While the death penalty is not believed to be in effect here, some think that the [NCAA] penalty [against Penn State] might actually be longer and considered more harmful than the death penalty, and [it has] been labeled as “unprecedented.”

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What could be worse than death itself?

A long arid life in which without football scholarships your university devolves into…

… dear God, into a university.

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Try to imagine the president’s official response:

Like Vice President Cheney in the aftermath of 9/11, Joe Paterno’s statue is being escorted to a secure location.

I have decided that it is in the best interest of our university and public safety to remove the statue and store it in a secure location.

Gotta be secure because Penn State risks a breakaway group of partisans stealing it and reestablishing the cult.

********************

UD thanks Phiala.

[In today’s] college football world… football is the big rat that keeps the university wheel turning.

It’s clear, vivid, a beaut.

That’s a Southern Methodist University professor waxing nostalgic about the few precious non-football-dominated years the place got after its program was shut down for massive corruption.

Note his language: SMU got a breather. A welcome breather.

Football at a place like today’s bad boy, Penn State (there are tons of identical locations in the US), is a total environment, a macroculture, a ship of fools, a village idiotocracy, a cretin collective, a deeply settled dunciad. If you give it the death penalty, if you shut it down, you’re going to create a situation of collective psychic numbing (the term comes from Robert Jay Lifton’s groundbreaking work on traumatized cultures).

If you want to know what post-death penalty Happy Valley will look like on the ground, go here, to the Jim Morrison grave/pilgrimage site in Paris. After Paterno’s official statue is taken down, his followers will construct their own and will, like Morrison’s people, camp out there. As they give way to despair, they will place more and more Jim Beam bottles along the statue’s surfaces until it, like Morrison’s memorial, becomes a famous object d’art, a gawker magnet. Happy Valley will become a curiosity, its revenue now derived from tourists who come to stare.

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Uh-oh.

… at Penn State, and what to do about it. The institution has been stained by so many and so much, the question of whether its former president should retain his faculty tenure is a small one. But given how much the taxpayers of Pennsylvania are about to chalk up in lawsuit awards against the university, the school probably would prefer not making them even angrier when they realize they’re paying Graham’s salary for as long as he feels like hanging around.

Given Sandusky’s conviction and the Freeh report, Donald Heller, dean of the College of Education at Michigan State University, predicted Penn State would rather negotiate with Spanier for his resignation than revoke his tenure.

“I don’t think they’re going to want to fight that battle with everything else that’s going on,” said Heller, who was director of the study of higher education at Penn State for 10 years until he left in January.

Throw a lot of money at him to make him go away. That comes out of the taxpayers too, but at least it’s a one-shot deal.

Moral indignation, university football style.

… the Oklahoma State University newspaper’s front page to get a sense of the rich culture of university football.

A student at UD’s alma mater discusses America’s sleaze-positive culture.

… this morning from Phil Knight. Feast your eyes. Don’t bother with the last couple of paragraphs.

John, John, John.

Do you know how often UD has been lectured on the subject of the athletic marketplace? “We can’t control the marketplace,” says David Boren, president of the University of Oklahoma. We just can’t! We can’t control the market! Whatever we have to pay, we have to pay!

Absolutely everyone thinks that way.

So now you say – under pressure of Penn State – you just say, you just state it like oh obviously – they shouldn’t give coaches multimillion-dollar contracts.

Tell me in what way that’s not a cheap throwaway line.

Like Auburn and other all-balls-no-brains schools, Penn State packs its board of trustees with witless jocks, guys who played for the university back when. Garban (scan his bio if you have the stomach) was until recently chair, baby. Penn State doesn’t fool around. Penn State leaves nothing to chance.

Of course, if Penn State had any sense – intellectual, moral, whatever – the entire board of trustees would have resigned months ago. But even the trustees themselves know that Garban – Grade A Paterno beef – has to go. Garban, who knew a lot about the Sandusky situation but told virtually no one – certainly not his fellow trustees – is refusing to leave the board. And no one can make him leave.

Why not?

It wouldn’t be the Penn State Way.

David, a UD reader, sends UD this opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal. It’s strong-minded and well-written, but it’s up against the same problem everyone writing about Penn State is up against.

