What’s going on here? As is often the case, it depends on who you are and what your perspective is.

The House voted by large margins to adopt resolutions that would overturn a two laws passed by the District of Columbia’s City Council. It was the first attempt to interfere with the District’s “home rule’ privileges in more than 30 years,  when Congress  overruled a local law in 1991 to annul a measure that would have allowed the construction of an apartment and office complex 20 feet above the city’s downtown height limit. Nothing in the District is allowed to be taller than the Washington Monument, and that was considered a potential wound to the Capital’s mystique and the honor due to its namesake.

Congress can exercise authority over D.C. local affairs, according to the District Clause of the Constitution (Article 1, Section 8, Clause 17). Congress reviews all D.C. legislation before it can become law (the members seldom read them, or course, usually acting as rubber stamps) and can change or reveres D.C. legislation. It is a power that Congress hesitates to use, however, especially when Democrats are in the majority. The two measures opposed this time, however were just asking for a slapdown. One allowed non-citizens to vote in local elections, a recent fad in woke cities, D.C.’s Revised Criminal Code Act of 2022, which would lower penalties for a number of violent criminal offenses.

The reaction of D.C.’s race-obsessed political class was so predictable it wasn’t even a challenge. Representative Eleanor Holmes Norton, the District’s nonvoting House delegate, reacted to the House vote by playing the plantation card, saying, “D.C. residents, a majority of whom are Black and brown, are either unworthy or incapable of governing themselves.” Continue reading →

Here is a second Comment of the Day on the brief post about the unforgivable “Proud Family” race-huckstering video circulated by the Disney wokesters. The company and the brand deserves to suffer for this, and it looks it will. JutGory’s take is significantly different from that of the previous COTD on this topic.

Two bits of information that haven’t appeared here before:

• “40 acres and a mule” wasn’t a broken promise as much as it was an irresponsible one. It didn’t come from Congress or the President; there was no law passed. That old softy General Sherman  issued Special Field Order No. 15, and it directed confiscated Confederate land to be distributed to freed slaves. (No mule is mentioned.) By June, the land had been allocated to 40,000 freed slaves, but there were 4 million of them. The war was officially over by then, and the government wasn’t bound by a single general’s promise, nor could it be.
• Disney’s propaganda piece repeats the “hand up, don’t shoot!” Big Lie from the Michael Brown affair….just like Black Lives Matters.

Now here is Jut’s Comment of the Day on the recent post about  Disney’s Critical Race Theory video: 

***

It is false.

Slavery did create a certain amount of wealth in the country for sure.

But, I am sure that those who created this video do not want to examine the true nature of that wealth creation.

Slaves were treated like beasts of burden. They do not magically generate wealth. There is an inherent COST to BENEFIT analysis that must be done.

And, slaveholders did that. Whatever wealth that was built by slaves came with an economic COST. Slavery did not mean slave labor was free.

You could just as easily say (taking a cue from the video) mule labor built this country.

You also need to look at the fragility of wealth. I have read hundreds of “slave narratives” (the interviews from the WPA don’t count as much as “narratives” as those of Booker Washington, Frederick Douglass or Harriet Tubman) and one of the recurring themes in a lot of them interviews of ex-slaves was that Union troops plundered Southern Plantations as they moved through. They took food, property, etc. as they went through the South and freed up plantations. Continue reading →

Today, February 9, has several important ethics and cultural markers. It was the date in 1964 that Ed Sullivan presented the Beatles to American television, and nothing was ever the same. How wonderful it was to have a single national meeting place every Sunday night where popular culture could be shared and passed on to multiple generations! That’s impossible today. I watch tapes of that episode of Ed’s show laughing and crying at the same time. The screaming! The crazed joy on the faces of those girls! It was nuts, and it was somehow marvelous—such innocence, such magic, stupid though it was. We will never, never see anything like that again.

