If you asked me last week who Joe Paterno was, I would only know two things: football and legend. I wouldn't have been able to if he was alive or dead or if he coached college or pro. What I know now is that he, being a legend, is in the minds of people who believe he should know everything, connected to the latest sex scandal to occupy the MSM.
So there's a new story to add to the old story. Something more for the peasant Americans to know. And I am beginning to feel more weary about what we all must know, given the state of today's communications networks, and optimistic about the next economy.
What I understand is that it must be inevitable that we will sell each other our dreams. That there is a fundamental biological need for us to hear each other's voices and share each other's company, but that with a sophisticated enough computer sytesm, human company can be simulated. And so we will pay to have 'someone' pay attention to us forever. Long after the last tree has been chopped down and we get power from the heat in the center of the planet, we will enjoy life in a Matrix of our own creation. But in the meantime, we are scandalized by real human failure which is the truth that's stranger than fiction and therefore more compelling.
it's because I'm looking to that inevitable post-material future 150 years away that it is easy for me to be dismissive at this particular moment. Paterno is old news. He's an old brick building that everyone thought was solid. But his cracks made him suited for condemnation, and so he will be demolished.
Paterno is no Caligula. Relatively speaking his drama is merely that. It is not world historic, but it rocks some people's worlds. Some people will shake their heads belieiving now that if it is true that Paterno was involved in a pedophilic homosexual prostitution scheme, that anything is possible. Anything has always been possible, but we build up legends around men so that we can believe that only a few things are possible. But you forget Caligula.
I don't hope anything either way for this football legend. I only hope for justice to be done.
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