Yes, It’s Another “Ick Or Ethics?” Quiz: Sarah Palin’s Surprise

/ Jack Marshall

Believe it or not, that’s Sarah next to the bear….

To be absolutely transparent, my mind’s made up on this one: I think it’s unethical. However, I admit to be a hard-liner on this issue, which is “The duty of leaders not to debase their positions or former positions for personal gain or ego gratification.”

Let me introduce this  horrific cultural episode by saying that I regard the TV show involved, “The Masked Singer,” among the Top Ten Stupidest Shows in the history of network television, and I’ve seen a LOT of network television, far more than is good for me. Its existence is an insult to the public, its taste and intelligence, and the United States of America. Maybe the species too. Adam and Eve.

Now here is the video clip. Consider yourself warned: it cannot be unseen or unheard:

Yes, Sarah Palin dressed up in a rainbow teddy bear suit and rapped “Baby Got Back” on national television.

The lyrics from Sir Mix-a-Lot’s Noel Cowardesque 1992 hit:

Oh, my, God Becky, look at her butt
It is so big, she looks like
One of those rap guys’ girlfriends.
But, ya know, who understands those rap guys?
They only talk to her, because,
She looks like a total prostitute, ‘kay?
I mean, her butt, is just so big
I can’t believe it’s just so round, it’s like out there
I mean gross, look
She’s just so, black
I like big butts and I can not lie
You other brothers can’t deny
That when a girl walks in with an itty bitty waist
And a round thing in your face
You get sprung, want to pull up tough
‘Cause you notice that butt was stuffed
Deep in the jeans she’s wearing
I’m hooked and I can’t stop staring
Oh baby, I want to get wit’cha
And take your picture
My homeboys tried to warn me
But with that butt you got makes (me so horny)…

Nice. Classy!

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day:

Was Palin’s appearance on “The Masked Singer” icky, funny, or unethical?

Oh, heck, let’s poll it before my rant:

Ronald Reagan was once asked if he would return to acting after he left the Presidency. He said that he would love to, but that “it would be kind of undignified, don’t you think?” Yes, it would have been  undignified, and it would still be undignified, despite all of the efforts of Michelle Obama (dancing with Jimmy Fallon), Rudy Giuliani (in drag), Ah-nold (though I never thought he was really Governor of California anyway) and others, including Future Ex-President Trump, whom I don’t even want to speculate and what he might do.

You want to know why Americans have less and less respect and trust in our leaders’ judgement, seriousness, character and motives? One of the reasons is that the narcissists who we elevate to leadership positions too often appear to be more interested in cashing in and feeding their grotesquely swollen egos than being statesmen, role models, and people America can be proud of.

The news media was terribly biased and unfair to Sarah Palin when she ran for Vice-President in 2008, but they weren’t, I now realize, wrong. She’s a low-life and an attention whore, as well as an ethics corrupter.

49 thoughts on “Yes, It’s Another “Ick Or Ethics?” Quiz: Sarah Palin’s Surprise”

  1. I was subjected to Much of this fiasco last night.

    The lovely Mrs. Gory subjects me to Bull, mainly to assist me in my ability to stay adept on the Rules of Evidence. I tolerate watching All Rise, even though the ethical violations depicted give me flashbacks to the closing sequences of Clockwork Orange.

    And, yes, I have watched more of The Masked Singer than I care to contemplate. I am trying to work my way through King Lear and I am unsure of which story is more sad or pathetic. Though, between Shakespeare and Sir Mix a Lot, I will take the Bard in matters of high poetry.

    Mrs. Gory told me that Sarah Palin lost last night. I was surprised because I saw the performance and could not have imagined that was Palin. But, I had no idea why she would do that.

    However, because she has been out of politics for so long (right?), this is more icky than unethical.

    -Jut

    Reply

  2. And of course—commenters on various conservative websites are defending Palin. They really are.

    In my book, this is no better than Democrats saying that Joe Biden is as sharp as ever, he just has this stammer…

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    • The only defense I can think of is that her reputation was destroyed during the election and there was nothing left to lose. However, this is a weak rationalization. Another awful (but true) rationalization is that her performance isn’t any less ethical than that of any other person appearing on this show.

      I knew there was a very good reason I have avoided television, only watching selected shows on streaming, for many years. My complete ignorance of the existence of this show has now been shattered, I have lost 5 IQ points, and now feel that my soul is dirtied for all eternity for merely knowing about this. More than ever, I think that IDIOCRACY was a warning sent by God.

      (OK, maybe that was a LITTLE harsh)

      Reply

  3. All of the above… none of the above. I cannot think there was any good reason to do a show like that if you ever wanted to be taken seriously or respected as a professional again. Shows like that are to reboot a performer’s career or get that last nudge to become famous. Doing a show like that, singing in silly huge costume cosplay or tripping on your feet cannot make people respect you, give you money, vote for you… you have cheapened any value you once could claim once you step on stage as the bearded woman or dog-faced boy in the old carnival sideshows.

