General politics thread

Ah—my apologies.

No. Not a single source used the phrase, "a cocoon of bitterness and resentment."

Can we just be real about this? 

I found it. I started a thread about that story on the Mothership.

Here is what I said then:

Someone posted this new Atlantic piece on the hazing death thread (should be a running thread at this point). It's a compelling piece - I listened to the audio during a run this week, which is a fun way to ("read") a longer magazine piece. Anyway, it definitely has a point of view, and proceeds from some premises stated as fact. (This jumped out, in a laundry list of the "ritual" that occurs after a fraternity hazing death: "Its most dramatic act will be to shut down the chapter, and the house will stand empty for a time, its legend growing ever more thrilling to students who walk past and talk of a fraternity so off the chain that it killed a guy.") Regardless, it is an important piece of journalism.

Nonetheless, I have an idea with the following paragraph about Joe Paterno, and in particular the last, bolded sentence:

In 2007, he gave the practice his implicit endorsement. Photographs had surfaced of some members of the wrestling team apparently being hazed: They were in their underwear with 40-ounce beer bottles duct-taped to their hands. “What’d they do?” he asked during an open football practice that week. “When I was in college, when you got in a fraternity house, they hazed you. They made you stay up all night and played records until you went nuts, and you woke in the morning and all of a sudden they got you before a tribunal and question you as to whether you have the credentials to be a fraternity brother. I didn’t even know where I was. That was hazing. I don’t know what hazing is today.” He wasn’t upset that the wrestlers had engaged in hazing; he was scornful of them for doing it wrong.

I don't read it that way at all. I don't think Paterno is endorsing hazing. He's saying that what was being reported as "hazing" by the wrestling team was not hazing, in his mind, and then gave an example of what he understood "hazing" to be.

I think she misrepresents Paterno's position, or at least can't write her interpretation as ... wait for it ... an established fact. Paterno wasn't "scornful of them for doing it wrong." He just didn't think that what they did was hazing.

The problem is that she needs Paterno to endorse hazing, because one of the premises that her piece rests upon is that Paterno's role as the dominant figure on the Penn State campus set the tone that eventually led to Tim Piazza's death and other fraternity malfeasance, like the Facebook page of naked, passed out women. (Full disclosure: That was my fraternity, though I didn't go to Penn State.) She also then gets to tie her piece in some way to the bigger Penn State scandal, Jerry Sandusky's reign of terror.

But, again, I just don't think Paterno says what she says he says.

Thoughts?

Right. That's what happened. I take it with a bit of a grain of salt. We don't know who the sources are. The writer is being a bit florid. But someone's probably telling him something along those lines. It's similar to how I view Woodward's books - a data point, rather than anything remotely definitive.

Disagree.