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Write what you love.

I love stalking folk singers, television, Virginia Woolf, Sweet Valley High, awkward moments, and liminal spaces.

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Supporters of the late Mr. Paterno may want to pretend this tragedy did not take place under his reign and within his considerable sphere of influence, but the evidence says otherwise. The evidence says football trumped everything at Penn State, when the university’s mission really is to educate young people. For that reason Penn State should suspend its football program until the university has sufficiently regained its perspective and reset its priorities. Football, in fact all sport, must be secondary at a credible institution of higher learning. This case is only the latest, and certainly the most tragic, example of what happens when a sport rules a major university.

Damning report: Penn State should suspend its football program - Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

I am not anti-athletics—I rather enjoy them both as participant and spectator—but I am anti many other things, including the atmosphere of superiority that some places/people of sport have. (I would think that being anti-child-rape and anti-save-reputation-above-all-else wouldn’t have to be said, but just in case, there you go.)

The Freeh Report definitely ranks as one of the most upsetting and appalling things I have ever read in my entire life. I try really hard to be a balanced person in terms of not diminishing or ridiculing others who have different beliefs/priorities than I do, but, ever since the story broke last year, I’ve realized just how unable I am to do that for apologists of Paterno and the others at Penn State who didn’t step up not just once, but so many times over.

If you had asked me, though, at the beginning whether or not anyone would actually be found guilty, I would have said no, given the pervasiveness of football culture in general and at Penn State in specific. And that’s my initial reaction to calling for suspension of Penn State football so that they—and the rest of us—may get our priorities straight. What a story it would be if I were wrong a second time and we were able to tell our grandchildren about the time when we as a nation finally made a gigantic leap forward w/r/t sexual predators and the dominance of extreme sports culture.