Tragically unnecessary.
That's how Dan Emmert, the president of the NCAA, the body that governs college athletics in the United States, summed up the Jerry Sandusky scandal at Penn State after announcing a suite of postseason bans, millions of dollars in fines, revoked scholarships, and voided victories targeting the Pennsylvania university's now disgraced football program.
That sentiment, of monstrous, surreal, inconceivable waste, could just as easily applied to another of July`s disturbing stories, the shootings in Aurora, Colorado.
There, the acts of James Holmes, the gunman who opened fire in a crowded movie theatre filled with men, women and children, was most marked by the 24-year-old former grad student's shock of dyed orange-red hair. It was insulting and sad that the vicious schemes of a clown had once again captured the conversation, this time by killing 12 people and injuring another 58. Speculation again turned inevitably to motive but the answer is always the same: to make people watch and wonder.
We did and madness scored another disgusting victory with another spectacular waste of time and lives. And that's enough said about that.
But whereas the Colorado shootings were a burst of insipid madness, the Penn State scandal was the exact opposite, an inexorable crawl of instutitional senility and perversion. In that it was far more disheartening: James Holmes's sudden evil flourished in a span of minutes and ended with his capture in a parking lot; the fall of Penn State took place over years of painstaking corruption and denial.
Yet both share a thread: there's no good reason James Holmes killed and hurt all those people and there's no good reason a revered university would enter into a symbiotic relationship with a serial pedophile.
The Penn State scandal, however, is more understandable. While multiple investigations into the sex crimes of convicted ex-assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky are ongoing, it appears senior university officials, including Nittany Lions head coach and sports icon Joe Paterno, stood to one side for years as Sandusky raped and molested boys as young as 10 years old.
John Philpot Curran famously said, "Evil prospers when good men do nothing," but the powers-that-be took the aphorisms to lengths as ludicrous as James Holmes's hair. By looking the other way, they allowed Sandusky to use the trappings of the Penn State football program and his children's charity, the Second Mile, to target, groom, and eventually violate troubled at-risk youth.
According to a Sports Illustrated special report, Sandusky worked out with his victims in Penn State's gym and abused them in its locker rooms; in at least one case took them on the road with the team to championship games; he arranged for them to sit in on coachs' meetings, interact with players and appear in videos profiling the Penn State program.
According to grand jury testimony, the most Penn State did in response to being used as the tool of a sexual child predator was, despite receiving reports of Sandusky's crimes as early as 1998, was to ban him in 2002 from bringing children on campus after another coach witnessed him sodomizing a boy in the showers. A university official would later admit even that quarter-measure was unenforceable.
Shame and the fear of not being believed are among the most powerful weapons sex predators employ to keep their victims from silent. Ignoring such cries from a child is what makes what happened at Penn State so unspeakable.
And that`s the rub of it. A collection of otherwise good, reasonable individuals made the decision to acquiesce to the desires of a pedophile rather than jeopardize the wealth, power and prestige of Joe Paterno - then one of the most successful coaches in U.S. sports history - and the Penn State Nittany Lions with their righteous motto: "Success with Honor."
In other words, children were sacrificed so men could remain comfortable and avoid embarrassment.
It is understandable. But it's one thing to think of it in the hypothetical, it`s another to see such a brazen, monstrous calculation, with defiled innocence weighed against bad publicity, revealed. It's an apt coincidence that amidst the culmination of the Penn State scandal last week Monsigneur William J. Lynn, a former Philadelphia archdioscese cardinal's aide, became the first U.S. Roman Catholic official to be sent to jail for covering-up sexual abuse by priests.
So the NCAA did what it could. The sanctions mean Penn State football will have to wait another decade to play a meaningful game and that Paterno, by virtue of 111 victories stricken from the record books, is no longer the winningest coach in major college football.
But the most enduring image of the scandal took place last Sunday, when now Penn State president Rodney Erickson made the decision to remove Paterno's statue from in front of the school's Beaver Stadium. Workers removed the likeness - of Paterno pointing to the sky as he leads his team onto the field - under the cover of tarps, with only the disgraced coach's finger visible. For a man who is said to have been regarded as a god for turning an obscure university into a U.S. sporting and educational goliath, it was like watching the fall of dictator on the streets of some failed state.
All of it tragic and unnecessary. Paterno, an English major who is said to have ruled with a wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command, nevertheless probably wouldn't have appreciated the end of Shelley`s Ozymandias in this circumstance:
"And on the pedestal these words appear:/"My name is Ozymandias, kings of kings/Look on my works, ye Mighty and despair!"/Nothing besides remains. Round the decay/Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare/The lone and level sands stretch far away."
