Quotes

My 15 Hollywood Cures For A Paterno-Penn State-Sandusky Hangover, Part 2

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Part 1 listed the first seven of my 15 cinematic remedies for Penn State-inspired ethics ennui. Part 2 includes the final eight. Please don’t take the order too seriously; I could have shuffled the whole batch. I also tried to include as many genres as possible. When it comes to ethics, good lists can be compiled using all Westerns, all sports movies, all war movies, courtroom drama or science fiction. Here we go…

8. Spartacus (196o)

The raw history is inspiring enough: an escaped gladiator led an army of slaves to multiple victories over the Roman legions in one of the greatest underdog triumphs ever recorded. Stanley Kubrick’s sword-and-sandal classic has many inspiring sequences, none more so than the moment when Spartacus’s defeated army chooses death rather than to allow him to identify himself to their Roman captors (“I am Spartacus!”)

Ethical issues highlighted: Liberty, slavery, sacrifice, trust, politics, courage, determination, the duty to resist abusive power, revolution, love, loyalty.

Favorite quote: “When a free man dies, he loses the pleasure of life. A slave loses his pain. Death is the only freedom a slave knows. That’s why he’s not afraid of it. That’s why we’ll win.” [Spartacus (Kirk Douglas)] Continue reading →

My 15 Hollywood Cures For A Paterno-Penn State-Sandusky Hangover, Part 1

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

For this hangover, movies work better.

The past week, as much as any week within memory, has caused me to despair about the culture, the state of ethical values in America, and my own futile efforts to try to bring some light to the darkness. My mood was not only ravaged by the Penn State scandal (and Penn State’s students’ scandalous reaction to it), but also the continued drift and incompetence in our government and the lack of any apparent leadership or courage to address the problems of our economic system, other than to complain about them.

In such times—there have been others, though happily not many—my spirit urgently needs an infusion of inspiration and hope, and fast: as Al Pacino reminds us in “Scent of a Woman,” there is no prosthesis for an amputated spirit. This is when I turn to the movies that speak to me of courage, redemption, and ethical virtues validated. They are my lifeline; I can’t write or think about ethics from the bottom of a pit. I’ve got only a few days before Thanksgiving, after all. This is no time to be cynical and dubious about the course of humanity and the United States of America, a nation I love and admire.

Thus I am going to take a brief detour from the usual format of Ethics Alarms, with your leave and forgiveness, and share with you the fifteen movies that I will turn to as I try to recharge my enthusiasm, inspiration, and hope. Here are 1 though 7; the rest will be along shortly:

1. A Man For All Seasons (1966)

Hardly the most upbeat film to start the list, but probably the greatest ethics movie ever made.

Ethical issues highlighted: Integrity, honesty, courage, leadership, corruption, abuse of power.

Favorite quote: “Why Richard, it profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world… but for Wales?” [Sir Thomas More (Paul Scofield)] Continue reading →

Ethics Quote of the Week: Greta Van Susteren

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Welcome to the Wisconsin Supreme Court!

“Are any of the newspaper asking for them to step down? People have very serious disputes and their whole lives depend on decisions on the Supreme Court, and this isn’t fair to the people. Are newspaper editors saying they got to go?”

—-Fox News Host Greta Van Susteren, asking Milwaukee-Journal Sentinel reporter Jason Stein why the Wisconsin news media has not demanded  the removal of Justice David Prosser and  Justice Ann Walsh Bradley or both, since by all accounts they turned ideological differences into a physical altercation in chambers. The reporter ducked the question, and blamed it all on Gov. Scott Walker, thus taking “missing the entire point” to art form status.

Van Susteren is not only right, but obviously right. Continue reading →

Incompetent Elected Official of the Month: Rep. Andre Carson (D-Ind.)

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Worse than Joe "You Lie!" Wilson; worse than Allan "The Republicans want you to die!" Grayson. Will anyone say so?

Many Members of the Congressional Black Caucus have specifically stated in the past that they have no interest in budget-balancing issues, and that their primary and over-riding objective is to keep government money flowing to their neediest constituents. That’s a narrow and irresponsible position, but defensible if your view of the duty of elected representatives is that they are only advocates for the voters who elect them, and not bound by any obligation to national welfare  as a whole. Even if one accepts this approach (shared by many in the Tea Party), it does not excuse executing that advocacy by stirring up race hatred with diatribes attributing monstrous and unjustified motivations to political adversaries.

In other words, it doesn’t excuse slanderous comments like these about the Tea Party and its adherents, issuing like flaming vomit from the uncivil mouth of Rep. Andre Carson:

“This is the effort that we are seeing of Jim Crow. Some of these folks in Congress right now would love to see us as second class citizens. Some of them in Congress right now with this Tea Party movement would love to see you and me… hanging on a tree. Some of them right now in Congress right now are comfortable with where we were fifty or sixty years ago. But it’s a new day with a black president and a Congressional Black Caucus.”

Continue reading →

More Quotation Ethics: The Martin Luther King Memorial Strikes Again…But It’s Maya Angelou’s Fault

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

Who said that quote inscribed on the MLK monument? Not Rev. King! Maybe that guy in the hat...

When I saw the Martin Luther King quote engraved on the north face of his monument at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial, my immediate thought was: “A little full of ourselves there, are we, Marty?”

