We expect every crime to have a narrative, and great crimes should have large narratives. Malcolm Gladwell, master of the simple answer to complicated questions, takes to the New Yorker to explain “Jerry Sandusky and the mind of a pedophile“:
… To recap: A man uses his new girlfriend to befriend the family of the ten-year-old boy he is molesting. He orchestrates a threesome in a bed in his parents’ house. He asks the girl to have sex with him with the ten-year-old lying beside them. She says no. She leaves him alone with his victim—and then he persuades her to marry him.
The pedophile is often imagined as the dishevelled old man baldly offering candy to preschoolers. But the truth is that most of the time we have no clue what we are dealing with. A fellow-teacher at Mr. Clay’s school, whose son was one of those who complained of being fondled, went directly to Clay after she heard the allegations. “I didn’t do anything to those little boys,” Clay responded. “I’m innocent. . . . Would you and your husband stand beside me if it goes to court?” Of course, they said. People didn’t believe that Clay was a pedophile because people liked Clay—without realizing that Clay was in the business of being likable.
Did anyone at Penn State understand what they were dealing with, either? Here was a man who built a sophisticated, multimillion-dollar, fully integrated grooming operation, outsourcing to child-care professionals the task of locating vulnerable children—all the while playing the role of lovable goofball. “If Sandusky did not have such a human side,” Sports Illustrated’s Jack McCallum wrote, in 1999, “there would be a temptation around Happy Valley to canonize him.” A week later, Bill Lyon, of the Philadelphia Inquirer, paid tribute to Sandusky’s selflessness. “In more than one motel hallway, whenever you encountered him and offered what sounded like even the vaguest sort of compliment, he would blush and an engaging, lopsided grin of modesty would wrap its way around his face,” Lyon wrote. “He isn’t in this business for recognition. His defense plays out in front of millions. But when he opens the door and invites in another stray, there is no audience. The ennobling measure of the man is that he has chosen the work that is done without public notice.”…
And then agaim:
… Paterno did not like Sandusky. They argued openly. Paterno found Sandusky’s goofiness exasperating, and the trail of kids following him around irritated Paterno no end. He considered firing Sandusky many times. But, according to Posnanski, he realized that he needed Sandusky—that the emotional, bear-hugging, impulsive knucklehead was a necessary counterpart to his own discipline and austerity. Sandusky never accepted any of the job offers that would have taken him away from Penn State, because he could not leave the Second Mile. But he also stayed because of Paterno. What could be better, for his purposes, than a boss with eyes only for the football field, who dismissed him as an exasperating, impulsive knucklehead? Pedophiles cluster in professions that give them access to vulnerable children—teaching, the clergy, medicine. But Sandusky’s insight, if you want to call it that, was that the culture of football could be the greatest hiding place of all, a place where excessive physicality is the norm, where horseplay is what often passes for wit, where young men shower together after every game and practice, and where those in charge spend their days and nights dreaming only of new defensive schemes…
As a narrative, it is unimpeachable. Some men are monsters, and those men have every impetus to disguise themselves among us ordinary folk if they are to satisfy their depravities. There was a monster named Sandusky, but he’s been defanged now, safely locked away. There was an old man with an obsession, and perhaps he should have been more attentive to the people under his direction, but that was in a different mindspace, and besides the man is dead. And everyone else in the narrative is a victim — both the long string of preadolescent victims, and all those many clueless, well-meaning adults (parents, university authorities, social workers and law enforcement personnel) who were too innocent or too legally restricted to grasp the extent of Sandusky’s depravity.
After all, perhaps this is not the best of all possible worlds, but there will always be a market for credentialled pundits to explain for us how everything has worked out for the best!
Bostondreams
Who had Anne Laurie in the pool? ;-)
Painful read, in all seriousness. :/
arguingwithsignposts
@Bostondreams: Now they’re just fucking with us.
Villago Delenda Est
The whole thing is just a gigantic mess that points to the dangers of complacency, and institutional blindness to long term damage in favor of the short term cover up.
