Just when I am convinced that The Great Stupid has finally reached peak stupid and the dimwits, hypocrites and virtue-signaling addicts in Woke World cannot embarrass themselves, society, the culture, the nation and the human race any more thoroughly, something like the “controversy” over Brendan Fraser winning the Best Actor Oscar for his performance in “The Whale” comes along.
I no longer watch the Academy Awards, I had no interest in seeing a movie about the travails of weighing 600 pounds and I’m not all that crazy about Brendan Frasier (though “The Mummy” was fun), so I heard about this a bit late. You see, Frasier wore a fat suit to play the hero of the movie. The actor is about 60 pounds past his physical prime when he played George of the Jungle (a funny Tarzan, more or less), but he hasn’t gotten that fat yet, so this was a necessary device. However, Fat is Beautiful activists slammed the picture, Frasier and the Oscars because 1) the film made fat seem unattractive and—this is the best part—it was discriminatory for the part of “the Whale” not to be cast with a real morbidly obese actor. (Brendan is only obese.)
This date in 1905 marks one of the most felicitous and essential marriages in U.S. Presidential history, as future president Franklin Delano Roosevelt wed his fifth cousin once removed, Eleanor Roosevelt, in New York, thus unifying the two branches of the elite Roosevelt family. Eleanor, herself an impressive intellect and activist, became her husband’s legs, rock and essential wing-woman as well as his moral compass (to the extent possible, at least). FDR was a pragmatist with natural leadership skills and gifts that exceeded those of all but a few of his predecessors, but he was far from an idealist, as he revealed here and there, often with troubling consequences. What other Presidents would not have reached the White House without a felicitous choice of life-partner? John Adams, certainly; in all likelihood, Lyndon Johnson, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton as well. Maybe Obama, but with Adams and Franklin, there is no doubt.
1. You have to admit, it has been an impressive scam, if a destructive one. The Claremont Institute, a conservative think tank and research center, has put together a database tracking corporate America’s capitulation to what the institute calls “possibly the most lucrative shakedown of corporate America in its history.” Spokepersons for the institute reveal in Newsweek that while “most Americans have happily moved on from the 2020 Black Lives Matter (BLM)-driven ransacking of some 200 American cities, which resulted in as much as $2 billion in property damage and at least 25 deaths,” the bounty from the group’s white-guilt and fear-driven squeeze on corporate America has been wildly under-publicized. Claremont Institute’s database indicated that BLM was pledged “an astonishing $82.9 billion to the BLM movement and related causes. This includes more than $123 million to the BLM parent organizations directly.” Claremont writes that the figures, “while shocking, likely underrepresent the true magnitude of the shakedown as some companies failed to make known their contributions, and many BLM organizations remain unknown.”
The figures are even more infuriating than that suit of armor with the huge “Black Lives Matter” sign that I have to walk by with Spuds every day. Among the biggest funders of BLM according to Claremont has been JPMorgan Chase, with a $30 billion ‘Racial Equity Commitment to “close the racial wealth gap.” Abbott Labs has pledged $25 million; Adidas $120 million. Amazon gave BLM and its subsidiaries $169,550,000….all of this to promote racial division, Marxist politics and anti-white racism, without even minimal assurances of legitimate financial stewardship controls.
I really thought the New York Magazine article titled “Ron DeSantis Eating Pudding With His Fingers Will End His 2024 Bid” was a joke…even though it appeared in the section called “Intelligencer,” which past experience has taught me often contains the dumbest essays ever contrived by homo sapiens. But it wasn’t a joke. Margaret Hartmann, the senior editor for “Intelligencer” who wrote the thing was serious. Observe…
Ron DeSantishas been hit with a food-related accusation so weird it may end his 2024 presidential bid before it officially starts. The Daily Beast reportsthat according to two sources, the Florida governor once ate chocolate pudding with three fingers… I’m calling it now: This story will follow DeSantis like pudding sticks to fingers. The devil is in the details. The report doesn’t say DeSantis dipped a finger into his pudding sheepishly; he used three fingers, presumably as a scoop. And it’s established in the preceding paragraph that he regularly ate during meetings, “like a starving animal who has never eaten before… getting shit everywhere.” This paints a vivid picture of being trapped in a conference room with your boss as he shoves most of his hand into a pudding cup, scoops the goo into his mouth, licks his fingers, and goes back in for more, with chocolate still smeared around his lips. Disgusting!
