Penn state and other fiefdoms.

• Author: Zirin, Dave
• Position: Edge of Sports

Welcome to Happy Valley, Pennsylvania, the world Joe Paterno made. It's a world where libraries, buildings, and statues bear his name. It's a world where the school endowment now stands at around $2 billion. It's a school where the social, cultural, and economic life of the campus revolves around the football team. It's a company town where the company is football, and moral posturing acts as a substitute for actual morality.

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It's the only way to understand how Paterno's longtime assistant Jerry Sandusky, sixty-seven, could be charged with forty sex crimes against boys from 1994 to 2009, with many bearing silent witness and not saying a word.

The minors were under the care of Sandusky's charity for impoverished youth, the Second Mile foundation, which Sandusky founded in 1977. As the grand jury presentment stated: "Through the Second Mile, Sandusky had access to hundreds of boys, many of whom were vulnerable due to their social situations."

Sandusky is denying all charges, but the grand jury report is a damning and detailed indictment of a man abusing his power and authority allegedly to rape young boys.

Many Penn State students refused to let this staggering abuse of power sink in. Embarrassingly, as fellow students at other college campuses joined the Occupy movement to protest economic injustice, students at Penn State rioted to protest the firing of their head coach, who appeared to have coddled an alleged pedophile.

Later, one PSU student named Emily wrote the following to Sports Illustrated's Peter King: "Truth is, if not for Paterno's philanthropy and moral code (until his fatal lapse of judgment), I and thousands of others wouldn't be here right now. If not for Paterno ... Pennsylvania State might still be an agriculture school and State College might be lucky if there were a Walmart within a thirty-mile radius. Paterno made a huge mistake, but that doesn't mean he's not a good man."

Bullshit.

Emily's words ring as false as the apologists for the Vatican, Wall Street, and the military command at Abu Ghraib. The same moral code that Emily praises absolutely cannot...