Inside the Real Paterno-Sandusky Relationship

Who’s to say Joe didn’t ignore the rumors as much as he could? He claims not to read the media reports about the football team and himself; I’m inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt as to how much he knew/heard.

I just read a person’s blog who discussed Penn State and Herman Cain through the lens of what people, especially men, are conditioned by society to dismiss mentally.

I can’t say that I particularly agreed with the author’s statements such as:

That questions illustrates exactly the issue at hand. Sex acts with a child are seen as non-threatening by many men. Is it because they themselves have been abused and grew to “deal with it” and therefore diminish the destruction it can cause?

I don’t necessarily think that one has to be a victim to “dismiss” even horrible things. Paterno was 74 years old. How many men that were born in the 1920’s and settled into adulthood in the 1940’s and 1950’s are even really capable of emotionally handling such an issue in the same manner as those of us born in the 1980’s? Society conditioned people differently back then. Paterno hears a second-hand account of an event and he’s going to respond the best way he knows how: put it in front of people who should take care of it. It’s not even necessarily a conscious decision to drop it at that. It’s societal conditioning.

Now, this is getting into purely conjectural psychology and sociology, but hell… it’s worth considering as much as the possibility that McQueary suffered / suffers from PTSD in regards to what he saw in 2002.

That being said, I’m not sure how victims of sexual abuse would respond to this situation if put into Paterno’s position. There’s a pretty good argument that they would respond more aggressively. There’s also the possibility that they would respond more passively, as the author of the post I read suggested.

When I was younger, I enjoyed taking baths (still do, actually). I’m not sure of my exact age, maybe somewhere around 8-10 years old, as I was old enough that I remember that day very clearly, and I was old enough to have been taking baths alone for several years. One day, I was taking a bath, and my grandfather walked in and proceeded to talk to me while he used the toilet. He just stood there and urinated while looking at me, as if it was completely natural. I had never mentioned this to anyone prior to this Penn State scandal and even now, I’ve only mentioned it anonymously online. I was never touched in a sexual way by anyone. This is the only incident that I can remember of being so incredibly… uncomfortable. Nothing else ever happened and in my own mind, I filed this incident away as dismissible.

Should I have? I don’t know. It just never occurred to me to dredge it up in my own emotions until now. In the context of what we know about Penn State and that grand jury report, an incident such as this shouldn’t be dismissed. In another context, maybe it’s dismissible as weird, but not criminal or anything.

everybody gets a piece".

And Jerry gets Lionel Hutz. Good Lord.

With the big lawfirms involved, get ready for a steady diet of strategic leaks and endless posturing.

but it’s sort of like the Michael Jackson defense. “I just love kids so much, I think it’s cool that they sleep in my bed.” (paraphrasing MJ there)

Doesn’t make it right. Very much not right at all.

He cannot refute that he was in the showers with kids. That is pretty much indisputable at this point. So he has to start putting the shadow of doubt out there in the public realm. The potential jurors are out there and he has to get his side of the story out in front of the jury selection process. This is his only defense for what to you and I, is the indefensible.

There’s probably something wrong with his brain. Some forced compulsion to do the terrible things he’s done. I swear I’ve seen a study or documentary that looked at the brains of either sociopaths or pedophiles and compared the reactions that took place against a normal person. They were remarkably different.

That’s not uncommon with people who do these sorts of things. No one that abuses kids does it purely because they want to f*ck a kids life up beyond repair. They do it because they have something wrong with them mentally, something that does not allow them to understand, or rather think that what they are doing is even remotely wrong.

more like sway. If Joe Paterno told you to do something, you didnt really have to do it, but chances are you were much more likely to do it because it was him telling you. If that makes any sense.

If Spanier and Curley and the Board really wanted Joe to be done coaching, they wouldn’t have renewed his contract. Is it unthinkable that the grown men in that living room were able to have a conversation and Joe was able to make a sound and logical point for him to stay on as head coach? People think that Joe just said “No” and that was it. I don’t buy that for a second. When talking in a group like that, I don’t see Joe actually convincing those men he should stay being out of the realm of possibilities.