11-06-2024 4:50am

Craig Bennett Considers Deeds and the Doer

Lesley Misko Editor

by Craig Bennett*

Back on October 4, 2024, the Expression ran an essay by local contributor Phil Repko regarding the death of Pete Rose and its possible effect on the decision not to include him in the Baseball Hall of Fame. Rose, it seems, was hardly the exemplary professional athlete, hero material for young boys all over America to look up to and attempt to emulate. His most damning offense was apparently to have engaged in betting on baseball games, especially ones in which he was involved. Although I devote very little if any of my time and attention to games, I found Phil’s essay rather interesting for the larger questions it raises and for his proposed answer to those questions. How much can we separate the deeds from the doer? Should we attempt to do this at all?

For example, I really enjoy Woody Allen movies. Nearly all of them with which I am familiar are either cleverly original, thought-provoking along other-than-usual lines, stealthily deliver commendable lessons in simple humanity, or some combination of these But Allen’s star has been tarnished by his relationship with his much younger step-daughter—which she declared only recently was non-consensual. But does that mean that his movies are no longer amusing, original, or anything else that made them enjoyable for me and a great many others? Should I never watch another Woody Allen movie again?

I’d always admired Bill Cosby for being able to keep an adult audience laughing for an entire performance without relying the foul language and obscene stories so many comedians rely upon. I am not particularly offended by these things, although I tend to avoid them myself out of consideration for those who are; but I believe that for a comedian, they’re just a way of getting cheap laughs. Cos, however, kept his audience entertained with funny stories from his childhood! And when my daughter began watching Cosby’s Fat Albert cartoons, I was further impressed. Each one was written to impart a simple, basic moral teaching of some kind.

But now we know that Cos apparently drugged women in order to have sex with them. That’s bad. That’s wrong. That abolishes most of the respect that I ever had for him. But does that mean that his old comedy routines about his childhood are no longer funny or delightfully relatable for anyone who has ever been a child? If my daughter were still young enough to enjoy Fat Albert cartoons, should I forbid her from watching them?

Henry Ford became perhaps the most admired man in America, at least for a while. He perfected the assembly line, although he “Taylorized” it after the famous (or infamous) time study that soon weighed heavily on the shoulders of the nation’s production workers. This obliged them to keep working at the same speed right through to quitting time that they did at the start of the work day, and resulted in the famous (or infamous) 1933 Ford Speed-up. Mike Widman, in Studs Terkel’s Hard Times, remembers that when he started working at the Ford plant in January of that year, it was producing 232 cars a day. Four months later, when he was fired after mentioning to the foreman that he was taking courses at Northwestern University in the evenings, it was turning out 535 in the same amount of time—without a penny’s worth of increase in pay for the men who had to work that much harder than before in order to keep up with the gradually accelerating assembly line.

Later, Ford bought the Dearborn Independent and turned it into a propaganda organ for his virulent anti-Semitism, promoting heavily the discredited Protocols of the Elders of Zion. There were movements to persuade him to run for president. After all, he was one of the richest men in America; and for the average American, there seems to be no higher, stronger, or more praiseworthy qualification to lead the nation than to have made a pile of money selling their fellow citizens something they were willing to buy. But does this mean that I should get rid of my Ford automobile and never purchase another?

Adolf Hitler ordered the construction of the Autobahn, which later became the inspiration for President Eisenhower to have the Interstate Highway System built in this country. He also commissioned Dr. Porsche to design the Volkswagen, which was to become the most popular production car ever, world-wide. But Hitler was a bad man—a very bad man. So should I refrain, therefore, from ever driving on an Interstate highway again, or try somehow to un-own the VWs I drove exclusively for two decades?

These are moral conundrums that I see as very similar to the Pete Rose/Hall of Fame question. How and to what extent can we separate the doer from his or her deeds? How and to what extent should we? In his early work The Hose of the Dead, based upon his years as a convict in Siberia, Fyodor Dostoyevsky tells of hardened criminals—men who have murdered, raped, abused children, and done despicable things—occasionally showing great kindness and other acts of deep humanity toward a fellow prisoner. This strongly suggests, if nothing else, that human beings are indecipherably complex organisms; and perhaps, as Dostoyevsky implies, those of us who have the greatest capacity for evil also have the greatest capacity for good—and vice versa.

This is certainly not to excuse the wrongs committed by Rose, Allen, Cosby, or any of the others named above. But, as Phil Repko suggests, there may now be a solution for the problem of Pete Rose and the Hall of Fame that I believe is transferable to those larger questions suggested above: Since the man himself is no longer among us, and therefore could reap no benefit regardless of what kind of honors or recognition might be heaped upon him, what remains is only the record of his accomplishments. Since these seem to be undeniably Hall-of-Fame-worthy strictly on their own merits, perhaps they should be included there along with the records of other baseball luminaries. And I can watch another Woody Allen movie or consider purchasing another Volkswagen automobile with a sufficiently clear conscience.

* Craig H. Bennett, author of Nights on the Mountain and More Things in Heaven and Earth, available at amazon.com, barnesandnoble.com, and most bookstores