Arts & Entertainment

Ethics Quiz: The Cartoon Quote

/ Jack Marshall / 34 Comments

I would, left to my own instincts, categorize this as a “When Ethics Alarms Don’t Ring” episode. But Legal Insurrection, a conservative commentary blog that I find to be usually reasonable, feels otherwise, so I’ll frame this as an ethics quiz.

Robert Ternansky, a lecturer at UC-San Diego, was interrupted by loud speaking  from the hallway outside his classroom. Ternansky walked into the hallway and seeing students he took to be Hispanic, immediately quoted the signature catch phrases of now politically incorrect Warner Bros. cartoon character Speedy Gonzalez, “The Fastest Mouse in All of Mexico”: “Sí, sí señor! Ándale, ándale! Arriba, arriba!”The video of the class also catches Ternansky  asking his students, “How do you say ‘quiet’ in Mexican?” One replies, it seems, “Caliente,” and the lecturer says,  “Caliente, huh? Help me. All I knew how to say was ‘Ándale, ándale, arriba, arriba.’ I don’t think that was — to be quiet? That’s like hurry up? Did I insult them?”

Apparently! Students complained, and the school responded with this statement:

UC San Diego officials were recently made aware of offensive and hurtful comments that a professor made in a chemistry class when video of the comments was posted to social media. At that time, the professor was engaged about his comments, and it was made clear to him that they do not reflect our community values of inclusivity and respect. The professor has since apologized to the students and will be doing so to others involved.

As a reminder to our community, and as was shared with media outlets who inquired, UC San Diego is committed to the highest standards of civility and decency toward all. We are committed to promoting and supporting a community where all people can work and learn together in an atmosphere free of abusive or demeaning treatment.

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day is, in the words of Legal Insurrection writer Mike LaChance…

“Does this strike anyone as a bit of an overreaction?”

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“1776” Actress Sara Porkalob Is An Ethics Dunce And Should Be Fired

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

The new, non-traditionally cast, “diversity”-pandering revival of “1776” is about to open on Broadway. Ethics Alarms already discussed it here: the production seems like a cynical, misguided, truly terrible idea that is likely to crash and burn, but as I wrote last month, “I hope the result is brilliant and illuminating.” I also wrote, “What I see, however, is a cynical abortion of a classic musical motivated by arrogance, ignorance, and greed.” In other words, the thing has a lot of self-inflicted problems standing in the way of critical and financial success, nicely symbolized by the photo above of an Asian-American woman playing slaveholding Continental Congress member Edward Rutledge singing “Molasses to Rum to Slaves” in the musical’s most dramatic scene. As a stage director and American history fanatic, I don’t see how having that song performed by someone who can’t evoke Rutledge in any way does anything but undermine the best song in the show. But hey, you never know.

One thing the radical production doesn’t need, however, is for that same performer to trash the production publicly. Here is “Rutledge,” Sara Porkalob, in an interview with Vulture’s Jason P. Frank:

“To me, the play is a relic. It is a dusty, old thing… On the inside, I’m cringing… I’m like, It’s okay. I wouldn’t have wanted it this way, but I am doing my job….[The direction] is horrible. I hate it… What I want to do with my time is make new works with collaborators…I feel like I’m going to work.”

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Mayberry Ethics

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

A theme here at ethics alarms is that ethics, unlike morality, is fluid and dynamic. Society gains in ethical enlightenment over time with reflection and experience.

Since I have been severely limited in my activity of late, I found myself watching an episode of the classic sitcom “The Andy Griffith Show.” Many, indeed most, of the popular shows from the Fifties-Sixties era feel stilted and naive today, but not all of them: “The Andy Griffith Show” is one that holds up beautifully. Like many TV shows then (but few today), the continuing saga of Sheriff Andy Taylor’s challenges as a single dad and the center of sanity in a small town full of Southern eccentrics often focused on societal values and ethics lessons, though it never crossed into preachiness.

The episode I happened across, “One Punch Opie,” was about peer pressure and bullying. A new kid in town is bullying the other children to do things they shouldn’t, like raid Mr. Foley’s fruit and vegetable stands outside his store and steal apples and tomatoes. When Opie (the then-unbearably cute Ron Howard) refuses to follow the gang, the much larger kid threatens him. Opie ultimately confronts the boy who quickly proves that he is a coward, and backs down, ending his malign influence over the other boys.

The bullying theme was not what struck me about the episode, however. The new kid breaks a street lamp with an apple, and Sheriff Andy has Opie round up the other boys who witnessed the crime so he can have a chat with them. (The troublemaking new kid refuses to come along.) The boys all say they witnessed the act, but didn’t throw the fateful fruit. Andy tells them that he’ll let their error in judgment go this time, but the next time, he’ll tell their fathers. “And you know what that means,” Andy says. “It means you’ll get a whippin’!”

