alias Bruce.

Good for the Penn State Board of Trustees for firing Joe Paterno

in the wake of the horrible sexual abuse scandal there. The entire situation is tragic, but the board acted promptly and rightly in asserting its authority at a school where, as with many big-time football powers, the coach and the athletic program are virtual deities.

In the case of the legendary Paterno, he is as iconic a coach as there is, with more wins than any other major college football coach and a well-deserved reputation as a football titan. But, like many titans, it appears he overestimated himself. He apparently thought he could still dictate the terms of his future at Penn State -- even after having displayed 10 years of reprehensible cowardice regarding the now-public allegations that former Penn State defensive coach and Paterno friend Jerry Sandusky sexually abused at least 8 boys. Essentially, after being told in 2002 by an eyewitness about Sandusky's allegedly sexually molesting a 10-year-old boy in the locker room shower, Paterno simply told his boss and then, when his superiors did nothing, kept his mouth shut for 10 years -- giving Sandusky a decade in which he allegedly continued to ruin more young lives through his access to young boys via a charity he runs for vulnerable youths. The university was sufficiently convinced of Sandusky's dangerousness to bar him from school locker room facilities -- but, for some odd reason, did not feel moved to protect potential victims outside of the university by going public with the embarrassing news about the allegations against one of their own.

Paterno's implicit message, as revealed in his own defense: Hey, I told my boss about this. I followed the rules. If they choose to hide the problem and not tell the police, why should I stick my neck out and bring down my football program by going to the police myself? Well, maybe now Joe realizes why he should have: because preventing 10 years of rapes of children is more important than protecting the brand name of Penn State football.

Paterno apparently thought he could outmaneuver the Board of Trustees by pre-emptively announcing yesterday that he would retire at the end of this season. But he badly underestimated them. The outraged board replied by swiftly and correctly handing Paterno his head, effective immediately, and by just as appropriately booting Penn State President Graham Spanier. Two of Paterno's bosses, Athletic Director Tim Curley and VP for Finance and Business Gary Schultz, have now been indicted for perjury and failing to report the incident to law enforcement. The grand jury says that Spanier also knew about the allegations against Sandusky and kept quiet, but at this point neither he nor Paterno have been indicted.

There are, of course, politics here. Paterno has been angering the board for years with his imperial behavior. His latest stunt, trying to escape the scandal via his sudden statement of retirement without consulting with the board, no doubt angered them more. And Paterno and President Spanier have reportedly tussled for power for years.

But the politics don't alter the facts. Paterno and Spanier are out on their ears because they failed the most basic test of responsibility for the welfare of young people and for the character of the university. And Curley and Schultz have been indicted because failing to be honest about an alleged sex crime on campus and to report it to authorities is, according to the Pennsylvania attorney general, illegal.

But what this is really about is that college football, at the big football schools, is a business. It pulls in big money from alumni benefactors. It generates media hype. It attracts students. It builds a college's brand. It is a collusion among frenetic high school and college coaches, see-no-evil college administrators, the NCAA, the NFL, and glory- and money-hungry athletes. It is an industry, and its ruthless needs trump quaint concerns like ethics, academics, respecting women, and safeguarding the interests of young people in general.

The most tragic thing about the Penn State debacle is that more young people were, according to the charges, set up to be sexually brutalized and traumatized in the ensuing years in part because a coach and several administrators were afraid to damage their venerated football program.

The second-most-tragic thing is that, in the midst of a Great Recession and the kinds of vast suffering and plutocratic brutality we've not seen since the 1930s, thousands of students at Penn State now feel moved to near-riots involving toppled lampposts and overturned cars not because American society is sinking toward peonage and fascism but because they are losing their football coach.

Penn State is perennially rated as one of the nation's top party schools by Princeton Review. It was ranked the #1 party school in 2009, when this episode of the popular radio program This American Life provided a glimpse into the circus-like aspects of student life there.

One can wonder, too, how administrators could have worked for 10 years to bury this awful Sandusky issue without word leaking out to anyone on the Board of Trustees. I mean, these are heavyweights we are talking about: the board's vice chairman, who made the announcement of Paterno's firing, is CEO of U.S. Steel, for God's sake.

Still, it's good to see that even as crowds rage on campus, the Penn State Board of Trustees appears to be awake, sober, and willing to act.

Happy New Year. I didn't mean to take this long

to blog again, but somehow I just haven't been into opinionizing. I've been writing poems and playing drums and taking care of my sick (but now healthy) cat and otherwise keeping myself occupied with the sorts of elemental things that are not subject to debate.

Of course, in the (welcome) exit from 2010 there are plenty of things that are subject to question and worth a quick look back:

President Obama and his party took a "shellacking" in November not, as house-trained pundits have been fond of saying, because they overreached, but because they underreached. On health care (e.g., public option), on jobs, and on oversight of the banking sector, the Dems and Obama repeatedly came to the table predisposed to fold on issues on which they enjoyed a solid majority in the polls. Rather than use public opinion as a negotiating weapon against hard-nosed Republicans, Hopey and Company foolishly telegraphed their concessions before bare-knuckle bargaining could even begin. Result: a lousy health care compromise that forces citizens to buy crappy coverage from a ruling private sector; a stimulus package big enough to be expensive but too small and timid to jump-start jobs and increase economic security; and banking policies that flush billions of taxpayer dollars down Wall Street toilets while making "too big to fail" institutions even bigger and more vulnerable to future hubris and ruin. So the political right is angry and emboldened, the center is despondent, and the left is furious and defiant. Nice going, Prez.

