Dunce Caps of the Moment to Everyone Who Supports Joe Paterno

The Amalgamated Dunce Caps Association will have to step up production this week in order to make enough dunce caps for all the Joe Paterno enablers who have earned one. Did somebody lift a rock the size of Beaver stadium out there in Happy Valley or what? How else to explain the sudden, frenzied appearance of dimwits waving signs, writing articles, giving interviews, and turning over vehicles in support of the defrocked football coach? Let’s begin with the dunce cap at yesterday’s Nebraska-Penn State game who held up a sign that proclaimed, “JoePa Got Screwed.” That dirtwad is so beyond gobsmacking that we thought for a minute he might be indulging in a bit of postmodern irony—until we remembered that Penn State types are too self-important to do irony. They do hero worship, hyperbole, arrested development, and lots of other pervy things, but irony ain’t in their playbook.

Nor do they have much truck with rational thought it seems. There were people who got screwed, literally and figuratively, in and around Penn State, but none is named Joe Paterno. Their names are Victim 1 through Victim 8 and counting.

A tip of the dunce cap, too, to Penn State’s Acting President What’s His Name, who didn’t sound so presidential when he said that the Nebraska game had to be played in order to focus attention on the issue of child abuse. Yo, Mr. President, your school has already focused more attention on child abuse than any other institution in the history of college sports. Your work is done in that regard. Rest easy.

Dunce caps all around to the Penn State students who rioted in support of Mr. Paterno last Wednesday evening after news of his dismissal had been announced—and to the students who gathered outside Mr. Paterno’s passively aggressive modest split-level house to show support for a diaper-wearing old geezer who didn’t think the report about his former defensive coordinator mucking about with a young boy in the showers on campus was anything to worry about.

The brightest dunce capof all to Mike McQueary who witnessed former Penn State defensive coordinator Jerry Sanduskey, then fifty-eight, abusing a young man in the aforesaid showers nine years ago. Instead of going to the young boy’s aid, Mr. McQueary, then twenty-eight, ran out to call his daddy, who advised him to tell Mr. Paterno. (Oh, hell. Let’s give a duncecap to old man McQueary as well. That sort of parenting should not go unremarked.)

To be candid, moral and intellectual turpitude of the sort we’re discussing here might be considered sufficient reason to retire the dunce cap awards, but they’re so much fun to write that we must proceed.

Finally, we have decided that Joe Paterno deserves something more than an dunce cap. He gets one of those fancy hats the pope wears—and maybe a sinecure in the Vatican. They’re always looking for a guy who puts college ahead of conscience.

If you enjoy burying the clowns, grifters, blowhards, politicians, billionaires, influencers, and public nuisances who make life dumber by the day, here are more dunce cap available–from all cap and no cattle to pin heads.