I had a doctor’s appointment today. Taking the elevator from the 9th floor to the lobby, I encounter one you man riding in the elevator already, with his face buried in his phone. Two more riders got on at stops as we went down. All walked in already focused entirely on their phones, and their eyes didn’t move. I looked around for a friendly face, a smile, some hint of humanity. Nothing. I came this close to booming out, “Well, hello, everybody!” (I did that once.)
I regard this behavior as simply rude, and its slow but steady development into a social norm as ominous for society and the species. I was already pondering the problem earlier in the week after seeing another one of those Progressive ads about the coach who tries to stop young couples who have become home-owners from “turning into their parents.” It’s a funny series, but in this particular installment, most of the conduct from the young homeowner was simple friendliness to a stranger.
Indeed, my father was always prone to chat up strangers. Not my mother: if you weren’t Greek, a family member, or someone already known to her, you were presumptively an enemy agent or a disguised invader from outer space. In this realm, as with many others, I took Dad as a role model, and experience has taught me that it is the right approach to the world and society around us. For one thing, I have learned how a random act of attention and kindness can brighten an otherwise dreary day.
I remember sports columnist Steve Buckley, now with the Athletic (the Times’ captive sports publication) from my halcyon days in Boston. Now he’s issuing badly-reasoned, ethically blind sports commentary from a national platform. Yecchh.
As a special annoyance, his poorly-reasoned observations on sports figures weighing in on national controversies are under a misleading headline: “Aaron Rodgers, Sophie Cunningham speak out. Caitlin Clark doesn’t. Either way, they lose.” I assumed from those words that Steve was going to echo my long-time position regarding narrow-range celebrities in general: “Shut up and sing/dance/act/ dribble/run/kick/pitch.”
But no.
“…Sports people (and this includes sports media people) who weigh in on political and social issues can count on being inundated with anonymous directives that they should “stick to sports.” It’s a mystery who these people are who feel empowered to tell others to stick to sports. The mere utterance suggests somebody with a doctorate in government affairs, or who perhaps has served in Congress or the diplomatic corps. The hypocrisy is at once comical and frightening. We like it when our athletes offer their opinions on this or that issue, except when we disagree with those opinions. (Stick to sports!) And athletes who choose not to play this silly parlor game are dismissed as cowards. At the risk of boring you with seventh-grade civics, but to use a kitschy sports term to make the point, this would be a good time to have a Turn Back the Clock event that teaches and celebrates the protections of the First Amendment. And if you happen to be a member of a championship team who’s been invited to the White House, go ahead and go. Or don’t go. Do that First Amendment thing and tell everyone else to screw off. For sports people who want to take a stand on this or that issue and who are prepared to deal with the avalanche of positive and negative commentary that ensues, go right ahead. For athletes who choose to say nothing, allow them that right. Why does everything have to be so complicated?”
Because things are complicated, Steve—now I remember why I skipped your work at the Boston Herald—and because they are complicated, most sports celebrities have nothing of value to contribute in understanding them. Celebrities do, however, have outsized metaphorical megaphones that give their usually simple-minded opinions far more influence on the public than is healthy for democracy and the quality of civic discourse. I know why Buckley has his own simple-minded view of this issue: sportswriters are, with few exceptions (not him, obviously), also unqualified by intellect, education, experience and skill, to comment publicly on political and social policy matters. Like all journalists, they think they are smarter than they are. This column is a useful piece of evidence to the contrary.
The inspiration for Buckley’s piece was Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback Aaron Rodgers criticizing Dr. Anthony Fauci after the Ethics Villain repeatedly invoked the Fifth Amendment during a Senate hearing last week, plus Sophie Cunningham‘s public statements regarding trans-females competing in women’s sports, along with fellow WNBA star and team mate Caitlin Clark’s refusal to get drawn into the controversy. Right off the bat (that’s a sports metaphor), Steve trips on his sneaker laces by mixing apples and oranges (a fruit analogy).
Let me begin with a few critical observations, some with ethical overtones.
First of all, “The Odyssey” stinks.** It isn’t a massive, A-bomb of a movie, like “Snow White,” but its quality has to be measured in contrast to a) the embarrassing number of critical raves by people who are supposedly watching movies for a living, and b) the movie’s undeserved box office success. Hollywood is excited that Christopher Nolan’s latest over-praised film is getting people to leave their TV screens for the audience experience, and they should be. It is tragic that the draw isn’t a great movie. Or a good one. Or even a meh one.
I went into the theater with a completely open mind. I love both “The Illiad” and “The Odyssey.” I love classic spectacles, and many reviews told me I would see one worthy of the great Cecil B. DeMille. I have no bias against Nolan or for him. I do not understand his critical sanctification.