Before I turn EA over to the commentariat, I have to say that the erudite and thoughtful people who honor me by checking in here also give me hope that reason, precise communication and intellectual cross-pollination will survive, and productive civilization with it, despite all evidence to the contrary.
There is a lot of that: I just leafed through the first “People” Magazine I have seen in many years (it was sent to my wife as a promotion), and it is profoundly depressing. The pop culture magazine used to have genuine articles; now it is almost completely taken over by snippets of a hundred words or less accompanied by photos of the B, C, and D level celebrities who have split-up or had babies without being married or worn “stunning” clothes at a Hollywood event. Obviously the publication is now pitched to the texting and social media-addicted masses who have the attention span of kittens and the reading tastes of fifth grade drop-outs.
And I thought USA Today had deteriorated! “People” makes the old movie fan mags like “Photoplay” look like “Remembrance of Things Past” by comparison.
Off-off Broadway, in Brooklyn, a small professional theater company in Brooklyn called Target Margin Theater is presenting, it claims, “Pericles,” one of William Shakespeare’s less-celebrated dramas, and I’m being kind. The play is a mess, and one might wonder why a 1608 play that only survives because Shakespeare’s name is on it keeps getting productions at all.
Well, to ask the question is to answer it: “Pericles” gets produced now and then because Shakespeare’s name is on it. It’s the cognitive dissonance scale at work: the Bard is so high on the scale that he even elevates the worthless junk he wrote, kind-of wrote or badly wrote like “Timon of Athens” and “Titus Andronicus” out of deep, deep negative territory on the scale because he is held in such high regard. Surely something produced by a genius must have redeeming qualities, directors and producers reason, and maybe we can be the ones to find them after all these centuries!
It is a bit like recording a cover of “Why Don’t We Do It In The Road?” because it’s a Beatles song.”
But the Target Margin Theater production of the Bard’s Bomb tries some things. For example, the convoluted plot of “Pericles” gets started with the revelation that a nasty king, having lost his wife, has turned to his beautiful daughter “with whom the father liking took and her to incest did provoke.” However in this production, that line is rendered as, “The dude sleeps with his daughter.”
Mediocre movies can still raise important ethics questions, and so it is with a 2021 bomb called “American Traitor: The Trial of Axis Sally.” The film dramatizes the bizarre tale of Mildred Gillars, a Maine-born American woman of modest looks and talents who rode her aspirations for a Hollywood career into an infamous gig as an infamous Nazi German radio propagandist during World War II. My father told me about her broadcasts from Berlin, and how she used sexy tones to tell American servicemen that they were doomed, that the Jews, not Germany, were their real enemy, and that their wives and girlfriends were cheating on them while they were in Europe fighting Hitler’s “invincible army.”
Her last broadcast was just a few days before Germany surrendered; Gillars was arrested and charged with being a traitor. In 1948, “Axis Sally” faced a very real threat of being hanged as she went on trial for eight counts of treason. Thanks in great part to a vigorous (if reluctant) defense by famed criminal defense attorney James Laughlin, played by Al Pacino in the film, the jury found her guilty of only one, and what could have been a 30 year jail term turned into ten.
Dad said that American GIs thought “she”Axis Sally” was hilarious, that no soldiers took her seriously, and that her singing was terrible. Her broadcasts were popular in the U.S., as she often relayed news of American prisoners of war to show how well they were being treated by their German captors.
Although I suspect that Pacino’s ringing closing argument in her defense was punched up considerably from the original by Laughlin and maybe even contained some arguments Laughlin did not make, the points he raises in the movie are fascinating:
The latest addition to “intersectionality” is “adultism,” defined as the “[s]ystemic/interpersonal exclusion of youth from decisions that impact their lives.” You see where this is coming from, right? Transgender activists want children to be able to decide to sexually mutilate themselves without parental or government interference, once they have been thoroughly indoctrinated by their teachers, peers and the news media into believing that changing genders like socks makes one happy, healthy and wise.
I had somehow missed the latest toxic substance the mad Left had begun leaking into the culture. It’s exhausting keeping up with this stuff; it is like an existential game of Whack-A- Mole that never ends. The longer society gives allows these calculated corruptions to sink in and pollute minds, the more damage they do, and the harder they are to beat back.
