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Created: July 22, 2002
Latest Update: July 22, 2002
jeannecurran@habermas.org
takata@uwp.edu

"They're Not All Crooks"

Teaching Essay Copyright: Jeanne Curran and Susan R. Takata and Individaul Authors, July 2002.
"Fair use" encouraged.

This essay is based on a Wall Street Journal piece by Ben Stein, the actor and lawyer, on Monday, July 22, 2002: They're Not All Crooks. At p. A 14.

Mr. Stein reminds us that the general condemnation of crooked and self-dealing businessmen who brought us the current corporate scandals places us in grave danger of obsessive adversarialism. . In his own experience, Ben Stein says:

"Not one of the brokers I work with is an especial genius---sorry, guys!---but none of them has ever cheated me. And if I find a mistake, they always correct it with lightning speed."

He goes on to recall the heroism of so many borkers and business people trapped in the World Trade Center catastrophe.

"What about Harry Ramos from the May Davis group, who stayed behind to help a man named Victor Ward when Ramos could have gotten out, and died in the North Tower's collapse? Is he someone to be ashamed of? . . . What about Tom Burnett, the Pepperdine Business School grad who was one of the leaders of the "let's roll" insurrection on United flight 93? Was he a bad guy?"

Ben Stein's message is clear:

"In any event, let's write it down on our hands and not forget it: Brokers, analysts, and CEOs are just people, and some of them are damned fine people, even now, even in the age of lead that followed so fast after the Golden Age. Let's be a little more precise wiith our mudslinging."

Essays on theory for conceptual linking:

• (See The Adversarial Compulsion A teaching essay based on Gordon Fellman's Rambo and the Dalai Lama.

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