Words. Words. Words.

MSNBC, one of the self-appointed arbiters of cultural affairs in the 21st Century, has posted an article saying that LAX is the "most social" airport in the world, because more people check Facebook from there than from any other airport.

Remember when "society" actually involved personal interactions with other people? Facebook, and other, similar, social media, are the opposite of "social." 

Does Anyone Else Smell Fish?

I haven't really been following this child-sex scandal out of Pennsylvania, the one involving a former coach who reportedly had sex with one or eight or forty underage (way underage) boys, sometimes actually in the Penn State University's football facilities. I know, just from not living under a rock, that the American media gets really excited, throbbing and pulsating with ratings lust, every time someone does something of a sexual nature that can be reported on ad nauseam. So I try to take it all with a chunk of salt.

Penn State University; photo by G. Chriss

I have to wonder, though, about this one: according to the reports I've read, in 2002, an assistant in the football program told head coach Joe Paterno directly that "he saw Sandusky raping a 10-year-old boy in a locker room shower."

That statement strikes me as incredible. I think if I were Joe Paterno, who, as I understand it, is a decent, upstanding guy with at least an ordinary sense of right and wrong, I would have found the allegation hard to believe. (I'm assuming, obviously, that he had no personal knowledge of any unusual sexual inclinations of the ex-coach.) Saying a man is "raping" a boy in the locker room is shocking, but in the real world, such as we have it these days, I would (1) suspect the guy making the report is exaggerating, maybe because he, like so many others in our modern world, thinks overreaction is always the appropriate reaction; (2) consider that the guy making the report might have some ax to grind where this ex-coach is concerned; and (3) find out what my obligation was in dealing with this report that I am reluctant to believe. As I understand it, Paterno's obligation was to report the matter to the University higher-ups, which, again as I understand it, is what he did.

My only point here, besides a general contempt for the salivating of the media when its nostrils catch the whiff of musk, is that "raping" a boy is such a shocking thing that I'm amazed so many people kept quiet about it. I'm a skeptic. I suspect there is much, much less to this whole story than the media wants there to be.