you told us, YEP, SPATH!” It’s not yelling, it’s emphasizing.
Of course, we have no way of knowing if it is the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth when someone posts their experience here. It doesn’t matter, we post our stories and the red flags are what we are discussing. The reason is so that in the future, people who experience similar things can look back and say, “Oh yeah, that’s a red flag, I need to be careful.” As Donna says, one red flag doesn’t make a spath, but many together, do. Even a murderer is not necessarily a spath, it could be self-defense or they might have been framed. (But if they WERE framed, it’s likely a spath who did it.)
The case with Joe Paterno, is that we don’t have a little story from one anonymous poster. We have a 3 million dollar report by a federal investigator and his team. We have grand jury testimony. We have several credible sources now speaking out, including a woman who was run out of Penn State for not playing the “Penn State Way”, which is to bow to Paterno. We have emails that tell how Curly and Spanier were considering going to the police UNTIL one of them talked to Paterno, then he changed his mind. We have Paterno negotiating a huge retirement package, in secret, in January as he planned to retire at the end of the season , then “offering” to retire after the season, in November. We have a VIDEO of him saying that he’d never heard of man/boy sex. Not only is that ludicrous, but for anyone who might be duped, we later learned that he KNEW all about the man/boy sex that Sandusky had been accused of in 1998. So, he lied, unnecessarily. Why? If you watch his behavior, you can see him play the “I’m an old befuddled man” card. My spath uses it all the time.
People come on to this site all the time madly in love with their abusers and we try to help them see past their emotions and just look at the behavior. That’s all we’re doing here, Silvermoon. Of course, we also need to accept that we can lead a horse to water but we can’t make him drink.
Sky,
When you hear or know good things about a person but also learn damning information (I mean something more than a one time mistake, but something very wrong that happened continuously over time), do they have the same weight for you, or does one outweigh the other for you at least rationally?
In the past the good outweighed the bad I knew of someone. Now the bad and damning outweighs the good for me, because I have learned it’s quite easy to do good out of pure pretense.
I think the issue, here, is that the status of deity has overshadowed the fact that Paterno enabled, ignored, and basically pretended that nothing was amiss. Yes, the “red flags” are all screaming, flapping, and waving, but I have to keep in mind how gobsmacked I was, myself, when I discovered what the exspath really was.
It’s a very, very hard and bitter pill to swallow when we learn that someone who presented as a hero to be idolized turns out to be merely human and very, very, very flawed.
So…..that’s MY 2 cents…..please, note: “MY” is not intended to be interpreted as online/virtual screaming or yelling. The CAPS were intended to be read as emphasis, ONLY.
Sky,
Its not difficult if you write clearly and say what you mean in a way someone else can understand it. English will get the job done.
I don’t appreciate your reference and calling me a horse’s ass doesn’t make you an authority.
If YOUR spath does it, then certainly everyone in the world can be measured by that? Right?
When are you going to let going of owning the best spath in the world?
That’s the trump card isn’t it?
My Spath plays the befuddled old man
My Spath kills people
My spath kills cats
My Spath has minions
Therefore I win?
What’s the deal here?
What is the thinking:
I have the biggest spath, the most information and the ultimate authority and the right to insult anyone I want to because I’m right and I’m angry.
What you know about horses will probably fit on the head of a pin, but, why talk about them when we could be talking about YOUR SPATH?
I read the story of the woman who marched into Penn State to Change everything and she reads like Doloris Umbridge at Hogwart’s.
She needed to go because her idea of change infuriated the entire community. She was not popular with any of her initiatives and that she could rewrite life in State College in a single year is absolutely crazy.
“Joe Paterno was an incredibly principled person,” she said.
She was asked to leave because she was too aggressive. I’m not convinced there isn’t some “spin” on this story. Nor would any reasonable person who read the english of what has been written.
Vote early, vote often
Darwinsmom, that’s a really poignant question you ask.
I used to be the type of person who overlooked (deliberately) damning things about others. After all, didn’t everyone “deserve” the “benefit of the doubt,” as I was raised to believe?
So, yeah…..very insightful question.
Silvermoon,
I think you have every right to make up your own mind in your own time frame about Paterno. It’s a right any of us has.
