“Company officials admitted that the perception of racism was more important than whether or not my tweet was actually racist.”

—Amber Athey, explaining how she was fired as a morning co-host of D.C.’s WMAL’s public affairs show, “O’Connor & Company.”

I will assume (Arguendo!) that Athey’s account is accurate; so far, the executives responsible haven’t denied it.

This is one of those periodic episodes that should be a trivial local story but that reverberates with significance. WMAL, owned by Cumulus Media, is a popular D.C. AM radio station (especially at “drive time”) regarded as “conservative” because it employs conservative talk radio pundits here and there until they cross some invisible line and get fired or driven away. Amber Athey, the Washington editor for The Spectator magazine, was fired from the “O’Connor & Company” morning radio for a stupid tweet on a stupid topic regarding a stupid woman.

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I was searching desperately for a YouTube clip of the memorable climax of “Michael Clayton,” in which the soul-dead law firm fixer played by George Clooney reveals to the Machiavellian general counsel of an industrial polluter that he is wearing a wire and that she has just been recorded admitting to murder. I couldn’t find the clip , but that memorable line (The New York Times would have written, “You Are So F-worded,” which just doesn’t work as well, somehow) jumped into my head the second I saw the photos of dead Ukrainian civilians in Bucha, murdered in undeniable war crimes and thrown into ditches.

Putin and Russia are so fucked. Neither can come back from this. The only thing delaying the inevitable is the news blackout in Russia, but that can’t last too much longer. Putin is actually claiming that the bloody corpses are “actors”—Russians may have a self-destructive addiction to dictators, but they aren’t stupid. The latest horrible news from Putin’s unprovoked invasion—as if there hadn’t been too much all ready—clinches it. Russia is now globally reviled, and it won’t come back from that until Putin is dead or standing trial.

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I went downstairs to eat lunch and realized that I couldn’t leave Pete Seeger’s “Where Have All The Flowers Gone?” out of the discussion started in the last post.

It may not be one of the 40 saddest songs of all time, but I know this: Marlene Dietrich’s performance of the anti-war ballad was the most emotional performance of any song I have ever witnessed in my life. She used “Where Have All The Flowers Gone?” as the encore in her concerts, and the combination of her unique voice, amazing face, and what we know of her activities during the war, made the whole package overwhelming.

Here it is, essentially the same performance I saw live, almost 20 years later.

I know, I know: these slideshows are clickbait. That’s no excuse for presenting what is supposed to be a definitive list when you haven’t done any research, talked to anyone with more perspective than you, or bothered to even think hard about what you are doing.

A web hack named James Cannon purported to have a slideshow of the 40 “saddest” songs “in history,” —someone may have even paid him for it—but as is usually the case with such stunts, “history” meant the obscenely narrow band of this guy’s experience, Because he didn’t know what he was talking about, he had to resort to filler, including songs that aren’t sad by any standard, like “It’s a Wonderful World,” while somehow missing classic songs that are world famous as heart-breakers. like, for heaven’s sake, “Danny Boy,” written by English songwriter Frederic Weatherly in 1913, and set to the traditional Irish melody of “Londonderry Air.” The song is still played at funerals, which would be a big hint, if Cannon performed a modicum of due diligence before making readers culturally and musically ignorant.

My objective isn’t to argue about all 40 songs; he’s as welcome to his list as I am to mine. But if your category is “history,” you can’t limit the field to recent pop music, which is, with a few (and seemingly arbitrary) exceptions what he does. You can’t make the list he purports to have made and completely stiff country western music, which is famously sad. This Hank Williams classic isn’t on the list of 40, for example:

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I bet everyone has forgotten about this series, which began on Ethics Alarms almost a year ago. I haven’t.

The first metaphor for the Trump Presidency was that of the passengers in an airplane navigating a storm voting to let a dog (in some versions, a chimp) try flying the craft. The metaphor was apt, and it’s still apt, even though moral luck worked its magic, and not only did the plane not crash, the dog turned out to a better pilot than anyone could have predicted. It was still irresponsible for this country to permit a man with Trump’s well-documented character flaws and proven proclivities both and executive and a human to be given such control over the destiny of the nation.

The second metaphor was from “Animal House”:

As I wrote:

A segment of the population decided that the system was rigged against them, that Democrats and Republicans were both involved in a massive, decades long con in which their primary goal was not to do what was in the public interest, but what was most likely to keep them in power and eventually line their pockets, and that their voices were not just being ignored, but that they were being insulted while being ignored. The so-called “deplorables” were mad as hell, and they weren’t going to take it any more. Voting for Trump was an “Up yours!” to the elites, the sanctimonious media, the corrupt Clintons, the hollow Obamas, and obviously corrupt Democrats like Pelosi and Harry Reid, machine Republicans like Mitch McConnell, and pompous think-tank conservative like Bill Kristol…It’s idiotic, but the message isn’t. It’s “Animal House”! and “Animal House” is as American as Doolittle’s Raid….In Germany, The Big Cheese says jump and the Germans say “How high?” In the US, the response is “Fuck you!” Obama never understood that…. I love that about America. And much as I hate the idea of an idiot being President, I do love the message and who it was sent to. America still has spunk.

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