Saints, Sinners and Codes of Silence

By now the world, or that small part of the world that follows American football, knows that the New Orleans Saints have been, for the past three years, taking part in some decidedly un-Saintly behavior.  No, this isn’t going to be a post about football per se but it is inspired by the events surrounding what is now known as “bounty-gate.” 

Football, a sport that thrives on violence, has been forced in the last few years to walk a shaky balance beam; one between the magnitude and types of collisions and hits that it can allow and the recent focus on the effects, both immediate and long term of those hits.  That focus has come from former players with debilitating injuries, from the medical community and also, as if they don’t have other things to worry about, from Congress; yeah that Congress the legendary house of grand-standers, losers, knaves and busybodies.  And so with all of this going on, members of the Saints’ coaching staff and defensive team decided it would be a fine time to offer bounties to players who could knock an opposing player out of a game.  It was a practice that violated an assortment of rules both written and moral and when Commissioner Roger Goodell got wind of it the Saints were told to knock it off; an edict which the team of course ignored.  The league office found out that the Saints from players on up must have thought that the commish was just kidding and continued with the bounties.  Well the Saints just found out that you do not fuck with Roger Goodell and you certainly don’t lie to him and make him and his most prized possession, the NFL, look like hypocritical chumps.  As a result, head coach Sean Payton was suspended for the year, former defensive coordinator Gregg Williams may have coached his last NFL game and various players are probably scanning the help wanted ads as they wait to see what happens when Goodell cracks the league whip on them. 

Well, someone must have told the league office of the goings on in Saintdom and here is where a moron named Warren Sapp comes in.  Warren Sapp is a former player and current idiot who now does football commentary on TV.  When Goodell fired off his lightning bolts Sapp tweeted that former Saint, Jeremy Shockey was the “snitch” in the vein that anyone who would reveal the bounty system could only be a sleazy, slimy, backstabbing dirt bag.  Here’s what you need to know about Warren Sapp; he’s a bug-eyed goon and longtime sufferer of diarrhea of the mouth with a Twitter name of QBKILLA.   In a similar tone, Mike Golic, one of ESPN’s Mike and Mike referred to the player’s traditional “code of silence” which apparently protects everything from players’ sexual escapades right up through bounties.

Codes of silence aren’t unique to football locker rooms.  They exist on the streets, in offices, in industry and in government.  A disgusting code of silence even existed in the Roman Catholic Church when priests who got their sick jollies out of telling their altar boys to bend over were shuttled from diocese to diocese and shielded by the hierarchy in order to protect the reputation of the church.  That worked out well for the church didn’t it?   Reporting illegal, immoral or otherwise harmful behavior to law enforcement, higher ups or, even worse, the media is frowned upon and can result in anything from being ostracized to be being demoted, to being harassed, to being fired, to ending up in a ditch sleeping the long sleep.  This is where a particularly repugnant T-Shirt comes in.  It bears the logo “Snitches End Up With Stitches.”

I used to work with a young man who would occasionally wear the Snitches in Stiches T-shirt and I found it offensive at the time (and still do). When Mike Golic discussed the “code of silence” he did so in reverential tones as if protecting questionable behavior is the moral thing to do.  Really?  Why is that?  Why is it honorable to keep silent about acts that are harmful or immoral or both?  Oh I know the answers.  You’ve got to have your friend’s back or you can’t do something to harm the brand of the organization.  Even if it means selling your own soul.   

I doubt that someone with Sapp’s malfunctioning moral compass would ever stop to think that whoever did blow the whistle on the Saints might have saved some player from having a knee blown out or worse.  To me it’s a pretty fair trade off if a rogue coach is forced to sit out a season to save a player from a potentially career ending injury.  Does a friend who commits crimes really deserve to be protected?  If that friend is robbing or injuring or even killing shouldn’t you first be turning that person in and then questioning your criteria for choosing friends? 

This, code of silence, “I’ve got your back,” mentality is entrenched in our society.  If you turn someone in you, YOU, Y-O-U are the bad person for “singing like a bird,” “ratting someone out,” or “dropping a dime.”  You are, in the language of my generation, a “stool pigeon” or a “rat fink.”  In an online dictionary I found a definition of rat as; “A despicable person, especially one who betrays or informs upon associates.”  Well what does that make the perpetrator?  What does it make the victim?  I know the answer to that question.  In the language of the day; “sucks for you.”  Even if you’re now broke, injured or dead. 

There is another term for “snitch” that shows up when it concerns reporting industrial or governmental shenanigans.  It’s called whistle blowing.  During my lifetime there have been a number of whistleblowers whose actions have exposed corruption, waste and illegal activities going on in places that we thought we could trust.

                In 1970, New York Police officer Frank Serpico exposed corruption within the department.  And you thought it was just a movie.

                In 1971, Daniel Ellsberg released the Pentagon Papers telling the American people that most of the justification for the Vietnam War was a charade; instead of seeking peace the U.S. Government was actually broadening the war and while we were supposedly promoting democracy in Vietnam we were taking part in corruption and the rigging of elections.

                Lois Jenson exposed rampant harassment of female workers in Minnesota’s Eveleth Mines leading to a class action lawsuit that forced the mining company to establish a sexual harassment policy.  It was the first ever sexual harassment lawsuit and it served notice to the business community that harassment is a real issue that is not to be taken lightly.

                And of course who could forget “Deep Throat”, the informant who fed reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein information that eventually led to the resignation of Richard Nixon, a sitting president who thought he was immune to the laws of the people he had been elected to serve.  At this time it’s appropriate to credit Nixon whose merry band of burglars got caught trying to break into the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee at a business complex in Washington D.C. called Watergate.  Watergate went on to become the general term to describe the chain of tawdry events leading to Nixon’s resignation.  Since then any scandal worth its salt is described with –gate tagged on to it; hence “bounty-gate.”

The people that I just described should all fall into the category of “rat fink, snitch;” shouldn’t they?  They ratted out their colleagues.  And when they and others like them did that they caused the improvement of society and in doing so they oftentimes were the victims of unrelenting retaliation.  Karen Silkwood, for instance, was in the process of exposing safety violations at the Kerr-McGee plutonium fuels production plant in Oklahoma when she died suddenly in a mysterious fatal one car crash. 

So lets put all of this in a nutshell. If you report an associate for purposely committing an immoral act that injures someone else, you are an asshole; even if the person who you are protecting is the original asshole. If on the other hand the selfsame associate becomes a victim of the immoral actions of another asshole who isn't an associate and you happened to see who the perpetrator was and turn him in then you are something altogether different.  You are now a champion of justice, a hero. Taking the twisting of morality further, consider that the moral bedrock of a code of silence is the protection of an immoral act. I have a new word for that; hypocrisy-gate.