After Nassar, what is to be done?

Hand wringing is overrated. Dispensing with even that fig leaf of nicety makes it no less easy framing a coherent and compassionate response to the cascade of pain and betrayed trust flowing from the Michigan courtroom during the sentencing hearing for Dr. Lawrence Nassar; that broken damn where 169 young women, current and former gymnasts, have delivered victim impact statements.

Given the amount of pain suffered and to be endured, it almost seems a quaint or callous afterthought to ask, what is to be done?

Nassar's fate is fait accompli. The predator, the pedophile, the go-to doctor for elite-level women's gymnastics has already confessed to more than enough offense to comfortably support the 40 to 175 years handed down. The prison to which he is sent will likely have been built in a remote location for some of the same reasons U.S.A. Gymnastics trained its gymnasts at the Karolyi facility 60 miles north of Houston. A location where cellphones were not permitted; visiting was by permission only; distractions controlled, regimented and limited. In short, a cultivated location out of sight, out of mind.

Nassar, this betrayer of trust, must now trust prison administrators to enforce the protective custody he will need for the rest of his life; protection from the rest of the prison population. Given his psychological state as reflected in his ill-conceived letter to the judge complaining about the proceedings, he additionally will need to trust staff in following suicide protocols. This man, formerly a danger to others, is now possibly a danger to himself.

Still, it is both arrogance and ignorance for would-be superseding actors to assume that a quick end is a better one. One other even more inconceivable "monster," the convicted cannibal Jeffrey Dahmer, was beaten to death by a fellow inmate. That end was wrong. As sorting deviance from evil, and illness from controllably bad behavior, is an ongoing project, so is achieving a better understanding of freedom and justice.

The constitutional protection against cruel and inhuman punishment is this republic's concession that courts do not act from a position of perfectly understood, obtainable and executable justice. Openness to some further acquired insight into either deviance or evil, even accommodating the possibility of partial redemption, as opposed to acting with a god's privileged and indulgent vengeance, is what distinguishes free people from tyrants, the modern mind from barbarism.

Calling Nassar or Dahmer a "monster" is a thin veneer over an uncomfortable truth. Monsters appear only in fairy tales. They shield us from the dull fact that the feared and fearsome ogres are, rather, merely men. Children can and do handle monsters. Courts adjudicate the fates of humans.

No one is in any mood to entertain Nassar's complaint that the judge was mismanaging the hearings to suit her own agenda. Still, there was one moment where the judge, speaking directly to the condemned doctor, wistfully eluded to what the court might do to punish him if not constrained by the cruel and unusual punishments clause. The elected judge's regret that the court is restrained by a constitution, whether to elicit sympathy or votes, is only so much attention deflected from the victim's own statements.

In such situations, a judge's better move is out of the way. As it stands, that court opened the topic of whether the punishment the court would deliver is based, at least in part, upon the judge's own frustrated expectations regarding how individuals should behave. It should, rather, be genuine sympathy and concern for the victims.

It is a distinction worth making. For all the assumed worth of each victim's opportunity to publicly denounce her tormentor, after the cameras are off, after misplaced shame and self-loathing are washed away, each is still left with a lifetime of bad memory, damaged trust, and an ongoing battle with unwelcome intrusive thought. Previously motivated by carefully constructed dreams, these victims will be animated by managing and inducing forgetfulness. But what will have changed?

Calling it a "perfect storm" provides no better closure. Even accounting for the astonishing dedication Nassar single-mindedly employed in positioning himself and grooming both his victims and enablers, if not cohorts, so as to become such a uniquely prolific and cunning child predator, the magnitude of the surrounding enabling and motivated looking the other way is even a greater challenge to the moral imagination. Nassar, sitting in prison garb, gaunt and doleful, now merely appears as pathetic as he is loathed.

Meanwhile, organizations and institutions, such as the USA Gymnastics and Michigan State University appear plodding, and inept, conceding the need for change only as embarrassment forces their institutional hands. The USA Gymnastics only moved its training site away from the previously celebrated Karolyi facility after several gymnasts testified in the hearing as to how it had become for them a house of horrors. One more thing to be said for the public dissemination of the victim statements: such reactions are concrete evidence that the people in charge who should have been attuned to the gymnasts all along are now finally listening.

