Category → Fruit of Contemplation
Entertainment with Meaning Part II
For those of us still living in the 20th Century, modern music like this may occasionally supersede Flatt & Scruggs. This song and artist certainly do:
In the midst of war, flowers
In the midst of this political battle over retaining plainly stated Constitutional rights, I’m planning a wildflower hunt this spring. The location is in Middle Paxton Township on private land I manage. Amid all this testy unhappiness, it gives me something to smile about. I admit that my wife, children, and work give me much to smile about, but native wildflowers are a special weakness of mine. Finding a patch of trillium, wood sorrel, or Jack-in-the-pulpit always gives me hope. For these beautiful, delicate, gentle creations to survive and grow, much must be right in their small world.
And if there’s a small patch of All Right here, and there, and over there, then how much more there must be elsewhere. In a time of strife, these tiny, pretty thoughts remind me to be happy and remain hopeful.
See you little guys in April!
NCAA takes a shot to the gut
Good for Tom Corbett.
Pennsylvania’s governor has filed a lawsuit against the NCAA for its unfounded collective punishment of Penn State University, its students, its football players, and associated businesses and communities that depend on PSU’s reputation.
The indication that the NCAA has nothing to stand on is their spokesman’s response: The victims of Sandusky are “affronted.”
Say what? The NCAA is speaking for the kids now? What did anyone at PSU have to do with Sandusky? Two officials, maybe three, covered it up for a few years, and they will hopefully all rot in jail. But no one else out of the millions of people associated with the school had anything to do with it. Collective punishment is the domain of dictators, meant to instill terror. Invoking deep emotions instead of intellectual honesty shows the NCAA’s cowardice. A cowardly dictator? So much for the NCAA standing for much.
It’s my hope that the bizarre punishment levied against PSU will be tossed aside. Justice must be done, and done right. Here’s one step in that direction out of several steps that should include a public hanging of Jerry Sandusky and long jail sentences and huge fines for Shultz, Curley, and Spanier, none of whom should receive a public pension.
Ultimate Prosaic: What The Heck Happened to American Made Hunting Boots?
America made the best hunting boots, a fact known as surely as Einstein was the smartest person ever and Raquel Welch was the hottest babe, ever.
Until now. Now, hunting boots by even the most storied makers like Danner and Irish Setter are made in….where else…China.
Call me confused, but let me ask you, Are the Chinese big on hunting? Do they know how to hunt, what to wear hunting, are they gear hounds, etc. ? My sense, apparently now shared by a lot of other American hunters and outdoorsmen, is that the Chinese really do not know hunting or hunting boots. In fact, the Chinese suck at hunting (although I once watched a video of Chinese soldiers happily picking off gentle, unarmed Tibetans who were walking through the Himalayan snows to escape their China-occupied country, so I guess the Chinese are good at murdering, but that’s unrelated to hunting), if their products are any indication.
The proof that the Chinese stink badly at hunting is that they keep on manufacturing hunting boots, and the hunting boots keep on getting returned by increasingly surly buyers. Label says waterproof. Wallet says you just paid $200 for high quality, waterproof boots. Your wet feet say “These ain’t waterproof.” And back to the store they go.
Some guys (and ladies, too), are returning three pairs of the same model before they give up on either that model or on the entire brand. A lot of people seem to be migrating toward spending no less than $300, and easily up to $375, on a pair of hunting boots that they know will not fail them when they are alone, a long, long way from civilization, and dependent on their footwear to get them around and back home at the end.
Does three hundred and fifty bucks sound like a lot of money for hunting boots to you? Holy smokes, it sounds like a lot of money to me. A pair of fancy dress shoes by the best makers rarely go for that amount, even on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. Something is afoot here, friends, and it is not pretty.
On the one hand, a lot of hunters are kvetching about their low-quality boots online and in product reviews. So hunting as a sport is clearly taking a hit. On the other hand, Chinese boot manufacturers are hazing hunters, forcing many of them to spend a small fortune on the only American-made hunting boots, thereby restoring comfort to their feet and honor to our crumbling nation. I am at that point myself, having purchased, worn, and returned several expensive pairs of boots by the most storied names in boot making history.
