Character

The Flag and Whitney Houston

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

If Ol' Blue Eyes was worthy, why not Whitney?

New Jersey Governor Chris Christie  ordered New Jersey’s flags flown at half-staff in official mourning for Whitney Houston, and a lot of people are outraged. The critics of the honor fall into two categories: those who believe that the honor should be reserved for military heroes and high government officials, and those who believe that Houston is especially unworthy because of her well-documented substance abuse problems.

For his part, Governor Christie defiantly declares that Houston, as a daughter of New Jersey, deserves the state honor because of her contributions to the culture.

Technically and officially, Christie is out of line. Federal law is very specific about the proper treatment of the flag, including when it can be flown at half-staff. Simply put, celebrities don’t qualify, no matter who they are. A state governor can proclaim that the flag be flown at half-staff in his or her state for fallen soldiers, but not for non-military individuals. But governors ignore the law routinely, and have for decades. Tennessee’s governor lowered the flag when Elvis died. Massachusetts did the same for Red Sox great Ted Williams, though he was also a war hero, so no one was going to object. The law, in terms of custom and enforcement, is a dead letter, and probably should be.

True, some governors have abused the spirit of the law, including Christie, when he lowered the flag for Clarence Clemons, the saxophonist for Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band—a great musician, but hardly a figure of transcendent national significance. If 4 USC Section 7 isn’t going to be followed or enforced, then we need some new standards, or before we know it they’ll be lowering the flag for Joan Rivers. Continue reading →

Ethics Quote of the Week: Chris Matthews

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“Loyalty is the heart of Pat’s being. He is loyal to country, to church, to neighborhood to heritage. To Pat, the world can never be better than the one he grew up in as a young boy. Blessed Sacrament Church and Grade School, Gonzaga High School, Georgetown University. No country will ever be better than the United States of America of the early 1950s. It’s his deep loyalty to preserving that reality and all its cultural and ethnic aspects that has been his primal purpose and is what has gotten him into trouble. Not just now but over the years.”

—MSNBC talking head Chris Matthews, in his wistful on-air tribute to Pat Buchanan, who was fired from his long-time role as the left-wing network’s token hard-right conservative.

"Pat, I may disagree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it...on some other network."

Matthews’ quote helps explain why loyalty is the most corrupting of the ethical virtues. Loyalty is important and admirable, but when it is divorced from the other values, it can lead to rigidity, stubbornness, and corruption. When a person, organization or cause no longer embodies the qualities that justified the loyalty in the first place, loyalty can undermine ethical conduct as strongly as any vice.

The right is attempting to frame Buchanan’s dismissal as part of a conspiracy to silence conservative voices. I never understood why Pat was on MSNBC anyway, unless it was to have a particularly Jurassic conservative around to make MSNBC’s extreme liberal bias look reasonable by comparison. It was Buchanan’s latest book, “Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive 2025?,” that finally triggered his ouster. I haven’t read it, but I’ve heard Buchanan on this topic sufficiently already. He may not be a racist, xenophobe, homophobe and anti-Semite, but his confusion of the need to hold on to American cultural values, with which I agree, with the need to keep America as white, Christian, heterosexual and Anglo-Saxon as possible is hard to distinguish from racism, homophobia, xenophobia and anti-Semitism. If I were running a news network, I wouldn’t employ him. Continue reading →

Reflections On President’s Day, 2012: A United States Diminished in Power, Influence and Ideals

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Rep. Ron Paul is fond of saying that the United States shouldn’t be the world’s policeman, and thanks to irresponsible stewardship of America’s resources and horrific maintenance of its ideals, his wish has already come true. One result is a world that has no functioning opposition to evil, a world at the mercy of chaos with no champion or guiding inspiration in sight. The other result is a United States that no longer stands for its own founding principles.

For proof, we have only to look as far as Syria, where a brutal dictator is killing his own people at an accelerating rate. Although his people have tired of his tyranny, Hafez al-Assad, like Gaddafi before him, seems determined to kill as many of his own countrymen as he has to in order to stay in power. Our President, Barack Obama, has delivered stern admonitions and disapprovals, which is this President’s style and approximately as effective as tossing water balloons. The Secretary of State, Mrs. Clinton, expresses frustration, for all the good that does. The killing, of course, goes on.

