I'm probably going to lose some friends over this, and that's a shame, but it doesn't change the truth.

I get that some people are sports fans and some people are Penn State fans and some people are Joe Paterno fans.  That's fine.  I'm not a sports fan, and I honestly kind of dislike the whole sports business, but I don't hassle people about it.  It would be no more right of me to do that than it was for a lot of bullies and trend-followers to ostracize and harass me as a kid in part because I *wasn't* a fan.

But I think you should know that every time I see one of these tearful eulogies for Joe Paterno, it kind of makes me throw up in my mouth.

The guy was a football coach, and the only thing that makes that a thing of meaning or relevance is the number of people who are willing to pay big money to watch a bunch of meatheads beat the shit out of each other chasing an inflated ball around.

I've never been a huge sports fan, but I try to understand.  Not everybody's a huge music fan either, and plenty of people put up with my music and don't bitch...but you're also not going to see me posting feather-masked photoshops of Gary Glitter with his lyrics in Edwardian script and a beam of heavenly light shining on a guitar with his profile superimposed. 

He didn't cure cancer.  He didn't bring peace.  He didn't add any great works of art to the body of human creativity.  He didn't create new governments or open new frontiers of physical or intellectual exploration. 

What he did do was coach a college football team, and turn his back on a situation that involved several young - pre-adolescent - men being sexually groped, molested, abused, and harassed.

I don't much give a damn how well he could induce jocks to throw a ball around.  That doesn't solve any problems or add anything of value to the world, save the artificial value attached by sports fans to their teams and the victories of those teams. 

Yeah, I know.  Sports teams fund colleges.  I happen to think that's kind of sick, myself, that our institutions of higher learning are held hostage by the least intellectual pursuits possible.  But I get it.  Sports = money. Fine.

But that's no excuse to beatify a guy whose greatest legacy is enabling a sexual predator of children to hunt.

Am I vaguely sorry that the guy's dead, for the sake of his family?  Sure, I'm not inhuman or unreasonable nor am I a lynch mob.

But all things considered...yeah.  I hope people understand that while YOU might be seeing some tearful and profound quote from a "great man," I see the disturbing, selfish, and inexplicable whitewashing of the reputation of an accomplice to child rape.

I just thought you, my friends who have been pushing all the pretty "RIP" messages and graphics the last couple of days, should know that. 

(I'm tempted to push a bunch of "tribute" graphics with Jerry Lee Lewis talking about how awesome it was to marry his 13 year old cousin, or R. Kelly extolling the virtues of pissing on high school girls, just to drive the point home, but I won't. )

I'm just asking folks to question their priorities.  As yourselves what amount of money or publicity Paterno could possibly have brought to Penn State that was worth sacrificing the innocence of an unknown number of pre-teen boys.  How many Rose Bowls or Orange Bowls would PS have had to win, to make the molestation of those boys worthwhile?  Clearly there are some people who think such a number exists; I just wonder what that number is.

Penn State's football program as it exists today is the direct result of a bunch of adults, including Joe Paterno, failing to do the right thing when a sexual predator used that program as a meat market.  They're going to have to do a lot of work to change that.  As far as I'm concerned, every dime made by the football program while Paterno and Sandusky were involved should be given to the victims.

Every.  Dime.

Nobody's perfect, and that's fine, but I start to have problems with that when we're casually overlooking the rape of little kids in order to preserve our dearly-held allegiance to the college football coach who knew it was happening and did nothing to stop it.  We’re not talking about an inappropriate seduction of a teenager here, or the sexless arranged marriage of a child of nine or ten years, as sometimes happens in parts of the world.  We’re not talking about a couple of teenagers discovering the joys of a few rounds of hide-the-salami.  We’re not even talking about a profoundly disturbed but at least positively-motivated weird who fell in love with a 14 year old when he was 30 – sick as that is, at least it has the possibility of redeeming feature – there is, after all, love involved, as inappropriate as that may be according to our values and laws.

But we’re talking about an adult man abusing his power to enable the buggering  of ten year old boys.  There’s pretty much no way to make that shine, no matter HOW liberal your sexual attitudes might be.

In the case of Paterno, we’re talking about a full-grown man who failed to put a stop to this crime when he was informed of it.  He didn’t contact police, or the media.  He didn’t file charges or offer testimony as a witness.  He tried to hide it, for the good of the program.

That is wrong, and it is  wrong enough that I don’t think the man deserves this deification and “Oh JoePa my JoePa How Great Thou Art” routine.

I find it profoundly disturbing and depressing that we consider the material success of a college football program to be a more relevant issue at hand than the abuse of a bunch of little kids at the hands of that same program.

Yeah, Joe Paterno’s a human being and was in a tough situation he didn’t ask to be in, and he’s dead now and both he and his family have my sympathy.

Not as much as those kids do, though…and he sure as hell doesn’t have my respect.