‘Look Forward, Not Backward’. The unofficial motto of the Obama Administration when it comes to any and all Bush-era crimes, ranging from torture to systemic fraud on Wall Street. But this idea of studiously and diligently refusing to deal with the recent past, of instead making a pro forma apology and trying to get back to ‘normal’ as quickly as possible, has become as American as apple pie. We simply acknowledge, however briefly, that ‘mistakes were made’, maybe even toss a ‘few bad apples’ under the bus and then, of course, everyone is supposed to move on.

Or, as George Carlin put it, ‘For God’s sake, stop living in the past. Do yourself a favor, count your blessings, be glad it wasn’t you.’

I was reminded of that willful blindness repeatedly when reading about the Penn State scandal this week.

Yes, the Penn State scandal. Not the Sandusky scandal, or the Paterno scandal, but the Penn State scandal.

For those who don’t have the background, a primer: Central Pennsylvania, like much of the country, has an obsessive, cultish worship of a regional athletic franchise. In this case, Penn State’s football team.

Penn State has one of America’s largest and most loyal fan bases, drawing more than 100,000 people to its home games in State College, a community of less than 40,000 with the nickname Happy Valley. Paterno spent 46 years leading the Penn State team, and won more games than any other major college football coach in America. The team’s success has brought in millions of dollars in television broadcast rights, merchandising and more.

Unfortunately, said athletic franchise has been rocked this week by a sickening series of revelations regarding its current and former staff, as well as the administration of the university, its student population and the Penn State community.

A former assistant coach at Penn State by the name of Jerry Sandusky has been charged with at least 8 sexual assaults of children over many years. This is of course unspeakably awful in and of itself, but even worse, it turns out that the university, and local legend head football poobah Joe Paterno, knew he’d been raping children… for years.. and did nothing.

Actually, that’s not quite accurate. Not only did they do nothing, they covered it up, sheltered him from prosecution, and allowed him to continue running football camps for, you guessed it, young children. For years.

It should come as little surprise, of course, that a child molester would infiltrate a sports program that gave him access to lots of little boys to rape. You rob banks because that’s where the money is; if you’re a child predator, you arrange to be in a custodial position with as many children as possible.

Sandusky’s an obvious villain, of course. But aiding his alleged (and partially admitted) criminal career were numerous other, supposedly non-deviant adults at Penn State. You had the college itself, which knew from a *six week* investigation in 1998 that Sandusky was molesting kids and did nothing to stop it, even after Sandusky admitted to many of the accusations. You had Paterno, who probably knew about the 1998 investigation (since he canned Sandusky not long afterward), but definitely found out in 2002, when a boy was raped, again, this time with an eyewitness no less. That witness, and now ‘whisteblower’, is a man named Mike McQueary, who upon seeing a grown man raping a little boy turned around, ran home, and cried to daddy. Literally. Not only did he not stop the assault, he didn’t report it to the police, and instead immediately started the coverup. As Maureen Dowd put it:

It would appear to be the rare case of a pedophile caught in the act, and you’d think a graduate student would know enough to stop the rape and call the police. But McQueary, who was 28 years old at the time, was a serf in the powerfully paternal Paternoland. According to the report, he called his dad, went home and then the next day went to the coach’s house to tell him.

“I don’t even have words to talk about the betrayal that I feel,” the mother of one of Sandusky’s alleged victims told The Harrisburg Patriot-News, adding about McQueary: “He ran and called his daddy?”

Paterno, in turn, refused to contact the police, instead calling Penn State’s athletic director, another alleged adult by the name of Tim Curley, who was once a Penn State quarterback. Curley didn’t call the police either, instead waiting a week and a half to talk to McQueary (one can only assume he was busy with something, perhaps stamp collecting). At that point McQueary repeated his story to Curley and Gary Schultz, the man in charge of the same campus police who’d been actively covering up Sandusky’s child rape career for years.

They also did nothing.

Well, not quite. They made sure Sandusky would take his child rape somewhere off-campus from now on:

Two more weeks passed before Curley contacted McQueary to let him know that Sandusky’s keys to the locker room had been taken away and the incident had been reported to The Second Mile, the charity Sandusky started in 1977.

Prosecutors suggest that the former coach, whose memoir is ironically titled “Touched,” founded the charity as a way to ensnare boys. They have charged Sandusky, now 67, with sexually assaulting eight boys he met there.

Despite knowing of the two similar rapes, The Second Mile did not do anything to keep Sandusky away from vulnerable children until 2008.

Curley said he told Sandusky he could no longer bring children onto the Penn State campus. In other words, Jer, if you want to violate kids who live in cow town where everything revolves around the idolatry of Penn State and Paterno, kindly take them off campus. The predator was still welcome on his own, though; he was spotted at the football team’s weight room working out last week.

When this story broke, inexplicably and amazingly, the focus of most commentators was seemingly on how it would affect the football coaching career of the great and powerful Paterno. Astonishingly, Paterno tried, ultimately unsuccessfully, to keep his job through the end of the year. Ultimately the board of trustees decided that, no, they weren’t prepared to continue paying the man who protected a child molester from prosecution, and they fired both Paterno and the university’s president.

Graham B. Spanier, one of the longest-serving and highest-paid university presidents in the nation, who has helped raise the academic profile of Penn State during his tenure, was also removed by the Board of Trustees. When the announcement was made at a news conference that the 84-year-old Mr. Paterno would not coach another game, a gasp went up from the crowd of several hundred reporters, students and camera people who were present.

…

After the announcements about Mr. Spanier and Mr. Paterno, the news conference immediately took on a frenzied and somewhat vitriolic tenor. Angry questions were shouted at Mr. Surma, who responded to them while the other board members sat behind him and to his sides. One cameraman repeatedly said, “Your campus is going to burn tonight.”

