Arts & Entertainment

When Ethics Alarms Don’t Ring: The Education Secretary’s Play List

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Wow. What an idiot.

Here are some sample lyrics from the songs our Education Dept. Secretary loves:

“Out o’ town, put it down for the Father of Rap And if yo’ ass get cracked, bitches, shut your trap. Come back, get back, that’s the part of success.”

“Fuck all you hoes. Get a grip, motherfucker!”

“My my, I’m big huh, I rip my prick through your hooters I’m sick, you couldn’t measure my dick with six rulers”

Secretary Cardona can listen to, read and love whatever he chooses, but his tweet—he quickly deleted it, of course, after multiple social media commenters explained to him that the tweet called into question his priorities and judgment—is a red flag to parents who don’t want their children to be immersed in a sexually-obsessed culture when they need to learn academic skills. This is the official who is overseeing U.S. education policy, and he saw nothing inappropriate about endorsing songs with lyrics like “Fuck all you hoes.”

Ethics Dunces: “Snow White” Star Rachel Zegler, And Disney (Of Course)

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

I thought actress Sarah Porkalub, who trashed the (ridiculous) Broadway production of “1776” that had given her the chance to play South Carolina’s Continental Congress delegate Edward Rutledge as an Asian woman (Don’t get me started!), was the most irresponsible and arrogant performer I had heard about in decades, and, in fact, she might still hold the title. But it’s now a close competition, as Rachel Zegler, Disney’s star of the almost as ridiculous live-action re-imagining of its animated 1937 classic, “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” as “Snow Latina and the Seven Whatever-the-Hell-They Are” has been allowed to insult her film’s progenitor, which, among other things, is substantially responsible for her employer’s very existence.

“It’s really not about the love story at all, which is really, really wonderful,” Zegler has blathered. “I mean, you know, the original cartoon came out in 1937 and very evidently so. Um… there’s a big focus on her love story with a guy who literally stalks her! Weird, weird, so we didn’t do that this time…People are making these jokes about ours being the PC Snow White, where it’s like, yeah, it is — because it needed that… our version is a refreshing story about a young woman who has a function beyond “Someday My Prince Will Come.'”

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Insufficient Mockery Alert #1: The “Jewface” Controversy

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Jonathan Turley likes to begin his posts on oft-visited topics (like speech suppression on progressive college campuses) by reviewing all of his past posts on the matter. If I started this post like that and listed all of the ridiculous, hypocritical, wokey, DEI-inspired casting ethics controversies EA has highlighted, there would be no room for the post itself. But I will supply a sampling…

Let’s see: a black actress can play Anne Boleyn, and James Earl Jones can play the Celtic King Lear, but a white actor is engaged in racism by playing Othello. Hmmm. Gay Hollywood actors (most of them are, after all) can play straight characters, but Tom Hanks apologized for playing a gay character (and winning an Oscar for it) in “Philadelphia.” Lou Diamond Phillips simultaneously asserted that as a Filipino actor he is entitled to play anyone—after all, he has made his living playing Hispanics, South Americans and Native Americans— then in the same interview said “I happen to agree that casting Caucasian people in what are supposed to be ethnic roles is not kosher.”

Yes, it’s Calvinball! The minority communities, supported by progressive DEI fanatics, make up the rules as they go along—whatever keeps whites, heterosexuals and non-disabled actors out of roles. Back in 2019, I designated this “the dumbest casting controversy yet”: that was when Bryan Cranston was criticized for playing a quadriplegic without being actually paralyzed from the neck down. Well, the DEI maniacs have gone way, way beyond that, and conveniently, the most recent ridiculous Calvinball installment is relevant to today’s nonsense.