It reads: “I was a drum major for justice, peace and righteousness.”

Personally, I’ve always hated drum majors—prancing, flashy show-offs with big hats. I never thought of Martin Luther King as a drum major, or as someone prone to self-glorifying descriptions. I was relieved, therefore, to learn that what he really said was this, in a sermon two months before his death, speculating on what his eulogy might sound like:

“If you want to say that I was a drum major, say that I was a drum major for justice. Say that I was a drum major for peace. I was a drum major for righteousness. And all of the other shallow things will not matter.”

Ahh! Now that’s the Rev. Martin Luther King I remember! Unfortunately, it’s not the one future generations of America will know, because a false quote, mischaracterizing his meaning and his character, is immortalized in stone on the National Mall. Continue reading →

Historical Theft at the King Memorial

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Rev. Theodore Parker

The new Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial is not just the King-in-Carbonite monolith that has caused so much controversy. There is much more to the National Mall’s latest addition, including inscriptions in marble of quotes from the martyred civil rights leader’s writings and speeches. There are more than a dozen examples of his oratory, a quotation from King’s 1963 “Letter From a Birmingham Jail,” and an excerpt from King’s Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech in 1964.

Among them, this:

“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

But Rev. King didn’t say it. Theodore Parker, an influential and eloquent Boston minister and abolitionist, did. King never pretended otherwise; it was one of his favorite quotes, and he used it often, but he usually credited its originator. Continue reading →

Hypocritical Spam of the Year

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Tastier than usual, though....

This morning my routine cleaning out of the accumulated comment spam sent to Ethics Alarms revealed either that spammers are developing a keen sense of irony, or that their hypocrisy knows no bounds. The following comment, for some reason attached to the Stephen Sondheim Ethics Hero article, read…

“Excellent post! I have been looking for just such information. Your site is a good resource…a little too spammy, though.”

The author of the post was named “Penis Enlargement Pills.”

Some Post Iowa Debate Ethics Awards

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Other than the fact that both would look crazy on the cover of Newsweek, how is Humpty Dumpty like Michele Bachman?

The GOP pre-Iowa straw poll presidential debate last night earned a few ethics awards, with many more to come as we get to know these pretenders better:

Journalistic Integrity Award: Chris Wallace, Fox news anchor and questioner.

Wallace continues to bring legitimate and fair journalistic practices to his job, and gets accused of being biased anyway. Or, as in this case, (and as when he shocked Michele Bachmann by asking her directly what everyone was implying, “Are you a flake?”), conservatives who expect softballs from Fox react with indignation that an assumed ally is asking a tough question. Wallace asked Newt Gingrich about his flailing campaign organization, and Gingrich angrily called it a “gotcha” question. That’s not a “gotcha,” Newt, and you know it. When most of a candidate’s  campaign staff, those who know him  best, have indicated that they don’t think he has a chance—or perhaps shouldn’t have a chance—by jumping ship, it is fair and responsible to ask a candidate to explain. Continue reading →

Ethics Quote of the Week: Justice Antonin Scalia

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

“Justice Alito recounts all these disgusting video games in order to disgust us — but disgust is not a valid basis for restricting expression.” 

— Justice Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, in the majority opinion of Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association that over-turned a California law restricting the access of children to violent video games. Scalia was responding to the argument by conservative colleague Joseph Alito, who described the wide range of violent and offensive experiences a child could have though video-gaming, such as reenacting the shootings at Columbine High School and Virginia Tech,  raping Native American women or killing ethnic and religious minorities.

Scalia is the Supreme Court justice liberals love to hate, but he is the most stalwart defender of the First Amendment since Justice William O. Douglas and Justice Hugo Black on the Warren Court. As political warfare increasingly focuses on the tactic of suppressing and inhibiting speech and ideas rather than rebutting them, Scalia’s uniform rejection of any effort to squelch the free exchange of ideas, even disgusting ideas, is the last line of defense against government-imposed political correctness, nanny state thought control, and puritan censorship. While sufficiently important ends, such as protecting our children and our culture, may justify some extreme means, Scalia’s opinion reaffirms the core American principle that those means can never include government restriction of speech in its broadest definition. Continue reading →

Unethical Quote of the Week: U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Hillary said something unethical? I'm shocked! Shocked!

“But the bottom line is, whose side are you on? Are you on Qadhafi’s side or are you on the side of the aspirations of the Libyan people and the international coalition that has been created to support them? For the Obama Administration, the answer to that question is very easy.”

—–Obama Administration Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, responding in a press conference to Congressional objections that the U.S. continued participation in attacks on Libya violates the War Powers Resolution—which it undoubtedly does.

Most of the objections to Sec. Clinton’s comments focus on her apparent hypocrisy; after all, this is the same woman who as a U.S. Senator in 2003 objected to “are you with us or against us” rhetoric from the Bush Administration regarding the Iraq war by saying,  “I am sick and tired of people who say that if you debate and you disagree with this administration somehow you’re not patriotic. We should stand up and say we are Americans and we have a right to debate and disagree with any administration.” But this isn’t necessarily hypocrisy: Hillary has a right to change her mind. What is unethical about her statement on Libya is that it is manipulative, unfair and dishonest. Continue reading →