History

Fevered Musings on Abortion, Love Canal, and the Broken Ethics Alarms of American Women

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

(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.

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Recipe for Confusion: Take A Trump Ad-lib, Spoon in a Measure of Tucker Carlson Demagoguery, and Mix Both into JFK Assassination Conspiracy Hysteria

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Again, I must invoke Curmie’s versatile “Oh bloody hell!”

I have been studying Presidential assassination history and conspiracy theories since before I had to shave, and I have little patience with those who misrepresent, distort or exploit these events. Just two days ago, I was pointing out that the much-admired Stephen Sondheim musical “Assassins” was a blight on the culture despite my belief that entertainment should have a wide margin for creative license. The musical—the songs aren’t bad—is based on the absurd premise that John Wilkes Booth’s motivation for his decision to assassinate Lincoln is a mystery, and that, like other POTUS assassins and attempted assassins, he was trying to make a difference in a society that had ignored and marginalized him. That’s just crap for most of the historical killers and wackos portrayed in the show, but especially Booth. “Was it bad reviews, Johnny?” a balladeer croons. Of course not, you idiot: no assassin ever made his motivations clearer than John Wilkes Booth.

He was a dedicated Confederate partisan; he blamed Lincoln (correctly) for not letting the South go its own way, he was crushed that the South was headed for defeat, and believed that if the Union government could be decapitated (the plot was to kill Lincoln, Vice-President Johnson, Secretary of State Seward and General Grant in a single night) the South might yet prevail—and his plan might have worked. No mystery! But our history is constantly misrepresented to the historically ignorant and illiterate, that is to say, most of the public, often for the selfish purposes of rumormongers and worse.

You know, like Tucker Carlson.

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Ethics Dunce: Mississippi

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves declared April 2024 as Confederate Heritage Month in the state, following a 31-year-old tradition that began in 1993. Beauvoir, the museum established in the home of Confederate President Jefferson Davis in Biloxi, announced the proclamation in a Facebook post on Friday, April 12. Governor Tate’s proclamation read,

“Whereas, as we honor all who lost their lives in this war, it is important for all Americans to reflect upon our nation’s past, to gain insight from our mistakes and successes, and to come to a full understanding that the lessons learned yesterday and today will carry us through tomorrow if we carefully and earnestly strive to understand and appreciate our heritage and our opportunities which lie before us. Now, therefore, I, Tate Reeves, Governor of the State of Mississippi, hereby proclaim the month of April 2024 as Confederate Heritage Month in the State of Mississippi.”

I have argued vigorously on Ethics Alarms against toppling the statues of important historical figures associated with the South’s disastrous and misguided attempt to secede from the Union and the bloody war that resulted. That is because erasing history is a form of public mind-control and totalitarian to its core. Moreover, many of the figures now being denigrated and “cancelled” with their memorials defaced or eliminated and their names erased from buildings and institutions had complex lives and careers worthy of honor, study and memorializing despite their participation in the rebellion.

Most of all, perhaps, the practice creates a dangerous precedent and a slippery slope: today Robert E. Lee, tomorrow Thomas Jefferson. When I first posted that warning here, many ridiculed it. Not long after, Jefferson, Madison, Jackson and even Washington became targets of the statue-topplers.

But those were human beings. The Confederacy was a movement, deadly and and unethical, rooted in a theoretically legal defense of an inhuman and evil practice. There is no way to commemorate the Confederacy’s “heritage” without appearing to justify and celebrate the slavery it represented, as well as the scars it left on America. Declaring Confederate Heritage Month in Mississippi might not be intended as coded racism, but then again it might.

Starting the tradition was tone deaf and suspicious in 1993. It is divisive and offensive to continue the tradition in 2024. The next step down the same slope would be “Jim Crow Heritage Month,” wouldn’t it? After all, we can “gain insight from our mistakes and successes” and “come to a full understanding” of “the lessons learned yesterday and today” from the South’s post-Civil War system of apartheid and discrimination too.

Frankly, I am amazed that Mississippi is still romanticizing the Confederacy.

Catchy tune, though.

Bitter, Pathetic, Miserable Hillary Clinton

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

Yes, I know I’m breaking my own rule about not using unflattering photos of Hillary Cinton, a pledge I made during the 2016 Presidential campaign I think—it might have been earlier. She deserves it in this instance.

