Ethics, Truth, and Alice’s Restaurant

 

In ProjectManagement.com’s February discussion of ethics, I believe an important distinction should be made: while many discussions of ethics center on individuals’ choices and behaviors, ethical distinctions and boundaries can (and often are) transgressed by entire organizations. How do entire organizations become unethical? The same way, I believe, most individuals do: they embrace a narrative that is inconsistent with the facts of the environment in which they exist, and exert effort at insulating that narrative from events or people who would otherwise overturn it. It follows, then, that when an organization turns away from an ethical approach to conducting their business, the first casualty is the truth.

Examples abound, but the one I wish to focus on has to do with Arlo Guthrie’s popular song/narrative Alice’s Restaurant. Released in 1967, the song parts of the recording frame a spoken story about how the narrator and a friend visited Alice, her husband Ray, and Facha, the dog, who lived in the bell tower portion of a deconsecrated church. Since they lived in the bell tower, they left their garbage in the lower part of the church, and had been doing so for some time when the visit occurred. As a favor, the narrator and his friend describe how they collected the garbage and took it to the city dump, only to find the dump was closed for the Thanksgiving holiday. After driving around with the trash for a little while, they noticed another pile of trash that had been dumped off the side of the road. Figuring that one large pile of trash is better than two smaller piles, they dumped Alice and Ray’s trash on the previous pile, and returned to the former church. The story’s narrator is awakened by a phone call the next morning from the local police, who eventually charge and bring him and his friend to trial. After some shenanigans concerning the visual nature of the evidence collected and the fact that the judge was blind, the two are convicted and sentenced to picking up the trash they left, and paying a small fine. The incident comes back up later when the story’s narrator is being evaluated by his draft board, which declines to induct him for service in the Vietnam War due to his having a criminal record. Nice, happy ending, right? The song/story Alice’s Restaurant would become something of a 1960s-era anti-war anthem, supporting the narrative of intelligent young people giving “The Man” his comeuppance (for a thorough definition of who “The Man” is, I suggest a viewing of the Jack Black movie School of Rock).

But is that narrative consistent with the facts as related by the narrator? Consider the evidence:

• Alice and Ray use the main area of a former church as a personal garbage dump.
• Unless Alice and Ray live above the Arctic Circle (they didn’t – the backstory as related in Wikipedia indicates that Alice and Ray’s former church residence is in Massachusetts[i]), it would not take long for even a relatively small accumulation of garbage to:
  • Develop a strong, unpleasant odor,
  • Attract roaches, mice, and rats, among other vermin,
  • Incubate a wide variety of pathogens, and
  • Reduce the value of both Alice and Ray’s residence and the homes around them.
• I am aware of no style of church architecture where the area of the building reserved for the congregation isn’t significantly larger than the square footage of the bell tower. In other words, the dump area was likely much larger than the “living” quarters in this facility.
• The narrative does not assert nor imply that Alice and Ray were involuntarily compelled to live under these arrangements. They were apparently unaware of the dangers of such an un-hygienic living circumstance, or, knowing, would not exert the effort to correct it on a consistent basis.
• Alice owned a restaurant. Would you go to a restaurant where you knew the owner dumped her garbage, over a long period of time, in a room inside her own home?
• The story’s narrator never uses this language, but he essentially pollutes a hillside. A key aspect of the narrative embraced by the 1960s youth movement was that they revered the environment, and aggressively opposed all polluters, but it looks like that wasn’t the case here.

In short, the proffered narrative of free-spirited young people surviving harassment from their local government, and actually turning the whole incident into an anti-war positive, can only be considered viable by the most blinkered of listeners. Given the facts, my interpretation is that lazy, un-hygienic polluters failed to receive their comeuppance from the ultimately righteous local constabelry.

Anyway, that’s how I interpret the proffered facts, and hold them to be at odds with the conclusions within the story. Given that the truth is usually the first casualty when an organization begins to behave unethically, ask yourselves this question: are there any narratives  -- no matter how charming, or oft-repeated – within your organization that are inconsistent with available facts?

[i] Alice's Restaurant. (2016, February 18). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 02:35, February 21, 2016, from https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Alice%27s_Restaurant&oldid=705556686