Ethics Heroes

Remember The Alamo Today, March 6, When The Fort Fell, And Entered American Lore And Legend Forever.

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

No, I didn’t forget the Alamo, and I hope against hope that more Americans than not are at least noting the anniversary of when the mission that became a fort fell in the early morning hours of March 6, 1836. As soon s I get this post up, I’m going to re-watch the 1960 John Wayne movie commemorating the siege and the men who died that day. The Duke’s film has plenty of flaws, but a lack of conviction and passion isn’t one of them; in the end that, plus the Demiri Tiomkin score, is what what makes “The Alamo” my favorite cinematic telling of the story.

Did the old newspaperman’s manifesto from another John Wayne movie, “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence” ever apply more perfectly to an event in American history?  “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” “I answered them with a cannon shot.” The line in the sand. The couriers who came back to the fort to die. Jim Bowie fighting from his sickbed. Davey Crockett fighting to the end. Truth and fiction, the Alamo is my favorite of all American history tales, and the Alamo itself is my favorite historical site to visit in the United States.

I didn’t have a new inspiration to justify a new post this year, so I’m reprising the one from this date in 2023. Among other things, it included the climax of the Alamo diary Michael West contributed a few years ago.

Now the bugles are silent
And there’s rust on each sword
And the small band of soldiers
Lie asleep in the arms of the Lord.

***

I regard the siege of the Alamo one of the signature ethics events in U.S. history, both for what it was and what it came to represent. There have been many posts on the subject as well as many references to the Alamo in other posts, all of which are accessible here.

Today, March 6, marks the fall of the converted mission. Ethics Alarms has two pieces from its archives to present: Continue reading →

Ethics Hero: “Landman” Creator and Writer Taylor Sheridan

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

The Billy Bob Thornton star vehicle “Landman,” following the stressful life of a West Texas “landman” and operational executive for an independent oil company in West Texas, has a lot going for it, mostly Thornton, who is one of our most interesting and versatile actors. The Paramount streaming series is already better, in my view, then the last two oil dramas I watched, the over-rated “Giant” and the relentlessly unpleasant “There Will Be Blood,” in great part because as with all of his roles, Thornton brings a great deal of humor to the proceedings.

I have not finished the series’ first season (I sure hope there is a second), but I was struck by the long scene above in which Tommy Norris (that’s Billy Bob) gives a quick primer to his company’s attorney on the facile conventional wisdom of the anti-fossil fuel lobby. The rant begins (at the 57 second mark), as Tommy denies the “cleanness” of wind power, and he takes off from there. It was an instant classic that quickly went viral on social media: as soon as I heard it I knew I could find the speech on YouTube and resolved to post it today.

There are also a lot of rebuttals to the speech on line, and that’s great: the ethics point is that for once Hollywood isn’t stuffing smug 21st Century woke politics into its audience’s brains, but is presenting a dissenting analysis. More more amazing yet, this one comes from a series’ protagonist and an appealing one at that.

Taylor Sheridan, who created “Landman,” cast Thornton and wrote and directed the speech deserves thanks and credit for packaging a provocative point of view that is sure to spark debate. Debate is ethical. What isn’t ethical is cultural indoctrination, which is how Hollywood has mostly been approaching the oil issue for decades.

Not surprisingly, the Wikipedia entry linked above states that the series contains “misinformation about renewable energy… “exposed as common propaganda tropes by Big Oil.” This is why Wikipedia should be considered a member in excellent standing with the Axis of Unethical Conduct. If Democrats had won another term in the White House, we would probably see “Landman” forced to include a disclaimer on Tommy’s speech.

Death of a Baseball Ethics Hero: Fay Vincent (1938-2025)

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Fay Vincent, the last real Commissioner of Baseball, has died and attention should be paid.

The post of Commissioner of Baseball was created in the wake of the 1919 Black Sox scandal, with baseball’s future in doubt after the revelation that key members of the Chicago White Sox had accepted money from gamblers to throw the World Series to the vastly inferior Cincinnati Reds of the National League. The desperate owners turned to an austere judge, the wonderfully named Kenesaw Mountain Landis, who accepted the job provided that he had absolute power to act in “the best interests of the game.”

