Month: December 2023

If You Are Troubled By The Ferguson Effect, Wait Until The Aurora Effect Kicks In

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

The surge in homicides following the Michael Brown fiasco in Ferguson, Missouri sparked a debate about whether the demonizing of police by the news media, lawyers seeking quick liability pay-outs every time a perp was killed in a confrontation with police, and progressive politicians demonstrations, and the anti-police hostility they engendered triggered the murder spike. City Journal contributing editor Heather Mac Donald, among others, identified a “Ferguson Effect,” in which police were pushed into passive law enforcement for fear of criminal prosecutions primed by political factors and the kind of life- and career-wrecking publicity that savaged Officer Darren Wilson, who was found by a grand jury to be blameless in Brown’s shooting. Since that 2014 ethics train wreck, the Ferguson Effect has metastasized thanks to the George Floyd freakout, the Black Lives Matters riots, and the conviction and imprisonment of the group officers involved. It is indisputable that proactive law enforcement is dangerous now both in the streets and in the aftereffects when events turn ugly.If police are going to be sitting ducks for moral luck prosecutions, it requires a martyr or a fool to take the kinds of risks today’s social and legal climate engenders.

Next up on the metaphorical social justice shooting gallery: paramedics.

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The 2023 Ethics Companion To “Miracle On 34th Street” [Updated and Expanded]

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

2023 Introduction

What makes “Miracle on 34th Street” the most appropriate classic Christmas film for 2023 is its theme: the importance of conquering cynicism and  pessimism, and always keeping one’s mind and heart open to hope. This has been a truly awful year, not one of the worst in our history but to a lot of Americans it seems that way (because they “don’t know much about history,” like Sam Cooke), but bad enough that we should be glad to see it go. I know my year has been especially miserable on multiple fronts. Nonetheless, I remain, at heart, about 12 years old. The same things make me laugh; my level of optimism remains high; I believe in this nation’s miraculous ability to somehow get out of the fixes it gets itself into; I’m still a romantic, and, yes, I think with a little luck and one more starting pitcher, the Boston Red Sox can make it to the World Series next year. I am being constantly confronted with old friends, some much younger than me, who have suddenly decided to be old: they think old, they act old, and they seem to have given up the future as irrelevant. The Santa Claus myth represents faith in the possible, or rather the impossible. Yes, its easier when you are a child, but it is worth the fight to never lose the part of you that still believes in magic and miracles. Kris Kringle really isn’t Santa Clause: he’s nuts, basically. But somehow that tiny wisp of a hope that he might be the real Santa is alive at the end of the movie. It’s really quite wonderful. It’s also important.

The production of “Miracle on 34th Street” itself epitomizes the ethical values of competence and integrity. Watch any of the attempts to remake the film over the years; some aren’t bad, but none equal the original, or even justify a remake that places the story in contemporary times.There have been four remakes starring, as Kris Kringle, Thomas Mitchell, Ed Wynn, Sebastian Cabot, and Richard Attenborough. That’s a distinguished crew to be sure. Mitchell was one of the greatest character actors in Hollywood history. Wynn was nominated for an Academy Award (for “The Diary of Ann Frank”) and Attenborough won one, Best Supporting Actor Award in 1967 for “The Sand Pebbles.” Cabot wasn’t quite in their class, but he was a solid pro, and looked more like Santa Clause than Mitchell,  Wynn, or Attenborough.

None of them, however, were as convincing as Edmund Gwenn. He made many movies—all without a white beard— and had a distinguished career in films and on stage, but even audience members who knew his work had a hard time reminding themselves that he wasn’t Kris Kringle while they watched the movie. I still have a hard time.

 The film is one more example of the special, unappreciated talent of Maureen O’Hara, who never was quite regarded as a top rank a movie star, as lovely and strong an on-screen presence as she was. Her ability to anchor great movies while never dominating them is the epitome of the “collaborative art” they always blather about during the Oscars, but which is seldom truly honored.  O’Hara was the female lead in four genuine classics: “The Hunchback of Notre Dame,” “The Quiet Man,” “How Green Was My Valley,” and “Miracle on 34th Street.” She also starred in the original “The Parent Trap” for Disney.

