If there’s one image that speaks to America’s twisted relationship to college sports, it’s the Penn State pro-Paterno rallies. Football before all. Lives were likely ruined at the hands of a possible predator, thanks in no small part to Paterno. Yet it’s Paterno who must go out “with dignity.”
All UD‘s English professor life, campus athletes and their fans have characterized themselves as the soul of all-American normalcy, with intellectually-inclined professors and students hopelessly twisted. And it’s strange – because if you’ve ever read even one account of the culture of paranoid teams and their whackaloon camp followers you know just how exactly turned around that appraisal is.
People are obviously very resistant to this truth, because even though they can watch the all-American anti-intellectual macho team parading its deep peculiarities on tv every night during the Republican debates, they continue to insist that Rick Perry and Herman Cain are the normal ones.
November 10th, 2011 at 9:17AM
My wife is a primatologist. The only thing that made it at all possible for me to continue to work for 40 years as a professor was the parallels she consistently drew between human behavior in academe and the behavior of chimpanzees and other non-human primates in their societies. (Homo academicus as baboon! It reminds me of a certain limerick about a certain Chomondely Colquhoun.)
In a word, our species (like most animal species) really is nuts, irredeemably nuts, despite our best efforts to prove otherwise.
It is the Perrys and Cains, the Paternos and Hausers of the world, and those who applaud and enable them, who are the normal ones, by any statistical measure. Aristotle was wrong: humans cannot be defined as “rational animals.” At best, we are rationalizing animals.
It is the relatively few people who just don’t “get it,” who find it repellent to go along with the program, who cannot follow the dominant paradigm, who are the statistically abnormal members of our species. At least, that’s how it looks to me after 40 years in Academe.
So here’s to our abnormality! We, too, have a role to play, though is is an outsider’s role. We will still advocate for truth, for honesty, for beauty, and for other things like them. If we do nothing else in our lives, that at least is well worth doing. At the end of our days, it is well worth having done.
November 10th, 2011 at 9:21AM
Perhaps, without the ideological spouting, there is an illustration of the utilitarian fallacy: is the greater good (assuming for the sake of discussion that such exist) served by a few little boys sacrificing in order that generations of PSU students get their Saturday traditions?
When it comes to Big Time Sports, the reader with long memory will recall that Donna Shalala was very much part of Bill Clinton’s court intellectual feminist team as well as paymaster for big time football at Syracuse and Wisconsin at the same time that she was wrecking academic programs in the name of Diversity.
Pederasty State’s final regular season game will be at Wisconsin, and I expect Badger Nation to be suitably demonstrative that Saturday. You don’t give those kids, whackaloon fans or otherwise, this kind of material.
November 10th, 2011 at 9:47AM
Big ol’ Cognitive Dissonance Express train coming down the tracks. The normal response is to seek comfort and support from the group that holds the belief being challenged, the weirdo response is to think ‘Maybe we’ve all been wrong.’
November 10th, 2011 at 12:25PM
No, MattF. This is college. University. Any other location, maybe. But if Penn State is anything other than a fraud and a joke, if it’s an actual university, it is the one place in the country where all of those sports attitudes – loyalty above all, evasion of important matters, winning as the only goal – are the opposite of what the institution stands for. At universities, all that stuff is weird. Fearless, independent thought, serious consideration of serious things, moral autonomy – that’s what universities are about, isn’t it? That’s why universities are weird places to normal people, why politicians on the right think they’ve scored major points merely by saying out loud that Obama used to be a college professor. People at universities are supposed to be the first to say Maybe we’ve all been wrong.
November 10th, 2011 at 1:22PM
I’d say Penn State is, right now, an arena where an unambiguous line can be drawn– And, OK, in one corner we have ‘normal’, and in the other, ‘not normal’…
I don’t think, by the way, that winning is the only goal for sports fans, group identification and cohesiveness are the real deal, and are the things that those unhappy Penn State students don’t want to give up.
November 10th, 2011 at 3:14PM
How much does this episode really have to do with football? It’s a lot more like what’s happened to the Catholic Church than like what we hear about in (say) Coral Gables. The organization didn’t crack down hard on a transgressor because he had been a faithful servant (otherwise) and because the publicity would be bad. Obviously the specifics of the case, including the dollars and publicity involved, are conditioned by the aura surrounding Penn State football, but the same kind of cover-up could happen almost anywhere, inside and outside the university.