Too Big Not to Fail

Why a scandal like Penn State's was bound to happen

Of all the insane stories history will shake its head at while remembering the Joe Paterno / Penn State scandal, one stands out: when the story broke, the 84-year-old Winningest Coach In College Football history stonewalled the media all day, then returned home to find dozens of supporters waiting for him. To show their support, they sang the Penn State fight song:

Fight on State (GO!)
Fight on State (GO!)
Strike your gait and win, (LET’S GO STATE!)
Victory we predict for thee
We’re ever true to you, dear old White and Blue.

It's unclear what they thought they were fighting. Assistant Coach Jerry Sandusky's urge to have sex with boys he recruited through a foster program designed to give them a safe place to live and thrive? The resolve of Paterno, his immediate superior, to fail to take action for nine years after being informed children were being raped? The Penn State faculty's near-complete, practiced obliviousness to all this?

Those would have all been things to fight. But no, Penn State was fighting for itself -- to protect itself against the charges leveled at it so that those attending could continue to enjoy whatever sense of tradition, unity, and solidarity they got from being students there. The children badly abused by an authority figure, those who'd have to live with the molestation their whole lives? Unfortunate side effects.

Yeah, we're all furious about it. I'm not saying anything new. But when Paterno finished crying conspicuously in his front window, he came out to address the supporters, and said this:

We’re always going to be Penn State, regardless of what happens to certain people. We’re Penn State. I’m proud of you. I’ve always been proud of you. Cheer our football team on Saturday, all right? Beat Nebraska.

That's right. The focus was on beating their next opponent, and maintaining solidarity. The rapist and his conspirators, whatever vague things they may have committed, were relegated to being "certain people."

It's okay, though, because JoePa proved how much he cared with his next statement:

We’ve had some criticism of how we’ve handled some of the poor victims. My wife and I, we have 17 grandkids from 16 to 3 and we pray for them every night. And we’re going to start praying for those kids who got involved in some of those problems we've talked about. They don’t deserve it. We owe it to them to say a prayer for them. And make sure they understand that their life is one that can be enriched, one that they can make a significant impact on other people and do a lot of different things, as all of you can. So God bless everybody.

Clearly, the important takeaway for Joe is that he remember to pray. Praying fixes everything. The only thing worse, apparently, than systematically allowing child rape to occur on your watch for a decade is to not be worshiping Jesus. Do the "poor victims" get an apology? No. Just a prayer. I mean, we owe them that, right? Because it costs nothing to pray. And even less to talk about it. The lawyerspeak was particularly galling, relegating the abuse to the level of "getting involved in problems," as if the kids had all gathered together one night and decided to vandalize a storefront because they were bored. Disgusting.

The immediate parallel which leapt to everyone's mind was the Catholic Church, who has its own history of institutionalized abuse. Their response was even more appalling:

"It reopens a wound in the church as well," said [Timothy] Dolan, the New York archbishop. "We once again hang our heads in shame." Dolan made the comments in response to a reporter's question at a national meeting of bishops in Baltimore.

He said the scandal shows that abuse of children is not limited to any particular faith or to clergy. Still, he said the church has "a long way to go" in making up for its mistakes. 

Dolan declined to offer advice to Penn State University on how to deal with its scandal, because the church "has not been a good example of how to deal with this in the past," he said. "No one has suffered more than the Catholic community."

"Our love and prayers go out to the victims, the families and the whole Penn State community," Dolan said. "I know it's a bit of a cliché, but we know what you're going through."

Once again, you see the intentional disconnect. The victims are always, but always, lumped in with the criminals, and then with the community, so that their pain becomes "our" pain. Then come the excuses: Everyone does it.

Of course, the problem is not that pedophiles can be found wherever young boys (or girls) can be found. That's like saying that robbers like banks. What is neither normal or acceptable is the cover-up. From a journalistic standpoint, writers are always taught that the cover-up is worse than the crime, because the cover-up requires collusion. It requires multiple criminals and multiple crimes. It is institutional by nature.

And so we come to the institution. The central authority, that which becomes a religion to people, whether it's a secular or religious institution, because of what they're told and believe it represents. Because of what we need such things to be.

Institutions breed corruption, every one of them, if they're large and established enough. The actual thinking conservative -- not whatever Herman Cain and Rick Perry are supposed to be -- realizes this about government. The actual thinking liberal -- not the hippie in the drum circle -- realizes this about corporations. Athiests see it in every religion. Religious people see it in other people's religious institutions. No doubt students at The Citadel in South Carolina shook their heads in wonder at Penn State until they discovered that they, too, had a skeleton in their academic closet. 

