Ethics Heroes

When Jack Palance Stood Up For Ukraine Against Putin

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Over at The Bulwark, culture editor Sonny Bunch reminded me of a tale of some relevance to current events, though like most pieces in The Bulwark, his account is missing crucial details.

It involves one of my mother’s favorite Hollywood villains, Jack Palance. Younger readers probably remember him only in his long, lucrative late-career self-parody period (Watch “Shane”: what’s the matter with you?), which got him one of those weird Best Actor Oscars for just doing what he had done naturally for decades, but hammier, in “City Slickers.” (He was also aided by lines like “I crap bigger than you.” (To Billy Crystal.)

The actor was born in Pennsylvania as Volodymyr Palahniuk, the son of Ukrainian immigrants. In 2004, after Palance’s final film and just two years before his death, a Hollywood celebration  of “Russian Nights” in Los Angeles ended with an awards ceremony. “Russian Nights” was a week-long film festival that celebrated “Russian contributions to the world of art,” and was sponsored in part by the Russian Ministry of Culture. Russian president Vladimir Putin endorsed the propaganda event. Scheduled to receive “narodny artyst” awards ( translated as “the Russian People’s Choice Award”) were Dustin Hoffman and Jack Palance. Hoffman, like Palance boasted of Ukrainian heritage.

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Ethics Hero (“Socking It To Georgetown University” Div.) #2: Federal Judge James Ho

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

As a graduate and former employee of Georgetown Law Center (and, though I say it myself, a living legend there), I have found the recent disgraceful episode where conservative scholar Illya Shapiro was suspended by the Dean at GULC for a tweet expressing the view that President Biden’s announced plan to make race and gender his primary criteria for filling Justice Breyer’s soon to be vacant seat on the Supreme Court particularly discouraging. (My JD diploma was already face to the wall for previous embarrassments, however.) I have been particularly disgusted by the failure of the GULC faculty to speak up in support of Shapiro in public, though other academics across the country have done so.

Thus it was with particular pleasure that I learned how Judge James Ho of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, slated to speak at GULC yesterday on “Fair Weather Originalism: Judges, Umpires, and the Fear of Being Booed,” saw the obvious relevance of his topic to Shapiro’s ordeal and shocked his hosts by giving a different lecture than the one announced. He said in part,

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Ethics Hero (“Socking It To Georgetown University” Div.) #1: Student Jessica Costescu

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

No weenie she.

Costescu is a junior at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service and the president of the Network of Enlightened Women chapter on campus. Her parents fled communism in Romania. She has been shocked and disturbed by the growing hostility to free speech, and indeed to freedom itself, that she has encountered at what is supposed to be an elite and distinguished institution of high learning in our nation’s capital.

As a vocal conservative, she has been threatened “so much so that [she] now fear[s] to speak freely and voice [her] conservative beliefs.” She reports that she has been cyber-bullied by other students “in such a menacing way” that she is “afraid to engage online, or even during class” with her “left-leaning peers.”

However, instead of hiding, or, as is the response sought by such tactics, conforming, Jessica wrote about her experiences on the conservative website College Fix, not anonymously but under her own name, not pathetically but in defiance. She writes in part, Continue reading →

Ethics Hero: Crossing guard And Police Officer Annette Goodyear

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Here we have a rare res ipsa loquitur Ethics Hero award that requires no further commentary. Details of the incident can be found here.

Well done, Officer Goodyear.

(Is that what fascism looks like too, Susan?)

Ethics Hero: Luke Bunting ’22, Editor-in-Chief Of The Georgetown Journal of Law & Public Policy

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

The battle over the punishment of Illya Shapiro for WrongThink—Imagine, he actually thinks excluding outstanding Supreme Court candidates by using racial and gender discrimination is unwise!—continues.

Luke Bunting, a 3L at Georgetown University Law Center who also edits one its journals, is stepping up where the GULC faculty has failed miserably. Echoing the legal academics and scholars across the country who have signed an open letter protesting the Law Center’s Dean, William Treanor’s effort to ingratiate the school with the censorious Woke and the race-baiting mob, Bunting has authored a similar letter for GULC alumni to sign. It reads,

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Yikes! I Better Finish “Will The Audacious ‘It Isn’t What it is’ Propaganda Assault By The American Left Succeed?” Quick Before The Answer Is Too Obvious To Bother With: The Democrats’ Amazing Filibuster Hypocrisy

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Wowie Zowie, Democratic “It isn’t what it is” grandstanding is reaching record heights faster than I can comment on them!

Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.), cementing her Ethics Hero credentials that (I admit) I doubted would stand up in June) delivered a speech yesterday in which she reiterated her  support for the filibuster, pretty much killing Democrat Party efforts to unilaterally change the rules to enable the party to ram through legislation that would federalize elections and permanently weaken their integrity. The filibuster is a long-standing procedural device that requires three-fifths of Senators to agree in order to advance toward a vote. It is very much a pro-democracy measure, instituted to prevent a bare Senate majority from passing important and controversial legislation without bi-partisan support. You can’t have a smaller Senate majority than Democrats do now, with a 50-50 split only enhanced by the Vice-President’s tie-breaking vote.

Sinema said that she personally supports both the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, but does not believe it is wise to kill the filibuster. “And while I continue to support these bills, I will not support separate actions that worsen the underlying disease of division infecting our country,” Sinema said. “There’s no need for me to restate my longstanding support for the 60-vote threshold to pass legislation.” 

She did this despite President Biden’s disgraceful speech this week claiming that anyone who continues to support a filibuster to stop his party’s voting rights legislation is choosing to “stand on the side of George Wallace over Dr. King, Bull Connor over John Lewis, and Jefferson Davis over Abraham Lincoln.” It had to be one of the worst examples of race-baiting as an illicit political tool of recent memory, particularly since the claims that the legislation has any connection to race is fictional. It is not discriminatory to require voters to prove who they are at the polls. It is not “racist” to limit early voting. I would eliminate it entirely: the procedure encourages blind, knee-jerk, fact-free partisan voting over voter consideration of all relevant information during the campaign. It supports incompetent democracy. It is not racist to place limits on mail-in voting, vote-harvesting, or drop-boxes. It is responsible. Moreover, allowing such easily manipulated weaknesses in election controls encourages distrust in the final results.

It is profoundly disturbing that all but two Democratic Senators have the courage and respect for democracy to oppose the filibuster rule change, and apparently none will stand up for the integrity of elections. Meanwhile, Sinema is being called a racist and a foe of democracy for doing the right thing. Continue reading →

Ethics Hero: Uber Driver DaVante Williams

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Virginia’s inexcusable snowbound crisis last week, when motorists were trapped in their vehicles for more than 24 hours while the state’s governor dithered, did have the compensating virtue of revealing some local ethics heroes. Another whose ethical instincts and heroism recently surfaced is DaVante Williams.

The part-time Uber driver didn’t know that the winter storm had created a 50-mile-long backup when he agreed to drive a teenage girl from Washington, DC’s Union Station to Williamsburg, Virginia, a lengthy journey. Her train had been cancelled because of the weather conditions, and it was 2 am. They were about 20 miles into the typically two-and-a-half hour trip when Williams realized the chances of them reaching Williamsburg were slim because of the back-up on I-95. He tried an alternate route but was foiled when police directed him back onto the Interstate because those roads were also closed due to downed trees and power lines.

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Ethics Hero: H&S Bakery Co-Owner Chuck Paterakis

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

The inexcusable 1-95 mass traffic jam in Northern Virginia this week produced at least one Ethics Hero, and it sure wasn’t Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam.

Casey Holihan and her husband John Noe, stranded on Interstate 95 along with countless other Virginia motorists, had an inspiration at around hour 16 hours when they spotted a Schmidt Baking Company truck ahead of themon the morning of January 3. The couple were very hungry, for it had been approximately 37 hours since they had any food. So they decided to call Schmidt Baking Company in Baltimore to make a plea for charity and kindness, and to ask if the company would share its bread with the marooned and starving. People had been trapped on I-95 for close to 24 hours, and the couple could hear children crying in other cars. Noe reached the customer service line for the bakery and left their phone number with a representative along with their tale of woe (Fortunately, this was not CVS.)

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Ethics Hero: Sixth Grader Davyon Johnson

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

This story out of Muskeegee County, Oklahoma, seems too good to be true. I hope it is true. It is a measure of how much distrust the news media has engendered that such a story is impossible to accept without doubt today. Here, however, is the story we are being told.

Davyon Johnson, 11 years-old, was near the water fountain at his school on December 9 when he heard a seventh-grade boy gasp, “I’m choking! I’m choking!” The kid had used his mouth to open a water bottle and the cap had popped down his throat.  Davyon, who had learned  the Heimlich maneuver off of YouTube (his uncle is an emergency med tech, which Dayvon says he also aspires to be), began applying it to the older boy. On the third squeeze to the boy’s abdomen, the cap flew out.

