Arts & Entertainment

The Girl Scouts, the Loyal Wife, and “Wisconsin Sickness”

/ Jack Marshall / 138 Comments

Just what I want to see on my daughter's Girl Scout troop leader's husband's website! And you?

The Girl Scouts have been going through a strange period lately. There was the controversy over a transgender troop member, a boy who identified as a girl.  Then it was revealed that the organization’s literature was promoting Media Matters as a means of civic education.  This, however, takes the cake.

Stacy Hintz, a 28-year-old mother from West Bend, Wisconsin,was removed from her volunteer position as a Girl Scout troop leader because of her husband’s website. The site is called Wisconsin Sickness, is slick, professional, unique, and 100% batty. Here is its introduction:

“Whatever the reason, there is a deep and passionate psychosis that runs through the unstable synapses of those of us from Wisconsin, land of serial killers and cannibals. And we’re proud of it. Wisconsin Sickness, a Mental Shed project, is all about bringing the independent, underground Wisconsin scene together and spreading the sickness like a virus.”

And really, that’s nothing: wait until you see the site, which, among other things, celebrates Ed Gein, the serial killer/cannibal/necrophiliac whose horrific crimes and, uh, interior decorating style inspired “Psycho,” “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre,” and dozens of lesser horror films. Continue reading →

Ethics Alarms Recap: A Long Weekend of Ethics

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

If the long Presidents Day weekend took you hither and yon and away from ethical dilemmas and controversies, welcome back! Here is what went on here in a lively three days:

Punishment for Color Blindness: ESPN’s Unfair and Cowardly Suspension of Max Bretos

/ Jack Marshall / 71 Comments

What Max Bretos means by "chink in the armor." Not that ESPN cares.

The headline “Chink in the Armor: Jeremy Lin’s 9 Turnovers Cost Knicks in Streak-stopping Loss to Hornets” appeared on ESPN’s mobile web site last week, and it was quickly removed. ESPN apologized, then fired the over-night headline writer who thought it would be cute to make a racially-offensive play on words between the derogatory slur for a person of Chinese descent, and the old, respectable, and the completely non-racial phrase meaning “a flaw or weak point.”

ESPN’s response to the tasteless headline was appropriate.

But it wasn’t enough for ESPN, which was under a full barrage from the  political correctness police and race bullies as well as Jeremy Lin fanatics. So the station also decided to make a victim of  innocent anchor Max Bretos, suspending him for 30 days because he used the expression Wednesday when he asked New York Knicks legend Walt “Clyde” Frazier on air about Lin.

“If there is a chink in the armor, where can he improve his game?” Bretos asked. Continue reading →

Ethics Incoherence From Sir Paul

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

"Obladi oblada."

I thought about a lot of possible headlines for this post. “Most Muddled Ethics Statement of the Century” was a real contender. I thought about making it an Ethics Alarms quiz, with the plaintive query,“Can anyone please tell me what the heck Paul McCartney thinks he is saying?” And, yes, I thought about skipping the story completely, as I am not eager to rattle the cages of the zealous pot enthusiasts, several of whom bombarded me, my business and my wife with vicious and threatening e-mails last week.

But this cannot pass without comment. Paul McCartney has given an interview to Rolling Stone in which, among other things, he announces that he is giving up smoking pot as a responsible father of an eight-year-old girl.

“I did a lot, and it was enough,” the co-writer of “With a Little Help From My Friends” (“I get high with a little help from my friends…”) and “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds” tells the interviewer. “I smoked my share. When you’re bringing up a youngster, your sense of responsibility does kick in, if you’re lucky, at some point. Enough’s enough – you just don’t seem to think it’s necessary.”

This is completely bewildering. Is Paul saying he’s had his fill, and now that he has, come to think of it, it’s irresponsible to smoke pot? Is he expressing regret? Continue reading →

The Flag and Whitney Houston

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

If Ol' Blue Eyes was worthy, why not Whitney?

New Jersey Governor Chris Christie  ordered New Jersey’s flags flown at half-staff in official mourning for Whitney Houston, and a lot of people are outraged. The critics of the honor fall into two categories: those who believe that the honor should be reserved for military heroes and high government officials, and those who believe that Houston is especially unworthy because of her well-documented substance abuse problems.

For his part, Governor Christie defiantly declares that Houston, as a daughter of New Jersey, deserves the state honor because of her contributions to the culture.

Technically and officially, Christie is out of line. Federal law is very specific about the proper treatment of the flag, including when it can be flown at half-staff. Simply put, celebrities don’t qualify, no matter who they are. A state governor can proclaim that the flag be flown at half-staff in his or her state for fallen soldiers, but not for non-military individuals. But governors ignore the law routinely, and have for decades. Tennessee’s governor lowered the flag when Elvis died. Massachusetts did the same for Red Sox great Ted Williams, though he was also a war hero, so no one was going to object. The law, in terms of custom and enforcement, is a dead letter, and probably should be.

True, some governors have abused the spirit of the law, including Christie, when he lowered the flag for Clarence Clemons, the saxophonist for Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band—a great musician, but hardly a figure of transcendent national significance. If 4 USC Section 7 isn’t going to be followed or enforced, then we need some new standards, or before we know it they’ll be lowering the flag for Joan Rivers. Continue reading →

Ethics Quote of the Week: Chris Matthews

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

“Loyalty is the heart of Pat’s being. He is loyal to country, to church, to neighborhood to heritage. To Pat, the world can never be better than the one he grew up in as a young boy. Blessed Sacrament Church and Grade School, Gonzaga High School, Georgetown University. No country will ever be better than the United States of America of the early 1950s. It’s his deep loyalty to preserving that reality and all its cultural and ethnic aspects that has been his primal purpose and is what has gotten him into trouble. Not just now but over the years.”

