It almost seems absurd to mention this trivial ethics misdemeanor when discussing a soulless, greedy TV network that happily promotes a sport that sends young men onto its fields to maim their brains so team owners and sponsors can make millions. Yet somehow this level of moronic rote wokeness deserves our attention.
Here is part of what the election last month was a reaction against. Let’s hope NBC and the equally disgusting National Football League are tardy enough reading the metaphorical room that they both lose audiences, popularity and millions. I know it won’t happen. But I’m a dreamer…
Jayden Daniels, the quarterback of the Washington Commanders, set a record last night as he led his politically correctly named team into the NFL play-offs while breaking the old record for most rushing yards by a rookie quarterback. A Washington QB had held the previous record too: Robert Griffin III ran for 815 yards in his rookie year (2012), and Daniels topped him with 830.
So NBC quickly put that graphic up that you see above, but not before blotting out the name of Griffin’s team when he was playing…the REDSKINS!
NBC had to protect the delicate sensibilities of Sunday night football fans who thrill to see players break bones and crack skulls, making sure that their viewers wouldn’t suffer psychic trauma by being reminded that the Commanders once had a racist name, or so the Mad Left decreed. Thus it made sense to a news organization that it should misrepresent history, tamper with evidence and sacrifice truth to satisfy progressive crazies—you know, like it has done regularly for years now—and as PBS was doing tonight until I couldn’t stand watching any more, running a documentary about what a great President Jimmy Carter was.
Nah, airbrushing away a team name on a jersey is petty censorship. I know it. I also know that a news organization that will bother lying about something nobody cares about won’t blink at lying when it advances its own interests.
Libertarians contribute significantly to civic policy discourse by staking out an extreme position that serves as useful ballast against extreme statists from the other side of the spectrum. I often use Reason, which I used to subscribe to in its print format, for ethics topics. Unfortunately, libertarians constantly erode their credibility by taking absurd positions, arguing for open borders, wanting to legalize heroin, and mu particular favorite, arguing that the U.S. should have sat out World War II.
Today the libertarians, or at least too many of them (one would be too many) are arguing that Jimmy Carter was an excellent President. Yes, I am really reading that. Here is Reason quoting Gene Healy, a vice president at the Cato Institute, with favor:
“Abroad, he favored diplomacy over war, garnering the least bloody record of any post–World War II president. So what if he didn’t look tough, or even particularly competent, as he did it? A clear-eyed look at the Carter record reveals something surprising: This bumbling, brittle, unloveable man was, by the standards that ought to matter, our best modern president.”
Because, you see, the standards that “ought to matter” mean that reducing the American Presidency in influence, prestige and power is a good thing. So what if Americans have no respect for the office or the man holding it? So what if the new template for future leaders is fecklessness and apathy? What “matters” is that if chaos reigns all over the globe, the United States canconfidently eschew all responsibility because no one we care about gets hurt.
Heck, if diminishing the Presidency is an accomplishment, Joe Biden must stand as one of the all-time greats!
I have tried arguing with libertarians periodically over the years, and found them to be cultists, like climate change fanatics, abortion activists and the Trump Deranged. Reality doesn’t impose on their beliefs at all, at least not the libertarians who have swallowed the whole philosophical enchilada. It is useful to have vocal individuals who express principled objections to government over-reach, but when they declare weak leaders good leaders and praise passivity as an absolute virtue, such voices disqualify themselves as serious advocates.
In short, if Jimmy Carter was our best modern President, I’m Woody Woodpecker.
Jimmy Carter, the 39th President, finally died at the age of 100 in, of course, Plains, Georgia, which no one ever heard of before he arrived on the national scene. Ethics Alarms last discussed Carter here, in the fifth chapter of its inquiry to name the Worst President Ever. Carter made the final field that was announced this month, along with FranklinPierce, James Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, WoodrowWilson, RichardNixon, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and, last but not least, Joe Biden.
I doubt there are many strong arguments that can be made to assert that Carter doesn’t belong there, just as there is little doubt that he doesn’t deserve the booby prize. Carter’s Presidency stands as testimony to the foolishness of the belief that good intentions mitigate failure. Carter supporters’ argument for his Presidency ultimate devolves into rationalizations such as #3A, The Road To Hell, or “I meant well,” #14, Self-validating Virtue, #38, The Miscreant’s Mulligan or “Give him/her/them/me a break!,” #18, Hamm’s Excuse, or “It wasn’t my fault,”and the dreaded #22, Comparative Virtue, or “It’s not the worst thing.” Given its crippling leftward bias, the mainstream media is tying itself into knots today to make Carter out to be something he was not, an effective President.