Another marker was in 1971, when the Hall of Fame put Satchel Paige on the ballot, leading to his eventual admission after being voted in by sportswriters. He was unquestionably a great pitcher, but he didn’t make it to the majors until he was far past his prime, indeed 42 years old, making him the oldest rookie in MLB history—and he was still excellent, serving in relief for the World Champion 1948 Cleveland Indians. Baseball’s color line, of course, had kept Paige locked in the Negro Leagues, along with many other players who could have been stars in the big leagues, until Jackie Robinson integrated the sport in 1947. Other Negro League greats followed Paige into the Hall despite never playing in the majors. It is often forgotten now, but it was Ted Williams, in his Hall of Fame acceptance speech, who started the movement to recognize the Negro Leagues players by making the point that their omission continued a great injustice.

1. The rest of the story...Curmie alerted me that Cardinal Local Schools  reversed its administrators’ unethical decision to cancel the high school musical, “The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee,” because of aspects of the show that those same administrators should have been aware of when the show was was chosen for production. Music Theater International, which owns the licensing rights, and the show’s authors agreed to 23 requested revisions including a different song to take the place of the controversial “erection” number. Curmie writes, tongue firmly in cheek, “I’m sure the national humiliation they endured was completely irrelevant to this change of course.”

I like to think, in its small way, Ethics Alarms helped; the big assist goes to the original production’s cast members who spoke out.

I personally hold the position that if a school is going to have to make 23 substantive changes in a show to find it acceptable for its performers and audience, the school should find a different musical. Samuel Beckett would agree with me. Continue reading →

The lunch menu offered on February 1 at Nyack Middle School in Rockland County, New York consisted of fried chicken and waffles, with watermelon on the first day of Black History Month.

Perfect! Exactly what the diversity obsession deserves: a nice petard-hoisting. I wonder: would any menu of perceived black ethnic cuisine be seen as appropriate, or would it all be “racist”? Where’s the line between stereotypes and historical fact? Would serving potatoes on St. Patrick’s Day be offensive? If I was a dinner guest (I never am, but theoretically) should I be offended if I was served mousaka, with the host saying, “Since you’re Greek, we made this just for you?”

(If it was good mousaka, I’d be thrilled. Most mousaka is terrible. I think I’d prefer being served fried chicken, waffles and watermelon. And since I’m not black, I wouldn’t be obligated to be offended.)

David A. Johnson, the school’s principal, grovelled in a letter to parents that the luncheon fare was “inexcusably insensitive and reflected a lack of understanding of our district’s vision to address racial bias. We are extremely disappointed by this regrettable situation and apologize to the entire Nyack community for the cultural insensitivity displayed by our food service provider,” Johnson wrote. Continue reading →

That’s Sen. Steve Daines (R-Mt) the chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, and his wife above, in the Senator’s new profile picture.  Twitter froze his account in punishment, because its “Media Policy” was supposedly violated. See?

Continue reading →

I want to start next week out with as little inventory as possible, so I’m going to go to the potpourri format a second time today. This morning’s installment is here.

1. My current quest is to locate as many popular songs and records from the 1950s (and early Sixties, which were the Fifties in spirit, pre-British Invasion.) that are effectively “cancelled” today for being politically correct. As I note in a comment earlier today, I am trying to persuade Pat Boone to do this as a “theme” for his weekly Sirius show on the Golden Fifties Channel. He’s a terrific host, by the way—great voice still, smooth, fascinating comments on the songs. Pat also likes playing his own hits, understandable enough, and one of them was the infamous “Speedy Gonzalez,” which traffics in more Mexican stereotypes than you would think could be packed into a song. ( I wrote about the Chuck Jones cartoon character here; Mel Blanc even does “Speedy” on Pat’s record.) That song above from “The Most Happy Fella” is another. Boy, it’s creepy, with lyrics like,

Standing on the corner watching all the girls go by
Standing on the corner underneath the springtime sky
Brother, you can’t go to jail for what you’re thinking
Or for the “Woo!” look in your eye
You’re only standing on the corner watching all the girls
Watching all the girls, watching all the girls
Go by!

