Success with Dishonor at Penn State
DATELINE: NOT SO HAPPY VALLEY!
One bad PR move deserves another. After rioting, Penn State held a little-too-late candlelight vigil for unknown victims.
Before that, Interim Penn State football coach Tom Bradley gave a press conference upon his appointment to speak about his beloved Joe Paterno, his mentor and enabler.
Penn State Nitpickers or Ninnies or whatever they are called were the audience for Bradley’s cogent comments that smack of Shakespeare as performed by Monty Python.
If the words of Tom Bradley, short-term football coach, sounded familiar, they were perverted twists on the great speech of Marc Antony about Julius Caesar in Shakespeare’s play.
Unlike Jerry Sandusky who wanted the rears of young boys, Bradley merely wanted to bend the ears of nitpickers.
Bradley came to the new job with a heart heavier than Lyndon Johnson when he sent soldiers to Vietnam. At the press conference new coach Bradley noted how he came to praise Paterno, not bury him.
The good, Bradley noted, was often buried with the bones of men like Paterno, but he didn’t want to see, to hear, to speak of the evil his predecessor who covered up horrific crimes in support of 409 NCAA victories.
For supporters of Paterno, pursuit of victory was a noble ambition, and little children tossed under the bus were a small cost to pay.
When Penn State lost, didn’t Joe Pa cry? According to Bradley, evil should be made of sterner stuff.
Didn’t Paterno fill the coffers of Penn State? Joe Paterno never took a dime, did he?
Didn’t Joe Paterno refuse to retire and leave his team bereft of a figurehead? He refused to allow them to put a halo over his head on the campus mural of Penn State’s Mount Olympus.
Bradley held his press conference to speak what he did not know, though he was likely complicit in the coverup too.
As Bradley said, everyone loved Paterno, not without cause. He affected the lives of “so many,” and he repeated it with lyrical parallel. He touched almost as many as Sandusky.
Coach Bradley’s heart is in the coffin with Paterno. Let’s hope there is no victory on Saturday and no additional press conferences. Bradley’s eloquence makes us queasy.
