In Defense of Dirt : Code of Ethics? We Don’t Need No Stinking Code of Ethics

I don’t remember who said it, and one of the perks of being a columnist is that you don’t have to retain petty journalistic details, but an L.A. City Council member made this comment just before that body thoroughly deveined the most recent attempt at a code of ethics for city officials:

“Just because Mayor Bradley made a mistake in judgment, that doesn’t make all of us crooks.”

Now, obviously, it doesn’t make Mayor Bradley a crook either, unless his mistake in judgment involved violating a criminal statute or two. But there’s a larger point here. The councilman--and I really wish I could remember who it was, but they all kind of blend together--was saying, I think, that just because we elect a person to hold power over us; agree to be forced to fork over the money that goes for, among other things, his salary; and empower him to render decisions that can make other people very rich, there’s no particular reason why strictures against accepting bribes should apply to that person any more than to you and me.

In other words, in the eyes of the law, the odds should be assumed to be equal that Occidental Petroleum would pay you, or somebody at City Hall, to undergo a sudden attitude change about oil drilling in the Palisades. And, really, that’s only basic fairness.

The real problem here is that, as another council member pointed out, L.A. is the cleanest city in the nation. He wasn’t referring to the sidewalks or the bookstores; he meant his and his colleagues’ particular nest. An ethics code would only make matters worse.

Because what makes other cities’ politics so vibrant, so interesting, so capable of competing for air time with grisly serial killings, is dirt. Think about it. How many of us would spend a substantial part of our waking lives paying attention to show business if the real scoop were that it’s the cleanest industry on the planet? This, in fact, is the reason celebrities telling us about their recoveries from addiction to disgusting habits are such thorough bores. They seem to miss the crucial point: It was their disgusting habits that made us love them, or at least remember who they were.

People in New York or Chicago can tell one city councilman or alderman from another. They know exactly who’s on the take from whom, which guy or gal is in the pocket of which developer, union or mobster. Only in Lake Woebegon is the public’s consciousness sufficiently becalmed that one pol can be distinguished from another by which church he chooses to favor with his faith.

So it’s not accidental that the cleanest city in the nation also has the fewest people who know or care about what goes on downtown. Being the cleanest means being the most boring, which in turn means we pay so little attention that even if it weren’t the cleanest, we wouldn’t know. It’s what the computer people call synergy, or telesis, or something.

This was why hopes were raised so high last year when the mayor had his little, you know, mistake in judgment. But even after we learned that possible indications of culpability had been whited out, we weren’t so much roused to indignation as nudged into the kind of tolerant disappointment you feel when an expensive, old bottle of wine, upon opening, turns out to be headed around the vinegar bend. “It’s too bad,” we thought as we opened a bottle of younger stuff and turned our thoughts to “Batman’s” grosses.

So the watering down of the code of ethics is a promising first step. In conjunction with the yawns that greeted the mayor’s, you know, mistake in judgment, it may embolden our city fathers and mothers to more provocatively flagrant misbehavior. But high public awareness of local politics depends on another development: the arrival in town of an ambitious egotist with a catchy moniker who figures that a hot new way to make a name for himself in local TV news is to know, and say, where the bodies are buried. Is there a Geraldo Jr.? How could there not be?

It’s probably fortunate, though, that he hasn’t hit town yet. If, let’s say, the airline pilots who live around here had heard the councilman’s “crooks” remark, they might get carried away and refuse to take random urine tests. “Just because the captain of the Exxon Valdez made a mistake in judgment, that doesn’t make all of us drunks or dope fiends.” And where would that leave the War on Drugs?