Rules? What Rules?
It was a year dominated by deception, thanks to a revered coach, a Native American leader, an MIT official, students, teachers, political operatives, cops, and more. Seriously. Would we lie?
Belicheat?
Our coach?
Belicheat?
Well, that's a bit harsh, isn't it? After all, his team did put up one of the greatest seasons in the history of the National Football League.
In early September, an operative in the employ of the New England Patriots staff got caught illicitly videotaping the defensive signals of the New York Jets during the season's opening game in the Meadowlands. This came as something of a surprise, if for no other reason than the fact that the performance of the Jets that day gave no indication that they had any defensive signals to steal. Anyway, the league had issued a specific warning to all NFL coaches not to do this. Which meant, if you were keeping score at home, that Bill Belichick and the Patriots blatantly flouted the directive in a stadium approximately 10 miles from the league office. NFL commissioner Roger Goodell whacked Belichick and the Patriots good, fining the coach $500,000 and the team itself half of that. He also pried away one of next spring's first-round draft picks. It got us all talking about it, and calibrating the precise number of football functionaries who could dance on the head of a pin. There was earnest speculation about whether what happened was "really" cheating. (As we've seen, those answering in the affirmative had 750,000 very good arguments on their side.) The debate raged on in the finer precincts of sports-talk radio and even spilled over onto the op-ed pages.
Despite being lighter in the wallet and thinner in the depth chart than he was before it all happened, Belichick also picked up a brand new cyber-moniker. In fact, a Google search for "Belicheat" now gets you 43,700 responses. And simply Googling "cheating" gets you a large number of Belichick references as well, although not as many Belichick ones as there are references for various country-music lyrics. (There's a difference, though, between cheating, which is what the videotaping was, and cheatin', which refers to adult covert interactions and is what the songs are about.) Add to these the fact that New England safety Rodney Harrison got busted for using human-growth hormones, and it becomes plain that Belichick is the hooded face of a rather remarkable year in local cheating. We cut so many corners this year that our ethics now look like the Route 2 rotary.
It was a banner year, for example, for local people who decided to pump up their resumes the way Harrison pumped up his biceps. Marilee Jones, a longtime and much respected MIT admissions dean, quit her job because it was discovered that she'd claimed to have at least three degrees that she did not, in fact, have. And Jones was a piker compared to Glenn Marshall, the fallen leader of the Mashpee Wampanoags who, at one point, lied about his service in the Vietnam War, let his supporters lie about the medals he'd won there, and also lied about having been a cop. Apparently preoccupied with these fabulisms, Marshall forgot about his convictions for drug possession and rape. The things that'll slip a fella's mind. And, elsewhere, speaking of creative new fronts in crime and chicanery, computers have, like everything else in modern life, made them easier. This was the year that we discovered more about some enterprising souls who had hacked out millions of credit card numbers from the computer system of
In September, Drake Bennett of the Globe cast about to determine why we seemed to have wrapped ourselves up in crib sheets. He discovered a number of reasons - from basic brain biology, to cost-benefit calculations, to a remarkable theory called "defensive cheating," by which the act of cheating is a vehicle to bring justice to systems rigged by other cheaters. So Belichick's videotaping was excusable, his defenders argued, based on the widely held suspicion that every other team in the NFL was doing pretty much the same thing.
Whatever the source, there's no point in denying the essential truth about ourselves. Cheating is deeply embedded in the cultural DNA of Boston. Oh, of course, there was all that talk about founding a shining "city upon a hill," but the raw historical fact is, if those same people hadn't engaged in land fraud, double-dealing, blunderbuss-negotiating, and other forms of jiggery-pokery as regards the people who already were here, then the non-resume-inflating Wampanoags wouldn't have to be spending all that time and money now trying to get their own back, one casino at a time. However, given all that happened, there's a certain amount of rough justice in the fact that Native Americans may accomplish this by putting in place the infrastructure through which we may soon get together and cheat one another - or, at the very least, go broke trying to get something for nothing.
