The Age of Reason

Saban met with a recruit this weekend and told him they couldn’t honor his verbal because they were over committed (he was the 7th verbal of the class). Saban promised to honor the scholarship next January, and even signed a piece of paper promising him that he would give him the scholarship next year! Saban said they would get him a job in the meantime near his home!

And the recruit? He is going to stay committed. He knows they are going to honor the scholarship because “they told me they would”. Just like last time?

And yes, JFB, it has nothing to do with your topic. I just can’t handle discussing this anymore.

It’s why the phrase “history is doomed to repeat itself” exists.

It is why we don’t understand many of the codeces of the Mayans, nor the Quipu of the Inka, nor why certain skull surgeries were preformed by ancient cultures.

I don’t think there’s anyway to know what he meant.

The statement pretty much internally contradicts itself. If he knows what rape is, he knows about men being rapists because most rapes are committed by men, obviously. And he’s read plenty of history books and he used the word “rape” correctly in that sentence, so it’s likely he knows what rape means.

Perhaps he meant “a boy,” instead of “man.” I guess that might make sense although it’s very unlikely that he’d literally never heard of sexual child abuse. Maybe he’d never never actual full-on child rape in the way the GJ report says it happened, but that’s not really the point. The rest of what he said shows he understood it well enough to know it was something he didn’t understand very well, so to speak. He knew it was a big deal that required him to call some senior people.

But while it’s clear he probably didn’t mean literally what he said, it’exam possible to know exactly what he did mean. I suppose he meant something along the lines of “I didn’t think a guy like Jerry Sandusky could do such a thing, but I didn’t want to just dismiss it out of hand. I didn’t know if there could possibly be an innocent explanation. I didn’t know how to investigate it or if this could be investigated.”

But that’s just a guess. One way or the other, he couldn’t get his brain around it. If he had, he’d either have pursued it more or, if we go with the “evil Joe” hypothesis, cover it up completely. He did neither.

Hopefully, he’ll get better and be able to clarify. Or maybe it really doesn’t matter anymore.

It’s not uncommon for lucid people to accidentally say something nonsensical – like the scenes on a DVD blooper reel – but they usually correct themselves. It’s harder for a guy in his state to be completely on top of it.

I can easily see a guy like Joe being completely at a loss when talking about anything other than football. I know people that are so completely consumed by their profession, that they can’t tell you who the president is. Extremely successful people are often that way because they are so completely focused on their goals. They pull on the blinders on every morning because that’s what the job demands, and they’re not willing to fail.

When has a Joe Paterno comment been anything other than somewhat nebulous?

No way an 85 year old man from Brooklyn never heard male on male rape or man on boy rape. That’s just a huge leap to make to believe it. I cringed when I read that.

I think the interview as a whole was a big mistake. Yet another PR disaster in this whole, sordid affair. It did more harm than good. If you don’t have anything completely new and somewhat earth shattering, or something that exonerates you, why speak at all? The attorney or attorneys who okayed this must have also been “medicated”.

I do find it quite ironic in all this that for years Joe’s detractors (especially the Pitt fans) have been saying that he’s a senile old man and figurehead of a coach. Yet once this scandal broke those very same detractors were the ones screaming the loudest that Joe knows everything and runs everything at Penn State. Huh??? Yeah, that fits right in with a senile old man who’s a figurehead.

And I don’t have a problem with them. These sordid things were simply not discussed by that generation. And the statements in the story fit well with the accounts of Joe not at all understanding the hysteria until his family forced him to read the GJP. There’s a big difference between intelletctually understanding that something is possible, and the true understanding that the possibility is a reality. Finally, think real hard about the sources from where you learned about such ‘possibilities,’ and then consider the liklihood that someone of Joe’s generation would have encountered those sources in 2002, bearing in mind again that that is not something that was ever a topic of conversation or joking amonst friends. I think it was late high school before I finally understood the jokes about ‘dropping the soap.’ And I’m positive I didn’t learn what it meant by watching the evening news.

parsing his exact words probably misses the point.

I could absolutely hear my grandparents (or parents even) say, “I don’t know from such things,” meaning not that they don’t know about the existence of child rape, but that it is out of their realm of experience.

BTW, Sally Jenkins’s Q&A about the interview in yesterday’s WaPo, indicated that Joe was less than lucid in many parts of the interview.

Like I said, I don’t think you can take that statement literally.
I’m not just trying to excuse Joe for saying something obviously untrue. The context of the statement and everything else he said and did shows that he didn’t mean it that way.

Joe put Mike in the position to tell the Penn State administrator in charge of the UP Police what he saw, and then decided it was best if he stayed out of it, in large part due to potential conflicts of interest. But he still repeatedly give McQuery the opportunity to tell him if it wasn’t being handled properly. I cannot for the life of me understand why that was in any way insufficient action for Joe. No further alarm bells were rung, so no further action was taken.