Popular Culture

The Song “White Christmas” Is Sad, and It’s Meant To Be

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

I’m rewriting a post from last Christmas that I liked, in part because the ethics news is ticking me off, in part because I am once again having a non-Christmas because I miss my late wife Grace too much to celebrate anything, and in part because the song means a lot to me. I foolishly posted the first version of this last year on Christmas day, guaranteeing that few would read it. I’ll try a bit earlier this time.

I co-wrote two Christmas revues for my late, lamented (by me, anyway) professional theater company in Arlington, Virginia, The American Century Theater. The most popular of the two (though not my personal favorite) was called “If Only In My Dreams,” a title taken from the lyrics of another wistful Christmas song, “I’ll Be Home For Christmas,” by lyricist Kim Gannon and composer Walter Kent. It was introduced by Bing Crosby in 1943—it’s amazing how many of our secular Christmas songs were first recorded by Bing. Well, maybe not so amazing: what was amazing was the range and warmth of his voice. 

“If Only In My Dreams” was constructed around the letters written by GIs overseas during World War II to their families or  girlfriends as Christmas loomed. They were published in an issue of American Heritage, a wonderful magazine now, sadly, in the company of Life, Look, and the Saturday Evening Post, gone and nearly forgotten. I alternated those letters with narration and the popular Christmas songs of the period. The brilliant Jacqueline Manger directed the show, which was being written as she rehearsed it. 

The most famous and important of these songs was, of course, “White Christmas.” Bing Crosby’s version is still the best selling single of all time, and deserves the title. When Irving Berlin handed the song over to the musician who transcribed his melodies (Irv could not read music and composed by ear, just like another brilliant and prolific tune-smith, Paul McCartney), he  famously announced that he had written, not just the best song he had ever created, but the best song that anyone had ever written.  Continue reading →

If A.I. Wrote a WAPO Op-Ed Piece to Set Us Up For a Take-Over By the Bots, This Is What It Would Be Like…

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Oh , yeah, this is good advice.

The Washington Post (gift link, but don’t get excited, it’s a crummy gift) permitted a father-son team of faithful dupes to reassure us all that artificial intelligence is no different from any other machine, and can never compete with the human mind. Authors Andrew Klavan (a novelist) and Spencer Klavan, a classicist, are here to explain to us that artificial intelligence is like a wax writing tablet was to Plato (Spencer’s idea, I bet) or computers were to past generations, technological advances humans foolishly thought could match the human mind. “But by using machines as metaphors for our minds, we fall prey to the illusion that our minds are nothing more than machines. So it’s not surprising that now, when the possibilities of AI are enthralling Silicon Valley, those who think programs can become conscious are trying to tell us that consciousness is just a program,” they write.

Point? We have nothing to worry about! These things can’t really think or feel like we do! A.I. lacks “what ancient philosophers called “the inner logos” — the unique interior apparatus we have for structuring and understanding our experience of the world.”

Neither Klavan has anything in his biography to indicate they have more than the average landscaper’s understanding of technology, so what’s their authority for this verdict? Jesus, and Louis Armstrong. I kid you not. “The great Louis Armstrong, performing the George David Weiss and Bob Thiele song, “What a Wonderful World,” put it this way,” they write. “I see friends shaking hands, saying ‘How do you do?’ / They’re really saying: ‘I love you.’” Jesus put it similarly in Matthew 15: “The things that come out of a person’s mouth come from the heart.”

The two non-scientists have come to the dangerous and ignorant conclusion that A.I. bots are just “large language models” (LLMs) that are not capable of thought because, well, that’s what Louis sings. They tell us at the end,

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Why Are People Like This Teaching In Colleges…or Anyplace?

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Like all holiday movies, “Planes, Trains and Automobiles” has ethics at the core of its metaphorical heart, though not to the extent of “It’s a Wonderful Life,” “White Christmas” or “Miracle on 34th Street,” the objects of the three Ethics Alarms holiday ethics companions. (Is there another film I should add to the series?) But it really takes effort—and pernicious bias—to claim that the John Hughes classic contains a “dangerous” pro-capitalist message, as SUNY Purchase College Professor Mtume Gant claimed on the insane leftist podcast “Millennials are Killing Capitalism” with host Jared Ware. 

The podcast describes itself as a “platform for communists, anti-imperialists, Black Liberation movements, ancoms, left libertarians, LBGTQ activists, feminists, immigration activists, and abolitionists to discuss radical politics, radical organizing and share their visions for a better world.” Great. And it has to dig so deep for topics that it stoops to searching for sinister messages in a formulaic holiday movie?

