Shorter Ross “I Would Do Anything For Love, But I Won’t” Douthat

Entertaining, very unfair. Here’s Douthat’s conclusion:

“The best piece about Darío Castrillón Hoyos was written by the Catholic essayist John Zmirak, and his words apply to Joe Paterno as well. Sins committed in the name of a higher good, Zmirak wrote, can “smell and look like lilies. But they flank a coffin. Lying dead and stiff inside that box is natural Justice … what each of us owes the other in an unconditional debt.”

“No higher cause can trump that obligation — not a church, and certainly not a football program. And not even a lifetime of heroism can make up for leaving a single child alone, abandoned to evil, weeping in the dark.”

Sins […] can “smell and look like lilies.
Do not send this man to the florist for a wedding bouquet.

Sins committed in the name of a higher good, Zmirak wrote, can “smell and look like lilies.

Also I am intrigued to learn that there was a higher good motivating Paterno’s crime that might cause a casual observer or an over-subtle casuist to view “complicity in child-rape” as an admirable lily-smelling behaviour.

What Paterno presumably considered “the higher good”, was protecting the church’s image. But no one think that’s OK. I do not get the impression that Douthat does either.

There is a point in saying that otherwise nice people can do horrible things in defense of institutions/ideologies they belong to, and think are good. The message when you say that, isn’t that these people are really nice.

and like Ross has been hanging out with the Care Bears at Castle Care-a-Lot

You sound like a parody of a snarky blogger.

You sound like a parody of a snarky blogger.

Douthat deserves no better.

I read Belle’s post and the comments so far, then I read the Douthat piece itself. Belle is right. Where Douthat goes off the rails is when he asserts that while “bad and mediocre people” sin out of mere habit and weakness, “good” and “heroic” people sin for more exalted reasons, because of “the illusion, common to those who have done important deeds, that they have higher responsibilities than the ordinary run of humankind.” There’s a small amount of truth here–people who have achieved a lot can draw on a more grandiose set of narratives when they feel the need to justify their own misdeeds. But it doesn’t make those misdeeds any better than those of people who have just muddled through life without doing anything heroic.

The trouble with Douthat’s piece is that whatever he grudgingly admits in his last couple of paragraphs, his real rhetorical payload is his earlier assertion of the existence of an elect — of the idea that some people are “bad and mediocre” while others are “good” and “heroic,” and that these qualities are independent of whether or not a particular individual was, for instance, complicit for years in enabling the rape of children. After everything we’ve learned, we’re still supposed to agree that “Joe Paterno is a good man.” I’d be willing to stipulate that Joe Paterno has some good in him if Douthat were also observing that everyone else does, too, but Douthat has already come down hard on the idea that some people are plain old “bad and mediocre” no matter what, and conversely, that some people are “good” no matter what enormities they commit.

Douthat’s real business is to make sure we remember that some people are just plain better, no matter what sins they get up to. This is always and everywhere the heart of conservatism, the idea that certain people are better just because. Once you’ve slipped that idea across you can afford to dole out some to-be-sures in your final sentences. The actual work was done several paragraphs ago.

I’d agree with quite a lot of what Patrick has to say, except that again his reading of Douthat is too glib:

“But good people, heroic people, are led into temptation by their very goodness — by the illusion, common to those who have done important deeds, that they have higher responsibilities than the ordinary run of humankind. It’s precisely in the service to these *supposed* [emphasis added] higher responsibilities that they often let more basic ones slip away.”

That paragraph would be every bit as offensive as Patrick says, were it not for the use of the word “supposed”. Douthat’s saying fairly plainly that “doing bad things is justified in the name of a higher calling blah blah” is an ill-founded belief.

I don’t have much faith in meritocracy on the op-ed pages, so agreed on the first. Same for blogs like this – I can’t think of one collaborative blog/thing that didn’t include at least one person who made me go “why on earth did they include him? (Right back to Jon Katz on Slashdot)

But as long as you give attention, I think you might as well give consideration, otherwise you’re just contributing to the noise.

I think you give Douthat an ideologically tinged uncharitable reading if you read him as saying much more than “people who do big things risk seeing themselves as justified”. Maybe that’s not terribly deep, or terribly well-argued, but neither are your attempts at snark.

Anatole France makes a similar point to Douhat in ‘The God’s Are Athirst’ when the young idealistic Evariste Gamelin becomes a blood crazed murderer through his enthusiasm for the ideals of the revolution. The difference is that France had the wit to realise that once a line is crossed you become a bad person whatever the inital nobility of your motives. At the end of the book there is no doubt that Evariste is a bad person. If Douhat sympathised with the Jacobins he would claim that Evariste was good irrespective of his actions and that his badness needs explaining in the context of said ‘goodness’. But surely corrupted goodness is not goodness at all?

I was just about to quote the same bit as tomslee, but instead I’ll pull out a sentence from between the two he quotes. This is Douthat describing “bad and mediocre people” when they sin:

The earlier lies or thefts or adulteries make the next one that much easier to contemplate.

Sorry Ross, but this is exactly what Paterno and the Catholic Church did. I keep coming back to McQueary: How did he and his father know that it was necessary to cover up for Sandusky? Even if they hadn’t known Sandusky for decades and been looking the other way for years, they knew that whitewashing sin/crime on behalf of the football program was routine and necessary. They abdicated their responsibility in this instance because they had done so for years, making that abdication “easier to contemplate.”

Bob McManus, #22: I don’t actually think we can establish beyond all doubt whether a particular person is fundamentally “good” or “bad”, which is why it’s wisest for those of us who aren’t God to stick to assessing acts rather than claiming to know the state of particular people’s souls. This is of course one of several reasons to dislike Douthat’s attempt to establish categories of people based on their supposed inherent qualities.

I also don’t think it’s remarkable that in casual speech people, including myself, speak as if some people really are knowably “good guys” or “bad” and so forth. Conversational speech is made up of a lot of approximations. But at the level of precision at which Douthat claims to be operating, taking such liberties is less acceptable.

“An adult” at #21: “He sees the powerful as having gained their place by merit and pities them when they’re corrupted by power. He has less pity for the rest of us.” Yes, exactly.

Is there a problem with believing there are no good or bad people, but only good or bad acts?

Not really, so long as you’re willing to accept that lots of people classify ‘person who has committed a really bad act or perpetrated a really bad negligence/failure to act’ as a ‘bad person’ for shortcut reasons and won’t get on their case about it. There are only good acts and bad acts and neutral acts, and flogging people for reasonable grammatical shortcuts is a bad act. :)

(BTW, I’d agree the general idea of a ‘good person’ is suspect and at the very least far more subjective than ‘bad person’ unless we just use it to mean ‘not a bad person,’ but Douthat seems to be the only one attempting to sincerely assigni ‘good person’ status to anyone — tomslee was mocking. Also ‘bad person’ is subjective in cases where there’s disagreement or controversy between conversation participants that a remarked-upon act or failure to act was ‘bad’ or not, but presumably that concern doesn’t obtain here.)