Worse, institutions that are too centralized lose all sight of everything but the bottom line, becoming bloated and unwieldy and unable to move without first sloughing off a ton of red tape -- a hard lesson learned by FEMA's response, or rather lack thereof, to the victims of Hurricane Katrina. Political parties consolidate until they're so ideologically opposed they can't talk to one another, much less legislate.

It affects products and services on the most basic levels, too. The radio stations and record companies consolidate, making popular music sound uniform and uniformly terrible. Complaining to the manager at, say, McDonald's is a sick joke. The guy at Lowe's has never heard of drywall.

The institution always takes on a life of its own, given world enough and time. Power becomes centralized. Corporations become people. Unions become corrupt. Communism becomes totalitarianism, capitalism becomes corporatism, military leaders become dictators. "Defense" of one country suddenly becomes about invading another country. The flag and the uniform and the fight song become tools of oppression.

And the dystopia spreads outward to everything it touches.

By May of 1988, the allegations -- not rumors, allegations -- about Sandusky had spread, not just through the coaching staff, but to the University Police, the county DA, the university's lawyers, the Second Mile lawyers (that's right, a foster charity had lawyers), and the PA Department of Public Welfare. By the fall of 2000, those allegations had spread to the University's janitorial staff, and by 2002, even to the Penn State athletic director and its senior vice president for finance and business. By 2007, it had reached the Second Mile executive director, the Penn State president, and the university's wrestling coach.

Everyone knew. More than one person saw it with their own eyes. Yet no one said a word. The victims themselves were afraid to come forward. Because Joe Paterno is the Winningest Coach In College Football History. Not just good at winning football games (bringing in a cool $50 million a year to the University by doing so), not just the best at winning football games, but an icon, a man so popular he'd gotten a statue made of him without even dying first. You know, like Michael Jackson.

Paterno was, as the metaphor sometimes goes, an institution on campus.

Penn State, 1855.

If you don't think sports has devolved from a statement of community pride into a desperate secular religion, you haven't seen Detroit after the Lions lose. Or win. Detroit's still falling apart, too, even though the government bailed out its storied automakers not long ago. Also the banks. We apparently couldn't let either go under, despite their rampant corruption and poor business practices, because, well, they're institutions, now inextricably wired to every other area of the economy, like a tumor growing deep inside the brain of the body politic. That's what they mean by "Too Big to Fail."

The sense of small, tribal community that once raised barns, built schools, and formed town councils has now all but disappeared, replaced by a slavish devotion to institutionalization, secular religiosity, centralized power, to the symbols of things rather than the things themselves.

Worse, this kind of thinking is starting to infect individuals themselves, inducing them to think and behave like institutions. Corporations became people, in part, because people were willing to become corporations. When someone's daughter is murdered, they don't sit at home any more and mourn in privacy or with the support of friends and family -- they lawyer themselves up and hold press conferences on CNN, as if their pain were any different than anyone else in the same tragic circumstance. Celebrities talk about themselves in terms of "branding." We can always spot the real self-important douchebag at the party: he's the guy talking about himself in the third person, as if he were some separate entity that was cutting himself a paycheck. We are a nation of people living from the top down, desperately pretending we're at the top of anything. A nation of privileged sociopaths. And God or Joe Paterno help anything weaker than us that gets in our way.

It doesn't have to be this way. Anarchy is a dirty word in America, and lots of other places, but it's not about rioting in its purest, philosophical sense; it's about decentralization, about being flexible, about transparency, about organizing by what the community, and not the institution itself, requires.

Today.

It happens already. There's no other word for what happens every day on the Internet. It was the internet, you'll remember, that allowed the Arab Spring to happen by mobilizing people without prior benefit of approval by societal institutions. It broke the back of the music industry, allowing musicians to make profit without a middleman. Hackers do more damage than protesters. And when a corporate web page tries to force a new invasion of privacy on us, someone's right behind them with a script that undoes their insidious work.

Even "IRL," there are examples of decentralization that work. The local co-op. The credit union. The representative town meeting. Or in my hometown of New Orleans, for example, where charter schools cropped up after Katrina and provided a much better alternative to state-run educational you-know-whats. See, when a small school has autonomy, it not only does a better job mentoring its students -- much like teachers with small classes teach better than teachers with big ones -- but they also don't get big enough to produce any Sandusky incidents.

Hopefully we can all learn a lesson from that. Turns out all that corny Frank Capra stuff was right: in order to keep Bedford Falls from turning into Pottersville, you have to make sure Old Man Potter doesn't control everything. Bigger is simply not better any more.