Arts & Entertainment

How Paul Anka Proved Harry Truman Right…

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

I am not a big fan of Paul Anka or his work, so I considered the new documentary on his career a default choice this morning since ice is on my satellite dish and the channel selection on Direct TV was severely limited. But it’s true: you learn something new and useful almost every day, and often in the least expected places.

I did not know, for example, that Anka wrote “Johnny’s Theme,” the now iconic music that Johnny Carson walked onto the stage to at the start of his version of “The Tonight Show.” But it’s how it ended up as Carson’s entrance music that hammers home an ethics lesson.

When Johnny Carson was preparing to take over from Jack Paar as the host of “The Tonight Show” in October 1962, he ran into Anka, whom he had worked with in a TV special. Carson mentioned to Anka that they needed a new theme, so the pop star composer of “Put Your Head on My Shoulder,” “Puppy Love” and the theme to “The Longest Day” repurposed the instrumental arrangement for “It’s Really Love,” a song recorded by his one-time girlfriend Annette Funicello (not one of Annette’s hits) and sent a demo to Carson.

Johnny phoned Paul and thanked him for the offer (and said he and Ed McMahon loved the tune) but said that “Tonight Show” bandleader Skitch Henderson had “his nose out of joint” (does any one use that phrase any more?) because Carson wanted to use a melody written by a “20-year-old kid.”

So Anka suggested that Johnny Carson write new lyrics to his song and that they call it “Johnny’s theme,” which would then be the composition of the “20-year-old kid” and Henderson’s boss. Brilliant! Henderson had to consent to the song’s use every night, and it was Johnny’s walk on music for 30 years until Carson handed over the show to Jay Leno.

Carson’s name on the song meant that he got half the royalties, which averaged $400,000 per year: Carson’s cut was $200,000 a year for lyrics that were never heard or sung. “Johnny’s Theme” had been played more than 1,400,000 times by the end of the Carson’s show’s run. Anka says that Carson admitted he was embarrassed to make all that money for nothing, but the singer shrugs and smiles about it. Johnny got a great theme, and they both made money.

My favorite Harry Truman quote, perhaps my favorite ethics quote by any President and right up there with Winston Churchill’s immortal, “Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm,” is:

“It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit.”

I don’t know if Paul Anka was familiar with the quote or even if he knows about it yet, but his solution to the “Tonight Show” dilemma is as good an example of Harry’s wisdom in practice as we are likely to see.

[Still waiting for WordPress, or someone, to tell me how to get page breaks in posts under their new %$^&#@ block system…]

Should It Matter If a Children’s TV Hostess Is a Virulent, Lying Anti-Semite?

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

It is remarkable the things you learn while searching for ethics topics that have nothing to do with President Trump.

For example, I had never heard of Ms. Rachel, perhaps because my ‘kid’ is 31. Ms. Rachel is the professional moniker of educator, YouTuber, and singer-songwriter Rachel Accurso. She created the YouTube series “Ms. Rachel” (originally known as “Songs for Littles”), a children’s music series that focuses on language development for infants, toddlers, and preschoolers.

That’s nice! Unfortunately, she can’t resist exposing the fact on social media that she hates Jews . Last week, she “liked” a post by one of her followers on Instagram that said “Free America from the Jews.” Oh-oh. Then she posted a video in which she wept pitifully and claimed that she had meant to delete the thing but inadvertently “loved” it.

Oh. Well, anyone can make a mistake, though I don’t see how someone could make that one. The problem is that this kiddie educator has been ranting on social media about Israel “genocide” in Gaza for quite a while now. Earlier, she posted on Instagram, ‘”Free Palestine, Free Sudan, Free Congo, Free Iran.” Last year she filmed a ‘Letter of the Day’ video with Palestinian journalist, Motaz Azaiza. Azaiza has praised Hamas’s October 7, 2023 terrorist attack on Israel, in which infants and children were massacred among other victims. He once posted online, “May God curse the Jews themselves.”

Call me judgmental, but hosting an anti-Semite like this guy seems like an ominous sign for a child educator. Yet Ms. Rachel appears to be uncancellable. Over at “Unspiked,” Brendan O’Neill speculates why. He writes in part,

“The Damocles sword of cancellation dangles precariously over all of us for such trifling speechcrimes as wondering if the Koran is bollocks (Islamophobia) or thinking immigration should be curtailed (racism). And yet you can openly rub shoulders with anti-Semitic people or anti-Semitic posts and the cancellers will look the other way.