Prosecution, punishment, confronting the witnesses, suing the enabling institutions and organizations, dismantling the arrangements between these entities, better vetting, better parental awareness, better education and monitoring of those involved in training and treating the young athletes -- it is all necessary, all good. Yet, it's not enough. There is a worm in the apple.

In the 1980s, Susan Sontag struck a sour note regarding gymnastics, noting how some of its origins and ideals arose in fascist and totalitarian dogma and sympathy. Her observations were met with derision. The pushback aimed to puncture her sophisticated analysis with earnest quotes from young gymnasts, such as, "Gymnastics is really fun!" The gist of Sontag's critique is that gymnastics grew at least in part out of the romanticization of gymnastics as metaphor for the fascist will to power and the revolutionary Soviet "new man" [and woman]. She pointed to a sensibility associated with the films of Leni Riefenstahl combining images of the Nuremberg Rally and the Berlin 1936 Summer Olympics. The gist of the counterargument is that it is an unfair smear on young men and women engaged in a healthy, disciplined and competitive pursuit of both athletic excellence and aesthetic grace.

Neither side has the better of the argument. It is ultimately a fruitless dichotomy arguing over whether the sport better emphasizes the Greek gods Apollo or Dionysus, austerity or competition, purity or Eros, and so on. Both poles are part of the human character. Both are reflected in the sport's Greek origins. Recreating the body and making it perform in astonishing ways approaching imagined Platonic forms seems, on first glance, an estimable pursuit. But the problem with idealized forms is that the ideal-oriented agenda is susceptible to being hijacked. It is one thing to build onto a sport the thought that anything a man can do, a woman can do better, and vice versa. More problematic is anything a woman can do, a girl can do better. Where most of the Olympic movement is based upon the idea that young boys and girls should train to become competitive men and women, a realistic description of women's gymnastics is that elite girls are mostly groomed to peak before they become women. In gymnastics, to the extent judging is based on the Olympic credo of higher, faster, stronger, then prepubescent, smaller and more compact has the significant advantage in completing rotations, swings and twists. One consequence is that eating disorder, diuretics and delayed puberty, and the related injuries flowing therefrom, are all too common attributes of the sport.

Higher, faster and stronger are and will always be the most important criteria in rewarding Olympic excellence, and enforcing the integrity of sport. But gymnastic judging contains a subjective component that should also reward values such as artistic elegance, maturity, virtuosity and originality. In how the sport is governed, in how the rules are drafted and interpreted, and in how the standards of excellence for women or young women are thereby shaped, some have more influence than others. Bela Karolyi, the famous coach of the perfect 10 Nadia Comaneci, who, with his wife, exerted so much influence over American gymnastics and whose secluded ranch cum training facility remained, until midway through victim impact statements, the training destination of everyone who hoped to compete internationally for USA, once bragged, "The rest of the world laughed at American gymnastics before I came."

In the 2012 London Summer Games, the "Fierce Five" took the Gold in women's artistic gymnastics. They embodied competitive excellence. They represented with superior athleticism, elegance and grace. And at least four of the five were abused by Nassar. As were scores of elite gymnasts occupying the levels just below and supporting this pinnacle. An honest assessment of the imported centralization, and top-down organization of the sport that Karolyi promoted and Nassar exploited will necessarily have to take in this bad with the good.

As for the patriotic aspect of Olympic sport, will USA Gymnastics be judged by what it says, or what it produces? In response to the sentencing, the USA Gymnastics says it will create a culture that empowers and supports its athletes. It probably does not help that the political backdrop is an American president who infamously claimed a celebrity privilege to grab women's genitalia; who brags about crashing the dressing rooms of beauty pageants he owns and promotes as his preferred version of idealized womanhood, so as to ogle young undressed women. But setting aside the president's bad example, what flawed focus on the glittering gold pinnacle of idealized female athleticism explains or justifies the successive, interlocking failures on so many levels that have facilitated so much abuse in women's gymnastics? It will take more than merely a harsh criminal sentence or a few depositions to break this spell.