;)
ANVILLE, Calif. — Apparently, without anyone's
noticing, our entire universe collapsed into a black hole and emerged in
another dimension where everything is backward: Bill Gates (who used to be
evil) is spending billions to vaccinate children in third-world countries,
while the Catholic Church (which used to be good) is defending priests
accused of molesting children. The stock market (which used to go up) now
only drifts downward. And the surest way to lose respect is to mention you
started a dot-com.
But here's the strangest backwardism of all: People seem surprised that
captains of industry are stealing vast amounts of money at every
opportunity. Back in our old dimension everyone assumed that C.E.O.'s and
C.F.O.'s were weasels. Now it's big news.
I think it's useful to put these corporate scandals in perspective.
Every employee I ever worked with in my old cubicle-dwelling days was
pillaging the company on a regular basis, too. But the quantity of loot
was rarely newsworthy. My weasel co-workers were pocketing office
supplies, fudging expense reports, using sick days as vacation and
engaging in a wide array of work-avoidance techniques.
Most people rationalize this kind of behavior by saying that
corporations are evil and so the weasel employees deserve a little extra.
The C.E.O.'s and C.F.O.'s aren't less ethical than employees and
stockholders; they're just more effective. They're getting a higher
quality of loot than the rank and file, and for that they must be
punished.
I have some friends in law enforcement who say the only crooks that get
caught are the stupid ones. Assuming this holds true for C.E.O.'s, it's
bad news for the economy. I have to think that at least a few of the
executives who are running billion-dollar companies are smart, so we might
be seeing the tip of the weasel's tail here.
The typical C.E.O. legal defense — and it's a good one — is to place
the blame on plain old massive incompetence, not on evil. If I end up on
the jury for one of those trials, I'll be torn. On the one hand, I'm
predisposed to believing that executives are indeed clueless. But on the
other, I'm enough of a weasel to vote guilty just to watch a C.E.O. cry. I
lost a lot of money on Enron,
Tyco and WorldCom. (Yes, I owned
stock in all three.) So I might enjoy being a juror on one of those cases.
I might even volunteer. And when I sign in to the jury room each morning,
I'll steal the pen, because frankly, I deserve it.
Scott Adams, a cartoonist, is the author of the forthcoming
"Dilbert and the Way of the Weasel."
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