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Ethics Verdict: “Rich Men North Of Richmond”

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

Cutting to the chase: It’s ridiculous that this standard issue country ballad is a culture war battlefield. Anyone who took the time to watch Ken Burns’ documentary on the genre will immediately recognize the themes, though Anthony’s blue collar anthem is a bit more whiny than most. Jeez, man, stop bitching and do something about it: that’s the American way! Though I guess he is, by exploiting the politicization of everything today to make a lot of money with a song that doesn’t offer anything new or original, just the familiar “Those rich politicians up North don’t care about us hard-working folks, so life is a struggle and it ain’t getting any better.”

Well, I’d rather listen to this than “Imagine.”

Here are the lyrics:

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“Painkiller”

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

“Painkiller,” the new Netflix series about the origins of the opioid crisis largely created by the despicable machinations of the Sackler family and Perdue Pharma, could not be better timed. Just three days ago there was another development in the fall of the Sacklers, as the U.S. Supreme Court temporarily blocked the implementation of the 2021 $6 billion deal in federal bankruptcy court that would have blocked future opioid lawsuits against family members, who added to their vast fortune by creating and peddling OxyContin to complicit doctors and unsuspecting members of the public.

OxyContin was introduced in 1995 as Purdue Pharma’s breakthrough drug for chronic pain. The company employed an unethical marketing strategy that family scion Arthur Sackler had pioneered decades earlier, lobbying doctors to prescribe the drug and increase its dosage by dangling gifts, free trips to “pain-management seminars,”( aka all-expenses-paid vacations), paid speaking engagements, and ego-stroking visits from comely sales reps with cheerleading credentials.

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Ethics Quote of the Week: Benjamin Franklin

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

“Thinking aloud is a habit which is responsible for most of mankind’s misery.”

Benjamin Franklin, quoted in the 2008 series “John Adams,” spoken by Franklin (Tom Wilkerson) as advice to Adams (Paul Giamatti)

I wasn’t looking for more perspective on Donald Trump’s most recent disqualifying outburst when I revisited the first two episodes of HBO’s 2008 series “John Adams” after many years. My wife and I were just seeking something intellectually stimulating, inspiring and real to watch after completing the bizarre fictional entanglements of “The Affair.” By pure happenstance, however, a dramatized conversation between John Adams and Benjamin Franklin following a session of the Continental Congress in 1775 had immediate relevance both to the post and several of the comment threads following it in which Trump defenders praised his apparently unbreakable habit of blurting out or typing every thought that jumps into his head.

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New From The “Nation Of Assholes”: Movie Theater Of Assholes

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Back in 2015, Ethics Alarms sagely predicted that an election of Donald Trump as President would begin a death spiral of American manners, civility and societal comity. It proved to be a lot more accurate than any cliamte change predictions so far, but it was still too optimistic. As EA has documented since, all ends of the political spectrum have devoted themselves to trashing respect, manners and decorum since 2016. Yes, Trump has been a catalyst, but so has “the resistance,” Democrats, Black Lives Matter and popular culture. And the destructive pandemic lockdown: don’t forget that.

We continue to discover the breadth and width of the unanticipated carnage of that dumb policy, from children who can’t read to the horrible “ghost runner” in Major League Baseball extra-inning games. Now, the Wall Street Journal reports:

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Another Unlikely Ethics Problem From “The Affair”

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

This one isn’t an ethics quiz; I know the answer. Maybe you’ll disagree.

In the final, 5th season of Showtime’s Chaos Theory and ethics series “The Affair,” the ethics carnage radiating from the now over-and-done-marriage-destroying tryst between Alison and Noah is still powerful. Alison is dead (murdered); Noah is out for prison, and teaching at a charter school in LA. His first wife and kids are also in LA, having followed her new, reliable, loving partner Vik, a surgeon, to a new post at a prestigious hospital.

But Vik is diagnosed with Stage 4 pancreatic cancer. He knows it’s incurable, and stubbornly refuses treatment. Asked by Helen, Noah’s wife before “The Affair,” what she can do, he answers, “Have my baby.” (That’s a selfish request, but it’s a different issue). Overwhelmed by self-pity, the prospect of impending death, and a “why me?” mood, plus being drunk and depressed after learning that Helen can’t have any more children at 50, Vik falls into bed with Sierra (above), a New Age, moon-ring, crystal-loving, 20-year-old woman-child hippie idiot next door. SHE gets pregnant as a result, and decides to keep the baby.

