Anti-Climacus

Being a mature sort, or at least attempting to be, I don't go in much for swearing, either in person or on the internet. But sometimes it is more than deserved, as when Deadspin gives approximately the right response to the fawning Washington Post profile of Joe Paterno. For a more measured but no less apoplectic take, there's always The Atlantic. Here as elsewhere (see also the Catholic church sex scandals, as both articles point out, but also the response to U.S. practices on torture), euphemistic language and the unwillingness to accept personal responsibility for the things one has left undone serve to efface the severity of what happened.

(I do think in Paterno's case we have to accept the possibility that he was not compos mentis as far back as 1998, i.e. his language is not willfully evasive but he genuinely lacks the mental capacity to understand what has happened and his own role in it. This does not apply, obviously, to anyone else involved in the case, or those involved in the parallel cases. But it still doesn't make him a good man, or even a tragic one; if he really wasn't in a position to understand about this he should have stepped down, as people wanted him to do for most of the last decade. But, there you have it: the banality of evil.)