Is there some woke reason I have missed that explains why virtually all Halloween lawn decorations in my Northern Virginia neighborhood consist of gravestones, skulls, skeletons and spiders? Or are people suddenly suffering from an appalling lack of imagination? No witches, no black cats, no devils, no vampires, no wolfmen. I made the rounds today with Spuds, and saw no ghosts at all, except in front of one house with a large American flag flying. Obviously, the “ghost” is really a reference to the Klan, and anyone who flies Old Glory is likely to be a racist. Or am I just imagining it all?

1. Customer service ethics: I am going to war with CVS. It was August 28 when I first complained to CVS about my appalling treatment at the local store. At the time when I wrote the post, I was awaiting a promised call (24-48 hours) from a “group leader” regarding my incident report. The call never came. I called two days later to register a second complaint about the failure of CVS to follow through as promised on my first complaint. This time, I got profuse apologies, a new incident number for future reference, and a second assurance that I would be receiving a call, also in 24 to 48 hours. That call also never came.

In mid-September, I called the complaint line a third time, to add my third complaint to the previous two, this one about being jerked around and lied to in the last call. I was told that there was a video of my encounter, that it would be reviewed, and that a named executive would contact me “in a week to 10 days.”

Guess what happened. Oh, come on, guess.

There was no contact. Thus it was that yesterday, on October 15, that I called CVS Customer Relations to register complaint #4. I recounted the incident and the previous calls, as well as their apparently lack of sincerity. “It seems clear to me that the CVS policy is to delay, obfuscate, and draw out the process, assuming that dissatisfied and abused customers will give up and drop their complaints. I’m sure that works with most people, but it won’t work with me. I am prepared to pursue this until I see a fair and appropriate response, ” I said. This agent, like the others, assured me that CVS wasn’t like that, but that since she wasn’t a member of “the leadership group,” she wasn’t sure what she could do to ensure action. “Let me transfer you to someone higher up who can help,” she said. Then she transferred me. “Hello?” a loud voice said when the call was picked up. “Yes, hi,” I said. “Is this CVS?” “CVS? Fuck no!” the charming woman shouted, and hung up.

So I made my fifth call to submit my 5th complaint. That nice agent said she would transfer me to her manager. “It’s hard with everyone working at home,” she added. The manager never answered the phone. After profuse apologies, the agent suggested that I call back next week.

2. On the plus side, more people will read my article there than ever see what I write here...A website with millions of views (it claims) stole a copyrighted article I wrote for my now-defunct theater company, published it almost word for word, and included no attribution or credit while representing the piece as original. How many wars is it wise to fight simultaneously?

I better ask George W. Bush.

3. Trump Derangement as a campaign strategy. I don’t think I’ve ever seen this before. In Virginia, where Clinton bag man Terry McAuliffe is trying to get elected governor again and running scared. Democrats are featuring a TV ad that says nothing about Terry and virtually nothing about his GOP opponent, Glenn Youngkin, except that Donald Trump endorsed him and Youngkin said he was honored. This isn’t even ad hominem negative campaigning. It’s an implied ad hominem attack against someone who isn’t running but who has stated that he supports a candidate, with the implication that politely accepting an endorsement is proof of fealty, or alliance, or affection, or something. As with the successful 2020 strategy of running an obviously unfit Presidential candidate with an obviously unqualified running mate on the assumption that sufficient numbers of voters will decide on who they want as their leaders based solely on raw, blinding hatred of the alternative, Virginia Democrats are similarly courting hate to compensate for their blatantly unethical candidate for governor, who slipped up and admitted that he doesn’t want parents sticking their noses into the progressive indoctrination of their children.

This is no way to run a democracy.

On October 15, 1946, Hermann Göring cheated the hangman, as they say, killing himself in his cell by swallowing a cyanide tablet he had hidden from his guards. Göring was Hitler’s designated successor, as well as commander in chief of the Luftwaffe, and president of the Reichstag. As the man directly responsible for purging of German Jews from the economy following the Kristallnacht pogrom of 1938 and initiating the “Aryanization” policy that confiscated Jewish property and businesses, he certainly was as deserving as any of the death sentence he received after being tried at Nuremberg for “crimes against humanity.” (He was also a very strange man, as this astounding tale about his relationship with his brother, who rescued Jews from the death camps, makes clear.)

