In March 2016, historian and Penn State Professor Emeritus of Sports History Ronald A. Smith gave a public talk at the Centre County Historical Society — just down the hill from Penn State’s Beaver Stadium — about his recently released University of Illinois Press book, Wounded Lions: Joe Paterno, Jerry Sandusky, and the Crises in Penn State Athletics. Though I hadn’t yet read the book, which the press described as “a myth-shattering account of misplaced priorities,” I was interested in attending the talk. As far as I could tell, this event was the first public conversation about the Penn State child sexual abuse scandal that promised information and analysis supported by archival research and peer review. Other than a November 2014 screening of Amir Bar-Lev’s documentary Happy Valley and, eleven months earlier, the premiere of Eric Porterfield and Erik Proulx’s alternate-reality film 365 Days: A Year in Happy Valley, both at the State Theater in downtown State College, embodied publics hadn’t often gathered around the topos of the scandal except in occasional vengeful mobs.[1 ]
I had not met Smith before — we have since had coffee once — but because I had been a local print journalist in the 1980s, covering both the Penn State administration and, on occasion, local and state government, I knew some of the history his book traversed, including the tenure of infamous Penn State women’s basketball coach Rene Portland — she of “no drinking, no drugs, no lesbians” (Training Rules) — who was hired in 1980 by then Penn State Athletic Director Joe Paterno.
Two things about Smith’s public talk surprised me. First, Smith commented twice that he was relieved no one brought guns to the event. I learned later from Smith that publishing a book drawing on careful archival research, complete with timeline — e.g., “March 18, 1972: a student organization, Homophiles of Penn State, seeks recognition” … “November 19, 1973: Joe Paterno says he wants ‘to coach for another four or five years’” (190) — had resulted in Smith being subjected to online threats of lawsuits and worse. Wounded Lions suggests that one structural cause of the Penn State child sexual abuse scandal was Penn State’s decision in December 1979 to move athletics out of academics, against the advice of the university’s own Thoele Committee Report but at the insistence of Paterno (190-91).
The second thing about Smith’s public talk that surprised me was how it ended. After he finished answering the last question and thanked the assembled, packed into two adjoining rooms, he said this: “But wait. Is Rosa Eberly here?”
Had it been any time before the spring of 2003, I would have calmly walked toward him eager for a chat, assuming that he had no sinister motives or news of doom. That response would have been from the person I was when I left the University of Texas — though an introvert, confident through accrued practice in my public role as speaker as well as writer: rhetorical acts were the means by which I performed an integrated public self. Instead, as the friends who were with me can attest, Smith’s arresting hail made me wonder why in the world he would have called me out when I had nearly succeeded in attending a public event without anything bad or particularly upsetting — other than the topic of the talk itself, “the How? and Why? at the heart of the Penn State scandal” (“Wounded Lions”) — happening. So my friends Keith, Adam, and Lexi walked along with me to the front of the room. Smith was attempting to answer the queries of a particularly vehement interlocutor, and so we waited.
One thing about trauma is that you can’t choose whether or by what you might be traumatized. Another thing is that, isolated and without support, it’s more difficult to recover. In isolation the temptation to enter the circularities of what Jenny Edkins calls “trauma time” rarely abates.
I extended my right hand. “Professor Smith? I’m Rosa Eberly. Is there something you need?”
"For security we had to have people pre-register for this event," he said. "Yours was one of the few names I didn't know, and so I looked you up." Smith said he had read my work on the UT Tower and public memory and suggested we meet for coffee. "You write about stuff like this, about institutional mistakes. You've been critical of a place you worked."
And we did have coffee. And it was OK. And it helped me remember myself: Being perceived first and foremost through my public writing helped me scratch down through a few more layers of my palimpsest self.
I had the privilege, relatively rare in a pre-internet world, of writing for and being read by tens of thousands of people — the privilege of being known at a distance to a reading public — from the time I was seventeen. Working for The Daily Collegian, Penn State’s independent daily student newspaper, I covered, among other stories of public concern, Penn State’s conversion from an academic calendar based on ten-week terms to one based on fourteen- or fifteen-week semesters (see, for example, “Conversion Study Warns of ‘Tight Fit’”). Significantly, my editors, who went on to work for the New York Times, the Associated Press, and the Wall Street Journal, assigned me to this beat while the university was still deliberating the details of the conversion. Thus I had habituated identity formation through public writing years before my brain was fully formed.
