Just when I thought my holidays couldn’t get any more depressing than they already are, I lost my wallet yesterday and I have no idea how or where. I’m currently without a driver’s license, my credit cards, my insurance cards, and other stuff I need but can’t remember I’m sure. I feel like George Bailey when he goes to Martini’s bar on Christmas Eve to try to pull himself out of his panic and depression and a stranger punches him in the mouth after he begs God to help him find the path out of his dilemma.
On the bright side, nobody has punched me in the mouth. Yet.
The 1992 miniseries Turner Movie Classics produced about MGM has several ethically-inspiring stories. I recently saw it again, and an anecdote that slipped right by me before I started my ethics business impressed me this time. (If you don’t have a hammer, sometimes even a nail won’t look like a nail.) The studio was being torn in the late Forties by an ideological battle between founder and CEO Louie B. Mayer and Dore Schary, who was the head of production. Schary was pushing films with political messages, while Mayer believed that MGM should avoid politics and stick to pure entertainment. (Sound familiar?). Schary had greenlighted a big budget anti-war film, an adaptation of Stephen Crane’s “The Red Badge of Courage,” which Mayer vehemently opposed. The film’s director, John Huston, went to Mayer and said that while he believed in the film, he would pull out if Mayer insisted.
According to Huston, Mayer excoriated him for his willingness to quit a creative endeavor because of anyone’s opposition to it. “I’m ashamed of you,” he supposedly said. “In this business, you have to be willing to fight for what you believe in. I don’t want us to do the picture, but if you believe in it, then fight for it.”
So Huston left the meeting and gathered a mob of actors and writers and tried to take over the executive offices.
Okay, I made that last part up….
In other news…
1. I think I have some perspective on this issue...NPR had a feature on its website called “The right (and wrong) things to say to a grieving friend.” It’s “don’ts” included “I can’t imagine what you’re going through,” (I’ve heard that one a lot), “anything that starts with “at least,” which in my case has always been the same: “At least she didn’t suffer,” and “DON’T use cliches or platitudes.”
I believe I wrote earlier this year about “I’m sorry for your loss,” which indeed, as the NPR article says, seems like the speaker or writer is checking a box; that’s what they always say on the TV procedurals. The friends whose reactions I have found most comforting and appreciated have been those who conveyed their feelings in their tones of voice, their facial expressions when saying whatever they said, cliche or not, and their efforts to keep in touch and check in on me periodically. This includes the 70 or so friends and colleagues who attended a memorial event for Grace on October 12, eight months after her sudden death, some coming from the West Coast. “You can pretend to care,” my friend who organized it for me (I was useless) said, “but you can’t pretend to come.”
2. Elton John, for some reason, chose now to make a statement that legalizing pot was a mistake in a Time Magazine interview. Welcome to the party, pal, but when his opinion could have made a difference, he stayed quiet and got quietly stoned. At this point, there is no going back.
“Reason,” the voice of libertarians who worked so hard to give the U.S. a third legal addictive substance with long-term health dangers when we were already coping badly with two (Good job!) snarked that Elton “ignores the damage done by prohibition, and he overlooks our right to do what we please without state interference so long as we harm nobody else.” I hate the first argument; it is relevant now, but was a false rationalization before the dam burst. It was not valid before the elites like the people who read “Reason” started deliberately undermining society’s consensus that marijuana use was unhealthy physically, mentally and culturally: Prohibition, as noble an effort as it was, failed because alcohol was already thoroughly integrated into the fabric of life after centuries of acceptance. The lesson was that you can’t go back once you’ve let such genies out of the bottle to run amuck, and that’s where we are with pot now—sorry, “cannabis.”
The second argument is old pot-head propaganda, and garbage to the core. As with alcohol, recreational drug use harms families, workplaces, careers, organizations, education, and national productivity. It isn’t victimless, any more than alcohol abuse is. I figured this out in college. It wasn’t hard.
3. Sadly, although the signs indicate that The Great Stupid may be weakening temporarily, the bastions of the Axis of Unethical Conduct and the pathologies its members carry are not going to go quiet into that good night. During a dance party in Boston, a DJ played Miley Cyrus’ “He Could Be The One” as pictures of cute assassin Luigi Mangione appeared on a big screen. The audience cheered. Nice.
