John McQuaid
11/10/2011
This is the way accountability is supposed to work: wrongdoing comes to light
in an organization. The perpetrator is disciplined, fired and/or charged. And
the organization moves on, weakened in the short term but, one hopes,
strengthened in the long run by ridding itself of a bad actor, and also by
demonstrating its ability to police itself.
I doubt it ever truly worked this way, especially at the highest levels of
any field. But as practiced today, the rituals of accountability have a
peculiar, petulant, degraded quality. In whatever field you like – let’s say,
college football, corporate media, and organized religion – it requires a media
firestorm and public outrage to force any kind of response, and that response is
grudging, accompanied by rearguard defenses executed by teams of attorneys and
crisis management experts.
The message: too much is materially at stake for me, so I’m not going
quietly, and I don’t give a damn about anything or anyone else.
So the Penn State board of trustees deserves some credit for taking
decisive action in the case of former assistant football coach Jerry
Sandusky, charged with sexually abusing eight children over 15 years. Firing Joe
Paterno and President Graham Spanier at least shows a minimal recognition of
reality: that this was in no way business as usual, more revelations will likely
follow, and some unambiguous action was required.
But of course, given the near-criminal inaction and wishful thinking and a
sense of entitlement by the principals, the accountability train had already run
off the rails long ago. (And we still don’t know what other shoes will drop, or
the ultimate chain of responsibility for everything that happened.) To cite only
the most obvious, most ironic and heartbreaking example, had Paterno acted
earlier – as one hopes the benevolent father figure he was would act, to
preserve the sanctity of his “home†and the safety of worshipful young people
who passed through it – he could have, at minimum, saved some kids. Instead, he
opted to do
the absolute minimum, hoping the problem would go away, or not be noticed,
or something.
This has obvious similarities to the Catholic Church’s far larger, longer,
systematic coverup of child abuse by clergy, which apparently continues,
even today, despite some progress made by Pope Benedict in recognizing and
addressing the problem. But it took decades of organized action by abuse
victims, some fantastic
journalism, and changing times to get even the limited, zig-zagging response
we’ve seen so far.
Or take the whole Murdoch mess, in which News Corp.’s resources were devoted
first to illegal phone hacking and spying, and now, above all, to protecting the
Murdoch family. Their defense depends on brain-freeze-inducing
parsing of what James Murdoch knew and when, combined with remedial actions
calculated to do the minimum to appear bold while simultaneously shielding the
family from any sort of accountability.
The main message to the public – and to anyone else sitting on some horrible,
career-ending revelation (you know who you are) – isn’t about righting wrongs.
It’s very meta, one of pure contingency: how to best handle the crisis? If there
is widespread outrage and a media feeding frenzy, how can it most efficiently be
placated? A few heads on platters, financial settlements, theatrical displays of
remorse? Those are interesting questions. But the important issues are harder,
and they are secondary: what went wrong? Was it a product of some kind of
institutional sickness? Who bears ultimate responsibility, and do they recognize
what that is and what it means?
Nobody likes to look at those questions. And those that do take risks. In
general, they’re more likely to get fired than the malefactors. And as time has
passed, I think the willingness to take them on has faded. I’ve written about it
ad infinitum, but I’ll mention it again here: the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers
is responsible for design errors in defective hurricane levees around New
Orleans whose premature collapses flooded most of the city and killed a lot of
people. If anyone in an official capacity has suffered for this, let me
know.
Robert
McNamara remained silent on the Vietnam War for nearly three decades before
writing a memoir offering a mea culpa – not exactly a model of accountability.
But look at Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld today, who permit themselves no
self-reflection or the slightest concession of error over colossal screwups in
Iraq. Today, it seems, a genuine accounting is impossible: if you can, you play
to your own crowd, and place a bet history will turn your way. Institutions
drift, and problems grow.
