Toastmaster: Gentlemen, pray silence for the President of the Royal Society for Putting Things on Top of Other Things.

(There is much upper class applause and banging on the table as Sir William rises to his feet.)

Sir William: I thank you, gentlemen. The year has been a good one for the Society (hear, hear). This year our members have put more things on top of other things than ever before. But, I should warn you, this is no time for complacency. No, there are still many things, and I cannot emphasize this too strongly, not on top of other things. I myself, on my way here this evening, saw a thing that was not on top of another thing in any way. (shame!) Shame indeed but we must not allow ourselves to become too despondent. For, we must never forget that if there was not one thing that was not on top of another thing our society would be nothing more than a meaningless body of men that had gathered together for no good purpose. But we flourish. This year our Australasian members and the various organizations affiliated to our Australasian branches put no fewer than twenty-two things on top of other things. (applause) Well done all of you. But there is one cloud on the horizon. In this last year our Staffordshire branch has not succeeded in putting one thing on top of another (shame!). Therefore I call upon our Staffordshire delegate to explain this weird behaviour.

(As Sir William sits a meek man met at one of the side tables.)

Mr Cutler: Er, Cutler, Staffordshire. Um … well, Mr Chairman, it’s just that most of the members in Staffordshire feel… the whole thing’s a bit silly.

(Cries of outrage. Chairman leaps to feet.)

Sir William: Silly SILLY!! (he pauses and thinks) Silly! I suppose it is, a bit. What have we been doing wasting our lives with all this nonsense (hear, hear). Right, okay, meeting adjourned for ever.

(He gets right up and walks away from the table to approving noises and applause…)

Ever have one of those moments?  Silly! I suppose it is, a bit. What have I been doing wasting my life with all this nonsense…  I remember my Ayn Rand days with about the same bewhildered emberassment that I remember my early teenage bible thumper days.  In my defense first, hey…I was raised in a Baptist household…okay?  Second, I can honestly say that the rarefied heights of my passion for all things scriptural occurred within months of my having a "the whole thing’s a bit silly" moment.  I guess I’m just one of those people who has to smack into every damn brick wall for himself, before he knows its there.

I was a passionate Randian right up until Ronald Reagan convinced me that an utterly unregulated market will happily drive itself off a cliff chasing after that one last dollar it hasn’t yet pocketed.  I devoured her books.  Re-reading them again after all these years is really, Really embarrassing.  She may be a good at plot and scenerio, but a writer of believable characters, let alone believable dialogue, she simply wasn’t.  I’ve read yaoi romance novels with less embarrassing dialogue then Rand’s.  And she never, never trusted her readers to understand anything.  Why simply make your point in the story’s action, when you can pound it into your reader’s head with a jackhammer.  She’s like a little bird perched on your shoulder while you read, constantly chirping in your ear, Do you get it?  Do you get it?  Do you get it? 

So I remember very well, all her novel’s heroic capitalists, and her school girl idolization of the manly titans of industry.  I once heard romanticism described as an art form that wasn’t concerned with reality, but with the idealization of reality.  Probably the one and only thing I still have from Rand that I believe in, is that this is false, that romanticism is not only an idealization, but an essentialization of the world around us, and that no one who disconnects themselves from reality, can ever be a good romantic, because you cannot idealize something you do not understand.  Oh…had Rand only taken her own advice a time or two, and actually looked the fuck at what she was writing about…

Duke Cheating Probe Shows Failure of Post-Enron Ethics Classes

By Matthew Keenan and Brian K. Sullivan

May 1 (Bloomberg) — The cheating episode at Duke University may cause academics to conclude the post-Enron emphasis on teaching ethics in graduate business schools is a failure.

Thirty-four first-year candidates for a master’s of business administration degree at Duke’s Fuqua School of Business were disciplined in the program’s largest cheating scandal. Nine students face expulsion for collaborating on a take-home test, in violation of the professor’s rules.

Business students are more likely to cut corners than those in any other academic discipline, several studies show. A Rutgers University survey last year found that cheating at business schools is common, even after ethics courses were added following scandals that bankrupted Enron Corp. and WorldCom Inc.

"What is taught in a business program sometimes reinforces students’ tendencies to be entrepreneurial and results-oriented", said Timothy Dodd, 50, executive director of the Center for Academic Integrity at Duke, in an interview from Durham, North Carolina. "Those sometimes aren’t the people who understand that moral means have to be used to achieve moral ends."

Well…duh.  The Baptist Boy in me would say that if they’re not getting their lessons on ethics at home, they won’t learn them in school.  But there have been good, bad, and indifferent families for generations, and I think the world worn middle aged guy I’m becoming has come to believe now, that the problem isn’t the home life a kid has, but that sharks simply gravitate to where the good hunting is, and a marketplace where ripping people off and bleeding them dry is not only legal, but an easy and respectable way of life, is going to attract a lot of sharks.

I’m old enough to remember when our economy had some regulation that made it hard for business to do that.  I can remember when folks who worked in the retail sector could afford decent if modest housing, a basic car, and still raise a family, pay their bills, put the kids through school, and take a short vacation to someplace once a year.  I was raised through most of my childhood by a single working woman who made nothing more then basic clerical wages all her life and I never went to bed hungry once, never walked out of the house without clean clothes on, and had everything I needed for school and my health provided for.  The bills got paid, we lived in a series of pretty nice garden style apartments, I got the usual gifts on my birthdays and at Christmas, and once a year we all went to the beach for a couple weeks.  When mom retired, she got a basic pension (you may have to look up that word ‘pension’) which combined with her social security and medicare gave her a pretty nice retirement right up to the day she died.

They called it trickle-down economics during the Reagan years.  A rising tide would lift all the boats they said.  So they freed big business from the shackles of the liberal welfare state.  And golly, a lot of businessmen are doing much better for it, aren’t they.  But I’m sure as fuck glad I’m not a kid today, being raise by a single mother trying to make ends meet on clerical wages.  I go to the store these days, and I see the faces of the people serving me behind the counter, being nickeled and dimed to death now and no, the tide didn’t rise, it went out and left a lot of boats stranded, which doesn’t make sense because people can’t spend money they don’t have and when they don’t have a living wage anymore they aren’t bloody likely to be buying stuff they can’t afford.  But what you have to understand about an unregulated marketplace, is that nothing, not even its own sustainability, matters more then the profit you can make Right Now.  The sharks will happily drive our economy and our country off a cliff chasing after that last dollar they haven’t pocketed yet, just because it’s there.

At some point, hopefully, the nation will have a "the whole thing’s a bit silly" moment, regarding the innate goodness of unregulated markets and we can start talking about how to put back together again, what the Reagan republicans started tearing apart.  It would be nice someday, to be able to walk into a store and not feel ashamed at being served by people who simply cannot make ends meet on what they’re being paid.