Helen learns about this as her crypto-husband (they never formally wed) is on his death bed. Later, after promising Vik, Helen tells Sierra that she will do what she can to help her with her now deceased sort-of husband’s offspring, because he so wanted to have a piece of himself live on, or something.

Now it’s nine months later. Sierra, an aspiring actress with IQ of a sponge, has invited about 20 New Age friends into her home to witness the birth of her child, “naturally,” in her living room. They romp around chanting, toking and dancing with funny things on their heads. Meanwhile, Sierra has been in labor for 24 hours, and a woman who may or may not be a trained midwife is telling her that her “negative energy” is keeping the baby from feeling welcome and other nonsense.

Sierra is exhausted and in pain. Helen shows up and Sierra shouts out that she can’t stand the pain and wants to go to the hospital. The acting midwife says that this is typical of first-time mothers under the influence of “negative energy,” and that Sierra doesn’t mean it. Helen is worried about the baby and Sierra.

What should she do?

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From Showtime’s Series “The Affair,” An Ethics Zugzwang “What Would You Do?”

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

As I noted in this post, I am slogging through Showtime’s ethics series “The Affair ” (2016-2021) again after catching much of it pre-streaming. One of the issues raised during an episode was discussed here. At the climax of the second season, a wildly contrived scenario that determined the course of the whole thing occurred. I write ethics hypothetical for a living, and I could not come up with one filled with more ethics conflicts, dilemmas and rationalizations.

Here’s the set-up: The four parties involved in “the affair” are Noah, a late forties, insecure, narcissist writer; Helen, his wife of 25 years with whom he has had four children; Alison, a young, clinically depressed former nurse whom Noah encountered in a chance meeting at Montauk restaurant, The Lobster Roll,” while his family was vacationing, and who subsequently engaged in a mad, impetuous affair with him that broke up his marriage and hers; and Cole, her ex-husband, who ran the family ranch and dealt drugs on the side.

At the point when the incident in question occurs, Noah and Helen are divorced, as are Cole and Alison. Alison and Noah are now married but estranged because Alison just informed Noah that what he thought was their infant daughter is in fact the result of an impulsive post-divorce one-time-only moment of passion with Cole when they were both drunk and depressed. (Everyone drinks a lot in “The Affair.”) Helen and Noah have finally agreed to share care of their kids, especially after Helen having a DUI with her youngest daughter in the car made her case for full custody untenable.

Stipulated: all members of the shattered couples have lingering intense feelings for each other.

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“The Affair”

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

I’m recommending the Showtime series “The Affair,” now streaming its five seasons (the show ran in 53 episodes from 2014-2019), as a challenging and perceptive ethics show. Covering, as you might guess, a sexual and romantic affair involving two couples and their extended family, and the chaotic consequences the illicit relationship triggers, the “The Affair” reaches into relationship ethics, friendship ethics, marital ethics, parenting ethics, community ethics, legal ethics, academic ethics and artistic ethics, and probably more: I’m finally watching the whole thing after seeing the third and fourth seasons a few years ago. Wrapped up in those larger categories are questions involving honesty, loyalty, conflicts of interest, empathy, and abuse of power.

The one irritant in “The Affair” is the scarcity of genuinely ethical or admirable characters. The closest is probably the primary victim of the affair, the adulterous writer’s wife, played by Maura Tierney (of “ER” fame). One aspect of the show that will benefit many is how awful so many of the parents portrayed in the show are: if you question your parenting abilities, “The Affair” will restore your confidence. (So far, my favorite moment was when a grown daughter finally orders her incredibly over-bearing, toxic and manipulative mother out of her home, saying, curtly, “I hate you.”

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