Arts & Entertainment

Ethics Quote of the Week: Christian Toto

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

“‘SNL’ became hyper-partisan and abandoned bipartisan satire. ‘SNL,’ like the legacy media, mostly ignored President Joe Biden’s obvious mental decline, the most stark example of its liberal bias. Show founder Lorne Michaels pretends the show remains nonpartisan. Reality says otherwise. Screams it, to be precise.”

—“Hollywood in Toto” blogger Christian Toto as tonight’s much hyped “SNL50: The Anniversary Special” looms.

My sock drawer organization is in true crisis, so I had programmed my schedule to handle that task tonight long before I knew of the special. Otherwise, I would have certainly wa…oh, who am I kidding? No I wouldn’t have watched the show if my Roku was malfunctioning and the only alternatives were re-runs of “Rosanne” and “Hart to Hart.” As Toto correctly explains, the show betrayed its mission, its origins, its original fans (like me), the culture, and the tradition of political humor, satire and comedy itself.

Toto points out that “Saturday Night Live” had the power, influence and ability to be at the forefront of a counter-culture revolution. In doing so, it would have been a national unifying force, holding the excesses—and it has been almost all excesses—of the extreme progressive capture of the Democratic Party to the public ridicule and derisive finger-pointing it deserved and needed. James Carville recently ranted that “It’s like, there’s a plant somewhere in quote–progressive—unquote America, that just to seize how many jackass, stupid things that they can embrace. It’s stunningly stupid.”

But apparently not stupid enough to be funny.

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And Now, By Request, A Brief Musical Interlude…[Updated]

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

A good friend who is a legal, ethics and theatrical colleague of long standing was discussing his skepticism about Elon Musk’s DOGE mission. He reminded me that in 1982, my musical political and legal satire performing group “The Music Lobby” was hired to handle the entertainment for a Washington trade association’s convention during the 1982 mid-term campaign, when Ronald Reagan was urging voters to “stay the course” as he tried to reign in spending.

The opening number I wrote was a parody of the Four Aces’ most famous hit (I love the Four Aces), “Love is a Many-Splendored Thing,” from the sappy William Holden-Jennifer Jones movie of the same name. My friend, who is one of the rare vocalists who can approach that group’s astounding tenor ( the great Al Alberts) in range and blast, was part of the quartet that night (as was I), and we killed.

He told me today that it wouldn’t take much to update my lyrics to the present day. It didn’t. So here is the 2025 version of “Love is a Cut in Spending Thing.” Play the video above and sing along. And repeat…

Love is a cut in spending thing!
The elusive rose that voters chose
Donald Trump to bring…

It’s the engine of destruction
Of waste, fraud and corruption
To give back the economy its zing!

Fighting with passion, guts and will,
There is Elon Musk, from dawn to dusk
Finding scams to kill…

Once those wasted billions stabbed my heart,
But now it wants to sing!
For true love’s a cut in spending thing!

Of Signs, Flags and Art…

/ Jack Marshall / 24 Comments

Two controversies raise issues of ethical line-drawing in state and local laws.

1. Sign or Art? Leavitt’s Country Bakery in Conway, a community of more than 10,000 people in New Hampshire, erected a colorful mural over the store in 2022. It was the creation of local high school art students showing sunbeams shining down on a mountain range made of sprinkle-covered chocolate and strawberry doughnuts, a blueberry muffin, a cinnamon roll and other pastries. The muralwas popular with everyone but the local zoning board, which ruled that the painting was not art but advertising. This meant it was a sign, and at about 90 square feet, four times bigger than the local sign ordinance allows. Lawyers for Conway insist that “restricting the size of signs serves the significant government interest of preserving the town’s aesthetics, promoting safety, and ensuring equal enforcement.” The store’s owner sued the town in federal court in 2023, saying his freedom of speech rights were being violated. He’s seeking a symbolic single dollar in damages.

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“The Meat Axe”

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

I had some amusing bloody meat-axe graphics all ready to go for this post, but it is really about flat learning curves: the Democratic Party’s, the Axis news media’s, and maybe, frighteningly, the public’s.