    No one time, flash in the pan cash payment or meth high of attention is worth that level of self-sabotage. It cheapens any of your actual accomplishments. It’s a bad example to people around you that you do not even respect yourself. I never was the fan of Ms. Palin, but this is not funny or a lark, it’s like seeing a poorly preserved streetwalker in the lowgrade red-light district, its very sad and raises no fun and little gloating that a once candidate for the second-highest office in the land destroys their own reputation and legacy for what? A hundred thousand and the mocking laughter of people who do not care for anything she once advocated as a conservative.

    It’s not unethical, now thoroughly retired people can make themselves look like idiots all they want to. (but loved ones and advisors should prevent reality tv and further office seeking if they care for them) It’s not funny, not even clever. That song was chosen to appeal to people who know nothing and probably don’t vote. I don’t think cosplay and performing is icky, I’ve seen an inspired enaction of a Pon Farr ceremony to the tune of ‘Do love’ with mid century dance at a SF con, among others.

    But this is hugely stupid and validates any previous criticism that she was a lightweight chosen as a token not as a real candidate. And she is a horrible ground-breaker, now losing any ground she once represented as that a woman can be a stateman. She says by this stunt that fifteen more minutes of fame is more important to her than smoothing the way for the next female candidate who might win, based on ability and experience.

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  4. She has ceased being a credible politician the minute she resigned from office to become a reality TV star.

    “Sarah Palin’s Alaska,” anyone?

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  5. What a terrible show. Do they pick from an approved list? If I were Tina Feys or Christina Applegates publicist, two accomplished actresses, I would issue a statement that said: do not guess my client again, under no circumstance would they appear on this show.

    Anyway, more Ick because I think she has implicitly conceded that her political career, such that it was, is over.

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  6. In case anyone’s curious, here are the other shows on my Top Ten Stupidest Shows list. The criteria is that I actually watched all of these at least once. You’ll notice that I couldn’t get the list down to ten.

    I found that “The Masked Singer” seemed more tolerable as I reflected on some of these; nonetheless, it would still rank near the top, that is, the bottom. Nothing can or ever will top The Brady Bunch Hour, however. With that one, I watched every second of every misbegotten episode, knowing immediately that we would never see the like again.

    Here’s the list:

    Hart to Hart
    My Mother the Car
    Gilligan’s Island
    Baywatch/Charlie’s Angels (TIE)
    Time Tunnel
    The Swan
    The Monkeys
    The Brady Bunch Hour
    The Hathaways
    Cop Rock
    Three’s Company

    Reply

  8. “The news media was terribly biased and unfair to Sarah Palin when she ran for Vice-President in 2008, but they weren’t, I now realize, wrong. She’s a low-life and an attention whore, as well as an ethics corrupter.”

    I would offer that she became a low-life and attention whore after being corrupted by the insatiable appetites of the American demographic that enjoys such behaviors. National politics can do that to you. Once the spotlight that was once on you turns to illuminate another it is amazing the depths you will go to bask in the warm embrace of public adulation. Palin is not alone in this regard.

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  10. Said Julius Evola:

    “There is a necessary correspondence between the most advanced stages of a historical cycle and the most primitive. America is the final stage of modern Europe. Guénon called the United States “the far West”, in the novel sense that the United States represents the reductio ad absurdum of the negative and the most senile aspects of Western civilization. What in Europe exist in diluted form are magnified and concentrated in the United States whereby they are revealed as the symptoms of disintegration and cultural and human regression.”

    The Dissident Right, from a stance of definite horror, looks upon the on-going debasement as an inevitable symptom of aggressive *liberalism* and *progressivism*. The Dissident Right therefore, and as a result, turns away from the spectacle of the banal in nauseous alarm, and has no choice but to analayze 1) the causal chain in the decay of intellect that has brought this about, 2) the complicity of an entire system in the creation of these mind-numbing spectacles of idiocy, 3) and then on to identify *cui bono?* from the numbing & dumbing down of the American mind. The further point is to recognize that America has made itself a sort of disease which spreads — that is spread with great energy as an economic plan for the world — and as a result of its spread DESTROYS VALUE. That is to say, these grotesque expressions of regressive infantilism literally infect other peoples, and just as the American people have been reduced by infantilism to the state in which we observe them, and in which we are grotesquely forced to interact with them (and thus ourselves suffer), the worship of the inane spreads out like a terrifying miasma. And this is what Pierre Krebs refers to as ‘the Americanopolis’.

    Having lost your country, having allowed the very soul of it to become corrupted, having allowed the most perverse and self-centered (on lucre) interests to have made a direct inroad to the very center of the Republic where they determine, as if writing a perverted sit-com script, that what you will *see* and what *food for the soul* you will receive, you can see how the absolute regression away from *transcendental value* affects this nation. This is what you have become.

    Now, with all that put out there on the table are you still going to tell me that you are a ‘special people’ and that you have a right, at any level, to instruct other people how they should live? How they should organize their civic life? Do you have any right at all to make these determinations? No, you do not. And the meaning here is to interiorize this realization. This is the meaning of a dumbed-down America and the *quacking duck* would do well to learn the lesson.