The Obama tax deal was an obscenity, reflecting, again, the conciliator-in-chief's inability to fight for what the nation needs. The deal's endorsement by Bill Clinton -- the president who brought us triangulation, NAFTA, welfare reform, and continued deregulation -- was thoroughly unconvincing.

The repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell was a genuine victory, and one worth celebrating. It is nice to be able to say, in the year 2011, that one more version of Jim Crow has lost some of its legitimacy. I believe Obama sincerely wanted this, and what made it doable for a politician of his pliancy was the repeal's practical appeal. As was the case with racial segregation during and after World War Two, the easiest (and therefore first) breach in gay segregation is the practical matter of making all possible bodies available to a strapped American military. Only the most hardened bigots (and craven sycophants to hard-right mobs) in the House and Senate were willing to stand against the clear-eyed declarations of top generals that barring gays is militarily stupid and humanly unjustifiable. The necessity of repeal exploited a huge Republican weak spot -- Repubs were caught between fire-breathing conservatives and the military brass -- and it played into Obama's preference to let problems work themselves out rather than fight battles.

The ratification of the START Treaty is a joke, putting the phony stamp of mutual restraint on a U.S.-Russian nuclear arsenal sufficient to destroy mankind many times over.

The case of WikiLeaks' Julian Assange is where criminal prosecution and opportunistic politics meet. The timing of the Interpol warrant and the Swedish charges stinks to high heaven. If you think this sudden fervency for Assange's prosecution is purely about justice for women, I have a bridge I want to sell to you. At the same time, the case highlights the need for sexual assault to be taken seriously, as neither a tool to "get" a political dissenter nor fodder to preemptively make him a martyr. As I've said before, Assange is an object lesson in the danger of building an activist organization around a cult of personality. Successors -- and there will be successors -- will learn from this. I am beginning to think that the next truly potent movement against corrupt American political authority -- in the wake of the last one, which happened in the 1960s and 70s -- may be the cyberleak offensive, which exploits a quiet but profound vulnerability of modern capitalism: the ruling elite's dependence upon information technologies in which skilled outlaws have cultivated a decided advantage. Wouldn't that be something: the Halliburtons and Goldman Sachs and their government minions meeting their downfall not in street riots but in guerrilla cyberwarfare.

More soon.

Roman Polanski: Madness.

Why is the three-decade-old case against Roman Polanski for his having had sex with a 13-year-old girl in 1977 being dragged wheezily along by U.S. prosecutors, this time with a celebrity-bust drama in Switzerland?

It's not for the sake of the victim. Samantha Geimer, now 45, who Polanski had sex with after he gave her champagne and part of a Quaalude following a photo shoot with the young would-be actress, has said repeatedly over the years that the courts and media have damaged her far more than her ordeal with Polanski, and that the criminal case should have been dismissed years ago. (She sued Polanski and they settled out of court.)

Nor is this spectacle being pursued for the sake of justice. The trial, already a media circus, became a travesty when Judge Laurence J. Rittenband intervened and revoked a plea agreement reached between the prosecution and the defense. The Washington Post has reported (9/28/09) that the prosecutor, defense, and journalists at the time agreed that the judge's get-tough act stemmed from his own well-known hunger for publicity. It was in response to the judge's stunt that Polanski fled the country in fear of a prison sentence of up to 50 years.

So why is the State of California, already beyond bankrupt, flushing dearly-needed public funds on an international caper that satisfies no need and serves no one's interest? Why recruit Switzerland for an absurd extradition attempt that accomplishes nothing except to underline the hypocrisy and puritanical obsession of a nation that blithely steamrollers universal health care while breathlessly pursuing a 31-year-old sex case that even the victim says is past tense?

Somebody here needs a good therapist.

Hell Hath No Wrath Like an Uncle Tom Scorned.

It's almost enough to make you feel sorry for Clarence Thomas.

That would be Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, Yale Law '74, the least competent and most enraged member of the nation's highest judicial body and author of a vitriolic new book in which he lays himself out for a martyr's funeral as bitterly as any fatherless gangbanger who ever took a full clip in the chest.

I've not read Thomas' book, My Grandfather's Son; it seems to me that the lifesaving work of chronicling black American male rage has always been better left to possessors of actual talent and conscience: Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Amiri Baraka, Sekou Sundiata.

But from what I have heard, Thomas is one pissed-off brother, if he doesn't mind my use of the b-word. Excerpts of his new screed sound like the spittled outbursts of a man fast on his way toward the stroke unit of Shock Trauma. Here is one anecdote from the book, as pithily detailed by former Washington Post reporter and columnist Ruth Marcus:

"Whoop-dee damn-doo," Thomas relates telling his wife when she interrupted his bath to report that he had been confirmed. "Mere confirmation, even to the Supreme Court, seemed pitifully small compensation for what had been done to me."