They always miss this. Always.
Mr Stagger Lee
I wonder if ESPN/ABC is going to show another F*&*^%ing Penn State game like they did for the last 3 weeks? I wonder if Franco Harris reads this he still be a true believer? Oh and Brown University decided not to boot JoePa from their athletic hall of fame, so the Paternos can at least be relieved at that.
Southern Beale
David Corn says there’s more to be revealed tomorrow … OMG ….
arguingwithsignposts
@Mr Stagger Lee: I guess I tuned out the “Penn State is struggling to overcome tragedy” storyline after week one. Do they still play football in Happy Valley?
Yutsano
Inb4 Special Timmeh shows up.
@arguingwithsignposts: Dashboards? We don’t need no stinkin’ dashboards! ALLONS LES POSTS!!
Nemo_N
But I thought pedophiles are those guys who watch children cartoons and japanese animes. Football coaches? How could they! They are so cool and lovable!
Now seriously, people think pedophiles are the ones they already dislike. I wish more people were aware of this.
Eric U.
the current president, Rodney Erikson has said that football didn’t have too much power here. I think that is obviously wrong, but the one person that Paterno did have too much power over was Spanier. It really shouldn’t take too much thought to realize that if Paterno wanted Spanier fired, it was a done deal.
There is a certain amount of 20-20 hindsight going on. When something is hiding in plain sight like Sandusky’s activities, it takes a prepared mind to see it. So hopefully this will be harder to get away with in other places. Apparently Sandusky was a wrestling coach, and this is a very common hideout for pedophiles.
Corner Stone
This has been one of the worst officiated football games in the NFL I have ever seen.
Mnemosyne
I dunno, maybe it’s because I don’t properly despise Gladwell (I still think his essay comparing dogfighting and professional football was fucking brilliant), but that’s not what I got out of the article at all. More like he was saying that Penn State is a cautionary tale about not letting people present themselves at face value and the dangers of ignoring red flags for so long that, by the time you see your nose in front of your face, you’re morally an accomplice in those crimes.
Lihtox
I wish people would distinguish between pedophiles (people sexually attracted to children) and child molesters. I have no doubt that for every Jerry Sandusky, there are dozens of pedophiles who restrain their sexual impulses. And even the pedophile who makes an awkward pass at a child once or twice is nowhere near as reprehensible as a premeditating serial molester like Sandusky.
Pedophiles are much less likely to seek out help if they are afraid of being treated like a criminal.
Mnemosyne
Also, in OT but sad pet news, our friend’s cat has a serious bowel obstruction and the vet is telling her that the surgery will cost $10,000.
No, I didn’t accidentally add a zero. I love our cats dearly but, honestly, I’m not sure I could bring myself to pay that amount of money for one of them to have surgery. (I also don’t have that kind of money laying around, but that’s beside the point.)
ETA: Moving this up to the recently created open thread.
Brachiator
Bullshit. Bullshit. Bullshit. There were adults who knew, who suspected, who failed to follow through, or who allowed themselves to be intimidated into silence. Yeah, some adults were fooled. Others wanted to be fooled.
And then there is Sandusky’s wife, who may be an unindicted co-conspirator.
As a narrative, Gladwell’s narrative is a simplistic fairy tale that some adults will read to lull themselves to fitful sleep.
But that’s OK. One day, Hollywood will come up with an edgy TV show about a child molester with a depraved heart of gold, and people will fall all over themselves talking about how it is better than Dexter or Breaking Bad.
salsa_lover
Gladwell’s point is that you can’t trust what people tell you or show you because the darkness in their soul is known only to them. Unless, of course, you’re Joey Pa who just spends his time in basements and kitchens dreaming up offensive and defensive sets, watching the Wonderful World of Disney, and yelling at Sandusky. Because, apparently, back-slapping defensive coordinators are impossible to come-by in Division I college football.
Citizen_X
A sentence than is now far more disturbing than originally intended.
burnspbesq
Sandusky’s sentencing is scheduled for October 9. That’s about as much closure as the legal system can provide. Hope it’s enough. Doubt it will be.