    Too hard what I say? No, not hard enough. So again, when the Dissident Right mediates on these things it is forced to see what you call ‘conservative values’ as the tooting of a clown’s horn riding his absurd unicycle through the important affairs of the day. And when it meditates on *cure* or *remediation* — how could this be otherwise? — it proposes radical revisions that begin in taking things seriously at the level of the soul.

    What we see here in this ridiculous display is not anything more but an acute representation of a general banality that infects American culture. It is a symptom of descent. It is not a *one-time event*. It describes the general atmosphere of American intellect.

    “The American mentality can only be interpreted as an example of regression, which shows itself in the mental atrophy towards all higher interests and incomprehension of higher sensibility. The American mind has limited horizons, one conscribed to everything which is immediate and simplistic, with the inevitable consequence that everything is made banal, basic and leveled down until it is deprived of all spiritual life.”

    That ‘regression’ is best described as a falling away from intellect and intellectus into the emotionalized sensations of a possessed child. It is recognizably female. That is, it is everything that a father, a man, and a patriarch should not be. So ‘infection’ — psychic infection — has to be thought about. What has happened to your women? And what have yo allowed to happen to you insofar as you, too, are infected by these subterranean forces that you allow to infect you? That is what happens to man when he imitates his women. But this *imitation* as I call it is a source of pride for you. Sexual confusion is one of the roots of this infantilism. And this, with hysteria, with excesses of sentimentalism, mixed together with strange doctrines of egalitarianism and leveling-down: this is the social contagion that sweeps over the land.

    “Life itself in American terms is entirely mechanistic. The sense of “I” in America belongs entirely to the physical level of existence. The typical American neither has spiritual dilemmas nor complications: he is a “natural” joiner and conformist.”

    Right, and there you have it. What is the function of your Glorious Wars when looked at from this angle? What part of the social body and the general social-economic entity (the nation in its various stratifications) has put these wars in motion? These are not correspondences to the intellectual side of society. They are rather manifestations of brutality. Meaning, that in the absence of a higher dimension generally (the transcendent sense) all that is left to man is a full descent into the dynamics of power, and strictly on a material plane. You have no ‘transcendent function’. You have no ‘transcendental object’. What results from all of this is mechanical force divorced from any higher purpose. And that is the point where you shift into evil action.

    And with this *structure* as it were, or this *current*, the American lemming-mind conforms to the general current. Where will it go? Where will it be directed?

    Well, any thoughts? 🙂

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    • Ditto!

      Seriously, though, the infantilization of the American psyche is ongoing, pernicious and discouraging. These things may be generational, one hopes, and the cohort after the Millennials may be an improvement. Though, the condition in which they find things will be important.

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  11. Interesting discussion. I finished reading your post and watched the local panic hour masquerading as the local news, leading into Jimmy Kimmel Live, which was hosted by none other than Rhodes Scholar, Harvard and Oxford grad Pete Buttegieg. He ran around looking for a job, mocking his failed bid for the presidency. I was curious: Is self-deprecation and self-mockery unethical, too? Should a current mayor (small town though it is) with future aspirations host a comedy show the likes of Kimmel (which could only increase that stupid show’s value, if that is even possible) or the Colbert Report? Buttegieg was amusing and the comedy clearly was not inappropriate. I didn’t see it as unethical per se but I thought it was a curious thing for him to do. Does it impugn or impair his seriousness as a future leader? Then, I thought maybe it was a generational thing as I imagine brain-dead walruses who laugh at Kimmel and his show relate on a different level than I (I really like Rush, which is clearly not for the empty of head – as we all know!).

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    • Blurring the lines between celebrity/ show business/ and performing and government leadership undermines the institutions of government and trust in leadership, is harmful, serves no significant positive function, and is thus unethical.

      I’ll have to write up Mayor Pete as an ethics dunce for that.

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        • Great question. You had to be there, I think. On reflection, I’d say yes, for more than one reason. It was politically brilliant at a time when all conventions and traditions were under attack, but deeply cynical and dishonest. It was part of a great re-branding exercise, the so-called “New Nixon,” and given how close the 1968 election was, it might have won the damn thing for Tricky Dick. He was not, as we quickly learned, a new Nixon. I’d say it was funny and unethical, but didn’t seem icky at the time. John Wayne appearing is a blue bunny suit and hopping off stage was more disturbing….

          By the way, it was “Sock it to me?”

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      • I think you’re right on this point. But, I wonder if we are entering a new phase in leade . . . Forget it. Leadership is an important ethical qualification. That is why I am so annoyed at Sanders. He is watching the DNC pull the rug out from under him and he hasn’t blown his stack. He just rails about “corporate media” and “billionaires and the top 1%” controlling the debate. The DNC has declared that he will not be the Democrat nominee, come Hell or high water, and he is letting it happen. He did it 2016 when agreed with the DNC’s super delegate arrangement, where Clinton owned all of them. He did this last year when he agreed with Warren on the no-aggression pact, which she destroyed right in front of him on national television and he took it. He has not demonstrated leadership at all. He has clearly demonstrated that he is a coward. Does he really think Russia, China, Argentina, Botswana, and the Maldives are going to take him seriously? They will run right over him. What a fool.

        Reply

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