Arts & Entertainment

Standards, the Salahis, Bluto, and Us

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

A sane culture discourages ethical misconduct by condemning and punishing it. The American culture, thanks to greed, intellectual rot and an irresponsible media, rewards unethical conduct by making it profitable. This isn’t a trivial matter.

Tareq and Michaele Salahi are about as despicable a pair as one can imagine, redeemed only by the fact that they haven’t caused any oil spills, aren’t abusing children and haven’t killed anyone. They are full-time grifters, and are diligently working to profit by exploiting America’s sick obsession with media celebrity. They crashed a White House dinner in November, costing several people their jobs, and launching multiple investigations that added to the tax-payers’ burden. None of that mattered to them, of course, because the irresponsible escapade advanced their idiotic, pathetic and selfish goal: joining the likes of Jose Canseco, Corey Feldman and Gary Busey on TV’s equivalent of belching, a reality show. Then, being completely shameless, they recently stalked a White House dinner again, getting themselves stopped by the Secret Service as they rode in a rented limousine, dressed in formal attire, with an “Inside Edition” camera crew in tow. This was just an “incredible coincidence,” they explained…wink-wink, nudge-nudge. Continue reading →

The Old Pro’s Betrayal, Baseball Style

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

It’s a dramatic scenario as old as Homer. The Young Hero (YH) lets his ego get in the way of his judgement, and the Old Pro (OP), now graying, diminished and wobbly, sets him straight with a cuff to the head, a sympathetic smile, and some tough love. Years later, the YH, now established and successful, credits the OP, now dead and perhaps forgotten, with making the difference in his life.

This isn’t just movie and novel stuff, as you know: it really happens. It may have happened to you. I know I’ve played both roles, and more than once.

In 2010, however, the plot is a little different.  Continue reading →

Ethics Hero: Campbell Brown

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Almost nobody is ever fired anymore. Obviously sacked Presidential staff, agency heads and Cabinet officials announce that they are leaving to “pursue other opportunities” or to be with their families. (Recent glaring example: Desiree Rogers, who “resigned,” just coincidentally after being instrumental in allowing two gate-crashers into a White House star dinner.) Nobody believes it, of course. The same is true of actors fired from movies, TV shows, and plays for being wrong for their parts or just impossible bt work with, who then announce that it was a “mutual decision.” All of this is intended to avoid the stigma of losing a job because, well, the individual just wasn’t delivering as hoped or promised. It doesn’t work, of course: nobody is fooled, but the charade simply adds to the public belief, increasingly justified, that everyone lies, all the time.

So although Campbell Brown’s stark honesty about why she is leaving her low-rated CNN show shouldn’t be anything special, it is. Continue reading →

Searching for Ethical Explanations For Inexplicable Media Conduct

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

I want to be fair to the news media; I really do. They work hard, and it must be maddening to hear themselves being described as biased, state-controlled Obama toadies when they feel they are making a good faith effort to cover all the important news with objectivity. So when there is an incident that seems to scream liberal media bias, like the almost complete failure to report or criticize Attorney General Eric Holder’s stunning admission that he had still not read the Arizona illegal immigration statute despite already going on record as believing it could lead to racial profiling, I believe that it only fair to search hard for legitimate, ethical reasons for their surprising handling of the story. Continue reading →

Empathy and Ethics Insanity in Hollywood: “CSI New York”

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

In this week’s episode of C.S.I. New York, entitled “Unusual Suspects,” a 14-year old is shot and his younger brother intentionally misleads the police regarding the shooter, identifying the wrong suspect who is ultimately chased by the police and fatally hit by a bus while trying to flee. Eventually the truth comes out. The two boys–armed with a gun!—robbed a bank, and the older boy, who engineered the crime, was shot by a man who subsequently took the loot from them.

The boys knocked over the bank because they overheard their mother say that she couldn’t pay the rent. This is apparently sufficient justification for the bank and the District Attorney to decide not to press charges against the little dears. As the show ends, two of the C.S.I. squad look in on the hospital room, misty-eyed. where the wounded boy lies recovering, as his brother and mother sit vigil by his bed.

