Bad behavior, scandal and evil are part of the human condition. So is giggling and gossiping about it.
I doubt the world has become darker, nastier and more dangerous than it was in the good old days, whenever they existed, but you would be excused for thinking otherwise. Around the clock cable news and instant information available with a few keystrokes leave the impression that single women are constantly disappearing from Caribbean islands and mothers are regularly murdering their children.
We either tune it out, as I do, or are entertained by the salacious details. In other words, we become hardened to the steady drumbeat of human misery and malfeasance.
But a week after news of the Penn State football pedophilia scandal broke, I still can't wrap my brain around it, and the story won't leave my consciousness.
The similar and much larger-scale tragedy of predatory sex in the Catholic Church didn't surprise me because it involved the religion of my youth, and I had long suspected unsavory activity was being hidden behind the medieval attitudes and costumes.
Penn State football is different. It was seemingly created and certainly run by a bonafide scholar with Lombardi-esque clarity about right and wrong.
Joe Paterno was on a pedestal high above the tawdry cheating and hypocrisy of big time college sports. He produced national champions the right way, with respect for the rules and zero tolerance for ethical fuzziness.
Or so we thought. As the details of the Penn State situation dribbled out in the past week, I have become increasingly astounded at the moral cowardice apparently epidemic at a nationally esteemed school entrusted with shaping future generations of Americans.
Paterno was a poseur as a leader of young men, and we were all taken in by him. A decent person would have asked questions, pursued the troubling report he received, and called the police.
High-ranking university administrators covered up, looked the other way and even lied under oath, according to criminal charges filed against them. We are talking the alleged rape of a boy estimated to be 10 years old in a school athletic facility, and that was not the only reported incident that should have been immediately referred to off-campus police.
What kind of moral midgets are these people?
How should we react to this? The temptation is to become even more cynical than we are as a country. The better choice is to be less gullible.
Be realistic about those who command hero status. Don't expect them to be any more saintly and courageous than the average working stiff, and hold them to common sense ethical standards. Nobody, not even the winningest coach in major college football history, gets a free pass from doing the right thing.
Click on this Huffington Post link to see a timeline of the sequence of events involving the Penn State scandal. It's chilling.
Damien has been around so long, he was at Summerfest the night George Carlin was arrested for speaking the seven dirty words you can't say on TV. He was also at the Uptown Theatre the night Bruce Springsteen's first Milwaukee concert was interrupted for three hours by a bomb scare. Damien was reviewing the concert for the Milwaukee Journal. He wrote for the Journal and Journal Sentinel for 37 years, the last 29 as theater critic.
During those years, Damien served two terms on the board of the American Theatre Critics Association, a term on the board of the association's foundation, and he studied the Latinization of American culture in a University of Southern California fellowship program. Damien also hosted his own arts radio program, "Milwaukee Presents with Damien Jaques," on WHAD for eight years.
Travel, books and, not surprisingly, theater top the list of Damien's interests. A news junkie, he is particularly plugged into politics and international affairs, but he also closely follows the Brewers, Packers and Marquette baskeball. Damien lives downtown, within easy walking distance of most of the theaters he attends.