Yes, in 1962, a wise and reliably benign TV authority figure casually referenced corporal punishment—probably with a belt, no less, as Andy didn’t say “spanking”—- as a fact of childhood and responsible parenting. Nobody blinked. Sixty years later, such a statement would cause an uproar, and be considered an endorsement of child abuse.

What accepted conduct today will seem equally wrongful in sixty years?

Thoughts On Spain’s Artistic Law School Cheat

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Yolanda de Lucchi, a law professor at Spain’s University of Malaga, recently shared photos on her Twitter account showing the most impressive exam cheating attempt she had ever encountered. One of her students tried to cheat on a law final by etching the criminal procedure law on eleven BIC pens. You can see what the pens looked like up close above. Here they all are:

If the student had put half the time into studying the material that he devoted to his baroque cheating technique, he wouldn’t have needed to cheat anyway. I was immediately put in mind of several Ripley’s “Believe it or Not!” oddities involving meticulous engravings of text on grains of rice, like this one, featuring the Lord’s Prayer:

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Stay Classy, Michelle!

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Former First Lady Michelle Obama’s voting promotion group “When We All Vote” has partnered with the BLK dating app and is doing “voter registration activations” with the company.” The BLK dating app is aimed at Black singles looking for hook-ups.

Last week, BLK released a video encouraging Black voters to go to the polls for reasons other than civic responsibility. It’s title: “No Voting No Vucking.” Vucking! See, that’s not vulgar, like, say “fucking.” Former First Ladies can approve of “vucking” for votes. Sample lyrics:

“No voting, no vucking, no voting, no touching,” rapper Saucy Santana sings in the video. “You wanna hit this booty, gotta do your civic duty!”

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Comment Of The Day: “For Some Strange Reason, The Playwright Didn’t Think ‘N-Word’ Carried The Same Dramatic Punch…”

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Confession: before I wrote the post that Curmie fashioned into his Comment of the Day, I emailed him the underlying story in advance, given his unofficial position as the Ethics Alarms dramaturg. I almost asked him to write a guest post on the head-exploding tale of a university banning a black playwright’s work about the civil rights movement because it has white characters using the word “nigger,” but I guessed, fortunately correctly, that he would provide a Comment of the Day on the topic whatever I wrote.

And do he did, very well indeed.

Here is Curmie’s Comment of the Day on “For Some Strange Reason, The Playwright Didn’t Think ‘N-Word’ Carried The Same Dramatic Punch…“

***

The first comment on this post, by JutGory, is especially apt. [ JutGory wrote: “The Woke Paradox: We must teach ‘real history’ even if it might hurt the feelings of white kids/We can’t teach ‘real history’ if it will hurt the feelings of black kids.”]

But, as someone who taught college-level theatre courses for over forty years and continues to do some scholarly writing in the field, I’d like to take the analysis a little further.

In the interest of full disclosure, I should mention that I have directed two plays which contain the word “nigger.” Both, Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Athol Fugard’s ”Master Harold”… and the boys, are widely anthologized and both are regarded as among the greatest works of 20th-century drama. The latter, which includes a particularly crude racist joke, is also unquestionably an anti-racist play, as Down in Mississippi appears to be (I confess I haven’t read it or seen it).

I was also asked by a recently-graduated black student a decade or so ago to play the role of a slave-owning plantation owner in a short film he had written and was directing. The character probably used the dreaded epithet at least a half dozen times in a four- or five-minute scene. I agreed to play the role, but for whatever reason the film shoot never happened.

My first question, unanswered by the linked article, is precisely who made the decision to cancel the performance. It certainly wasn’t the (black) playwright, who said that “maybe you should be less fragile. And try to listen to what your former generations are trying to teach you for the well good being of all of us,” and it’s unlikely to have been the theatre department, given that they were the ones who decided to produce the play to begin with.

Administrators above the level of department chair are almost never involved in the process of selecting a production season. But they will stick their noses into the process if there’s a potential controversy, even a fallacious one. We can reasonably surmise that it’s a dean, a vice president, or a president who is the Designated Weenie in this case. It certainly wasn’t the chairman of the Board of Trustees, Glenn O. Lewis, himself a black man, who points out that censorship is not a solution, and that “you don’t learn anything new until you get out of your comfort zone, and I think that is what Mr. Brown intended for this play to do.”

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For Some Strange Reason, The Playwright Didn’t Think “N-Word” Carried The Same Dramatic Punch..

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

Yes, this is another Strange Tale of the Great Stupid.

