Jessi Lillo's Serious Sarcasm - Laugh Cry or Scream?

What is REALLY Wrong in the World- College Football

Tear down JoePa's statue? Abolish Penn State football? Close down the University? Yes, wonderful ideas. But only a beginning. 

Right after that we need to tear down Mt. Rushmore, the Washington monument and any other statue, building, park or plaque that honors or bears the name of any of our elder statesmen who owned slaves. After all, these men and those in their employ systematically raped, tortured and starved the generations of human slaves they owned. We must then redesign all of our currency because nearly every coin or banknote depicts one of these despicable humans. No matter that recalling and exchanging all U.S, hard currency will completely crash our economy (so what, those guys were bastards and our currency is offensive because of it?) because step 4 of the plan involves burning the Constitution. Those jackasses considered Blacks three-fifths of a person and allowed those they governed to hang, beat and rape Black citizens for nearly 200 years without penalty.

Next, we must go after the churches. Start with the Catholic churches, since they allowed their priests to molest thousands. Also, their superiors at the Vatican not only harbored Nazi's, but profited immensely from it. Anne Frank wasn't the only child to die in the concentration camps, you know.

Now that the little stuff (slavery, the Holocaust, institutional racism and rape by men of God) is obliterated, we can move on to what is REALLY wrong in the world- college football.

The ACC, Big Ten, and NCAA must go. One of these bodies allowed the other two to acquire universities with documented institutional cover-ups of multiple rapes and other crimes by their football players and staff. Granted, these crimes were against women and therefore not heinous enough to warrant the firing of a coach or anything, but we must wipe them out anyway. Carnegie Mellon has to go too. Do you know how many children were exploited and killed during the industrial revolution?  Military academies, seeya!  Anyone remember My Lei?

I hope I'm not leaving anyone out, but the whole Penn State scandal has me so righteously indignant and morally superior that I can't look at the big picture. I'll try to get there, but without the Constitution or free enterprise, there will be no media to tell me what to think.

CALL ME NANCY DREW

Well slap my Pulitzer and call me Nancy Drew, I have solved the Case of the Puppet Master!  It's Joe Paterno.  I know it's bad form to start with a conclusion, but you may not have time to read the whole story and I'm sure you want to know whodunit.  So feel free to just take my word for it.  I'm awesome.  And really smart.  And important.  And I make a lot of money.  

So I figured the best place to find a smoking gun was in 1998.  Why else would the NCAA have vacated wins since then, right?  There it is, the crucial evidence. In emails dated May 6th and 13th Curley mentioned that Coach, probably Joe, wanted to know what was going on. Aha!  See, that's what's so brilliant about Joe; he pretended not to know what was happening and got Curley to mention him in these emails so as to divert attention away from himself as the puppet master.  He had to keep a low profile, not involve himself in the process, not get in on the conversation, basically be unaware of the investigation in order to hide the fact that he was secretly...

Oh crap.

Apparently there were a bunch of local and state cops and social workers who investigated the allegations against Sandusky but decided there wasn't enough evidence to make any sort of charge.  But Louis Freeh said those people were overworked and not equipped to understand what they were dealing with, so it's not their fault.  Joe Paterno, on the other hand, had an Ivy League education, and had spent 48 years coaching football, so he should know better than...

Oh crap.

Yeah but there's more.  Apparently, during all of this, Sandusky was negotiating his retirement.  That's the key my friends.  It seems that scoundrel Paterno thought giving Sandusky's Second Mile kids unrestricted access to athletic facilities would open the school up to liability.  Obviously this had to be about molestation because no way could a football coach think personal injury liability.  How ridiculous.  If that were the case, then sports facilities all over the place would require people to sign waivers and...

Crap again.

But then this got me thinking that maybe Joe Paterno was psychic.  Couldn't that explain how he was able to win 409 football games?  Or was it 308?  Can't remember.  But that would explain the importance of the year 1998 wouldn't it?  But then I figured those geeky kids on Paranormal State would have surely uncovered that by now.  Maybe this whole paragraph didn't need to be included here since it isn't really related to the case, and I hope it doesn't stop you from reading further because your eyes are tired or anything like that because I would hate for you to miss the really important things at the end of this because you have other things to do.  I decided to go ahead and include it in the name of thoroughness.  Is that a word?  Not sure, but it's easier to pronounce than obfuscation.