Steve Martin plays an up-tight ad exec whose asshole tendencies emerge regularly when he gets involved in holiday travel hell as most of us have. He is desperately trying to get home to spend Thanksgiving with his family because it’s what you do, that’s all: he’s also especially sentimental about it. But circumstances conspire to force him to battle his way from Manhattan to Chicago with a gregarious shower-ring salesman (John Candy) who is his emotional and intellectual opposite.

It’s “The Odd Couple” crossed with “A Christmas Carol,” as Martin learns the values of empathy, kindness and good will by the end of the movie, while Candy, who has no family, is embraced by Martin’s in the misty-eyed finale.

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We Now Know Scientific Pronouncements Are Frequently Garbage, So We Also Should Know “The ’60s Parenting Practices We Now Know Were Terrible For Kids’ Brains” Is Mostly Crap…

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Being raised in the Sixties, I was naturally curious about the article in Media Feed titled “The ’60s parenting practices we now know were terrible for kids’ brains.” What I discovered, as one usually will with social science essays with an agenda, is carefully cherry-picked research being used to support an author’s already pre-determined position. You know, “Science!”

“Science” has been so thoroughly polluted by the political left to justify its objectives and claim absolute authority for propositions that are far from determined (or determinable) that the public should be conditioned to doubt any claim that begins, as this one does, “This article explores a dozen once-standard practices and uses modern research to explain why they were tough on a child’s developing brain, emotional health, and long-term well-being.” Here is what modern research as revealed in recent years: it can’t be trusted. It can’t be trusted because researchers and scientists can’t be trusted, and interlocutors like Kaitlyn Farley, the gullible (or dishonest) author, don’t know enough about science to interpret studies with appropriate skepticism. (I just checked: Kaitlyn claims to be, among other things, an AI trainer who specializes in “content creation.” That explains a lot about the article.)

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The Ethics Alarms 2025 “It’s A Wonderful Life” Ethics Companion

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

2025 INTRODUCTION

Once again, the annual Ethics Alarms posting of my guide to watching the 1946 classic is in Thanksgiving week, first, because I concluded a few years ago that it is a Thanksgiving movie, and second, because I personally need the movie right now. It’s a Thanksgiving movie because a man learns through divinely orchestrated perspective that he has a lot to be thankful for, even if it often hasn’t seemed like it in his life of disappointments and dashed dreams. He’s married to Donna Reed, for heaven’s sake! He has nothimg to complain about.

I just finished re-reading last year’s version and making some additions and subtractions. You know what? It’s worth reading again. I wrote the thing, and I still get a lot out of it.

Last year was a particularly gloomy one for me, and I’m afraid my annual introduction reflected that. It was hard for me to even watch “It’s a Wonderful Life,” which was my late wife’s favorite movie (well, tied with “Gone With the Wind” and “To Kill a Mockingbird”) last year, and, though I have had 364 days more to get used to existence with out her, I’m more resigned than better.

This year, in September, I had an “IAWL” moment when a lawyer whom I had only known for a few days pulled me aside at a gala celebration of the 52nd year of continuous operation of a student theater group I had founded my first year in law school. He said that his two young children, who I could see playing in the courtyard, wouldn’t exist if I hadn’t started the organization  where he met his wife, and he wanted to thank me.

The reunion of lawyers who  participated in the over 150 plays, musicals and operettas produced by the group revealed that dozens of lasting marriages and their children had been an unanticipated result of the unique organization, the only graduate school theatrical group in the U.S. “Strange, isn’t it?,” Clarence says to George as the metaphorical light finally dawns. “Each man’s life touches so many other lives. When he isn’t around he leaves an awful hole, doesn’t he?”

I’m not celebrating Thanksgiving this year for too many reasons to go into, but I guess I’m thankful that I’m here instead of a hole. It’s a lowly measure of success, but I’ll take it.

Grace so loved the final scene when Harry Bailey toasts, “To my big brother George, the luckiest man on earth!” and everyone starts singing  “Auld Lang Syne.” She always started crying, and, to be honest, I think I’ll skip that part this year. When I watched it last year, it almost killed me. 

Besides, Billy Crystal (actually Nora Ephron, who wrote his lines) pretty much ruined “Auld Lang Syne” for me with his observations in “When Harry Met Sally.” The song really doesn’t make any sense, it just feels right. One might say the same thing about “It’s A Wonderful Life.”

I won’t, however.

PREFACE

Frank Capra must have felt that the movie was bitterly ironic. It was a flop, and destroyed his infant project with some other prominent directors to launch a production company called “Liberty” that would give directors the liberty to put their artistic visions on the screen without interference from the money-obsessed studios. “It’s A Wonderful Life” was the first and last film produced by Liberty Studios: it not only killed the partnership, it just about ended Capra’s career.

