Penn State CULTure

An Open Letter to the Media:

Your claim to understand the "Penn State Culture" is a bit like taking a picture of the Eiffel Tower and calling yourself a Frenchman.  The truth is, few of you have ever visited Happy Valley, and those who have were only there for football. You have never braved a State College winter, smuggled a chicken cosmo out of a dining hall, pulled an all-nighter at the Diner, listened to reggae on the HUB lawn or felt a deep loss when it was announced that elms couldn't be saved.  You may know how the phrase "We Are" came to be, but you will never understand what it means.

WE ARE the millions who loved our coach, not because we were blinded by football fever, but because we looked beyond the football field.  WE saw the millions of dollars the Paterno family gave to academic projects.  WE saw the "Grand Experiment" become institution-wide, with academic honors and graduation rates for all Nittany Lion athletes exceeding those of the general student population at nearly every major university.  WE saw Ki-Jana Carter lose a Heisman and our team lose rankings because Joe refused to run up the score against our opponents and because he called you out on your inane questions and the many times you misquoted him or took his words out of context.

WE ARE appalled by your characterization of our football program and its staff as "win-at-all-costs."  WE supported them during the lean years at the beginning of the last decade when you were calling for JoePa's head.  WE saw a program that continued to garner blue-chip recruits without promising them early starts and while making it clear to them that they would be held to a higher standard of academic performance and personal conduct than their counterparts at other top programs.  WE saw that staff pass on some extremely talented players who were unwilling to do it The Penn State Way.  WE saw our star receiver dismissed before a bowl game for skipping class.  WE knew the bye weeks were important to our coach because he wanted to give his players time off to study for midterms, even with the Michigan game coming up.

WE ARE the ones who endured years of barbs about our coach's age.  WE heard you call him senile, say the game had passed him by, he has lost control, he is out of touch.  And now WE hear you call him the mastermind of a criminal cover-up that fooled everyone for years on end.  WE know that Sandusky hasn't had an office right down the hall from Joe for thirteen years.  WE know that "liability" is more likely to refer to bodily injury than risk of molestation.  WE have read the Freeh Report in its entirety and have used the skills WE honed at Penn State to critically examine the "evidence."

WE ARE, WE always will be, and WE will never allow you to define us.

Freehlance Investigations Opens PA Office

Well slap my pullitzer and call me Nancy Drew, I have solved the Case of the Puppetmaster!  It's Joe Paterno.  I know it's bad form to start with a conclusion, but you may not have time to read the whole story and I'm sure you want to know whodunnit.  So feel free to just take my word for it.  I'm awesome.  And really smart. And important.  And I make a lot of money.

So I figured the best place to find a smoking gun was in 1998.  Why else would the NCAA have vacated wins since then, right?  There it is, the crucial evidence. In emails dated May 6th and 13th Curley mentioned that Coach, probably Joe, wanted to know what was going on. Aha!  See, that's what's so brilliant about Joe; he pretended not to know what was happening and got Curley to mention him in these emails so as to divert attention away from himself as the puppet master.  He had to keep a low profile, not involve himself in the process, not get in on the conversation, basically be unaware of the investigation in order to hide the fact that he was secretly...

Oh crap.

Apparently there were a bunch of local and state cops and social workers who investigated the allegations against Sandusky but decided there wasn't enough evidence to make any sort of charge.  But Louis Freeh said those people were overworked and not equipped to understand what they were dealing with, so it's not their fault.  Joe Paterno, on the other hand, had an Ivy League education, and had spent 48 years coaching football, so he should know better than...

Oh crap.

Yeah but there's more.  Apparently, during all of this, Sandusky was negotiating his retirement.  That's the key my friends.  It seems that scoundrel Paterno thought giving Sandusky's Second Mile kids unrestricted access to athletic facilities would open the school up to liability.  Obviously this had to be about molestation because no way could a football coach think personal injury liability.  How ridiculous.  If that were the case, then sports facilities all over the place would require people to sign waivers and...

Crap again.

