Behind the Penn State scandal: A community fails to reckon with its past

[DonViejo]

The Sundance doc "Happy Valley" examines the delusional groupthink exposed by the Jerry Sandusky case

ANDREW O'HEHIR

PARK CITY, Utah — Whatever lessons we were supposed to learn from the Penn State sexual abuse scandal, we didn’t learn them; whatever questions we were supposed to ask went unanswered. Now, I’m aware that the phrase “Penn State sexual abuse scandal” will rile up many current and former residents of the Keystone State. Just for using that expression in a pre-Sundance blurb, I’ve gotten emails from readers arguing that it’s just the “Jerry Sandusky scandal,” that Penn State bears no institutional guilt for what happened, and that the legendary Nittany Lions football program should not be viewed as tainted.

In a way, those people are right, but not for the reasons they think: The real story is not smaller than Penn State, but larger. They are illustrating the points raised by Amir Bar-Lev’s subtle and provocative documentary “Happy Valley,” which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival this week. Bar-Lev, who also made “The Tillman Story” and “My Kid Could Paint That,” avoids leading you to any firm conclusion about who or what is to blame for what went wrong in bucolic central Pennsylvania, and viewers with different perspectives will understand it in different ways. This ambiguity is captured in a single person, Jerry Sandusky’s adopted son, Matt, who tells Bar-Lev that when investigators first showed up after his dad’s arrest, he told them that nothing like that had happened to him and that he couldn’t imagine the senior Sandusky doing such things. It wasn’t true, and although Matt Sandusky never testified against his father, his later revelations that he had endured long-term childhood sexual abuse were the final blow in the court of public opinion.

more
http://www.salon.com/2014/01/27/behind_the_penn_state_scandal_a_community_fails_to_reckon_with_its_past/

[bemildred]

1. "delusional groupthink" describes our whole government, our ruling elites. nt

[Herself]

2. after the end of the Nazi reign, many of the loyal Nazi's never owned their inhumanity

To their dying day. I've met some of their children.
I was taken to see the beautiful church's that survived the war, they were empty of children who had pro Nazi parents.

None wanted anything to do with a God that could condone the acts of Nazi's.

Americans have not done as such in modern day, but those that are caught turning the same blind eye to inhumanity and abandoning children do not accept responsibility.

[modrepub]

3. Another perspective

it's long but brings up some good points and gives a bit more background from a PSU perspective.

http://chronicle.com/article/Why-I-Resigned-the-Paterno/134944/

Penned by Michael Bérubé author of "What's So Liberal about the Liberal Arts"

Disclosure: I am a PSU grad who lived in the State College area for 7 years.

[Blue_Tires]

4. Sadly, it's a widespread issue of covering up crimes to protect a sports program

Thousands of examples out there over the decades on both high school and university levels...

[yurbud]

5. one story: a professor was stabbed for not changing a football players grade

and she got in more trouble than the jock.

Administrators pressured her to change the grade, but she refused.

After she got stabbed, an administrator just made the change himself.

When I was a grad student at USC, I applied for a job as a "tutor" for football players, but at the interview it became clear that the job wasn't to help them with their homework but to do it for them.

This hurts the jocks themselves as much as the rest of us. When OJ Simpson went on his low speed chase, he left a note behind with spelling and grammatical errors you wouldn't expect from a grade school graduate--but he had a degree from USC.

Most jocks don't have the post-sports careers OJ did, so the coddling they got all the way through school doesn't preparing them for any job that requires brain work, and most have messed up their knees so bad, they would even have trouble with manual labor.

[arachadillo]

6. Nice Post

From small details such as the uniforms to big details such as the importance of education, Paterno always taught "what's inside counts".

Most of the psu community is now relearning that lesson they were taught a long time ago

There's an easy way to learn and a hard way to learn. Unfortunately, in this instance the psu community learned the hard way. Unfortunately it was children, not the psu community who were the victims.

I forgot to add...
the author who wrote his rational for resigning the Paterno Chair said...

And that brings me back to those signs, Proud to Support Penn State Football. Lately I have seen companion signs, Proud to Support Penn State Academics. Now there's a thought!

ditto: us news currently ranks psu #37...which ranks Psu people as the dumbest people in the smart people University category
http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges/rankings/national-universities/spp+50


also Proud to Support Penn State Academics (Penn state '81)