Friday, March 31, 2017

The chronic dumbness of Happy Valley

Aaaand we have a winner in today's popular Blob category, You Can Stop Digging Now, Moron, aka The Mischief That Happens When Mouths Become Disconnected From Brains.

Come on down, Albert L. Lord!

Who is a trustee at Penn State. And who apparently is in the right place, because the University he serves  continues to lead the known universe in blame deflection, lack of accountability and terminal cluelessness.

Which is to say, damn this boy is dumb.

Here, for instance, is what Lord wrote the other day in an e-mail to "The Chronicle of Higher Education":

Running out of sympathy for 35 yr old, so-called victims with 7 digit net worth. Do not understand why they were so prominent in (former Penn State president Graham Spanier's recent) trial.

Just the thing you want to hear from anyone remotely connected to Penn State, where former football assistant/serial pedophile Jerry Sandusky was allowed to prey on young boys for decades thanks to both benign and malicious neglect.

Apologists such as Lord apparently consider Spanier as much a victim of Sandusky as all those young boys, an utterly absurd notion. The financial situation and age of the victims who testified in Spanier's trial, after all, is irrelevant. I doubt whatever "seven-digit net worth" they may have compensates much for the lifetime of nightmares inflicted upon them by a Penn State employee.

I also suspect Lord isn't alone in his sentiments.

I suspect a lot of people at Penn State are tired of Sandusky's victims, even if they won't say so out loud. That's because a lot of people at Penn State have never fully confronted the University's culpability in Sandusky's crimes. There has always been, or seems to have been, a belief in Happy Valley that Sandusky was purely a Sandusky problem.  Why, how could Joe Paterno have known? How could the AD have known? How, for goodness' sakes, could poor blameless Graham Spanier have known?

Which ignores the more relevant question: Why didn't they know? Or, in the case of Paterno (who apparently did know for years), why didn't he do something about it?

All of that is not the worst part of this, however. The worst part is that Lord wasn't smart enough to shut up once he'd started digging this particular hole.

Because after saying he was "running out of sympathy" for the "so-called" victims, he went on to compound his idiocy. He hinted that continued sympathy for the victims was the product of that old hobby horse, political correctness:

The notion that there can be only one point of view with respect to all this stuff, and trustees at Penn State should toe a line that reflects the politically correct point of view, is symptomatic of what ails us ... I am tired of victims' getting in the way of clearer thinking and a reasoned approach to who knew what and who did what.

Sorry, Albert. But saying you're "tired of victims' getting in the way" does not mean you're some courageous warrior in the battle against political correctness.

It just means you're an asshole.

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