Part of the work of my maturity is to not rationalize the behavior of others who share my same name, or ethnicity or even my bed. It isn't easy. The impulse to cover the tracks of someone else's shit is deeply embedded, particularly if you identify with and could be mistaken for the perpetrator. I watched the other black Americans I knew respond to Clarence Thomas' confirmation hearings. They felt a collective shame about a man none of them knew, few of them would have liked, yet nevertheless felt his transgressions were their own. Closer to home is how we all struggle when it is family -- our siblings, children, spouses. The tension between self-exculpation and loyalty to the transgressor is often unbearable and irreconcilable.
It's said that if you want to know something, follow your curiosity. As much as I told myself that I had fiction to write, math to study or bills to pay, on Thursday I kept returning to news about the Report of the Special Investigative Counsel Regarding the Actions of The Pennsylvania State University Related to the Child Sexual Abuse Committed by Gerald A. Sandusky, which will forever be know simply as the Freeh Report, and the associated revelations and analyses that came pouring out and continue to pour out of the media. Again, I cannot stop, so much so that despite reading excellent analyses and the report's Executive Summary I insist on reading the primary source -- the 267 page report.
I don't know what more I can learn that I haven't so far, or that I can't extrapolate. Perhaps it is a complicated act of atonement, or moral education akin to watching Shoah, or viewing the PBS series, The Civil War. I don't know. Just as success has many fathers, shame has many cousins -- denial and avoidance, rationalization, defensive rage, retributive justice and reform to name a few -- and every one of us who have followed this story have felt shame.
It's what I recall as I read some of the anguished commentary from people defending Joe Paterno and by extension, the university and ultimately themselves. They are beyond fact; as will the Paterno family be for the rest of their natural lives. (Mark my words: within a year's time Jay Paterno will publish an as told to book exonerating his father.) It doesn't make it any less infuriating to read, but I understand it. One of my perennial favorites is the lame excuse that "JoePA was an old man and wasn't familiar with man on boy rape." Even if Joe Paterno hadn't gone to mass in 50 years, I'm sure he had a passing familiarity with the Catholic Church's pedophilia scandal and as a grandfather I'm sure he had some personal feelings about all of it even if he never made any public statements about it. (Why, after all, would he be asked about that?). But not to have an inkling of that particular brand of depravity? Even Paterno's contemporary, my sweet Texas born, Baptist stepmother, who is such a lady through and through that she wouldn't shout goddamnit if you dropped a refrigerator on her foot, knows what time it is when it comes to child abuse. If she knows, Paterno knew but it is a fool's errand to argue with those who have everything to psychically lose by facing the truth. It remains for the rest of us to make sense of what has happened. Whether we want to, or not.
It's said that if you want to know something, follow your curiosity. As much as I told myself that I had fiction to write, math to study or bills to pay, on Thursday I kept returning to news about the Report of the Special Investigative Counsel Regarding the Actions of The Pennsylvania State University Related to the Child Sexual Abuse Committed by Gerald A. Sandusky, which will forever be know simply as the Freeh Report, and the associated revelations and analyses that came pouring out and continue to pour out of the media. Again, I cannot stop, so much so that despite reading excellent analyses and the report's Executive Summary I insist on reading the primary source -- the 267 page report.
I don't know what more I can learn that I haven't so far, or that I can't extrapolate. Perhaps it is a complicated act of atonement, or moral education akin to watching Shoah, or viewing the PBS series, The Civil War. I don't know. Just as success has many fathers, shame has many cousins -- denial and avoidance, rationalization, defensive rage, retributive justice and reform to name a few -- and every one of us who have followed this story have felt shame.
It's what I recall as I read some of the anguished commentary from people defending Joe Paterno and by extension, the university and ultimately themselves. They are beyond fact; as will the Paterno family be for the rest of their natural lives. (Mark my words: within a year's time Jay Paterno will publish an as told to book exonerating his father.) It doesn't make it any less infuriating to read, but I understand it. One of my perennial favorites is the lame excuse that "JoePA was an old man and wasn't familiar with man on boy rape." Even if Joe Paterno hadn't gone to mass in 50 years, I'm sure he had a passing familiarity with the Catholic Church's pedophilia scandal and as a grandfather I'm sure he had some personal feelings about all of it even if he never made any public statements about it. (Why, after all, would he be asked about that?). But not to have an inkling of that particular brand of depravity? Even Paterno's contemporary, my sweet Texas born, Baptist stepmother, who is such a lady through and through that she wouldn't shout goddamnit if you dropped a refrigerator on her foot, knows what time it is when it comes to child abuse. If she knows, Paterno knew but it is a fool's errand to argue with those who have everything to psychically lose by facing the truth. It remains for the rest of us to make sense of what has happened. Whether we want to, or not.
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