Where was I?  1998, 1999, somewhere in there.  So the puppet master asked for Sandusky's access to be limited, and since he ran that place it was and...

Crap.

Ok, but wait, it seems our Mr. Paterno made only a token appearance at Sandusky's retirement party.  A famous and popular man like Joe Paterno would have to lead a very active social life and leaving that party early proves he knew Sandusky was a monster.  I googled "Joe Paterno party animal shocking photos" and didn't find anything.  Called the Enquirer.  Nada.  Obviously Joe got to them ahead of me.  I did find some stories about him meeting with wealthy alums to solicit money for new academic buildings on campus, but they made it sound like he flew in for the meeting and went home to his wife.  Guess he got to them ahead of me too.  So this kind of turned into a dead end but i wanted to include it anyway to pay homage to the guy who uncovered it.  His bio says he's a great investigative journalist, and I think that must be true because he's the only person so far who has uncovered the fact that Penn State hired Seasock to derail the 1998 investigation.  How is a guy that smart writing online instead of at a major paper or magazine?  His name is Victor Thorn, just in case anyone wants to give him a better job.

Still confused about the 1998 thing, but I am a professional, so i decided to dig deeper.  And there it is, in print and on every television channel in at least this country: Joe did not report the 2001 incident to the police.  

Oh crap again.

At this point, the only direct evidence I had left of Joe's complicity was his public confession.  Remember when he said he should have done more, didn't do enough, however it was summarized or paraphrased, it was a confession.  I found the full statement.  

Crap

No problem, the answer is not in the details but in the overall culture at Penn State.  I need to look for proof that Joe and his football team ran the place. There were those janitors, the ones who reported it and were fired by Joe because everyone bowed to...

Crap.

And Triponey said Joe ran the place.  She is a brave woman who came forward before Joe's body was cold and opened the door for her oppressed brothers and sisters at the University to join her.  The floodgates opened and...

Crap.

As you can imagine, by this point I was all crapped out.  I couldn't really explain how I knew Joe was the puppet master, so I fell back on the one answer that works in all situations.  Because I say so.

 SO LONG FUTBAL CULTURE - HELLO EDUMACATION 

Now that the main furnace in the football factory has been shut down, Penn State can finally, finally, after 61 years, begin to attempt to meet the mission of educating students.  Obviously it is going to be very difficult because we will need to fight the entrenched culture of football fever that has permeated this University for so long and stunted all of our educations to the point that we are unable to formulate an unbiased opinion.  It's damn amazing we can even string two sentences together if we're talking about anything other than football.  I think such sweeping reforms can only be accomplished with the help of a very special group of people who have so far remained oddly silent:

•   The thousands upon thousands of professors and TA's who were forced to give special consideration to our football players, to change grades of all football players or to give higher grades for substandard work.  
•   The deans and department heads who waived credit hours and GPA requirements in order to hand out degrees and sell football tickets.
•   The nerd herd that was forced to do all the players' out-of-class work for them, take their graduate exams, and slip into class to secretly take tests for these players while the professor pretended not to notice they had suddenly shrunk 8 inches and lost 150 pounds of muscle.
•   The players who are now ashamed to admit that all these things were done for them and now their lives are ruined because they can't read and were never trained for anything other than football.
•   The deans and professors of all those graduate schools who accepted our players and now regret it cuz theys dont reed so gud.
•   The additional faculty, administrative and support staff who were forced to allow the players to run roughshod over the entire campus and conduct themselves like heathens.
•   All former Penn State assistant coaches, athletic trainers, and graduate assistants who were forced to do any of the above or to ignore that it was going on.

Where have you people been?   You should be jumping at the chance to finally be heard.  At all other schools where the NCAA has had to step in and save them from the win-at-all-costs football program, people such as yourselves have come forward in droves.  And they did so under the same regime which allowed it to happen in the first place.  But at Penn State, the oppressive dictator (no names, not going after individuals here) was overthrown months ago, his errand boys have been exiled and yet you remain silent?  Why are you not out there proclaiming "freeh at least, freeh at last, thank Joe almighty I'm going to be freeh at last."  I know those weren't Abraham Lincoln's exact words, but who cares about facts when children were abused by that guy... you know, the guy with the white hair who once worked for Paterno.