Damn, Mr. Justice Clarence. You're starting to sound like one of those poor-me black guys your conservative colleagues complain about.

"What had been done to him," for those of you who were not old enough to watch at the time, was the spectacle of the televised hearings for Thomas' confirmation in 1991, at which (black) subordinate Anita Hill came forward with explosively detailed charges of sexual harassment against Thomas, including the infamous "pubic hair in my Coke" allegation. (If this is news to you, go to the Wikipedia write-up; I couldn't even begin to describe it here.) Suffice it to say that Hill's charges of Thomas' sexual advances and porn-baiting (since corroborated by others, including his coworkers and classmates) nearly torpedoed his Supreme Court confirmation. Worse, in the ensuing years, his eagerly undistinguished and regressive (some of us might say Scalia lapdog) service on the Court has left him with a public image just this side of Stepin Fetchit (another trip to Wikipedia if you need it).

In other words, Justice Clarence Thomas is one pissed-off black man.

This is too bad, because it gives pissed-off black men in general a bad name.

I mean, being pissed off has been an occupational hazard of being black and male in the New World since approximately 1500 A.D. It has, of course, also been an occupational hazard of being black and female. But right now we are discussing the particular rites of passage that gave the likes of Clarence Thomas a sense that they were entitled to sit around the fire and rage with the rest of us brothers. To start with, there was that business of being stripped of our family names and male initiations as well as our culture in general. Then, on top of our having to work from sunrise to sunset, for free, at the end of a whip, there was our having to stand around while our wives or daughters were raped at will by the master or his son -- or to die trying to protest. And our having to deal, in the presence of white women, with the whole Puritan Caucasian big-black-penis Freudian thing, which often served as a theme for popular white (and family-friendly) outdoor parties where the main attraction was the ceremonial hanging of a black man and the bloody severing of his genitals. Mix all of that white mainstream guilt and penis envy with post-slavery black joblessness, poverty, street crime and adolescent black male bravado and you get what we've now got: A society that is hot for the chocolate stylings of the NBA, the NFL and corporate hip-hop's Next Angry Nigga but hateful and fearful toward the actual black men who throw and catch balls, who stand on street corners, and who smile in elevators from within business suits.

So a certain amount of rage -- along with a higher risk of chronically elevated blood pressure and resulting consequences -- tends to come with this black male territory. And our license as black males to carry and try to healthfully express this rage comes with a few hundred years' worth of historical documentation.

But now along comes Clarence Thomas, an unremarkable intellect who uses Affirmative Action to gain a foothold at Yale, and who then does a neat racial reverse-flip by which he voices newfound contempt for Affirmative Action to gain prominence as a black functionary in a rightward-tilted presidential administration, and who then, when publicly confronted by a black woman and a Senate panel with charges of sexually abusive and lewd behavior, has the surreal audacity to turn and yell, "Lynching!!"

We brothers don't appreciate that, Mr. Justice Clarence.

You don't get to quit a club, to badmouth a club for years, brother Clarence, and to then suddenly rejoin it in a pinch. The defense of black maleness doesn't work that way.

Certainly, brother Clarence, go ahead and be mad. Be as enraged as you need to be in that nasty little just-published selective-memoir of yours. Lash out at those who roll their eyes behind your back as you and your wife, who is white, awkwardly nudge your way through the Washington conservative insider circuit. Sneer at the blacks who sneer at you. Smolder inside at the whites who nod at your agreeably right-wing Court opinions while they privately snicker at you and your plebeian legal credentials and your attempts at good-Negro defiance. Call Anita Hill every vile name in the book if you want to. Go ahead and be angry, Clarence.

But don't lay your rage at the doorstep of black manhood. It looks to me as if you left yours on the steps of someone's grand pillared plantation manor long ago.

West Virginia Racial Torture Case.

Awful details are still emerging in the West Virginia case in which authorities say a young black woman was held for a week by six whites, including a mother and son, in a remote backwoods trailer and tortured, sexually abused, stabbed, forced to eat animal feces and drink from a toilet, and continually showered with a racial epithet.

Black media frequently give such stories their earliest and biggest play; primarily-white media often show a preference for white blonds as victims of abuse and cruelty. In this case, any such "white maiden" media bias may have been trumped by the graphic and blatantly racist nature of the atrocities, especially in the wake of media coverage of the Jim Crow throwback in Jena, Louisiana. CNN appears to have had the West Virginia story slightly ahead of the AP. The AP story was then picked up by Black America Web, Houston Chronicle, New York Times, CBS 2, Fox News (a cynic would say this is a twofer for Fox: an explosively sensational story, plus a golden opportunity for Fox to prove it will cover transgressions against blacks), Officer.com, and likely others.

The AP account includes this possible candidate for understatement of the year: "An FBI spokesman in Pittsburgh, Bill Crowley, confirmed that the agency is looking into possible civil rights violations."