Yes, once again we have a looming test of just how stupid the public really is. Democrats are betting their very existence on the public being as dumb as a box of Joe Bidens, and the biased, anti-Trump news media, having already been completely exposed as the enemies of the people Donald Trump said they are, have predominantly fallen back to the same tactics that served them so well in Trump 1.0. The unethical “advocacy journalists” are gambling that propaganda will prevail, and that the 2024 election was just a blip because the Democrats ran a babbling fool—but a historic one!—for President.

Trump’s tsunami of executive orders along with the relentless DOGE assault has the Axis searching for a magic bullet or two. They settled on two old unethical stand-bys: ad hominem attacks, aka. “kill the messenger,” and “It’s a constitutional crisis!” Trump being elected at all was a constitutional crisis for the Angry Left, and the phony “He’s breaching traditional democratic norms!” trope was core to both impeachments and the “Trump is Hitler” campaign refrain.

Elon Musk is being vilified by using classic Democrat class warfare tactics: he’s been successful and is rich, so obviously he’s only helping Trump cut spending because he greedy and he’ll make money from it somehow. How dumb does someone have to be to buy that logic? If there is anyone in the world who can be trusted not to be serving his country for the money, it’s Musk. I heard some mouth-foaming contributor on CNN screaming this morning that “Trump is a liar and criminal” and “Musk wasn’t even born here!,” an odd argument from a defender of illegal immigrants.

But the EA “Flat Learning Curve” graphic is up there because I heard Chuck Schumer—is he really an idiot or does he just play one on TV?—say that sure, everyone agrees that there is too much waste in government spending, but “this is a meat-axe!” Yup, it sure is, Chuck, and if you don’t know by now that the only way to seriously address systemic corruption, waste, incompetence, dishonesty and obstruction is with a meat-axe (or blow-torch, or metaphorical nuclear bomb), you’ve never successfully managed anything.

Experienced managers know this, and both Musk and Trump are experienced managers as well as successful ones. Good leaders know it too. Heck, I know it.

What Schumer is really saying is, “We don’t want to solve this problem, we want to look like we want to solve this problem, and we are confident that you out there listening are so uneducated, inexperienced, naive and gullible that you’ll fall for it…again.”

When a system is broken, corrupt and incorrigible, and because of its dysfunction causing constant harm, the technique of carefully trying to extract the jewels buried in the shit pile never works. It takes too long. Every inch of the shit will have advocates claiming that it isn’t really shit. Paring down the bureaucracy gets delegated to the bureaucracy, and improvement is minimal if you are lucky. Most of the time, the inefficiency, waste and corruption just gets worse. Nobody can deny that this is the futile path the United States government has been treading.

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Unethical TV Commercial In Oh So Many Ways: 2024 Hyundai Tuscon SEL

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Here’s now sinister this ad is: I must have watched it six or seven times before I thought, “Hey…wait a minute!”

The male “bad date” in the ad is so disgusting a viewer is half-hoping the woman pulls out a .44 and shoots him right between the eyes. This is masterful manipulation at work…he begins with an insult framed as blame causing him disappointment: “You’re too short.” Asshole. Then he reveals his narcicissm and boastfulness, showing the selfie “by the dumbbells.” Giant asshole! Next the air-drumming comment…UNBELIEVABLE asshole! When he gets to the bit about forgetting his wallet and “Sugarmamma,” the viewer is seeing red, and feeling that the victim of this toxic creep is being noble by just sneaking out rather than setting him on fire.

But she isn’t. She’s being an asshole too, just a slightly better one. Leaving the table on false pretenses to escape is cowardly and indefensible. Moreover, someone who misbehaves as outrageously as the “bad date” needs to be told just clearly how unacceptable his conduct is and why, since he obviously doesn’t know. His next victim will at least partially be the runaway date’s fault.

The commercial also showed an anti-female bias by making the bad date a male and his victim female. A genders switched version would inspire at least a substantial reaction from viewers of “What a weenie! The jerk doesn’t have the guts to confront that jerk!” But teh woman in the ad is also a weenie—it’s just that the Hyundai marketers are calculating that running away from confrontations and unpleasant situations is a girl thing, and socially acceptable.

No, it really isn’t. This is not only a stereotype, it’s a damaging one. Why haven’t we elected a female President yet? Accumulated cultural poison like this commercial is one of the reasons.

