Evading Blame Via a Twist of Grammar

So subtly that some people may not have noticed, a pattern of speech that grammarians might call the impersonal passive voice has gotten quite a workout in the business world this summer.

Speakers use the passive voice to move themselves into the background -- or out of the picture entirely. For instance, someone might say, “Crimes were committed,” instead of “I committed a crime.” For a business or political leader on the hot seat, the passive is a pleasant way to suggest that a disaster that occurred on his or her watch arose from unavoidable circumstances, rather than a personal failing such as incompetence or venality.

That brings us to Martha Stewart, who set a recent high water mark in the usage of the impersonal passive voice after she was sentenced to a prison term last month for lying to federal authorities about the circumstances of a 2001 stock sale.

During and after her sentencing hearing, Stewart admitted to numerous offenses, but for the most part these were related to standards of personal deportment. She copped to seeming arrogant to others, to not being “the nicest person on Earth,” to being a perfectionist. (She also admitted to being a fan of Dostoevsky, and with five months in prison looming on the horizon for her, the affinity is almost understandable.)

But when it came to the offense that earned her the jail time, she spoke as though it scarcely existed, labeling the case “an almost fatal circus event of unprecedented proportions spreading like oil over a vast landscape, even around the world.” The closest she came to acknowledging culpability in her pre-sentencing letter to federal Judge Miriam Cedarbaum was in writing that she was sorry “the perception of my conduct” had hurt her family, friends and company. (The italics are mine.)

Central to Stewart’s lament was the notion that her conviction was the product not of her actions but the imperfections of American justice, including prosecutorial ambition, a baying press and the public’s taste for schadenfreude. “In America,” she later told Larry King, “we like to build ‘em up, we like to break ‘em down, we like to see them suffer.”

She didn’t allude to the folly of providing ammunition to one’s enemies by lying to the feds.

Stewart’s sentencing followed by about a month the indictment of former Enron Corp. Chairman and CEO Ken Lay. Charged with 11 felony counts, including conspiracy and fraud, Lay said at a post-plea press conference: “I continue to grieve, as does my family, over the loss of the company, my failure to be able to save it and the tremendous hardship it caused so many employees, retirees and others.”

Thus he artfully represented “the loss of the company” not as the culmination of his own mismanagement and willful blindness to what was going on around him (or worse), but as a random calamity. It was as though Enron’s headquarters in Houston had been struck by a meteor.

At one point, Lay did accept responsibility for the collapse of Enron, but only after a fashion: He acknowledged he was too trusting of the snakes he had unwittingly allowed to wriggle into the management suite. He almost asked his audience to commiserate with him over the betrayal.

The performance reminded me of the old joke that defined a “liberal” as a conservative who had been arrested and a “conservative” as a liberal who had been mugged.

Today’s CEOs swank around the globe telling world leaders their business and pry 10-figure annual pay packages from their corporate boards by insisting that they’re the only individuals who command flawless understanding of how the entire company operates. Once indicted, however, they portray themselves as dupes of the canny thieves who managed to pull off multimillion-dollar scams just outside their office doors.

Lay epitomizes that breed. I recall that in the teeth of the California energy crisis, he appeared before the editorial board of this newspaper to deliver a lecture on the shortcomings of the state’s electricity deregulation policy. (He was on his way to Sacramento to upbraid Gov. Gray Davis.) He didn’t mention that his traders had been secretly gaming the system for Enron’s financial benefit, and their own.

No one that day could have guessed that just a few short years later, Kenneth L. Lay, advisor to presidents and scold of governors, would be playing the role of babe in the woods.

It’s easy to imagine what would have happened to any employee of Ken Lay or Martha Stewart who, during their respective eras of paramountcy, tried to explain away a blunder by ascribing it to the disloyalty of an underling, the failings of the system or the alignment of the stars. Enron’s ruthless culture never would have tolerated such a thing. Stewart’s unauthorized biographers, meanwhile, don’t portray her as someone who accepted excuses blithely, and one can read between the lines of her letter to Judge Cedarbaum (“I sometimes forgot that others need a bit more praise than I remembered to give.... “) to picture exactly what kind of boss she must have been.

Lay’s and Stewart’s cases aren’t precisely parallel, of course -- for one thing, Lay hasn’t yet been tried, much less convicted. But the efforts of both to rationalize away their faults only underscore what advocates for stricter corporate oversight have been saying for years: The rules have to be continually reinforced because no matter how many companies go bankrupt, investors are ruined or executives are sent to jail, people like this never believe they did anything wrong.

Golden State appears every Monday and Thursday. You can reach Michael Hiltzik at golden.state@latimes.com and read his previous columns at latimes.com/hiltzik.