I am getting sick of all the unethical political junk that has been rearing its yuletide head of late, so I’m sure you must be even more sick of it. But stuff like this, which doubles as rotten journalism too, just has to be noted. After all, what the mainstream media wants is for it to just slip away. All the better to help it lie to you later.
This is yet another IIPTDXTTNMIAFB example, short for “Imagine if President Trump did X that the news media is accepting from Biden.” These drive me crazy, because they demonstrate just how much what was once our journalism has transformed into partisan propaganda. The public was hammered daily with media accounts, fact-checks and accusations about how often Donald Trump “lied,” even to the extent of a phony “data base” that called even obvious cases where Trump was joking “lies.” All lie-counting stopped when Joe Biden was elected, however. That was remarkable, especially because Biden has uttered some of the most infamous lies in political history, notably when he gave an entire speech that he stole from another politician—and it was supposed to be an autobiographical speech!
Well, Joe Biden was making up events in his life once again, this time in an address to historically black college graduates in South Carolina, where, not for the first time, he said that he “desegregated restaurants and movie theaters” during the Civil Rights movement.
If you read Ethics Alarms often, you know about my objections to euphemisms, which I also call “cover words” since their intent is to deceive readers and listeners about the real nature of what is being discussed. My ethical objections to using “cover words” for words that are considered taboo in various settings follows similar lines, except those cover words don’t fool anyone, and thus are not just efforts to deceive, but silly and insulting efforts. If “f-word means “fuck” and everyone knows it means “fuck,” then it’s ridiculous not to just say “fuck.” The same, of course, goes for “n-word.” When we discuss that word here, we use the word. There are no “banned words” under the First Amendment, and I don’t grant anyone the right to tell me what words I can use to express what I want to express when those are the best words to express them..
Civility is, as a cornerstone of the ethical value of respect, important to societal comity. In dramatic works and literature, however, civility isn’t the issue: ideas, emotion and expression are. The bleeping out of “bad words” or shoving mild substitutes into the actors’ mouths on television constitute artistic vandalism; it’s less common now, but still happens too often. The archaic practice is offensive and insults the audience’s intelligence: the first time I hear a character in a film say “Forget you!,” I turn the channel.
Movies, we all know, stopped worrying about such delicate matters decades ago, and let TV stations worry about their language (and sex scenes, and graphic violence) later. Imagine my surprise, then, to hear Steven Spielberg’s redo of the 1961 “West Side Story” movie begin with the same version of “The Jets Song” that was required by the prevailing stage language requirements of the 1950s. The new, updated, woke-minded, spruced up musical with re-written dialogue still starts with the teen-aged, switchblade-carrying gang of punks singing,
No, it wasn’t Bing who introduced this Christmas song into the playlist…it was Bob Hope!
I’m having holiday guilt pangs over friends that I have lost touch with and know are struggling and unhappy. Some of them I consciously cut off because they became an oppressive burden, never offering companionship or contact without accompanying it with a plea for assistance, usually money. One such friend, and I do consider him a friend, and care about him, accepted several thousand dollars as desperation “loans.” I didn’t expect to ever see the money again, but I couldn’t deal with the never-ending appeals in the midst of new emergencies. How many such friends can one maintain, even if you are wealthy? What do you do with such people? Then there are the friends who are perpetually miserable, have never been willing to be pro-active and try to change what they hate about their lives, and have developed the habit of treating you with a constant “oh, you’re so lucky, and I’m not” guilt trip. What a joy they are at the holidays.
One unsentimental, cold realist friend analogizes trying to help such friends as “feeding squirrels”…they gradually expect more and more from you, become dependent, and finally aggressive.Is the ethical approach to try to brighten their Christmas at the expense of darkening mine and my family’s?
1. Good. The Florida Supreme Court just reaffirmed its decision earlier this year that bans Florida lawyers from receiving continuing legal education credit for programs that require “diversity” among panelists. This was aimed particularly at the American Bar Association’s CLE programs, because the ABA’s diversity policy imposes quotas on CLE panels which the court said “smacks of stereotyping or naked balancing.”
“We reject the notion that quotas like these cause no harm,” the Florida Supreme Court said in the Dec. 16 decision. “Quotas depart from the American ideal of treating people as unique individuals, rather than as members of groups. Quotas are based on and foster stereotypes. And quotas are divisive.”