A depressing one.

In the opening scene of Down in Mississippi by African American playwright Carlyle Brown, a white man calls a black character “nigger” multiple times and threatens him after learning that he’s in the area to help register black citizens to vote. Texas Wesleyan’s Black Student Association shared an Instagram post about how many students were “deeply disturbed” that such scenes would be shown on campus, because it might “hurt Black students and possibly students from other marginalized communities.”

So the university decided not to mount the production. Brown, the playwright, argued that the word’s use in the play was necessary to maintain historical accuracy and to provoke strong responses. Yes, and he might have also pointed out that this is live drama, and the objective of live drama is to arouse the audience’s emotions. Glenn O. Lewis, the first black board chairman the university has had, diplomatically said that he understood how the language could make some students uncomfortable, “But when have we ever … learned anything in our comfort zone?” Lewis asked. “You don’t learn anything new until you get out of your comfort zone, and I think that is what Mr. Brown intended for this play to do.” Lewis added that censorship of Brown’s work is not a real solution.

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We Have To Talk About Velma…

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

I wish we didn’t.

I wouldn’t raise the issue except that the conservative blogs and commentators seem to be horrified by this most minor of pop culture developments—the sexual orientation of a five-decades-old Hanna-Barbara cartoon character?–and the usual progressive suspects are awash with joy. (Well, I guess you have to take your victories where you find them, however minuscule.)

The ethics issues are encompassed in the routine question, “What’s going on here?”

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The Failure Of “Bros”: Why Don’t Minorities Accept The Right Of Majorities To Feel Like They Do?

/ Jack Marshall / 39 Comments

Gee, what a shocking development! Non-gay audiences haven’t flocked to see a romantic comedy that advertises itself like that!

I’m a movie fan. I have lots of gay friends, family members and associates: I worked in the theater for decades. I respect them all; I support their right to live and love and marry whomever they please; I want them to be treated like any other law-abiding Americans in all things as they are judged solely on the content of their character, and regard discrimination and bias against them as despicable and unconscionable.

But I don’t enjoy watching gay sex and related activities.  I have every right to feel that way. I would no more pay, or take time out of my sock drawer duties, to see “Bros” than I would watch an NFL game, or attend a one-man show by Alec Baldwin. So sue me. But I think there are millions of Americans with similar tastes, and they span the generations.

Apparently the makers of “Bros” convinced themselves that non-gay (I will say “cis” when there is a loaded gun at my head and not before) Americans, who are, believe it or not, the majority, would go to see a romantic comedy about gays because they have been told that they should, and are bigots if the don’t comply. Non-gay America replied, “Bite me!,” and good for them. Continue reading →

Unethical Quote Of The Day: Blogger Ann Althouse

/ Jack Marshall / 24 Comments

“Who is Miles Teller?”

—Ann Althouse, at the end of her blog post commenting on the premiere of “Saturday Night Live” and the New York Times’ review of it

The SNL premiere was guest-hosted by Miles Teller.

I’ve got some income-producing work to do for a client early this morning and I shouldn’t be working on an Ethics Alarms post, and I know I’ve been picking on Ann a lot lately, but I really can’t let this pass.

It’s really simple: if Althouse is going to engage in popular culture commentary as if her opinion should be taken seriously (as in “is worth reading on her blog”), then she has a base obligation to be at least minimally informed regarding American popular culture. She isn’t. She has never been, and I have read her blog for more than two decades, back when she was a law professor. There are arbitrary pockets of pop culture that she is obsessed with (like Bob Dylan songs), but it has always been obvious that Althouse is not very conversant in classic films or network TV; she’s even blogged about this hole in her experience. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, except that if one is going to critique popular culture, especially a show that at least purports to satirize current personalities and themes within pop culture, it is irresponsible, incompetent and arrogant (dare I say, “stupid”?) do do so when you literally don’t know what you are talking about.

Sixty-something Ann Althouse asking “Who is Miles Teller?” is the exact mirror image of those lazy jokes on TV and in movies about clueless Millennials who ask, “Who is John Wayne?” or “Who were The Beatles”‘ after a Boomer makes a reference to them or their equivalents. Saturday Night Live has always featured as guest hosts actors and singers (and sometimes, less successfully, politicians) who are currently popular, in the news and hot commodities, so Ann had to know that if Miles Teller was hosting the first show of the season, he must qualify. If she wasn’t familiar with him, then obviously she should have Googled his name: it would take all of three seconds. Her question, at the end of a post suggesting that “Saturday Night Live” is tired, unfunny and irrelevant (not that it isn’t), conveys stunning elitism as well as the qualities I already attached to it.

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