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<div class="timestamp">June 16, 2012</div>
<h1>Moral Dystopia</h1>
<span><h6 class="byline">By <a rel="author" href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/opinion/editorialsandoped/oped/columnists/maureendowd/index.html" title="More Articles by Maureen Dowd" class="meta-per">MAUREEN DOWD</a></h6>
</span>
<div id="articleBody">
<p>
EVERYONE is good, until we’re tested. </p>
<p>
We hope we would be Sir Thomas More in “A Man for All Seasons,” who
dismisses his daughter’s pleas to compromise his ideals and save his
life, saying: “When a man takes an oath, Meg, he’s holding his own self
in his own hands. Like water. And if he opens his fingers then, he
needn’t hope to find himself again.” </p>
<p>
But with formerly hallowed institutions and icons sinking into a moral
dystopia all around us, has our sense of right and wrong grown more
malleable? What if we’re not Thomas More but Mike McQueary? </p>
<p>
Eight tortured young men offered searing testimony in Bellefonte, Pa.,
about being abused as children by Jerry Sandusky in the showers at Penn
State, in the basement of his home and at hotels. </p>
<p>
But the most haunting image in the case is that of a little boy who was
never found, who was never even sought by Penn State officials. </p>
<p>
In February 2001, McQueary was home one night watching the movie “Rudy,”
about a runty football player who achieves his dream of playing at
Notre Dame by the sheer force of his gutsy character. McQueary, a
graduate assistant coach and former Penn State quarterback, was so
inspired that he got up and went over to the locker room to get some
tapes of prospective recruits. </p>
<p>
There he ran smack into his own character test. The strapping 6-foot-4
redhead told the court he saw his revered boss and former coach
reflected in the mirror: Sandusky, Joe Paterno’s right hand, was
grinding against a little boy in the shower in an “extremely sexual”
position, their wet bodies making “skin-on-skin slapping sounds.” He met
their eyes, Sandusky’s blank, the boy’s startled. </p>
<p>
“I’ve never been involved in anything remotely close to this,” the
37-year-old McQueary said. “You’re not sure what the heck to do,
frankly.” </p>
<p>
He was slugging back water from a paper cup, with the bristly air of a
man who knows that many people wonder why he didn’t simply stop the rape
and call the police instead of leaving to talk it over with his father
and a family friend. </p>
<p>
Tellingly, he compared the sickening crime to the noncomparable incident
of being a college student looking for a bathroom during a party at a
frat house, and inadvertently walking into a dark bedroom where a
fraternity brother is having sex with a young lady. </p>
<p>
He said he felt too “shocked, flustered, frantic” to do anything, adding
defensively: “It’s been well publicized that I didn’t stop it. I
physically did not remove the young boy from the shower or punch Jerry
out.” </p>
<p>
He told Paterno the next morning and went along with the mild reining in of Sandusky, who continued his deviant ways. </p>
<p>
Put on administrative leave, McQueary has filed a whistleblower lawsuit
against the school. (He was promoted to receivers coach and recruiting
coordinator three years after the incident.) “Frankly,” he said, “I
don’t think I did anything wrong to lose that job.” </p>
<p>
It’s jarring because McQueary looks like central casting for the
square-jawed hero who stumbles upon a crime in progress, rescues the
child thrilled to hear the footsteps of a savior, and puts an end to the
serial preying on disadvantaged kids by a man disguised as the patron
saint of disadvantaged kids. </p>
<p>
Bellefonte, the town in the shadow of Beaver Stadium, also looks like a
Hollywood creation: the perfect sepia slice of rural Americana
reflecting old-fashioned values. There’s an Elks Lodge, a Loyal Order of
Moose hall, a Rexall drugstore, the Hot Dog House with hand-dipped ice
cream, and a nice senior citizen shooing you into the crosswalk. This
was a big “American Graffiti” weekend in town: the annual sock hop and
hot rod parade. </p>
<p>
How could so many fine citizens of this college town ignore the obvious
and protect a predator instead of protecting children going through the
ultimate trauma: getting raped by a local celebrity offering to be their
dream father figure? A Penn State police officer warned Sandusky in
1998 to stop showering with boys; Saint Jerry ignored him. </p>
<p>
The first witness for the prosecution, now 28, recalled that Sandusky
wooed him starting when he was 12, letting him wear the jersey of the
star linebacker LaVar Arrington. </p>
<p>
In his Washington Post blog, Arrington, a retired Redskin, wrote that it
was “mind-blowing” to hear about the boy’s hurt. He recalled that he
had asked the kid, “Why are you always walking around all mad, like a
tough guy?” </p>
<p>
He assumed that since the boy had been involved with the Second Mile charity, he must be from a troubled home. </p>
<p>
“I will never just assume ever again,” he said of dealing with an angry
child. “I will always ask, and let them know that it’s O.K. to tell the
truth about why they are upset.” </p>
<p>
That accuser testified that at the Alamo Bowl, Dottie Sandusky, a good
German, came into the hotel room while her husband was in the shower
threatening to send the boy home if he would not perform oral sex. Jerry
came out and she asked him, “What are you doing in there?” But she soon
disappeared. </p>
<p>
“She was kind of cold,” the young man recalled. “She wasn’t mean or
hateful, nothing like that, just, they’re Jerry’s kids, like that.”