University of Illinois Chicago (UIC) professor Josefina Bañales told a panel last month that “adultism” “excludes youth from the opportunity to speak about their own racialized experiences, their own ways that they’re navigating the world” because psychology was developed by “white adults.” Picking up on the concept, Professor Julie Maslowsky, who works in the School of Public Health at UIC, recently made the assertion that abortions are essential because, without one, a woman is left with an “economic hardship and insecurity which lasts for years.” This came during in a presentation on “Reproductive Justice.”
In a typical incident, Whoopie Goldberg, once an iconoclast and truth-teller who didn’t bow to political correctness, groveled an apology to Woke World after…
…for using the word “gypped” in a spontaneous comment among “The View’s” usual incompetent blather. Now a virtual slave to the social media mob (Oooh, can I say “slave”?) Whoopie quickly told her Woke masters that she didn’t mean to utter a taboo word when she said, “The people who still believe that [Donald Trump] got gypped somehow in the election will still believe that he cared enough about his wife to pay … that money from his personal thing.”
She should be apologizing for taking a check to communicate like an illiterate 8th grader, but no: here was her actual apology: “When you’re a certain age, you use words that you know from when you were a kid or you remember saying and that’s what I did today. And I shouldn’t have. I should’ve thought about it a little longer before I said it, but I didn’t, and I should’ve said cheated, but I used another word and I’m really, really sorry.”
“Gyp” as a verb supposedly began as a reference to Gypsies and their alleged tendency to steal or trick unsuspecting marks. Did Whoopie use the term to insult the people who the language police demanded be called “Romani”? No. Did anyone have any problem understanding what she meant by “gypped”? No. Is she an Ethics Dunce by falling into line and acting like a good little bootlicker when she should have said, “I have nothing to apologize for. The whole ‘if a word may have originated from a reference that was motivated by prejudice or malice hundreds of years ago, it must be banned in 2023′”‘ is censorious garbage, and I refuse to follow it; grow the hell up!”?
Absolutely.
Sadly, poor Whoopie is now stuck for life babbling with a bunch of idiots on TV and can’t afford to be courageous or principled, for she depends on Woke World to make a living.
As an ethicist, I see news stories like this and want to hurl myself through the nearest wood-chipper. On the Left, we have racial-grievance fanatics claiming that eliminating discipline for disrupting class is necessary to avoid perpetuating “systemic racism.” On the Right, we have virtual Neanderthals with ethical standards stuck in the 19th century advocating teachers hitting cognitively challenged kids because…the Bible says so.
No wonder it’s so easy for Leftist fascism to get a foothold in our culture, when conservatives undermine their credibility with positions like that.
Oklahoma, where the wind comes sweeping down the plains and apparently through one ear and out the other of a lot of elected officials, is one of the 19 laggards that permit child abuse in the public schools. (Watch the Indian School corporal punishment inflicted on students in the “1923” miniseries now streaming on Paramount+, if you dare.) Democrats in the state legislature introduced House Bill 1028, a modest proposal—I would think—to outlaw school district personnel from “using corporal punishment on any student identified with a disability in accordance with the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act.” It didn’t even outlaw teachers beating kids in general, just students with disabilities. But the GOP has a super-majority, and not enough alleged conservatives (why is beating students “conservative” voted against the bill to narrowly kill it, 45-43.
The point at which Trump-Deranged, pro-Biden warriors could credibly claim that the current President is any less prone to uttering counter-factual fantasy than the previous one passed long before Joe Biden was elected, but it officially reached the absurdity level during Biden’s soft-ball interview with actor Kal Penn, who was guest hosting “The Daily Show” on Comedy Central.
When Penn asked Biden about his “evolution” on same-sex marriage, the perpetually addled POTUS exploded informed and objective heads all over America with this self-evident fiction, saying that in 1960, when he was in high school, Biden was momentarily shocked to see two men kissing. He said that his dad turned to him and said, “Joey, it’s simple, they love each other,” and that Joe adopted that approach ever since. “Doesn’t matter whether it’s same-sex or a heterosexual couple, they should be able to be married,” Biden told Penn. “What is the problem? So, listen to your auntie and uncle, get married. Do it now.”
That was an utter and complete fabrication, though Penn didn’t challenge it, either because he doesn’t know enough about Biden to conduct a competent interview, or because he doesn’t have the guts to call out an obvious lie. Continue reading →
Ethics Alarms 