Landis ruled with an iron hand and baseball’s perpetually corrupt, greedy and none-too-bright owners backed off while he was in power, from 1920 until his death in 1944. Landis, in the harsh light of hindsight, is now vilified for not figuring out that keeping blacks out of the Major Leagues wasn’t in the best interests of baseball (or blacks, or sports, or democracy, or society, or the nation), but he proved a tough act to follow nonetheless.

Most of his successors were mere figureheads or knuckleheads, notable more for their non-decisions and bad ones than their actions in the “best interests of baseball.” Ford Frick, one of the longest serving Commissioners, is best known for his foolish insistence that Roger Maris didn’t really break Babe Ruth’s season homer record, a controversy decisively ended in the American League three years ago by Aaron Judge. Baseball collected weenies and fools in the role because the owners wanted it that way.

There were a couple of exceptions. Peter Ueberroth made the game infinitely more profitable and considerably more popular by modernizing its brandingm merchandising, promotion and marketing. Bart Giamatti , following in the fading footsteps of Judge Landis, courageously refused to issue The King’s Pass to Pete Rose, one of the most popular former players in the game, and banned him for gambling. But when Giamatti died suddenly from a heart attack after less than a year as Commissioner, he was succeeded by Fay Vincent, in a sequence a bit like when the Vice-President takes over when a POTUS dies. He had been deputy commissioner under his good friend Giamatti, and the owners of the major league teams confirmed him without qualms as the next Commissioner . They thought he was one of them: a corporate veteran and lawyer who had served in top executive roles for Columbia Pictures and Coca-Cola before Giamatti recruited Vincent as his right-hand man.

Vincent, however, was not what the owners wanted or expected. He was intelligent, courageous, far-sighted, and worst of all, as a passionate baseball fan, he took his job description seriously and literally. He didn’t work for the owners, though they could fire him. His stakeholders were fans and the game itself. Vincent’s vision for the job was reminiscent of the difficult ethical conflict accountants face: businesses hire them and pay their salaries, but their duty is to the public.

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Ethics Hero: VP Kamala Harris

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

Harris has had, in my estimation, several opportunities to earn Ethics Hero status here in the past, and whiffed every time. Yesterday, she achieved that status by the easiest route imaginable: by simply doing her job, indeed one of the very few requirements of a job that has always been under-burdened by official duties.

Vice-President Harris officiated as the two houses of Congress met in joint session to formally count the Electoral College votes for President and certify the results. “The votes for president of the United States are as follows,” Harris declared, as she was bound to, after each state’s totals were read. “Donald J. Trump of the state of Florida has received 312 votes.” When Republican members of Congress rose to their feet to applaud, Harris managed to look non-committal, even if she might have been thinking, “Fuck you all.”

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Ethics Hero: Me, Dammit!

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

I’m not happy about this, but there it is.

Back in October I wrote this post about how the boobs at Safeway managed to give me over $300 in food for my wife’s memorial event without charging me for it. I ruefully observed that as an ethicist I was obligated to go to the store and pay what I owed them despite the fact that the Safewayers were none the wiser: it was a classic example of “ethics is what you do when nobody’s watching.”

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Ethics Hero: Some Rich Person In Idaho

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

The holiday-appropriate heart-warming tale is told in this video I can’t embed here. Apparently a wealthy “Secret Santa” is giving $1 million to “deserving people in eastern Idaho,” and the East Idaho News is publicizing the plan with daily surprise visit to the lucky recipient. “Brenda in Blackfoot”is first up. From the News: “She is a single mom with eight adopted children who all have special needs. She works from 4:30 a.m. to approximately 1 p.m. every day to support her children… She has really struggled… In May, they experienced a small house fire, which caused a lot of damage to her home….Googling the repairs for instructions , [Brenda] did all of the repairs herself. Her family also had a flood in their home about six weeks ago….Brenda went through cancer treatment last year as well…”

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Ethics Hero: Joe Biden

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

He didn’t have to be gracious. Few would have blamed him if he was not. He could have followed through with the obligatory meeting between an outgoing POTUS and an incoming one from the other party stiffly, coldly and as formally as possible. After all, Donald Trump had refused to extend the courtesy of such a meeting to him, when Biden won the election in 2020.

