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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
November 13, 2011
Spontaneous reaction
As goes Pennsylvania, so goes the nation, according to a standard saw of American political commentators, who sometimes call it the Bellwether State. When I think, myself, of "middle America," I find myself visualizing something like Pennsylvania, sometimes with, though frequently without, Philadelphia. It is neither southern, nor really northern; and while eastern, not decisively so, for it doesn't quite make it to the Eastern Seaboard, and spreads west. Well, middle west.My experience as a young hitchhiker persuaded me that Pennsylvania had a genius for being "typically American," in many different ways. ("Typical" being a complex idea, which typically combines opposites.) Since, I have not changed my view. Different parts of the state are quite different from others and yet, there is a certain prevailing aspiration to sameness. Even Philadelphia, which I last visited a few years ago, seemed still "the typical big American city." Not that it lacked all kinds of historical and neighbourhood peculiarities. Rather, they all came out in the wash. You want ghettos? It has ghettos. You want middle-class suburbs? It has them. And lots of big buildings downtown: a mix of the old and the new. There is an accent in that town at the extreme southeast of the state, and another, not dramatically different, in the rural northwest. Yet they both sound like the middle position of the general "American accent," urban and rural, respectively. The riot, this week, at Penn State, after the sacking of a legendary football coach and the college president, struck me as somehow "typically American." By contrast, the Occupy Oakland rioters, and those proposing to riot in other locations, are atypical. This was because they were targeting symbols. The Penn State rioters were defending symbols; albeit, just as incoherently. The Occupationists want things to happen; the kids in State College wanted something to unhappen. The latter also dressed differently, and from what one can see by examining photographs, they represent a truer cross-section of the general population. For there are, by a considerable multiple, more American college football fans than there are left-wing trolls. Indeed, this is one of the things I think foreigners should try to understand about America. There are a lot of things Americans don't usually care much about, and the list coincides fairly precisely with the things in America that get most attention in the world media. The visitor may discover this himself by observing American life, rather than testing his theories about it. Though of course, as a foreigner, I have theories, and one of them is that decades, now centuries, of democracy and populist egalitarianism have not homogenized America; they have made it aggressive in defence of the bland. That, except for pointy-headed intellectuals, they do not have any desire to become Europeans again, is something that has always mystified visiting Europeans. Canadian travellers, on the other hand, are surprised to find they are much like us - notwithstanding what we've been told by our own pointy-headed intellectuals, for whom America will always be "the Other." Now, as a legendary football coach, in office since 1965, Joe Paterno was the (very American) equal to an English Lord. You can't fire such people, they just are. And their job security has nothing to do with personal foibles or oversights, such as the rather serious one of failing to take sufficient notice of one instance of sexual abuse. (He didn't "do nothing," as certain interested parties have alleged; he merely didn't do enough.) Here, to my mind, is the interesting thing. The background condition of human life is such, that the sexual abuse of minors, and sexual immorality more generally, keeps happening. Children have been, are, and will be molested in schools, at athletic events, in summer camps, by babysitters, and even by priests and choir directors. That we must always be vigilant against it ought to go without saying. But it remains a fact of life. That persons in positions of institutional responsibility do not go out of their way to publicize institutional failures, should also be understood. This is not a quirk of college football authorities, or even of the hierarchy in the Catholic Church. Nor is their "inaction" necessarily morally contemptible. For they are in a position to see that more harm than good could come of it - and a lot more harm, in some instances. Self-interest comes into this, too. I'm sorry to have to tell my reader that self-interest figures in the calculations not only of people, but of all other members of the animal and vegetable kingdoms. (Hypocrisy is uniquely human, however.) As I said, there was something in that Penn State riot that was uncannily, and self-defensively, American. I've been trying to put my finger on it. The event was a remarkably spontaneous response, by unthinking youth, to something like a threat to the natural order. It would be going too far to say that they were saying, "political correctness has gone too far." But a serious feint was being made in that direction, and perhaps America-watchers should note that it came from the middle of middle America, and as a direct challenge. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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