Morality Tale

You could watch ESPN, listen to sports talk radio, or surf assorted sports web sites this past week, and you’d find that a remarkable percentage of the ink and talk was devoted to two off-the-field stories: the NBA labor dispute and the Penn State scandal.

As to the first matter, that’s a real yawner for me.  I don’t usually begin caring about the NBA until May anyway, and I haven’t missed their absence a bit so far in this season that wasn’t.  It’s possible that the basketball situation would be getting more attention if it weren’t for the epic events in Penn State.  As it is, though, one story -- or set of stories, really -- is eclipsing all others in the sports world.

The events themselves are almost hopelessly sad.  What happened in the past is tragic, and what is consequently happening in the present is inevitably awful.  But it is the coverage of that past and this present that strikes me as the truly fascinating cultural phenomenon.

Even though Jerry Sandusky is the chief culprit and some group of anonymous little boys are the victims, Joe Paterno is the most famous and most compelling figure in the story.  And he occupies our attention because he is a little of both: that is to say, Paterno is both culprit and victim.

Joe Paterno’s picture is in the dictionary next to the word “iconic.” There really is no one else quite like him in sports.  And even though he had some idiosyncrasies, they were mostly harmless and charming.  But his overall reputation for morality, character, and a clean program was legendary.

Just last month, Joe Paterno set the record for most wins by a Division I football coach.  He has been coaching at Penn State since the Truman administration.  He is an institution.  And now he is fired.  It is an almost unbelievable development, and it embodies in reality a principle that people sometimes resist in theory: namely, that one ‘bad’ can trump many ‘goods.’ 

We live in such a relativistic age.  And in the present climate, the idea of being “basically a good person” claims to be a sufficient achievement.  But not so.  Joe Paterno was “basically a good person.”  Indeed, a very good person, who had a tremendously positive impact on untold numbers of young men.  But now he exits in disgrace.  All of the good, it seems, is overwhelmed by one bad.

And the nature of that ‘one bad’ is yet another revelation.  For at least this brief moment, the sports-world slice of our culture is rediscovering a much-neglected concept: “sins of omission.”  Jerry Sandusky is the one character who is at fault for what he did.  Joe Paterno and everyone else involved at Penn State, however, are being called to account for what they did not do. 

And then, finally, there is this.  Perhaps the most astonishing cultural phenomenon in this whole sordid matter is the rare sense of moral clarity and outrage about a sexual act. 

For decades, our culture has been steadily shedding all of its sexual taboos.  From the free-love movement of the 60s to the “consenting adults” paradigm that followed; from the mainstreaming of the GLBT community to the “it’s not the sex, it’s the lying” refrain of the Clinton era, we have dramatically redrawn most of the old foul lines. 

In fact, I am suspicious that it may be exactly the lack of clarity about sexual morality, as well as the general air of non-judgmental permissiveness, that contributed to this Penn State tragedy.  Perhaps we have so handicapped individuals’ natural capacity to recognize what is right and wrong, or made people so timid about calling some behavior aberrant, that we have both left room for the sin of commission and cultivated the sin of omission. 

Meanwhile, at the rate we are going, it may be that the whole situation would play out differently twenty years from now.  Perhaps by then NAMBLA will have won the day; Sandusky, Paterno, McQueary, and the rest would keep their jobs; and all the stuff that people are outraged about today would be considered a non-event. 

Technorati Tags: Joe Paterno,Penn State,Jerry Sandusky