2. And welcome to my world...the vast majority of the legal ethicists and ethics-specializing lawyers and law professors on the legal ethics listserv i pay to participate in were aghast at the decision. One well-respected authority in the field wrote,
Michael West’s thorough exposition of the wartime military weirdness that begins the film in Part I explains why my WWII vet and retired combat officer father, a big a fan of Bing and Danny as he was, disliked “White Christmas.”
Now where were we? Oh, right, “The First Scene”.…
The movie moves into its funny guilt extortion phase when Phil Davis rescues his smooth-singing captain from being crushed by a falling wall in a World War II bombing raid, and injures his arm in the process. (It’s not a plot feature, but the battlefield set for the entire opening sequence is itself unethically unprofessional by being chintzy even by movie musical standards: it looks like they are filming a skit for a Bob Hope Christmas Special. I thought it was lousy when I saw it as a kid. Michael Curtiz deserved better; the man directed “Casablanca.” Show some respect.) Phil then uses Wallace’s debt of gratitude to coerce him into accepting the aspiring comic as a partner in Wallace’s already successful civilian act. This is obviously unfair and exploitative, but Bing accepts the ploy with good spirits, and the next we see of the new team of Wallace and Davis, it is knocking ’em dead and rising in the ranks of stage stars.
2. Wallace and Davis
The act looks terrible. Bing was never much of a dancer, a game hoofer at best, and you don’t feature the greatest voice in the history of American popular music by having him sing exclusively duets. Nevertheless, all we see of the team’s rise is both of them singing and corny dancing inferior to what Bing did with Bob Hope in the “Road” movies.
Never mind. They have a show on Broadway, and as a favor to a mutual army buddy, they agree to watch the boonies nightclub act of “The Haynes Sisters” (Rosemary Clooney as Betty, and Vera-Ellen, of wasp-waist and “On the Town” fame, as kid sister Judy. Did you know that in the “Sisters” number, Clooney sang both parts? And that Vera-Ellen’s real singing voice is never heard in the entire film?). Bing is immediately smitten with older sister Rosemary, but there is a tiff over the fact that younger sister Judy fooled them into seeing their act: she, not her brother, had sent the letter asking for a “favor.”
This is the first revealed of many lies woven into the script. This one is a double beach of ethics: Judy uses her brother’s name and contacts without his permission or knowledge, and lures Wallace and Davis to the night club under false pretenses.
Bing dismisses Judy’s cheat by noting that everyone “has an angle” in show business (“Everybody Does It”) , so he’s not angry. Rosemary is, though, and reprimands Bing for being cynical. That’s right: Vera/Judy use their brother’s name to trick two Broadway stars into watching their little act, and Rosemary/ Betty is annoyed because Bing/Bob (Bing’s bandleader, look-alike, sound-alike brother was also named Bob) shrugs off the lie as show business as usual. True, Betty is technically correct to flag the “Everybody Does It” rationalization, but shouldn’t she be grateful that Bob isn’t reaming out the Haynes sisters and leaving the club in a huff? OK, nice and uncynical is better than nice and cynical, but Bob is still giving her and Judy a break. As the beneficiary of Judy’s angle, Betty is ethically estopped from complaining that Bing/Bob’s reaction was “I don’t expect any better.” I can, she can’t. He should expect better: accepting unethical conduct allows it to thrive. But Betty criticizing Bob is like Bill Cosby reprimanding a rapist.
As we soon find out, however, Betty often flies off the handle.
3. Sisters
It seems that the Haynes Sisters are about to be arrested because they skipped out of their hotel room without paying, because, they say, the owner wanted to charge them for a burnt hole in their room’s carpet. Phil assumes, without confirming it, that this is an attempted scam by the hotel, though Judy, who relates the circumstances, is already established as a con-artist. I wouldn’t be surprised if she was smoking a joint and set the carpet on fire. In either event, they still owe for the bill. This happens in old movies all the time ( and in the real life adventures of Judy Garland): the heroes stiff landlords what they are owed, and the landlords are the villains. Whole generations were raised to believe that skipping out on the rent was the kind of thing good people did.
How many liberals got started with this concept, I wonder? No wonder socialism isn’t dead.
Phil arranges to let the sisters escape (thus abetting theft) to the train, which will take the girls to a gig at a Vermont inn. Wallace and Davis stall the fuzz by doing the sisters’ final number (and apparently the act’s only number) in drag. This is aiding and abetting a breach of contract and theft. Nice.