Mnemosyne
@salsa_lover:
See, again, what I got was more that Sandusky was useful to Paterno, so Paterno ignored all of the warning signs. Paterno’s own personal flaws allowed Sandusky to operate with impunity because Paterno didn’t want to be bothered, and dozens of kids (at a minimum) suffered because of it.
Maybe it’s not the full-throated call for a Cadaver Synod that you were hoping for, but it seems pretty damning of Paterno to me.
DougJ
That was a really interesting article.
Jose Padilla
Mr. Gladwells thesis appears to be that Paterno was too obsessed with coaching a football team to realize that one of his assistants was a pedophile. Yet in 2001, one of Paternos assistants told him that he witnessed fondling and something of a sexual nature (in Paternos words) occurring between a young boy and Sandusky in the Lasch Building showers. Its hard to imagine how Paterno could have remained oblivious under those circumnstances.
Interrobang
I don’t get the hate for Gladwell, but I find him very subtle. He doesn’t come out and whack you on the head with the point, so if you’re not paying attention, you might miss it.
His depiction of Paterno struck me as characterising him as so hyperfocused on football that he wasn’t going to let anything at all get in the way of what he wanted to do, least of all his own assistant coach molesting kids. Call it willful blindness, if you will. The Freeh Report is pretty damning in that regard as well.
Also, you know, sometimes there aren’treally a lot of ambiguities about allegedly complex situations.
Disclosure: I’ve actually met Malcolm Gladwell, about 12 years ago before he was famous; at the time, he was a staff writer at The New Yorker. His family is from near where I went to graduate school, and he came to do a guest lecture/workshop in one of my courses while home on a visit. Nice guy, actually, and he can write a little bit.
Raya
The summary is a little unfair to Gladwell, who granted is generally an over-simplifying putz — but his point here is really that pedophiles (at least, those who are bent on gratifying rather than fighting their urges) dedicate ALL their energy and ingenuity to “grooming” their victims and picking off the children who are most vulnerable. Under such circumstances, it’s not enough to look out for the dirty old man in the raincoat — one has to be vigilant and take very seriously ANY evidence, however slight, that something fishy might be going on. The article is full of examples — kids who tried to speak up, parents who tried to speak up and get investigations started, a psychologist who correctly read the evidence that molestation was taking place — who were successfully bamboozled into thinking they must have imagined it, through a combination of factors: (1) isolation (the successful pedophile is careful to operate in such a way that whoever comes forward is unlikely to meet or learn of anyone else who might have come forward, so they are alone out on a scary limb); (2) a charm assault from the pedophile himself, who has highly developed manipulation skills; and (3) institutional fear of liability (“Are you sure you want to go through with this accusation? If your son is wrong/lying/just imagining it, you could be irrevocably destroying a man’s life!”).
To me, the main message of the article was to expose the means by which successful pedophiles operate, and to exhort all of us to be (a) more watchful/aware, and (b) more trusting of our own instincts and less willing to be talked out of our suspicions when we think something fishy is going on. JoePa was a negative example, not presented as blameless but quite the reverse; because he was so incapable of taking responsibility for anything other than the technical aspect of the football program, he created a golden opportunity for Sandusky to work his stratagems.
What I mostly took away from it was, when my son is old enough to play sports, I’ll be making damn sure he’s never alone with any single coach/member of staff. There should be two adults on duty at all times, keeping an eye on each other — for their *own* protection as well as for the protection of the kids.
Lordwhorfin
@Mnemosyne:
Bah, I liked Clint Eastwood’s Obama Synod better.
The Original Raven
Kraw…
By Gladwell’s description, Sandusky is a sort of person who I avoid; there is always a thread of meanness in their “goofiness.” And sometimes, more than a thread. Covert aggression is a tell–one can’t know how deep it goes, or what is underneath it. People who go along with it, who think it is funny, are opening themselves to greater abuse.
Attention to that might, and a few other tells, have protected a lot of boys; might protect a lot of people still.