…we move on to the condescending protection of "minorities" in the form of superfluous hate crimes legislation. The latest attempt has been named the Matthew Shepard Act, in honor of a Wyoming meth addict killed in a drug deal gone bad. The fact that he happened to be gay apparently entitled him to more protection than your average straight meth addict.
Thank you, ABC News, and especially you Elizabeth Vargas, for giving gay haters everywhere a way to pistol whip that poor kid’s memory forever, if not his actual body like they’d like to.
Almost immediately after the bill passed the House, president Nice Job Brownie threatened to veto it, saying that the laws "already on the books" were sufficient. One of the most pernicious memes the religious right is putting out there regarding hate crime laws is that they’re unnecessary, because the violent crimes committed against gay people are already illegal.
It’s one of those pat little bits of dishonest rhetoric by which they poison the national discourse. Yes, killing someone is already illegal. But motive has always been a part of how killings are prosecuted. It is more then simply determining the kind of punishment that fits the crime. You have to know what crime was actually committed, before you can know the punishment that fits it. Was the killing accidental? Was it accidental but reckless? Was it reckless in a depraved and indifferent way? Was it intentional? Was it committed in a heat of passion, or in a cold, calculating and deliberate way? This process of evaluating a criminal’s motive, and differentiating between them as to the charges and punishments applied works the same for just about every serious crime that comes before a court of law. When the religious right argues that hate crime laws are thought crime laws, they are in effect arguing that four-fifths of the laws on the books today are also thought crime laws.
That’s not what they mean of course. What they mean is that crimes committed against gay people should not be treated as what they are, but as something they are not. Murder is murder is murder, they say. But it isn’t. Otherwise, why have so many different laws for it? And where you really see the effects of hate crimes on the gay community, isn’t in the murders, but in the far more common, and often devastating to the survivors, assaults, beatings, gay bashings.
Gabi Clayton called me on Wednesday to tell me that she had some very good news. She sent me the link to lennonpiano.com and said that they had contacted her to participate in an even to happen this next Tuesday at her house May 8, the anniversary of the death of her son, Bill.
Longtime readers of my diary know that I met Gabi at least 10 years ago over the net after having seen a picture of Bill. I also wrote and recorded a song — "Will It Always Be Like This" — about her and the whole incident.
The story of Bill Clayton is just heartbreaking…
Bill came out to us as bisexual when he was 14. He was afraid to tell us, because he knew that other kids had told their parents and that their parents had disowned them or reacted in other ways that were frightening. He had read the book I had loaned him "Changing Bodies, Changing Lives," and there were coming out stories in the book. Finally he worked up the courage to tell us and we assured him that we loved him and accepted him. He was so happy that he wanted to tell the whole world. We recommended a support group out at the college which I had just graduated from. Bill went to that group three times and stopped – he said he really liked it but that he was fine and didn’t need to go any more.
An older man had sexually assaulted him after one of the support group meetings. Bill struggled afterwards with the trauma, and with suicidal throughts…
Bill finally told Sam, his best friend. He told Sam that the memories of that sexual assault were overwhelming him and that he was suicidal. He asked Sam not to tell anyone, but Sam put the friendship on the line and told me, because he didn’t want to lose his friend. Bill was relieved once we knew, and we reported it to the police and got Bill started with a therapist.
It took the police a long time to find the man. When they finally questioned him he confessed to exactly what Bill had said. Then he got a lawyer, plead not guilty at his arraignment, and managed to avoid jail and court until a month after Bill died. (He finally went to prison for 13 months.) So, Bill would see him around town — which aggravated the post-traumatic stress he was in counseling for. There were times when Bill would suddenly take a nose dive into severe depression for no apparent reason. Later we would find out that it was because he had seen this man on the bus or at the movies. Bill was so depressed and suicidal at one point that he spent some time in the hospital.
He stayed in counseling, and finally was getting back to being his old, impish self again. His mental health improved tremendously. He had a summer job doing computer and office stuff, and he loved it. He started looking forward to school again (after two rough years), and he felt like he had a future. Yes, he was back! He and his counselor agreed that he was done with therapy, and she closed his case with Crime Victims Compensation — on April 5th, 1995.