The boys barely escape arrest themselves after their spoof and jump on the same train. (The number was largely improvised by Bing and Danny, and the take used in the film by Curtiz was supposed to be ditched. The famously unflappable Crosby was cracked up by Kaye’s clowning, and reportedly was angry that an “unprofessional” moment made it into the film. Not unethical by Curtiz, though, unless he promised Bing he wouldn’t use the take. (Like, for example, John Landis, who lied to Donald Sutherland and used his gag bare-butt take in “Animal House” after promising not to.) The director’s duty is to the film, not the star. It’s also one of the few moments in the film allowing Kaye to be Kaye.
The lovely sisters are going to Vermont, so Danny and Bing, who gave the entire cast the holidays off with full pay (I doubt that Broadway ever shut down shows over the holidays, which is a prime tourist period, before the Wuhan Virus struck.) What is the Radio City Music Hall Christmas show for? But this is a necessary plot contrivance.) .
Surprise #1 when they get to the inn: no snow. Surprise #2: the inn is owned by none other than General Waverly, Bob and Phil’s much-admired commander during the war, now retired and going broke running a ski lodge where nobody can ski. The general the closest thing to consistently ethical character in this movie, and he, against all self-interest, says that he will pay the Haynes Sisters full salary to play to crickets, though he had an out in their contract that could have saved him half their fees.
If Bob, Phil, Judy and Betty had any honor, they wouldn’t accept it. The Haynes sisters are cashing in, clearly, on sexist male bias. Then again, this is how the Betty and Judy—especially Judy– roll. It’s how all gorgeous women roll in Hollywood films (and, I daresay, in Hollywood to the day.) Is it unethical for women to appeal to men’s brain-numbing hormones with faint suggestions of potential lust and love that the women know is a fantasy, because they also know many men fall for it no many how many times experience proves them to be saps?
It will be interesting to see if the 1954 Christmas movie musical “White Christmas” experiences a major drop-off in TV showings this year, as a victim of the anti-whaite racism going viral during The Great Stupid.” It would not surprise me. Not only is the title a problem for the George Floyd Freakout-deranged, but the film is about as white as a movie can be. No inter-racial couples! Last time I watched the movie I wasn’t searching for Extras of Color, and maybe there are a couple dark faces in General Waverley’s troops and a even an African American dancer in there somewhere, but the movie definitely wouldn’t do well by current Oscar check-box standards.
Stipulated: this is an entertaining movie with an effectively sentimental and moving climax. That should be enough, and in 1954 it definitely was enough: the movie was a critical and box office hit. There are good reasons to be grateful for it today, too, provided “White Christmas” isn’t “canceled.”
Most importantly, it has been the most visible yearly reminder of the talents of Bing Crosby, by any measure one of the most important cultural figures and remarkable performing artists in U.S. history. The film also is, a bit perversely, the only easily accessible clue to alert younger generations that Danny Kaye was a unique and impressive performer as well—I say perversely because this is neither a typical Kaye movie nor one that reveals most of the qualities that made him a star. (Watch “The Court Jester” hans “Hans Christian Anderson”.)
Then there is Rosemary Clooney. Without “White Christmas” Bing’s romantic interest in the film would be almost totally forgotten, yet she was one of the greatest of all female popular vocal stars. Clooney joined Dinah Shore, Patti Paige, Doris Day and Peggy Lee in the dominant all-blonde singing quintette during the Fifties. Dinah lasted the longest, reinventing herself repeatedly despite the least impressive voice of the five; Patti Paige had the biggest selling records; Doris became an iconic movie star, and Peggy Lee, who was also a successful songwriter, had the reputation of being the genius in the group, but Rosemary could sing them all under the carpet. Unfortunately, she also suffered from emotional and substance abuse problems, had a breakdown, battled with weight gain, and disappeared from the scenes for more than a decade until she reemerged, older, saner, fatter and with a diminished voice, to star again on the night club circuit. That is the Clooney most people remember now, but that’s unfair to her legacy. In “White Christmas,” she’s in top form.
