One of them has got turn up eventually, right? RIGHT???

Attention should be paid to this date, September 20, for a couple of reasons.

Chester A. Arthur, one of my favorite Presidents and ethics stories, was sworn in today after the death of President James Garfield, who looked like he might have been a great one. I already have reposted this year the story of how a disabled, middle-age woman nobody had ever heard of secretly turned Arthur from a corrupt hack (he had never held elected office before becoming President of the United States) into a principled and courageous leader. I was tempted to put it up again when I saw the PBS documentary based on “Destiny of the Republic” by Candace Millard, which was the best-selling history that revealed the impact of Julia Sand. Incredibly, the documentary failed to mention Sand at all! Having studied Garfield and his murderer, Charles Guiteau, I was familiar with most of the information in the book but not the Sand episode, which I felt and still feel was the most important part of the book both historically and ethically.

The other ethically significant event to occur on this date was the 1973 tennis match between top women’s player Billie Jean King, 29, and Bobby Riggs, 55, at that point in his career a self-promoting huckster and loud-mouth, but not much of a tennis player. Somehow, this obvious mismatch was dubbed “The Battle of the Sexes,” enabling it to attract a huge TV audience, and King’s victory became a tipping point in the women’s equality movement. I liken it to the George Floyd fiasco in that respect: the contrived symbolism of the event overwhelmed the facts. Riggs, who one was a highly-ranked male tennis pro, had been shooting off his mouth about how even a broken down senior player like him was better than the best women in the sport. He was trying to get a play-day and a resurgence of lucrative fame by goading a female pro into a match, and it worked: Australian Margaret Court, then #1 in the female pro ranks, took the bait and choked, playing horribly while losing to Riggs’ soft serves, spin shots and lobs. Her friend King set out to redeem her, and won in straight sets, proving that one of the best female players in the world in her prime could defeat a male player almost twice her age. Wow.

The lesson: when enough people really, really want something to be true, they’ll decide it is true regardless of the facts.

1. From the “How Stupid Do They Think We Are?” files: The New York Times gives front page attention to First Lady Jill Biden’s (I’m sorry, Dr. Jill Biden—and she can call me “Dr.” too, since I’m as much one as she is) determination to make Joe’s campaign promise to bring “unity” back to the U.S. a reality. The promise was offensive when it was made, and if FLOTUS really thinks it is achievable, she’s a Doctor of Delusion. The recent revelations about how the Clinton campaign conspired to create a false conspiracy narrative that crippled Donald Trump’s Presidency while Democrats accused the Americans who voted for him of being racists, xenophobes, fascists and morons establishes how shamefully the Axis of Unethical Conduct set out to divide the public in order to regain power. It’s impossible to govern effectively without some measure of national unity, as they knew when they shredded any hope of such unity to sabotage Trump. Now that they are hobbled by the very conditions they set out to create, the sadly inadequate leader they foisted on the nation wants unity back. Gall, chutzpah, naivete, cynical, hypocritical, ethics estoppel, stupid, insulting—I can’t find a word or phrase sufficiently harsh to describe such a goal. They can’t be trusted with unity, and they don’t deserve it either. Good luck, Jill.

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1. More evidence that social media corrupts everything it touches…In an interview about her hit HBO mini-series “Mare of Eastham” (not bad, if you like being depressed), actress Kate Winslet revealed that actresses are sometimes cast in plum roles by producers because they have more social media followers than actresses who are better suited for the parts. Considering fake Twitter followers can be bought, this is strong incentive for actors to cheat. It isn’t that Twitter itself is unethical, just that it is a catalyst for unethical conduct in so many ways. Again permit me to quote the Amityville House: “GET OUT!!!“

2. Speaking of actors, Frederick March has been cancelled by his alma mater. University of Wisconsin officials have removed the late, great Fredric March’s name from campus theaters. March is one of the greatest and most prolific of American film actors who also had a distinguished stage career, despite the fact that few under the age of 60 today could identify him. (His most acclaimed movie is the iconic “The Best Years of Our Lives,” and the role most would recognize is probably his performance opposite Spencer Tracy in “Inherit the Wind,” where March channels William Jennings Bryan.) March’s artistic achievements and his mastery of his craft certainly make him an appropriate figure to memorialize with a theater, except for one detail: when March was a student over a hundred years ago, he joined an organization called the Ku Klux Klan that apparently had no affiliation with the notorious racist and nativist Southern organization of the same name. John MacWhorter explains the confusion here.

Investigations into March’s beliefs and activities show that, if anything, he was a vocal opponent of racism all of his life, so tarring him as a Klansman is unfair and untrue. But in 2018, the university took his name off the Fredric March Play Circle Theater on the Madison campus, and did the same this year to a theater on its Oshkosh campus. After all, students need to fell “safe” from a dead actor’s naive conduct before anyone had heard of him a century ago because of the accidental death of a petty criminal and drug addict under the knee of a brutal cop. McWhorter quotes a Madison student actor as saying, “I cannot believe that my friends and I have been performing in a space named after someone who would have considered all of us to be lesser beings…I find it so ironic that we are sharing our intersectional stories in a theater that honors a racist.” Ah, yes, the Great Stupid, where Facts Don’t Matter.

But I don’t think the University of Wisconsin had much choice but to consign March’s memorials to Cancel Culture Hell. If the school had to spend tens of thousands to remove a giant boulder that was once called a “niggerhead” because students protested, administrators were only being realistic to conceded that they could only lose if they tried to defend Frederick March….unless and until they did a better job teaching students to think.

3. Thank God the Biden Administration has returned openness and trustworthiness to government! From the New York Times yesterday:

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