Just remember, the Ethics Alarms position is to strive as much as possible to remain unbiased regarding a performer’s art regardless of his or her demonstrated political orientation or revealed personal character flaws. I enjoy Bradley Whitford as an actor.
But only an unethical, bullying asshole would write a tweet like that.
J.D. Vance’s much maligned “cat ladies” snark , like many furiously slammed comments by conservatives and Republicans are, may have focused attention on to a societal trend seriously threatening the health of American society. (If only he could have articulated it better.)
Lately I have been bombarded with TV ads for Smalls cat food. The promotions and commercials claim that it is “human grade” cat food, and why not, since the TV spots feature disturbed individuals male and female, not just proclaiming these animal companions as their surrogates for children, but literally stating that they are children. “He’s my son,” a young woman says in one ad, speaking of her cat. “She’s literally my baby!” says some guy, also talking about a feline “fur-baby.” Literally!
This would be funny in a mordant way if it were not so ominous. I can’t blame cat food companies for taking advantage of the apocalyptic collision of progressive anti-family attitudes in the U.S. and pet mania: so many people do come to regard a dog or a cat as cheaper, more predictable, less demanding equivalent of a child. What is disturbing about the Smalls commercials is that they represent this mindset as healthy and normal.
This explains a lot…
Since there is some reason to suspect that Jill Biden has been doing an Edith Wilson impression for at least some of her husband’s ill-starred term as President, a substacker decided to do a deep dive into Dr. Jill Biden’s dissertation to assess exactly how intellectually qualified she is to be shadow-President. What she found was, to understate it, horrifying….and yet, all in all, not surprising.
To summarize, the doctorate of education Jill received from the University of Delaware in January 2007 was based on a “scholarly” dissertation that was objectively crap. It is riddled with typos, mathematical errors, and horrible writing. Holly Mathnerd (not her real name, presumably) writes in part (this is a huge essay),
Waking up this Father’s Day [Thanks, Dad, for 1) being such a terrific, selfless father 2) for continuing to be an inspiration, a role model and a guide during my highs and lows (like now), and everything in-between 3) for loving my wonderful mom and showing it so brilliantly to everyone, especially her, without interruption for almost sixty years; 4) for somehow saving so much money on a modest salary to hand over to my sister, me, and the three grandchildren through sacrifice and smart investing, because without it I would be living in a cardboard box right now, and 5) for surviving the Battle of the Bulge] to the near certainty that my son (who informed me last week that he would like me to refer to him/her/they as my daughter, Samantha. OK! ), is almost certain to ignore this rather contrived holiday (which is fine with me), a mystery in my yard in which someone or something keeps pulling the 15-foot-long heavy plastic, 7″ diameter tubing, installed to send runoff from the gutters into the garden rather than into my home’s foundation, off the down spout and dragging it into my neighbor’s yard, and another fight with a customer service rep, who, I swear, spoke exactly like Andy Kaufmann’s character on “Taxi” but faster than an auctioneer—yes, this IS a long sentence!—I sat down with Spuds to talk myself out of seppuku, drink a cup of coffee, and check what nonsense the various news networks were spouting.
Big mistake.
…the main one being that the distress signal is appropriate, because the Axis of Unethical Conduct proved with this fiasco that it is ruthless, shameless, untrustworthy, and will do anything in 2024 to mislead the public if it might mean a few extra votes for Democrats. Or maybe the main one is that your friendly neighborhood ethicist was right about this story from the very start, which is why Fredo asked to make another appearance as my spokesman.
And this, my friends, is why we can’t have nice things.
Or a functioning republic.
Let me not get to far ahead of myself. Right now, the whole, biased, corrupt, anti-Trump, anti-conservative, Biden-protecting propaganda-spewing mainstream news media, the third partner in the Ethics Alarms-dubbed Axis of Unethical Conduct (“the resistance,” and Desperate Democrats completing the troika) is doing a mass Jumbo (“Flags? What flags?”) regarding what was its favorite earth-shattering scandal a week ago. This sudden amnesia was brought on because the Washington Post, perhaps seeking to embarrass its old rival, effectively eviscerated the Times’ “Get Justice Alito!” scoop, which EA first discussed here, and subsequently here, here, and here. (Don’t make me describe it again: I was sick of it days ago.)
Two days ago, the Post revealed that it had known about the first flag episode more than three years ago and had decided that it wasn’t newsworthy (because, as the revealed facts showed clearly, it wasn’t). Now-retired SCOTUS reporter Robert Barnes traveled to the Alito’s home on January 20, 2021, the day of Joe Biden’s inauguration, to follow-up on an anonymous tip he had received from some Alito-hating asshole neighbor about the flag. After investigating, Barnes and the Post concluded there was no story, because the flag-raising appeared to be the work of Martha-Ann Alito, Alito’s wife, not the Justice, as part of her dispute with her neighbors.
