History
Ethic Quiz: “Springtime For Hitler” Ethics
And speaking of Donald Trump…
In South Orangetown, New York, the school superintendent stepped in and cut the swastikas from Tappan Zee High School’s student production of “The Producers” less than a week before the production. Of course, the Mel Brooks musical satire based on his film “The Producers” employs swastikas on Nazi flags and armbands during its famous campy “Springtime For Hitler” number and at other points in the show. Before someone posted a picture of the swastikas on the stage on a Facebook page, this aspect of “The Producers” had somehow escaped the attention of school administrators.
Some parents were shocked, and complained. After checking out the stage, the superintendent cut the costume details and set dressing.“There is no context in a public high school where a swastika is appropriate,” South Orangetown Superintendent Bob Pritchard told CBS. Pritchard consulted with local rabbis before making his decision.
Rabbis, of course, would be a natural audience for “The Producers.” (Reports that the rabbis suggested a production of “Fiddler on the Roof” instead have not been confirmed.)
Your spring-is-in-the-air Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day is…
Is this example of school censorship of the performing arts fair, responsible and ethical?
“Zodiac” And Real Lawyer, Fictional Lie Ethics
One of the problems with being an ethicist is that every movie seems like an ethics movie.
I watched “Zodiac” last night, struck by how much it resembled “Spotlight,” and not just because Mark Ruffalo had similar roles in the two films. It is a long, intense 2007 movie about the frustrating 1960s and early 1970s manhunt for the serial killer who called himself the “Zodiac” while killing seemingly random victims in the San Francisco Bay Area, and taunting police, Jack the Ripper-style, by sending them letters, blood stained clothing, and in a special touch, ciphers mailed to local newspapers. The case remains unsolved.
What set off my ethics alarms, however, was a scene based on an actual incident in the case. From the website “Zodiac Killer Facts”:
On the night of October 11, 1969, the Zodiac murdered cabdriver Paul Stine and removed a portion of the victim’s shirt. Days later, the killer mailed an envelope to the offices of The San Francisco Chronicle. Inside, the Zodiac had included a blood-soaked piece of Stine’s shirt along with a letter that traumatized the Bay Area for decades. In his customary cavalier style, The Zodiac wrote, “School children make nice targets. I think I shall wipe out a school bus some morning just shoot out the frunt tire and pick off the kiddies as they come bouncing out.”
The Zodiac’s threat to assassinate school children terrified children and parents everywhere, and created a nightmare of security concerns for police and school officials. Armed men escorted children to and from schools while patrol cars and even aircraft followed along and monitored the surrounding area. As media coverage of Zodiac’s murderous plans increased and fears of a horrific ambush grew, a local television station was the setting for a chilling scene.
In the early morning hours of October 22, 1969, the Oakland police department received a phone call from a man claiming to be the Zodiac. The caller said he wanted famous Boston attorney F. Lee Bailey to appear on a local television talk show, but told the operator that he would settle for San Francisco lawyer Melvin Belli in the event Bailey was unable to appear.
Hours later, Belli was the guest on the show with host Jim Dunbar. A man called the KGO television station several times, and, in conversation with Belli, claimed he was the Zodiac and that his name was “Sam.”
Unethical Restaurant of The Month, Busted Ethics Alarms Division: Joe’s Crab Shack
“Wait, someone took offense at the photo of a lynching that we had as a placemat? Who could have predicted that?”
Yes, in a case of a staff-wide ethics alarms breakdown that defies the laws of probability, Joe’s Crab Shack in Roseville, Minnesota thought it would be cute and entertaining to its diners to place on a table a large photo depicting the hanging of a black man before white onlookers. Labeled “Hanging at Groesbeck, Texas on April 12th 1895,” the placemat included a speech bubble coming from the doomed black man that says, “All I said was that I didn’t like the gumbo.”
