U.S. Society

Nipping A Terrible Idea In the Bud

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

God bless America.

In policy debates over contentious issues like abortion, national health care, and capital punishment, a common argument, brandished like a flag , is that the United States is out of step with the rest of the world. My reflex reaction to that claim, when I can resist the impulse to say, “Good!”, is to point out that the rest of the world has never lacked for enthusiasms for terrible ideas, and the United States, by going in its own direction, has often been unique, innovative, and right.

Still, a bad idea abroad will inevitably inspire some enterprising social architect here to propose it, and a legislator to try to make it law. Thus, when possible, it is wise to try to identify and reject the most sinister examples of Europe being Europe before anyone here starts trying to play “me too.” In the case of Europe’s current push to create a so-called “right to be forgotten” on the internet, some very effective critics are on the case. Continue reading →

JFK, Ethics Corrupter

/ Jack Marshall / 37 Comments

The new memoir by Mimi Alford, the former White House intern whom President Kennedy made his sex toy (though not his only one), hardly comes as a surprise to anyone who didn’t accept the fabricated, idealized version of JFK sold to the public by the likes of Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. and Chris Matthews. Still, her account of Kennedy’s revolting conduct is infuriating, because it continues his corruption of American ethics and leadership standards, the real legacy of his presidency.

Kennedy was a thoroughly fraudulent human being, a cynical and arrogant leader who used soaring prose about freedom, aspiration and the human spirit while masquerading as a devoted father and husband, betraying his wife, abusing his power for selfish personal gratification, and in the process, putting his country at risk during the height of the Cold War. Only moral luck, combined with the failure of a complicit media to tell the public what they really had a right to know—that their President was a sexist, reckless, ruthless, SOB—allowed Kennedy to escape with his myth intact long enough to be regarded as a heroic figure. Now, as the truth relentlessly emerges, the product of his devoted image-makers collides with the ugliness of JFK’s behavior, creating cognitive dissonance of the most destructive sort.  After all, if the great John F. Kennedy abused drugs in the White House, used his office and power to lure employees into illicit sexual relationships, degraded and pimped-out women devoted to him, and did all of this with the full knowledge that it would bring down his administration and his party if anyone ever revealed his secrets, then this must mean that character doesn’t matter in our leaders, that we should tolerate a wide range of misconduct, and that the abuse of the power of the President is just a traditional perk. Continue reading →

Unethical Website of the Month: “Make Presidents’ Day Super”

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

The degradation of America’s values continues in seductive and incremental ways.

Take the online petition “Make Presidents’ Day Super,” described as…

“A plan to move Presidents’ Day to the Monday after the Super Bowl. For football. For hangovers. For America.”

The proposal is unethical in many ways, beginning with its dishonest presentation.  “We the people, in order to form a more perfect holiday, seek to take what should be one of our most patriotic holidays and actually give it more meaning, make it more American,” the argument begins. Make it “more American”? How, exactly, does moving a holiday that already minimizes the national recognition of the birthday of George Washington by making it a floating annual date to manufacture a three-day weekend make that holiday “more American”? Continue reading →

A Brief Note Regarding The Supposed Difference Between Male and Female Teens Exploited For Sex By Adult Authority Figures

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

"Come on! What 14-year old wouldn't enjoy being forced to submit to sodomy from her?"

I am posting this as my contribution to the epic argument on the post about Nevada’s wrist slap to the teacher who had various kinds of sex with multiple students. The gist of the dispute is whether it is appropriate to give disparate (harsher) punishment to male teachers who take advantage of female students than is given  to their female counterparts in the sexual predator world,  because “boys are different,” and are more likely to enjoy the sexual awakening without long-term adverse affects.

Yesterday’s sexual predator story (for there is indeed at least one every day, it seems) came from St. George, Utah, where a female fitness coach was sentenced after pleading  guilty  to two counts of forcible sexual abuse as part of a plea deal in which prosecutors agreed to dismiss three additional counts of forcible sexual abuse and five counts of forcible sodomy….of a 14-year-old boy she was supposed to be training.

The boy, now 16, says that he is treated completely differently in school now because of  his “experience.” Was he lucky to be made the sex toy of a hot adult fitness coach? It doesn’t sound like he thinks so. Nonetheless, the woman told the boy, “Well, you learned a whole lot, didn’t you?’ in a secretly taped conversation in which she tried to talk him out of helping prosecutors.

You see?  The attitude being advocated in the comments encourages and rationalizes the actions of female predators.

