January 26, 2012 by Susan Hansell.

The only way an oily person like Jan Brewer, who sticks her finger in the face of the President of the United States to make some incredibly small and literally-minded point about herself, ever gets elected in the first place, is because, like her, the majority of voters in the state of Arizona never graduated high school.

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January 1, 2012 by Susan Hansell.

It’s not that you’re lying; it’s that no one will believe you, and you won’t want to believe it yourself.

Be prepared to hyperventilate or throw up or run or scream or fall down or hide or panic or freeze or just plain not know what to do.

What, for example, does the condemnation of a 28-year-old graduate assistant tell us about the Penn State cover-up of pedophile Jerry Sandusky?

The grad student in question, Mike McQueary, was, according to the report, traumatized by what he saw:  Namely, a childhood father-figure, a former football coach of his own growing up, the father of his childhood friend, and a national leader in the football community, (allegedly) committing sodomy on a ten year old boy in the showers of the football locker room. McQueary could have ran screaming away and turned a blind eye to Sandusky’s  crime - which is what EVERYONE in the town of State College PA did for years:  Police, coaches, teachers, presidents, ADs - all got the creeps from seeing Sandusky with kids, and no one did a thing.

The Grand Jury reported a Korean War Veteran and Penn State janitor who, after coming upon yet another (alleged) Sandusky child-molestation incident in the football locker room, began shaking so badly that his colleagues thought he was having a heart attack.  No one reported the incident; all were afraid of losing their jobs.

It’s easy to say what you would have done, but what if you had grown up with this guy as your next door neighbor, your football coach, the father of your best friend, the best friend of your own dad, the founder of “Linebacker U”? Just ask Matt Millen…

McQueary reported in detail what he saw; the adults in the positions of responsibility and authority who heard his reports, who hadn’t been traumatized by actually witnessing Sandusky’s acts, these adults failed to follow up on what they had been told about Sandusky and his atrocities.

The impulse to DENY is and was stronger for everyone up and down the chain of command at Penn than it was for one graduate assistant, and the Grand Jury believed him when he gave his account:

Mike McQueary told the Penn head football coach Joe Paterno that he saw Jerry Sandusky anally raping a 10-year-old boy in the Penn football locker room.  Joe Paterno, the AD, the college president, etc. etc., they did nothing, and then they lied about doing nothing, by saying that McQueary hadn’t told them anything more significant than “horseplay.”  Then they kept the pedophile around the Penn athletic department, implicitly isolating McQueary and saying, through their actions, that Sandusky could get away with it, which he did, for ten more years.

This hideous cover-up says a lot about our culture:  that we do not want to face things that we do not want to believe to be true.   And this impulse to deny remains with many former players and many current students of Penn State.

And though you and I would like to think that you and I would stand on the steps of the Athletic Department with a bullhorn and inform the world of what you and I had seen if it were you and me, I also know that, at age 28, the fear and the doubt and the isolation would have been difficult for me to surmount if I felt like my own community, or my own family, would sooner dispense with me than it would with a pedophile.

In fact, haven’t we forgotten all about this oily Penn State thing already?

Happy 2012 to Happy Valley, PA!

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