In full disclosure, I must reveal that I did not see the whole movie. At almost exactly the half-way mark (90 minutes), my female companion, a private tutor who knew Homer’s version well and whom I had invited to see the film after she complained that none of her friends would see it with her, turned to me (I thought she was asleep) and said, “I have to get up early tomorrow, and this is terrible. Let me know how bad it is from here.” And I said: “I’m coming with you.” As a director and performer, I caught several media reviewers publishing full reviews of a show of mine when they had left mid-way and not revealed this in their review. That’s unethical: I got one of them fired for doing it. In this instance, I will issue a disclaimer: It is possible that the second half of “The Odyssey” redeems the first half. If so, out of the hundreds of films I have seen over my life, it would be the first movie that accomplished that feat after such a soporific, pompous, annoying beginning. It would be like “The Terror of Tiny Town” suddenly turning into “High Noon.”
My second point is that, to my surprise, there is nothing overtly political (or “woke”) about Nolan’s film at all, which means that confirmation bias warped the perceptions of both the Left and the Right on a grand scale. All looks yellow to the jaundiced eye. I would add “politics ruins everything” in 2026, but the film hit the screen ruined, and politics isn’t what ruined it.
A really, really smart friend whom I respect a great deal just posted on Facebook that the President, on one of his sophomoric name-calling jags, had mocked Sen. Ossoff (whom I just posted about today, coincidentally) as “Pinky Herman.” My friend wrote that Trump was obviously mixing up Peewee Herman with Pinky Lee, a vaudeville kids TV star in the Fifties. “More proof of dementia,” my friend wrote.
I never thought of it before, but it seems to me that Pinky Lee might well have inspired Paul Rubens’ decades later kids’ show character. Pinky and Peewee are pretty similar names. Confusing the two is hardly evidence of dementia, unless the one making the mistake is Donald Trump.
But as usual, everyone on Facebook laughs, likes, and acts as if this stupid smear is a profound diagnosis. Fifteen years ago, I confused Aaron Burr and Raymond Burr while teaching a seminar and didn’t even realize it. Another time I said “Helen Keller” when I meant to say “Anne Frank.” I have mixed up my Jacksons on occasion: Jesse, Reggie, Andy, Michael and Stonewall. I assuredly do not have dementia. I think claiming that Trump does based on mixing up two fey comic kids show stars with similar names is more evidence of mental decline than anything either Trump or I have done.
I really detest this stuff. It is so petty, disrespectful, ungenerous and obnoxious. And, you know, Trump might have deliberately merged Pinky and Pee-wee, which would have been clever. Nah, it couldn’t have been that…
I remember Pinky well. I even remember the words to his song:
Yoo hoo, it’s me! My name is Pinky Lee. I skip and run bring lots of fun To every he and she! It’s plain to see That you can tell it’s me! With my checkered hat And my checkered coat, The funny giggle in my throat And my silly dance Like a billy goat!
Rep. Gill confronted the Director of the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History after we uncovered an exhibit that called Mickey racist for allegedly symbolizing blackface.
These exchanges are hard to watch unless you enjoy watching dishonest, woke propagandists being publicly exposed as the disgraces to their professions and the enemies of democracy that they are.
When the White House announced that it was reviewing Smithsonian exhibits for left-wing bias about a year ago, I wrote here (in part):
“There can be little question that the current curators of the Smithsonian museums have used their positions to promote woke agenda items and to manipulate the exhibits to try to indoctrinate museum visitors. Most of what the Federalist flagged as well as the White House’s items are genuinely objectionable…For example, Ibram X. Kendi is a race-hustler, and his presence anywhere in the museums is signature significance.
“Does the Pride Flag have genuine historical significance? I suppose so. But emphasizing Ben Franklin’s early slave-holding stinks of the “1619 Project”: by the time that he was a Founder, Ben had become a vocal foe of slavery.
“I believe that a nation’s museums should err on the side of emphasizing the positive aspect of its history and culture, but that’s easier to say than to execute. Substituting one extreme bias for another is not a solution. But as I wrote in the previous post on this topic, I think finding an ethical balance will be a futile exercise.”
Yes, it’s true, I regard professional soccer and professional women’s basketball as less than diverting, but this sport, Australia’s Run Nation Championship (RNC), not only requires morons to watch and play it, the sport is likely to turn competitors into morons if they aren’t already.
Part Sumo wrestling, part Easter egg cracking, part “Jackass” and part bumper-cars, the “sport” involves muscular contestants running into each other at full speed to see who falls down. This idiotic competition was spawned by ‘run it straight,’ a social media trend that had random people running into each other for online views. The videos of stupid teens colliding and often suffering injuries have gotten millions of views online. The Run Nation Championship is trying to make the sport mainstream.
