The Boy Scouts of America: Always Prepared to Be a Dickwad

I know that I’m breaking no new ground with the revelation that I find most grown men who have maintained a connection with the Boy Scouts to be a little weird. Tree climbing and archery have their place, as do khaki shorts and red bandana neckties, just not in the lives of grown men who are gainfully employed. And let me add that my concern with the Boy Scouts has nothing to do with the pitched battle they have been waging with the gay activist community, as I don’t really have a dog in that fight: as far as I’m concerned, gay men can do what they want within the privacy of their own homes, and the Boy Scout troop leaders can rail against them in the privacy of theirs.

But I’ve come to the conclusion that a founding principle of the Boy Scouts of America is to inculcate a craven capitulation to all forms of authority in millions of American boys, effectively warping our entire culture and creating a national pathology.

My old boss Rick was by all accounts a “nice guy” in a nasty industry. He took the notion of doing the right thing very seriously. Whatever his faults as a leader and manager, he always tried to see that the folks in his department got a fair shake, and I appreciated that. He would organize annual departmental gatherings, sometimes to his mother’s old hobby farm, taking the entire office on a hayride, or to his summer home on Lake Delavan, where we’d go tubing off his speedboat on the lake. These were very wholesome affairs, very family oriented. More than at most jobs, my boss tried to convey the message that we were all in this together, that we could count on one another in a pinch, in short, that we were all friends. And it seemed to be a message that most folks in the department took to heart. Of my eight co-workers, five of them had been with the department for at least 15 years.

Unfortunately, Rick is also a lifelong volunteer for the Boy Scouts, which almost by definition makes him an abject toady who treats any and all instructions from his superiors as if they were brought down from Mount Sinai on clay tablets, and he expected his subordinates to do the same.

A couple of weeks ago, half the department was ordered into the conference room. They were told that cutbacks had to be made and that their services would no longer be needed. They were ordered to clean out their desks and vacate the building that morning. A one-month severance check would be in the mail. As it was the end of the month, health coverage was being cancelled that day at midnight.

Now, there was no skin off my back, as I had left my position about a month earlier to “pursue other interests”, as the memo says when you walk the plank into the vocational abyss. But I was ticked off, nonetheless, once I heard about the way the axe had fallen. I learned a long time ago that most folks at your job are NOT your friends. Corporations often spend a substantial chunk of cash to facilitate the illusion of camaraderie, but of course most of us know that it’s bullshit. But how hard would it have been for Rick to insist that the company use $50,000 or so to make sure that these folks were treated right, that years of service would be honored, that insurance would be extended? Or, failing that, Rick could have taken $20,000 of his bonus money to see that the those who worked with him all these years were left with at least some kind of a cushion. At the very least, he should have found a better way to break the news than simply ushering them into the showers and turning on the gas.

It took my buddy Jason, one of those to lose his job, to point out the relevant variable: “Hey dude, the guy’s a fucking Boy Scout. That’s all you need to know.”

Having suffered through three years in the Cub Scouts in the early Seventies, I thought back on what I remembered of those days. The highest rank I achieved was that of Webelos, which is an acronym for We Be Loyal Scouts (a scout may be loyal and trustworthy, but I guess being grammatical is not on the list).

There is a Scout Law we had to memorize at the meetings between mouthfuls of cupcake. There is also a Scout Oath, which is basically redundant, as the gist of it is that you are supposed to follow the Scout Law. And the Scout Law is not really a law at all, but a list of a dozen adjectives, stating that a Scout is Trustworthy, Loyal, Helpful, Friendly, Courteous, Kind, Obedient, Cheerful, Thrifty, Brave, Clean, and Reverent. A lot of these adjectives are pretty redundant themselves: “loyal”, “obedient”, and “reverent” all driving home the point you should unquestioningly obey all forms of authority, while “friendly”, “courteous”, “kind”, and “cheerful” underscore that, even in those moments when you aren’t under the direct purview of your superiors, you should take care not to be a general pain in the ass.

Looking back at it, this is exactly how Rick ran our department. In his mind, I’m sure he thought that he was taking a principled stand, jettisoning his supposed “friends” and co-workers without any kind of a safety net, since his boss assured him that the cutbacks needed to be made and that they were following company policy.

In fact, I bet Rick thinks he deserves a merit badge.