ETHICS
The cynicism of the '80s was, in fact, far less insidious than the
brand around today.
THIS IS THE SECOND piece entitled "Ethics" to appear in this space.
Those of you not suffering from attention deficit may have noted that the
first, though well intentioned, did not actually deal much with ethics at
all. That is because the title was not decided upon until the piece was
already in. In fact, since I'd once before written a column by the same
name, it was decided upon only after some resistance on my part.
So the following is intended as an introduction and a statement of
intent: a sort of overview of ethics in the '90s, which (since it is one
and the same) is also an explanation of that hesitation. It deals, in
brief--and not to get us all depressed by the second paragraph--with the
startling degree these days to which lip service is allowed to pass for
the real thing.
It begins back in the early '80s--specifically with a guy about
whom I was called upon to write a long magazine piece. This was, of
course, the start of the Reagan years, a period destined to rank right up
there with Sodom and the Roaring '20s for moral weight and seriousness of
purpose. Yet it can be persuasively argued that the cynicism then in
vogue was, in fact, far less insidious than the brand around
today.
Indeed, between the lines, what the piece was about was possibility
and perseverance, and I seriously doubt any reputable monthly would run
it these days. "Too sentimental," they'd say. "No, that's not it, but too
something."
Some of you might even remember the story. The guy's name was
Charlie Fiske, and one very slow news day he was the lead story on two of
the three network news broadcasts. There he stood, pleading to a
convention of the nation's pediatricians for help in finding a liver
donor for his dying baby; holding up the child's favorite toy, voice
cracking, eyes glistening.
You might also recall the miraculous, bittersweet ending-- how, a
few days later, a train plowed into a car in rural Utah and a tiny boy
died; but, astonishingly, in her grief, his mother remembered a report
she'd seen on TV. And that one-year-old Jamie Fiske was saved.
Only, see, what almost no one knew is that Charlie Fiske is, in
fact, as coolly controlled an individual as you'll ever meet. His
appearance before the pediatricians was essentially a
performance--calibrated, with an uncanny sense of both network news and
the American psyche, to do precisely what it did. Indeed, it was the
culmination of a long campaign, meticulously plotted and executed, that
overcame a long series of what had seemed insurmountable obstacles:
doctors who wrote the child off for dead, insurance companies that
wouldn't fund the procedure, an organ-gathering network that moved with
agonizing slowness. In the end, with his daughter close to death in a
Minneapolis hospital, Fiske--there's no other way to put it--blackmailed
the pediatricians into allowing him to appear at their convention. If
they hadn't, he was prepared to sick on them his many new friends in the
press.
Charlie Fiske ended up being the only subject about whom I ever got
into a fight with a fact checker. Poring over my manuscript with all the
joy of Scrooge at his counting table, she found him, if memory serves,
"an incredible user," a man of extraordinary "selfishness" and
"cynicism."
The funny thing is that Fiske himself would likely not have
disputed such a characterization: He had used people. His only caveat
would be that it was cynicism employed to a worthwhile end, and--for this
was important to him--that his fight might ultimately also help others in
the same fix.
I myself put it to her a helluva lot more bluntly. Selfish? Hell, I
was annoyed he wasn't more so; even as I wrote the piece, it seemed
apparent that when the producers came running, as they surely would, he
would not be interested. I don't want to make too much of this--a guy
like Fiske is out of the ordinary in any age. Still, that he was able to
elicit such a response--that powerful news organizations ran with a story
that these days wouldn't get a yawn--speaks to how considerably less
jaded we were a mere decade ago than we find ourselves today; and how
comparatively ready we still were to see ourselves as a community.
As time passed--for yes, this was also very much in the spirit of
those years--I pretty much forgot all about Charlie Fiske; or, more
accurately, as these things go, relegated him to the mental file of
serviceable dinner-party anecdote, along with such other former subjects
as Reggie Jackson, Gerard Depardieu, and the onetime Mossad agent who
captured Eichmann.
As it happens, I was being invited to a lot of parties then, which
in part had to do with the success of my column. I like to tell people it
was that profound and irresolvable contradiction--the absurdity of
seeking celebrity by writing about ethics--that ultimately made me give
it up. Actually, it was because the thing was so damn hard to write. In
fact, my instinctive reaction when the notion of reviving it was broached
this time around was to dwell morosely on those gruesome sessions
wrestling with intractable copy. And as I was doing my dwelling it hit
me: My God, if anything, it'll be even harder now!
Tags:
80s,
attention deficit,
cynicism,
denial,
ethics,
fiske,
hesitation,
lead story,
lip service,
news broadcasts,
pediatricians,
seriousness,
slow news day,
sodom
