This is part twenty-one of Marc H. Ellis’s “Exile and the Prophetic” feature for Mondoweiss. To read the entire series visit the archive page.
The statue of Joe Paterno in front of Penn State’s football stadium has been removed. Quite a fall from football’s Mt. Olympus.
Others statues have fallen. The big names – Lenin, Stalin, Hitler – mostly powerful political figures, have their images carved in stone or bronze. They’re heavyweight durable, made to last for centuries. Though difficult to bring down, down they come. When the times change and history has its say.
In our age sports heroes rank right up there. Sports figures become iconic. They also rise and fall. History doesn’t bow before the iconic forever.
Book writers beware of writing bios of iconic figures. A book tour of a new biography of Paterno is now on hold. The title of the book – should it actually come out – has been changed. The original title, The Grand Experiment: The Life and Meaning of Joe Paterno, has been, shall we say, shortened. New title, Paterno. Suggestions for a subtitle? This could become a late-night talk show bonanza. As in, How to Win Football Games and Garnish a University’s Reputation by Protecting a Child-Molester.
If you think Penn State is way out there on athletics’ scene, forget it. When you’re inside a university, you see it all. This includes the “Christian” colleges. Believe me the ethical bar is low. Just look at who serves as presidents of these institutions.
Get this quote in the New York Times: “Announced in March 2011 as ‘a biography of America’s winningest college football coach, who changed the country one football player at a time,’ the book will enter the marketplace at a moment when the name of Joe Paterno, the late Penn State coach, has gone from revered to radioactive.”
Radioactive indeed. Once revered. Yesterday. As the greatest moral example of college sports. The next day the statue is gone. Bye, bye, Jo Pa!
Wherever I travel, I find it fascinating to see who is revered and who is reviled. Or how the once reviled are now revered. For the iconic, there are second chances in history. Sometimes more.
Some years ago I was invited to speak at a Lutheran college in South Dakota. Airplane connections were complex and my time was short. The person arranging my travel was considerate and patient. The final scheduling problem involved my attendance at a church service celebrating Martin Luther’s birthday. It was scheduled the day before I spoke. The travel coordinator kept trying to get me to the church on time. Without specifying the reason, I kept putting her off. Truth be told, I wasn’t about to attend a celebration for one the most articulate anti-Semites of all time.
Obviously, Martin Luther has a very special place in the heart of Lutherans and for the denomination that bears his name. Whatever Lutheran church or college I visit, there it is – a larger than life statue of Luther starring me right in my face.
If you’ve ever read Luther’s extensive writing “On the Jews and Their Lies” you’ll understand where I’m going. Without assigning him to Hitler, if you travel north on Luther Street you can end up with mass death. Under the certain conditions.
“Under certain conditions.” Broad statement. Broad brush. Because, you see, Martin Luther was a revolutionary religious thinker. Viewed from various angles, Luther leads in different directions, the most fruitful of which he probably wouldn’t recognize. Like parts of the modern Lutheran community that I’ve been around. I doubt he’d even recognize them as his progeny.
I doubt they are his progeny myself, except in name. The Lutherans I know are what I call “aberrational Christians.” Don’t know how long they’ll be around.
Hybrids are part of history, too. But when does a hybrid become something other than a mixture of parts? When is a hybrid something altogether different? Alien?
True, as well, for Jews. Unrecognizable, what we have become, to many who went before us. Can you imagine a Rabbi from the 13th century recognizing as Jews, Israeli soldiers commandeering Palestinian homes and defecating in their living rooms just to show them whose boss? Is that behavior alien to “Jewish?”
Not now it isn’t, alien that is. What was is no longer. So we carry that defecation into the future.
Tainted greatness. Luther. So many others. Every leader? Every community? It all depends which way the historical winds blow – at this time and that. Because someone like Martin Luther means one thing in one era and something else in another. We don’t know which Luther will show up in the decades ahead. Scary, don’t you think?
It’s a risk that history has in store. Once there, always there. It depends on what is done with legacy.
I wonder how long before the Peace Garden statues that feature the likes of David Ben-Gurion and Yitzhak Rabin fall. Without comparisons but noting certain similarities, each following has its statue pantheon. Often it has to do with victory or defeat; the passage of time tends to elevate the defeated. But, then, the defeated are often used in the next victory procession. When the role reversal occurs and the power reversal comes in time, those statues also come down. There aren’t many Peace Garden statues that stand the test of history.
Meanwhile, watch out for ethnic cleansers in your communal Peace Gardens. Especially in the Peace Gardens of your mind.
“Can you imagine a Rabbi from the 13th century…”
Martin Luther may have been an anti-semite, but was this degree of religious intolerance the norm for that time period among the various religious faiths? In “Jewish History, Jewish Religion”, Israel Shahak raises the question of the historical attitude of Judaism toward gentiles.
I am not sure you are correct when you write: “If you think Penn State is way out there on athletics’ scene, forget it. When you’re inside a university, you see it all. This includes the “Christian” colleges.”
It seems to me that an institution’s leaders covering up a pedo ring is way worse than the kind of things I could even imagine being done in the other colleges’ athletic’s programs- including those of the “Christian” colleges. It would be comparable to having execution chambers like Pinochet set up in Chile’s stadium, or public executions like the Taliban had in Kabul’s soccer stadium. Really gross. I highly doubt more than even a few college athletics teams are institutionally connected to child rings or torture or execution chambers, but I could be wrong, and God willing I am.
That Sandusky was likely running a ring with the Second Mile is told by a victim of another abuser in this recent article in the New York Daily News:
http://articles.nydailynews.com/2012-07-17/news/32701763_1_second-mile-jerry-sandusky-barnaby-wittels
It’s also put forth by a different source in this article in the Ellis County Observer:
http://www.reddirtreport.com/Story.aspx/23022
“… Can you imagine a Rabbi from the 13th century recognizing as Jews, Israeli soldiers commandeering Palestinian homes and defecating in their living rooms just to show them whose boss? …”
Doesn’t this head off into the ‘saintly virtue of the victim’ direction?
That thirteenth century rabbi might get a real charge out of it.
Loved this new poem on Jadaliyya – http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/6580/apache:
“Crazy Horse” was not a horse.
He was an Apache child who ran as fast as the wind. So his mother called him “Crazy Horse.” He rushed the seasons to grow up and defend the Apache. At night he dreamed of one thing: Being a strong bird and soaring into the belly of the sky to nest in one of its clouds. To pounce on the White Man who hunted his ancestors like deer and scattered them all over Arizona.
But fever chased his soul out of his body and it settled in a passing cloud while his body slept in a ditch. He never became that fierce bird.
It was three years before the Apache’s final defeat, when five thousand soldiers besieged Geronimo and dragged him and his men in shackles (Skeleton Canyon, Arizona, September 4, 1886).
All that is left of the Apache today are reservations on the margins of history.
. . .
Do dreams die with their dreamers? Or do they roam the night searching for someone to dream them again?
Perhaps they become nightmares and inhabit the nights of others.
Apaches are hovering now.
In distant skies.
The hunt continues.
. . .
2010
* “Crazy Horse” was the call-sign for several Apache helicopters shown in footage released by Wikileaks in 2010. They were firing missiles on Iraqi civilians, including children, and killing them, in Baghdad in 2007.
Richard Steigmann-Gall details in his book The Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity, 1919-1945 how Luther was much admired by several leading Nazis.