I wouldn’t call this post an Ethics Quiz; I’d say it’s a thought experiment. Here it is:
What if Donald Trump either announced that he was no longer a Republican, or threatened to do so?
There is nothing stopping him from switching parties, or declaring that he is President under the banner of his own party, whether he called it “MAGA” or something else. The Constitution didn’t have a word about parties, and the Founders generally thought they were something to avoid. Trump could even cloak his radical decision in the spirit of the Founders. “I am not a President for Republicans or Democrats, but for all Americans!” he could say in the announcement, a national address. What would happen? The mind boggles, or at least mine does. Here are some thoughts and questions…
One of the weirdest events in world history took place on Christmas 1914, at the very beginning of the five year, pointless and stunningly destructive carnage of The Great War, what President Woodrow Wilson, right as usual, called “The War to End All Wars.”
World War I, as it was later called after the world war it caused succeeded it, led to the deaths of more than 25 million people, and if anything was accomplished by this carnage, I have yet to read about it.
The much sentimentalized event was a spontaneous Christmas truce, as soldiers on opposing sides on the Western Front, defying orders from superiors, pretended the war didn’t exist and left their trenches, put their weapons and animus aside, sang carols, shared food, buried their dead, and even played soccer against each other, as “The Christmas Truce” statue memorializes above.
The brass on both sides—this was a British and German phenomenon only—took steps to ensure that this would never happen again, and it never did.
It all began on Christmas Eve, when at 8:30 p.m. an officer of the Royal Irish Rifles reported to headquarters that “The Germans have illuminated their trenches, are singing songs and wishing us a Happy Xmas. Compliments are being exchanged but am nevertheless taking all military precautions.” The two sides progressed to serenading each other with Christmas carols, with the German combatants crooning “Silent Night,” and the British adversaries responding with “The First Noel.“ The war diary of the Scots Guards reported that a private “met a German Patrol and was given a glass of whisky and some cigars, and a message was sent back saying that if we didn’t fire at them, they would not fire at us.”
The same deal was struck spontaneously at other locales across the battlefield. Another British soldier reported that as Christmas Eve wound down into Christmas morning, “all down our line of trenches there came to our ears a greeting unique in war: ‘English soldier, English soldier, a merry Christmas, a merry Christmas!’” He wrote in a letter home that he heard,
Above you will see three interpretations of what angels—you know, those benign, heavenly creatures we hear on high and observe, “Hark! They sing!,” the celestial guardians like the funny little old man who shows Jimmy Stewart that he’s really led a wonderful life, the kind of immortal being that appeared to Mary to tell her she was going to bear the Son of God, you know, those things?—really look like. The version on the left is from the Mike Flanagan horror series “Midnight Mass.” It’s a scary angel, but not as scary as the ones that show up in Robert and Michelle King’s scary TV series “Evil,” which look like this…
Yikes.
The version of Gabriel in the center is pretty much how I had been taught and told and shown how angels look for most of my life, and I assumed that was how they are represented in the Bible. Now, this is at least partially my own fault for not knowing the Bible better than I do, but when artists, churches, Sunday school teachers, movies, tree ornaments, Christmas cards and children’s books all show angels as friendly-looking Scandinavians with big, white, fluffy wings, I think I can be excused for assuming that there is at least as much authority for those representations as there is for anything else in the Bible—-an assertion to which Carnac the Magnificent (oh, look it up, ye of pop culture deficit!) would say to me, “You are wrong, Ethics Breath!”
Last night I was totally blotto and depressed, took myself to a favorite restaurant to dine alone (I was looking for “a place where everybody knows my name” because the owner and some of the staff knew me and Grace because we started going there the week it opened, but none of them were around. Or were avoiding me…). I even had a stiff drink, my third this year.
I didn’t help. When I returned home, I decided to watch a semi-Christmas movie, the 1942 Irving Berlin movie musical “Holiday Inn” with Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire that I realized I hadn’t watched in decades, and never critically. The movie spawned several Irving Berlin classics, “White Christmas” and “Easter Parade” among them, as well as the movie “White Christmas,” which shares several ingredients with its predecessor—it’s a musical, it takes place at a resort inn in the country, Bing’s the star and sings his iconic Christmas song, he has an old friend and partner who dances, and there are two women who perform with them—but the movies have completely different plots.
And “White Christmas” has no blackface number….
