We Are Penn State. We Are Touched.

December 2, 2011

By now you probably know about former Penn State defensive coordinator and alleged pedophile Jerry Sandusky’s autobiography published in 2001, the tragically titled Touched: The Jerry Sandusky Story.

Not surprisingly, there has been a steady stream of public outcry directed at Amazon.com to remove the book from its virtual shelves. It’s still out there, by the way. For a mere $250 you can still purchase a copy of the seemingly whitewashed version of Sandusky’s life. At one point you could even get a personally inscribed copy on eBay.

Receiving much less attention since the scandal broke (despite being similarly as ironic) has been the children’s book written by Joe Paterno and his wife Sue entitled We Are Penn State! – which takes place during a typical homecoming weekend. Not sure if “typical” includes a story of how yet another late night man-boy wrestling match was swept under the mat to protect your program’s esteemed image, I guess I’ll have to read it to find out.

But perhaps the real shame is that these books were never marketed as a pair. Imagine if places like Amazon.com had sold these two books together as a set. It might have given us all an earlier clue as to what had been going on behind closed doors all those years.

All together now: I guess you can judge a book by its cover – or in this case books by their covers.

It’s kind of eerie really, like how you can supposedly sync up Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon album with the movie The Wizard of Oz.

In the case of Penn State and Sandusky, it’s too bad it took nearly 40 years for someone to look behind the curtain, or more accurately to report what they saw.

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Michael Grubb is a (semi) regular contributor to Team JSF. When he’s not out crusading for justice, he can be reached at:

@GrubbHub
GrubbHub.net
grubbhub@gmail.com

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