James Stewart was, by all accounts, miserable during the shooting. He suffered from PTSD after his extensive combat experience, and the stress he was under shows in many of the scenes, perhaps to the benefit of the film.

It is interesting that the movie is scored by Dmitri Tiompkin, a Russian expatriate who is best known for scoring Westerns like “Red River” and “High Noon.” He wasn’t exactly an expert on small town America, but his trademark, using familiar tunes and folk melodies, is on full display. Clarence, George’s Guardian Angel (Second Class), is frequently underscored with the nursery rhyme “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” because he is represented by a star in the opening scene in Heaven. The old bawdy tune “Buffalo Girls” is another recurring theme, an odd one for a wholesome film, since the buffalo girls were prostitutes.

Donna Reed is a revelation in the film. She is best remembered as the wise and loving Fifties mom in “The Donna Reed Show” (in the brilliant satiric musical “Little Shop of Horrors,” doomed heroine Audrey singing about her dream of domestic bliss “somewhere that’s green” sings “I cook like Betty Crocker and I look like Donna Reed.”) But she was an excellent dramatic actress, and Hollywood did not do her talents justice. She was also, I am told by my freind and hero Paul Peterson who played her young son Jeff, as nice and admirable in person as she seemed on the show.

Lionel Barrymore, once described by a critic as an actor who could overact just by sitting still, is nonetheless a memorable villain. It was no coincidence that he was known at holiday time for playing Scrooge in an annual radio prouduction of “A Christmas Carol.” Barrymore was an alcoholic like his two siblings, John and Ethel, both regarded more highly as actors but less able to work reliably through their addiction. Lionel was in a wheelchair for his latter career; he wouldn’t have been if he had been born a few decades later. He needed hip replacements and those weren’t possible for his generation. As a result, he is the only memorable wheelchair-bound film actor of note.

Thomas Mitchell, George’s pathetic Uncle Billy, was one of the greatest Hollywood character actors of his or any other era. He is memorable in many classics, including “High Noon,” “Gone With the Wind,” “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” “Stagecoach” and more, while also starring in several successful Broadway plays.  On stage he created the role of the rumpled detective “Columbo,” his final role.

The cop and the cab driver, Bert and Ernie (names borrowed by “Sesame Street” in a strange inside joke) were played by Ward Bond, another prolific character actor who shows up in key roles in too many great movies to list, and  Frank Faylen, who made over 200 movies with IAWL being the only certified classic. Both Bond and Faylen found their greatest success on TV, Bond as the cantankerous wagonmaster and star of “Wagon Train” and Faylen as the apoplectic father of highschooler Dobie Gillis in “The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis.” I don’t think any character on TV made my father laugh as hard as Faylen’s “Herbert T. Gillis.”

Now that the introductions are over with, let’s go to Bedford Falls…but first, a stop in Heaven…

1. A Religious Movie Where There Is No Religion

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WaPo: “Republican Overseeing Alamo Renovation Ousted After ‘Woke’ Social Media Post” Ethics Alarms: “Better Safe Than Sorry.”

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

I know, I know: Ethics Alarms’ annual “Remember the Alamo!’ posts usually don’t start until February. But an important Alamo story with ethics lessons reaching beyond the legendary Texas battle is in the news, and attention should be paid.

Kate Rogers had been leading the $550 million renovation of the Alamo in San Antonio, Texas. Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick reviewed a copy of her 2023 PhD dissertation on museums affecting history is taught in schools. “Personally, I would love to see the Alamo become a beacon for historical reconciliation and a place that brings people together versus tearing them apart, but politically that may not be possible at this time,” her dissertation stated. Patrick asked her to resign as CEO of the Alamo Trust based on that sentiment, and Rogers refused. declined. The next day, Patrick publicly called for her resignation. This time, Rogers complied.

This week, Rogers sued, alleging wrongful termination. The theory: forcing her to resign for what she wrote in her dissertation was a violation of her free speech rights. The dissertation wasn’t the whole story, however. On her watch, a social media post from the Alamo Trust had prompted this letter…

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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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The Sec. of Transportation Tells Kim Kardashian That She’s an Irresponsible Ignorance-Spreading Fool. Good!

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

In an episode of the reality show “The Kardashians” (My god, is that still on?) Uber Kardashian Kim, the only one of the breed who earned her celebrity (with a sex tape and a huge derriere), told actress Sarah Paulson that she had watched interviews with Buzz Aldrin, who was on the Apollo 11 mission with Neil Armstrong and the second person to walk on the moon, and they convinced her that the moon landing was a government hoax.