“There’s a lot of love in that room,” observes one of the officers.

A lot of felons, too. Continue reading →

Ethics Hero Emeritus: Lena Horne, 1917-2010

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

When actress Hattie McDaniel, the imposing African-American actress who played “Mammy” in the film “Gone With the Wind,” was criticized for her willingness to accept stereotypical and often degrading roles, she countered, “I’d rather play a maid and make $700 a week than be one for $7.”  Not Lena Horne.  Breaking into the movie business as a dynamic and glamorous singer-actress in 1942, she insisted on a long-term contract with MGM that specified that she would never have to play a maid. Continue reading →

CBS: Nostalgia Spoilsport

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

For many years, I’ve been trying to track down a recording of the theme song from the wonderful 1963-64 TV anthology “The Great Adventure.” A critically praised, largely forgotten dramatic series that portrayed stories from American history, “The Great Adventure” began with a spirited march written by composer Richard Rodgers, of Rodgers and Hart and Rodgers and Hammerstein fame.

Now I can play the show’s intro on my computer any time I feel like being inspired, thanks to a wonderful web resource, televisiontunes.com. The site has collected over 15,000 songs and instrumental pieces from the entire expanse of television history, and it is a magic doorway to instant nostalgia, not to mention some fun and excellent music, like the Rodgers composition, that is difficult to find anywhere else. Want to hear, for example, “Interjections!”, the cleverest and catchiest of all ABC’s “Schoolhouse Rock” creations? It’s there…or rather, here.

But if you want to listen to the “Twilight Zone” theme, or the iconic intro to “Perry Mason,” or, most tragically of all, the opening strains of “Hawaii Five-O,” perhaps the best TV theme ever, you are out of luck. You are out of luck because CBS, alone among the networks, has had its lawyers start pulling off the best-known themes from the CBS shows, as is CBS’s right as the owners of them. Continue reading →

Twins on Trial: Just Like “The Patty Duke Show”!

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Are you old enough to remember “The Patty Duke Show”? You know, with Patty, then a young starlet fresh off her Broadway and film triumphs as Helen Keller, playing “identical cousins” Patty and Cathy (with a British accent)? If you do, you surely remember the disturbingly catchy theme song about “two pairs of matching bookends, different as night and day!” Well, here’s a story about recent “matching bookends” who caused some ethics problems. To introduce it properly, to the melody of Patty Duke’s theme: Continue reading →

The Last Word on “Taser Boy”

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Today the New York Times weighed in with an editorial on the Phillies taser incident, not surprisingly siding with the kinder, gentler majority who have argued against the position taken here, sometimes, like my passionate friends over at Popehat, in a not so kind or gentle way. “The best course there [Philadelphia], as anywhere, is smarter, more attentive security in the stands,” the Times said. “Maybe it’s also higher Plexiglas, stiffer trespassing fines, less beer. Force must always be the last resort. Tasering a showboating kid is just plain excessive.”

<sigh!>

Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce: Roman Polanski

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

I know, this is akin to shooting fish in a barrel. Still, Roman Polanski’s self-righteous protest of what he sees as victimization and injustice, recently published in the French magazine La Règle du Jeu, is worth noting if only as a useful case study of how privilege and rationalizations can lead to ethical delusion.

Polanski, proclaiming, “I can now remain silent no longer!”—which I doubt will take its place next to Dreyfus’s “I am innocent!” in the annals of memorable prisoner quotes—makes it clear in his statement that he has no remorse and admits no serious wrongdoing for drugging, raping and sodomizing a 13-year old girl, the 33-year-old crime that began his legal problems. Oh, he accuses authorities of being unfeeling to the now-grown victim, who has repeatedly said she would like to see the entire issue disposed of and forgotten so she can get on with her life, conveniently forgetting that his brutality and subsequent refusal to be accountable to U.S. justice are the sole reasons she is suffering. Continue reading →