—MSNBC talking head Chris Matthews, in his wistful on-air tribute to Pat Buchanan, who was fired from his long-time role as the left-wing network’s token hard-right conservative.

"Pat, I may disagree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it...on some other network."

Matthews’ quote helps explain why loyalty is the most corrupting of the ethical virtues. Loyalty is important and admirable, but when it is divorced from the other values, it can lead to rigidity, stubbornness, and corruption. When a person, organization or cause no longer embodies the qualities that justified the loyalty in the first place, loyalty can undermine ethical conduct as strongly as any vice.

The right is attempting to frame Buchanan’s dismissal as part of a conspiracy to silence conservative voices. I never understood why Pat was on MSNBC anyway, unless it was to have a particularly Jurassic conservative around to make MSNBC’s extreme liberal bias look reasonable by comparison. It was Buchanan’s latest book, “Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive 2025?,” that finally triggered his ouster. I haven’t read it, but I’ve heard Buchanan on this topic sufficiently already. He may not be a racist, xenophobe, homophobe and anti-Semite, but his confusion of the need to hold on to American cultural values, with which I agree, with the need to keep America as white, Christian, heterosexual and Anglo-Saxon as possible is hard to distinguish from racism, homophobia, xenophobia and anti-Semitism. If I were running a news network, I wouldn’t employ him. Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce: Oprah Winfrey

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

If enough of these tune in to your TV show, the number of real viewers don't matter. Which gave Oprah an idea...

Oprah Winfrey’s new cable network, OWN, is foundering, so the much-worshipped icon of female empowerment empowered herself to rig the ratings system by sending out this tweet to her gazillion Twitter followers ( all right, she has only 9, 253, 598) Sunday night:

“Every 1 who can please turn to OWN especially if u have a Neilsen* box.”

OWN was debuting a new show called “Oprah’s Next Chapter.” Since a Nielson household is one of the 25,ooo Americans whose viewing habits are extrapolated to calculate the estimated viewers of any program nationwide, a direct appeal to someone with a Nielson box is an attempt to cheat. Those boxes count as many thousands of viewers in the ratings process, which is why the identity of the Nielson household is carefully protected. It is also why the penalty for trying to manipulate the ratings (if only the Nielson households and nobody else watched Oprah’s show, the ratings would inaccurately indicate that the program was a sensation) is to have the offending program’s ratings erased entirely. Continue reading →

American Idol Ethics, Group Day, 2012

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Johnny Keyser

American Idol’s Group Day is the one stretch of the show that is more reality show than competition, and it usually delivers the best ethics dramas of the season. Last year, for example, the Group Day chaos—all the Idol wannabes have to form combos and rehearse an a capella number in harmony, often fighting, crying or collapsing in the process—produced a moment of courage and character when Scotty McCreery, the eventual winning Idol, stepped up and took full responsibility for the rotten conduct of his group, which had tossed out another young man at the last minute to take McCreery in.

This year there were ethics heroes and dunces, but mostly dunces. A real gem was the awful stage mother of competitor Brielle Von Hugel, who was filmed in rehearsals complaining how weak a singer her daughter’s fellow group member Kyle Crews was. After Crews crashed and burned in the performance, and was the only member of the group cut, Mrs. Von Hugel was shown insincerely telling him what a “good voice” he had. Kudos to Idol’s director for immediately re-running her backstage slamming of the kid’s voice in the previous episode. Continue reading →

America Is Severely Confused About Domestic Abuse

/ Jack Marshall / 102 Comments

John Wayne paddling his wife (Maureen O'Hara) in "McClintock!" I love ya, Duke, but this isn't funny any more....if it ever was.

Violence inflicted by one partner in a relationship upon another is absolutely unethical, yet it is one of those embedded cultural habits from the bad old days that still flourishes. Over at the Whitney Houston post, where I am being over-run by the drug-legalization zealots, sicced on me by a sad website where people indulge their dreams of legally de-braining themselves on a regular basis, there is widespread contempt for the concept  that cultural norms of what is right, wrong and worthy of shame controls our worst impulses. That contempt is as crippling as it is ignorant, for controlling behavior is what cultures do, and why they are essential. And our culture is still giving confusing signals about domestic abuse. Two recent examples: Continue reading →

Greedo Ethics

/ Jack Marshall / 26 Comments

Who shot first?

Jedi Emeritus George Lucas betrayed a warped concept of cowboy ethics, self-defense and ethics generally in a recent Hollywood Reporter interview in which he was quizzed about his technological fixes on the original Star Wars trilogy. The topic was the shooting of Greedo in the bar, when Han Solo blasts away at the green, fishy porcupine-like villain, who has a gun pointed at him:

Lucas: Well, it’s not a religious event. I hate to tell people that. It’s a movie, just a movie. The controversy over who shot first, Greedo or Han Solo, in Episode IV, what I did was try to clean up the confusion, but obviously it upset people because they wanted Solo [who seemed to be the one who shot first in the original] to be a cold-blooded killer, but he actually isn’t. It had been done in all close-ups and it was confusing about who did what to whom. I put a little wider shot in there that made it clear that Greedo is the one who shot first, but everyone wanted to think that Han shot first, because they wanted to think that he actually just gunned him down.

Lucas’s idea of what constitutes a “cold-blooded killer” runs counter to law, common sense, and ethics. Continue reading →