I feel genuine compassion for Hillary, just as I do for Al Gore (and Samuel J. Tilden) up to a point. It must be terrible to win the popular vote for President of the United States and lose the election. I think it must be a little like what I am trying to deal with right now after waking up one morning and finding my wife dead.

Hillary is bitter and angry, and I understand that. The ethical mandate in such a situation is to strive to deal with these emotions with dignity, and, in her position as a public figure that many Americans admire and respect (mistakenly), to serve as a role model for everyone else who finds themselves suddenly losing something or someone that assumed they had firmly and safely in their embrace.

She’s failed that mandate spectacularly and repeatedly. Clinton lost the Presidency, not only by the quirk of the Electoral College, but also through her own perfidy, arrogance and incompetence, yet she refuses to take responsibility for any of that. In her view, at least publicly, it is all Donald Trump’s fault, along with the”deplorables” who voted for him. From the moment she learned that she had lost the 2016 election in a stunning upset, Clinton has set out to do everything and anything she can to hurt him, beginning with declaring his election illegitimate, spawning the Russian collusion investigation that crippled his Presidency, and using every opportunity to trigger the Trump Deranged with inevitably diminishing returns.

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American Historians Becoming Woke, Biased, and Corrupt

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Jack Henneman operates an excellent podcast called “The History of the Americans.” In his latest installment, he varies from his usual format to give us an editorial on the topic of the corruption of American history scholarship. Regular readers here would assume that I would approve, for Ethics Alarms has been deploring the ethics rot among American history academics for many years. Introducing his podcast, Henneman explains that he recently attended the Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association in San Francisco. “I learned a lot,” he writes, “especially how transparently politicized so many professional historians seem have become.”

“This episode recounts some of what I saw and heard, and concludes with my many thoughts on the greatest benefit of learning history, whether history should be ‘useable,’ and,” he adds, “why deploying history for partisan political purposes, as is now happening widely and overtly, corrupts history absolutely.”

The podcaster/historian does an excellent job, and it is work enhanced by his keen understanding of ethics. I listened to the podcast yesterday, and today read the truly nauseating partisan propaganda spewed on Bill Maher’s HBO show by once respectable historian Jon Meacham. Meacham wrote, among other celebrated tomes, “American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House.” (I don’t know why I’m promoting this traitor to his profession’s book, except that it is excellent, and he wrote it before he jumped the ethics shark, in 2008). He has since become a partisan Democrat to the point where I would view it as a conflict of interest, and one that he has not been forthcoming in disclosing.

It takes a lot for MSNBC to punish anyone for being unethical, that being one of the far, far left network’s missions, but Meacham was fired as a paid MSNBC contributor after he failed to disclose to the network that he was a Biden speechwriter. Before he was caught playing the role of objective scholarly analyst who was secretly being paid to endorse one party, he had made such obviously slanted claims as asserting on MSNBC that the Clinton impeachment process was wholly partisan, while Trump’s first impeachment was not. That’s not just biased, it’s counter-factual: Clinton’s impeachment had a bi-partisan House vote of 258-176, with 31 Democrats joining the Republicans. No Republican voted for Trump’s first impeachment. This is in the same category of dishonest historical analysis for partisan gain practiced by CNN’s pro-Democratic “Presidential scholar” Michael Beschloss, who just makes stuff up now.

Meacham is always described as a “Pulitzer Prize winning historian,” so it is prudent to recall that Nikole Hannah-Jones also got a Pulitzer for the fake history in her “1619 Project.” But when he’s being a pundit, which is apparently most of the time lately, Meacham just skips the facts as it suits him. He tweeted, for example, in 2019, that Trump’s mean tweets about “the Squad” meant that he “has joined Andrew Johnson as the most racist President in American history.”

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Revolutionary Open Forum, Friday, April 19, 2024

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

“On the 18th of April in ’75…Hardly a man is now alive who remembers that famous day and year.” I was going to post all of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “Paul Revere’s Ride” (the first substantial poem I ever memorized) yesterday, but, as usual, stuff happened. That means today is the 19th of April, a date banged into the heads of children living in Arlington, Massachusetts like me, the anniversary of the ugly little battle that took place just up Massachusetts Avenue a bit on Lexington Green, that officially started the Revolutionary War.

700 British troops were marching on a mission to capture traitors/patriots John Hancock and Samuel Adams and seize a rebel arsenal when they were blocked by 77 Minutemen under Captain John Parker. British Major John Pitcairn ordered ragtag army to disperse, but the proverbial shot rang out, everybody started firing their muskets, and a few minutes later eight Colonists were dead or dying and ten more were wounded. Only one British soldier was injured, but at around 7 am the same fateful day, the Redcoats got what was coming to them a little further up the road, at Concord Bridge.

