Joe Paterno

The death of Joe Paterno was somehow sadly appropiate. It brings to mind Paul Bear Bryant and Woody Hayes, both of whom died shortly after completing long and successful careers as head football coaches at big universities with perennial powerhouse football programs. When a person's reaon for living is removed, it seems that people are often ready to move on.

The tragedy, of course, is the manner in which Paterno's career ended. He should have finished coaching this past season, which was a good one for Penn State, then retired in glory. But it was not to be.

Instead, he was run out ignomoniously by a bureacracy and a society endlessly and self righteously searching for someone to blame. 

Paterno did nothing wrong, and he did a lot of things right. Informed of heinous behavior by someone in his employ, he took the matter up the chain of command. Should he have called the police instead? Perhaps. So should have the athletic director, the chancellor, and the university president.

Somebody should have called the police, long ago. Paterno did the least, not the most, he should have done.

Somebody should have called the police, long ago. But just as soon as he had done that, there would have been an uproar over the fact that he failed in his duties because he failed to follow the proper channels along the chain of command, and took matters into his own hands when he shouldn't have.

Oh, how we do love to assign blame in our hypocritical culture. Our hypocritical culture, in which a woman in the military is more likely to be sexually molested by a fellow serviceman than shot at by a foreign army, in which our media is saturated with sexual content because we, the consumers, want it to be. Our hypocritcal culture, which calls itself "Christian", then spends more time with pornography than with spiritual wisdom. Our hypocritcl culture, in which candidates for president benefit at the ballot box for having adulturous affairs.

Some years ago Paterno expressed his opinion that college athletes should by paid. Never a hypocrite, Paterno understood that collegiate athletes were no longer true amateurs, but had become cash cows for a multi billion dollar industry. Our hypocritcal higher education-athletic culture, in which universities sanctimoniously uphold the "integrity" of student athletics by imposing phony restrictions of their ability to earn money, while exploiting their athletic talent to enrich their own bank accounts.

Joe Paterno was a great man, and he should be remembered for it, not for having followed the guidelines given him by his hypocritical employer. Joe Paterno was no hypocrite; most of us cannot say the same.

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