Encores

Oh, You Didn’t Think I Would Forget Presidents Day, Did You? [Embarrassing Gaffe Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 23 Comments

Well, to be truthful, I almost did. The contrived holiday seldom occurs this early. Nevertheless, I’m going to recognize Presidents Day with re-posts of two essays about U.S. Presidents, neither of which were originally written for the holiday.

The first is one of my favorite mysterious tales about any President, in this case George Washington, and the second, from 2015 and re-posted five years ago, is my favorite story about any President ever.

Here they are:

Pssst! Bill Maher! The “Saved By God” Belief Has Inspired Some of Our Greatest Presidents. Shut Up.

Atheists and agnostics in the public sphere don’t have to be obnoxious, but an awful lot of them are. Their explanation for where the universe came from is no more persuasive that that of the faithful (The Big Bang? Come on.) but they just can’t restrain themselves. HBO’s Bill Maher is a prime example: along with mocking committed relationships (he hates the concept of marriage), extolling drugs and debauchery, and generally keeping his Axis of Unethical Conduct membership current, he ridicules Christianity at every opportunity.

The fact is, and it is a fact, that the United States of America had a much healthier and ethical culture before organized religion had discredited itself so thoroughly, driving whole generations away. Moral codes are especially essential for those who don’t have the time or ability to puzzle through ethics, and believing in God is the best catalyst for an ethical society that there is….and it has always been thus.

Heck, just look at what a jerk Maher is. That’s what atheism can do to you. But I digress.

My target here is more narrow. On last week’s “Real Time,” Maher sneered at the belief that God saved Donald Trump from being assassinated as stupid and “dangerous.” “People see signs because they want to see them. It’s why stalkers think Taylor Swift is blinking ‘marry me’ to them in Morse Code,” he explained. “It gets dangerous when the signs make someone think God is on their side,” Maher continued.  “Republican Congressman Mike Collins said after the shooting, ‘God spared Ronald Reagan for a reason. God spared Donald Trump for a reason. God doesn’t miss.’ Really? Tell that to John Lennon, Lincoln, JFK, RFK, and Martin Luther King. Look, the asshole who shot at Trump was cowardly, unpatriotic, selfish, vile, and weak, and he should rot in hell, but thinking that God protects your heroes but not mine? That isn’t cool either.”

How do you know, Bill, that God doesn’t protect your heroes for a very good reason? I can think of several good reasons for that, as well as for squashing you like a bug. Of course the certitude that God is responsible for anything is confirmation bias: my wife, the daughter of a Methodist minister, frequently expressed contempt for the faithful who simultaneously said that “God works in mysterious ways” and “there are no coincidences” while conveniently asserting that they had figured out those mysterious ways. But if Bill knew as much about American history, leadership and the Presidency as he should, he would know that the belief that God has saved them for a reason motivated many of America’s greatest leaders. It could have been dangerous, I suppose, but so far, that belief had been overwhelmingly beneficial to our nation. Perhaps even its salvation.

Leadership requires special character traits, the right formative experiences and a lot of luck. National leadership arises out of an individual’s conviction that they are uniquely qualified to do a better job than anyone else, accompanied by the passion, conviction and charisma necessary to convince others of their abilities. That’s why so many of our Presidents have been narcissists, true, but the anti-American trope that our leaders only seek power, wealth and personal benefits is, based on my lifelong study of history, garbage.

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The Song “White Christmas” Is Sad, and It’s Meant To Be

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

I’m rewriting a post from last Christmas that I liked, in part because the ethics news is ticking me off, in part because I am once again having a non-Christmas because I miss my late wife Grace too much to celebrate anything, and in part because the song means a lot to me. I foolishly posted the first version of this last year on Christmas day, guaranteeing that few would read it. I’ll try a bit earlier this time.

I co-wrote two Christmas revues for my late, lamented (by me, anyway) professional theater company in Arlington, Virginia, The American Century Theater. The most popular of the two (though not my personal favorite) was called “If Only In My Dreams,” a title taken from the lyrics of another wistful Christmas song, “I’ll Be Home For Christmas,” by lyricist Kim Gannon and composer Walter Kent. It was introduced by Bing Crosby in 1943—it’s amazing how many of our secular Christmas songs were first recorded by Bing. Well, maybe not so amazing: what was amazing was the range and warmth of his voice. 

“If Only In My Dreams” was constructed around the letters written by GIs overseas during World War II to their families or  girlfriends as Christmas loomed. They were published in an issue of American Heritage, a wonderful magazine now, sadly, in the company of Life, Look, and the Saturday Evening Post, gone and nearly forgotten. I alternated those letters with narration and the popular Christmas songs of the period. The brilliant Jacqueline Manger directed the show, which was being written as she rehearsed it. 

The most famous and important of these songs was, of course, “White Christmas.” Bing Crosby’s version is still the best selling single of all time, and deserves the title. When Irving Berlin handed the song over to the musician who transcribed his melodies (Irv could not read music and composed by ear, just like another brilliant and prolific tune-smith, Paul McCartney), he  famously announced that he had written, not just the best song he had ever created, but the best song that anyone had ever written.  Continue reading →

Encore! “From The ‘I Don’t Understand This At All’ Files: Why Should ‘Historically Black Colleges’ Be Getting A Surge In Donations?”