RNC has different weight classes. Most participants, called runners, have a background in combat sports, rugby, or American football. Run Nation co-founder and CEO Tremaine Fernandez says he’s trying to make the new sport as safe as possible…you know, like the electric chainsaw juggling contests do. Fernandez admits that the collisions still risk concussions and serious injuries, but his organization has doctors on the sidelines, so it’s all good.
Sports neurologist Rowena Mobbs, among others, has been calling for the sport to be banned.“Certainly every time they run up and clash in that way, there’s likely to be at least a microscopic brain injury,” Dr. Mobbs said. “They are high-risk and harmful activities, and almost having these protocols and practitioners there whilst good overall, I would ask, is it sort of giving an air of reassurance, an illusion or an impression that these activities are safe?”
You mean that children and teens and drunks and cretins will think, “Hey, this looks like fun!” and people will get maimed and killed? Of course they will! I guarantee this new pastime, which essentially takes the complex strategy, scoring and rules elements out of football and hockey to focus on what its fans really like—the violence—will become a sensation in the U.S., fueled by social media, on-line gambling, and low IQs.
Ban it? Hey, this is America. We have a right to the pursuit of happiness, and if running full tilt into consenting people makes some dim bulbs happy, then let them do it. A few thoughts:
1. The female runners should make just as much as the male runners. It’s only fair…
2. The biggest societal benefit of the sport will be its Darwinian selection features.
3. As with NFL football, anyone who watches this sport is complicit in the injuries it will cause.
Wow. Stephen King is so Trump Deranged and politically obtuse that he’s really publicly defending a Nazi-loving, lying, unqualified, serial sexually-abusing accused rapist communist as the Democratic candidate to be a U.S. Senator of his home state, Maine.
And they say President Trump is losing it.
I admire and enjoy Stephen King as a writer. Few writers’ books and stories have spawned as many excellent movies as King. He manages to keep politics out of his horror tales, for the most part. His political opinions are routinely infantile, but let’s face it, artists are usually like that. Stevey doesn’t style himself as an intellectual: G.K. Chesterton he’s not. I would be surprised if anyone is influenced by King’s political outbursts, to which the only response should be “Shut up and scare us.”
However, those tweets cross an ethics line, embracing multiple rationalizations while indicating the ethics standards of a mollusk.
Observations:
1. Why in the world would King, or anybody, hope that Platner doesn’t drop out? At this point Platner can’t win. His party has announced that it will not support him. At best he was a long-shot to defeat Susan Collins even before the latest rape allegation. Does King like Nazis? Tattoos? Communism? He can’t like Communism, can he? King is worth an estimated $500 million. If he’s into income redistribution, why hasn’t he redistributed his?
2. Whatever Donald Trump has or hasn’t done, his conduct is irrelevant to Platner’s qualifications to be a Senator. This is whataboutism at its dumbest. The corresponding rationalizations on the list are #2, Whataboutism, or “They’re Just as Bad,” #22, The Comparative Virtue Excuse: “There are worse things,” and #31, The Troublesome Luxury: “Ethics is a luxury we can’t afford right now.”
3. The term “Abuser in Chief” is a trope of the Epstein conspiracy theorists, and they are the dumbest, most vicious and most immune to justice, fairness and logic of the Trump Deranged.
4. King’s second tweet is even worse, which is remarkable. He libels every member of Congress with no facts whatsoever. “If we knew what we don’t know, I know that every member of Congress has done horrible things.” What an astoundingly irresponsible statement, as well as pompous, arrogant and mean! King also tops his previous rationalizations with the biggest rationalization of them all, and the most childish: #1 on the list, “Everybody does it.” But everybody doesn’t rape women. Or get a giant Nazi tattoo on his chest. Or post vile things on social media.
5. Finally, King defaults to the hoary “Let him who is without sin cast the first stone” (John 8: 7,10,11), #5 on the Rationalizations list. It doesn’t mean what King and other lazy wielders of the line cite it to mean. Jesus said that to a group of men preparing to stone a prostitute that all of them had slept with. He was condemning hypocrisy of a very extreme sort, not saying that only the perfect and blameless could make moral judgments. In the context of Platner’s conduct, the quote means, “Let him who isn’t a serial sexual abuser, rapist and substance abuser who has no experience in governing whatsoever and who presumes to run for U.S. Senate cast the first stone.