One of the few moments I remembered from the film was Astaire’s number above, which is spectacular. In the movie he improvises it on the spot when his dancing partner doesn’t show up, which is of course impossible, even for Fred. In fact, the entire movie is so ridiculous and contrived that suspension of disbelief is out of the question: It makes “White Christmas” look like a documentary by comparison. Another realization: As well as Bing Crosby sang in the Fifties, his freak voice in the Forties was much better. Wow.
And yes, the movie was the inspiration for the founders of the motel chain to call it Holiday Inn. Apparently they didn’t pay Irving Berlin a penny, the cheap bastards.
“Holiday Inn” is definitely not about ethics, as it is completely mindless.
But you’re going to make your contributions to day about ethics, right?
No doubt about it, one of the “norms” that President-Elect Donald Trump is shredding, stomping on and setting on fire is the tradition of Presidents not using their office, visibility, popularity and influence to sell products, with their names as brands. I’m not sure doing this had even occurred to previous White House residents; it certainly never occurred to the Founders…or me, to be honest.
Naturally, because it’s Trump, the usual Axis snipers are horrified. A particularly stinky response issued from New York Times Trump-hating columnist Frank Bruni‘s poison keyboard, titled “Take a Whiff of Eau de Trump. It Reeks.” [Gift link! Ho Ho Ho!]This is what the Axis propaganda machine is left with: playground-level insults for the elected President before he can even take the oath. Honeymoon? Respect? Good faith? Patriotism? Unity? Bi-Partisanship? Nah! What are they?
I’m probably not celebrating Christmas anywhere but on Ethics Alarms this year. Last Christmas was truly awful in every way, with my wife Grace in pain and suffering from some creeping malady that killed her in February and that I was too blind to detect (and so were her doctors). We were also in our worst financial crunch in 25 years of running our ethics business, my son was having personal problems, and all was definitely not happy and bright.
I am certainly conflicted about the holiday this year. I am a passionate Christmas booster, as long-time readers here know, because I regard the secular holiday as a vital social balm as well as an ethics catalyst. It is a unique holiday that calls on us to be kind, generous and forgiving, and, if possible (I’m trying!) to just be happy for life and its wonders. I am not religious, but I do believe that this is a profoundly ethical time of year. We all need Christmas, frankly. I need it, even though I dread every minute of it this year.
One of the special features of Christmas is that it is soaked with nostalgia and traditions along with bittersweet memories of people and events long past. Charles Dickens got this aspect of the holiday exactly right; it is why I love “A Christmas Carol” so much and have so often participated in public presentations of the story. My last professional directing gig was a staged reading of it, and that was the fourth time I have overseen one; I also have organized and directed three mass “radio” readings, using conference call technology and the sound effects wizardry of Keith Bell. (Where is Keith these days? See, there’s another memory knocking!).
With The American Century Theater, I co-wrote and presented two Christmas musical revues: “If Only In My Dreams,” which centered on the letters GIs wrote home at Christmastime during World War II, and “An American Century Christmas,” a salute to the old-fashioned TV Christmas specials and perennial Christmas movies like the three that have Ethics Alarms “guides’ here: “It’s A Wonderful Life,” which I posted at Thanksgiving, “White Christmas,” which will be updated and posted soon, and on Christmas Eve this year, “Miracle on 34th Street.” The first revue was more popular, but the second was my favorite, because it was generated entirely by my own warm memories of what Christmas was like for me and my sister growing up in Arlington, Massachusetts.
Both of our parents were Depression kids in poor families and their Christmases were spare at best, so both were determined to make the holiday magical for their children. And it was. We would decorate the tree carefully and lovingly a week before the 25th—I remember my mother insisting that each strand of genuine tin tinsel saved for years be placed individually on the branches—and go to bed after hanging our (huge) stockings with visions of sugarplums dancing in our heads. When we got up on Christmas morning, my parents had meticulous constructed a “Christmas panorama,” with the giant stockings stuffed with gadgets, oranges, walnuts and small packages lying by the fireplace, and the whole living room covered with presents, mine on the left of the living room, my sister’s on the right. The gifts were mostly unwrapped, and the vista was ever spectacular.
My father, a photography fanatic who was terrible at his hobby, had the old home movie projector spotlights blazing. He would record Edith and I coming down the stairs to see the amazing treasure left by Santa as mom looked on beaming and eager to see our reactions. My parents insisted on going through this ritual even after we were in college! My mother wouldn’t let the tradition go.
In 1963, the week before Christmas, Bing Crosby hosted “The Hollywood Palace,” a live variety show that was always headed by some entertainment legend, though Bing had the honor more than anyone else. That week he introduced a new Christmas song, the last popular Christmas song to have an unambiguous religious context. That was “Do You Hear What I Hear?,” and the video above was what I saw live. Something in the song immediately resonated with me; I was always a Bing Crosby fan, following the guidance of my father, but I loved everything about the new song despite its childlike simplicity. I said so immediately following Bing’s rendition. Sure enough, the song was playing on our old Magnavox stereo when my sister and I came down the stairs in our pajamas on Christmas morning.