“Be honest: what fate would befall a kids’ entertainer if they hosted on their show a man who had once said ‘Fuck all black people’? And if they then liked a post on Instagram that said ‘Get all blacks out of America’? We know exactly what would happen. They would be savagely cancelled. The only time we’d ever see them again would be in a Netflix documentary 20 years hence about the much-loved kids’ clown who lost it all by chumming about with racist scum.

“…The exact opposite has happened with Ms Rachel. She may have exposed the kids who follow her to a man who once said ‘Curse the Jews’, and she may have liked a post calling for the mass expulsion of Jews from the US, but she will survive. And thrive. Cancel culture will lay not one finger on her. And we all know why: because Jews enjoy none of the protections of ‘political correctness’. Jews have not been granted access to the kingdom of liberal concern. Offending Jews is seen as a lesser crime than offending any other group. Ms Rachel will suffer no consequences so long as her blunders only touch on the lives and feelings of Jews.

“The real problem is not Ms Rachel, who’s fundamentally just another celeb building a virtuous self-image from the rubble of Gaza. It’s the politics of identity. It’s that ideology’s ruthless demotion of Jews to the bottom of the league of identities. Scuff a page of the Koran and you’ll be had up for Islamophobia. Film a kids’ video with a man who said ‘Curse the Jews’ and you’re grand. There it is: the merciless neo-racialism of the woke era….”

This is another Cognitive Dissonance Scale issue at heart. Maybe a competent online children’s educator can still be regarded as effective and trustworthy as long as she keeps her vile political and social views out of her videos, songs and books. On the other hand, as Captain Hook would say, I’d rather have someone who isn’t a lying anti-Semite entertaining my children if I have a choice.

You?

Ethics Quote of the Day: “Adams Rib”

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

“I see something in you I’ve never seen before and I don’t like it. As a matter of fact, I hate it…Contempt for the law, that’s what you’ve got — it’s a disease, a spreading disease -… You think the law is something that you can get over or get under or get around or just plain flaunt. You start with that and you wind up in the…Well, look at us! The law is the law, whether it’s good or bad. If it’s bad the thing to do is to change it, not just to bust it wide open! You start with one law, then pretty soon it’s all laws, pretty soon it’s everything.”

—Adam Bonner, assistant district attorney, played by Spencer Tracy in the great Hepburn-Tracy comedy “Adams Rib” (1949). The lines were written by the movie’s screenwriting team, Garson Kanin and Ruth Gordon

I was re-watching the film this week because I needed a laugh, not because I expected to be yanked kicking and screaming into the into 2026 Anti-I.C.E. madness. But Tracy’s impassioned speech shocked me out of my amusement: When did that rational, pure American, self-evident and irrefutable statement about the society’s crucial fealty to the Rule of Law become controversial?

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Incident At Harris-Teeter’s

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

Last night I found myself bereft of several food items, basics like bread, spaghetti sauce, milk, hot dog relish and grape soda, so I took a jaunt over to the local grocery store to re-stock. The place was almost literally deserted; I thought of Dick Van Dyke, on his show’s famous flying saucer episode (“Unny Uffs!”) working late in an empty office and saying to himself in his best Boris Karloff impression that he felt like “the only living thell in a dead body.”

But one human being was in evidence…a short, slight little middle aged man with slicked down hair who is apparently on the job all day and night, all week long. I see him every time I visit that branch. He is always bustling about, restocking shelves, giving directions to customers, and generally hurrying up and down aisles like the White Rabbit in Disney’s animated “Alice in Wonderland.”

I had thought before, in past visits, that he was as hard working and professional an individual as I had ever encountered anywhere in any occupation, always cheerful, always cheerily greeting me and anyone else he came across. My only discourse with him before last night was to answer his “How are you today. sir?” greetings and to answer, “No, I’m okay, thanks!” when he asked. “Can I help you find anything?’

Last night, however, when we passed in an aisle and briefly ended up face to face, I noticed that he had a blackened, swollen eye and a large bandage over his cheek beneath it. So I inquired, “What happened to your face?” His expression immediately brightened, his demeanor relaxed, and he began telling me that he had that week an operation on a basil carcinoma. Animatedly, the man, whose name I did not know and still don’t know, told me about his history with skin cancers, the experiences of his three sisters, the size of the small growth removed, and more: where he grew up, how much time he has spent in the sun as a child, and his favorite sports and activities growing up. I stood there for 20 minutes listening to him. It seemed that he was so grateful to receive a caring response from one of the hundreds of Harris Teeter’s shoppers he must encounter every day, most of whom treat him as if he were a mannequin at Target, as I always had.

