Popular Culture

The Ethics of Silencing Hate

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

Good and just people are not just bothered by the bad things people do, but also by the bad things they may be thinking while they do it.  This is reasonable, on its face, because a lot of  the time (though far from always), misconduct arises from ideas, emotions, motives and intentions that are not very admirable and sometimes despicable. The indisputable connection between what we think and what we do increasingly is fueling the idea that we can and should try to control people’s thoughts—not by encouraging good ones through education, culture, philosophy, role models and positive reinforcement, but by preventing bad thoughts through punishment, enforced conformity, censorship, and linguistic controls.

The civil rights movement, once dedicated to wiping out discrimination, which is a kind of conduct, now focuses on eliminating bigotry and bias, a form of thought. Hate crime legislation extends penalties for criminal acts beyond the act itself to what the criminal was thinking while he committed it.  The term “hate speech” is frequently used to describe any intense negative opinion as a way of both suppressing and de-legitimizing political opinion. The label effectively argues that an opinion, even a reasonable opinion by itself, should be shunned and even suppressed based on the “illegitimacy” of the thought process used to arrive at it.

As many predicted, this device or tendency (which you call it depends in part on how cynical you are) has intensified with the election of our first African American president, allowing the kind of intense opposition rhetoric, satire, condemnation, hyperbole and ridicule that has been directed at virtually every president before him to now be characterized as hate speech, or proof of racial prejudice. People, of course, have a right to engage in this tactic, but it is wrong.

Over on Facebook, over a million people have joined a fan page called “DEAR LORD, THIS YEAR YOU TOOK MY FAVORITE ACTOR, PATRICK SWAYZIE. YOU TOOK MY FAVORITE ACTRESS, FARAH FAWCETT. YOU TOOK MY FAVORITE SINGER, MICHAEL JACKSON. I JUST WANTED TO LET YOU KNOW, MY FAVORITE PRESIDENT IS BARACK OBAMA. AMEN”, inspired by a joke that is a lot older than Barack Obama, and probably older than Millard Fillmore. Continue reading →

CBS: Nostalgia Spoilsport

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

For many years, I’ve been trying to track down a recording of the theme song from the wonderful 1963-64 TV anthology “The Great Adventure.” A critically praised, largely forgotten dramatic series that portrayed stories from American history, “The Great Adventure” began with a spirited march written by composer Richard Rodgers, of Rodgers and Hart and Rodgers and Hammerstein fame.

Now I can play the show’s intro on my computer any time I feel like being inspired, thanks to a wonderful web resource, televisiontunes.com. The site has collected over 15,000 songs and instrumental pieces from the entire expanse of television history, and it is a magic doorway to instant nostalgia, not to mention some fun and excellent music, like the Rodgers composition, that is difficult to find anywhere else. Want to hear, for example, “Interjections!”, the cleverest and catchiest of all ABC’s “Schoolhouse Rock” creations? It’s there…or rather, here.

But if you want to listen to the “Twilight Zone” theme, or the iconic intro to “Perry Mason,” or, most tragically of all, the opening strains of “Hawaii Five-O,” perhaps the best TV theme ever, you are out of luck. You are out of luck because CBS, alone among the networks, has had its lawyers start pulling off the best-known themes from the CBS shows, as is CBS’s right as the owners of them. Continue reading →

Twins on Trial: Just Like “The Patty Duke Show”!

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Are you old enough to remember “The Patty Duke Show”? You know, with Patty, then a young starlet fresh off her Broadway and film triumphs as Helen Keller, playing “identical cousins” Patty and Cathy (with a British accent)? If you do, you surely remember the disturbingly catchy theme song about “two pairs of matching bookends, different as night and day!” Well, here’s a story about recent “matching bookends” who caused some ethics problems. To introduce it properly, to the melody of Patty Duke’s theme: Continue reading →

What Hugo Alfredo Tale-Yax Can Teach America

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

The one with the premium-grade ethics alarms bled to death on the sidewalk. The people who never had them installed at all took pictures. Is this the way it’s going to be?

