and i thought i hated old-boy networks before!

i went to penn state for graduate school. i don't follow sports, though, ever since being bitterly disappointed by the cleveland browns as a sensitive and dramatic adolescent. i especially don't follow football, and extra especially not college football. in fact, it would be fair to say that i felt pretty disdainful and cynical of the rabid football culture at penn state (and at ohio state, where i went for undergrad, for that matter).

unbeknownst to me at the time, i was also apparently enamored of it. the recent developments, the details of which i won't recount here, have affected me to a surprising degree. i really feel like i lost something. i guess it's something of an object lesson for how ideology works: subtly and unconsciously and even when you think you feel to the contrary. but it would seem that i actually bought that paterno was a really good, stand-up guy, even as i rolled my eyes at him and his program and even some of the things he himself said and did.*

my feeling of loss, though, is not just about paterno's falling from grace, and it's not just about the vileness of the events and behavior that led to the current scandal. i would have been the first person to be skeptical about entrenched and opaque power structures with a lot of money involved, run by people who have only known privilege and who feel as though they are the center of the universe. the comparisons people make between the penn state scandal and the catholic church's similarly harboring child rapists are apt for many reasons. but i understood why people were still catholic; the religion seems to offer people enough that they could chalk the harboring of child rapists up to some very bad apples, but it didn't indict the entire institution. moreover, to devout catholics able to overlook the harboring of child rapists according to however their conscience handled it, i get the impression that the church somehow seems to exceed the issue, due to the spiritual and other intangible sustenance that religion provides. i tend to be fairly sympathetic to such positions, though i am not religious myself.

however. the case of penn state makes plain that the ideology equals the institution equals the persons who run it.** and in the abstract, before this mess, i would have vigorously claimed that to be true. it is materially, abundantly clear now. but even as i would have been making that claim, previously i would have held out some bit of, oh, i wouldn't call it "optimism" or "hope," but at least a baseline trust that institutions are institutions and people are people and when they meet, there is some kind of balance somewhere, some friction that puts a check on egregious violations of social trust.

and for me, that's part of why i feel so devastated: that there was no check or balance anywhere. the violence was of a piece with its enabling structures. the violence happened *because* of the institutional structure, not coincident with it and certainly not in spite of it. this causal relationship is further borne out in the the vulnerability and presumed disenfranchisement of the victims, who were "at-risk" in various ways, hence their involvement with sandusky's foundation. i always did think that many institutions (such as the catholic church) contribute to poverty, or disenfranchisement, or any number of other forms of oppression that the kids involved with sandusky's foundation endured regularly. you have to argue about how that oppression are brought about, though, and unearth processes and relationships that are not obvious to people who don't see them as a matter of course. i didn't think any institution could contribute so directly and so obviously to the rape of children.

so to my mind, it's not just that sandusky is the worst kind of pervert, or that curley, schultz, spanier and paterno are grossly negligent people or even that they made one or a series of dangerous decisions, or that penn state's domination over the lives of vulnerable children was exploited in the worst way. it's that the whole thing was set up to produce that violence and negligence (though this is different than saying it was all inevitable). as we all know, people are always stupid and crappy and undermining and incompetent and treacherous in all sorts of ways. whether or not this does damage is a matter of how the place operates.*** also, people rape people, they always have and they always will. but when incompetence, treachery or even rape occurs within an context of institutionalized domination, in which the importance of preserving that domination is communicated in all kinds of constant, subtle, binding and unconscious ways, you can blame the actors till the cows come home, and while they are in fact responsible, they did precisely the only thing that it made material and ideological sense for them to do. i mean, even i bought into the paterno legend. imagine how it was for people who actually like football and think that penn state is good and right for revolving around the sport.

the catholic church is a lot older and bigger than penn state, and that makes it easier to think of its harboring of child rapists as more dispersed and beside the point of its larger and loftier goals. but i used to think that the church, in its antique vastness and pretensions to transcendence, was somehow unique. in that, i believe i was actually allowing it transcendence. so now another sense of loss i feel is that the catholic church is no longer special or transcendent even in its violations. the church, with its oppressive and violent hypocrisy masquerading as piety is only a more dramatically pronounced version of something very banal. institutionalized domination, when granted the power of a mundane ideology that sells itself as transcendent, leads not just to a decimated lifestyle for certain populations, but also to acute violence to the bodies of the disenfranchised. in other words, while my problems with the catholic church have never been unique to me, it turns out they are not unique to it, either. and that is just devastating.

*for the record, i never bought that spanier, the president, was a good, stand-up guy. i was involved in trying to organize a union and spanier was your typical union-busting manager without seeming to get his hands dirty. sneaky and fakey.

**this list is in more or less random order, because the buck doesn't just stop with the persons. it's all a continuously-catalyzing chain reaction.

***i have seen places where such venality was rewarded, and places where it was cast off like water off a duck. but it never doesn't happen.