Further, I saw empirical evidence that writing — informative writing, persuasive only via the credibility of the writer’s words — could affect what happened in the world. Reading, writing, and listening — and the platform of student media — were the only tools required for this first-generation college student to craft a public self. Further, contacts I made during those four years helped me not only get a job offer from the local Knight-Ridder newspaper without first submitting an application, but also to have a healthy dose of freelance writing and editing work available on the side. I worked for two years for the Centre Daily Times and wrote freelance articles about research for the College of Human Development, but seeing management bust the typographers’ union at the newspaper made me wonder whether I should heed my former professors’ advice and go to graduate school to continue my study of William Faulkner and rhetorical style.
“Why don’t you come home and be a waitress? Like that nice girl you graduated from high school with?” The questions linger in memory across more than three decades. On the phone with my mom from my apartment on Chicago’s South Side, I knew that neither my parents nor I were quite sure what I was doing in college again. And I also knew that, while I did not want to stay at the University of Chicago, I did not want to limit myself to a life that was solely private. So I returned to Penn State and was hired by the English Department to teach rhetoric and composition.
One of the first essays I was assigned to teach was Richard Rodriguez’s “Mr. Secrets,” a chapter from his intellectual autobiography Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez. “Adulthood seemed consumed by memory,” Rodriguez observed, using writing to craft a space separate from the lives and ways of his parents. “I would tell myself otherwise. I would tell myself that an act of remembering is an act of the present” (190). Reading and teaching Rodriguez helped me connect my childhood — first living in the private space of the apartment above my family’s funeral home and later helping to set up chairs or clean in the often public space downstairs — with my literary study of Faulkner, sotted with memory and loss, and now with the undergraduates I was helping to find their public voices through writing. Rodriguez recalls his mother telling him, in a letter, “‘Just keep one thing in mind. Writing is one thing, the family is another. I do not want tus hermanos hurt by your writings…. Especially I don’t want the gringos knowing about our private affairs. Why should they? Please give this some thought. Please write about something else in the future. Do me this favor.’ Please” (193).
Soy Rosa. Pero soy gringa. When you grow up practicing a Hammond drawbar organ in the company of one or more corpses, you learn to consider everything from multiple perspectives. I’m pretty sure one of the reasons that I’m so bad at remembering names of people I meet socially is that I saw a considerably larger number of dead than live people in the first several years of my life.
That first year back in Centre County, teaching as an adjunct faculty member in the English Department at Penn State, I fell in love with rhetoric. A few years later, taking a minor in speech communication as part of my PhD, I fell in love with publics theory, a body of thought that allowed a “plausible harmony” among my various writing selves (Booth, My Many Selves).
It was no surprise, then, that given my first opportunity to teach a graduate seminar at The University of Texas at Austin, I chose the topic of rhetorics and publics. One week, the remarkable Susan Romano, who went on to become an award-winning scholar of Mexican rhetorics and a professor at the University of New Mexico, came to seminar livid after reading Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition. A returning adult graduate student and feminist mother of four, Susan rightly took issue with Arendt’s way of dividing the world, a division that Habermas followed in his Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, into the polis and the oikos, the former the public realm of alleged freedom and the latter the private world of alleged necessity.
Susan could not find herself — could not find much of her life as she had chosen to live it — in Arendt’s scheme. Yet at the same time she knew the concepts of “public” as adjective and “the public” as substantive — no matter how counterfactual — mattered too. She found herself, her lived experience, voided.
It is the memory of Susan’s justly enraged face in seminar — and my telling the story of Susan’s reading of Arendt in my graduate seminars once again back on the Penn State campus — that led me to turn a theoretical problem into an incantation: oikos-poikos, an other-than-merely-rational means of acknowledging that while the boundaries of public and private empirically blur, the concepts retain immense normative power, particularly in their practical absence.
