by Tom Pantera
Columnist

In a summer of big news days, Monday was a whopper.

You had the first appearance in court of James Holmes, the Aurora shooter, just hours after the NCAA announced what can only be called astounding penalties against Penn State for its attempts to ignore and cover up Jerry Sandusky’s sexual abuse.

We are still in the thick of both stories. The Sandusky tale is somewhat farther down the road, but even now, when it comes to really important considerations, in both the Holmes and Sandusky cases there are more questions than answers.

The biggest question, of course, is the hardest to answer: Why? We may never know, in either case, why the worst parts of the stories happened, because so much of the answer lies in the unfathomable darkness of the human heart and soul. And even if we figure out why these things happen, there may not be much we can do about it.

Really, as dissimilar as the stories are, they have a common element. It’s something sociologists call “alienation.” Dictionary.com defines alienation as “the state of being withdrawn or isolated from the objective world, as through indifference or disaffection.” That’s a coldly clinical description of a word that’s actually loaded with horrific meaning. What it really means is that an alienated person simply feels that he doesn’t have a dog in the same fight the rest of us do, living in society.

Holmes was alienated all on his own, while Penn State was alienated institutionally. It’s as much a matter of degree as anything else; if anything, Penn State’s alienation was a bigger problem, because it involved a whole institution – a greater number of people.

In his brilliant book on the Hell’s Angels motorcycle gang, Hunter S. Thompson talks a lot about alienation. In perhaps the book’s most fascinating passage, he traces the Hell’s Angels and their ilk back to the Oakies of the dust bowl era (when Thompson wrote the book in the 1960s, the Angels were largely a California phenomenon). They are, he said, “losers and the sons of losers,” and he makes the point that if every loser in America rode a motorcycle we’d have to redesign the entire national highway system. And most chillingly, he quotes one Angel as admitting that he’s a loser but vowing “to make a hell of a scene on the way out.” Such people are dangerous, because they feel they have nothing to lose (and, in fact, they don’t).

Obviously, James Holmes was profoundly alienated. That much is apparent, just by the nature of his crime. He simply didn’t care that he was ending the lives of people. Whatever reasons he might have had for doing it, he didn’t see any arguments against doing it. He may prove to be insane, although that’s doubtful; given what we already know, it’ll be tough for his defense lawyer to make a legal case for insanity. He might be a simply evil human being. Such people exist. It may be that he was simply born without the capacity to care if other people live, just as Thalidomide babies were born without limbs. It may be just who he is. Either way, he will be dealt with.

Really, the alienation at Penn State was more worrisome. There, you had an entire program – hell, an entire culture – that was alienated. The bad men who ran the Penn State football program, and that includes Joe Paterno, were profoundly alienated from larger society to the extent that they felt their own power, influence and lives were more important than the lives and futures of little boys. Sandusky is a monster, but he was driven by things beyond his control; that is not to excuse what he did by any means, but it’s apparent he was missing the kind of hard wiring most of us have that prevents us from doing those kinds of evil acts. He richly deserves the horror is life will be until he dies, but that’s because he acted on urges he wouldn’t even admit he has.

But the alienation, and the actions of the Penn State administration, are worse in a way. Their alienation was calculated. They weighed the costs and benefits of doing the right thing and then made the calculation that acting in an evil way would cost less, and was more beneficial, than doing what was plainly the right thing. They took a cold, hard look at the situation and made a choice. It was the wrong choice, obviously. But from their standpoint, it was the wrong choice only because if they got caught. And they got caught only because of the remarkable courage of the victims. Without those men, who fought back the part of them that remains a scared little boy, Sandusky and Penn State would never have been called to account.

The alienation of people like the Hell’s Angels and James Holmes will forever be a mystery. It hinges on quirks of human nature; part of it comes from stupidity (in the case of the Angels, who are, at bottom, nothing but stupid thugs), but who knows where the balance comes from? Evil people, whatever their reasons, will be with us always.

The alienation of those at Penn State is easier to understand. It was born of money and power and ego. Those men felt they did not have to care what society thought, or the amount of damage done to those little boys, because they saw themselves as Very Important Men. You could even see that during the trial, when Sandusky’s defense put on a parade of people talking about all the good he did, as if that would even begin to make up for the horrors he perpetrated.

What’s disturbing is that society allowed Penn State to be alienated. From the boosters who gave them money to the idiots who rioted after Paterno’s firing, people acted in a way that justified the program’s alienation. That is something we can do something about.

We really ought to try.