Paterno on His Pedestal

Maureen Dowd asks if it would be right to pull down the statue of disgraced Penn State football coach Joe Paterno, in her words, "as though he were Saddam Hussein." She writes:

Paterno is the tragic figure in the case, the man who went to church and taught his players “success with honor,” but succumbed to supporting depravity. His name was derived from the Latin word for father, and JoePa was the beloved paterfamilias of Happy Valley. So how did he crack his moral compass? It’s the story of “Faust,” a morality play that unspools daily in politics, banking, sports and the Catholic Church. It has taken many artistic forms, from puppet theater to the Marlowe and Goethe plays to opera to a buoyant musical that was also a sports morality tale, “Damn Yankees,” about a middle-age real estate agent who sells his soul to be a slugger named “Shoeless Joe” Hardy for the Washington Senators.

Though some of the columns caused a little controversy, I actually thought Dowd's reporting from the Sandusky trial was excellent — not everyone agreed. On the question of whether or not the statue should be removed, she's a little clearer. "If I were the Decider, I’d leave it up," she wrote. "But I’d put up another darkly alluring statue behind Paterno, whispering in his ear: Mephistopheles."

(Image: "With Joe Paterno's statue in the foreground, a plane dragging a banner that said "take the statue down or we will" circled Beaver Stadium for about 3 hours." Photo by Michael Bryant)