Oikos-poikos. Pairs well with ethos-tropos, another incantation to the rhetorical holy spirit, this one about selves as both one and not-just-one at once. Oikos-poikos holds in rhymed folly the possible vitality of immaterial memory-shards for intimations of reinvention. Towers of Rhetoric sets out - through linear and circular movement, in writing I've done from the 1980s to 2017 — to aid recollection, private and public.
RhetpunzelRhetpunzul stands on the second story
and looks into the garden.Rhetpunzul's hairs cannot do the job,
so she lets down her thoughts:
"Damned rabbits," she muses.She sees moving targets,
imagines a rifle:
uses her memory,
changes her mind.
American Voids
Would that it were as simple as writing nine lines to end the US gun violence epidemic. Would that we could, following XTC, just “Melt The Guns.”
I made the last keystrokes on these prefaces, and thus this project, on the day after Rep. Steve Scalise of Louisiana and four others were shot in Alexandria, Virginia, while practicing for a congressional charity baseball game. That news overshadowed the murder a few hours later of three people in San Francisco, California, by a gunman who then killed himself after injuring two additional people (“Gun Violence Archive”). Unaware another mass shooting was under way across the country, Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin was suddenly moved to this revelation: “An attack on one of us is an attack on all of us” (163 Cong. Rec.) — despite the attempted assassination in 2011 of his former colleague, Rep. Gabrielle Giffords of Arizona, despite the murder in 2013 of elementary school children at Sandy Hook, despite the massacre in 2016 at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, and despite repeated murders of unarmed black men, women, boys, and at least one girl by police officers across the country (Lowery). It seems that for Ryan, “us” is limited to Congress.
However, an attack on any one of us is indeed an attack on all of us. Gun violence is a public health issue. The same day as the Pulse shooting there were forty-two other reported US shootings, “resulting in an additional eighteen deaths and forty-one injuries. At least five of those killed were children” (Crockett). Gun violence affects everyone in the United States, though it affects different individuals and groups differently. Further, through US wars, our bellicosity harms the world and returns to us not only in waves of terror (Ratner, qtd. in Roberts) but also in twenty military veteran suicides a day (Shane and Kime).
In her agonizing longform news story “An American Void,” published a month after the June 2015 hate crime assassination at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, Washington Post reporter Stephanie McCrummen described life in the trailer where white supremacist Dylann Roof stayed with the Meek family in the days before the shooting. The trailer, McCrummen writes, “is in a town called Red Bank that the Meeks call Dead Bank.” McCrummen continues,
When Roof showed up asking Joey [Meek] for a place to stay, Joey says, he invited him in without hesitation. When Roof told him that he believed in segregation, Joey didn’t ask why. When Roof mentioned driving two hours to Charleston and visiting a church called Emanuel AME, he didn’t ask anything about it. When Roof said that he was going to “do something crazy,” as Joey remembers it, he … hid Roof’s gun but then gave it back, blowing it all off as a drunken episode.
“I didn’t take him seriously,” is what Joey says again and again to the people who keep asking the same questions again and again, including investigators who arrived at the trailer after one of the most notorious mass killings in recent American history.
Why did he do nothing? they asked.
What kind of people would do nothing?
“What kind of people would not have done more?”
That same question animates Amir Bar-Lev’s powerful documentary Happy Valley. As reviewer Alex Kupfer correctly observes, Happy Valley chronicles “the crisis of identity” that the child sexual abuse scandal caused within the Penn State community and beyond. In Kupfer’s judgment, “Happy Valley’s most significant contribution comes from the open-ended questions it poses about the wider sociocultural effects of overemphasizing college football on university campuses” (400). I’d agree. Yet whether those questions were ever open at all for many in “the Penn State community” itself remains an open question. During a recent conversation outside a State College-area restaurant, Bar-Lev’s Happy Valley arose as a topic of conversation. A campus colleague redirected the topic away from institutional and individual responsibility for the sexual assault of children — was Penn State, after all, just another culture of impunity? — and toward “but those Amish kids.” Two of us quickly corrected the record: “That’s the other film.”
We don’t know the goddamn words.
We don’t know the goddamn words….
