If allegations of sexual molestation of young boys by a former assistant football coach at Penn State prove to be valid, then the outrage that these charges have sparked is entirely justified. From the horror of the acts themselves to the refusal of those in authority on campus to confront or acknowledge them, the whole business is simply pluperfect awful in every respect. Although the Ol' Bloviator sees no point in adding to the din of breast-beating and pontification with further sermonizing to the choir on this human and moral tragedy, he is not averse, however, to taking to the pulpit on another aspect of this story that happens to intersect one of his most prickly personal peeves (Try saying that fast three times without your Fixodent, why don't you?), i.e., such utterly absurd and characteristically delusional baby-boomerish contentions as "sixty is the new thirty." In other words, now that we--the one-time zealots of the Cult of Youth--are the ones getting old, age suddenly doesn't matter. Here then is the text of today's harangue: At a few days shy of 85, Joe Paterno has been too damn old for his job for a long time and so, for that matter, have the three members of the U.S. Senate who, at threescore and seven, are two years his senior.
Who is the OB to so boldly declare that the superannuation of these individuals is incompatible with the responsibilities of their respective positions? He would be a 64.5-year-old college professor who knows that if he weren't working much more intently on his teaching than he did twenty years ago, he would live in constant fear of short-changing his students and embarrassing himself. Oh, yes, he knows that you may have heard that his recent explication of the significance of the Treaty of Versailles was damn-near brilliant, and he is certainly not inclined to dispute that appraisal. He would, however, proffer the little tidbit that while said discourse may have truly been just as stellar as it was when first delivered thirty-nine years ago, it now stands as the product of considerably more preparation than it required in those now-hazy days of his youth. His apologies, doubtless insufficient, to Toby Keith, but the OB is confident that he's every bit as good for a seventy-five-minute lecture as he once was, so long as he is willing to spend a lot more time composing it than he once did.
William Ian Miller's essay "Losing IT: The Lament of an Aging Professor" is a tongue-in-cheek cautionary tale for the OB. As someone who once complained of "dead wood" in his department, Miller confesses that younger colleagues now seem to regard him as "petrified wood" when he tries desperately to persuade them of his continuing viability and succeeds only in "boring them silly." The OB refuses to admit that he's this far gone yet, but he cannot deny that he's working his fanny off in order to keep from becoming this guy. Nor can he deny that it isn't as long as it has been until the day arrives when working his fanny off simply won't guarantee that he can still get the job done. When that day comes, he prays that he will have the gumption to recognize it before anybody else does and head for the exit before he needs either prompting or assistance.
Meanwhile, the gritty and grizzled Joe Pa has got twenty-one years on the OB. Moreover, whatever anyone thinks of the merits of his position and celebrity status, because of them his actions stand to have a more direct and immediate impact on a lot more people than the OB's do. The OB thinks Paterno's muted and almost minimalist response to the report of an alleged molestation (and perhaps to warning signals about earlier ones) by one of his associates may be in large part a reflection of his generational background. For most of Joe Pa's sixty-one-year coaching career, hushed-up accusations of sexual abuse of children by Roman Catholic priests obviously counted for less than the standing and ostensible mission of the Church itself. Likewise, Paterno's athletic generation was also one in which shower-room groping of a young boy or two would almost surely be deemed less consequential than damaging the reputation of the school or its athletic program or of the coaching fraternity in general. Take a gander at what sportswriter Michael Weinraub has to say about growing up in State College, Pa., where Joe Pa's hegemony was absolute: "Joe Paterno was our benevolent dictator, and nothing truly bad ever happened, and even when it did, it was easier just to blot it from our lives and move on. . . . Sometimes we were guilty of regarding him as more deity than man, as if he presided over us in mythological stand-up form. He was as much our own conscience as he was a football coach, and we made that pact and imbued him with that sort of power because we believed he would wield it more responsibly than any of us ever could. Maybe that was naïve, but we came of age in a place known as Happy Valley and naïveté was part of the package. . . ."
Such deference is a powerful temptation to arrogance, which, left unchecked or even unchallenged, can lead to its own brand of naiveté. Hence we have Wednesday's announcement by Paterno that he would be stepping down as Penn State's head coach "effective at the end of the season," and therefore the school's Board of Trustees "should not spend a single minute discussing my status." This statement was not a plea or even a suggestion. It was a directive--from someone so uncomprehending of the times we live in as to imagine that his status as a campus and college football icon afforded him the privilege of dictating the terms of his own departure despite revelations of his apparent role as an enabler (and arguably, even an unwitting abettor) of an alleged serial child molester operating right under his prodigious nose.
There is surely no guarantee that things would have turned out otherwise with a younger person in Paterno's position. Still, it seems altogether reasonable to suspect that someone of equivalent moral values but born since the Coolidge administration might have been more attuned to the dramatically heightened and pervasive sensitivity to the sexual abuse of children that has marked American life over the last generation. Would not such a person therefore have been more likely to appreciate the gravity of the situation and the disastrous consequences of failing to bring an immediate end to such horrific treatment of helpless children under the reprehensible guise of legitimacy afforded by the Penn State Athletic Department? As he teeters on the brink of senior citizenship himself, the OB salutes efforts to maximize an elderly person's sense of fulfillment and worth, but it's another thing entirely to put other people's health and safety in jeopardy just so an uber-egotistical old geezer can maintain his self-indulgent pursuit of immortality, be it in the coaching box or the halls of Congress.