Increasingly, Americans no longer agree on what justice and the rule of law mean. This is a very important societal problem, and gee, it would be nice if we had two, or even one, Presidential candidate who could articulate the elements of the crisis well and persuasively enough to make a sufficient proportion of the public aware that this trend must be addressed and reversed.
But we don’t, do we?
The most recent story that brings this into focus comes from Arizona, one of many states with a fracturing, incoherent culture these days. Melody Felicano Johnson, 39, attempted to murder her husband, putting bleach in his coffee at least twice. The woman’s husband, a US airman, began suspecting that something was amiss in March of 2023 when he was stationed in Germany; his wife’s coffee was never very good, but for weeks it had been especially foul.
This time, I’d like to concentrate on the answer “The Ethicist” gave to a question more than the question itself. Prof. Appiah was asked by a woman (or man) who had been sexually molested by his (or her) father whether it was time to finally inform family members about the abuse, now that this son or daughter has decided to cease contact with the father for other reasons as well as the obvious one. He or she says the mother and siblings think the decision to cut off Dad is cruel, and that the father should have a chance to make amends—but they don’t know the whole story.
“If I were to share these details with my mother, I’d risk destroying a decades-long marriage in a single conversation,” the inquirer writes. “If I were to tell my siblings, I’d do irrevocable damage to their relationship with our father. Should I continue my silence to protect the rest of my family from emotional harm? Or do I owe it to them to tell them the truth? As I write this, I’m also painfully aware that if I break my silence, he will try to manipulate them into believing that none of this is true, that I’m delusional — he has done it successfully before.”
I’m not a nuanced kind of person regarding situations like this. My reaction: The truth shall set you free. Would I want to know if my spouse or father was a monster? Absolutely. That the information would be painful doesn’t mean I’d rather live in contrived ignorance. The writer has no obligation to protect his father, and it’s not protecting the mother or siblings to enable a lie.
Here’s the philosophy professor’s answer, in a few bite-size chunks:
“Now, an immediate issue is whether your father could be in a position to repeat his crimes with other children — that there aren’t others suffering in silence. If that’s the case, staying silent isn’t an option. You don’t raise this as a concern, but you need to be confident that it isn’t one.”
And how exactly could that confidence be justified? It can’t be. The writer has already stated that this man has managed to fool his entire family for decades. The rest of “The Ethicist’s” answer is superflous: “staying silent isn’t an option.” A man who molested his own child isn’t trustworthy, and never can be.
Suppose you told him that you’ll keep quiet if he tells the family that he accepts that you don’t want to see him owing to a serious wrong he did to you. The problem is that questions would arise about the nature of that wrong, and that he may not be willing to deal with them. Nor is it obvious that keeping the details vague would leave your parents’ relationship intact. Besides, your father doesn’t sound like the sort of person who could be talked into taking responsibility.
Never mind that: bargaining with the damaging information comes to close to extortion for my ethics alarms.
Even if you reveal the truth, he may be confident, rightly or wrongly, that he can get people to believe you’re not to be trusted.
So what? Don’t be a weenie. Tell the truth, and if the family chooses to believe the abuser, that’s their problem, and their tragedy.
Whatever you decide, though, you shouldn’t be motivated by the thought that you owe this truth to anyone. It’s not that there isn’t reason to care that they know the truth. Many people in your family have relationships predicated on ignorance. They might even feel, were it to come out, that you should have told them before, precisely because we want to live a life in which our important relationships are not based on a failure to understand what our intimates are like.
Yet these reasons to disclose what happened don’t impose a duty on you of doing so. You may judge that they are outweighed by the fact that sharing the truth will cause pain and disruption to many lives without doing enough compensating good. Nor are you obliged to subject yourself to the pain and disruption that your father’s manipulations may bring you.
I disagree completely. There is no duty owed to the father to keep the ugly truth from the family, but the family has a right to know.
“Which brings me to my final thought: Taking measures to protect your well-being isn’t selfish when you are, objectively, the wronged and wounded party. Will your well-being be best protected by your admittedly painful policy of steering clear of both your father and the tumult of disclosure?…”
“It’s OK to be a coward if that’s the easiest path for you.” Again, I disagree.
The last point I have to make is that I doubt very much that the mother doesn’t know about the abuse. Spouses of child-abusing parents almost always either know or are in denial.
Some of the comments on this post compel me to cross-post the following story from Facebook, as I continue to try to deal with the sudden loss of my wife on Leap Year. The contrast with Kristi Noem’s cruel and impulsive shooting of a young dog that displeased her didn’t occur to me for some reason until I read the recent posts of readers here.