I first paid attention to the song in the 70’s, and they bothered me then. How cute: a bunch of guys ogling women and thinking about illegal things to do with them or to them. As you might discern, I see no reason to censor these songs. The Fifties was the most lively, varied, experimental and interesting time in U.S. pop music, with Broadway, jazz, rhythm and blues, country, Doo Wop, and orchestral all vital, the iconic rockers like Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis, Little Richard, Buddy Holly and Elvis on the way up, and the old-style crooners like Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, Frankie Layne and Tony Bennett still knocking out hits. Hundreds of that era’s songs are still worth listening to, including “Zip-a-Dee Doo-Dah” by Bob B. Soxx & the Blue Jeans, a Phil Spector-produced American rhythm and blues trio from Los Angeles. You know, I’m sure, that Disney has purged that Academy Award-winning song because it came from the allegedly racist “Song of the South” animated film. Among the platters I’ll suggest to Pat are “Please Mr. Custer,” “Ally Oop,” “Johnny Get Angry,” “I Told the Witch Doctor,” and Tex Ritter’s “Deck of Cards” song, which is openly Christian, so might “offend” someone. Please pass suggestions along, as well as the best way to contact Pat, who claims to have an email address. Twitter works, but I haven’t returned to that platform yet. I can’t tell if Pat himself ever checks his Facebook page. Continue reading →

Great thanks to my friend and Ethics Alarms reader Jeff Westlake for reminding me of the prescient and relevant episode from one of my all-time favorite (and shamelessly silly) sitcoms, “F-Troop.” That was “Crazy Cat” prodding the Hekawi chief; he took the place of medicine man “Roaring Chicken” Edward Everett Horton in the show’s final season (in color!) when the great old character actor became too ill in his eighties.

More spy balloon humor: one Twitter wag said that shooting down the Chinese balloon was the first thing the Biden administration had done to successfully combat inflation.

1 Regarding today’s headline: Not all that long ago, I used to watch as much of all the Sunday talking head programs on CBS, NBC, ABC, PBS and CNN (skipping Fox News and MSNBC because they were so one-note and shrill). Now I can’t watch any of them. All five shifted to full-partisan bias in 2016, and it just intensified since then. Even the evidence that Donna Brazile had used her role as a CNN “contributor” to let Hillary Clinton get advance notice of questions in a town meeting didn’t stop her from being featured as a pundit. George Stephanopoulos screaming Clinton conflict of interest continued to be ignored by ABC, and he stopped even trying to hide it. Chuck Todd turned “Meet the Press” into an hour-long infomercial for Democrats, and “Reliable Sources” under Brian Stelter became a literal fraud, an unethical media ethics show. I miss those shows, just like I miss journalism that at least tried to be informative, fair and ethical. Wouldn’t you think just one would have concluded that it would be wise to contrast with the others by actually being objective, rather than being indistinguishable?

2. Now that I’m reminded of our Native Americans so soon after this super-woke idiot complained about the Washington Redskins, the presence of the Kansas City Chiefs in the upcoming Super Bowl has once again triggered the Indian team names and mascots Nazis, notably in Kansas City itself. KCUR, the PBS affiliate in KC, published a story  on its website last week titled,  “As Kansas City Chiefs head to the Super Bowl, their violent traditions alienate even some local fans.” Violent traditions? What violent traditions? Do Chief fans traditionally try to massacre the fans of their opponents? No, the “violence” referred to is the “tomahawk” chop gesture the fans sometimes perform in the stands, like the home fans of baseball’s Atlanta Braves. You know, violence to the air. Or something. The petty, silly and obnoxious feature quotes Rhonda DeValdo, an activist and professor from Haskell Indian Nations University in Lawrence, Kansas: Continue reading →