Is there a problem with believing there are no good or bad people, but only good or bad acts?

There is a practical problem in so much as it becomes difficult to describe people who repeatedly carry out bad acts. In general I tend towards “bad acts” when dealing with the relatively powerless, and “bad people” when dealing with the powerful. Not for moral reasons, but just because labelling somebody a bad person makes it harder for them to survive.

Actually, what’s interesting about Douthat isn’t that he’s a hack, it’s that he’s a slightly clumsy hack. His performance is just labored enough that you can see him palming the cards.

Of course, these problems in Christian ethics go back a loooong way; it’s hardly fair to lay all the blame on poor Ross. I was just yesterday reading an interesting little book about Paul the Apostle (E.P. Sanders, “Paul: A Very Short Introduction), and puzzling through Paul’s sense of ethics with the author: Christians are definitionally good, no matter what beastly things they do, while pagans (and maybe Jews, depending on how Paul felt that morning) are definitionally evil, no matter how well they behave.

Well, said the author, we can’t can’t exactly accuse Paul of being an empricist. Quite so. Douthat is laboring in a long and distinguished tradition of scholarship here.

Cian: Maybe so, but then it wasn’t demonstrated in this particular article.

Patrick Nielsen Hayden: maybe so, but I couldn’t spot it this time.

If you’ve decided a certain writer is a hack, and want to expose him as such, pick one where it’s obvious even to people who don’t assume every word to he says is insincerity laced with honey. Otherwise, it’s just stupid to give him attention. It just looks like an ideological hatefest.

Hearing Chris Matthews the other night claim that we all expect people like priests and Saint Joe Paterno to exist on a “higher moral plain” than the rest of us (speak for yourself, Chris), I thought immediately of this confused Douthat column. The fathers-and-sons motif running through this whole saga is stunning. A particular model of the father-son relationship. Fathers as beneficent but absolute authority, with females in the wings supporting the father (or expected to do so — oh, those pesky mothers of the Seven Mile charity victims).

And they can’t spell.

Calling me a part of a “cadre of online defenders” is a great way to make me a phenomenon to be analyzed, talked about rather than talked with. But it’s wrong anyway. I am hardly a fan of Douthat. I just don’t see him as particularly more “hackish” than typical for an op-ed writer. I strongly agree he does not deserve a podium, I just think very few people do.

Uncle Kvetch suggests that it is Douthat’s job to defend catholics. Well, who pays him for that? Compare it to a real hack, namely Bill Kristol. Kristol did in fact have a job defending certain evil policies, and he was actually paid for it. Defending his team, no matter what (which is incidentally what the plain reading of this article makes out to be a serious sin) was absolutely part of Douthat’s predecessor’s job description.

Maybe it’s from mostly following climate “debate”, but I probably have a somewhat higher threshold for calling someone a hack. I’ve seen nothing to indicate Douthat doesn’t work in good faith and espouse his own views – misguided as they may possibly be, incompetenly as it may possibly be.

@PNH
But also, he doesn’t say whether they are “good” because they fulfilled their roles as good fathers, husbands, and members of the community (and presumably church), or because of what they did politically, or for some other reason. Similarly, he doesn’t say whether they “sinned” because they went too far in being good church members, or in being involved “in the world,” or for some other reason. If it’s not the first, in each case, he’s actually supporting the idea that the child molester who never misses a mortgage payment and helps at the soup kitchen every week is a better man than the famous surgeon who’s never set foot in a church, and that the former should always be defended and the latter always attacked.

Douthat is one of the few remaining NYTs columnists who isn’t consistently bland and predictable. I disagree with pretty much anything he has ever written, but I’ll still take him over Bill Keller any day.
So Douthat writes a column struggling with questions of sins vs. sinners etc. So, yes, he fails, it’s not a great column, I agree. But I don’t really get why people think it’s a dishonest column. Even less do I understand why it’s supposed to be hackery. It’s not like it’s a terribly flattering column about the Catholic church.
I think taking cheap shots at people with opposing political views based on super-uncharitable readings of their columns is much more typical of hackery.

Speaking of hackery, look what we have here: David Brooks has managed to make Ross Douthat look thoughtful and profound.

I guess the fact that Douthat resisted the temptation to blame it all on the hippies has to count for something.

Uncle Kvetch gets to the point here: it’s ridiculous to take this essay as merely arguing its explicit point, which is an empty, meaningless, “indeed, sometimes good people do bad things.” The REAL point is the hidden premise, “prominent Catholic = heroically good person.” The goal is to head off the line of thinking that leads people, when they see bishops covering up sex scandals, to start thinking that the Catholic Church is Bad Institution, and replace it with one that somehow lets those scandals highlight the essential goodness of the church.

Calling me a part of a “cadre of online defenders” is a great way to make me a phenomenon to be analyzed, talked about rather than talked with.

The extent to which one is a welcome part of the discussion can perhaps be inferred from this, no?

Maybe there exist coherent circumstances in which aiding and abetting sexual abuse would be a sin committed in the name of a higher good, as Douthat explicitly and specifically claims is the case here. I neither can imagine nor desire the capability to imagine what those circumstances could be.

The words “in the name of” are definitely the most important words here. It’s not attempting to assert “Paterno may be a good man even though he screwed up horribly here,” it’s asserting something like ‘Paterno’s aiding and abetting sexual assault was an evil means to a good end.‘ Douthat’s reflexive defenders might do well to expound upon the specific good they feel Paterno was able to accomplish through his decision to not interfere with ongoing sexual abuse perpetrated by one of his subordinates.

First of all, kudos to Belle for reading the piece before having an opinion about it.

A charitable reading of Douthat’s column is that he’s saying that Paterno and Castrillón convinced themselves that certain evils must be overlooked in the service of a greater good, but they are wrong. For Castrillón and others in the Catholic hierarchy, “they somehow persuaded themselves that protecting their institution’s various good works mattered more than justice for the children they were supposed to shepherd and protect”, but “not even a lifetime of heroism can make up for leaving a single child alone, abandoned to evil, weeping in the dark”.

In Belle’s terms, Douthat says that Paterno and Castrillón *believed* p (pars 1-5), but actually, not p holds (pars 6-7).

I don’t believe the Catholic church or college football represent a greater good, but the important thing for Douthat’s column is not so much what is true, but what Paterno and Castrillón believed, and that their “heroism” in the service of that belief was misguided.