The question is, with boots this expensive, are guys going to begin comparing boots at camp? That will make me feel quite uncomfortable. The last thing I want is to be associated with effete city slicker behavior. It’s like pollution in a pristine environment. It’s a Chinese plot to destroy hunting, one way or another. God help us.
Bear season, it’s all about the views
Bear season in Northcentral Pennsylvania came and went this year.
Although no one in our cabin killed a bear, or saw a bear, we all hiked in beautiful country and admired nature’s miracles.
Time alone is rare. Time alone to contemplate God’s creation, the wife, the kids, work…well, it’s hard to make.
In remote areas, sitting on a steep mountainside, no one else within a half mile at least, admiring the views, I was able to center myself.
One of my guests is a Wall Street guy, taking a turn in his career. He said his first time hunting was really about the scenic views. He has traveled the world, but said he never felt so alone, or so at peace as this week. He called it a success.
Bear season, it’s all about the views.
Joe Paterno gets fired, the end of innocence
When Paterno got fired from Penn State, it marked the true end of the innocence that defined much of Happy Valley’s day-to-day existence.
For Paterno to have to leave at the end of the season was a big blow to the whole university-football-alumni-money system.
For Paterno to be summarily fired, by phone and before the end of the season, indicates the depth of the failure and the cost of the coverup now dawning on Penn State’s board of directors.
Such a thing was unimaginable a week ago.
To make such a move is to sacrifice much short-term stability, long-standing tradition, and external confidence in PSU. But the trade-off is that eventually that outside confidence will return, because the board acted decisively and painfully.
Spanier’s firing is a whole other matter.
Spanier was not a fixture of PSU like Paterno had been, and he was not co-identified with the university. Paterno was Penn State, while Spanier was simply working at Penn State. Sure, Spanier was there a long time and he liked to present himself as being as much a fixture as Paterno, but he wasn’t one.
Firing a university president is a sad but important fact of academic life. While it is usually painful, most college presidents (and I have met or worked with at least a dozen in my career) are just as human as you and I, except that they all have gigantic egos for reasons that no one else outside of academia can understand. These folks are no more deserving of adulation than anyone else, and actually probably get fired a lot less than they deserve or experience. My city’s garbage men perform a more necessary and appreciated service than any college president, so Spanier gets zero sad faces from me on account of his termination.
But Penn State, my shining city on the hill, that is still getting sad faces. And we still do not yet know what happened to get us all to this point. The Sandusky scandal probably goes deep.
Here is an indication of just how broad the scandal is: A small independent news source in Israel actually wrote a report titled “Football Related Scandal Traumatizes the United States,” http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/149584#.Tr1TyPL4J6Q.
A quick search of other international news outlets indicates that PSU has a far bigger reputation than I would have ever guessed. And I’m one to think that the world revolves around Penn State and State College.
Resolution had better be done correctly, or we will end up looking even worse.
Joe Paterno steps down…end of an era
Joe Paterno has just announced that he will step down from his head coach position at the end of this football season.
The Jerry Sandusky scandal has ended Joe’s career on a negative, when it should have ended on a positive. People argue that Joe could not have ended it on a positive no matter what, because he had groomed no successor, seemed unwilling to face his age, and has been disengaged from the actual sideline coaching.
I will miss Joe, for all of the obvious reasons: His leadership, his values, his dedication. I am pained that a bunch of little boys had to be raped by his subordinate in order to bring this change.
It’s not the way that anyone saw anything related to PSU turning out.
Earthquake in State College, Now Here Comes the Tsunami
Earthquake in State College, Now Here Comes the Tsunami
© By Josh First
November 6, 2011
Late this past week an earthquake was felt in State College, and the resulting cascade of day-by-day events signal that a tsunami is following close behind. If you think that an earthquake is bad, wait until the tsunami hits. It’s much worse than the earthquake.
First the earthquake: Jerry Sandusky was a household name in the State College I grew up in, the 1970s through the 1980s, when I graduated from Penn State. Heir apparent to coach Joe Paterno, Sandusky was a household name, a golden name. As the high-performing caretaker of Penn State’s famous “Linebacker U” identity, Sandusky epitomized the toughness, braininess, and determination of one of college football’s all-time greatest programs, the Penn State Nittany Lions.