Today is July 1, which is always treated across the United States as the gateway to a long weekend and the Fourth of July, and little more. This year, it is the run up to the 250th Anniversary of out nation’s founding. July 1 is also, however, the anniversary of the first day of the Battle of Gettysburg, the most important and most deadly battle of the many important and deadly conflicts in the American Civil War. The two American armies that clashed in the Pennsylvania town sustained more than 50,000 casualties on the Gettysburg battlefield, which may be the saddest and noblest place in America. It is also reputed to be the most haunted, which considering the number of souls lost between July 1 and 3 in 1863, shouldn’t surprise anyone.
[Digression: The Gettysburg Hotel is allegedly haunted, and the proprietors designate specific rooms as haunted. The rent for those rooms is less than the other rooms because, I was told when I called to inquire regarding reservations, “guests tend not to stay the whole night in those rooms.]
Our 250th celebration is an appropriate time to remember Gettysburg, because it is one of those landmark events in American history that could have so easily turned out differently, and if it had, we would never have made to the Centennial, never mind the 250th. The fact that the North prevailed was due to a confluence of random events, the essence of moral luck.
If you have not made at least one pilgrimage to the battlefield, you owe it to yourself, to your family, and to the memory of the combatants, to go. You need not swelter in July. Gettysburg is just as inspiring in the Spring or Fall.
I was briefly tempted to make the latest Savannah Guthrie sympathy porn outbreak on NBC’s “Today” show an Ethics Quiz, but to heck with it: I have no doubts about this. “Today” show is abusing its position as a news or an entertainment show to exploit the disappearance of co-host Savannah Guthrie’s almost certainly dead mother for cheap publicity and reality show appeal. As for Guthrie, it’s simple: she is unprofessional, self-indulgent, and incompetent.
The New York Post reports from “Page Six,” which catalogues celebrity news, gossip, and other matters that waste time and thought,
“[On]“Today” show on Tuesday… Savannah Guthrie broke down in tears while discussing the ransom note her family received in February allegedly claiming her missing mom, Nancy Guthrie, had died. “A lot of people at ‘Today’ are affected by it,” says a source. “There was a sense of sadness today. Everybody just feels so bad for her. There is a lot of uncertainty.” “There is a lot of admiration and praise for her that she is still able to do her job,” says our source. “People really support her and care about her, and people are heartbroken.” During the show, Guthrie said she had “no comment” on the headlines and is “not involved in … coverage” of her mother’s abduction, but that she couldn’t “pretend” to not be present for the conversation. “I just wanted to take the opportunity to really ask people and really beg people to come forward because somebody knows something,” Guthrie continued.“This is a news story today that is on your radar, but this is the life my sister, [Annie Guthrie], lives, that I live, that my brother, [Camron Guthrie], lives, that our extended families live, that our children live every day,” she explained. “We cannot be at peace,” the journalist said. “No matter how much I try to come out here every day and smile and find that joy — and I will, I promise I will — this is a moment to say we need your help. … I’m not gonna miss that opportunity.”Guthrie ended her emotional plea with a promise: “We love our mom, and we’ll never stop looking for her. Ever.”
Ugh.
Ethics Alarms flagged the news media’s Guthrie obsession as unethical special treatment for the rich and famous in February, when the apparent kidnapping was at least new:
More than 10 years ago I wrote about Kristina Rei, 22, of St. Petersburg, Russia. She wanted to look like Jessica Rabbit, the cartoon character, so she got herself a pair of huge—lips.She has undergone over 100 silicon-injection procedures, and considers it just the initial step in her quest to look like Roger Rabbit’s Toon wife from “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?”. ” At the time, I asked whetherit ethical for a plastic surgeon to give her the ridiculous lips she coveted, since plastic surgeons are subject to the Hippocratic Oath like other doctors. My own position then and now, was that it is unethical, though I tried to give both sides of the issue.
“If Kristin can eat, drink and breathe with her mega-lips,” I wrote, “and there is no risk that they might explode, killing everyone near her, the decision to do what she wants is probably ethical, at least by medical ethics standards. The fact that her Chap-Stick costs will be astronomical is not the doctor’s concern, however.” Nevertheless, I concluded that “a plastic surgeon who assists a patient, especially one so young, in disfiguring herself to this extent is unethical. Autonomy is to be respected always, and beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Kristin’s lips are so far beyond reason that a plastic surgeon debases his profession by assisting in what can fairly be called self-mutilation.”
My bias regarding fake puffy lips does not involve such extreme disfigurement; indeed most would agree that young women getting their lips puffed up isn’t disfiguring at all. However, it is increasingly becoming apparent to me that this particular form of supposedly aesthetic enhancement is becoming a norm, and a harmful one.
Ethics Alarms 