That’s the charitable reading. Now since Douthat is a bad, bad man, maybe an uncharitable reading is more appropriate, and he’s allowing Paterno and Castrillón the honor of being seen as great tragedies, as a backdoor to a forgiveness they don’t deserve.

Maybe that’s right, but it requires an *extremely* uncharitable reading. And such interpretations can form a closed loop: Douthat is a bad, bad man, and therefore everything he says can only be given the worst possible interpretation, which is very bad, and therefore because of all those bad things he says, he’s a bad, bad man.

A question on pronounciation – the title suggests his name should be pronounced like ‘do that’. Is that right? I’d be happy to know – I’ve been saying it like ‘doubt hat’ for quite a while, and I don’t want to look any more foolish than I probably already have done . . .

Back when I followed college football as a kid, make that college student, Joe Paterno was one of the people I disliked intensely, a real bully and manipulator of the media whose teams (back in the days before instant replay when this was pretty easy a la USC) always seemed to get a little help from the referees, like John Capelleti being given a touchdown when his knee hit at the two and he crawled into the end zone. People like that are often charitable in their later years (also a Catholic tradition), so I would discount much of what Mr. Alpers said above.

I remember sitting in Saint Peter’s on Holy Thursday 1980 and listening to John Paul II’s repulsive sermon on what is still my favorite feast of the ecclesiastical year. The guy seemed to think that Jesus has become incarnate to boost the egos of priests. In mine own service as a eucharistic minister years later I rejoiced in the fact that we were all equally loved by a loving God; the notion that I was better than the communicant and the priest was better than me never entered my head. So Douthat is a very bad man, put up by people who despise all that was admirable in Catholicism.

For what it’s worth in my Catholic days I divided the people into the flawed, the bad, and the out of control. The good wasn’t a category.

Kiwanda@56, I don’t think the argument is that Douthat is “allowing Paterno and Castrillón the honor of being seen as great tragedies, as a backdoor to a forgiveness they don’t deserve.” Douthat wants to separate them from common evil-doers in order to defend the corrupt institutions that Paterno and Castrillón served.

Douthat wants to make it about Paterno and Castrillón, so we don’t start thinking about the Catholic Church and bigtime college sports.

Aulus Gellius@52 put it this way:

The goal is to head off the line of thinking that leads people, when they see bishops covering up sex scandals, to start thinking that the Catholic Church is Bad Institution, and replace it with one that somehow lets those scandals highlight the essential goodness of the church.

Think about McQueary, McQueary’s father, Paterno, AD Curley, VP Schultz and President Spanier. Every single person who confronted this – at least six people – made the same decision. That isn’t some kind of weird coincidence; it’s not aberrant behavior. The Penn State system was designed to produce this result. That’s what Douthat doesn’t want you to think about.

Douthat’s real business is to make sure we remember that some people are just plain better, no matter what sins they get up to. This is always and everywhere the heart of conservatism, the idea that certain people are better just because.

As usual, PNH gets it just right.

Politicalfootball @56 hits it on the head. Kiwanda @56, I think, misses the point of contention. Douthat is not being accused of exonerating Paterno and Castrillón. He condemns them, we condemn them. For the record: Boo to child rape.

But “Boo to child rape” is not much of a theme for so lofty an object as a New York Times opinion column. Douthat wished to say more than that. He seemes to have said two things, one of which is unobjectionable. The other is grotesque.

The unobjectionable thing is, in Kiwanda’s phrasing, “[they] convinced themselves that certain evils must be overlooked in the service of a greater good, but they are wrong.” Well, yes.

The grotesque thing is the idea that there are “good and heroic” people in the world, and there are “bad and mediocre” people in the world–but you can’t tell whether a person is “good” or “bad” by simply observing what they do. Both good and bad people do terrible things, but they sin in _different ways_. Bad people sin because they are weak. Good people sin because they are so very good in the first place.

This is so illuminating precisely because it wasn’t the _point_ of the column; it was just a passing comment that Douthat felt no particular need to develop or defend. The division of humanity into the heroic and the wicked, the elect and the damned, the good and the bad, without any reference to what people actually do, say, or believe, is fundamental to his worldview. It is the water in which he swims.

“Maybe it’s from mostly following climate “debate”, but I probably have a somewhat higher threshold for calling someone a hack. I’ve seen nothing to indicate Douthat doesn’t work in good faith and espouse his own views – misguided as they may possibly be, incompetenly as it may possibly be.”

Absolute lack of logical sense, making tortured arguments which end up at an ideologically-predisposed conclusoin?

I think that Douthat’s point is that this is a “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” situation.

The Penn State football team can only succeed if enough young boys are assaulted. Now that we know this we must ask ourselves the question if that is not a sufficient price to pay.

@Kaveh – I understand, but I don’t agree that the argument only makes sense if you minimize the evil of child rape (“abuse” still seems a rather euphemistic term for what happened).
The whole point of the column, as I read it, is to wrap his mind around how people who had been “good” even “heroic” in their lives up to then*, could be complicit in acts of such magnitude of evil. I don’t think you need to minimize the evil for this argument to make sense. Douthat doesn’t think the people are still “good” in the balance of things in the end: “And not even a lifetime of heroism can make up for leaving a single child alone.” I just don’t see how that minimizes child rape.
The whole “they didn’t concern themselves with lowly things” is a paraphrasing of their thought process, clearly not condoned by Douthat.

[btw. I think Craig’s critique of the whole idea of “good,” “bad,” and “mediocre” people is very much on point. But I don’t think it has anything to do with Belle’s original post.]

*and I agree with others that this seems like a stretch for Paterno. So he didn’t let his athletes skip class and he donated a couple of the millions he made back to the University – seems like a low bar for “heroic”.

One of the things that Douthat elides about Castrillón and Paterno is the nature of their crimes. Neither is accused of molesting children. Both demonstrated that they put their own public images above everything. Yet Douthat asks us to trust that these manufactured images reflect reality.

Douthat describes Castrillón as a man who

reputedly made his way to Pablo Escobar’s house disguised as a milkman to demand that the drug kingpin confess his sins.

He reputedly did this. Given the success these guys had in the ruthless management of their own reputations, why should we trust any narrative that originates from them or their acolytes?

belle:

Is Michael going to weigh in on this?

Is Michael going to weigh in on this?

Do you really think his now-unfortunate job title requires him to?

Can’t help feeling that if Douthat weren’t such a bad writer, he might have made an important point, or at least posed an interesting question. It is, after all, something of a mystery that one and the same person (not Paterno, but apparently the archbishop) can behave nobly at one time and disgracefully at another. Maybe the puzzle is not so much a moral or psychological one as a linguistic one: what is this term “person,” whose normal usage leads us to be so surprised at the coexistence within the same linguistic space of A and not-A? A reminder that nouns are fictions and that the world is simply a field (many fields) of events.

