Arts & Entertainment

Melania and Vanity Fair

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

One of the nauseating Axis catch-phrases is that Trump’s is not a “normal” Presidency. That is true, but it is the people saying that who have made it so. A particularly petty example, which I rank near the organized effort to stop Trump in his first term from participating in the Kennedy Center Honors program (that worked out well!) is the catty, mean girls decision to keep Melania Trump, obviously one of the most attractive and glamorous of all First Ladies (she makes Jackie Kennedy look like a Muppet) of all the women’s magazines, when covers featuring the First Lady had previously been routine. Puppet President enabler Jill Biden was judges worthy of several covers, but not Melania Trump. Nah, there’s no ladies magazine media bias!

The snotty boycott reached its apotheosis earlier this month, when sources reported that staffers at Conde Nast’s “Vanity Fair” threatened a walk-out over the possibility of a Melania Trump cover. A “mid-level editor” supposedly said that she’d “walk out the motherfucking door, and half my staff will follow me” if the magazine tried to “normalize this despot and his wife.” “Normalize.” “Despot.”

Nice. How fair and rational. Also reportedly, Melania told the magazine to get lost when it proposed a cover after snubbing her (because her husband is eeeevil) all this time. Good.

Just because the Trump-Haters have been trying to tear the nation apart doesn’t obligate the victims of their vendetta to prostate themselves to make peace.

Open Forum, and a Note Having (almost) Nothing to Do With Ethics

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

It’s Friday, time for the last Open Forum of the month, and my infected leg is much better, thanks, so EA should be returning to normal soon.

Probably not quite to normal, because from now until mid-September all of my nights and weekends will be occupied as I return to my theatrical side, in mothballs for a decade, to direct and write a musical revue to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Georgetown Law Center Gilbert and Sullivan Society, the only student-run theatrical organization at an grad school in the country. Alums will be flying in from all over; the show itself is going to have a student-alumni cast of more than 70, and it promises to quite an adventure.

I’m overseeing the show because I unwittingly started the tradition with a guerilla production of “Trial by Jury” when I was a first year student, directed the next six yearly shows after that, and have returned to the scene of my former triumphs (that’s a Gilbert quote: which show?) for the 20th, 30th, 40th and now 50th anniversary blow-outs (actually this is the 52nd anniversary because of two postponements.)

That’s a cast photo from the 1977 production of “H.M.S Pinafore” that I directed in GULC’s Hart Moot Courtroom above. (Can you spot me?)

The lesson of this saga is that you never know what the things you do in life will prove to be most significant. That organization has launched successful show business careers, sparked romances, marriages, and lifetime friendships, changed the culture of the school, and made many thousands of people laugh and cheer over the course of over 150 productions including the G&S canon, Broadway musicals, dramas, comedies, Shakespeare, and a production of “Twelve Angry Men” (my first) that is credited with starting the process of turning the classic movie into a successful stage show.

Me, I was just trying to address my boredom with law school and had no idea what I was starting. Yet if I get squished by a piece of space junk tomorrow, I’m pretty sure that theater organization will be my most lasting legacy.

Go figure.

But that’s enough about me. Time to write about ethics…

Addendum: Joy Reid’s Rant

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

This little factoid is too rich to pass up. As noted yesterday in the pot pourri post, the execrable racist Joy Reid had done an interview raging about how everything whites invented had been stolen from black innovators, focusing especially on music. “We black folk gave y’all country music, hip hop, R&B, jazz, rock and roll, they couldn’t even invent that. But they have to call a white man The King. Because they couldn’t make rock and roll. So they have to stamp The King on a man whose main song, was stolen from an overweight black woman,” the former MSNBC star said.

The “overweight black woman” she was referring to was Big Mama Thornton, the original artist to sing “You Ain’t Nothing But a Hound Dog,” which she recorded on August 13, 1952. It was Thornton’s only hit record, selling over 500,000 copies. Elvis, of course, subsequently recorded the song and it became not only an even bigger hit, but his breakthrough record.

Mark Hemingway of The Federalist pointed out on “X” that, as usual, Reid didn’t know what she was talking about. For while Big Mama was black and was the first to sing the song, she didn’t write it. “Hound Dog” was written by the immortal Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, who were as white as Elvis.

They wrote or co-wrote over 70 chart hits including many of Elvis’s most famous songs. Among their hits for other artists: “Stand by Me,” “Leader of the Pack,” “On Broadway,” and Peggy Lee’s “Is That All There Is?” Peggy was very white. Lieber and Stoller were inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1985 and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1987.

Quoth Hemingway: “Reid is an idiot.” Yes, and she’s a racist idiot who makes anyone who listens to her more ignorant than they were when she started talking.

Incompetent Re-Branding of the Decade?