But I do find that with regards attacking someone else personally in this discussion your posts to sky earn that honour. The only one talking about ‘winning’ and only one trumping others with understanding is you IMHO.
Admittedly sky mentioned cognitive dissonance and being fooled by a spath in connection to you, and that is her opinion. I accept that such an opinion is hurftul and feels personal, and seems like an insult (the latest victim of my spath says it’s personally insulting to read the facts I know of him and my claim on how he ‘hooks, line and sinkers’ people). But it is a far cry from calling you sick, crazy or accusing you of anything.
In contrast I observe you basically telling anyone here literally that you know better, that those who see red flags in Paterno’s behaviour as bitter witchhunter, claiming that they claim to know better, have shown to literally misrepresent commenter’s sentences (such as mine), and are now personally attacking someone else and accusing them of being in a contest of who has knwon the best spath. I understand that this is how you interprete posts at the moment, but it is not what I read in any of sky’s posts or other posts. Your posts come across as lashing out as personally and as harshly as you can to sky, and imo undeservingly so.
I do understand you disagree about the proposition that Paterno is a spath and I feel that the factual info out there may justifiably be not enough to damn a character. I also feel you have the perfect right to question who find there is enough info to damn him. I do not think any less of you because of it, nor do I think it’s wrong to put to us the question whether we allow the tidbits of damnable info on Paterno outweigh the good of him so much. I think that’s a fully deserved question to make us consider how and on what info we judge nowadays. I even find it a VERY interesting issue and discussion.
As I said in an earlier post (and thank you Truthspeak for thinking it a very interesting question too), today the damnable info outweighs the good info when it comes to judging people. For me the damnable info on Paterno is the retirement deal he brokered when taken in light how and when he brokered it. The rest is confirmative info for me, though by itself could be taken in light of Paterno having been duped by Sandunsky. But the retirement deal was not about Paterno being duped, but about duping Penn State on an extremely material matter and reeks of entitlement and shameful values. It’s the exact same thing as those bank managers and CEO’s who left the globe in an economical crisis while reaping and negotiating bonuses and saying it doesn’t matter whether that’s right or not, because it was ‘legal’. And it does not fit the portrayal of someone being ashamed and feeling guilty on how they got duped.
At the same time we are having this discussion there’s another thread where people discuss the urge of wanting to warn new victims. We felt so ashamed of having lent credibility, protection and status to the spath that once we realize and learn how much we were duped that we wish to right some wrongs we feel accompliced to. If Paterna imho had been a very good person who believed in doing the right stuff and yet got duped because of being naive, he would have displayed behaviour of feeling totally ashamed of the info that was going to get public, he would have tried to warn all of the board and be too ashamed to even try to get that much money out of a deal, do it as secretively, and later would hardly dare to threaten Penn State for not wanting to honour the brokered deal under such deception. That is the damnable info on Paterna that makes me think he’s not a good person at all, but only pretended to be one.
When I realized the ex was a spath, my first urge was to undo wrongs, undo the deception of the spath on other people. I wanted to out him and warn others. Some people I warned for example were two tourists who had trusted him and believed him to be a long term friend. There was one incident where 200$ went missing, and the sole one who would have had the opportunity to take it was the spath in that short unguarded time. Those guys asked me whether he could have done that. They had an extreme hard time to believe he would, and in the end didn’t believe he had the personality to do that. I (who only knew him for a week) agreed with them it couldn’t have possibly been him characterwise. Two years later the mask fell and I was finally ready to believe the worst of him instead of the best. And I contacted one of these guys and reminded him of that money incident and told him that I was sure the ex had stolen it and told them why.
A good person would do all they can within their might to undo in actions the responsibility they feel they had in allowing a spath to dupe so many, and they rather feel more responsible than they were. That is not what Paterno did at all.
A while back (a year or more) someone here said (or I read) (CRS) that some things are so heinous that no matter HOW MUCH GOOD that person does, the heinous things outweigh all the good in the world that any one human could do.