Incidentally, I hope that actor who plays the asshole was well paid for his performance, because he may end up dying single and alone as a result.

Ethics Observations on a Hollywood Controversy I Could Not Possibly Care Less About

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

This story gets a Kaufman, the Ethics Alarms label for a topic that rates George S. Kaufman’s famous assessment of his interest in Fifties crooner Eddie Fisher’s difficulties finding younger women to date. (Eddie, you may recall, was the husband Elizabeth Taylor divorced to hook up with Richard Burton, and who earlier, with Debbie Reynolds, fathered Carrie Fisher.) Kaufman said, when posed with Fisher’s dilemma on a TV panel show,

“Mr. Fisher, on Mount Wilson there is a telescope that can magnify the most distant stars to twenty-four times the magnification of any previous telescope. This remarkable instrument was unsurpassed in the world of astronomy until the development and construction of the Mount Palomar telescope. The Mount Palomar telescope is an even more remarkable instrument of magnification. Owing to advances and improvements in optical technology, it is capable of magnifying the stars to four times the magnification and resolution of the Mount Wilson telescope. Mr. Fisher, if you could somehow put the Mount Wilson telescope inside the Mount Palomar telescope, you still wouldn’t be able to see my interest in your problem.”

And yet there have been dozens of news stories and social media posts about the current story, and I feel compelled to comment.

“Emilia Pérez” is a 2024 Spanish-language “French musical crime comedy” about a Mexican cartel leader who enlists a lawyer to help her disappear so that she may transition into a woman. [Comment: Well, other movies with insane premises have managed to be good…] At the 97th Academy Awards, “Emilia Pérez” will have 13 nominations, including Best Picture. Karla Sophia Gascón, who plays the cartel leader, is the first openly trans woman to be nominated as Best Actress.

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A Nelson For Disney and “Snow White”

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

“The Nelson,” the Ethics Alarms designation for very special episodes of swell-earned schadenfreude, was introduced in 2023 in a post about…Disney’s live-action reboot of “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” the 1937 animated film that began building the Disney entertainment empire. Thus it is nicely symmetrical for Nelson to give his trademark “Ha ha!” to the trailer of this slow-motion disaster, which has set what is believed to be a YouTube record with, as of yesterday, 40,383 “likes” and 1,012,299 “dislikes.” The film is hitting theaters in March. Ethics Alarms warned Disney about what was bound to happen if and when this botched project ever got out of the cutting room. I wrote in part,

The ethics value defied here is competence, and what we are seeing is the classic sunk costs fallacy in its classic form. The Vietnam War was the most painful example of this breach of life competence and common sense, which holds that devoting a lot of time and/or resources to a failed project argues for devoting more of the same, lest those “sunk costs” go to waste. In reality however, what is being missed is that fact that whether or not one has invested a great deal in a lost cause, its status as a project that has proven itself unworthy of investment is unaltered. Doing what Disney is doing with the “Snow White” project is called “throwing good money after bad.” It is bad business—incompetent, wasteful, and irresponsible.

First, Disney woke fanatics thought it made sense to cast a Snow White-of-Color, which makes no sense since the story makes such a big deal about how “fair” the heroine is. Then, because a single au courant little person actor complained about the dwarfs in the classic fairy tail, Disney eliminated them in favor of these dorks…

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Again: How Does One Ethically Respond When One’s Friends Are Slipping Into The Throes Of Madness?

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Nah, the Trump Deranged aren’t losing their frickin’ minds…

That’s the most recent cartoon from Ann Telnaes, that witty, subtle, objective and non-partisan political cartoonist who quit the Washington Post who didn’t think her juvenile submission was worth publishing. So now she’s operates from her substack, issuing brilliant art like that. Incredibly, one of my oldest and most accomplished friends posted that crap—it’s the equivilent of a schoolboy drawing of the unpopular kid with blacked out teeth and horns—with approval on his Facebook page, where his decision was roundly praised as he revealed that he subscribed to her visual hate-fests. This is the equivalent of someone announcing that he has decided to subscribe to the “Turd of the Week” service. Another equally rational, intelligent Facebook friend until he went bonkers posted a long, irrelevant quote from the Nuremberg trials about the nature of fascism, and everyone metaphorically nodded and applauded as if it has anything to do with current events.