Later that evening, when his mother was driving with Davyon on the way to an evening church service, the car passed a house that had some smoke billowing out of it. Ms. Johnson says that Davyon persuaded her to turn the vehicle around and check. They saw small fire near the back of the house, and cars outside that indicated that there might be people in the house who may not have been aware of the fire. Davyon’s mom honked her horn and called 911. Davyon got out of the car and knocked on the door.

Five people in the house stepped outside; they had not been aware of the fire. They ran, leaving an elderly woman with a walker struggling to leave the burning home on her own. (Nice.)  Davyon helped her along and led her to the truck that the rest had climbed into.

When he was 8 years old, Davyon said later, he watched his father enter a burning apartment complex to make sure everyone was safe.  Davyon’s father  died last summer.

The Muskogee Police Department and Muskogee County Sheriff’s Office presented Davyon with a certificate on December 15 in recognition of his big day of community service. According to media accounts, the boy claims to not understand why everyone is making such a big deal over him doing what he calls “the right thing.” ‘I don’t want everyone to pay attention to me. I kind of did what I was supposed to do,” he was quoted as telling a teacher.

Here’s the kicker, which depending on how cynical you have become, will either get you choked up or make you thing, “Oh, come on!” The New York Times reports that Davyon doesn’t tell people about his recent burst of heroism unless he’s asked, and even then relates a simple, straightforward account.

“But there was one person he did want to tell,” says the Times. “One morning this month, he put on his sneakers and gray hoodie and went to the cemetery to see his father. He squatted, picked at the dirt and started to tell the stories, beginning with the scene at the water fountain.”

Luckily, a newspaper photographer just happened to be passing by…

__________________________

Source: New York Times

H Jackson Browne And “Life’s Little Instruction Book”

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

In 1991, H. Jackson Brown Jr. hit the best seller lists with a humble tome called “Life’s Little Instruction Book.” It consisted of 511 pieces of advice, common sense, traditional wisdom and best practices in life, adapted from a hand-written 32 page guide he handed to his son when he went off to college. “This is what your dad knows about living a rewarding life,” Brown told his son. He had tried his hand at authorship with two earlier books of fatherly advice, but decided that his latest approach had more promise.

It sure did. Re-tooled and expanded into “Life’s Little Instruction Book,” it was a bestseller for years, much imitated, and a contribution both to Brown’s fame and financial well-being and the nation’s healthy ethics alarms. By 1997, the book had sold about seven million copies, and it was translated into 33 languages

The book is all about ethics, though not explicitly. Even the corniest of the entries are based in ethical principles. “Resist the temptation” just means to keep your ethics alarms functioning and not let them be silenced by non-ethical considerations. #34, “At meetings, resist turning around to see who has just arrived late,” is a Golden Rule application; #22, “Learn three clean jokes,”is a subtle way to remind us to not allow incivility to become a habit.  “Avoid sarcastic remarks,” # 81, is no more than a caution against being a habitual jerk. #89, “Don’t let anyone ever see you tipsy” is a call for dignity and decorum. #254, “Learn to show cheerfulness, even when you don’t feel like it,” is a reminder that being a responsible member of society means not allowing your own feelings to undermine your group’s spirit. “Overtip breakfast waitresses”  was #7, a call for generosity and gratitude. #144, much ridiculed at the time, is “Take someone bowling.” It just means be kind, and to reach out to someone who might be lonely.

Ethics is never considered cool, and efforts to encourage good behavior is typically mocked. Journalists and critics mostly ridiculed “Life’s Little Instruction Book” as collection of naive nostrums unrelated to the real world. Pittsburgh Post-Gazette columnist Brian O’Neill wrote, in a typical reaction, that the book was “designed to teach nothing but how to part with $5.95.”

In truth, what Brown’s book most resembled was  “110 Rules of  Civility & Decent Behavior in Company and Conversation,” which our first President was forced to commit to memory by his father. Those rules served George well, and had a major impact on the degree to which he was trusted by the infamously competitive and back-stabbing Founders. Pretty much all of George’s guidelines turn up in various forms in the “Instruction Book;” I have often wondered if Brown ever read them. His book also has one advantage over the “110 Rules”: it isn’t interrupted with archaic howlers like George’s #13:

 Kill no vermin, or fleas, lice, ticks, etc. in the sight of others; if you see any filth or thick spittle put your foot dexterously upon it; if it be upon the clothes of your companions, put it off privately, and if it be upon your own clothes, return thanks to him who puts it off.

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