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

I was about to write almost the exact same essay I wrote in 2019, but fortunately something deep within what I jokingly called “my brain” prompted me to check the Ethics Alarms archives and now I have an extra 45 minutes or so to spend organizing my sock drawer. Sure enough, I had published the lament before, and prompted by the same stimulus”: a New York Times news item.

Yesterday’s article (gift link!) was was déjà vu too: “MacKenzie Scott Gives $700 Million to Historically Black Colleges.” In 2019, I wrote “The philanthropist MacKenzie Scott has given more than $500 million to more than 20 historically Black colleges in the past year.” That was bonkers, her current gift is bonkers, but this item in the latest Times article is really  nuts: 

“President Trump has also shown support for historically Black institutions. In his first term, he distributed $250 million in annual funding and cut more than $300 million in federal loans for the schools. In April, through an executive order, he unveiled a new White House job to oversee H.B.C.U.s. But the position currently remains vacant.

“Dr. Gasman, the Rutgers professor, said the Trump administration has sent mixed signals. The president has sought to crack down on diversity programs in education and has complained about the teaching of Black history. The funds for H.B.C.U.s and tribal colleges were announced as the federal government cut programs that support minority students in science and engineering programs and schools with significant Hispanic enrollment.

“They are willing to support Black people in Black institutions, but they are not very comfortable with Black people in white institutions,” Dr. Gasman said.”

That’s deliberately negative spin, but it’s not completely unjust. What the hell? Historically black colleges are the epitome of “good discrimination” in the hypocritical style of DEI. Howard, Harris’s alma mater (Be proud,Howard—you graduated a babbling fool!), got the largest donation from Scott, 80 million bucks. Do you know what the white enrollment at Howard is? Less than 1%! Talk about disparate impact—you know, the EEOC trick that finds invidious discrimination based on statistics alone?

Across all of the HBUCs, there are about 10% white students  and 2% Asians. I thought Chief Justice Roberts wrote that the way to ensure no discrimination based on race, was to not engage in discrimination based on race. This is undeniably discrimination based on race.

The Trump Administration should not be supporting black colleges and universities. If most of our elite colleges are a sham, spending more time on ideological indoctrination than on teaching, the Historically Black Colleges and Universities are worse. By an “in isn’t what it is” PR haze endorsed by the news media (‘Oh! They are historic! That means they are good schools, right?’ Right, just as the historic Biden press secretary Karine Saint-Pierre was “good.” They aren’t good: they have inferior standards for admission, inferior faculties, and their graduates come out with misleading diplomas) the public is led to believe that these are elite institutions too.

Ten years ago, Ethics Alarms played a minor role in saving Virginia’s Sweet Briar college from being closed by a board that decided that an all-women’s college was an anachronism and no longer needed. I argued that there were many good reasons to have all female colleges as an option for women, but none of those good reasons apply to racially segregated schools.

OK, now I am getting into the substance of the essay from six years ago, and I have frittered away some of that saved sock drawer time. Heeere’s Jack!— from 2019….in “From The ‘I Don’t Understand This At All’ Files: Why Should ‘Historically Black Colleges’ Be Getting A Surge In Donations?”

***

Make no mistake: I know why they are getting a surge in donations: cynical virtue-signalling and mindless George Floyd Freakout tribute. However, like the historically black colleges themselves, the phenomenon of picking now to celebrate segregated education, and mostly inferior education, is self-contradictory. It also highlights the hypocrisy of the “antiracism” movement itself, and the incoherence of the “diversity” chants coming from the Left.

For these colleges are the opposite of diverse. They are, in fact, discriminatory in concept and execution, and to see them “thrive” while activists are demanding literal quotas in other institutions in order to create numerical demographic parity—at least—is a blazing example of how the George Floyd Ethics Train wreck is less a cultural awakening than it is an opportunistic and unethical power play fueled by white guilt and cowardice.

The front page article in the New York Times today is so full of head-banging-on-the-wall moments I ran out of head before I ran out of wall. Here are some…

Continue reading →

Ethics Alarms Encore: “Unethical (And Stupid) Columbus Day Quote of the Decade: Kamala Harris”

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

[ This was last year’s Columbus Day post, and I decided that I couldn’t improve on it, so up it goes again. It is, after all, the proverbial two-bird stone: a straight reminder of how much we, and the world, owe to Chris, and how narrowly we avoided electing a pandering idiot as President. Another Columbus Day Ethics Alarms post worth visiting is this one, because it has the link to Stan Freeberg’s immortal Columbus riff on his “Stan Freeberg Presents the United States of America,” one of the most inspired pieces of musical satire ever.

But back to Columbus Day: its cancellation in some woke-lobotomized states (Indigenous Peoples Day) was part of the “America is evil and we should all be ashamed” cultural poison that the Mad Left has been trying to choke our society with for a long time. President Trump has more pressing challenges as he takes on the herculean task—it compares to Herc cleaning out the Augean Stables, the last and most disgusting of his Twelve Labors—of repairing our culture, but clarifying the significance of Columbus finding the New World is part of it. Let’s be clear: by any utilitarian analysis the European migration to North America was a very good thing indeed, probably inevitable, and beneficial to the entire world. Thank-you, than-you, thank you, Columbus. ]

“European explorers ushered in a wave of devastation, violence, stealing land, and widespread disease.”

—Kamala Harris in 2021, pandering to the “America is a blight on the Earth and the world would have been better without it” bloc in the Democratic Party  in a Columbus Day address.

Boy, what an idiot. Continue reading →