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Unethical Quote of the Day: Some Jerk on Twitter/”X”

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

“He’s more than what you’ll ever be.”

—Ian Mendoza, whoever the hell he is, an “X” commenter whose profile says “It’s okay to be anti-Israel don’t let anyone else tell you otherwise”

Out of the mouths of morons occasionally come enlightening idiocy!

Ian was delivering what he thought was a crushing retort to critics of the latest Trump Deranged rant from actor Mark Ruffalo, this one at the Golden Globes. Ruffalo’s name now comes up #1 on Google if you search for “Anti-Trump actor,” just ahead of Robert DeNiro. Like DeNiro, Ruffalo is an excellent actor; also like DeNiro (and a surprising number of seemingly intelligent actors), he is a political, historical, critical thought-deprived ignoramus. The actor was prominently wearing the anti-I.C.E. “Good” pin at the awards show, which I consider signature significance. His latest rant was so fatuous it isn’t worth my time to fisk it, but I was impressed with Ian’s comment.

It perfectly encapsulates the logical fallacy that makes so many Americans pay attention to the outbursts of Dunning-Kruger suffering celebrities. Ruffalo, like AOC, was a bartender for almost a decade, not that there’s anything wrong with that. But he apparently got the idea that he was some kind of public policy guru by winning arguments with drunks. Other than mixology, his only other occupational pursuit of any duration has been acting, which he began in earnest in high school and then immediately entered the professional ranks upon graduation. Wikipedia tells us Ruffalo attended “progressive schools,” so he is a cautionary tale in the perils of ideological indoctrination.

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If It Exists, Heaven Isn’t a Game Show. I Hope.

/ Jack Marshall / 46 Comments

When ” Dilbert” cartoonist Scott Adams, in his last days before dying, announced that he had converted to Christianity, my immediate thought was that it was either a final joke by the “cancelled” wit and iconoclast or a classic deathbed conversion that lowered my opinion of him. It may have been both based on his final tweet, which said in part,

“Many of my Christian friends have asked me to find Jesus before I go. I’m not a believer, but I have to admit the risk-reward calculation… for doing so looks so attractive to me. So here I go. I accept Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior and look forward to spending an eternity with Him. The part about me not being a believer should be quite quickly resolved; if I wake up in heaven, I won’t need any more convincing than that. I hope I’m still qualified for entry.”

Ann Althouse, for some strange reason (but she was always a big Scott Adams fan) finds this announcement astute and charming, rating it “an impressive mix of intelligence, respect, humor, and honesty. I have read many Christians cheering for Adams as well.

This is demeaning to God and Christianity, and I say this as a life-time agnostic. What kind of silly religion holds that you will reach paradise for eternity as long as you say the magic words, whether they are true or not, just before shuffling off these mortal coils?

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What’s This? A TV Show Satirizes Woke Obsessions?

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

And rather nastily, too.

I’ve been watching the Taylor Sheridan’s Paramount+ series “Landman” starring Billy Bob Thornton as a cynical oil drilling executive with the most non-feminist wife in TV history and a bimbo daughter. In the episode that just dropped, the daughter finds herself paired at TCU with a roommate from Hell: a militant, non-binary extremist who demands a “safe space” in “their” dorm room without music, light, fragrances…life, basically. Ainsley, the bimbo daughter who doesn’t know what her roommate’s pet ferret is (“What’s a ‘weasel’?”) despite an IQ around 80 (That’s a guess, and it might be generous) and a vocabulary to match, is shown winning a brief argument over the validity of gratuitous pronouns, with the grim roommate saying, not in jest, that without instruction she wouldn’t know what Ainsley “identifies” as.

I found the portrayal of the non-binary character unfairly negative, playing into the worst stereotypes imaginable. I know several non-binary individuals and trans men and women, and none of them is anything like the monster this character is. How is that character any different from a fairness perspective than a Steppin Fetchit character denigrating blacks as lazy, shuffling dolts, or the many ridiculous gay characters who lisp, flop their hands from limp wrists in Mel Brooks movies?

Of course, Ainsley Norris, Billy Bob’s bimbo slut daughter, is an absurd stereotype too, but at least she’s nice, sweet, and benign. What surprised me about the episode is that the writer and producer were willing to oppose their super-woke community’s knee-jerk, absolute support of the LGBTQ community, including its excesses, particularly as a trans rights controversy hits the Supreme Court.

