You may need some background on this Ethics Alarms distinction, which has not been discussed here since 2022…It all began fifteen-and-a-half years ago, when then rising starlet Lindsay Lohan got the first award on the old Ethics Scoreboard. Arrested for driving intoxicated and found with cocaine in her pants pocket, Lindsay told police that she wasn’t wearing her own pants, and had no responsibility for the coke contained in them. That stood as the “most brazen and manifestly ridiculous excuse ever” until 2012. That year, the drunken captain who piloted the Costa Concordia cruise ship onto the rocks and left his passengers to fend for themselves claimed that he left the capsizing vessel before his passengers because he “fell into a life boat.” He still missed his chance at the title because the same month, The Smoking Gun reported that in Wisconsin, police responding to a domestic abuse episode were told by the alleged attacker that his victim had really been beaten and nearly strangled to death by a ghost.
Then he was overthrown by Melissa Jenkins Johanson, 47, who drove her car down a footpath in Wales thinking it was a road because she was blind drunk, and who blamed her dog, which she swore was driving her car at the time.
Well, Mark Nakagawa is the new champion.
Last December he walked up to his Jewish neighbor’s door in West Hollywood and scrawled a swastika on a case of seltzer sitting outside. That neighbor, Leah Grossman, confronted him, and he denied doing it, even though she had a security camera that caught him in the act and told him so. The incident occurred after Nakagawa called her a fascist in a homeowner’s association meeting for hanging the flag of Israel from her balcony after the Hamas terrorist attack on October 7.
“What’s going on in the world has really opened up a crevasse of anti-Semitism and I think people feel really emboldened to push Jewish people around. People just shouldn’t get away with this,” Grossman told local reporters.
The level of audacity demonstrated by Nakagawa denying the video evidence of his conduct was signature significance, and he proved it when a local TV station interviewed him about his anti-Semitic gesture. Nakagawa insisted it was all an innocent misunderstanding. He said he was just trying to educate Grossman about the sadly forgotten history of the swastika as a Buddhist symbol of love. “The way I went about it, in hindsight, the way I went about it was not the right away to go about it. It was bad judgment on my part. I realize that,” Nakagawa said, without laughing.
Sure! Who wouldn’t leave a swastika on a package at a Jewish woman’s door in the midst of a surge in anti-Semitism to promote Buddhism? Incidentally, Mark isn’t a Buddhist.
He is, however, the new Ethics Alarms “All-Time Most Outrageous Excuse” champion.
Ethics Alarms 
Not to mention the fact that the swastika symbol, although also linked to Buddhism, is more associated with Hinduism.
And he muffed it. The Buddhist/Hindu swastika is facing the other way. The Nazis flipped it and rotated it. Honestly, though, unless you see them side-by-side, your brain sees the Nazi version. When I first married and moved to Japan and got a map of town, the hairs on the back of my neck stood up. The map was sprinkled with swastikas, or so it looked to me. It’s the official map symbol for a temple.
BTW, sorry my comments have been duplicated. It’s been happening since Word Press starting redirecting me to log in. If it happens again now, that’s why
Or American Indians. The 45th Infantry Division from OK had it as their symbol for a while, before they switched it out for a thunderbird.
I have a “history of the University” book in my office at the Oklahoma school I work for, and there’s a photo from around 1920 of the school’s “Swastika Club” – they even had armbands! My brother works at a small town bank where the building was built in the late 1910s with 4 foot square swastikas in the brick walls on either side of the vault door.
Is that his “swastica” in the title photo? He didn’t even draw it right. Can you be dyslexic for non alphabetical symbols?
It was so badly drawn that he could have been better off claiming that it wasn’t a swastika, but an obscure Shinto symbol called the Yaniminataku, which brinks luck when attached to someone’s pink grapefruit seltzer.
We’re on the brink aren’t we? About how use of the swastika was hate-speech but now going forward it’s going to be a “hate-identifier”. (I use quotes because that’s what they’ll say it is, but not really what it is.)
They’ll say “it was a way for nazi’s to support and say yay nazi’s as hate-speech against a nazi target, now we’ve reclaimed it and we use it to identify nazis and when we do it, it’s not hate speech, we’re identifying someone we believe is a nazi or a fascist or a republican or a conservative or a libertarian or a centrist or anyone who isn’t exactly our version of the the right kind of people.”
As a society – it increasingly feels like we are f’ing doomed.
I just glanced at it. I thought it was the Z with a slash through it (as used to distinguish from a poorly written 2). I only realized it was supposed to be a swastika after reading the post.