“Do You Hear What I Hear?,” Bing’s version of course though there have been hundreds of covers, is the first Christmas song I play every year as soon as whiffs of holly, evergreens and mistletoe are in the air. It throws my mind back to those magical Christmases that Grace and I tried to recreate for our son every year while he was growing up. That magic was significantly dimmed when my father died, in his sleep, on my birthday in 2009, leading to the saddest Marshall Christmas. The spirit fell away a bit more the next year, when my mother, who never got over losing the love of her life after 58 years of marriage, was in the hospital fighting a voracious hospital infestion that killed her two months later. Christmas was never the same after Mom died: it was her joy and obsession. Still Christmas reminds me of her, and Dad, and that lost magic…and Bing.
I was pondering when and whether to put up a post about “Do You Here What I Hear?” this year when I checked out Ann Althouse’s blog and discovered that she had posted the video as a joke after her post about Jill Biden getting a laugh at her Christmas comments wishing the assembled “joy.” Apparently some took her choice of words as a sly swipe at Kamala Harris’s ill-fated “joy” theme.
In the comments to the post, some wags made jokes about how the shepherd boy tells the king to bring the “child shivering in the cold” silver and gold when what the baby needed was a blanket or a space heater. Yeah, good one: they made those jokes in 1963. Some jackass wrote, “If you listen to the lyrics, “Do You Hear What I Hear” ranks right up there with “Santa Claus is Coming to Town” for supposedly secular seasonal songs with aggressively creepy quasi-Christian imagery applied to Progressive pieties.”
Oh, bite me. The song was never intended to be “secular” and how it can be heard as “anti-Christian” is beyond me. And Bing: he was a devout Catholic, and one of the reasons Crosby became the voice of Christmas is that he sang Christmas music with such reverence and conviction. (The other reason was that he had that amazing, rich, expressive voice.).
It is especially perverse to impugn the lyrics of a Christmas song written by a man with the first name “Noël.” “Do You Hear What I Hear” was written in October of 1962 during the Cuban Missile Crisis, by a married songwriting team that wondered at the time if it would be the last thing they ever did. Regney, the lyricist, was born in France and had studied music at the Strasbourg Conservatory and at the Conservatoire National de Paris. When France was overwhelmed by Hitler’s troops in 1940, he was conscripted into the German army. As a Nazi soldier, Noël secretly joined the French underground and served as a spy, passing information along to the resistance. Once he led German soldiers into a trap where they were massacred by French fighters who cut them down in a crossfire. Regney was shot too, but survived. He then deserted and worked with the French underground until the end of the war. Continue reading →
Quotes by his guy, a defrocked Methodist pastor known for his social and political activism and “writings from a liberal Christian perspective,” (I’m quoting Wikipedia there) always start popping up on social media this time of year. He’s been quoted a lot on Facebook especially lately because he is a vocal advocate of the idiotic “Mary and Joseph were immigrants too” analogy used by nice, deluded people to justify open borders and illegal immigrants.
These memes are notable because their emotion-based, legally and ethically bonkers argument is even more absurd than the one that claims the U.S. should let everybody in because the Statue of Liberty says so. I think I banned a commenter this year for using that one, invoking the Ethics Alarms “Stupidity Rule.” I will do the same if someone makes the “we should let illegals in because all they want is better lives for their children just like Mary and Joseph” argument. The same logic justifies theft. This is how shoplifting became legal in California.
Pavolovitz, who has about 374,000 followers on Twitter/X, every one of them dumber than when they first encountered him, was at it again this holiday season, posting after the election last month, “It’s good the Christians excited about the mass deportation of immigrants weren’t in Egypt when Jesus’s family fled there, or we’d have a much shorter Bible.”
It’s unethical to use one’s influence and reputation to make people ignorant and stupid: that fatuous statement (and his many like it) marks Pavolovitz as an Ethics Corrupter. I’m assuming readers here don’t have to have explained to them the reasons why analogies between public policies today in the United States and those in the Middle East 2,000 years ago are completely invalid and useless.
When one X-user pointed out to Pavolovitz that his argument was flawed, this modern follower of Jesus replied, “You’re a Trump lapdog. Your opinion of me is irrelevant. Shove it.”
To be fair, that last part is a rough translation of what Jesus said to the Romans…
Ethics Alarms 