And then it all came apart…
On April 6, 1995, Sam and his girlfriend, Jenny, were walking with Bill near their high school to Jenny’s house to watch a video they had rented. Four guys — one of whom knew Bill and Sam because he was in the same high school (and had gone to their middle school before that) — followed them in a car and yelled things I will not repeat related to sexual orientation. Bill and his friends ignored them and decided to walk through the high school campus, thinking it would be safer because the gate was closed. The four guys drove off, but they parked the car nearby, because the next thing Bill and his friends knew, they came up on foot and surrounded them. They said "You wanna fight?" Bill, Sam and Jenny tried to walk away — they didn’t want to fight at all.
The four then brutally assaulted Bill and Sam, kicking and beating them both into unconsciousness while Jenny screamed at them to stop. It was broad daylight during Spring break.
When they regained consciousness a minute after the attackers left; Bill, Sam and Jenny ran to the school custodian’s office and called the police and then their families. They were taken to the emergency room where we met them. Bill had abrasions and bruises. They thought he might have kidney damage, but he didn’t. Sam was a mess too, with a broken nose and many bruises.
While we were in the emergency room, one of the guys who did the assault came casually walking through with two other friends, to visit a friend who had just had a baby. Sam saw him and Sam’s parents called the police. When they found him he confessed and told the police who the other guys were – they were all under 18 years old. The police treated it as a hate crime from the very beginning.
It did its work…
We thought he was going to make it – he seemed to handle things really well until after the rally, and then he crashed back into depression. He was suicidal again – it was too much. The assault sent him right back into the place he had fought so hard to get out of. He suddenly became depressed and suicidal, and we had to put him in the hospital again. While he was in the hospital he heard that a friend of his was gay-bashed at school in a nearby town.
After about 10 days he came home. We and his doctors in the hospital thought he had gotten past being suicidal. But Bill took a massive overdose on May 8th. Alec found him unconscious on the kitchen floor and had him rushed to the hospital, but they couldn’t save him.
And the attackers? Well the police may have treated it as a hate crime from the beginning, but the courts sure didn’t…
The boys who assaulted Bill and Sam were finally sentenced to 20-30 days in juvenile detention followed by probation and community service and 4 hours of diversity training focusing on sexual orientation.
Hate crimes really are different in kind, from other crimes, just as manslaughter is different from murder one is different from terrorism. That much is obvious from the overkill police often see in them. But the religious right doesn’t want people to see it that way. Partly, it’s because they don’t see it that way themselves. Homosexuals don’t love, they just have sex… In their eyes, gay people aren’t even human. We don’t feel pain like real humans do. We are sick, depraved, lower then animals. Attacks on us simply do not do the kind of profound damage they otherwise do to real humans. If anything, the gay haters think that crimes against us should be treated Less seriously then crimes committed against real people…as something tacky and graceless, that polite upright god fearing men don’t do, at least not in public anyway, but not rising to the level of an actual crime against a Person. More like kicking a dog. These are homosexuals after all.
But gay bashings are more like rape then like common assaults. For the victim, a gay bashing strikes a knife into the heart of their most intimate sense of sexuality and self. And that is the intent. And they are a kind of domestic terrorism. It is that last quality that makes them particularly useful to the religious right, and why they emphatically don’t want the nation to become serious about combating anti-gay hate. A fearful homosexual, is a good homosexual. Fearful homosexuals stay in the closet. They don’t agitate for equal rights. They don’t live openly. They don’t hold their lover’s hand in public. They are not proud.
This is what the fight against hate crime law is about. This is why the gay haters are taking such a scorched earth attitude toward the Matthew Shepard Act. When a gay person is murdered, the religious right can point to the seriousness of the crime and argue that a hate crime enhancement is meaningless. When the killer is brought to justice they can say that the law already prosecutes murder, what is the point of adding a hate crime charge too? But most gay bashings do not result in death, most are random and sudden attacks such as the one that left a same sex couple beaten and bloody on the streets of Scottsdale Arizona last year, when they’d dared to hold hands in public …
Scottsdale police are investigating an alleged hate crime reported by a gay couple who said they were jumped by as many as seven men outside a Scottsdale restaurant near McDowell and Scottsdale roads.
As they held hands and began to leave Frasher’s Steakhouse late Sunday, Jean Rolland and Andrew Frost said they were humiliated and beaten in the restaurant’s entryway.
Frost, 19, was taken to Scottsdale Healthcare Osborn, where he was treated and released. Frost received several staples to treat a wound on his scalp, and several stitches to seal other wounds to his face.
Rolland, 28, suffered minor injuries.
The men, who had been dating for a couple of weeks, are seeking to press charges against their attackers – none of whom have been arrested as of Monday afternoon, according to Scottsdale police.