</p>
<p>
Another accuser, now 18, testified that he screamed when Sandusky raped
him in the basement; though Dottie was upstairs, there was no response.
</p>
<p>
NBC’s Michael Isikoff reported on a secret file discovered in Penn
State’s internal investigation, led by Louis Freeh, the former F.B.I.
chief. Graham Spanier, a former university president, and Gary Schultz, a
former vice president, debated whether they had a legal obligation to
report the 2001 shower incident, and in one e-mail, agreed it would be
“humane” to Sandusky not to inform social service agencies. </p>
<p>
That revoltingly echoes the testimony in the trial of Msgr. William Lynn
in Philadelphia, where the late Cardinal Anthony Bevilacqua ordered the
shredding of a list of 35 priests believed to be child molesters. Lynn
testified that he followed Bevilacqua’s orders not to tell victims if
others had accused the same priest of abuse, or to inform parishes of
the true reason that perverted priests were removed and recirculated.
</p>
<p>
When a seminarian told Lynn in 1992 that he was raped all through high
school by the monstrous Rev. Stanley Gana, Lynn conceded he let it fall
“through the cracks.” He also admitted he “forgot” to tell the police
investigating a preying priest that the diocese knew of at least eight
more cases. </p>
<p>
Yet Lynn claimed he did his “best” for victims. </p>
<p>
Inundated by instantaneous information and gossip, do we simply know
more about the seamy side? Do greater opportunities and higher stakes
cause more instances of unethical behavior? Have our materialism,
narcissism and cynicism about the institutions knitting society —
schools, sports, religion, politics, banking — dulled our sense of right
and wrong? </p>
<p>
“Most Americans continue to think of their lives in moral terms; they
want to live good lives,” said James Davison Hunter, a professor of
religion, culture and social theory at the University of Virginia and
the author of “The Death of Character.” “But they are more uncertain
about what the nature of the good is. We know more, and as a
consequence, we no longer trust the authority of traditional
institutions who used to be carriers of moral ideals. </p>
<p>
“We used to experience morality as imperatives. The consequences of not
doing the right thing were not only social, but deeply emotional and
psychological. We couldn’t bear to live with ourselves. Now we
experience morality more as a choice that we can always change as
circumstances call for it. We tend to personalize our ideals. And what
you end up with is a nation of ethical free agents. </p>
<p>
“We’ve moved from a culture of character to a culture of personality.
The etymology of the word character is that it’s deeply etched, not
changeable in all sorts of circumstances. We don’t want to think of
ourselves as transgressive or bad, but we tend to personalize our
understanding of the good.” </p>
<p>
Lawrence Lessig, a Harvard law professor dubbed “the Elvis of cyberlaw”
by Wired magazine, was seduced by his rock star choirmaster at the
American Boychoir School in Princeton in the 1970s when he was 14 and
turned into his supportive “wife,” as he calls it. “It made me really
feel like a grown-up. Typically, sex doesn’t have to be terrible.”
</p>
<p>
In 2004, he represented another victim in a successful lawsuit against
the school. He told me that “an astonishing 30 to 40 percent” of his
peers there had been abused, “and everybody knew and nobody did
anything.” That echoes the horror at the Horace Mann School in the Bronx
in the 1970s and 1980s, where a culture of sexual abuse by teachers
developed. </p>
<p>
And as if we needed more evidence that perversity lurks everywhere, the
Jehovah’s Witnesses have been ordered to pay more than $20 million to a
woman who was abused for two years, starting at age 9, by a congregation
member in California. She had filed a lawsuit accusing the church of
instructing elders to keep sex-abuse accusations quiet. </p>
<p>
“You don’t want to be the outsider who betrays the institution;
whistleblowers are always the weirdos,” Lessig said. “There are so many
ways to rationalize doing the easy thing. And it’s really easy for us to
overlook how our inaction to step up and do even the simplest thing
leads to profoundly destructive consequences in our society.” </p>
<p>
I asked Cory Booker, the Newark mayor, why he ignored his security team
and made a snap decision to run into a burning house to save his
neighbor. He said his parents taught him to feel indebted to all the
people who had sacrificed for his family. And he recoiled in law school
at the idea that there was not always a legal obligation to help the
vulnerable. </p>
<p>
“We have to fight the dangerous streams in culture, the consumerism and
narcissism and me-ism that erode the borders of our moral culture,” he
said. “We can’t put shallow celebrity before core decency. We have to
have a deeper faith in the human spirit. As they say, he who has the
heart to help has the right to complain.” </p>
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<br clear="all"><br>-- <br>Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)<br><a href="mailto:art.deco.studios@gmail.com" target="_blank">art.deco.studios@gmail.com</a><br>