Hugo Alfredo Tale-Yax was a Guatemalan immigrant who lived in Queens, New York. His life was a mess; he was destitute, ill, and had no job or likelihood of getting one. When he saw a knife-wielding man apparently assaulting a woman on the street two weeks ago, however, he knew what his ethical obligations were. He rescued her by intervening in the struggle, and got stabbed, badly, for his actions. The attacker ran off, and so did the woman, who didn’t check on Hugo after he fell, and  never contacted the police. She also neglected to say, “Thanks for saving my life.” Continue reading →

“Everybody Draw Muhammad Day” Ethics

/ Jack Marshall / 66 Comments

The “Everybody Draw Muhammad Day” mess is a wonderful example of how ethics train wrecks begin to engulf anyone who get near them. It also an example of an idea that is clever, funny, well-intentioned, and wrong. Continue reading →

Conan on “60 Minutes”: Failing His Own High Standards

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

Conan O’Brien went on CBS’s “60 Minutes” this week, and managed to carefully trash NBC and Jay Leno without crossing the boundaries laid out in his agreement with NBC, which prohibited him from “disparaging” the network that treated him so abysmally and paid him 30 million dollars in the bargain. I sympathize with Conan. A “60 Minutes” softball interview (CBS is a competitor of NBC, remember, so it likes Conan, an NBC casualty and victim; “60 Minutes” only does tough interviews with people they don’t like) is good for Conan’s image, helps him publicize his national comedy tour and his new deal with TBS, and best of all, allows him to stick it to the people who did him dirt. This would be hard for anyone to resist, and obviously Conaa couldn’t. Still, it would have been better if he had. Continue reading →

“The Good Wife” Ethics Follies

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

“The Good Wife,” CBS’s legal drama starring Julianna Margulies, began as an unusually nuanced show of its type that presented intriguing ethical dilemmas without crossing into David Kelley’s over-the-top Legal Theater of the Absurd. Little by little, however, the show’s willingness to ignore core legal ethics principles is becoming more pronounced. “Boom,” which aired last week, continues a trend that is ominous, considering “The Good Wife” is still in its first season. After all, the lawyers in Kelley’s “The Practice” didn’t start finding severed heads and getting charged with murder until a couple of seasons in.

If you missed “Boom,” or if you didn’t but had misplaced your A.B.A. Model Rules of Professional Conduct, here are the legal ethics howlers committed by the “Good Wife’s” attorneys: Continue reading →

The Weintraub Delusion

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

Jerry Weintraub, the epically successful producer of movies and manager of legendary performers, notably Elvis Presley, has written an entertaining autobiography entitled, “When I Stop Talking You’ll Know I’m Dead: Useful Stories From a Persuasive Man.” Maybe the stories are useful, but clearly not in the way Weintraub thinks they are.

As Weintraub was promoting his book on NPR this morning, he told several stories, all amusing. One involved a period when he was managing the late singer John Denver. Continue reading →

Misrepresentation, Manipulation and Lies About Arizona, E-Mails and More, Brought to Us By Those We Trust

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Within a span of about three minutes two days ago, I heard Tony Kornheiser on his sports radio show and Joy Behar on her whatever-the-heck-it-is cable show describe the new illegal immigration statute in Arizona in almost exactly the same words: “So the police can go up to anybody for any reason at all, ask them to prove their citizenship, and arrest them if they can’t.” Now, the law specifies “reasonable suspicion,” so whatever the Arizona law permits, Tony and Joy’s version is clearly not it. Nonetheless, this is what a large proportion of the public believes, because this is what they are being told by reporters, bloggers and elected officials…and, disgracefully, the President of the United States, who once pledged to use his gifts and power to unite rather than divide us. Speaking about the Arizona law, Obama said.. Continue reading →

History Lesson: Stephen Ambrose

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

Over the past two decades, historians have gone from obscure scholars to media stars, as the 24 hour news cycle prompted TV news shows to bring the best-selling non-fiction authors out of the archives into the studios. There the masters of the past were suddenly opining on the present, as the likes of Douglas Brinkley and Doris Kearns became as ubiquitous as Pat Buchanan or George Will. The supposed wisdom and solemn reliability of historians has put them in other unlikely roles too, such as Truman biographer David McCullough lending his soothing baritone to the narration of Kan Burns’ epic Civil War documentary.

One of the catalysts for this development was the late historian Stephen Ambrose, who hit on a formula to make history both provocative and lucrative.. Ambrose turned himself into the troubadour of World War II, inspiring dramatic renditions of his books, such as “Band of Brothers,” and launching a “Greatest Generation” industry. Shortly before Ambrose died in 2002, a brief scandal erupted when it was revealed that one of his histories was significantly plagiarized (Kearns had one of her books similarly discredited), but he handled the potential disaster deftly, admitting that he inadvertently published some verbatim notes, and died soon enough thereafter that the scandal did little to suppress sales of the “Band of Brothers” DVDs. The truth was, however, that more than one of his books stole from other sources.

Now new evidence is making it clear that Ambrose, the historian pop star, was indeed a full-fledged fraud, raising the question, “Who are these guys?” And why should we trust them? Continue reading →