I don’t understand this at all. I know that Minnesota has as many African Americans as Washington, D.C. has albinos, but still: who would think this was appropriate decor anywhere in the U.S.? And if there was one employee who did, due to a lesion or something, how did no other employee or no one in management intercept this atrocity, saying, “Whoops! Gotta watch Cletus the Closed Head Injury Busboy more closely, everyone. Look what he put on this table!”
Surely most people in 2016 have better racism detectors than this. Please. Tell me this was a social science experiment or something. Please.
The evidence, though, suggests that the entire establishment is run by Cletuses…or maybe crabs! That would explain it—the Joe’s Crab Shack chain is operated by crabs! Crabs are notoriously insensitive. That would explain the restaurant’s apology: Continue reading
Pathological Pandering: A Case Study
Today, on the day she attended Nancy Reagan’s funeral in Simi Valley, California, Hillary Clinton praised her for confronting AIDS, which emerged during her husband’s first term, telling MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell….
“It may be hard for your viewers to remember how difficult it was for people to talk about H.I.V./AIDS back in the 1980s. And because of both President and Mrs. Reagan – in particular, Mrs. Reagan – we started a national conversation, when before nobody would talk about it. Nobody wanted anything to do with it.”
As anyone who was alive at the time remembers, however, and as the families and friends of gay victims of the disease will never forget, the Reagans went out of their way to ignore AIDS as long as possible. Despite desperate calls for action from the government by the frightened and mourning gay community, Mrs. Reagan did not mention H.I.V. or AIDS publicly until 1985 and did not give a speech about the disease until 1987. Harshly judging the Reagans in retrospect may or may not be too harsh, but praising Nancy for what Clinton today called her “low-key advocacy” defies reason and reality.
Continue reading
Ethics Quote Of The Week: Garry Kasparov, Former Russian Chess Champion And Dissident, And While I’m Thinking Of It, Is It Too Late To Draft HIM For President?
“I’m enjoying the irony of American Sanders supporters lecturing me, a former Soviet citizen, on the glories of Socialism and what it really means! Socialism sounds great in speech soundbites and on Facebook, but please keep it there. In practice, it corrodes not only the economy but the human spirit itself, and the ambition and achievement that made modern capitalism possible and brought billions of people out of poverty. Talking about Socialism is a huge luxury, a luxury that was paid for by the successes of capitalism. Income inequality is a huge problem, absolutely. But the idea that the solution is more government, more regulation, more debt, and less risk is dangerously absurd.”
—-Former chess grandmaster and Soviet dissident Garry Kasparov on Facebook, explaining to clueless U.S. citizens what they don’t appreciate about their own system, from the perspective of an immigrant who has seen where socialist fantasies lead.
Of course, Kasparov isn’t remotely eligible to be President, since he was born in Russia and is now a Croatian citizen. Yet if I could, I would vote for him over any of the leading candidates in both parties even if he couldn’t speak English and had to commute from Croatia.
Kasperov, who is the chairman of the New York-based Human Rights Foundation and the author of Winter is Coming: Why Vladimir Putin and the Enemies of the Free World Must Be Stopped, elaborated on his theme at the Daily Beast, giving an American history lesson in the process (Does Donald Trump know any of this stuff? No chance!) and saying in part… Continue reading
Ethics Dunce: Marcia Clark
Bill Buckner’s error: he didn’t kill anyone, but to many Red Sox fan, this was worse.
“I did not want [Simpson] to try on the evidence gloves. I never did,” failed O.J. prosecutor Marcia Clark tells”Dateline NBC” in a TV special airing this week. “That was [Darden’s] call. … I was miserable from the moment that Chris said, ‘No, I’m doing this.’ And I never expected anything good to come of it.”
