History

The Obligatory Joke Principle

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

Today a Facebook friend who is addicted to posting about the most mundane and prosaic matters on her page. Today, the press had to be alerted to this revelation: “For some reason my phone no longer recognizes my thumb-print.” Talk about the problems of the privileged! I’m sure it’s Trump’s fault. She added, “Does anyone else have this problem?”

A comment read: “Yes. My phone doesn’t recognize your thumbprint either.”

I hope, if I had seen the query first, I would have issued the same mandatory response. When Fate, or God, or whoever is in charge of cosmic humor delivers to you through the mouth or text of an agent a slow, hanging curve-ball of a straight-line that begs to be knocked out of the metaphoric ballpark and you let it go by, you have violated a sacred obligation to the human race. It needs as much mirth and merriment as it can get, and if a perfect opportunity to get a laugh like that set-up goes unrealized—because of fear, lack of attention, witlessness or self-absorption—a grievous ethics offense had been committed. Shame. Shame.

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Elon Musk: “Delusional,” Huckster, or Credible Dreamer?

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

A twitter user I have never heard of (but who somehow has amassed over half a million followers posted that tweet above with the comment, “I don’t understand why people continue investing in a company whose CEO is self-evidently delusional and whose plans for the business have no basis in reality.” Another user quickly pointed out that the eccentric billionaire entrepreneur “reduced the cost of launch to orbit by ~90%, mainstreamed electric cars, and gave a paralyzed man the ability to control a computer with his mind.” Yes, that’s a complete rebuttal to the “influencer’s” snark. Why do investors trust Musk? Because he’s an out-of-the-box thinker with the resources to make impossible-seeming ideas reality, and has a track record that says, “Don’t bet against him.”

Regular readers here know that I detest John Lennon’s anthem for idiots, “Imagine.” John identifies himself as a “dreamer,” which he rationalizes “Everybody does it” style: He’s not the only one who thinks we can achieve his juvenile version of utopia (“Nothing to live or die for…”). But John was a minimally educated lifetime musician and poet: like the Everly Brothers, all he could do was dream (and they were silly dreams anyway). Elon Musk has shown that he is capable of making some previously impossible dreams possible. That deserves awe and respect.

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Some Answers To Gail Collins’ Question: “Where, oh Where, Will the First Female President Come From?”

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Gail Collins is one of the New York Times’ chatty and less extreme progressive columnists, which is not to say that her bias doesn’t leap from the page at regular intervals. Her latest effort is “Where, oh Where, Will the First Female President Come From?” (gift link). The sudden interest in this on-its-face sexist query comes from two likely sources: Michelle Obama’s offensive accusation (but she just doesn’t like the United States very much and has been saying so in various ways since she was in college) that the public isn’t “ready” for a female President, and the moronic DNC cant that the only reason Kamala Harris lost (after the worst Presidential campaign ever!) was that she was sort-of black and/or female, take your pick.

The United States doesn’t need a female President, or a male President, or a black President, or a white President, or a gay President, or a short President. The United States needs a competent, ethical courageous and effective President, and what EEOC category or categories that leader fits into should be irrelevant. Now, I have spent decades studying where Presidents come from, and it is true that a lot of the features and backgrounds that seem to create the weird types that tend to become POTUS do not help the chances of aspiring female Presidents, and it will take a remarkable, unusual woman to overcome the template. (But Presidents should be remarkable, shouldn’t they?)

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President Trump Morphs into George McGovern! Didn’t See THAT Coming!

/ Jack Marshall / 31 Comments

In 1972, on the way to an epic trouncing by Richard Nixon in that year’s Presidential race, nice, clueless, ultra-liberal Sen. George McGovern’s flower child-fueled campaign was roundly mocked for a proposal to give a thousand dollars to every man, woman and child. This was called the ultimate nanny state hand-out plan, among the more polite criticisms of it. Now President Donald Trump, hardly one for tie-dyed shirts, says he wants to give most Americans a $2,000 handout funded from tariffs.

“A dividend of at least $2000 a person (not including high income people!) will be paid to everyone,” the President wrote last week in a Truth Social post. U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told Fox News that the rebates would likely be given to families making “less than, say, $100,000.”  They might get a puppy and candy too.

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Once Again, An AI Bot Doesn’t Know What It’s Talking About, This Time Regarding U.S. Presidents

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

I wish Ann Althouse would stop publishing her conversations with Grok, Elon Musk’s chatbot. Is she on Elon’s payroll? Yesterday, the quirky retired progressive law prof turned blogger was writing about the Netflix series “Death by Lightning” based on the excellent  “Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President,” which EA discussed several years ago. (The books main character, James Garfield, is one of my favorite Presidents, as is the man who succeeded him after he was assassinated, his VP Chester A. Arthur.)