“Miracle on 34th Street” is an ethics movie in part because its artists committed to telling a magical story and charming audiences by working as an ensemble selflessly and  efficiently. John Payne, as the idealistic lawyer in love with Maureen, is never flashy, just completely convincing. One reason may have been that, as he told an interviewer once, the role of Fred Gaily perfectly matched his own ideals and beliefs.  This is the magic of performing talent: they make audiences suspend disbelief because they seem to believe in the story and characters too. The director,  George Seaton (who also directed “Airport,” which is NOT an ethics movie), also wrote the script that won him an Oscar. He cast his movie brilliantly, and making the correct but bold decision to stick with a matter-of-fact, realistic, unadorned style that keeps the story grounded. There are none of the corny features or inexplicable gaffes in this film that make other holiday-themed classics inherently unbelievable, like the cheesy battlefield sets in “White Christmas” or the heavenly dialogues in “It’s a Wonderful Life.”

“Miracle on 34th Street” is, as I said at the start, about the importance of believing in good things, hopeful things, even impossible things. Today many of my friends, colleagues and associates are depressed and fearful of the future—their future, the future of the nation, even the future of the planet. (The planet will be fine…the rest? As Samuel L. Jackson says in “Jurassic Park, “Hold on to your butts.”) “Miracle on 34th Street” reminds us that wonderful things can happen even when they seem impossible, and that life is better when we believe that every day of our lives. Of course, some days are easier than others.

Never mind. As the Fairy Godmother in the musical version of “Cinderella” sings, “Impossible things are happening every day.” Continue reading →

For Your Christmas Weekend Reading Pleasure…

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Well, few are visiting EA today. I guess it is a holiday of sorts, so I won’t take it personally. As a thank-you to those who do drop by, here is a post I encountered on the new substack, “Ramparts.” “War and Christmas:Christmas and the enduring spirit of Freedom” focuses on two important and inspiring Christmases in our nation’s history, both occurring while the nation was at war.

The second has special significance for me. My father, Jack Anderson Marshall, Sr., fought on thatChristmas day in 1944, having just been released from the Army hospital after having half his foot blown off earlier in the year, before D-Day. After my parents moved from Arlington, Mass. to Arlington, Virginia, I would accompany my father every year around this time on his pilgrimage to the Battle of the Bulge veterans memorial at Arlington National Cemetery, just a short walk from the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. The year he died on my birthday in 2009, Dad had skipped the reunion of BOTB veterans for the first time. The dwindling numbers made him too sad, he said.

Stop Making Me Defend Eric Adams!

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

PIX11’s Dan Mannarino interviewed New York City Mayor Eric Adams this week and at the end asked a Barbara Walters-ish question. “Mr. Mayor, we’ve come to the end of what was a very eventful 2023. So, when you look at the totality of the year, if you had to describe it in one word, what would that word be? And tell me why.”

Adams answered, “’New York.’ This is a place where every day you wake up, you could experience everything from a plane crashing into our Trade Center, to a person who’s celebrating a new business being open. This is a very, very complicated city. And that’s why it’s the greatest city on the globe.”

Republicans, conservatives, the social media mobs and even some on the Left “pounced.” “Eric Adams gives the worst answer any politician has ever given to a softball question,” MSNBC contributor (and you know what THAT means) Tim Miller tweeted. echoing the reactions of many Adams critics. (Adams is also being mocked this week for joking that he will occasionally “look at myself, and I give myself the finger.”)

Refreshing as it is to see a Democrat getting the Donald Trump treatment for an off-hand remark that critics deliberately interpret as negatively impossible, Adams doesn’t deserve the brickbats for the 9/11 gaffe. It’s obvious what he meant, isn’t it? Searching for contrasting extremes that illustrate what an exciting and unpredictable place his city is, his mind jumped to the most shocking of all Big Apple events, putting him in instant peril. It reminded me of a scene in “Bang the Drum Slowly,” when the baseball team’s manager (played by one of my favorite character actors, Vincent Gardenia) is trying to give an inspirational speech to his players, who have just learned that their back-up catcher (Robert DeNiro) is dying. He’s determined not to mention that metaphorical elephant in the locker room, but the first words out of the manager’s mouth are “When I die..” Gardenia’s eyes roll in disgust with himself as soon as he hears what he said—the perfect expression of someone thinking, “I can’t believe that I did that!” But it’s like trying not to think of a hippopotamus.

Anyone who speaks often in public and spontaneously is going to have these moments. I speak unscripted for a living, and I think I’m good at it, but now and then the words I hear coming out of my mouth are horrifying. Talk show hosts, reporters, politicians, stand-up comics, teachers—this is an occupational hazard. Most of the social media-dwellers attacking Adams have never given a pubic speech or an unscripted public statement in their lives.

