Theres no good reason to consider Malcolm Gladwell a serious writer or thinker anymore, thanks in large part to the things Gladwell continues to write and think. Despite this, he was allowed to write a new bookif you want to know more about it, I suggest clicking on this review in The Atlantic and doing a Ctrl+F search for poets die youngthe press tour for which brought him to Bill Simmonss podcast. There, while receiving no pushback from Simmons, he deployed a truly dogshit defense of former Penn State football coach Joe Paterno.
Gladwells never been very rigorous in constructing his arguments and theories, but he possesses enough rhetorical flair that you would at least expect him to come up with a novel argument about Paterno, and one that could at least sound true and convincing for the three-second interval before you actually started thinking it over. But no, Gladwell couldnt even give us that. His argument that Paterno was wrongfully blamed for not having done anything to stop Jerry Sandusky from raping children is as old and simple and small-brained as such arguments get. From the podcast (the conversation starts about the 50-minute mark):
Gladwell: You know I have that chapter on Jerry Sandusky in my book, and its all about how I feel the leadership of Penn State was totally, outrageously attacked over this. I think theyre blameless.
Simmons: Yeah.
Gladwell: But with Joe Paterno... Joe Paterno essentially did nothing wrong. He hears the allegation and immediately tells his superiors, and the critique of Joe Paterno was essentially, Why was a 75-year-old football coach not behaving towards a suspected pedophile with the savvy and insight of a psychiatrist?
Simmons: Right.
Gladwell: Hes a football coach! He doesnt even know what the wordthere was this hilarious[regretful sigh] hilariousthere was this moment in, I think one of the trial transcripts, where someone was asked, Did you use, when you went tothe quarterback who goes to Paterno, McQueary, the former quarterback, goes to Paterno to tell him this allegationDid you use the word sodomy? And hes like, No I didnt use the word sodomy. And then theres this sort of thing, I think, where theyre wondering whether Paterno actually knew what the word sodomy was [laughing].
Simmons: Right.
Gladwell: He doesnt! Hes been thinking football 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, for 60 years. He is not going to be alert to the darkness inside the heart of one of his former coaches. You cant ask him to do that. Thats why you have mental health professionals or fit, trained psychologists in the world to handle those kind of problems. We do this thing sometimes when a crisis happens, when we suddenly expect our leaders to be skilled at absolutely every job under the sun. Theyre not.
Gladwell isnt doing anything here that Joe Posnanski and Sally Jenkins didnt already do years ago, which is to excuse Paternos failure to call the cops by rendering him as a doddering old simpleton who couldnt possibly be expected to understand or properly respond to being told that his longtime assistant coach was seen raping a boy in the Penn State showers. It only holds water if you believe that old people are children, and that football coaches are incapable of understanding anything other than football.