Noting that Garfield was a reluctant Presidential nominee, Ann decided to once again ask Grok’s opinion, as she has been doing almost daily for months now. “I’m interested in the Presidents who have not wanted to be President, who have felt bad about winning. I asked Grok to list them in the order of how much they did not want to have to do it.” Well, I wouldn’t have had to ask that, and Althouse, by publishing Grok’s ill-informed and sloppily reasoned answer, has made her readers less informed than they already are. Here was Grok’s terrible answer:

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Ethics Quiz of the Day: Mencken-Style Ad Hominem

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

At the Washiungton Free Beacon, columnist Andrew Stiles writes,

Jack Schlossberg, the sentient boat shoe and semi-employed TikTok user, is running for Congress in New York. It was bound to happen. The 32-year-old Democrat belongs to the Kennedy dynasty—that inexplicably beloved menagerie of goon-faced Habsburgian freaks, Nantucket douche bros, chronic alcoholics, and bloated sex pests. Schlossberg, a mentally deranged internet addict who cracks jokes about guzzling “Jew blood” and “male jizz,” has sought to inject the storied Kennedy brand with Gen Z flare.

That anti-Kennedy invective made me laugh out loud more than once. But is it fair commentary to mix in so much ad hominem invective in an opinion column if it is genuinely funny, at least to a substantial number of readers (or listeners)?

Famous (or infamous) journalist-pundit H.L. Mencken (1880-1956, above) excelled at this sort of thing; he may have even invented it. Here is part of his “obituary” for three-time (losing) Presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan after he died shortly after he faced off against Clarence Darrow in Dayton, Tennessee in Tennessee v. Scopes aka, “Monkey Trial”:

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The Duty To Remember: Jan Ernst Matzeliger, Inventor, (1852-1889)

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

This kind of thing drives me crazy, as regular and long-time readers here know. The culture and society lose so much when important events, figures and trailblazers are gradually lost—forgotten, ignored, erased by ignorance and apathy. That this remarkable and important inventor somehow fell into the memory hole of American history is particularly galling because he was black, and black activists have gone to extreme lengths, at times manufacturing significant black historical figures out of otherwise marginal accomplishments, to show the contributions of African Americans to U.S. society and culture. Jan Ernst Matzeliger was a big deal. We should know his name.

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“Right To Offend: The Black Comedy Revolution” and the Duty to Remember

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

So much of the nation’s cultural health and societal values rely on our fulfillment of the duty to remember. Thanks to our incompetent and unethical education system and the increasing estrangement of American history from our popular culture, recent generations share so little important historical and cultural touchpoints as Americans that effective cross-generational communication is becoming impossible. Television could be a nostrum for this dangerous phenomenon, if only finding the constructive and informative programming were not a task akin to finding, as the saying goes, a needle in needle stack.

I was thinking about this after I stumbled upon the 2022 Starz documentary, “Right to Offend: The Black Comedy Revolution,” a two-part series that I only saw because I am briefly getting Starz free on DirecTV. I missed it entirely when it was new, and have never read or heard anything about it. I haven’t seen the whole series yet either, and only watched an incomplete stretch of Episode One. But that was enough to trigger several thoughts, and to make me schedule a serious viewing of the whole thing from beginning to end.

Among those revelations,

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Unethical (and Stupid) Quote of the Month: Zohran Mamdani [First in a Long, Long Series…]

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

“We will prove that there is no problem too large for government to solve, and no concern too small for it to care about.”

—Zohran Mamdani‘s marathon victory speech on Election Night, after the Democratic Socialist (that is, Communist) was elected as New York City’s mayor.

A commenter asked my opinion regarding Mamdani’s speech and I demurred, because it was standard commie tripe that I’ve read and heard from everyone from Lenin to Castro, and now this guy. He speaks well, and I’m always in favor of that as a key leadership skill. So did David Koresh. However, as I kept seeing that quote being published by the disgracefully uncritical mainstream media, my inner Popeye scratched to get out (“It’s all I can stands, ’cause I can’t stands no more!”) Who does he think he’s kidding?

Perhaps more importantly, what is the proper reaction to any American who wasn’t raised in a cave who doesn’t hear that insane claim and conclude, “Oh, brother! So much for that guy. He’s either lying, ignorant or a moron”? At very least it’s “RUN AWAY!”

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Victor Fleming Was a Genius

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

And attention should be paid.

Victor Fleming is never included in the list of immortal Hollywood film directors. I never understood why, and now I really don’t understand why. Everybody knows, or should, that Fleming pulled off the all-time film directing achievement of helming two deathless classics in two distinct genres in the same year, 1939. The films: “The Wizard of Oz” and “Gone With the Wind.” The closest to that amazing performance anyone else ever came was in 1993, when Stephen Spielberg delivered both “Schindler’s List” and “Jurassic Park.” But Spielberg is automatically in the discussion when great film directors are the topic, and Fleming is not.

I could make the argument that Fleming belongs in that discussion based on his output alone. Though he died at the age of 59 and had only 20 years to create movies in the sound era, Fleming had several other classic films that still hold up: “The Virginian,” “Captains Courageous,” “Treasure Island,” Dr. “Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” “A Guy Named Joe” and “Joan of Arc” in addition to his two 1939 icons. But that isn’t the reason for this post.

Victor Fleming was ahead of his time, way, ahead, in two respects that only noticed recently:

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