It didn't get any better as the Puritans died out, either. The sainted James Michael Curley became an icon to the immigrant generations because he used all means, fair and foul, to strike power from the hands of the descendants of those founding frost monsters who'd cheated the Indians. He remains one today, even though he cheated his eyebrows off to gain and maintain political power. According to Jack Beatty's essential biography, The Rascal King, one of Curley's favorite tactics was to bribe the building maintenance men at the city's various brothels to identify his political opponents as regular customers. Beatty quotes the observation of a reporter at the time that ". . . any man who runs against Curley will have to take it for granted that he will have a family row on his hands within a week." As it turns out, cheating and cheatin' work in tandem with each other, to the detriment of all.
Of course, in politics, it's important to point out the difference between what is cheating and what is merely sharp practice. The campaign of Mitt Romney is a good object lesson in this regard. He's running for president, and doing a fairly good job of it, by all accounts. When he goes around the country, Romney is not cheating when he tells a hall full of rubes he really ran in Massachusetts as a long-lost son of the South - rather than, as he argued at the time, that he was a candidate who could be gayer than Ted Kennedy. There is an element of caveat emptor to campaign speechifying that mitigates any accusation of cheating. People should be able to figure on their own that, in godless Massachusetts, nobody with the positions that Romney's now espousing could have been elected alderman. But the badges, though. The badges were cheating, pure and simple. Back in July, an aide named Jay Garrity resigned from the campaign after it was reported he'd been flashing what looked like a police badge at people he thought were inconveniencing Romney. If you want to muscle the press around, don't break out your junior G-man kit. Do what Hillary Clinton's doing: Don't talk to the scrimy creeps in the first place.
GIVEN WHAT HAS GONE ON TRADITIONALLY WITH our elected officials, it's a good thing there are other institutions in society upon which we can count to maintain the public morals. The police, say, or our schools, wherein the youth of our region will be taught the ethical guidelines to ensure that they will never grow up to steal signals, use fake badges, or bribe brothel custodians. Two pillars of rectitude in an age of brigandage, right? Well, maybe not so much.
In July, Boston Police Commissioner Edward Davis announced he was tossing out an entire examination for prospective detectives because it appeared some of the candidates had traded on inside knowledge. The test was to be taken from four books on a list provided by the testing company. However, several diligent souls worked the case and discovered only three of the books were used, which obviously would cut the required studying by a quarter. It can be argued that anyone who could find out something like this on his own has the makings of a great detective, but it's easy to see the commissioner's point.
Of course, mandatory testing is most prevalent in our schools, and has long been fertile ground for innovations in modern cheating. This was a banner year there, too. People who showed up to take the examination in order to qualify to teach in the state's public schools found themselves required to be thumbprinted. It seems that, over the last four years, the state has busted at least 15 people who sent ringers in to take the exam for them. They should take the tests themselves and hire the ringers later. To monitor the lunchroom for them, say. No jury would ever convict them.
Once they pass the exam, they will move into a system in which, according to a study released in November, the number of students caught cheating on the MCAS exams more than doubled over the previous year. Some of this involved educators who helped students along, but a lot was the result of individual initiative. One student memorized an entire plot summary of Jane Eyre for the writing section of the English MCAS, while another just copied down the text of a poster hanging on the wall of the room in which he was taking the test. In New Hampshire, nine students faced possible felony charges for breaking into a school to swipe copies of exams. A magazine article charged that students at Algonquin Regional High School in Northborough gamed their school's system with iPods and cellphones, which they used to trade answers. No more craning your neck over the shoulder of the student in front of you. A few clicks of the button, and the Pythagorean theorem whisks through cyberspace.
Naturally, these crude methods pale in comparison with the techniques available at our finer prep schools. Last month, four students at Milton Academy got caught hacking into the school's computer system, whereupon they changed grades, monkeyed with attendance records, and, in one case, copped the answers to an upcoming exam. This outbreak of cheating at Milton, of course, comes on the heels of a sex scandal involving the school's hockey team. In August, a book about the sexual culture at the school became a local succes de scandale. It's good to look back over the year and to realize we're raising kids who already have in them the attitudes necessary for what will surely be a thriving casino economy, even if those attitudes have temporarily derailed their formal academic careers. Things are really looking up.
Charles P. Pierce is a Globe Magazine staff writer. E-mail him at pierce@globe.com.