One subsidiary benefit of memorizing “Paul Revere’s Ride” is that I’ll never forget that famous day and year, or the day after it. I wonder how many of today’s public school-educated children, even those in neighboring Arlington, know the significance of April 19. Heck, I wonder if it will be mentioned in the mainstream media’s blathering today at all. It would be a good day for the President of the United States to use his “bully pulpit” for something positive and remind everyone, but no, these days that platform is reserved to call half the nation fascists.

I digress, however. Celebrate the beginnings of America by taking about ethics, for this is the only nation in the world that was created to embody ethical principles and to model ethical values.

That battle rages on.

Ethics-DEI-Baseball Dunce: Ja’han Jones

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

I know, we’ve been seeing a lot of Sidney Wang lately.

Ja’han Jones is the blogger for Reid Out, the MSNBC race-baiting show (well, one of them) starring Joy Reid. As such, the fact that he has such a bone-headed and biased position regarding diversity is like finding out that water is wet, but it is still surprising to see anyone who can put his shoes on (I’m assuming Ja’Han can) write something as ignorant and idiotic as “The decline of Black players in MLB should be a warning about the war on DEI.”

If DEI proponents keep making arguments this bad, eventually even the dimmest members of the public will figure out that it’s a hustle. (Won’t they? Don’t they have to?) Another rule Ja’Han seems to have missed is “Don’t write about subjects you know nothing about when a lot of your readers do, because they will figure out that you are a fake.”

To summarize one of the worst published screeds I have read in a long time, this supposed “futurist,” journalist and pundit argues that Major League Baseball needs DEI programs to increase the percentage of black baseball players. (Baseball’s number of black players has been declining for a welter of cultural, financial and attitudinal reasons, none of which involve discrimination.) It’s difficult to know where to start a rebuttal of an argument that is only worthy of “What the hell are you talking about?” Might as well just dive right in…

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When Ethics Alarms Don’t Ring, You Are Too Ignorant To Work In Your Industry, or You’re a Nazi…[Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 29 Comments

Oopsie! Adidas was shocked..shocked! to discover that its soccer jersey customizing kit made the number 44 due look exactly like the symbol used by Nazi SS units during the WWII. That was, as you know but apparently no one in the chain of command at Adidas did, the brutal section of Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich that carried out “The Final Solution.” A German historian, Michael König, first pointed out that the kit’s design was “very questionable.” That’s called an “understatement.”

An Adidas spokesperson insisted that the kit’s resemblance to the SS thunderbolts was unintentional. [Notice of correction: I originally left out the “un.”] “We as a company are committed to opposing xenophobia, antisemitism, violence and hatred in every form,” he said. “We will block personalization of the jerseys.”

Nobody in Germany found that design objectionable until a historian pointed it out?

Oh-oh…

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Pointer: Curmie

Addendum: “Easter Morning Ethics Exultation”

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

The photo above, showing three illuminated cross along Lower Manhattan Skyline in New York city symbolizing the three crosses on Calvary, contrasts sharply with Item #3 of the previous post noting that the White House viewed Easter egg decorations with “religious symbols” inappropriate for the day’s festivities.

I ask, without irony or innuendo: “Is this progress?”

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Pointer: Sachin Jose

The New York Times Uses Joe Lieberman’s Death to Spread the 2000 Election Big Lie Again

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

The just can’t help themselves. In “Revisiting Florida 2000 and the Butterfly Effect,” New York Times reporter reminds readers (or as I would prefer to ssay, “whines”) that “the evidence is strong that Al Gore would have won had it not been for an infamous ballot design in Palm Beach County.” The Times will not, when Jimmy Carter dies, reminisce that “the evidence is strong” that if Jimmy Carter had not used the single Presidential debate against Ronald Reagan to appeal to the authority of his then 13-year old daughter Amy regarding nuclear proliferation, Carter would have been elected to a second term,” but then that wouldn’t have given the hypocritical paper an opportunity to claim, falsely and with complete knowledge that the claim was false, that Reagan’s history-altering election wasn’t legitimate. Nate Cohn, one of the rising leftist propagandists in the Times stable of dishonest pundits, does pivot to that claim regarding George W. Bush’s election.

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