If you think I’m going to advocate U.S. action in Syria, you are wrong. Quite simply, we can’t afford it—not with a Congress and an Administration that appear unwilling and unable to confront rising budget deficits and crushing debt with sensible tax reform and unavoidable entitlement reductions. Yesterday Congress and the President passed yet another government hand-out of money it doesn’t have and refuses to raise elsewhere, among other things continuing to turn unemployment insurance, once a short-term cushion for job-seekers, into long-term government compensation for the unemployed. Part of the reckless debt escalation was caused by the last President unconscionably engaging in overseas combat in multiple theaters without having the courage or sense  to insist that the public pay for it, and the current administration is incapable of grasping that real money, not just borrowed funds, needs to pay for anything. The needle is well into the red zone on debt; we don’t have the resources for any discretionary military action.

Ron Paul thinks that’s a good thing, as do his libertarian supporters. President Obama, it seems, thinks similarly. They are tragically wrong. Though it is a popular position likely to be supported by the fantasists who think war can just be wished away, the narrowly selfish who think the U.S. should be an island fortress, and those to whom any expenditure that isn’t used to expand  cradle-to-grave government care is a betrayal of human rights, the abandonment of America’s long-standing world leadership in fighting totalitarianism, oppression, murder and genocide is a catastrophe for both the world and us. Continue reading →

Ethics Bob: You Were Right; the Kansas Republicans Are Dunces

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Yes, Bob, you were right again and I was wrong; you don't have to be so damn happy about it.

When I wrote about Kansas House Speaker Mike O’Neal, who disgracefully circulated Psalm 109 to all Republican House members that he said was a perfect prayer for Obama—a Psalm that calls for the death of a despot—my colleague Bob “Ethics Bob” Stone disputed my prediction that his GOP party leaders would force him to step down.

Bob was right; I was naive. A national petition is circulating to demand O’Neal’s ouster, but it is being pushed by Democrats, which conveniently gives Republicans, and O’Neal, the chance to argue that the effort is “partisan.”

It isn’t partisan. It’s necessary, rational and reasonable. The fact that Republicans don’t have the integrity to take the lead in purging their ranks of this irresponsible, uncivil and vile official–that’s partisan.

Bob wins. I ignored a key rule that controls in such situations: Never overestimate a political party’s capacity for courage, decency, or common sense.

Especially Republicans.

Ethics Dunce: Oprah Winfrey

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

If enough of these tune in to your TV show, the number of real viewers don't matter. Which gave Oprah an idea...

Oprah Winfrey’s new cable network, OWN, is foundering, so the much-worshipped icon of female empowerment empowered herself to rig the ratings system by sending out this tweet to her gazillion Twitter followers ( all right, she has only 9, 253, 598) Sunday night:

“Every 1 who can please turn to OWN especially if u have a Neilsen* box.”

OWN was debuting a new show called “Oprah’s Next Chapter.” Since a Nielson household is one of the 25,ooo Americans whose viewing habits are extrapolated to calculate the estimated viewers of any program nationwide, a direct appeal to someone with a Nielson box is an attempt to cheat. Those boxes count as many thousands of viewers in the ratings process, which is why the identity of the Nielson household is carefully protected. It is also why the penalty for trying to manipulate the ratings (if only the Nielson households and nobody else watched Oprah’s show, the ratings would inaccurately indicate that the program was a sensation) is to have the offending program’s ratings erased entirely. Continue reading →

Tales of Moral Luck: The Snake, the Testicle and the Lousy Friend

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

"Heck, sure, pal, I'll suck the venom out of your face--what's that? You were bitten WHERE????"

Irish tourist Jackson Scott was engaged in a necessary bodily function while vacationing in the Australian outback, when he was bitten—on the testicle.  The biter was a tiger snake, and its venom can be fatal.

Panicked, Scott begged his camping companion, Roddy Andrews to suck the venom out. Roddy, however, said, “Ewwwww!”

Also, “No.”

But he drove Scott in a race against time to the nearest hospital, where doctors administered an antidote in time, barely, to save Scott’s life. Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce and All-Time Most Unethical Group With “Ethics” In Its Name: People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

I'm SO glad my boyfriend joined PETA!

The People For The Ethical Treatment Of Animals seems to be unable to grasp the simple concept that if you show yourself to be completely insensitive to matters of right and wrong involving human beings, nobody in their right mind is going care what you think constitutes the ethical treatment of animals. The latest in a long trail of proof: before the disturbing controversy over the pro-Chris Brown tweets had cooled and in the wake of the death Whitney Houston, a former of domestic abuse victim. PETA thought it was the perfect time to release a new ad celebrating the desirability of being able to harm women in the bedroom.