But then this got me thinking that maybe Joe Paterno was psychic.  Couldn't that explain how he was able to win 409 football games?  Or was it 308?  Can't remember.  But that would explain the importance of the year 1998 wouldn't it?  But then I figured those geeky kids on Paranormal State would have surely uncovered that by now.  Maybe this whole paragraph didn't need to be included here since it isn't really related to the case, and I hope it doesn't stop you from reading further because your eyes are tired or anything like that because I would hate for you to miss the really important things at the end of this because you have other things to do.  I decided to go ahead and include it in the name of thoroughness.  Is that a word?  Not sure, but it's easier to pronounce than obfuscation.

Where was I?  1998, 1999, somewhere in there.  So the puppet master asked for Sandusky's access to be limited, and since he ran that place it was and...

Crap.

Ok, but wait, it seems our Mr. Paterno made only a token appearance at Sandusky's retirement party.  A famous and popular man like Joe Paterno would have to lead a very active social life and leaving that party early proves he knew Sandusky was a monster.  I googled "Joe Paterno party animal shocking photos" and didn't find anything.  Called the Enquirer.  Nada.  Obviously Joe got to them ahead of me.  I did find some stories about him meeting with wealthy alums to solicit money for new academic buildings on campus, but they made it sound like he flew in for the meeting and went home to his wife.  Guess he got to them ahead of me too.

Still confused about the 1998 thing, but I am a professional, so I decided to dig deeper.  And there it is, in print and on every television channel in at least this country: Joe did not report the 2001 incident to the police.

Oh crap again.

At this point, the only direct evidence I had left of Joe's complicity was his public confession.  Remember when he said he should have done more, didn't do enough, however it was summarized or paraphrased, it was a confession.  I found the full statement.

Crap

No problem, the answer is not in the details but in the overall culture at Penn State.  I need to look for proof that Joe and his football team ran the place. There were those janitors, the ones who reported it and were fired by Joe because everyone bowed to...

Crap.

And Triponey said Joe ran the place.  She is a brave woman who came forward before Joe's body was cold and opened the door for her oppressed brothers and sisters at the University to join her.  The floodgates opened and...

Crap.

As you can imagine, by this point I was all crapped out.  I couldn't really explain how I knew Joe was the puppetmaster, so I fell back on the one answer that works in all situations.  Because I say so.

Let Freehdom Ring

Tear down JoePa's statue? Abolish Penn State football? Close down the University? Yes, wonderful ideas. But only a beginning.

Right after that we need to tear down Mt. Rushmore, the Washington monument and any other statue, building, park or plaque that honors or bears the name of any of our elder statesmen who owned slaves. After all, these men and those in their employ systematically raped, tortured and starved the generations of human slaves they owned. We must then redesign all of our currency because nearly every coin or banknote depicts one of these despicable humans. No matter that recalling and exchanging all U.S, hard currency will completely crash our economy (so what, those guys were bastards and our currency is offensive because of it?) because step 4 of the plan involves burning the Constitution. Those jackasses considered Blacks three- fifths of a person and allowed those they governed to hang, beat and rape Black citizens for nearly 200 years without penalty.

Next, we must go after the churches. Start with the Catholic churches, since they allowed their priests to molest thousands. Also, their superiors at the Vatican not only harbored Nazi's, but profited immensely from it. Anne Frank wasn't the only child to die in the concentration camps, you know.

Now that the little stuff (slavery, the Holocaust, institutional racism and rape by men of God) has been obliterated, we can move on to what is REALLY wrong in the world- college football.

The ACC, Big Ten, and NCAA must go. One of these bodies allowed the other two to acquire universities with documented institutional cover-ups of multiple rapes and other crimes by their football players and staff. Granted, these crimes were against women and therefore not heinous enough to warrant the firing of a coach or anything, but we must wipe them out anyway. Carnegie Mellon has to go too. Do you know how many children were exploited and killed during the industrial revolution?  Don't forget the military academies.  You think My Lei was an anomaly?

I hope I'm not leaving anyone out, but the whole Penn State scandal has me so righteously indignant and morally superior that I can't look at the big picture. I'll try to get there, but without the Constitution or free enterprise, there will be no media to tell me what to think.