I BET SANDUSKY AND LYNN WISH WE WERE BETTER FOLLOWERS

A measure of justice in Philadelphia:

A monsignor who oversaw hundreds of priests in the Philadelphia Archdiocese was found guilty on Friday of one count of endangering the welfare of a child, making him the first senior U.S. Roman Catholic Church official to be convicted for covering up child sex abuse.

The jury acquitted Monsignor William Lynn on two other counts....

And, as I'm sure you know, in Centre County, Pennsylvania:

Jerry Sandusky, a former Penn State assistant football coach, was convicted Friday of sexually abusing young boys, completing the downfall of a onetime local hero....

Sandusky stood stoically as the jury foreman read off the verdicts on the 48 counts against him. The foreman said guilty 45 times....

Reading that Sandusky story, I cringed when I read this:

The case against Sandusky, even before his trial, had exacted an enormous toll.... Penn State officials, alumni and students were forced to confront the possibility that the interests of big-time college sports had trumped concern for the welfare of vulnerable children.

"The possibility"? Gee, ya think?

But that's who we are as a society: We respect authority. We're not skeptical enough -- but we are able to see things clearly, at least sometimes, when confronted with overwhelming evidence that people who've been put on a pedestal are shown to be contemptible and monstrous.

I can't help wondering how David Brooks feels about all this. You know -- David Brooks? The guy who recently wrote this?

We live in a culture that finds it easier to assign moral status to victims of power than to those who wield power. Most of the stories we tell ourselves are about victims who have endured oppression, racism and cruelty...

The old adversary culture of the intellectuals has turned into a mass adversarial cynicism. The common assumption is that elites are always hiding something....

I don't know if America has a leadership problem; it certainly has a followership problem. Vast majorities of Americans don't trust their institutions. That's not mostly because our institutions perform much worse than they did in 1925 and 1955, when they were widely trusted. It's mostly because more people are cynical and like to pretend that they are better than everything else around them. Vanity has more to do with rising distrust than anything else....

So, David, was it vanity that led to these verdicts? Was it a failure of followership? Should the jurors -- more than half of whom had ties to Penn State -- have just unquestionably accepted the argument that Jerry Sandusky was a great man, worthy of elevation to an exalted position in his community, and that he was victimized by lying grifters, as his lawyer and his wife argued in the courtroom? Should the holy fathers of the Philadelphia archdiocese also have been taken at its word? Did we convict these two guys out of narcissism, the same way we add a Sub-Zero refrigerator to our McMansions? You want to argue that in your next column, David?

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AND: Yes, I know: Brooks declared last fall that it was "vanity" to believe that we would have dealt with the Sandusky situation better than the people at Penn State did. But it doesn't matter what we think about ourselves. The fact is that the people at Penn State were regarded as moral paragons, in a way that most of us never are. And they were confronted with a situation that tested their morals, in a way that most of us never are. They were supposed to be the morally superior ones. And they failed.