4. Also in “Reason,” Amanda Knox, the American woman falsely accused and convicted of murdering her room mate in Italy until she was finally exonerated and released from prison, touches on many ethics-related issues in a long interview. Her perspective on coerced confessions is instructive; she also argues that the police should not be allowed to lie in order to get suspects to give up information regarding their alleged crimes. Knox coins what she calls “The Single Victim Fallacy”….”This idea that in any given morality narrative, there’s only room for one victim.”
5. Unbelievable. The government’s response to the current confusion, fear and anger surrounding the drones being spotted over New Jersey and elsewhere perfectly illustrates why the public is losing faith in democratic institutions. No matter what the truth is, Biden’s underlings are obviously being evasive and disingenuous….again. The Pentagon’s John Kirby and other spokespersons have repeatedly said that 1) the government doesn’t know who is responsible for the drones and what they are doing, and 2) there is no reason to believe they are doing anything harmful. The two statements do not support each other: if we don’t know what is going on, then we don’t know if what is going on is sinister or not. What Kirby’s statement really says to Americans is: “Your government thinks you are stupid and gullible.”
Secretary of Homeland Security Majorkas—he’s good at his job, see, because he is historic—blathered on to CNN that the drones can be easily explained because lots of drones fly around in the U.S. all the time. He actually said that. Critics of Trump’s appointees who did not call for this hack to be fired years ago are ethically estopped from complaining about the competence of Trump’s picks, any of them. I am reasonably certain that there are some middle school students who could have done a better job than Majorkas.
6. Speaking of destroying trust, Zero Hedge has an interesting article about the Biden Administration’s inflation of job numbers after the Philly Fed reported, “Estimates by the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia indicate that the employment changes from March through June 2024 were significantly different in 27 states compared with preliminary state estimates from the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ (BLS) Current Employment Statistics (CES)”, the Philly Fed said on December 12. According to the early benchmark (EB) estimates conducted by the Phily Fed, employment was lower in 25 states, higher in two states, and lesser changes in the remaining 23 states and the District of Columbia.” Of course this comes out after the election.
7. Finally, The Ghost of Equal Rights Amendment Past is haunting the White House! Some prominent members of that party that reveres American institutions and democratic norms is trying to do an end-around both the Dobbs decision and the Constitutional amendment process. The New York Times (uncritically) reports [Gift link! Merry Christmas! What did you get me?]:
Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York is on a mission in President Biden’s final days in office. She wants to convince him that he can rescue his legacy by adding the century-old Equal Rights Amendment, which would explicitly guarantee sex equality, to the Constitution as a way to protect abortion rights in post-Roe America.
He could do it all, she contends, with one phone call. Both houses of Congress approved the amendment in 1972, but it was not ratified by the states in time to be added to the Constitution. Ms. Gillibrand has been pushing a legal theory that the deadline for ratification is irrelevant and unconstitutional. All that remains, she argues, is for Mr. Biden to direct the national archivist, who is responsible for the certification and publication of constitutional amendments, to publish the E.R.A. as the 28th Amendment.
The move would almost certainly invite a legal challenge that would land in the Supreme Court. But Ms. Gillibrand wants Mr. Biden to use his presidential power while he still has it to force the issue, effectively daring Republicans to wage a legal battle to take away equal rights for women….Ms. Gillibrand has pleaded her E.R.A. case at every available opportunity [and]….has presented White House officials with fat binders full of legal research and polling.
...The Constitution states that proposed amendments must be passed by two-thirds majorities in both houses of Congress and ratified by three-quarters of the states. It makes no mention of a deadline for ratification, but Congress in modern times has typically included a seven-year clock for the states to sign on. The House and the Senate approved the Equal Rights Amendment in 1972 with a seven-year deadline, and then when it had yet to be ratified by enough states by 1979, extended the deadline to 1982. By then, only 35 states had ratified it — still short of the three-quarters requirement. Since then, three more states — Nevada, Illinois and Virginia — have ratified the amendment, surpassing the threshold. But some other states have since rescinded their ratifications….