The entire complicated, powerful, wildly popular, and unimaginably lucrative system of university football is corrupt — morally degenerate, criminally sordid. Forget academic fraud and university-specific stuff like that. Academic fraud is endemic, of course, but that’s a trifle here. When people like the WSJ guy talk about “shining a harsh light, and building the whole thing over, the right way,” they’re talking about revolutionizing a culture – a culture of massive university-sponsored alcohol sales to students, routine post-game riots and campus-trashing after tailgates, Mondo Cane-style coach-deification (after Penn State pulls down Uncle Joe’s statue, you can worship at Saint Saban’s), total subordination to television stations and naming-rights banks…

En effet, mes petites, it can’t be changed. That’s why the harshest critics of it resort to comedy, as in the hilarious yearly Fulmer Awards for the team with the most arrests among its players. A joke is an epigram on the death of a feeling, said Nietzsche, and all the smartest critics of college football and basketball are jokesters. They’re way past feeling anything about it. Do you think Italians at this point do anything other than tell each other jokes about the mafia? University football and basketball have settled in, and if you don’t believe me, look at the guy running the biggest joke of them all – the NCAA. Scroll down for the skinny on Mark Emmert, aka “top stooge.”

No, look. J’adore Barack Obama, but he’s a mad jock. Say we get Romney next — Mr Olympics. Ahnold’s trying to repair his marriage to Maria so he can run. (I know – citizenship problems there.) Look at the Senate, for chrissake. We can’t even remove the tax exemptions these educational activities enjoy. Luxury boxes are exempt.

From the little freshman fan in the cheap seats to the President of these United States, everyone’s slobbering and panting for grander Godzillatrons and stronger steroids. Everybody’s hyped up. School spirit. When you feel it, you give money to the sports program so the school can be even more of a jock joke.

The WSJ guy is right – it’s a culture. It has many, many moving parts, and they mesh wonderfully. It’s way past anybody fucking with it in any serious way.

A woman who worked at Penn State and witnessed “the culture that allowed Jerry Sandusky to exist,” recalls her time there.

Back in 2005, she wrote to the university’s president about Saint Joe:

“I am very troubled by the manipulative, disrespectful, uncivil and abusive behavior of our football coach,” she wrote. “It is quite shocking what this man — who is idolized by people everywhere — is teaching our students.”

… [President] Spanier came to her home and sat in her living room after Paterno lost his temper at [a] meeting about the players involved in [a] brawl. She said he told her, “Well, Vicky, you are one of a handful of people, four or five people, who have seen the dark side of Joe Paterno. We’re going to have to do something about it.”

She shakes her head, recalling that conversation now. “‘Doing something about it,'” she says, “ended with me being gone.”

And for those readers who continue to believe Penn State isn’t a cult, there’s this:

She received threatening phone calls at home when her husband was traveling and was savaged on student message boards. Her house was vandalized and “For Sale” signs were staked in her front yard. By the time police installed surveillance cameras, she was already on her way out.

… She stopped going to Wegman’s, a favorite upscale supermarket outside State College, because “the Penn State people went there.” They recognized her and without fail turned their backs and walked away, she recalled.

Former colleagues who did want to reach out held back. Later, they explained that they were afraid of losing their jobs, too.

… about professors at football factories. Seems a good time to recycle the piece.

… President-for-Life (scroll down), Penn State’s God-for-Life-and-Afterlife, or any number of the world’s tinpot Dictators-for-Life, daily existence always eventually devolves into farce under the Beloved Leader.

Quickly, it became clear that Mr. Paterno … had failed to go to the authorities or even to confront Mr. Sandusky after he had been told in person of the episode. The prospect that Mr. Paterno, a revered figure, might be fired by the board of trustees was suddenly real.

Mr. Paterno quickly issued a statement saying, in effect, that the board need not act, that he would resign at the end of the season. Neither he nor the university revealed that he had effectively agreed to do so already, in return for an expensive financial package.

The board fired him anyway, a decision that caused rioting and led to an angry and often very personal backlash against the trustees, but it agreed to honor his contract. It was then that the full board came to find out what the university was obligated to pay Mr. Paterno.

You see all the familiar elements. The pathetic ignorant violent mob (“During a conference call, one board member worried aloud that failure to make good on what was owed to the Paterno estate could lead to another “reign of terror” by Mr. Paterno’s supporters …”); the pathetic, useless, out of it, trustees; the snarling Leader and his snarling family, brandishing lawsuits and demanding entitlements and pots of cash.

Think of the on-field violence of football as the ceremonial violence of this country’s Happy Valleys; behind the headbutts and quarterback sacks lie boosters, coaches, and fans ready to riot and issue fatwas.

La vie est une farce à mener par tous said Rimbaud. Take a comfy seat. This particular farce has only just begun.