It was time for EA to do its annual March posting of my favorite Saturday Night Live performance. Hearkening back to this week’s contentious debate about the ethics of wasting one’s life, which began here, I give you John Belushi. I’m still furious with the troubled comic for robbing the world of all the laughter and entertainment his gifts would have provided had he managed to survive his 30s.
In case you’re interested, my March came in like a Woolly Rhinoceros and is going out like a sea slug.
And on the topic of comedians, how did you like President Trump joking about Pearl Harbor to the Japanese Prime Minister? If you are minimally culturally literate, this classic comic performance should have come to mind…
But I digress. Please proceed to the ethics aisle…and you can certainly talk about the war.
Ethics Alarms 
I would suggest that it was beneath the President. Jokes about Pearl Harbor, whether countering an accusation about a sneak attack or not, are unbecoming a chat with one of our major allies. The Japanese paid dearly for Pearl Harbor. This is one of those Trump just blurts out whatever he’s thinking incidents that make some people laugh, some people fume and just bugs the dickens out of the rest of us.
Pardon me for now. I have to get back to slogging through The Sun Also Rises. Do I just not get Hemingway? Is there something I’m missing?
Nabokov criticized Hemingway starkly:
”He is merely a writer of books for boys. He is better than Conrad and has at least a style of his own. But it is nothing I would care to have written myself. In terms of mentality and emotion, he is hopelessly juvenile. I loathe his works about bels, balls and bulls.”
Ernest was at his best with short stories.
This was a joking way to answer the reporter’s question. The question was why did he not tell some of the allies about the planned attack. Would it have been any better had he just said that surprise attacks must be kept secret which is why we were left at the mercies of the Japanese in 1941? You could view the joke as acknowledging the Japanese tactical advantage by keeping their plans from falling into our hands.
The more accurate answer is that he cannot count on the allies to keep secrets or otherwise commit to anything involving Muslim nations now that their own countries have been colonized by the nation of Islam. Do we want honesty or do we want to lighten the mood on a very serious subject that will require significant work to ensure that our alliances will not continue to be one sided where the United States shoulders the burden of protecting Europe and other nations around the world.