The timeline issue has left the amendment in limbo. Many legal scholars, as well as attorneys general in 23 states, have argued that since there is no reference to a ratification deadline in the Constitution and no precedent for any state successfully reversing its approval, neither issue should stand in the way of the E.R.A. becoming the 28th Amendment and the law of the land.
The amendment has taken on greater urgency for many Democrats since the Supreme Court’s 2022 ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization overturned abortion rights. Ms. Gillibrand and other abortion rights advocates argue that Mr. Biden has one last opportunity to enshrine reproductive rights into law for millions of women, and that there are strong constitutional and political arguments for him to do so….adopting the amendment could provide a new legal basis for protecting abortion after the overturning of Roe v. Wade…
Ethics Alarms 
I’m confused as to what the ERA has to do with abortion? If the purpose is to make women legally equal to men (which they already are), are both men and women going to be permitted abortions?
What am I saying? This is the era of women can be men, after all! If men can menstruate and give birth, they can have abortions!
What a time to be alive!
(You read this post before I had caught the typos! Sorry!)
And I posted far too quickly for my own good!
I should point out that if the ERA were passed that would mean that women will be required to register for the draft in order to prevent the loss of federal opportunities.
Some of the advocates for the ERA are okay with that.
Maybe when we have an all volunteer force but when they find themselves sending their daughters off to some hell hole to fight with a real enemy their tunes will undoubtedly change. I believe that everyone should be required to register even if actual combat is off the table for females.
How would ERA affect things like child custody. Surely it would put the final nail in the Believe all Women coffin?
It seems to me that many of those states that didn’t sign up may have seen more disadvantages for women than advantages!
A non-political note from a film buff about John Huston’s The Red Badge of Courage. What’s onscreen is uneven but I respect it as a brave production that was arguably appropriate to spark discussions in the years immediately after World War II when returning military personnel dealt with their own traumatic memories of combat. Remembering that Huston himself was a front line combat veteran who shot with a film camera instead of a rifle to produce documentaries about Army campaigns in the Aleutians and northern Africa. His films were controversial with military brass, and often reedited, because of their unsparing portrayal of combat. And, perhaps most relevant to Red Badge, there was his little-seen 1946 documentary Let There Be Light about hospitalized soldiers recovering from physical and mental trauma. It’s “little-seen” because the Army, which owned the rights, didn’t like what the film showed about the treatment of those wounded, withdrew it from distribution, and kept it shelved until the 1980s.
Casting non-professionals like the highly decorated Audie Murphy (who continued acting) and cartoonist Bill Mauldin (who went back to his drawing board) for their combat experience rather than their acting resumes was a risky artistic choice, and their unfamiliarity with being in front of a camera sometimes shows in technical aspects of their performance, But I think the casting works more broadly.
Jack, what do you, as a stage director, think of Huston’s casting choices, the actors’ performances, and the film in general?
I’m torn on Audie, who with the exception of his autobiographical film, had zero screen presence, but whom I admire as an American hero and tragic figure. I understand and admire Huston’s choice, but it didn’t work (t least what we have of the movie), and I wouldn’t have done it myself. I think after Huston’s experience, he thought having two combat vets in the ensemble would give the whole project a spiritual boost. But since the film was massacred by the studio and virtually cut in half, I don’t think there’s any way to fairly judge it or Audie.
In general, I’m not a big fan of Huston as a director. Of the 5 who were recruited to film the war, Huston, Wyler, Capra, Ford and Stevens, I’d put Huston a cut below the rest. I like African Queen, Key Largo and The Maltese Falcon, though none of them as much as I’m supposed to. I find him a rather slack director. (Moby Dick is terrible.)
I’ll never forget his booming baritone as the first voice actor to bring the wizard Gandalf to life. He’s probably also a candidate for one of the most interesting men ever with his very broad experience.
I agree completely. Fascinating, complex, brilliant man, good actor in his spare time, wonderful voice. Have you seen Clint Eastwood’s film about Huston, “White Hunter, Black Heart”? Eastwood does a Huston imitation. The movie is complex and ambitious. It totally bombed at the box office, and I’ve often wondered what Huston would have thought of it.