Joe. Paterno. Is. Dead. Again.

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.

Make Concubinage Legal in America

In the spirit of like-I-have-this-time-to-waste, I have been reading accounts tawdry and, ehem, from the paper of record, serious, about the projectile vomit which is the Schwarzenegger-Shriver scandal.  (And I know I don't have to link to nuthin' because you have, too.)  Things have gotten so bad in the Republican Presidential field that Obama may win a second term in part because the opposing team is so damn bad.  (Remember when Republicans were all a-twitter with proposing constitutional amendments so that a certain Austrian-born naturalized citizen could be eligible to run for President?  Oh where oh where was Orly Taitz then?)

Daniels dropped out -- I sure his wife, Adultress Cheri, Repentant Cheri, has been reading about all things Newt and Callista, and all things Arnold and Maria and said, No.  Oh Hell No! to subjecting herself to that press scrutiny.  So, no Mitch Daniels to kick around any more.  (Yawn.)  And Newt?  He's been punked by the American press and hasn't copped on yet.  The longer he pretends he's running the worse it will get.  And wait until they catch his wife delivering a speech or answering a question on tape.  The 2 of them will be American mincemeat very soon.  Mark my words.  As for Romney, Pawlenty and the rest of them?  Booooooooring.  And we Americans long to be entertained.  But, I digress.

It's polygamy I'm concerned with today, the need to codify and legalize it so we can stop this Oh-Mary pearl-clutching every time some powerful, prominent, full of himself American male exercises his droit de seigneur in our meritocratic, no-royalty-on-this-side-of-the-Atlantic country.  Let Bill have his Monica, and Arnold his Gigi, his Mildred, his... and so on.  And let all the Hillarys and Marias go on about the business of getting older and jowlier.  Let them expose those swinging-like-a-hammock upper arms that are the proud badge of the female crone.  And let Wives No. 1 spend the rest of their lives doing more meaningful work than running interference for the pigs they married, resuming the careers they abandoned, or pursuing the dreams they deferred.

The kind of men they married will always "be among us".  And there will always be women who want them and will do anything to have them.  (See Sinclair, Anne as Lady Macbeth.)  But, why demean an entire life being in association with them?  They should obtain status as a First Wife.  Once achieved they are officially off the hook for their husband's behavior.  (It's more efficient than divorce.)