It’s all about success worship, deference to hierarchy, and institutional loyalty. Good conservative American values.

As various people have already wondered, how can Douthat bring himself to apply the word “heroism” to the job of coaching football? Do meanings mean nothing to him?

But this is a writer capable of losing himself in his own rhetoric to the point of describing “complicity in child rape” as “smell[ing] and look[ing] like lilies” when performed by the right person.

Douthat is wrong. These people weren’t morally upstanding except for a few lapses. They committed real crimes with real victims, and lost all moral authority they might have had with it. That’s what makes his argument ridiculous: we’re asked to assent to a premise that all know now isn’t true.

Duranty is immortal and will always be the typical liberal journalist.

A foot ball program that has brought meaning and joy to hundreds of thousands

So, roughly the same “greater good” as the producers of Jersey Shore have created.

And now, another bastion of masculinist authority/ariansm admits to inaction:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/11/14/the-citadel-faces-child-a_n_1092348.html

One Jewish view that I have learned about this whole mess is that as the good inclination gets strong, the evil inclination gets equally strong, in order to allow people freedom of choice. So there may be some things that are obviously bad and contemptible that [random person] would never do but there are things that you have yet to learn that you would never do that will tempt you. And a weapon that the evil inclination has is complacency– “I do all of these good things” or “If I report this my reputation/ability to do good things will be taken away.” None of which excuses anyone.

@70
He asserts only that the failures of the great are tragic and the faiures of the small are to be taken for granted.

That’s bad enough.

Well, I’m burning my Shakespeare’s Collected Works then.

Douthat describes Castrillón as a man who
reputedly made his way to Pablo Escobar’s house disguised as a milkman to demand that the drug kingpin confess his sins.

So the best evidence to be adduced for the Archbishop’s heroism is that if his hagiography is to be believed, he put pressure on a ruthless criminal to take part in a meaningless ritual that would have made no difference to the criminal’s behaviour? Really?

Most of us fall into sin through our weaknesses. That’s common, and not very interesting. Some of us fall into sin through our strengths. That’s uncommon and very interesting, as the Greek tragedians knew. I doubt that Paterno and Castrillon are Oedipus. I’m damn sure Douthat ain’t Sophocles.

I’d like to second Patrick Nielsen Hayden. Douthat is always a prat, and often an offensive prat at that.

In the past I’ve brought up his sneering little article about himself and a bunch of other Harvardians, confronted by a waiter who went to Tufts. I think that effort is apposite here: he’s always bifurcating humanity into honestiores and humiliores, and we needn’t doubt where he sees himself. I also recommend the article’s magical properties : within me it caused to appear, out of nowhere, a sudden dislike for Harvard students.

And yes, I was looking for an excuse to say honestiores and humiliores.

If we’re talking about saintly child-molesters, we need look no further than Marcel Maciel: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Josemar%C3%ADa_Escriv%C3%A1 Perhaps in Douthat’s mind Paterno is standing in for Maciel.

In the past I’ve brought up his sneering little article about himself and a bunch of other Harvardians, confronted by a waiter who went to Tufts.

I just read that Crimson piece — I’d never heard of it before. What a truly vile piece of work he is.

…the only way to determine the best English departments in the US is by way of a national playoff.

And may the best band win.

No . . . it’s just as snotty as I remembered.

We in the criminal law business are fond of a saying, “A man is not as bad as the worst thing he has ever done.” It’s often true.

Kaveh – I actually did that thought experiment. Think, e.g. of postwar communists. Many of them were genuinely good people. Some of them had been heroic (actually heroic – not “endowed a chair” heroic) in their resistance against Nazi occupiers (or in the case of German communists the Nazi regime at home).
Yet many of them closed their eyes to the atrocities of Stalinism, continued to actively support the regime etc.
I know it’s not a perfect analogy – postwar Western European communists didn’t have a police to go to etc. – but I think the general idea is quite similar. And I certainly don’t think asking the question why good, heroic people with, until then, their politicla hearts in the right place, would support Stalinism at all minimizes its cruelty

Sebastian(1) @ 67: @Salient: I’m confused now. I thought you were the arbiter of “[t]he extent to which one is a welcome part of the discussion” here.

Ooo, what a great idea. Salient for Crooked Timber moderator!

We’d get about a 500 percent improvement in the conversational atmosphere, at the cost of a mere pittance taken from each of the front posters! Salient, you’d gladly work your butt off for 17 pittances, right? And front posters, you’d gladly give a pittance each to support the worthy efforts of Salient and see your blog improved 500%, right?

I’m so glad that’s settled. Thank you, Sebastian (1)! (And you’ll kick in the pony, right?)

Malacylpse:

I had no idea that was Michael’s official title until I looked it up just now. All I knew was that he’s a very smart and humane man and an expert on cultural studies and actually within the very culture that appears to be a critical factor in this case.

Bill Benzon:

Thanks for the update, for a reason that you’ll see below may be bitterly ironic.

Michael:

Sorry for the pressure. I’ve been sort of collecting links and videos of people commenting on this story who were simply absolutely mind-boggled. Good people. Smart people. People from within the culture–Jon Ritchie, Centre County-raised, Stanford educated, friend of Sandusky, on ESPN for instance. That’s because I’m mind-boggled, too.

So then I was wondering, who the hell could comment on this story who I could trust and who could help me un-boggle? And I thought of you. I suppose that was selfish of me, so again, sorry for the pressure.

Hi,

Do you think it might finally now be the right time to start dealing with at least a few of the most critical issues regarding our long-held, totally dysfunctional, religio-philo-psycho-sexual socialization processes? How would you describe your own? Are you totally “normal” as a result of that experience [pulling out my deep-probe, fine-gradation, bell-curve scale on you, [and I won’t need a log graph either]]?

No matter how many national leaders throughout history have already fallen, does it actually take the fall of a college football icon to finally create critical mass on this issue?

As far as I can tell, these “falls from grace” are a universal, historical, endemic, international problem, and probably most of us have also somehow been victims of it in some way or another at least during some time in our lives. Young people are particularly vulnerable.

Too bad though, it seems to me that as of now there are still no real honest brokers on this subject anywhere in sight. Sigmund Freud at least gave it a try, but he was shot down in flames almost immediately. Doesn’t “objective” academia have any responsibility to lead us through this shit?

Yes, we have laws, and we should enforce them, and we should enforce them on ALL the perpetrators. But in the meantime, we should also look at the impossible, hypocritical, psycho-socio-religio-edifice we’ve created within which we are all expected to live and conform. Do you really believe that is going to happen any time soon?

In the meantime, the regular, continuing, outrages are predictable.

