I did a Danny Thomas spit-take when I read that Kamala Harris, in an interview with the New York Times, proudly proclaimed herself “a historic figure.” Harris noted the tradition of creating a marble bust for every U.S. Vice President after they leave office, saying: “There will be a marble bust of me in Congress. I am a historic figure like any vice president of the United States ever was.”
This has sparked mass mockery in the conservative news media and social media.
Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day:
Is this mockery fair?
Pro mockery: Harris, many wags have noted, already was a bust as a Presidential candidate. Her insistence that she was anything but significant for the most technical of reasons: she happens to be “of color” and female, demonstrates the delusion of DEI cant: no one is rendered virtuous or accomplished by their group membership alone. Does she have anything to be proud of? Oh, I suppose. She’s in an elite group, even if it is an elite group packed with mediocrities and historical footnotes. Still, her boast comes close to resembling people who put winning a second-grade gold star for having the best score on a spelling test on their resumes. She ran arguably the worst campaign of any major political party candidates in history, and was a flop as Veep too. Her bust will be, if anything, the equivalent of a participation trophy. And she couldn’t be articulate even in that two sentence snippet!
Con mockery: She was a Vice-President of the United States, and there have only been 50 of them. She is the only woman elected to that office, as well as the only sort-of-black one, though being the first black VP after there has already been a black POTUS somewhat reduces the distinction to trivia. Yes, she didn’t do much as VP, but that makes her the rule rather than the exception. How many Vice-Presidents who didn’t become President after the President’s death were remarkable or accomplished in the job? Without doing a lot of research, I can think of only three: Martin Van Buren (Jackson’s VP), Richard Nixon, Al Gore, and, most of all, recently departed Dick Cheney, and I’m giving Al the benefit of the doubt because I feel sorry for him.
___________
Addendum: For the pop culture-deprived, this is comic/actor/singer/St. Jude’s Hospital founder Danny Thomas doing the vaudeville spit-take maneuver that he perfected into an art form on his Sixties sitcom, “The Danny Thomas Show,” usually in response to a wise crack from one of his TV kids, Rusty Hamer or Angela Cartwright:
Ethics Alarms 
Pro mockery:
Never mind Kamala’s dismal performance; you can objectively be the greatest historical figure of all time by every honest and fair measure but if you talk about yourself as being a historic figure I’m going to mock you.
People who live in mansions don’t call their homes mansions. It’s for people who don’t live in them to call them mansions. Unless they want to be mocked.
Indeed, Newport is full of modest summer cottages, thank you very much….
A lion doesn’t need to tell you he’s a lion.
Or call yourself smart if you’re actually smart.
Bush the Elder probably merits mention too. Wasn’t Jefferson vice president under John Adams because of the old rule of how vice presidents were chosen? That’s about all I can think of without doing any research.
Kamala Harris a self-proclaimed historical figure? Despite the short-lived “yes we Kam” shirts and the magazine covers, there are times it’s not good to be a historical figure. The only thing Harris is notable for is being the epitome of drinking hiring, total incompetence, and failing miserably in a presidential campaign that was pretty much doomed to fail from the start. I’d rather spend eternity in obscurity than be known for that.
In fact, she felt so flat that I would jokingly ask what color she was and say flat black. 😜😀
Honk! Honk! Wocka! Wocka!
Smugness begets contempt, and this reeks of smugness. I won’t mock her, but it’s hard to say it’s not deserved.
Her bust is browner than she is…
…and far more eloquent.
Her Jamaican father evidently always resented his, and by extension, her being considered African American. I think he’d have preferred Jamaican-Indian.
It seems this bust is a bust of a bust.
To me it looks like a white woman and does not look anything like Harris other than a woman.
I can’t determine if this is a 1) statement of fact, 2) humility, 3) defensiveness 4) conceit.
She could have said, “I am honored to be included among my peers.”
She’s a historic figure because she was Vice-President, not because she got a bust for being Vice-President. The bust remark earns her the mockery. There’s a bust of Mr. Spock near a Philadelphia hospital. In the grand scheme of things, Mr. Spock is more historic than Kamala Harris.
Historical figure? Yes.
Her bleating about it deserving of mockery? HELL YEAH!!!
Self-Praise Stinks!
PWS
Has anyone asked Willie Brown what he thinks of her bust?
I think Aaron Burr deserves a mention:
Well, wow, I guess I didn’t know that Burr was tried for treason. President Jefferson pretty much ordered that he be indicted, and Chief Justice John Marshall presided over the trial in his capacity as the federal circuit court judge for Virginia. At the request of Burr, Marshall issued a subpoena to President Jefferson for some letters Burr required for his defense. Jefferson never acknowledged the subpoena and only provided some of the letters.
Here is a fascinating passage:
Oh, what a tangled web we weave……I am forever grateful to this blog for enticing me into researching historical topics of which I was formerly unaware.
“I am forever grateful to this blog for enticing me into researching historical topics of which I was formerly unaware.”
Yeah, buddy!
PWS
Sorry I can’t get past “a historic” when surely it should be “an historic” (?) A safer and simply factual alternative would be “an historical” which, in a way, we all are or will be… although the scope of interest in our individual histories will vary!
As you may have noticed, I reject “an historic” on Ethics Alarms because no one has ever explained to me why that is grammatical but “an history,” “an housing shortage” or “an hippopotamus” isn’t. No offense, but on my ear it lands like “irregardless.”
Ooh dear if you want language to be consistent and logical my sympathy that you happen to have English as your primary tongue… the spelling alone…. Sorry!
You gotta try, or we’ll be right back to the random spelling before Websters.
I sometimes find my self saying or writing “an” before a word with a pronounced “h”, though I can’t really explain why. I might say “an horrific ___” though not “an horrible ___”. Perhaps it has something to to with which syllable is stressed in the following word?
If I were to say “an historic”, I probably wouldn’t pronounce the h. Until today, I never noticed the discrepancy between a history and an historic.
Kackles is entitled (probably one of her favorite words) to what is most often the participation trophy for all vice presidents. It has nothing to do with how “historic” she imagines herself to be.
The rest of us are equally entitled to mock her as we wish. She may well be historic in providing fodder for that.
The general rule is that if the ‘h’ is silent, use ‘an’ (an honor).
If the ‘h’ is pronounced, use ‘a’ (a hit man).
And Holly is quite correct – English is second to Chinese in difficulty because of its endless inconsistencies.
I like the bust. Kamala is a beautiful woman. She’s a hapless moron, but beautiful.
“I would much rather have men ask why I have no statue than why I have one.” – Cato the Elder