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By Dr. Robert Beeman
Penn State Class of ’63, ’91, ’96
Propaganda is the art of lying hugely enough to obscure badness. PR is the art of lying convincingly enough to cover badness with a thin film of happyface.
We’re now passing from the Holyshit phase of Penn State University’s public colonoscopy and on into Damage Control.
Taking a cue from the Jew-haters and white supremacists to whom the Holocaust was largely a matter of bad public relations, wise Penn State University heads are now nodding around the water glass trying to scrape together a PR program to gum over a rent in the fabric of trust that will never be obscured but, with truth and humility, might eventually be healed.
The advice PSU is getting from the steaming brown pile of public relations wisdom ranges from dismal to you’re-kidding:
Branding biggie Mark Stevens gets it halfway sorta kinda right in suggesting PSU donate all football revenues next year toward child abuse prevention. He would have hit the mark squarely had he urged donating the same number of years’ revenue as the number of years of life that little boy brought into the locker room that night, and giving it to child abuse detection.
Because detection was what got shoved under Curley’s and Shultz’s and Spanier’s desk blotters. And Paterno’s, and the little creep whose name I forget, who watched Sandusky rape a helpless kid and then, his day seriously ruined, minced daintily off to call his daddy.
Gerard Corbett, chairman of the Public Relations Society of America, calls for wholesale firings [ok so far] and a need to ‘walk the walk.’ Really? Reminds me of Mr. Obama saying America ‘needs more openness.’ Not that Obama intends to be more open, but who can disagree with his remark?
Kelly O’Keefe, professor of brand strategy [schools that sanction child rape are natural customers for brand strategy] favors frequent honest communication from the highest officials. Golly, that never occurred to me.
But with real down-home, chittlins-in-the-fryin-pan wisdom, Institute for Crisis Management president Larry Smith opines that if PSU begins winning football games next season, this will all go away. Gee, yuh think? I know at least eight kids who might disagree with you, Mr. Smith.
For those who equate PR with truth, the PR salamanders are right. This is a really and truly super-regrettable public relations bummer so ugly it might even impact home game ticket sales.
Additionally, Second Mile’s Raykovitz resigned as president of the charity Sandusky set up to score victims. While apparently unconnected to the rapes, Raykovitz just felt, what with donations at an all-time low of nothing, Pittsburghers practicing saying his name while spitting on the sidewalk, and the city fathers of Sandusky, Ohio, considering changing the name of the town, it might be time to move on.
As far as Second Mile itself goes, an Associated Press article reports that ‘its youth programs serve as many as 100,000 boys and girls a year,’ but fails to specify how many may have been served up.
Oh, wait a minute; you may not be aware of this new bit of gladness. From the
Just When You Thought Things Couldn’t Get Any Worse department, a respected sports reporter is currently investigating hints that Jerry Sandusky might have been pimping out some of Jerry’s kids to carefully selected Large-Dollar Donor Daddies of similar evil appetites.
Penn State’s name will drag through the muck for years. After the criminal trials will come the civil suits by children now grown and by outraged parents whose innocent children will now grow with the same talisman of shame around their necks. Each new trial will encourage yet more victims to emerge from the shadows In view of Penn State’s condition of denial, they will be legion.
This is a crisis of Honor. You can restore Honor; you cannot replace it. This horror is a matter of Evil, Capital E, a word which should only be capitalized in the case of respected American Musloids averting their gaze at the murder unbelievers in the Name of God, or a respected American university averting its gaze at the murder of childhood in the name of Image.
Since Penn State permitted its campus and officers to shield shame, perhaps it should now use its campus and officers to attempt redress.
Nothing can reverse the damage done to the little children already befouled. Yet in future every child shielded from these monsters, every monster itself discovered and penned up, adds just the tiniest bit toward restoring the Honor that Penn State University threw away.
As this tragedy continues to unfold, why not transform Penn State University into a beacon of child protection, a bulwark against this particular depravity? Set aside three-quarters of all football revenues for the next ten years to establish, endow, and maintain a Penn State University College of Child Welfare.
Mission: to educate, to train, and to position child abuse specialists throughout the world, to study pedophilia with a view toward discovery, apprehension, prevention and possible cure, and to aggregate into one central collecting place all the wisdom in the world about this noxious evil.
Thus would Penn State University make the safety of helpless children as important a specialty as engineering, as prestigious as the education side of the University itself, and as powerfully advocated as Penn State football. I’ve never watched a full game in my life, but if three-fourths of my ticket price were earmarked for a plan like this, you’d see me at Beaver Stadium next fall.
Thus would Penn State University begin to redeem honor from shame. And having restored Honor, nothing else matters.
Dr. Robert Beeman
About the Author:
Learn more about my current novel No More Time for Sorrow
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