That golden program’s glow illuminated all that sat in its shadow, and Happy Valley has radiated quiet quality and confident happiness for decades. Sandusky was at the center of an empire built on trust, integrity, and clean living, qualities of which we stodgy, old-fashioned old Penn Staters are tremendously proud. It’s all at risk, now.
Now, according to charges brought against him, Sandusky appears to be heading toward the lowest reputation a man can have, a pedophile. Of course, he is innocent until proven guilty, but the crimes appear to be so numerous, so egregious, that if even just one is eventually proven, it alone would be too much to bear. The whole debacle threatens to drag down Penn State with it.
For the first time in Penn State’s storied football program, and by extension the university’s own administrative reputation, an event so dramatic has occurred that it potentially strikes at the core of the universal happiness. After the earthquake, a stain is seen slowly spreading on the kingdom that Joe built. Guilt by association with the charges against Sandusky is not far behind.
And here’s that tsunami, bearing down on all of Penn State: According to additional charges announced a day later against PSU heavies Tim Curley (Athletic Director) and Gary Schultz (Vice President for Finance and the campus police), a house of cards artificially held Sandusky in place, professionally and socially. Despite rumors and actual eyewitness reports of Sandusky’s crimes being conveyed to Curley and Schultz, neither of them relayed the accusations to the police. Under their protective gaze, Sandusky continued to use his Second Mile charity for at-risk children to put yet more children at risk.
Schultz’s attorney claims that his client is under no obligation to report child abuse allegedly committed by a former employee. Yeah sure, that’ll fly, when Sandusky was allowed to use the same university facilities where some of the alleged assaults occurred because of his former Golden Boy status and tight small town, big program, charitable relationships with Tim Curley and Gary Schultz. It doesn’t matter whether the cops, district attorney, or a jury of their peers eventually agree with that line of thinking.
What matters most is public perception, and the general perception is that these two senior PSU executives demonstrated fatally poor judgment. That public perception is going to quickly become public pressure, and the two men will go into retirement some time in the coming weeks. We know it’s coming.
Adding insult to injury is PSU president Graham Spanier’s lame defense of Curley and Schultz. In what has to be the most public display of Good Old Boy Circle The Wagons defense we’ve seen since the tobacco company executives took their congressional oaths years ago, Spanier actually testified to the good judgment of both men and promised they would be exonerated.
Popularly known as ‘doubling down’, Spanier’s bigger bet on the two men is going to be a loser. Mr. Spanier, you can’t really be president of one of America’s premier academic institutions and defend the indefensible. Spanier is demonstrating the clueless arrogance that goes with all big fishes living in small ponds, and he, too, is about to feel the wrath of public pressure. If Spanier lasts another month as Penn State’s president, it’ll be a miracle.
And if you love Penn State as I do, which is fanatically, then the final outcome of this sordid affair is likely to be bittersweet.
With the Athletic Director spot about to be empty any day now, and with the President spot likely to be empty any week now, our aged hero, head coach Joe Paterno, will find himself all alone at the top of a heap over which he has little control. Change will be in the air in State College in the coming weeks, and it is unlikely that Paterno will survive it. Curley and Spanier both tried to bump Paterno out years ago, and both lost. They are soon to be gone, and new people with no history or loyalty to Joe will fill their seats. The new folks will make it a fast and final decision. Penn State will have a new coach within a year of now.
Like Penn State, the institution known as Coach Joe Paterno has my love, appreciation, admiration, and respect, for all of the obvious and same reasons he inspires that devotion among millions of others. I grew up with his wholesome kids and played in his all-American home, watched him recruit new players and listened to him lecture the young men on the straight-and-narrow Penn State way. He is a moral giant in a field crawling with opportunism and outright cheating. His example and principles are needed now more than ever. But if there is one more indication that Coach Paterno has lost the ability to hold on, it’s that he didn’t blow the whistle on Sandusky with more force.
Right now, Penn State is reeling from the earthquake. But no one can withstand a tsunami. What will be left at University Park after the coming tidal wave passes through will be interesting. Hopefully, what is left will be a return to the simple, humble, noble traditions that made us Nittany Lions great to begin with.
© Josh First, licensed to Rock The Capital, www.rockthecapital.com