So why does Ethics Alarms dump on “White Christmas” every year? It comes down to what I wrote in last year’s intro: if you are going to make an ethics movie, someone involved ought to have functioning ethics alarms. I was gratified when I watched the PBS documentary about Bing Crosby and learned that he was critical of “White Christmas” despite its success because he felt the movie should have and could have been much better with a more carefully constructed story, as in “one that made sense.” The heartwarming ending when the old general played by Dean Jagger, gets saluted and serenaded by his reunited army unit doesn’t make up for all the gratuitous lying and betraying, not to mention the mind-blowing leaps of logic and assaults on common sense, required to get there.
The most ethical feature of the movie was an ethical act that allowed it to be made, performed by one of the most unlikely people imaginable, Danny Kaye. I credit Kaye with my interest in performing, musicals, and comedy, but my research into the real man, when I was in the process of collaborating on a musical about his relationship with his wife and muse, songwriter Sylvia Fine, revealed that in stark contrast to his persona and his public image, Danny was a miserable, paranoid, selfish, mean and insecure sociopath when he wasn’t playing “Danny Kaye,” which could be on stage or off it. “White Christmas” had been conceived as a re-make of “Holiday Inn” with the same cast as that black and white musical, Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire. Fred couldn’t do the project, so his part was re-written for Donald O’Connor, who became ill so close to shooting that there was no time to retool the script and have the film ready for its target holiday release. In desperation, the producers asked Kaye if he would play Bing’s side-kick even though it meant 1) playing a support, which he had never done in a movie since becoming a star 2) playing a role that couldn’t highlight his special talents 3) subordinate himself to Bing Crosby, who was indeed the bigger star and box office draw, and most daring of all, expose his own limitations by doing dance numbers created for Donald O’Connor. Kaye was not a trained dancer, just a gifted mimic and athlete who could do almost anything well. Danny demanded $200,000 and 10% of the gross, to rescue the project, but he still was doing so at considerable personal risk…and he didn’t need the money.
Everyone around Danny Kaye was shocked that he agreed to all of this. Not only did he agree, he also amazed everyone by not playing the under-appreciated star on set, by doing O’Connor’s choreography as well as he did, and by knowing how not to steal focus from the star, something he infamously refused to do when he was in “Lady in the Dark” with Gertrude Lawrence. The movie was the top grossing film of 1954, and the most successful movie musical up to that time.
I have been punished by writing this critique: I used to enjoy the film despite its annoyances, and now those are all I see. But it really is an ethics mess, and as bing sensed, perhaps, it didn’t have to be.
“White Christmas” is offered by Netflix year-round.
This was certainly inevitable. Project Veritas is an unethical journalism organization with a one-way bias (that’s to the Right, in case you have been studying loftier matters), meaning that it is not interested in truth or informing the public, but only the truth (maybe) that benefits a particular political agenda. But unethical people and organizations where the ends justify the means is a motto provoke unethical responses in the other direction—it is the ethics version of Newton’s Third Law—and that is where ethics train wrecks come from.
The ends of Project Veritas’s various unethical means have been revealing and valuable in many cases. A corrupt community organizing group, ACORN, was exposed, as it deserved to be. Planned Parenthood’s ghoulish lack of respect for human life was also exposed, with fewer consequences. It wasn’t really necessary for Corporation for Public Broadcasting executives to be gulled into saying for posterity that the taxpayer-funded company is progressive and biased because that should be screamingly obvious to anyone who isn’t biased themselves. But progressives (and those brainwashed by the progressive media) continue to gaslight critics with the Jumbo-esque “Bias? What bias?” defense of the indefensible, so this Project Veritas hit was satisfying, if not ethical.
Now, as we knew it would, those embarrassed or exposed by Project Veritas are striking back. The focus is President Biden’s troubled daughter Ashley’s diary, in which, among other things, she suggests that her father showered with her when she was a child. The diary found its way into the clutches of Project Veritas before the election, though it did not publish any of it. (Its explanation for this choice, that O’Keefe felt doing so would be seen as a “cheap shot,” defies belief coming from the King of Cheap Shots, but never mind.) Apparently, the New York Times’ investigation found, Ashley left her diary behind when she moved out of the home of a friend, and it was found by a woman named Aimee Harris, who moved in after Ashley left. {The Times feels it necessary to detail Harris’s personal and financial problems, which is completely irrelevant to the diary. That’s a real cheap shot. Her conduct is what matters in the report, not her problems.)