Unbelievable. How petty, unfair and low of Clark at this late date to start trying to blame others on the prosecuting team for losing a murder case that should have been won! It is decades later, the story is part of U.S. legal, racial and cultural lore, and everyone has known that Darden was tricked into the bloody gloves trap by Johnnie Cochran for almost all of that time. There is no justification for Clark to turn on her colleague now. Continue reading
Anti-Trump Sunday Concludes With An Ethics Quote Of The Day: President Ronald Reagan
“Those of us in public life can only resent the use of our names by those who seek political recognition for the repugnant doctrines of hate they espouse. The politics of racial hatred and religious bigotry practiced by the Klan and others have no place in this country, and are destructive of the values for which America has always stood.”
—President Ronald Reagan in 1984, after learning that the KKK had endorsed him.
The contrast between this and the disgraceful, dishonest, weak and waffling response by Donald Trump Sunday when asked about his endorsements from the KKK and David Dukes is stark and illuminating.
__________________
Pointer: Instapundit (Ed Driscoll)
“Anti-Trump Sunday” Continues With Ethics Hero: Conservative Commentator Erick Erickson
A representative example of incisive Trump supporter logic…
Erick Erickson is a prominent and respected conservative blogger, talk show host and political commentator. He is so far right of me he would probably think I was Lenin’s Ghost. Erickson was one of the first conservatives to figure out that Donald Trump lacked the character to be President: his misogynist attacks on Megyn Kelly were enough for him. (For the record, I knew Donald Trump lacked the character to be President about 20 years ago.) Now Erickson has written a thorough and much-needed message to other conservatives that begins…
I will not vote for Donald Trump for President of the United States even if he is the Republican nominee.
He is an authoritarian blending nationalist and tribal impulses, which historically has never worked out well for the nation that goes in that direction or the people in that nation.
Gee, I wonder what historical figure Erick might be referencing?
The rest of his essay is excellent, though progressives, Democrats and others will blanch at Erickson’s policy beefs with Trump. That’s irrelevant, though: he’s not writing to people who already would gnaw off their feet before they would vote for Trump or any Republican. Erickson is trying to wake up conservatives and the Republican Party, and remind them of their ethical duty, at the risk of alienating some of his own audience.
Some other highlights… Continue reading
First Up On Anti-Trump Sunday: An Unethical Quote Of The Month
“No more politicians for President!”
— A Donald Trump supporter, on a conservative web site today.
Bizarro has an observation to make...
I have been reading and periodically shooting down the comments of Trump supporters on a series of websites in my continuing and desperate quest to find a single, substantive, intelligent, informed argument for why anyone should support Donald Trump for President. I’m only looking for one. You would think there would be one. Yet so far, my research hasn’t yielded any more valid that the unethical quote above.Why is it unethical? It is unethical because it shows that the speaker is incompetent at citizenship, and has failed the basic responsibility of those who live and benefit from democracy: understand how the government works, and what leadership in a democracy requires.
No, “He can beat Hillary Clinton” does not make the grade. First of all, he can’t, for the simple reason that if someone like me, who knows Hillary Clinton’s record and character well, rates ethics and character as prime qualifications for President, and who regards her as approaching Richard Nixon as the most dishonest and flawed individual ever to run for the office (but without his talent and skill), would still vote for her to avoid the disaster of Donald Trump, he can’t beat Hillary. Second of all, it is a Rationalization #22, “It’s not the worst thing” excuse, and that’s all it is. It is, to evoke “Jurassic World,” like releasing the T-Rex because you want to stop the Indominus. (Actually it is Trump who is the Indominus, the unnatural monster.) Continue reading
Ethics Alarms 
This most recent ethics thread commentary from Rick Jones (a.k.a. “Curmie,” who chronicles education fiascos, among other matters, during the year on his own blog) involves the recent kerfuffle over a high school production of “The Producers” having its Nazi decorations stripped away. I confess that I specifically requested Rick’s take on this one, knowing him to be a theater colleague as well as a teacher, and he did not disappoint….except that he uses the British spelling of “theatre.”
Here is Rick’s Comment of the Day on the Ethics Quiz: “Springtime for Hitler” Ethics.