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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July 22nd, 2012 at 6:34AM
A line of police blocked the street around 6am this morning while chainink fence and blue tarps were erected to shield the Paterno statue from sight.
The statue is to be stored in a safe place, while the library will retain its name. The president’s statement is a minor masterpiece.
July 22nd, 2012 at 8:15AM
Phiala: Many thanks for the update and the link!