Kind of like “he’s a wonderful man, friend, father, and husband, WHEN HE ISN’T ROBBING BANKS” or you could have said about Ted Bundy “he was a great friend when he wasn’t raping and killing women”
So I think that what Paterno did in covering up for Sandusky in an effort to “protect the foot ball program” and “avoid a scandal” is pretty much like the Bishops protecting the reputation of the Church by shuffeling the priests to new parishes without telling anyone.
Paterno may have been the best, most upright coach, father, mentor, etc. etc. but the ONE thing he did over rode everything else he did in his life. The ONE major dishonest thing he did was the WORST thing he could have chosen to do. It will wipe out the rest of the good he did, however much or however little that good was.
There are plenty of “good” people who sit idly by when others are being abused and they know it and DO NOTHING.,…or worse3 yet, cover up for them.
Until a few years ago I went to a small rural church. I didn’t particularly like the minister, he was an angry man, and when I needed help in the worst way, he “didn’t have time” to even talk to me face to face. I was being abused and my family abused by a convicted sex offender and ex convict…he EMBRACED the sex offender as a full fledged member of the congregation and though I had been there for decades, he “blew me off”—-but later after I had quit that church becdause of how he treated me, he was ARRESTED for CHILD porn and for trying to lure what he thought was a 14 year old girl to meet him for sex…turned out it was a 40 year old deputy sheriff and he got caught.
You should have seen how the church rallied around him to “keep it quiet” SO IT “WON’T BRING SHAME ON THE CHURCH.” UGH!!!! The shame to me is in the TRYING TO DOWN PLAY WHAT SOMEONE HAS DONE. A cover up if you will.
In many schools there are coaches that are considered deities, and foot ball programs that bring in millions of dollars per year. The coaches are paid millions of dollars when the math and science and English professors are paid in the tens of thousands not millions of dollars. WHAT IS WRONG WITH THIS PICTURE???
Where did EDUCATION go? How many scholarships would those millions of dollars paid to the coaches and spent on the foot ball programs fund?
BTW I feel the same way about religious MINISTERS who are paid huge salaries as well, and who get on television and plead for contributions for starving children when they are making millions. WHAT IS WRONG WITH THIS PICTURE? The Apostle Paul said that a minister is worthy of his hire, but to pay someone like a media star for being a minister somehow smacks of something besides the desire to preach the world of God.
I just finished reading a book about the vigilantes that were in Montana when it was a territory before it was broken off from Idaho as a separate territory. They hung about 23 men in a three week period of time….and many of those men were killed because someone on the vigilante committee had a grudge against them. There was a fever of hanging people that disagreed with them. True there was quite a bit of road gangs robbing and killing and other out of control behavior, but vigilanteism was not the way to solve the problem.
The news media today smacks at times of that same vigilante code of “justice,” or injustice, as the case may be….but at the same time…innocent people are “ruined” in the press and guilty people prosper.
Not every person who kills someone is a psychopath and not every psychopath kills someone….but research shows that 25% of the crimiinals in prisons are card-carrying psychopaths, and the AVERAGE score for inmates on the PCL-R is 22 which is still very high in P traits, not someone you would want to take home for a pet.
So every person who has a prison record has a 50/50 chance of having a score of 22, and a 25% chance of having a score of 30+.
It is a CRIME to cover up a felony…so what Paterno and the President of the University and the others that knew about Sandusky did was CRIMINAL. Paterno will never be tried, he died before he could be tried, so legally he is “innocent” criminally, but I have no doubt that there will be some civil suits that hold him responsible for the children that Sandusky molested AFTER Paterno knew what he was doing. And well he should be held responsible.
One point skylar did admit that it was yelling.
skylar says:And the flags are so obvious and easy to see once you know them. So we are YELLING at you because we want you to see them. Yet you refuse. July 19, 2012 at 1:13 am
I noticed everyone was leaving this out.
G1S
“via the written word.” Yes it can. Plus another thing I’ve notice some have a hard time keeping things in context. We grab on to one bit and forget the rest and things start to spiral out of control.
In this case
Sm: “I do disagree and frankly I’m offended by your brash, harsh, know it all judgements on the whole thing and WHEN YOU YELL LIKE THAT you really piss me off.”
Then Sk comes right back with: “So we are YELLING at you because we want you to see them.”
I think that the meaning is understood by them both.
But yes it can be tough to tell the difference at times.