The Statue Comes Down

Last week someone flew a plane over Penn State trailing a banner that read, "Take the statue down or we will." Fearing violence between students standing watch over the statue and those who planned a Saddam-statue takedown, Penn State has removed the statue of Joe Paterno.

Paterno had taken on the stature of a demigod at Penn State. The Freeh report, released last week, determined that Paterno knew a lot more about Jerry Sandusky's crimes than he pretended to, and was involved in the decision to do the "humane" thing and cover up Sandusky's child abuse, allowing him to continue molesting children.

A typical reaction from Penn State was that of the statue's sculptor, Angelo Di Maria:

"When things quiet down, if they do quiet down, I hope they don't remove it permanently or destroy it," he said. "His legacy should not be completely obliterated and thrown out. ... He was a good man. It wasn't that he was an evil person. He made a mistake."

But this truly mischaracterizes what happened. In the beginning there were only vague suspicions about Sandusky, and Joe Paterno could stand by and silently acquiesce to Sandusky's evil, having no clear knowledge of it. But when Mike McQueary saw Sandusky sodomizing a child in the shower, the issue was forced. At that point Paterno could have continued to stand by and let justice follow its course. Instead, he actively intervened and prevented the incident from being reported to the police.

When you come right down to it, there is no one worthy of the sort of adulation we heap upon people like Joe Paterno, or Tiger Woods, or Barry Bonds, or Charlie Sheen, or Mel Gibson. They are all fallible people with their own blind spots and deficiencies. These guys are not heroes. They are not all that brilliant or moral. They are just like us. They are just doing a job that happens to be entertaining us.

The irony of this sorry story is that Joe Paterno was famous for being the exception to the corrupting influence of celebrity. He seemed to be a normal, moral, modest person who had not succumbed to the adulation of millions.

The people who are still trying to hang on to the Joe Paterno myth don't get it, but they share some of the blame for his fate. They put Paterno on that incredibly high pedestal and set him up for the big fall. If his fans had not built up his ego so high, had not made a college football program into the Second Coming, then perhaps Paterno would have stayed the modest and moral man he was when he started out.