The Obligatory Paterno Post
A high ranking American religious figure, a deity more than just a high-ranking official in the Church, has bitten the dust.
This is if by now you have not yet sensed that the chief religion in the United States is not Christianity at all. It can't be, because the precepts of Christ are rarely followed anywhere in the country. But those of the real religion, Sports, are zealously put into play wherever you look, and the chief denomination of that religion is the game called football, a pursuit typified by the instant evolution of its players into men who have suffered the indignity of having their necks become suddenly shortened or the slopes of their shoulders have steepened and enlarged right up to the hinges of their jaws.
Unlike another deity in the same category, however, Steve Jobs, Joe Paterno didn't die, though by now he probably wishes he was dead. The longtime successful head coach of the Nittany Lions, a college football team somewhere in Central Pennsylvania, was instead fired, and with no hope of any kind of redress or of making an eventual comeback, because it seems that by many testimonies, one of his assistants has engaged in a long series of sexual crimes against young men and children, in which Paterno, by having covered up for him, has come to be seen as sharing a certain amount of the responsibility. Therefore, in the nation today, you can observe much weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth. Some students at the Pennsylvania State University even staged a full-scale riot right on the campus, because of the firing.
Little did I know that when it no longer became possible to go to the stadium whenever the whim struck me and buy a ticket to watch the Washington Redskins, because that privilige had suddenly become available only to season ticket holders, that deed, on the face of it such an evil thing, was actually one of the best things that could ever have happened with me. It was right up there with the day I decided that I no longer wanted to be a Baptist or anything else along those lines, and with that season ticket atrocity the same became true when it came to Sports -- cemented in stone a little later when I further realized that when you have seen one football or baseball or basketball game, you have actually seen them all.
This is if by now you have not yet sensed that the chief religion in the United States is not Christianity at all. It can't be, because the precepts of Christ are rarely followed anywhere in the country. But those of the real religion, Sports, are zealously put into play wherever you look, and the chief denomination of that religion is the game called football, a pursuit typified by the instant evolution of its players into men who have suffered the indignity of having their necks become suddenly shortened or the slopes of their shoulders have steepened and enlarged right up to the hinges of their jaws.
Unlike another deity in the same category, however, Steve Jobs, Joe Paterno didn't die, though by now he probably wishes he was dead. The longtime successful head coach of the Nittany Lions, a college football team somewhere in Central Pennsylvania, was instead fired, and with no hope of any kind of redress or of making an eventual comeback, because it seems that by many testimonies, one of his assistants has engaged in a long series of sexual crimes against young men and children, in which Paterno, by having covered up for him, has come to be seen as sharing a certain amount of the responsibility. Therefore, in the nation today, you can observe much weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth. Some students at the Pennsylvania State University even staged a full-scale riot right on the campus, because of the firing.
Little did I know that when it no longer became possible to go to the stadium whenever the whim struck me and buy a ticket to watch the Washington Redskins, because that privilige had suddenly become available only to season ticket holders, that deed, on the face of it such an evil thing, was actually one of the best things that could ever have happened with me. It was right up there with the day I decided that I no longer wanted to be a Baptist or anything else along those lines, and with that season ticket atrocity the same became true when it came to Sports -- cemented in stone a little later when I further realized that when you have seen one football or baseball or basketball game, you have actually seen them all.
posted by Carl (aka Sofarsogoo) | 5:28 AM
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