But instead of tit-for-tat, payback, bitterness or resentment, President Biden said, “Welcome back.” Never mind that this is an odd thing to say to man whom his party (and Biden himself) had pronounced a fascist and an existentialist threat to democracy. Trump, himself addicted to outrageous hyperbole as a lifestyle, knows more than most that this was just a campaign ploy, albeit a particularly divisive and unfair one. “Welcome back” is as close as President Biden could come to saying, “It’s over, you won, and no hard feelings,” even if the hard feelings are there, for how could they not be?

It is supremely ironic that Joe Biden’s most remembered quote as President will be this one, uttered as he his administration is going out not with a bang, but a whimper. (George Washington also had a famous quote acknowledging his successor: “I am fairly out and you fairly in! George said to John Adams. “See which of us will be happiest!”)

At the end of ” MacBeth”Malcolm says of vanquished Thane of Cawdor, “Nothing dignified him in this life more than his leaving it.” It may be said of Joe Biden that “Nothing so dignified his Presidency as his leaving it.” I suspect that it will be.

Ethics Hero: Karoline Leavitt

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Res ipsa loquitur…

The link is here. (WordPress wouldn’t let me embed it.)

I had never heard Leavitt before; she was an assistant press secretary at the end of Trump’s term, ran unsuccessfully for Congress in 2022, and is now Trump’s 2024 National Press Secretary. Compare her to the pathetic Karine Jean-Pierre. Trump should use Leavitt as an example of the different standards of competence in Democratic and Republican administrations (not that Trump didn’t employ more than his share of incompetents as well, some of whom are now telling the news media that he likes Hitler).

In a sane and ethical world, a candidate staffer showing herself to be prepared, competent, articulate and devastatingly accurate when faced with mainstream media propaganda should not warrant Ethics Hero status. Unfortunately, displays like Leavitt’s almost never happen. She reduced the ABC Axis propagandist to nearly literal “huminahumina” babbling.

If only the candidate himself could communicate this well.

(Heck, if only I could communicate this well, I might have made my final appearance on NPR, when I was ambushed and mocked for correctly explaining how sexual harassment law can be abused to target public figures like Donald Trump, a more memorable last stand.)

Ethics Hero: Jon Stewart

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

There hasn’t been a Jon Stewart sighting at Ethics Alarms for a while, but he has a thick dossier here, mostly negative and deservedly so. He has also been an Ethics Hero twice before, but long, long ago before Stewart got full of himself and spawned the metastasizing of almost all cable and network news satire shows into progressive and Democratic propaganda tools.

Nonetheless, Stewart recently bucked his mostly Trump-Deranged audience by defending comedian Tony Hinchcliffe’s sometimes racially and ethnically provocative stand-up routine at Donald Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally—you know, the one the ironically-named Axis of Unethical Conduct says was modeled on a 1938 Nazi rally.

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Half-Ethics Hero: Kamala Harris

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

Kamala Harris is going into the metaphorical lion’s den and will be interviewed on Fox News by news anchor Bret Baier. Earlier in the campaign, she rejected a Fox News debate with Donald Trump, to which he had already agreed. Good for her.

The official Democratic Party position has long been to denigrate Fox because it does not follow the pro-Democrat/progressive propaganda mission of the other major networks. Barack Obama said, more than once, that it didn’t qualify as a legitimate news source. The Party has long shown hostility toward Fox News; it formally barred the network from hosting a primary debate in 2020. Hillary Clinton, as the 2016 Democratic presidential nominee, had one Fox News interview and that was the last one by a POTUS candidate from her party in the last eight years. President Biden refused to appear on Fox.

Harris gets only a half-Ethics Hero not because hers is an act dictated by crisis. If one has any doubt that internal polls, external polls, and basic vibes show Harris’s cynical, gossamer campaign on a losing flight path, her decision to have an interview with a journalist who might not be planning on voting for her should dispel it.

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