So have a nice day,
Antti

It’s weird. You’ve worked yourself up so much that you seem to think I’m going disagree with you that the assistant coach was really bad. Doesn’t the logic of my statement kind of require that I think he acted really badly? Or do you think I was paying him some kind of compliment by comparing him to Duranty?

“Important intellectuals who looked away from Stalin’s reign of terror were single-minded people led astray by too-fast adherence to political principles. ”

Yeah they were. And it was fucking awful of them to provide cover for the mass murders. intentional starvation campaigns, genocide and gulags. (Scary that ‘gulags’ is the least of the evils). I don’t see why ‘too-fast adherence to political principles’ is any more of an excuse than ‘I thought Paterno did great things in my community’.

My whole point is that people are willing to do some seriously bad shit to defend institutions or ideologies that they believe in.

I think the fact that Stalin was defended for so long by so many (and even worse Mao–I mean fool me once, but come on) is crazy, but it is a particular kind of crazy that seems really really common among human beings. Hell Pol Pot convinced people to kill their teachers and parents over an ideology that had already proven to be murderous without leading to anything good. Catholics end up defending priests who raped their children. People look the other way on petty evils defend structures they want to support.

When I compare him to Duranty (who was fully aware of the starvation campaign while he was reporting that it wasn’t happening) that isn’t an excuse for either of them. They both did really awful things in support of things that they for their own stupid reasons thought were more important. Why is supporting Stalin by knowingly and publicly reporting lies about his murder campaigns, for ideological reasons supposed to be better than supporting Paterno for the good you thought he did in your community?

Yes the coach was stupid to think that any alleged good was worth hushing up a child rape. Of course he was! But there wasn’t any alleged good worth hushing up the Ukranian starvation campaign either. In neither case should any outsider with a drop of common sense think that it was worth it.

But people do.

All the fucking time.

And it is scary. I’m fully with you that it is awful. But it isn’t some mysterious awful that we see only every now and then. It is part of how lots of humans operate lots of the time. THAT is what is seriously scary.

Salient for Crooked Timber moderator!

Seconded.

ohdeargodno

Ah but if you wanted the job you’d be no good for it.

Sebastian #132: My whole point is that people are willing to do some seriously bad shit to defend institutions or ideologies that they believe in.

That’s not what I get from your comments. If that was your point, no one would bother disagreeing because it’s obvious. But it’s not relevant: when I go back to Douthat’s article, I can’t see that we are reading the same thing at all. The article is not a universal story of the tragedy that people (all people) are capable of doing bad stuff because of their beliefs. Instead he presents these particular and apparently undeniable crimes (at least, he doesn’t deny them) as part of a tragic arc of specific “heroic”, “virtuous” people, while similar crimes carried out by less prominent people are part of a different story – that “Bad and mediocre people are tempted to sin by their own habitual weaknesses.” They are just bad people.

Imagine these stories presented to a judge. They are clearly presented to invoke an identification with the flawed but “virtuous”, and a dismissive lack of identification with the anonymous “bad and mediocre”.

There are bad people lurking out there, but Douthat explicitly excludes Castrillón and Paterno from their ranks.

Belle Waring said:

The only reason Catholics like Joe Paterno and Darío Castrillón Hoyos are able to commit such uniquely awful crimes is because they are ethical in a way that run-of-the-mill godless folk cannot understand. Plus, I hereby stipulate that raping children is, admittedly, bad, mumble…[makes mysterious, several-part gesture with hand and wrists which magically resolves obvious contradictions.]

This is a wilfully misleading and scurrilous post. I always distrust journalists who neglect to quote chapter and verse the source they are attacking. Here is what Douhat actually said about Paterno and Hoyos:

Sins committed in the name of a higher good, Zmirak wrote, can “smell and look like lilies. But they flank a coffin. Lying dead and stiff inside that box is natural Justice … what each of us owes the other in an unconditional debt.” No higher cause can trump that obligation — not a church, and certainly not a football program. And not even a lifetime of heroism can make up for leaving a single child alone, abandoned to evil, weeping in the dark.

Doesn’t sound like a “mysterious…hand-waving gesture” to me. More like calling a spade a spade, but with some some charity towards the spade-wielder. Ross Douhat is one of the few honest and sane conservative pundits in the MSM, who actually understands conservatism. A rare and endangered species, he deserves better than this travesty.

The “crimes” (no charges laid) for which Paterno and Hoyos stand accused were sins of omission, not commission. They did not rape any children, at worst, they failed to denounce suspected child rapists or the protectors of such, out of loyalty to their church or team. I am not an expert on calculus but that looks like the second derivative of a crime.

That does not make their tribalism right but nor does it make them “uniquely awful crim[inals]”. They are about on a par with old time fellow travellers (G. A. Cohen I am looking at you), with the qualification that the Soviet Union provided only illusory goods, whilst Catholic Christianity has, by and large, busied itself with good works. I wonder how many Leftists of a certain age could look themselves in the mirror when judged by Miss Waring’s standard?

Hi Belle,

Antti: you mean, should we try to change human society to be more rational and just and free from prejudice and so forth? Um, yes. That what politics is for.>

No, Belle, that’s a bit patroning, and of course it’s not what I meant at all, but I expect you already knew that. I suppose this isn’t a good topic for general discourse and public consumption, but yet here today, on CT, it seems to be a topic of discussion anyway.

I’m concerned about something much more fundamental about our early socialization processes, and especially about how they relate to the formation of our sexual identities, which for most of us, are completely beyond our personal understanding . In fact, I think we’re actually mostly forced to suppress it. I think that’s true for both men and women alike by the way. And I think for some, perhaps even many people, that leads to very dysfunctional and anti-social behaviors and outcomes, as evidenced by this and many other popular issues dujour.

I don’t pretend to have any simple, easy, answers either, but I think it’s obvious that what we have now is completely effed up. And I don’t think we can ever get out of this awful situation until we have a much different cultural environment for dealing with this difficult subject. We should start first with marginalizing the influence of all of the religions on this issue. Then of course we would still have a lot of work to do in all our other cultural spheres.

I think I understand your passion about this though, and I mostly sympathize with it. There’s a lot of human exploitation going on here, and I think that is reprehensible. There are obviously a lot of collateral victims too in all these travesties, as we can clearly see in this latest scenario. I also think much of this is also probably ultimately preventable. But I don’t think it is entirely a “good versus evil” problem. We need to be a bit more understanding about our many human frailties, proclivities, tendencies, and socialization consequences, especially when it comes to the many issues of sexuality and erotic motivations, on which the propagation of our species depends. How can such a simple biological objective become so complicated?