As it happened, a prescient prediction (or threat?):

The scandal, and the fallout from it, has left Penn State’s normally placid campus in a state of shock. Scores of students poured into the streets downtown in the immediate aftermath of the news conference. Many held up cellphones to take pictures and others blew vuvuzelas and air horns. A few climbed lampposts, tried to topple street signs and knocked over trash cans. Others set off firecrackers from the roofs of buildings, and a television news truck was flipped on its side. A lamppost was torn down and police pepper-sprayed some in the crowd.

“I just don’t think it’s right that JoePa’s losing his job,” Corey Davis, a 23-year-old senior studying international politics, said. “All the facts aren’t out, we don’t even know he’s done anything wrong. Joe’s the fall guy.”

Kathryn Simpson, 20, a junior studying graphic design, was weeping as she walked away from the university’s administration building, Old Main, with a friend.

“This is devastating for us,” she said. “I never in a million years thought I’d see this.”

A number of students went to the coach’s house, where Mr. Paterno and his wife, Sue, spoke with them.

Dressed in a baggy gray pullover sweater, Mr. Paterno waved his hand and started to walk back inside. A student yelled, “We are Penn State,” the frequent rallying cry. Mr. Paterno stopped and turned around to say: “That’s right. We are Penn State, don’t ever forget it.”

(Lest anyone feel sorry for the university president, Spanier, the grand jury says he was aware of the 2002 rape via a report, and yes, following the pattern, he did nothing to prevent future atrocities.)

So, to recap: at least five prominent Penn Staters (Paterno, McQueary, Curley, Schultz and Spanier), along with numerous unnamed others (the janitor, the campus cops, etc) apparently stood idly by and even actively intervened to protect an alleged serial child rapist. For years.

And the student body, community, and local journalists respond with shock that a football coach might lose his job over this.

And then many of them rioted over it.

Perhaps worst of all, the response to the entire affair from many quarters has been, as usual in ‘Look Forward, Not Backward’ America: the university needs to put this behind it, move on, and get back to playing football so that the people of Pennsylvania can feel good about themselves again.

Yes, seriously.

For example, from a candlelight vigil supposedly being held in remembrance of Sandusky’s victims:

Lavar Arrington, who played football at Penn State and in the National Football League, spoke of how the Sandusky allegations are a challenge the university must rise above.

“The worst crime for all of us would be to leave here and forget what happened,” Arrington said. “This is our call to duty.”

The vigil, he told those assembled, is the start of a new story for Penn State.

“It’s on us to renew the pride of Penn State,” he said. “I’m not going to take that fight lying down.”

TJ Bard, the president of the undergraduate student body, said the vigil represented hope, not only for the victims, but for the battered school.

“We cannot let the actions of a few define us,” he said. “May we fight until no child is harmed again.”

A few… bad apples, maybe?

Or take this website put up in the aftermath of the revelations touting the greatness of the university:

We are…

…A grassroots network of proud Penn State alumni, students, parents, and fans, who are embarrassed and shocked by the recent events at Penn State
…Here to stand up for the victims of abuse and help Penn Staters get their pride back

…

By doing so, we hope to show the world what being a “Proud Penn Stater” is really all about and how Penn State is much, much bigger than the alleged actions of a few people. Our hearts go out to the victims, and now our actions will as well.

Because the goal here should be to make hundreds of thousands of people feel good when they put on the jerseys of an athletic team that doubled as a child supplier to a serial pedophile?

And again, these were bad apples. We need more looking forward, not backward. Nothing to see here, move along.

Or take this post from prominent liberal blogger Booman, which is largely concerned about all the good stuff the football program did when they weren’t busy aiding and abetting child rape:

I hope the program can find someone who will continue to do all the little things right and slowly rebuild the reputation for excellence that Penn State earned. And I hope they don’t have any huge moral blind spots that ruin their efforts. There will be a lot of ten-year olds counting on them.

Ugggggggggggh.

This emerging field of Penn State apologetics misses the point entirely, of course. This scandal isn’t just about the actions of one pedophile, or even the apparent conspiracy many in the Penn State administration over decades to shelter said pedophile. This is about the degeneracy now manifestly evident in the Penn State culture itself. It’s about people who put, yes, football above the safety of children, about those who are so intent on their idol-worship, on protecting their cherished group rituals, that when it turns out their local college athletic department resembles Abu Ghraib for tots they move to whitewash it all away. Down the memory hole. Let’s get back to what’s important, which is, of course, pride in the very organization in which this rotten cancer grew undetected for so many years.

The real problem is this CULTURE on display. The problem is the absolute refusal of so many ostensibly sane human beings to reevaluate their beliefs and their personal heroes and, yes, their priorities in life in the light of new evidence.

The people you thought were heroes were scum. The ‘values’ you trusted them to instill in your children directly lead them to cover up unspeakable crimes. You were wrong. They were wrong. Penn State was wrong. And yes, maybe, just maybe, the entire religion of football is wrong.

At some point, sane, rational people would question whether something that results in so many awful secrets is worth defending, let alone returning to, at all. And of course, there have been such voices willing to look at the bigger picture.

But not many. Because we live in ‘Look Forward, Not Backward’ America, where our cultural institutions are sacrosanct, holy and ineffable.

No matter how many victims they chew up and spit out.

Again, from Paterno himself:

Mr. Paterno stopped and turned around to say: “That’s right. We are Penn State, don’t ever forget it.”

Yes you are, and no, I won’t.

*’Look forward, not backward’ is a slightly pithier deviation from the original formulation, put forward by Obama himself, namely ‘Look forward, as opposed to looking backward.’