How Happy Was My Valley?

It is an image forever burned into my memory: September 1992, I'm 18 years old and spending my first semester at Penn State.  I am one of the relatively few students who, based primarily on SAT scores, get to spend their entire four (or so) undergraduate years in Happy Valley.  At this point, I am still under the illusion that State College is totally awesome (or some other 90's cliche).  I walk out beyond the dormitory complex called East Halls and I see a sight that boggles the mind.  What is normally nothing but large parking lots and empty fields is now a portable city.  The bacchanal spectacle that is tailgating confronts my senses and I am overwhelmed, I am swept up in a dream that maybe all those ridiculous teenage delusions about college might actually be true; drunken revelry, loose young women and the wonderful, creamy caramel center that holds it all together: Penn State football.
Fast forward four years.  I have now had enough of the dream.  In fact, I had had enough of the dream at least two years ago.  I stopped buying my student tickets and had mostly stopped leaving my apartment on football weekends.  I had had enough of drunken revelry and was even tired of loose women who, as it turned out were rarely stable, interesting people when they (and you) were not fully tanked on horrible cheap beer.  I was yearning to get out of State College, not because I was itching to get on to real life, but because I was being afflicted by something which I could not name and certainly did not fully understand.  Ennui is the deep rooted boredom which comes when you have confronted the basic absurdity of human existence and are struggling to find some meaning that will allow you at least get out of bed in the morning.  Walker Percy, who I was just beginning to read, describes it as malaise in The Moviegoer, the main character of which I was beginning to resemble.
I had some very deep suspicions that somehow the place I had been living for several years was largely responsible.  I wasn't like this when I came there.  I had traded in the happy hippie for the angry young man.  The Grateful Dead had been replaced by Nine Inch Nails (those are both music groups for those of you who are either old, young, or clueless, google them to learn about the contrast).  I left State College with a Bachelor of Science, a mild depression, and a sense that something just wasn't right in that town.
Today, the NCAA handed down some massive sanctions against Penn State University, basically for allowing an environment to exist where a pedophile like Jerry Sandusky could molest children with impunity.  While I was shocked and saddened to learn that so many children were victimized over the years, I could not exactly say I was surprised by the indictment of the culture of Happy Valley.  How many girls had I known who were raped, but felt they couldn't report it?  How many people developed serious alcohol or drug problems?
I'm not claiming to be psychic, or particularly observant during that particular phase of my life, but I know there was something awry in that town.
The one part that was truly shocking was the involvement and apparent complicity of Joseph Vincent Paterno.  All through my college years, no matter how cynical I became about the rafts of drunken morons hanging off of balconies shouting, "We are, Penn State," I always considered Paterno to be above the fray.  On the several occasions when I saw him ambling about campus, he would always smile and say hi, even to a kid with unnaturally orange hair.  I knew that some day the house of cards would probably come down, but I figured we could always look to the rumpled little man with impossibly thick glasses to be our JoePa.
I admit it, he pierced my cynicism.  Even when I was outraged about Sandusky, I wanted to believe that Joe didn't know.  Let me say that again, I WANTED to believe that Joe was still above the fray.  I could tell you that State College is a spiritually sick place, that Penn State football is an idolatrous construction of blue and white neo-pagan debauchery, but leave Joe Pa out of it.
Now, he has posthumously lost the title of winningest (spell checker says that isn't a word), his statue has been removed, and the system which once practically revered him as a god is trying to blot out his memory.
If he knew and tried to cover it up, there is no excuse to be made.
But I will say this, in all of history there is only one person who ever proved he was bigger than the system, and Jesus had to come back from the dead to make that case.  Paterno was not big enough to transcend his culture.  He could fight the trends in college football to sink to practically paying athletes, he could stubbornly cling to academic standards and refuse to put names on the back of the jerseys, but he couldn't get away from the golem that he helped create.    It reached out and took away his 60 year legacy in a matter of six months.  He became a victim of Jerry Sandusky, albeit the least tragic and most capable of defending himself.  It's the last tragedy of his life that he didn't step up and defend his own honor and in the process defend a whole bunch of innocent kids.
Despite what the NCAA intends, they are never going to change the culture of college football.  The culture that will defend the program no matter what is going to persist, maybe not at Penn State, but it will go on.  Look long and hard at Ohio State, Michigan, Alabama, LSU, USC and even dear old Notre Dame, they've got the same affliction.  They worship the same idol (at Notre Dame they even have Touchdown Jesus).  They just haven't had their Jerry Sandusky show up yet... or maybe they have and we just don't know it yet.
Now there's a scary thought, the University of Pheonix is looking better all the time.