If you think this is simply “good versus evil”, then we are probably going to be “ships passing in the night” on this subject. But you seem to be mostly enraged by the exploitation of children, and the use of force in sexual relations, and I completely share your outrage about those behaviors.

Best regards,
Antti

Sebastian H @ #86 said:

The whole point is that it is a very human thing to hide misdeeds when you are institutionally invested in something that you think is doing good. For some it is communism for others the Catholic church, for others it was Clinton, for others it was the Iraq War. It is something humans do. And pretending that only (or mainly) your political enemies do it is a great way to let really big nasty things grow on your own side. And you pretty much can’t police the other side nearly as well as you can your own side. But institutionally, we don’t like to police our side. So when other people point it out, we don’t think about it seriously, we whine about hippie punching or unpatriotic behavior, depending on which side we are on.

Here here, thats the most un-biased and fair-minded comment posted in the entire history of the blogosphere. The institutional (and ideological) Left and Right tend to close ranks on their own side whilst declaring the other side a free-fire zone. Its what they do.

Cultural conservatives played dumb whilst the Church winked at child abuse. Although the Church has finally got around to making some kind of restitution and repentance. Even now the Right continues to cover up its monotonous record of catastrophic failure, see Pentagon under the neo-cons and Wall Street under the bankstas.

Here in Australia Left-liberals made a complete balls-up of indigenous self-determination, a free-for-all cultural policy which unleashed an epidemic of child rape in remote communities. Finally one lawyer had the guts to file a damning report. A conservative government declared martial law in the Northern Territories which went some way to restoring adult supervision. For her troubles the lawyer was ostracised by Left-liberals, who still, to their eternal shame, continue with the cover up and stone-walling. No one has been held accountable, because every one had the best of intentions, you see.

And don’t get me started on political correctness and pas d’ennemis à gauche.

Ideological goals and institutional rules are ultimately instrumental, rather than intrinsic, goods. The guy who suggested “thou shalt not worship false idols” was on the right track.

I’ve been thinking about Michael Berube’s long comment on and off for hours now. It’s given me greater insight into the Greek tragic chorus (in some plays, at least), the depth of whose painful laments when the disaster comes home to them has sometimes felt to me out of sync with their earlier prudent acquiescence and conventional wisdom. In turn, the Greek tragic chorus gives me a way to think about all of this.
We are invested in our institutions — and shouldn’t we be? Have we really any choice? Isn’t that investment, in some vital way, what it is to be human? Even if our thoughtful and imaginative investment often demands that we utterly transform those institutions? But we need more than conventional wisdom to transform them — after all, the chorus is often, in the end, right, but it is always markedly ineffective.
I’m wondering why Penn State (like my own small liberal arts college) celebrates the coach who actually and truly supports academic endeavors — as if that support legitimated academic endeavors. Shouldn’t things be the other way around? Shouldn’t the auctoritas lie with the professors, who then actually and truly support the value of athletic endeavors? Have we abdicated that authority? If so, why? (And are we thereby complicit, if only through a kind of choral passivity?)
Sorry to get OT Belle’s post, but MB’s comment seemed to me worthy of special consideration.

Belle Waring @ #143 said:

I was going to respond but 137 did already. “I believe Joe Paterno is a good man.” This is an unambiguous statement and the overwraught emotionalism of the close does nothing but obfuscate.

If you add the all the good that Ms Waring (and I for that matter) have ever done it would not come close to the amount of good Joe Paterno has done in his life both on and off the field, even allowing for his moral lapse. Of course Joe Paterno is a Republican, Catholic, crusty old curmudgeon. Thats three strikes!

Jesus was spot on as usual when he scorned the Pharisees.

the amount of good Joe Paterno has done in his life both on and off the field

OK, somebody convince me that achievement in athletic contests, in any role, in any context, has any moral value whatsoever, positive or negative. I assert that they do not. Athletic contests are essentially decorative, mostly harmless, often great fun, but in themselves completely devoid of moral content.

Meanwhile David “We Lack Scripts” Brooks has had time to set his thoughts in order:

In centuries past, people built moral systems that acknowledged this weakness. These systems emphasized our sinfulness. They reminded people of the evil within themselves. Life was seen as an inner struggle against the selfish forces inside. These vocabularies made people aware of how their weaknesses manifested themselves and how to exercise discipline over them. These systems gave people categories with which to process savagery and scripts to follow when they confronted it. They helped people make moral judgments and hold people responsible amidst our frailties.

But we’re not Puritans anymore. We live in a society oriented around our inner wonderfulness. So when something atrocious happens, people look for some artificial, outside force that must have caused it — like the culture of college football, or some other favorite bogey. People look for laws that can be changed so it never happens again.

Umm, err, really, Mr. Scripts? There’s some of that going on, yes, but I see mostly confusion. This “society oriented around our inner wonderfulness”, where is that? On Oprah? In the pages of Deepak Chopra? In the upper reaches of the mighty towers on Wall Street? Or maybe inner wonderfulness is a Koch Brothers product. As for those script-loving Puritans, in this case, who would they have burned first?

His last paragraph:

The proper question is: How can we ourselves overcome our natural tendency to evade and self-deceive. That was the proper question after Abu Ghraib, Madoff, the Wall Street follies and a thousand other scandals. But it’s a question this society has a hard time asking because the most seductive evasion is the one that leads us to deny the underside of our own nature.

Such wisdom there, yes indeed. Think about that David “Mr. Evasive” Brooks: “How can we ourselves overcome our natural tendency to evade and self-deceive.” How indeed? Almost makes me want to break out my Little Derrida Do-It-Yourself Deconstruction Kit.

Whoops! The “But we’re not Puritans…” paragraph is Brooks as well. Sorry.

The way the Republican campaign has been going, we should probably expect Paterno to throw his hat into the Presidential ring within the next couple of weeks.

For some reason this thread has me more than usually frustrated.

#146: If you add the all the good that Ms Waring (and I for that matter) have ever done it would not come close to the amount of good Joe Paterno has done in his life both on and off the field, even allowing for his moral lapse.

I had never heard of Joe Paterno before this scandal, or Darío Castrillón Hoyos, but I feel I’ve read this narrative many times. There are cases where we (the reading/watching public) hear a portrayal of the accused individual and are asked, in agonized tones, to balance their failures or crimes against their achievements, to treat them as rounded individuals with frailties and strengths.

Then there are the other 99% of cases where the accused has no such three-dimensional shape. Will we anguish about Brittney Carvery, 21, of no fixed address, who is accused of accessory after the fact in Toronto? Or will the justice system say that she is just a bad or mediocre person, tempted to sin by her own habitual weakness.

