"Cheater! Cheater! My babysitter said I cheated at Monopoly. I didn’t. I just was too shy to ask the rules. Lying—that’s another story. I became a past master at an early age."
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Outing the Cheater, Finding the True
Who’s Zoomin’ Who?
I don’t know if I’ve cheated at cards. I never progressed much beyond ‘go fish’ and blackjack with the deck of fifty-two. I can’t remember if I ever kept excessive change dealt out by a storekeeper. I found $400 dollars in tightly rolled bills in a baking soda can, stashed in the demolished darkroom of a dentist’s office. I shared the windfall with my fellow workers and didn’t tell the property owner. I guess that was cheating. Or maybe it was worker’s comp.
I shoplifted a pocket full of Craftsman tools in Oakland for the revolution, but I got busted. I cheated on a girlfriend in college, but we were a continent apart and the relationship had been rendered ambiguous by final exams and farewells. Oh, and my partner and her accomplice cheated me and the accomplice’s mate in Monopoly. So much for true confessions, so I have been cheated on. But speaking of victimization…
I recently read a letter to the online Washington journal called Talking Points Memo, published by political analyst Josh Marshall. The letter was written by JI, a Finnish journalist who clearly feels nervous enough to ask that his name be withheld. Finland shares a long border with Russia and has been battling with its neighbor for a few thousand years now, and the Fins have a vested interest in what America has been doing vis a vis what JI the journalist calls “Russia’s long game.”
We Americans like to call modern Russia a kleptocracy, whose leaders we call oligarchs who play courtier to Putin’s queen bee. These kleptocrats and Putin himself operate outside the rule of law to embezzle money via kickbacks, bribes, and mafia-style favor exchanges to appropriate the wealth of the people. I’d call that cheating, wouldn’t you?
But JI doesn’t want to talk about cheating in Russia. He wants to talk about cheating in America. “I think you folks in the USA have not even started to realize the role of your internal politics in the long game of Russia!”
He talked about Trump cheating his way into office, partially with the help of Russia. He watched the GOP (whom he calls “Girlfriends of Putin”) cheating the American people by excusing Trump’s proven extortion of a new Ukrainian president. That’s right. Ukraine. And we all know Trump was impeached a second time for incitement to insurrection. And acquitted. Trump brags about that.
By ignoring the facts of Congress’s impeccably presented case, the Girls Of Putin rubber-stamped an acquittal of President Trump, stamped in red ink for the world to see. The world watched while America did nothing, helpless against a second monumental cheat of America and the world. Imagine Putin watching all this with his beady eyes.
Now, JI thinks it’s great that President Joe Biden is offering weapons and support to Ukraine and helping to organize a concerted NATO warning to Putin. But in the meantime, JI notes, we’re continuing to allow the cheaters to go free, the cheat perpetrated by the same GOP that acquitted Trump twice for impeachable crimes and still tries its damnest to steal the 2020 election from Biden.
Sure, we’ve busted a corral full of the duped bozos who attacked the capitol, but no big shot has yet been held accountable for supporting Trump’s big lie, for trumped up [sic] voter fraud, for rewriting voting laws, and threatening election officials.
A year has passed — Finland’s JI is writing in CAPS now — and our major institutions, including the Department of Justice, hasn’t even begun to question the main suspects named by Congress’s January 6 Committee. And the Girls of Putin are working overtime to make sure they can cheat even more on the next election than they did on the last one. “And you are just going to let it happen,” JI says. “Tralala.” (He’s very square in his colloquialisms, this JI, but what the hell, he lives in a land of reindeers and long winter nights.)
So, he says, if you really want to do something for Ukraine, “please do your own homework. Enforce your existing laws against ultrarich, influential white dudes. Stop being the Western flank of Putin’s army. Don’t let him use you. Please understand that, by your collective inaction in your internal affairs, you let bad things happen in the whole world.”
Now I think JI is a bit simplistic and not as knowledgeable as he might be about the battles we are fighting against the cheaters. In my opinion, Trump has been reduced to ranting in Mar a Lago. People who follow him are fools and cowards and in the minority. The long arm of the law moves slowly and carefully.
But JI lives on Putin’s flank, just like Poland. And we haven’t seen many of our own oligarchs and kleptomaniarchs pay for what they’ve done. We may or may not bring Giuliani, Meadows, Hawley, and even Ginni Thomas to the fore via the January 6 investigation. Clarence Thomas may even have to step down, but from the outside, it looks as if we’re defending democracy elsewhere and letting it languish here. I’d say we’ve been cheated… wouldn’t you?
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Four Morally Ambiguous Cheating Vignettes
Example 1: High School, 1968. Trigonometry test. I walked by the desk of a girl I liked – not romantically, but a nice friend. I looked at her test sheet, and quietly said words to the effect: “problem 12 – divide by two.” She did, thereby earning 5 more points. My rationale: She obviously understood the problem and the math; why should she get penalized by a brain fart? And maybe she’ll be nice to me.