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

Amazing. Mediaite, an MSNBC cheerleader, calls this thing above as ‘surprisingly elegant.” Elegant? MS is best known as a disease, and a nasty one. If someone says, “I have MS now,” the proper result is, “I’m so sorry! What’s the prognosis?” More pandering from Mediaite: “Media rebrands usually stink. Quibi. Tronc. Syfy. The graveyard is crowded with names that sounded bold in the boardroom and ridiculous everywhere else, which is why MSNBC’s new identity as MS Now feels like such a surprise. It’s not perfect. It’s not thrilling. But it’s… smart.” Hey, everybody! It’s smart to make your new identity the common name for a dread disease! Is it possible that no one mentioned this among the dozens—hundreds?—of alleged professional marketers and image consultants involved in the process? Just to make sure I’m not imagining this, I just Googled “MS.” The result:

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Ethics Hero: Maluma

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Here I am, with almost a dozen important ethics issues languishing thanks to my (I hope) temporary incapacity, picking the least consequential of them all to begin EA’s blogging day. Go figure.

Colombian rapper Maluma (whom I had never heard of before) halted his Mexico City concert to admonish an audience member who had brought a baby, presumably hers, to the event. He was in the middle of a song, in fact, when he noticed the infant in the audience and called out the woman.

“Do you think it’s a good idea to bring a 1-year-old baby to a concert where the decibels are this fucking high?” he asked. “That baby doesn’t even know what it’s doing here! Next time, protect their ears or something. For real. It’s heavy. It’s your responsibility.”

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A Popular Culture Note…

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

My energy and stamina are down, but I’m trying…and I’m going to indulge myself with a post that has little or no nexus to ethics. Based on album sales, these are the 50 best-selling music acts of all time.If you can’t guess #1, you are dangerously estranged from history and popular culture, which pings my “life competence” alarm. On other hand, if you guess #2, kudos.

Elvis is third.

Sydney Sweeney Indeed Has Great Genes and Those Freaking Out Over Her Jeans Ad Do Not

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

If an attractive black model or actress had made this commercial, nobody would be complaining. But because Sweeney is white and blonde, and because the American Left has lost its mind, a classic provocative blue-jeans ad (Remember Brooke Shields saying “Nothing gets between me and my Calvins”?) is being cited as proof that America is embracing Hitler’s Master Race narrative. Sure.

This warrants an Ethics Alarms “Bite Me!” if anything does.

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July Send-Off Ethics Round-Up, 7/27/2025

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

The fact that my leg appears to be rotting off seriously impeded my Ethics Alarms activity this entire week, so a round-up of lingering ethics tales is desperately needed. The stupid wound, complete with a giant blood-blister the size and color of an eggplant, isn’t going to hurt any worse if I sit at my desk a bit longer, so here we go…

1. That painting above, “American Progress” by John Gast in 1872, was posted on the Homeland Security Facebook page with the message, “A Heritage to be proud of, a Homeland worth Defending.” Right, and right. Some Americans weak in citizenship are apparently offended by the statement and the painting. What’s wrong with them, and how did they get this way? The U.S.’s saga is objectively an inspiring one. I do not blame Native Americans for being bitter about how things worked out for them, but a Stone Age civilization was going to fail eventually one way or another, and the resulting culture, society, government and civilization has been a blessing to humanity. My only cavil with the painting is that it might be deliberate trolling. I think government departments and agencies shouldn’t troll. Neither should Presidents.

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Unethical Protest of the Week…

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

….along with an ethically inert “X” approval of it.

But then, assholes tend to admire assholes. Theater types are such weenies. That jerk who decided to betray his duty to the performance, the work of art, the paying audience and the other performers who cared about doing their jobs should have been tackled and dragged off stage, either by back stage staff or the actor next to him. This clip caused flashbacks to the unconscionable stunt by the “Hamilton” cast in 2017, using the stage to corner Mike Pence and lecture him on some woke agenda item or another; I neither recall nor care which. (Pence, of course, himself being a weenie, didn’t have the guts to tell the performers “Bite me!” and walk out.)

I confess: that disgraceful incident is why I haven’t seen “Hamilton” yet as my own little protest against ignorant actors pretending that what they think about pubic policy is any more intrinsically valuable than the opinions of the average drunk in a bar.

The flag display flunks the tests in the Ethics Alarms 12 Step Protest Ethics Checklist. See…

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Ethics Quote of the Week: Citizen Free Press

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

“Bwaaahaha, perhaps you should have cut out the bias, bitches.”

—Citizen Free Press, on all the whining and breast-beating from public television and radio talent and execss over NPR and PBS finally losing taxpayer support.

Citizen Free Press is the successor to the Drudge Report as the go-to conservative news aggregator. It’s a bit too unprofessional for me most of the time, with links headlined “Nancy Pelosi should have shut her pie hole!” and such, but this time, its colloquialism hit the mark.

The arrogance of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting has been offensive for decades. It has been a hard left propaganda machine, the automatic foe of Republican Presidents and the reliable enabler of Democrats since anyone can remember. NPR’s Supreme Court commentator Nina Totenberg was a buddy of the late progressive SCOTUS Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, a clear conflict of interest, but she didn’t care and neither did NPR: after all, the idea was to bash the conservative decisions anyway. Ken Burns disgracefully turned his documentary on the Jews and the Holocaust into a Trump-bashing screed, and PBS just nodded its metaphorical head in agreement. There are too many examples of both networks spinning reality to support Woke goals and narratives to tote up.

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