The fact that the judge who gave Jerry Sandusky lenient bail terms has apparently worked with a non-profit set up by Sandusky is more of the same. Who gets empathy and who gets strict sentencing? If we get to know Paterno, to reflect on the pain this is going to cause him and his family, then we need to get to know Brittney Carvery as well, and what brought her to this point in her life. But I doubt that any newspaper will be doing that.

Bill, I feel Derrida is part of the fooling ourselves. As for Brooks I have the answer to his question, but I doubt he will want to hear it. (Hint: it starts with an S and ends in “ism”). But that’s not the issue we have. Joe Paterno knew what he was doing was wrong. The person who reported their discoveries to him trusted him to do, what for whatever reason (fear of retaliation, feeling deeply disturbed by what he just saw, perhaps not wanting to get involved) he could not. (Sorry about the plurality of pronouns.) He had a responsibility to at a minimum report this higher up and fire Sandusky immediately. Sandusky’s employment facilitated his crimes. He did not. I doubt that any degree of sophistry could change the nature of what he did.

Sebastian H 11.14.11 at 7:20 pm

” Well I suppose I could have gone to Duranty winning a Pulitzer prize for cheerleading communism and denying the Ukranian mass starvation. Countenancing the murder of millions might be ‘pretty much the same thing when you think about it’ as hiding child rape.”

When one side has to go back 80 years to find their counter-example, it says something.

I would like to know whether Paterno qualifies for Zizek as a knight of faith. Really, it would clarify the concept for me.

@153
The problem is that Douthat isn’t making an argument, unlike Brooks, to the latter’s eternal credit. Douthat is just meandering around with words like “good” and “mediocre” without caring what his readers will think those words mean (which is why all we can get out of it is “he divides people into two groups”), and he over-relies on readers knowing who he is to get the right point across.

The problem is that Douthat isn’t making an argument, unlike Brooks, to the latter’s eternal credit.

Sorry, bianca, but I’m not going to give Brooks any credit for “People used to know child rape was wrong, but then the hippies came along and told everybody to ‘just do your own thing, man.'”

Uncle Kvetch,
It’s pretty obvious that Douthat and Brooks have pretty much the same prescription for what they believe to be America’s moral ills: religion. Brooks adds modern social science (which he believes can be meshed with religion), and Douthat won’t, but I don’t think that’s the big difference between them. It’s that Brooks says the scandal means we should investigate and change things, and Douthat says the scandal means we should learn to shut our mouths (though of course he doesn’t actually say that, and it’s entirely possible he agrees 100% with David Brooks).

Brooks is confusing because, I think, he would have been a liberal if he’d been in a different place and time. But he came up in the conservative movement (and also, he’s Canadian), and he seems pretty sure only the Republicans can save us.

Brooks: “These systems gave people categories with which to process savagery….”

‘These systems’ also licensed a lot of savagery. Indeed, for some of ‘these systems,’ killing “infidels” wasn’t considered savagery. It was considered a moral obligation.

to me, picking out one sentence from the middle of the column and then taking it to be the main message, even though it is directly contradicted by the columns concluding thoughts, is, to me, the definition of uncharitable reading.

More generally, I want to ask what the point of reading and commenting on Douthat is if you actually take that to be the correct reading. It’s clearly not because you think you can learn anything from it, because what Douthat says is obviously stupid. It also doesn’t appear to be to make an argument against Douthat that’s supposed to convince anyone who isn’t already convinced.
So the only reason left I see is to create a nice in-group feeling of “we’re good, they’re bad, we’re smart, they’re dumb.” That strikes me as neither particularly interesting, nor particularly well suited to a tragedy like this – I don’t think raping children and failing to act while the rape and abuse of children goes on is particularly left wing or right wing – but if that’s what you want.
I find it particularly irksome, that people seem to think/assume it necessary to argue about a child rape along partisan lines (and yes, Brooks’ initial reaction, linked to above in @51, is a much more egregious example of that than anything in this thread). E.g. I have no idea what Barry @160 means by “one side.” I like to use the failures of Western communists and socialists facing Stalinism and Maoism precisely because they were on _my_ side – I can’t really empathize with someone who believes religion or football are any types of higher goods that legitimize much of anything, so I take the closest analog of people who did and/or overlooked evil that I can somehow relate to. I could also point to the failure of the German reform school/alternative pedagogy movement to police child rape, but I figure too few people here know anything about that for it to be useful as an example.

(and since at this point some here seem so enraged that they have stopped to see clearly a public service announcement: Jack Strocchi is a troll – don’t feed.)

Let me offer an obvious observation and a dumb and simple-minded comment.

One. Though Sandusky is the one accused of child molestation, we’re not discussing him. We’re discussing Paterno.

Two. The Paterno discussion would be much easier if he could be put through a Magnetronic Being Splitter that would turn him into four different persons: 1) Paterno the winningest coach in college football, 2) Paterno the benefactor of good things at Penn State, 3) Paterno the figure-head of PSU, and 4) Paterno the guardian of children. If we could do that, then we could execute #4, burn #3 in effigy, give #2 a Let me offer an obvious observation and a dumb and simple-minded comment.

One. Though Sandusky is the one accused of child molestation, we’re not discussing him. We’re discussing Paterno.

Two. The Paterno discussion would be much easier if he could be put through a Magnetronic Being Splitter that would turn him into four different persons: 1) Paterno the winningest coach in college football, 2) Paterno the benefactor of good things at Penn State, 3) Paterno the figure-head of PSU, and 4) Paterno the guardian of children. If we could do that, then we could execute #4, burn #3 in effigy, give #2 a plaque in the lobby of the PSU library, and erect a statue to #1. Alas, the Magnetronic Being Splitter hasn’t been debugged yet, so we can’t do that. We’re stuck with having 1, 2, 3, and 4 in one indivisible person; and we don’t really have a way of making sense of such people. in the lobby of the PSU library, and erect a statue to #1. Alas, the Magnetronic Being Splitter hasn’t been debugged yet, so we can’t do that. We’re stuck with having 1, 2, 3, and 4 in one indivisible person; and we don’t really have a way of making sense of such people.

Sebastian H 11.15.11 at 3:20 pm

” I didn’t have to go back 80 years. That was my second example.”

For which you had to go back 80 years.

“is, to me, the definition of uncharitable reading”

Making five paragraphs of assertions that range from cringeworthy to alarming and from disturbing to sickening, and then tacking on a couple paragraphs that flower up the language while maintaining a painfully high degree of ambiguity, is, to me, the definition of uncharitable writing. God forbid we call that out, though.

Brooks is confusing because, I think, he would have been a liberal if he’d been in a different place and time.

At any given place and time he would have been whatever would have enabled him to do well for himself and associate with the better class of people. He contains multitudes.

At any given place and time he would have been whatever would have enabled him to do well for himself and associate with the better class of people.