Example 2: One of the sillier features of “advanced” high school mathematics textbooks and introductory college texts on the same subject is to put answers to the problem sets in the back of the book, but only give answers to the even or odd problems. For the same trigonometry class described above, we had the teacher’s edition on the bookshelf at home, no doubt given to my father by virtue of his employment on the math faculty at Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo. In that edition, the answers to all of the problems were in the back.
Did I use the teacher’s edition, complete with all the answers for my homework assignments? You bet. I found it an efficient way to learn. You do the problem, and if the answers I got didn’t agree with the book, I reworked the problem, sometimes beating my brains out, until I got it right and understood how to get there.
So far, so good. Since I always did my homework, and showed my work, no problem, correct? Well . . . at the end of the semester, our homework scores were added to the score on the final exam in arriving at the grade for the course. I routinely figured out that I needed a 6 or so on the final (out of 50) to score an A for the semester. So I had an advantage. My rationale: I learned better, and wouldn’t need the homework scores anyway to raise my grade on the final. My clone brother, also in the class, had a different moral view, and he never looked at the teacher’s edition. (This added to my sometime nickname of the evil twin). Years later, he asked me why I took the approach I did. I gave him the answer again – I figured this was a better way to learn – and much to my surprise, he said, “Ok. Makes sense to me.” So people’s views do change.
Example 3: College: 1971: Elementary Intensive Russian. Double credit. Hard. For absolute beginners. Except the best students in this class had at least a year of high school Russian, but didn’t think (I guess) that they were up to the intermediate level course. Or maybe they wanted an easy A for a six-hour course. So they breezed through and others of my ilk struggled – I struggled, and after a single semester of intermediate Russian the next year, the professor said, “Mr. Ed, we like you. You work hard. But you should not take any more Russian.” Years later, after having read “The Spy Who Came in From the Cold” I arrived at a way of feeling good about this: The CIA recruited from these classes, and my non-language Econ classes and other papers might have interested them in me. But “ne govoru po-rooskii.” Thank God, perhaps. I would have made a lousy CIA agent, had I survived at all.
Example 4, from family lore: One’s career as an officer after graduating from West Point, the Naval Academy, and I presume, the Air Force Academy, is enormously enhanced by high class standing, and severely limited by graduating in the lower half of the class. High class standing is notably reflected in choice of assignments and promotions. (There are exceptions; Dwight Eisenhower is probably the most stunning example of a Cadet at the bottom of his class rising to the highest ranks.) At any rate, in WW II, the Army drafted my father, like most all college men, and shipped him to boot camp. Those who scored high on their written diagnostic tests were asked (or sent?) to officer training. Some of those spent a year or two in college, now on the Army’s nickel, and then were admitted to the military academy. Such happened to my father, who, as a result, never saw combat in WW II. But the point of this example is that he had already spent two years at the Colorado School of Mines, got drafted, had another year at Amherst College, and then went to West Point.
West Point’s math and engineering program was rigorous, and many still flunk out today because they cannot pass it. Electrical Engineering claims many victims. (The Naval Academy, I’m told, has a less rigorous course.) My dad had already had these courses at the School of Mines and Amherst, so he breezed through the science and math, and got his first choice (as a high ranking graduating cadet) when he was finally commissioned as an officer. He saw no combat and served his time without incident, although he had a few close calls flying B-36’s. Did he cheat and receive a higher class rank as the result of taking hard courses twice? I don’t think so. But others in his West Point class who didn’t have the class standing to escape dangerous combat suffered severe casualties in Korea. Nevertheless, if this week’s prompt is broadened to encompass taking advantage of unfair advantages, and because West Point was basically his second (or third) bite at the academic apple, maybe he did have an unfair advantage, akin to cheating, which may have saved his life. It’s impossible to run down the what-if’s in this story, and and we never discussed the ethics of it. The only close reference was an off-the cuff comment he made, saying, “It’s easy, ICTB,” meaning, it’s easy, “if course taken before.”
Say It Ain’t So, Joe!
Say It Ain’t So, Joe!
Apparently cheating is nothing new, even the Biblical King David cheated on a wife or two.
And cheating in professional sports has been around for a long time too. Even before Pete Rose and the pine tar, and the Boston Patriots and eDeflategate, there was Shoeless Joe Jackson and the World Series fix.
Joe Jackson was a talented left-fielder for the Chicago White Sox when his team won the American League Pennant and would play the Cincinnati Reds in the 1919 World Series. That year a best-in-9 games format was in place in hopes of increasing baseball’s popularity and bringing in more revenue. The Series went to 8 games and the Reds won it 5 – 3.
Later however allegations were made that Jackson and 7 other Sox players had thrown the series for payments of $5,000 each (about $75,000 in today’s currency).
A grand jury investigated and during testimony Jackson confessed to his part in the fix. However in a Chicago trial that followed he was acquitted of wrongdoing after the other players testified that in fact Jackson had not been at meetings planning the fix. Controversy over his guilt or innocence continued, but his baseball career was over – the Commissioner banned him from the sport. The moral of Shoeless Joe’s story – cheating doesn’t pay.
And now you may ask, did I ever cheat? I confess to shoplifting on a dare back in junior high school, but other than that youthful indiscretion I think I’ll take the Fifth.
– Dana Susan Lehrman