What Adams was trying to say was that his single word description of 2023 from his perspective was “New York” (that’s two words, by the way) because you never know what’s going to happen, and have to be ready for anything. Sure, he would have been safer breaking into a verse of the theme from “New York, New York,” but he didn’t, and once he committed to the “good vs bad” approach, he was stuck. (If he had chosen the Jets losing their starting quarterback on the first play of the season instead of 9/11, he would have been attacked by Jets fans.)

Mayor Adams has had a rocky year to be sure, but as failing Democratic big city mayors go, he’s been lapped in incompetence by the mayors of D.C., Chicago and Boston, among others. He deserves a break.

Ethics Quiz: The Christmas Flash Mob

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

A group of about 60 Christmas carolers the the local Cure Church staged a good cheer invasion at a Kansas City, Kansas, Walmart last Sunday. Shoppers and employees stopped to listen and some sang along. Naturally the scene was caught on video, and, predictably, the video “went viral” on social media.

Also predictably, Scrooges were out in force on social media. Reddit patrons were especially hostile. “Not the Bee” was depressed at the reaction, sniffing, “This is Christmas we’re talking about! We used to understand that things were a little more magical and glorious this time of year.”

Well, yes, I am certainly sympathetic, but it was still a disruption in a private business without prior consent, and if anything flies in the face of “diversity” cant, it’s a public demonstration of a particular religion’s beliefs to a captive audience. After all, the group wasn’t singing “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.” One person’s Christmas magic is another’s inappropriate proselytizing.

Your Ethics Alarms Christmastime Ethics Quiz is…

Was the Christmas caroling flash mob ethical?

Musings on Jesse Otero, the Human Broken Window

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Jesse Leonardo Otero, 44, has been arrested 90 times for shoplifting in the Bay area of California, most recently this month. He is a drug addict, homeless, and supports himself by shoplifting and selling stolen property, often stealing from the same stores over and over again. He doesn’t discriminate, though, targeting small businesses, big-box stores, or whatever seems convenient at the time. He isn’t just lifting candy bars: when Jesse steals, it’s usually hundreds of dollars of merchandise at a time. Local police and store managers know him by name. The manager of Five Little Monkeys toy store in Albany, California, for example, says she has reported Otero to police more than 20 times. Jesse ranged far and wide in his shopping trips, and is an expert on the BART transit system, which he uses to hit stores at every stop.

Nobody has kept count of the number of days Jesse has spend in jail for his exploits, but it isn’t very many. The usual routine is that police give Otero a citation and release him. Sometimes, as with this month’s arrest, he is arrested and jailed for a short time, then let out of jail free, just like in Monopoly. All of this ridiculous pattern is due to California voters, in their wisdom, passing a law in 2014 that weakened penalties for everything Jesse does, like illicit drug use, vagrancy, petty theft, and shoplifting. Prosecutors now can’t file a felony shoplifting charge unless the items taken top $950 in value.

Multiply Jesse by several hundred (or thousands?) and you can understand why so many stores in California are experiencing ruinous shoplifting. Social justice warriors, advocates of “restorative justice” and those who regard the fact that a disproportionate number of those in prison are black as proof of systemic racism dispute the validity of the “Broken Windows” theory, but California’s experience is one more bit of significant evidence that the theory is sound.

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Christmas Countdown Open Forum!

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

Presumably you know what to do by now…

About the song: apparently Harry Belafonte never performed this classic for TV; if he did, no one’s put it on YouTube. Every year, I admire his rendition of “Mary’s Boy Child” more. The singer introduced the song into the popular Christmas canon in 1956, after hearing it sung by a choir. It has been covered many, many times by singers ranging from Andy Williams to Charlotte Church, but is one of the very few Christmas songs without an interpretation by Bing Crosby.

Ethics Quote of the Month: 2022 Nobel Prize Recipient Philip H. Dybvig

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Commenting on Harvard’s increasingly apparent appointment of an under-qualified, diversity hire as the university’s president, Dr. Dybvig, who was a co-winner of the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel “for research on banks and financial crises,” said,

‘‘I realize I have been too pure. I assumed that a lot of people shared my dream (expressed for example by Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King) of ending oppression. However, the dream of most people (especially but not exclusively the oppressed) seems to be becoming the oppressor. This is why there is a strong correlation between abusers of children and people who were abused as children.  Claudine Gay has power now and she is the oppressor of any group not favored by her and other people in power. This is a common pattern in governments heading for totalitarianism. First, say you represent the oppressed. Then you get power and oppress non-favored groups. This leaves you in a morally indefensible position that could not survive given free speech, so you do what you can to destroy anyone (“counterrevolutionaries”) who disagrees with your narrative.’’

