I want to salute an all-American pastime
It's as American as apple pie. Or saluting the flag. Or watching fireworks on the 4th.
Or taking steroids to improve athletic performance.
I'm talking about that great American pastime, cheating.
Now I'm not necessarily talking about corruption here. Corruption is like cheating's first cousin. There are certainly nations that are more corrupt that we are, although we're no amateurs at it either. Nor am I talking about cheating on a spouse. I'll leave that to John Edwards and various GOP senators.
No, I'm talking about good ol' fashioned American cheating, like the huge scandal that has broken in Atlanta recently over the fixing of the standardized test scores of the city's schools. And surprise! …it wasn't the kids who were cheating.
This fine display of Americana came from the teachers, the principals and the administrators for the city's school district in an effort to boost scores to reflect unearned levels of excellence, to ensure continued funding and to keep people from being fired for being lousy teachers.
But let's not just pick on the teachers in Atlanta. There are news reports that this may have happened in as many as 10 different states. Now that's what I call an outbust of patriotic spirit!
Yes, I know, we all teach our children not to cheat. I certainly teach that to my kids. But in a culture that cheats on almost every level (come on, admit it, you've tweaked you tax returns a bit or two over the years) and in almost every profession (steroids in baseball, track and field, cycling, football, Wall Street insiders cheating by getting inside information, health care companies cheating on the Medicare payments forms they file, farmers who report more acres than they actually have so they can collect more government hand-outs, healthy people who park in handicap zones etc., etc.) it hard to get them to listen to you when everyone around them is, well, cheating.
In fact, I would say that we kind of glorify cheaters. Few people are as famous as Bernie Madoff. Or Barry Bonds. Or the 1919 Black Sox (anyone remember even remember the name of the team that they played that year). Lots of people still think George W. Bush cheated when he became president in 2000.
Which begs the question why do we cheat so much? Well, that's easy. Fear of failure for one. "Because everybody does it" is a great rationalization to cheat. But I think it's' often about the Benjamins and the fame. Baseball players took steroids so they could sign contracts that were bigger than the economies of small African countries, or because they would do anything to break an important record. Or, as in the case of Atlanta's test scores, people cheated to make themselves look good and keep the money and accolades flowing.
Oh yes, they do get caught now and then, and when they do the consequences can be drastic. Barry Bonds will never be in baseball's Hall of Fame. Bernie Madoff is probably in prison until the second coming. Many, many teachers and administrators across the country are going to lose their jobs over cheating on test scores. But even knowing those possible outcomes, they still cheated. Because we all think we can get away with it.
They say that cheaters never prosper. That might be true. Certainly that's the case in Atlanta. But Barry Bonds name is still in the record books. And last I checked, not all that many people have gone to jail for the Wall Street escapades that have put us all on economic life-support. Wall Street is recording record profits again.
So we can expect cheating to remain a popular activity for a while yet. The potential rewards are just too tempting.
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