"My only hope is that they’re going to brag about it and tell their friends how tough they were," said Rolland, a native of France who lives part-time in Scottsdale.
"How tough is it to use seven guys to take on two guys, including one 19-year-old who weighs 120 pounds?" he asked.
Frost, a Scottsdale resident who graduated from Mesa Westwood High, said the attack was the second he endured in the past three years. When he was 16, he said, he was attacked by two teens and an adult in Mesa. One used an aluminum baseball bat.
The Sunday night incident was upsetting, he said, because no one from the restaurant said they saw anything, though the attack happened only a few feet from the front door.
Of course no one saw anything. And George Bush and James Dobson would like it very much if this nation keeps right on not seeing anything. Except this:
Imagine. Imagine a world, where there was no hate…
Why Newspaper Readership, and Network News Ratings Are Declining
Via Brad DeLong… Yes…the Internet probably plays its part. But there is no doubt that a sizable portion of old media’s audience is being driven away from it, by the stench of rot. Delong Quotes Tristero over at Digby’s Hullabaloo…
And in fact the sheer mediocrity of print columnists – Friedman – as well as their blithering stupidity – Brooks – surely must be a factor in the decline of newspaper readership… As for Jon Chait, well… he supported the war when he should have known better. There’s a myth that simply won’t die, that the horror we see today in Iraq was unpredictable. Here’s Nora Ephron’s version:
[Tenet and Powell] couldn’t have known at that time [Powell’s infamous UN speech] that the war would be such an unmitigated disaster; they surely couldn’t have known that there wouldn’t even be a July 4th sparkler found in all of Iraq…
Well, actually, they could have and should have. And so should have Chait. I suppose it’s not fair to dismiss someone’s entire corpus of opinion-making because they happened to make one itty-bitty mistake about something like an illegal, immoral, totally unjustifiable invasion of a foreign country that – no matter how depraved the leadership might be – never attacked the US and had nothing to do whatsoever with 9/11. But that’s just the way I am. After William Buckley called for all HIV positive people to be tattooed on their buttocks – yes, he did, you can look it up – it should have been quite clear to anyone with a brain that you could get more coherent political and cultural commentary from reading Mad Magazine than the National Review. Similarly, when Chait supported Bush/Iraq.
As I’ve said before, there is a serious intellectual crisis in this country. Bush/Iraq – especially the failure of the media to catch on before it was too late – is a direct consequence of that. That folks like Chait still command enough respect to have the opportunity to write cover articles for the New Republic – on any subject – while those who were absolutely right about this debacle from the start are still all but completely ignored by "respectable" opinion-making journalism should be cause for genuine alarm. Without truly intelligent, educated, and street-smart voices available to raise a… hullabaloo before it’s too late, this country is almost guaranteed to repeat the spectacular debacle of Iraq in the near future. And I don’t see enough of those voices in the mainstream political discourse.
To which DeLong adds:
I remember Powell’s Chief of Staff, Colonel Wilkerson, saying that the night and he and Colin Powell worked on Powell’s speech was the worst night of his life–that they knew at the time that they were doing something very evil.
Yup. And they did it anyway. Tells you all you need to know about them. And the fact that the mainstream news media actively looked the other way while they did it, tells you all you need to know about Them.
WALTER ISAACSON: We’d put it on the air and by nature of a 24 hour TV network, it was replaying over and over again. So, you would get phone calls. You would get advertisers. You would get the Administration.
BILL MOYERS: You said pressure from advertisers?WALTER ISAACSON: Not direct pressure from advertisers, but big people in corporations were calling up and saying, ‘You’re being anti-American here.’
So, "big people in corporations" get to call up CNN and tell them what they should be doing with their news coverage.
If you haven’t watched the most recent Bill Moyers Journal, Buying The War, and you’ve got a strong stomach, you can watch it online, Here. At least until the republicans manage to finally pull the plug on PBS…
OLBERMANN: Let’s just sit here a moment more as we watch this. And this touches on the idea of regal qualities that were not seen in South Carolina. This is the prosession, this is the parade, these are tonight’s debaters. The ten candidates, filing out, just in fact to our right. We can see them from where we are seated. There is a coronation quality that just was not present in South Carolina.