I understand the ritual significance of the state killing a condemned prisoner, but I have never regarded “cheating the hangman” to be anything to lose much sleep about. Such people were determined to be unworthy of life in a civilized society, and they decided to carry out the sentence themselves. Thanks! The ethics of life-without-parole prisoners and the outrageously guilty (like Jeffrey Epstein) similarly shuffling off their mortal coils without permission is a tougher one, and some day I might ponder it sufficiently to write a coherent post. All I can say now is that when I hear of such an incident, or even when some particularly horrible murderer is killed by a fellow prisoner (as in the cases of Dickie Loeb and Jeffrey Dahmer), I’m not outraged, offended, or troubled by his fate.

1 A quickie ethics quiz was posed today on the Friday Open Forum, and I can’t resist commenting here. Esteemed commenter Willem Reese sparked a lively set of responses when he asked, “It’s clever, but is it ethical to do this with your dog?” regarding this photo:

My verdict? No, it’s not unethical, assuming the dog wasn’t in pain and wasn’t made uncomfortable. Dogs are not concerned with dignity in human terms, so “embarrassing” it is not a legitimate complaint. Nor is it signature significance for an unethical dog owner, because dog owners do these kind of things who love their animal companions beyond all imagining. However, I view doing such a makeover to a dog as a possible indication, rebuttable of course, that the human responsible does not have sufficient regard for living things. Dogs are not props, and an owner who makes a dog look like that is treating it as a prop. I feel the same way about parents who dress up babies, because this…

…too easily metastasizes into this...

and worse, THIS:

But I digress. My answer to Willem’s question would be one that I often put in my legal ethics seminar multiple choice answers: “It may not be unethical, but I wouldn’t do it.”

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You have to wonder how long it will be before all these idealistic, liberal-minded, wealthy white people begin to realize that their support for progressive candidates and causes won’t save them from being discriminated against, insulted and abused as the woke mob they helped put in power presses on with its plan of compensatory racism. If the answer is “never, because they are weenies and fools”—and it might be—there is no calculating how far this Bizarro World version of “justice” and “inclusiveness” might go.

The Art Institute of Chicago summarily fired all of its volunteer docents. Almost all were retired white women. They were canned in a masterpiece of authentic frontier gibberish authored by Veronica Stein (above), the museum’s newly appointed Woman’s Board Executive Director of Learning and Public Engagement, who announced her priorities as “designing culturally responsive programming and anti-racist curricula, cultivating fully accessible spaces, and ensuring staff wellness and learning.” Somehow, anti-racism also meant eliminating the trained and dedicated docent staff because they were too white. “She had further stated, we acknowledge our responsibility to rebuild the volunteer educator program in a way that allows community members of all income levels to participate, responds to issues of class and income equity, and does not require financial flexibility to participate. Rather than refresh our current program, systems, and processes, we feel that now is the time to rebuild our program from the ground up.”

Volunteers are not covered by federal employment laws, so the wealthy white women who chose to serve the community for free out of their civic pride and generosity will be replaced with a new “diverse” group of non-volunteers, who will be paid $25 an hour to do be less trained and experienced than the docents just released. The few non-white volunteers had to go as well, because there was no way to fire just the white women without making the racist motives behind the move too apparent.

The Docent Council complained about the decision in a letter to Art Institute President James Rondeau, which listed their members accomplishments and qualifications and further stated,

“We believe we were dismissed (1) because the museum’s perspective is that the current docent corps’ demographics do not meet the need of the strategic plan (2) the museum concluded that reengineering the docent program was a step towards achieving the museum’s important goal of creating a culture of diversity and inclusion.“

And that’s what you get, ladies, when you accept the dubious proposition of diversity for diversity’s sake, where merit takes a back seat to quotas. They were not given the courtesy, gratitude or loyalty of being moved into the new positions they would be overwhelmingly qualified for if they weren’t too white and “privileged.”

The Chicago Tribune, hardly Fox News, wrote in an editorial, “Once you cut through the blather, [Stein’s] letter basically said the museum had looked critically at its corps of docents, a group dominated by mostly (but not entirely) white, retired women with some time to spare, and found them wanting as a demographic,” stated the Chicago Tribune.