Today I was driving home from the vet’s with Spuds and his newly drained ear, and “I Will,” Paul’s sweet little song from the White Album came on the radio. (“Who knows how long I’ve loved you…”)
Grace envied singers and always wanted to sing herself, but was convinced that she couldn’t…I tried to tell her that she didn’t have a bad voice and should take some coaching, but she wouldn’t do it. When she wanted to sing, only with me, she deliberately used a fake voice, either a high falsetto or sometimes a weird guttural voice that sounded eerily like Pazuzu in “The Exorcist.”
Grace shared her mother’s and oldest sister Edie’s deep connection to animals: all three loved them so much the animals could sense it. If one of our dogs or Kibber the cat had some wound or problem to be tended to, they would only let Grace do it: it was almost mystical.
When our beloved 160 lb. English Mastiff, Patience, had her cancer return in her seventh year (Grace paid $12,000 for her treatment when the cancer first appeared and didn’t tell me for years…I didn’t mind: Patience was worth it, and it bought her another year), the sweet, sensitive dog was so brave…she had no appetite and was fading away, but she always wagged her huge tail when Grace came near. One day, as we knew Patience was running out of time, I returned from an errand to find Grace lying on the floor with her head at Patience’s ear. She was singing softly in her real voice, “I Will” to Patience as the dog slowly wagged her tail. Grace had tears pouring down her face, and pretty soon, so did I.
Over the next few days, Grace sang that song to Patience every time she seemed uncomfortable or agitated, usually beginning with, “Don’t be afraid!” and then, softly, “Who knows how long I’ve loves you…” And Patience would look into her eyes, and wag.
Three days later, we called a vet who made house visits to come and end our dog’s suffering. We probably waited too long. Patience had to tell us it was time by wandering out of our back yard down the hill into the bamboo; I had to persuade her to come back. She had gone off to die. As the vet fed the fatal drug into the vein in Patience’s leg, Grace was lying right by Patience’s side with her arm around her. She sang “Who knows how long I’ve loved you” until that big tail stopped, and Patience was gone.
I’m so glad that Grace never heard the Kristi Noem story.
(This may end up as more of a rueful observation than a post.)
Last night I watched PBS’s “American Experience’ because it was late, my satellite package has amazingly few channels that aren’t commercial junk (No TCM for example, and I miss it) and no baseball games were on. It was a new episode about the Love Canal protests during the Carter Administration, something I hadn’t thought about for a long time.
It was the first toxic waste dump scandal—PBS was celebrating “Earth Day”—- and a landmark in the environmental movement: one can get some sense of the kind of things going on from “Ellen Brockovich,” about a another community poisoned by chemical manufacturers. That account focuses on the legal battles, but Poisoned Ground: The Tragedy at Love Canal centers on the local activists, mostly housewives and mothers, who organized, protested and kept the pressure on local, New York State and national government officials to fix the deadly problem, something the bureaucrats seemed either unwilling or unable to do.
One feature of the tale I had forgotten: the furious women briefly held two EPA officials hostage, and released them promising a response that would make that crime “look like Sesame Street” if President Carter didn’t meet their demands for action in 24 hours. And Carter capitulated to the threat! It doesn’t matter that the women were right about the various governments’ foot-dragging and irresponsible handling of the crisis: a competent President should never reward threats from people breaking the law. Jimmy just didn’t understand the Presidency at all, the first of four such Presidents to wound the U.S. from 1976 to 2024.
That wasn’t my main epiphany, however. It was this: In the late 1970’s, before the feminist movement took hold, so-called ordinary women, mostly mothers, became intense and dedicated activists fighting for the lives, health and futures, of their babies and children, as well as their unborn children because the Love Canal pollution was causing miscarriages and spontaneous abortions. The women were heroic, and the public and news media were drawn to them because they projected moral and ethical standing by fighting to save lives.
by Curmie
I’ve promised two essays that are indeed partially written; I could finish one of them in 20 minutes or so if I could just concentrate, but something else always seems to come up. So let me try yet a different topic.
One of my friends and former students (we’ll call him L for the purposes of this post) teaches theatre in a public school. He recently posted on Facebook about a confrontation he’d had with the father of one of his students. The boy had failed to do three significant assignments, and, curiously enough, his grade reflected that fact.
Ah, but you see, the lad is an athlete, and a failing grade made him academically ineligible. So Dad screams for “about 15 minutes.” My friend responded like this: “I want him to be able to play […], too. I understand how important it is for him to have that outlet. But if I want lights on in my house, I gotta pay bills. If I wanna drive a car, I gotta pay to put gas in the car. So, if _______ wants to play […] then he’s gonna need to stop being lazy and do what is required in this class. Not to mention the other three classes he is failing.”
Ethics Alarms 