Steyn On McQueary

Mark Steyn weighs in on Penn State's "wickedness." He is especially hard on Mike McQueary. After quoting directly from the grand jury report about how McQueary witnessed an assault in the shower and then "left immediately, distraught." Steyn writes:

Hold it right there.

Here surely is an almost too perfect snapshot of a culture that simultaneously destroys childhood and infantilizes adulthood. The "child" in this vignette ought to be the 10-year-old boy, "hands up against the wall," but, instead, the "man" appropriates the child role for himself: Why, the graduate assistant is so "distraught" that he has to leave and telephone his father. He is pushing 30, an age when previous generations would have had little boys of their own. But today, confronted by a grade-schooler being sodomized before his eyes, the poor distraught child-man approaching early middle-age seeks out some fatherly advice, like one of Fred MacMurray's "My Three Sons" might have done had he seen the boy next door swiping a can of soda pop from the lunch counter.

The graduate assistant, Mike McQueary, is now pushing 40, and is sufficiently grown-up to realize that the portrait of him that emerges from the indictment is not to his credit and to attempt, privately, to modify it. "No one can imagine my thoughts or wants to be in my shoes for those 30-45 seconds," he emailed a friend a few days ago. "Trust me."

"Trust me"? Maybe the 10-year-old boy did. And then watched Mr. McQueary leave the building. Perhaps the child-man should try "imagining" the 10-year-old's thoughts or being in his shoes. Oh, wait. He wasn't wearing any.

Steyn has no time for those who attempt to psychologize, rationalize, or otherwise, excuse McQueary's failure to act.

He is quite right, not to. No doubt, there are others who, like McQueary, in the same situation would have failed to act. But that would be to their complete and utter shame. There is no escaping that. And Mike McQueary never will.