A Citizen Kane Redux: Featuring Joe Paterno
I live in the shadow of Happy Valley, even though State College is a four hour drive from Erie. We’ve all been processing the meaning of Paterno’s life and we’re a conflicted lot.
Some still call him Joe Pa. These folk have stories of his personal generosity. They watched him generously pour his affections back into the campus. I have a friend who played for Joe PA during the Rose Bowl winning season and is now mourning the loss of a loved mentor.
I know others that will never call Paterno by his nickname again. Paterno is the man who willfully allowed a sexual predator to roam the campus and to freely victimize innocent boys. I’d heard multiple stories from sexual abuse victims who’ve involuntarily had to re-live past horrors; the recall triggered by ten-minutes of listening to ESPN. Their version of Paterno is a man who turned his back on innocent boys and knowing let a monster do the unthinkable in order to protect something far less valuable.
This debate subsided for a few weeks, but bubbled up as we all watched the coverage of the funeral. Coach’s legacy has become a Rubric Cube and we’re unsure what combination of tumbled squares brings clarity.
Paterno is our Citizen Kane.
Amy bought me the 70th Anniversary Edition of the movie for Christmas and I watched it again for the umpteenth time over break. The movie tells the story of a journalist assigned to learn the meaning of Kane’s last words. Like Paterno, Kane, was both loved and hated and larger than life.
The movie ends and the reporter is stymied. The viewer is left to conclude that it is impossible to truly know what’s in the heart of a person. This is, perhaps, doubly truly if you are wearing the skin of the person being studied. Citizen Kane is an Every Man.
…
When I left college, I fell in love with Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. Story by story, Dostoevsky chipped away at my tendency to catalog people into my two boxes: Villains and Heroes. His characters were all divided selves. The heroes had dark sides and the villains all possessed beautiful nobility. He populated his world with people who were an impossible mix of oil and water.
Citizen Paterno was both JoePA and Joe Paterno. Oil and Water. A divided Dostoevskian-self.
And I believe there’s hope in seeing both him and ourselves in this light.
For starters, we’d come a little closer to understanding the Gospel. God’s story isn’t one of coming to earth to reward the good people and damning bad ones. That story was taken by Santa. And we all know, deep down, that’s there’s no such thing as wholly good or wholly bad children. We’re all just divided selves, broken by the Fall, and unable to do a darn thing about it.
It’s the story of a Christ who came to earth, and died to begin to heal the damage of sin, including the human duplicity found in all of us.
Like Citizen Kane, Joe Paterno was a larger-than-life Every Man, reminding us all of our dived condition.