The ethics question is whether such an extreme slap in the metaphorical face of the non-binery/trans social trend is a welcome ethical course correction for a biased popular culture, or unethical punching down at a troubled group that already has a lot to cope with, including body dysphoria, indoctrination by the Left in crippling beliefs, hostile, even violent bigots, and arguably, mental illness.

What’s going on here?

A Confederacy of Dunces at the Golden Globes

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

The sock drawer isn’t small enough not to keep me from watching the annual Golden Globes broadcast, the parade of awards from people I don’t know or respect to performers I’ve barely heard of for shows I haven’t seen. Nonetheless, Hollywood (and others) managed to disgrace itself once again, reminding us that the artists who make our mass entertainment have the critical thinking skills of paper clips.

Once again the “Hollywood progs” (the name used by critics too genteel to call them “Hollywood assholes”) promoted the misguided latest woke cause. Last year it was the anti-Israel position insisting that nation should stop fighting Hamas and let the terrorists re-stock for the next massacre. This year, stars were wearing the fatuous anti-ICE pin, “Be Good.” Yeah, let’s all demand open borders, interfere with law enforcement, use our cars to block I.C.E operations, resist arrest, nearly run down and officer and get shot! Oh-oh, Sidney Wang is demanding a word…

Yeah, we know, Inspector.

We also know now that the late neighborhood open-borders fan was not good, as she was a contributor to Black Lives Matter, signature significance for someone who supports anti-white racism, lies (Michael Brown was murdered, you know!), riots, anti-law enforcement violence, dishonest news and scammers.

But never mind! The ACLU, among other principle-free organizations including communist groups, funded the creation and distribution of that tiny salute to idiocy. Talk about minds: the ACLU has genuinely lost theirs, along with any claim to respectability and credibility. The organization used to stand for free speech. Now it is deliberately using its reputation and resources to mislead the public into thinking Good was engaging in it by blocking law enforcement and defying the law.

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Confronting My Biases #27: Middle-Aged Men Wearing Basball Caps Backwards

/ Jack Marshall / 31 Comments

I started really being annoyed at this when “The Gilmore Girls,” an annoying chick TV series to begin with, began featuring the single mom’s boyfriend who wore his cap like the guy in the photo. The graphic is a screen shot from a Tik-Tok video in which the guy is railing against wearing caps like that because you look like an idiot when you do. Verdict: True. In fact, I assume anyone who wears a baseball cap that way IS an idiot. It looks stupid, it defeats the purpose of the brim—there is no excuse for it whatsoever, except, in the opinion of the guy in the video, it is an attempt to look “like a ‘bad boy.'”

Oh. Well that’s all right then!

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Yup, Mayor Mamdani Is a Deluded Utopian and This Will Not End Well For New York

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

At all.

Ethics Alarms has repeatedly pointed out that it is unethical to waste time, passion and civic debate on nice, hopeful, idealistic policy objectives that are literally impossible. The anthem for these positions, again as I have noted ad nauseam, is my least favorite John Lennon song, “Imagine.” Yes, I regard anyone who takes that tripe seriously as mentally-challenged and historically, economically and politically illiterate. The official political ideology of these misty-eyed utopians is, of course, Communism.

Utopians, which include at the lower levels of delusion progressives generally, persist in the belief that human nature isn’t an immutable constant and that certain principles of reality can somehow be wished away if we all close our eyes and hope hard enough. Thus we keep hearing that there shouldn’t be wars, violence, hunger—President Franklin Roosevelt, in his cynical, pandering “Four Freedoms” speech, actually said that there should be freedom from “want.” Riiiight, Franklin, like that’s going to happen.

New Yorkers, in their infinite ignorance, elected utopian (and communist) Zohran Mamdani as their mayor. The charismatic demagogue ran on all sorts of claims that various things should be achievable by government without his having any experience whatsoever in making and executing policy. Yesterday, the New York Times reports, Zohran engaged in a signature significance example of irresponsible wishcraft, handing out vouchers for free tickets to a theater festival featuring experimental works. “The shared laughter in a crowded theater, the eager debrief after a musical, the heavy silence that hangs over all of us in a drama — these are moments that every New Yorker deserves,” Mamdani said.

Got it. Everyone deserves live theater, see, so there. It costs too much, though, so “POOF!” let’s make it cheaper.

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