FINEMAN: Keith, if you look at that picture and took away all of the writing and all of the words, and just had the image, could the American people tell that those were Republicans? I think the answer is yes. There is a hierarchical, there is, dare I say it, male, there is an old-line quality to them that some voters, indeed a lot of voters, find reassuring. And this is something that the Democrats need to understand. The Democrats are the “we are family” party, which is great, but this is the other side of the conversation and this is their home here. We really are in Reagan country.
Anyone remember how Ronald Reagan opened his 1980 presidential campaign on a theme of State’s Rights…in Philadelphia, Mississippi…the town where civil rights workers Cheney, Goodman and Schwerner were murdered? Yes, it’s about old male superiority…but not just any old males…
But the "old guard" that so many people find reassuring isn’t just male, is it? The Democrats had a couple of other inappropriate people on that stage last week — a brown one and a black one. (Yet another example of that ridiculous "we are family" stuff.)
I think the Democrats know very well what "the other half of the conversation" is, don’t you?
I, for one, found it extremely "reassuring" that only three out of ten of the Republican candidates for president don’t believe in evolution. And only nine out of ten said it would be a good day if Roe v Wade were repealed. Hey, it could have been worse.
Only nine out of ten? Gosh. They’re really getting liberal over there, aren’t they.
Okay, Gallery Three – The Shadows and Light Sessions, is up, Here. You probably want to read the About The Images page, Here. This is as I said, a younger me. But I’m still pretty happy with the work I did back in the early 70s. I can’t say in all honestly that I am completely comfortable with it. But it’s me. Looking at my own work, I often find myself thinking of something the composer Ralph Vaughan-Williams is said to have remarked upon hearing his forth symphony performed for the first time: "I don’t like it, but it’s what I meant." Yeah. Pretty much.
On The Boardwalk, Ocean City New Jersey, Winter 1973
WASHINGTON – An Interior Department official accused of pressuring government scientists to make their research fit her policy goals has resigned.
Julie MacDonald, deputy assistant secretary for fish, wildlife and parks, submitted her resignation letter to Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne, a department spokesman said Tuesday.
MacDonald resigned a week before a House congressional oversight committee was to hold a hearing on accusations that she violated the Endangered Species Act, censored science and mistreated staff of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
MacDonald was recently rebuked by the department’s inspector general, who told Congress in a report last month that she broke federal rules and should face punishment for leaking information about endangered species to private groups.
Interior Department spokesman Hugh Vickery confirmed MacDonald’s resignation but declined to comment further.
This is why the three branches of government are supposed to be equal and independent from each other. And of course, why the republicans have been trying so hard to make them all into one great big party machine. You have to understand…they don’t regard this sort of thing as corruption. They hate the system precisely because it was designed to favor democratic over authoritarian governing, a premise they categorically reject. The republicans of this day and age are anti-democratic authoritarian radicals. This is not Goldwater’s republican party.
Via Good As You… This ad apparently aired during an episode of the NBC TV show Heros last night. It’s a richly deserved dig at the eHarmony dating service, which doesn’t allow same-sex pairings. A business that makes its living selling folks the joys of love and romance while peddling cheapshit bigotry out the side door, probably isn’t all that serious about the love and romance it’s dealing out the front door either.
As presidential spectacles go, it would be hard to surpass George Bush’s triumphant ”Top Gun” visit to the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln yesterday off the California coast. President Bush flew out to the giant aircraft carrier dressed in full fighter-pilot regalia as the ”co-pilot” of a Navy warplane. After a dramatic landing on the compact deck — a new standard for high-risk presidential travel — Mr. Bush mingled with the ship’s crew, then later welcomed home thousands of cheering sailors and aviators on the flight deck in a nationally televised address.
The scene will undoubtedly make for a potent campaign commercial next year. For now, though, the point was to declare an end to the combat phase of the war in Iraq and to commit the nation to the reconstruction of that shattered country….
-Editorial, May 2, 2003, The New York Times.
The tail hook caught the last cable, jerking the fighter jet from 150 m.p.h. to zero in two seconds. Out bounded the cocky, rule-breaking, daredevil flyboy, a man navigating the Highway to the Danger Zone, out along the edges where he was born to be, the further on the edge, the hotter the intensity.
He flashed that famous all-American grin as he swaggered around the deck of the aircraft carrier in his olive flight suit, ejection harness between his legs, helmet tucked under his arm, awestruck crew crowding around. Maverick was back, cooler and hotter than ever, throttling to the max with joystick politics.
Compared to Karl Rove’s ”revvin’ up your engine” myth-making cinematic style, Jerry Bruckheimer’s movies look like ”Lizzie McGuire.”