In related commentary, Jason Riley wrote in the Wall Street Journal in answer to the question of why Harvard can’t and won’t fire Gay, “To admit she has performed poorly is to raise basic questions about the entire ‘diversity’ enterprise.” Prof. Glenn Reynolds, commenting on both pieces, suggests that there are benefits “for her to remain as a lasting discredit to Harvard.” I agree with that as well. The mask has dropped, and all can see (who are willing to see) the ugliness beneath.

Comment of the Day: “Now Here’s A Scary Poll Result…”

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

The Ethics Alarms post regarding the Harvard-Harris poll showing that Americans between the ages of 18 and 24 had wildly diverging beliefs from the rest of the population in supporting “woke values and victim culture” ended with the plaintive query, “Now what?”

Michael R, in his Comment of the Day to “Now Here’s A Scary Poll Result…,” answered the question thusly:

***

Hmm… So, maybe you CAN’T allow people who hate this country and what it stands for teach the children. Maybe you CAN’T let them control the media including the news. Maybe you CAN’T let them be hired by the government and take over the 4th branch. We have allowed this for 50 years and now we are surprised by the results.

Who could have predicted this would be the outcome?

Of course, everyone with a brain predicted this at least since the 1970’s. Now, the problem is what to do about it? You can’t fix the education system.

  • You can’t hire teachers that aren’t fixated on spreading the woke mind virus because the people doing the hiring only hire people who have appropriate brain washing.
  • You can’t become a teacher if you don’t support the woke mind virus because the education faculties will throw you out otherwise.
  • Even if the faculty don’t want to throw you out, the professional standards call for DEI, pronoun usage, etc. It is a requirement of the program that you believe these things.
  • If you don’t pledge allegiance to the woke agenda, you don’t meet the requirements of the teacher ed program. Even if that is ignored, the accreditation body would remove the department’s accreditation if they allowed an outsider to become a teacher.
  • Even if you somehow overcame that, the teacher’s union would eliminate any teacher hired who didn’t conform.

There are a couple obvious options.

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Business Ethics Dunces: Best Buy and Geek Squad

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

No, they are not ready to help, or at least not yesterday, when I gave the Geek Squad at my local Best Buy an opportunity to live up to its claims on the Best Buy website.

ProEthics had an emergency yesterday. Grace’s laptop, from which she runs our business, wouldn’t start; we couldn’t get the power to go on. We know we need to replace it because it is old and has been having hiccups more frequently recently, but the end-of-year cash flow being what it is, were hoping to deal with the issue in January. My son has the magic touch regarding all forms of technology and anything mechanical, but he was at work, and I decided that we should deal with the crisis without interfering with his life. My neighbor has maintained a Geek Squad service contract for many years (though her computer needs do not involve a business), so I decided to give them a try. A corner of the local Best Buy is devoted to the computer repair and service company, which they acquired some time ago.

There was a bad omen at the start: two people were waiting, and no one was behind the counter. “She said she’ll be back in a minute,” one of the customers told me. As you know, almost every establishment, doctor’s office, restaurant and retail business is understaffed now, thanks to foolish minimum wage increases and businesses trying to keep costs down with epic inflation by hiring fewer employees. Customer service is virtually extinct. Best Buy, which once was notable for its plethora of employees on the floor who could answer questions and guide you through your visit, has now joined the trend.

When the Geek Squad staff member on counter duty returned, it was not a smiling man or a women professionally dressed in the Squad uniform pictured, but a strutting young lady with her hair in a durag with some kind of big bow on top. She had false eyelashes so thick and long that she appeared to be in party attire, with extreme make-up.

Well, heck….I decided that if Geek Squad felt she was a computer expert, she was a computer expert. I tried to explain my problem, including that my business relied on this laptop and that trying to get it working was crucial, but she cut me off saying, “Well let’s plug this in and see if it starts.” As I tried to say, “Yeah, it’s been plugged in all morning and it won’t…” she left the counter again, leaving me gaping like a fish. She returned in about five minutes, saw no sign of life and said, “It’s dead, sir. You need to buy a new computer. They’re over there…” She started to leave again. I said, “Wait. I told you this was an emergency. If I buy a new computer, I need you to transfer the data from this one.” “We can do that, but it’s going to take two to four days,” she said. “As I said, this is an emergency,” I replied. “Can’t you do the job faster than that?”

“Sir, we have our people working on other computers; that’s the fastest we can be,” she said dismissively, and left again. I was going to ask for assistance in sifting through the options, but didn’t have the chance. I took back the laptop and left.

Well, guess what? When my son got home from work, he took the laptop and returned it a few hours later. It’s working fine.

Well…

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