The 30 second spot shows a young woman without pants and wearing a neck brace as she painfully walks to her apartment. “This is Jessica,” narrator says. “She suffers from ‘BWVAKTBOOM,’ ‘Boyfriend Went Vegan and Knocked the Bottom Out of Me,’ a painful condition that occurs when boyfriends go vegan and can suddenly bring it like a tantric porn star.” Jessica reaches the apartment and smilingly get ready for another round of presumably rough sex.

There are many terms that accurately describe men who are so uninterested in the women they have intimate relations with that they cause them pain and take pride in it. Rapists. Abusers. Max Cady. Sadists. Misogynists. Ass-holes.

“Vegans” is not one of them.

“PETA members,” perhaps.

 

American Idol Ethics, Group Day, 2012

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Johnny Keyser

American Idol’s Group Day is the one stretch of the show that is more reality show than competition, and it usually delivers the best ethics dramas of the season. Last year, for example, the Group Day chaos—all the Idol wannabes have to form combos and rehearse an a capella number in harmony, often fighting, crying or collapsing in the process—produced a moment of courage and character when Scotty McCreery, the eventual winning Idol, stepped up and took full responsibility for the rotten conduct of his group, which had tossed out another young man at the last minute to take McCreery in.

This year there were ethics heroes and dunces, but mostly dunces. A real gem was the awful stage mother of competitor Brielle Von Hugel, who was filmed in rehearsals complaining how weak a singer her daughter’s fellow group member Kyle Crews was. After Crews crashed and burned in the performance, and was the only member of the group cut, Mrs. Von Hugel was shown insincerely telling him what a “good voice” he had. Kudos to Idol’s director for immediately re-running her backstage slamming of the kid’s voice in the previous episode. Continue reading →

Ethics Quote of the Week: Yu Jie

/ Jack Marshall / 23 Comments

“I arrived in the United States a month ago, thinking I had escaped the reach of Beijing, only to realize that the Chinese government’s shadow continues to be omnipresent. Several U.S. universities that I have contacted dare not invite me for a lecture, as they cooperate with China on many projects. If you are a scholar of Chinese studies who has criticized the Communist Party, it would be impossible for you to be involved in research projects with the Chinese-funded Confucius Institute, and you may even be denied a Chinese visa. Conversely, if you praise the Communist Party, not only would you receive ample research funding but you might also be invited to visit China and even received by high-level officials. Western academic freedom has been distorted by invisible hands.”

—Yu Jie, Chinese dissident and author recently relocated to the U.S., in an op-ed column in the Washington Post, exposing how America’s dependence on China for trade and financing has not only made the nation vulnerable, but is also eroding its integrity and values.

Every budget cycle that the United States permits to expand its debt makes the nation more indebted to China, and places more power in the hands of its leaders to exert influence over American policies. Yu Jie’s disturbing article shows how our values are being undermined as well. China’s is a repressive, undemocratic and often brutal regime that the United States has foolishly allowed itself to become dependent upon. What will the consequences of this be? How can the United States lead the free world while being under the thumb of the Chinese? Corruption is inevitable. Yu Jie writes, Continue reading →

Greedo Ethics

/ Jack Marshall / 30 Comments

Who shot first?

Jedi Emeritus George Lucas betrayed a warped concept of cowboy ethics, self-defense and ethics generally in a recent Hollywood Reporter interview in which he was quizzed about his technological fixes on the original Star Wars trilogy. The topic was the shooting of Greedo in the bar, when Han Solo blasts away at the green, fishy porcupine-like villain, who has a gun pointed at him:

Lucas: Well, it’s not a religious event. I hate to tell people that. It’s a movie, just a movie. The controversy over who shot first, Greedo or Han Solo, in Episode IV, what I did was try to clean up the confusion, but obviously it upset people because they wanted Solo [who seemed to be the one who shot first in the original] to be a cold-blooded killer, but he actually isn’t. It had been done in all close-ups and it was confusing about who did what to whom. I put a little wider shot in there that made it clear that Greedo is the one who shot first, but everyone wanted to think that Han shot first, because they wanted to think that he actually just gunned him down.

Lucas’s idea of what constitutes a “cold-blooded killer” runs counter to law, common sense, and ethics. Continue reading →