The colleague’s desperate non sequitur finds explanation in another film, one with a similar title, made very soon after Jerry Sandusky’s sexual assault of children became public knowledge and the question of institutional responsibility for that abuse went viral: Porterfield and Proulx’s 365 Days: A Year in Happy Valley, a film Charles Thompson of the Harrisburg Patriot-News described as “a reassuring love letter to the scandal-shaken residents of Penn State’s home.” Cowritten by a Penn State alumnus, 365 Days laments what its trailer calls a “rush to judgment,” perpetrated by a villainous mass media, of Paterno, former Penn State President Graham Spanier, and the entire Penn State community. Its purpose is to celebrate the arc of the community “from hopeless to hopeful.” Why the very sudden hope? According to the narrative of the film, the advent of (then) new football coach Bill O’Brien would make everything right again. That O’Brien left Penn State in January 2014, weeks after the film’s release, to become head coach of the Houston Texans is not, however, the film’s most egregious misjudgment.
We don’t know the goddamn words.
We don’t know the goddamn words….
We don’t know the goddamn words….
In the context of institutional responsibility for harboring Sandusky, 365 Days: A Year in Happy Valley veers to the topos of forgiveness and attempts a seamless segue from the aftermath of the Penn State scandal to the 2006 West Nickel Mines School shooting.
If you do not recall the 2006 West Nickel Mines Amish School shooting in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, two hours southeast of State College — well, maybe public memory is the profoundest American void.[2 ]
On October 2, 2006, ten Amish girls were taken hostage and bound. Eight were shot. Five of the girls died. There is ample evidence that the shooter, who killed himself soon after the state troopers arrived, intended to sexually abuse the girls before killing them. Some of the girls spoke only Pennsylvania German and — for that reason and for others — did not understand what the shooter was telling them to do. 365 Days: A Year in Happy Valley seems to suggest that because the families of the murdered Amish girls forgave the parents of the shooter, the Penn State community should forgive the administrators who allowed Sandusky to abuse children for so many years.
Yet in addition to the profanity of juxtaposing the bondage and murder of schoolgirls to optimism about a scandal-besotted college football program, the film’s account of “Amish forgiveness” is willfully stupid. The account of forgiveness in 365 Days is not told by those who did the forgiving, for whom forgiveness is not a choice (Kasdorf 342). The most careful and responsible — the most accurate and empathetic — account of the West Nickel Mines atrocity and its aftermath that I have found was written by the poet Julia Spicher Kasdorf, herself of Amish and Mennonite descent. Kasdorf builds her essay around the topos of “Amish forgiveness” and examines critically the notion that “the Amish symbolically function as ‘a saving remnant’ within the dominant culture” (Weaver-Zercher, qtd. in Kasdorf 337). “Perhaps the enthusiasm for ‘Amish forgiveness’ expresses an understandable but irresponsible longing for graceful narrative closure to a horrible scene we would rather not examine, feel, or understand” (342), Kasdorf writes, presciently explicating the willfully ignorant cultural appropriation of “Amish forgiveness” in 365 Days, years before the film’s making.
It was my late sister Sarah Jane — who would become a special education teacher in Lancaster County and who won the Educator of the Year Award in 1988, three years after surviving a brain tumor — who taught me the words to Penn State’s alma mater, at least as they were sung from around 1970, when she moved from Penn State’s Mont Alto campus to University Park, through the last decade of the twentieth century (Gill, Frezza). The lyrics were simple enough for a very close-listening eight-year-old me to appreciate — and consequently to reflect on for decades. One simple, declarative sentence, repeated for the duration of the entire song:
We don't know the goddamn words,
We don't know the goddamn words,
We don't know the goddamn words:
We don't know
the goddamn
words.
1. In my view the film that best explains the towering power of secrecy over human decency that facilitated the Penn State child sexual abuse scandal is Tom McCarthy’s Spotlight: “If it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a village to abuse one.”
2. Yet higher education is in a unique position to foster public memory. Among the many examples I could cite are Angela Aguayo’s short but vital documentary “778 Bullets,” about police shootings in Carbondale, Illinois, in 1970, and A.D. Carson’s “See the Stripes,” about Clemson University’s history of slavery and racist brutality.