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During the 1930s, President Roosevelt and New York Mayor La Guardia frequently read the morning newspaper to radio audiences. Convicted Watergate conspirator E. Gordon Liddy managed to have a popular conservative radio talk show for years that mostly consisted of his reading articles from the newspaper. Today’s Times had many statements that made the ethics mines in my head explode repeatedly, so I feel compelled to share:

• Headline: “Cities Reverse On Police Cuts As Crime Rises.” My reaction: “Morons.” What did the “defund the police” activists think would happen? This goes beyond incompetence to criminal incompetence.
• This front page story contained one botch after another. The black superintendent of schools reacted to the George Floyd episode by sending a message to the parents of all 7,700 students in the district in which she labeled “a reality check” her conclusion that “Racism is alive in our country, our state, in Queen Anne’s County, and our schools.” Here’s a reality check that I am pledged to note every time anyone uses the Floyd death to show racism by police, the law, or the United States in general: there was and is no evidence that the episode involved racism. There is every reason to believe that Derek Chauvin would have treated a white perp who behaved like Floyd in exactly the same brutal manner. That a school superintendent would leap to the conclusion she did marks her as uncritical and irresponsible, governed by confirmation bias bias, and unqualified to lead a school district. As usual, the Times report never mentions that Floyd’s death was not am incident of racism except to those who wanted it to be, presumed it to be, or dishonestly used it for political gain. There are other unethical statements in the story, like”The debate has sometimes focused on K-12 curriculums after conservative activists began branding a range of topics including history lessons and diversity initiatives as “critical race theory,” an academic framework that views racism as ingrained in law and other modern institutions. The term is now often deployed to attack any discussion of race and racism in American classrooms — pitting educators who feel obligated to teach the realities of racism against predominantly white parents and politicians who believe that schools are forcing white children to feel ashamed of their race and country.” This is pro-critical race theory propaganda. Many non-conservative parents object to this indoctrination trend, and many black parents as well. It is an especially ironic statement in the context of an article about how one educator falsely interpreted a non-racial incident a proof of racism. How can such educators teach “the realities of racism” when they are biased and using false information? They can’t.

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1. This shoe we knew was dropping soon...U.S. District Judge Robert Pitman granted a temporary restraining order this week against the controversial Texas law that prohibits conducting abortions after a fetal heartbeat has been detected. It’s a really, really bad opinion, full of wokisms, and unprofessional appeals to emotion, and it is now blocked by a temporary stay by the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Pittman had written that “this Court will not sanction one more day of this offensive deprivation of such an important right.” His own opinion is pretty offensive on its own, avoiding the use of the term “women” and including nary a hint that another right, maybe even a superior one, might be at issue here.

The Texas law is likely to be found unconstitutional, maybe in more ways than one, but the TRO followed by a higher court stay has become a routine sequence. Another predictable shoe: a misleading and intellectually dishonest reaction from pro-abortion activists. The Center for Reproductive Rights’ president and CEO Nancy Northup, for example, said in a statement,

“It’s unconscionable that the Fifth Circuit stayed such a well-reasoned decision that allowed constitutionally protected services to return in Texas. Patients are being thrown back into a state of chaos and fear, and this cruel law is falling hardest on those who already face discriminatory obstacles in health care, especially Black, Indigenous, and other people of color, undocumented immigrants, young people, those struggling to make ends meet, and those in rural areas. The courts have an obligation to block laws that violate fundamental rights.”

Well reasoned? I bet she didn’t read past the order itself. Of course, current abortion laws fall hardest on the most helpless and innocent of victims, the unborn, but never mind: Nancy doesn’t acknowledge their humanity. She also feels it necessary to play every victim card in the deck (other than the dead baby card, of course), as if it matters in constitutional terms whose rights are being violated, and as if violations of Left-anointed groups’ rights are more important than violations of others. All citizens have the same rights, and the Constitution guarantees equal rights under the law.

2. When ethics alarms don’t ring…and historical literacy is dead: In Germany, yellow badges (okay, they are technically buttons, but still…) signify that the wearer has been vaccinated. Colorful!

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