Harris, whom the Times makes sure we know “was a fan of Mr. Trump,” meaning she was by definition evil, learned that Ashley had stayed there previously and had left some things behind. Harris apparently found the diary.
Subsequent debates center on whether the diary was lost or abandoned. I don’t care about the legal haggling: Harris was ethically obligated to contact Ms. Biden and ask what she wanted done with it. The options for responses were a) “Sent it back to me”; b) “Destroy it,”and c) “I don’t care what you do with it.” Only c) would have entitled Harris to read Biden’s private entrees, or to give it to anyone but Biden.
With crime rates soaring in many cities and “smash and garb” raids disrupting large retailers, companies like Home Depot, Nordstom’s and Target are calling on communities to increase policing. By “like,” I mean companies that previously hailed Black Lives Matter and other anti-policing organizations,, festooned their stores, ads and websites with endorsements of BLM as it vilified law enforcement and called for “defunding” the police, and gave large grants to it and other “social justice” movements seeking to reduce police protection of communities across the nation.
It was all part of “The Big Pander” sub-division of The Great Stupid, itself fueled by the George Floyd Freakout, because it makes perfect sense to decide that a single brutal police incident proves that all police are racist menaces. The fake history “1619 Project” and offshoots of Critical Race Theory also were bolstered by these corporations’ cynical virtue-signaling, at a time when catering to criminals is seen as a virtue.
Predictably, just when I have the least time, the most ethics issues, and important ones, are flying by. I know I’m going to miss some; I’m missed some already. Yesterday, for example, I neglected to note the anniversary of the 1791 ratification of the Bill of Rights, though plenty of readers reminded me. A more ethical historical document does not exist, and the Bill of Rights continues to bolster American values as well as delineate them. I should do a full post on the status of the document and its contents, which have seldom been so besieged. A “Bill of Rights Day” holiday would make much more sense than “Juneteenth,” other than its unfortunate placement so close to Christmas.
What else did I miss? On the 15th in 1998 we saw what might well be the last legitimate impeachment in U.S. history, since the Democrats so thoroughly abused and weakened the standards for the process in their quest to bring down Donald Trump. Whether Clinton should have been convicted in the Senate is a close call for me; he certainly should have had a real trial, which he did not. On balance, I believe his obstruction of the investigation, and especially his dishonesty before the grand jury, tilts the scale to conviction.
Today, the 16th of December, marks the 248th anniversary of The Boston Tea Party, when 60 allies of Samuel Adams’ radical resistance group dumped dumped 342 chests of tea worth about $18,000 (nearly $600,000 today) into the Boston Harbor to protest British taxes. The targeted economic riot was a catalyst: Parliament retaliated against the colonies by enacting the so-called Intolerable Acts, in 1774, closing Boston to merchant shipping, establishing formal British military rule in Massachusetts, declaring British officials immune to criminal prosecution in the Colonies, and requiring the colonists to quarter British troops (hence the Third Amendment in the Bill of Rights). The colonies responded with the first Continental Congress, and the rest, as they say, is history.
Just so you know what kind of public school teacher I would be, I’d assign students to compare and contrast the January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol to Sam Adams’ little uprising.
1. What are schools for? The always provocative City-Journal reveals that a recent survey by YouGov and American Compass, asked 1,000 American parents with a child between the ages of 12 and 30 about what the priority for the public education system should be, phrased thusly: “Which is more important, helping students maximize their academic potential and gain admission to colleges and universities with the best possible reputations, or “helping them develop the skills and values to build decent lives in the communities where they live?” The latter prevailed by approximately a 2 to 1 margin.
Kevin Clinesmith, a former senior FBI lawyer who was sentenced to 12 months probation last January after pleading guilty to a felony in connection with the falsified information used to acquire the FISA warrant used to surveil marginal Trump campaign figure Carter Paige in relation to the Trump-Russia investigation, was restored as a member in “good standing” by the District of Columbia Bar Association’s discipline committee.
Maybe there is a a good reason for this, but it seems very strange.
The Bar did not seek Clinesmith’s disbarment which lawyers convicted of felonies involving the justice system typically face. He has not even finished serving out his probation as a convicted felon. After the negative publicity about the apparently rigged FISA process (the objective was to “get Trum”), the bar temporarily suspended Clinesmith pending a review and hearing. In September, Clinesmith’s suspension was ended with time served and his status to “active member in good standing.”
Ethics Alarms 