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Is “The Three Amigos” Really Racist, or Have I Just Been Brainwashed?

/ Jack Marshall / 29 Comments

I am proud to say that I thought “The Three Amigos” was a largely unfunny and lousy movie when I saw it the first time…this, despite the fact that I generally admire John Landis as a director of comedies (he will always have a place dear in my heart for directing “Animal House”), and although I generally appreciate the talents of the movie’s stars, Steve Martin and Martin Short (Chevy Chase not so much). For some reason it has been showing repeatedly on MGM+ of late, and upon re-watching the thing after my sock drawer was in order, I found another reason to hate it other than its annoying tone and its predictable gags. This time around, the film seemed egregiously racist.

Oh no! Have 40 years of relentless bludgeoning by political correctness, hyper-sensitivity and wokism taken over my brain? When I first viewed the film (which Wikipedia tells me was ranked 79th on Bravo’s list of the “100 Funniest Movies,” a factoid that only reaffirms my long-standing belief that Bravo is useless), that thought never occurred to me for a second.

One of many films that borrows heavily from the Western classic (and ethics movie) “The Magnificent Seven,”—others include “A Bug’s Life” and “Battle Beyond the Stars” along with a pretty bad remake, with Denzel Washington standing in for Yul Brenner—“The Three Amigos” (the film’s score is by the same composer who scored “The Magnificent Seven”) tells the tale of three incredibly white silent movie stars who end up rescuing a town of substantially helpless and poor Mexicans. The town’s tormenter is “El Guapo,” the evil leader of the most ugly, stupid, dirty and brutal band of Mexican bandits in silver screen history. All right, maybe the Mexicans in “The Wild Bunch” are worse, but the white guys in that bloody film are hardly what you’d like to see your daughter bring home to meet the family either. Naturally the three white guys prevail, despite their collective IQ of about 210, for an average of 70 each (it actually breaks down to 85 for Martin’s character, with Short at 70 and Chase at 65).

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Sanctuary! Well, Not So Much…

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

It is mordantly amusing to listen to progressives on MSNBC bemoan the incursion of ICE into the “sanctuary” of churches attempting to extend their invisible force field around illegal immigrants. These are the same people who have shown no respect or reverence for Americans who assert their religious beliefs regarding, to take one infamous example, compelled speech.

In the case of church sanctuary, they are oh, a couple centuries behind the times. Allowing a church to harbor criminals and others sought by the state is a tradition that goes back to Roman times, and here and there it has been bolstered by the law. Not here and now however. The tradition makes no sense in modern times, and if churches have no legal grounds to protect lawbreakers, the claims of so-called sanctuary cities and states are weaker still.

The political and ideological Left has dashed itself on the rocks of illegal immigration, and based on some of the talking head nonsense I saw on MSNBC and CNN today, they are still dashing. When they are not crying “Think of the children!” (Note: law-breaking parents who put their children in untenable positions by their parents’ conduct are 100% accountable for those children’s plight) the apologists for illegal border-crossers are asserting that they are “human beings” and deserve to “have their humanity respected and recognized.” That’s fine: nobody denies that they are human beings. They are also human beings who do not belong in the United States.

This, for some strange reason, seems difficult for some progressives and Axis hacks to grasp. One of the two women I saw rending their garments over the Trump deportation policy, stuttered, babbled, shrugged, sighed and finally said, “I just can’t believe that this is happening! It’s so cruel!” Her partner in absurd “Good Illegal Immigrant” rhetoric nodded and agreed that deporting illegal immigrants who weren’t violent criminals is a violation of human rights.

There is apparently, according to these revolutionaries, a human right to live anywhere you want to. This is pure “Imagine-ism,” probably caused by hearing John Lennon’s fatuous paean to brainless utopianism one time too many. Both women also bemoaned the “collateral damage” of deportations. All law enforcement has “collateral damage” to families and others who depend on the law-breakers. That is a reason not to break laws, not to stop enforcing them.

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Bonus cultural literacy quiz: Who is that lovely young actress playing Esmeralda in that clip from “The Hunchback of Notre Dame”? No cheating, now: this is an ethics blog…