This time Maverick didn’t just nail a few bogeys and do a 4G inverted dive with a MIG-28 at a range of two meters. This time the Top Gun wasted a couple of nasty regimes, and promised this was just the beginning.
–Maureen Dowd, The New York Times, May 4, 2003
And many others, either equally fawning or equally passive in their complete willingness to simply jot down all of President Junior’s talking points and pass them along as news, without so much as letting a peep be heard from the dissenters. Oh no. To read the New York Times back then you’d have thought there was no dissent anywhere regarding the threat Iraq posed to the world, or that it had weapons of mass destruction, much beyond a few dirty radical hippy leftists who nobody needed to pay any attention to. It was "You provide the pictures, I’ll provide the war…" all over again. except this time it wasn’t the William Randolph Hearst of our era doing it, but the Gray Lady herself.
Ah well… The Times has yet to admit its culpability as a willing participant in the Whitewater smear campaign either…
Via Pam’s House Blend. Warning, this video is disturbing and violent. It is also the reality of life for gay people in Jamaica, a place that bills itself as “A premier caribbean travel destination”…a place of “Sweet fragrances, shimmering sunsets, spicy flavors…No wonder hearts beat faster in Jamaica.”
Public Defender Earl Witter resorted to the vernacular yesterday as he advised members of the gay community to “hold your corners”, and avoid flaunting their sexual preferences in the face of those who are repulsed by their behaviour.
Condemning violence in all forms, particularly against homosexuals, the public defender, however, warned members of the gay community that if they continued to shove their tendencies on others who found it repugnant, it might incite violence.
“It may provoke a violent breach of the peace,” Mr. Witter told The Gleaner yesterday evening.
… During the luncheon, Mr. Witter said that, as with most things, “tolerance has its limits” and gays and lesbians should be sensitive to the “repulsion that others feel” and should not be so “brazen”.
“What takes place behind closed doors between consenting males is ordinarily beyond the reach of the law so they (gays) should confine their activities to their bed chambers and not, by their conduct, provoke disapproving reactions. In other words ‘hold yu corner,'” Mr. Witter said.
…not, by their conduct, provoke disapproving reactions. Now…where have I heard that before…?
Okay, I’m going to actually link to Sullivan for this one. I know…I know… In blindly supporting Bush out of nothing more noble then a puerile contempt for democrats, progressives and liberals, for so many years, Sullivan has helped keep the time when the following stops being a horrific reality for gay and lesbian Americans just out of reach. Even those of us blessed enough to live in places where our relationships are given some sort of legal status, can have it all go nightmarishly wrong the moment we step over a state line. And if the republicans Sullivan has passionately supported for so long have their way, eventually nearly every fucking state in the union will have an anti same-sex marriage amendment in its constitution. Just never mind that for a moment. You want to know why we fight…why the struggle for same sex marriage is so important…?
I remember a story told by a friend during the plague years. He was visiting a dying friend in hospital and a couple of beds down the ward from his friend, the curtains were drawn around a patient. From behind the curtains, he could hear a man softly singing a show-tune. "Well, at least that guy’s keeping his spirits up," my friend remarked. "Actually," his dying friend replied, "the man in that bed died this morning and was taken away by his family. That’s his boyfriend. The family won’t let him go to the funeral or ever see his spouse’s body again. They’ve kicked him out of their apartment. It wasn’t his name on the lease. So he’s just sitting there, singing their favorite song to an empty bed. It’s the last time he’ll get that close to his husband. The nurses didn’t have the heart to tell him to leave yet. He’s been there for hours."
There it is. Why we fight. What our enemies are fighting to preserve. It’s not about marriage. It’s not about the bible. It’s about keeping that knife in our hearts, and their right to twist it whenever they feel like it. Preferably, right when our hearts are most exposed and vulnerable. Because if we don’t bleed, they’re not righteous.
Hey Stu…you still think I’m too angry? Still think I need to be a tad more closeted in order to get along with people? Of course you do. Homosexuals don’t love, they just have sex. Right? It’s like I have this nasty disgusting little…personal issue…or mental disorder, as you’ve suggested a time or two…and as long as people like me just keep that disgusting part of ourselves under wraps we’ll all get along, won’t we?
So he’s just sitting there, singing their favorite song to an empty bed…
I’d tell you to go to Hell…but what the fuck, you’re already there.
What’s Good For Business Is Good For America. Well…It’s Good For Business Anyway…
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…
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.
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