I’m not disagreeing with you, but unless I’m confusing Brooks with someone else, he got his start in real journalism by writing a parody of William F. Buckley at a time when Buckley was trying to recruit large numbers of college students for the new “conservative movement.” So to put it the opposite way, any left-liberal might have his job at the Times if there had been a left-liberal recruiting college kids with Brooks’s interests and approach, in the way Buckley had been doing, in the late 1980s.

Bill Benzon @179 (part two): I was trying to make a somewhat related dumb and simple-minded point @83 and 94.

Also, I don’t see how Douthat can write any column about the acts of a top Catholic Priest without referring to the fact that his decisions as part of the hierarchy were not in conflict at all with Catholic practice and teaching on the subject of “scandal.” For the Priest to be viewed as “tragically misguided” out of something noble, pure, and selfless –love of the good done by the organization–you would have to posit that the organization itself wasn’t asking him to aid and abet its continuity by covering up child molestation on a grand scale. But its trivially obvious that not only was the Priest rewarded for his coverup (so, not doing it from purely disinterested motives) but it was institutional policy that things should be covered up (following protocol with respect to the importance of shielding the church from scandal). He was at no time acting independently at all.

Douthat doesn’t discuss this in his column but his analysis assumes that “great and good men” act while mediocre and flawed men react. He’s arguing that the sins of the little men result from the “no missing a slice off a cut loaf” attitude of the petty person. Since they are never achieving anything or acting out of the common their motives and their sins are always presumed to be self interested. His great men are above that–their goals, like their sins, are for the common good. But there’s just no way to assert that under the circumstances. Both the Priest and Paterno were, in fact, petty apparatchiks in a larger system that rewarded them for precisely that attitude–hey! no one misses a slice off a cut loaf. The harm’s already been done! That they, in Douthat’s version, mistook the future and reputation of the organization for being as important as the future and reputation of the littlest adulterer and thief doesn’t make the choice of the coverup any less culpable.

aimai

“An adult”: I don’t think it’s individualists against individualism. Douthat is arguing quite simply from a different premise.

For Douthat, it’s more like: “Silly liberals, expecting Joe Paterno to suffer the same for covering such a horrendous crime as some shmoe down the street. That’s your ridiculous equality-of-outcome things. Paterno used his opportunity to build enormous goodwill and social capital within his tribe, and now the silverbacks are closing ranks, as they should. You have the same equality-of-opportunity, you know, and you blew it. Don’t expect me to write an elegiac in your defense. You’re not important enough.”

geo@186. Yes, you were. Perhaps we need to repeat the dumb and simple-minded idea yet a fourth time? This is one of those “it does not compute” problems that distinguishes human beings from super-smart computers hell-bent on world domination.

PS – Bill: Just clicked on your name tag and discovered your website. Wow!

Thanks, geo. Though my current pet project does seem rather far afield from the PSU mess.

“AC”:
Actually, I thought I had to word that to make room for someone like Leon Wieseltier on the other side, but even before he decided to interpret the whole of the Talmud for a mainstream press, in the 1980s he recruited . . . Andrew Sullivan.

It’s true that a depressingly large number of people might not have intervened if they saw a middle-aged man sodomizing a ten year-old — though I am aware of no evidence that things have gotten worse in that respect since the damned hippies took over. But even in our degenerate times, lots of people still would intervene. I, personally, have intervened to prevent a cruel act nowhere near as bad, and many people I know have done so, too. And none of us is particularly heroic. Maybe Brooks ought to spend more time talking to the common run of folks at Applebee’s salad bar.

It’s now being reported, e.g. on the NewsHour, that McQueary has sent e-mails in which he says that he did stop the assault that he witnessed; the grand jury report didn’t include this because it is a compressed summary of a lot of testimony. (Of course, even assuming this is true, which it may or may not be, it still leaves the issue of his subsequent apparent failure to report what he saw to anyone outside the university.)

Sebastian(1) @ #174 said:

to me, picking out one sentence from the middle of the column and then taking it to be the main message, even though it is directly contradicted by the columns concluding thoughts, is, to me, the definition of uncharitable reading

That was my conclusion already upthread at #138, good to see some one’s paying attention:

I always distrust journalists who neglect to quote chapter and verse the source they are attacking. Here [in the concluding par of the column] is what Douhat actually said about Paterno and Hoyos:

And not even a lifetime of heroism…

Which makes Sebastian(1)’s concluding obiter seem bizarre:

(and since at this point some here seem so enraged that they have stopped to see clearly a public service announcement: Jack Strocchi is a troll – don’t feed.)

A little more self-awareness, a little less self-regarding waffle might help you in your travels.

There are six comments in this thread that criticize McQueary on the basis of the indictment. It now appears that he may not only have stopped the incident he witnessed but also reported it to the authorities. “Innocent until proven guilty” is the right stance to take in all public discussions about culpability, for heroes and mediocrities alike.

In the interest of piling on tomslee, I’ll add that I would expect a pedophile caught mid-rape to stop. As best as I can figure, McQueary’s defense – and that of the others involved in the coverup – is that they asked that Sandusky not rape children at Penn State.

oops
…since, which neither prosecutors nor the university seem inclined to try to stop, and …

The AP lede says that McQueary’s e-mail contradicts what the grand jury report said, but the story doesn’t seem to back that up. I’d say he amplifies on the content of the report.

The grand jury notes that Sandusky and the victim both saw McQueary. Reading that, I assumed Sandusky stopped raping the child, but it’s true that the grand jury report doesn’t actually say that. Nor does it say that McQueary spoke, but I don’t read it as having said he didn’t speak. It did say that McQueary “left immediately, distraught.” I think that still leaves time for McQueary to speak.

Here’s McQueary on the police:

I did have discussions with police and with the official at the university in charge of police

The grand jury report is clear that he spoke to VP Schultz – a week-and-a-half later. So maybe he eventually had a chat with a cop, too. What the grand jury says is that McQueary was never “questioned” by police. I don’t see McQueary as contradicting that.

If McQueary said he called the cops that night, he would be contradicting the strong impression left by the grand jury report, and would considerably mitigate his fault in the matter. But he doesn’t say that.

The “grammatical shortcut” responses to bob mcmanus’s question seem disingenuous, or at least superficial. What’s being argued is mostly: what is the correct amount to hate the candidate moral monster Paterno? Which is basically a celeb-infused culture war bullshit issue.

Perhaps someone could come up with a list of good deeds that would equal a child rape. Maybe this is like the torture debate about how it is worth it to torture one person to stop the bomb from exploding.

One child rape = a college library?

I am neither an economist nor a philosopher nor a university administrator, so perhaps I am wading deeper than I should. But, I am guessing that Paterno will need to fully fund a lot of humanities departments before he equals out the scales.