“I don’t think we did. I think it was fake,” the Kimster announced. “I’ve seen a few videos on Buzz Aldrin talking about how it didn’t happen. He says it all the time now, in interviews.” Does anyone know what the hell she’s babbling about? The last time I heard about Aldrin in relation to the moonwalk conspiracy theory, he punched a guy in the face for claiming it was true.

Then Kardashian repeated a trope of the ancient conspiracy theory: “There’s no gravity on the moon. Why is the flag blowing?” I view that statement all by itself as signature significance: anyone who says it once is too gullible to be let outside without a keeper, and anyone who says it publicly is an idiot. The “mystery” can be answered by viewing the archived videos or by 3 seconds of googling. Who goes on TV and asserts a non-fact that anyone, including her, can prove false in a trice?

This time, however, big guns were trained on the specific idiot. Sean Duffy, the US Transportation Secretary and acting administrator of NASA, rebutted the whatever-she-is on X. He wrote: “Yes, Kim Kardashian, we’ve been to the moon before … Six times! And even better, NASA Artemis is going back under the leadership of [President Trump]. We won the last space race and we will win this one too.”

Madison, Wis, bloggress Ann Althouse, in one of her “it’s not the topic, it’s the tangents” posts, asks,

“Why is a government official calling out a private citizen who expresses interest in a conspiracy theory? We’re Americans. We have our conspiracy theories. Keep your government nose out of our business. You’re only giving more ammunition to the conspiracy theorists. Why stick your neck out to deny what isn’t true? You’re making it more fun to believe the theory!”

Ann is evoking the “Streisand Effect” with her “You’re only giving more ammunition to the conspiracy theorists.” She’s wrong, maybe even at an Ethics Dunce level. This conspiracy is hardly unknown: there was even a movie about it, and I have encountered moonwalk skeptics periodically ever since the event. “Why is a government official calling out a private citizen who expresses interest in a conspiracy theory?” Because, Ann, celebrities are not “private citizens.” They are public citizens; they make their millions by being famous and by appearing, speaking and misbehaving in public. More Americans by far know who Kim Kardashian is than who know who Sean Duffy is. A disturbing number of Americans, maybe even a majority, believe that being a celebrity (and appearing on TV) indicates virtue, wisdom and intelligence. Celebrity culture helped get Donald Trump elected President. Doesn’t Ann Althouse understand that? Hasn’t she ever heard the rejoinder, “If you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich?”

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Ethics Dunce: Ethics Villain, the National Football League

/ Jack Marshall / 26 Comments

The headline raises an interesting question: can an ethics villain be an ethics dunce, since ethics villains by definition don’t care about ethics, so how can they be judged stupid for ignoring them? Ah well, a topic for another day. Ann Althouse would ask Grok to resolve the issue…if I ever start quoting AI here regularly, someone please come up behind me and bash in my head with a brick.

I’ve been putting off the National Football League announcing that its now iconic halftime show during the 2026 Super Bowl in Santa Clara will star Bad Bunny, a performer I was mercifully unaware of before the announcement. After all, I could write this post any time between now and February 9, 2026, the day after the national sports event that I will not watch again because the sport it involves is deadly.

Today, however, I am in a bad mood, so it’s time. The Super Bowl has evolved as cultural phenomenon that is one of the rare yearly American events that unifies the nation, families, races and commerce. It is supposed to be non-partisan, non-political, and G-rated so families can watch the game and its surrounding hoopla with their children. When Janet Jackson exposed a nipple during a halftime performance, you would have thought that she has performed a human sacrifice by the reaction in the news media.

But now it is 2025, the Great Stupid still stalks the land, Trump Derangement reigns in the corporate suites, and thus the National Football League, which happily pays its players to become brain-injured, has chosen as its star attraction during the Super Bowl half-time show…

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Stop Making Me Defend Tilly Norwood!

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Hollywood actors are freaking out over fake actress “Tilly Norwood.” That’s already a plus to the AI-generated performer’s credit: Hollywood actors deserve to be freaked out as often possible (within the boundaries of law and ethics, of course). It gives them something to scream about other than how the President of the United States is a fascist, or how as more unborn babies should be killed. And cases like this one, where their freaking out reveals just how hypocritical and intellectually shallow they are, it’s a public service: NOW do you understand why you shouldn’t pay attention to these one-trick millionaires?

Tilly Norwood, in case you never watch E! or read Variety, is an AI-generated fake actress with about 40,000 Instagram followers who don’t have a life. Tilly was created by Xicoia, the AI division of the production company Particle6, from the rib of an AI-created actor. OK, I’m kidding about that.

Eline Van der Velden, the Dutch producer who founded Particle6, claims to be seeking an agent to represent Norwood to place her in real films, ads and TV shows, unlike the fake, AI created scenes in her videos.

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