Tales Of Ethics Dunces Past: Recalling the Self-Indulgent Suicide of Hunter Thompson

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

I can’t claim that I am surprised that my post about the suicide of Don Cornelius attracted comments that either showed a misunderstanding of what I wrote or a stubborn determination to change the subject. It was not a post about the virtues of suicide, but about how suicide’sethical calculations may be changing as a broken medical care system increasingly makes the final years and months of the elderly a burden that crushes families and constricts the quality of life  for the nation generally. In short, killing yourself for your country may have to become an accepted practice, an ethical and courageous act, if something doesn’t change. Killing yourself for yourself—to avoid pain, problems, or the consequences of your own actions, should always be considered wrong, for wrong it is.

Jeff Hibbert, one of my favorite contributors here and also one with a great memory, reminded me that I had written on this topic once before. I had forgotten, but that post may be a useful contrast to the Cornelius post. There is not a word of it that I don’t still believe. It concerned the 2005 suicide of Hunter S. Thompson, the cult “gonzo journalist” who lived like frat boy and  wrote like angel. Here it is:

Hunter Thompson’s values were admittedly always a little out of whack, but nothing diminished the self-styled “gonzo journalist” in this world so much as his manner of leaving it. He shot himself to death last February while talking on the phone to his wife, with both his son and grandson in his house with him. Nice. That should guarantee some lucky psychoanalyst or three a comfy income for the foreseeable future. Continue reading →

Ethics Quote of the Week: George Clooney

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

“I think it’s a stupid thing. I think it’s stupid for anyone, whether they’re celebrated or not, I don’t believe their 911 calls should be broadcast around the world.” 

"Poor Demi! The public has a right to hear us humiliate her."

—-Actor George Clooney, speaking during Sunday night’s Screen Actors Guild Awards.  He was referring to the release and subsequent airing of a 911 call from a woman summoning rescue workers for actress Demi Moore, who, the caller said, was convulsing and had lapsed into semi-conscious.

Good call, George.

911 calls are considered public, but that doesn’t mean that the public needs or has to hear them, or that sleaze-factories like TMZ should put them online when their only purpose is titillation and to embarrass celebrities. There may be special circumstances that justify making a recording of a 911 call, rather than a  transcript, available to the public, but those should be exceptions. In cases like Moore’s, playing them is unfair and unkind, a clear Golden Rule violation, not that TMZ, or most journalists for that matter, would know about that.

If the media can’t control itself when it comes into possession of a 911 call that will embarrass someone who already has enough problems to deal with, then we need laws to keep 911 calls out of irresponsible hands…in other words, the news media’s hands.
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Don Cornelius, Suicide…and Ethics Hero?

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

“Soul Train” creator and pop culture icon Don Cornelius took his own life at 75 yesterday, using a gunshot to the head to do it. Suicide always conjures up feelings of special sadness for the deceased, sometimes mixed with anger. The act can be cruel and devastating to family members and friends; often it leaves behind crushing problems, financial and otherwise, that the living have to deal with. Suicide is stigmatized in our culture as a coward’s way out of earthly problems; many religions consider it a sin, and many legal systems consider suicide a crime. Yet it may be that American culture will have to undergo a major cultural transformation in the matter of taking one’s own life. While morality tends to ossify, ethics is fluid and adaptable. Changing conditions and new realities can, in rare circumstances, cause societies to conclude that what was once considered right is really wrong, and what was once condemned as wrong is in society’s best interests. I think we may reach that point with suicide. Continue reading →

Scylla and Charybdis in the Schools

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

This is Scylla. Charybdis is in the teachers lounge.

Responding to one of the recent posts here about the deteriorating relationships between students, teachers and administrator, teacher Brook Styler alerted us to his own crisis, a situation right out of “The Children’s Hour” in which vengeful female students, aided and abetted by parents, circulated rumors that lost him his job.

Styler has launched a website, Teacher Hunt, to collect the experiences of teachers, who, like him, have been victimized by false accusations from students. I plan on visiting it often. But the site appears at a time in which teachers using their students for sexual gratification is either on the rise, or is being uncovered with remarkable efficiency. Every day, one or more cases of teachers preying on students is in the news. Yesterday, it was Rachel L. Farrell, 25, a  Bangor, Maine  high school teacher  charged with having sex with a 17-year-old student on “numerous occasions” while she was supposed to be tutoring him in English. Authorities believe she had sexual relations with as many as three other students. Today, it was the still unfolding horror of Mark Berndt, 61, a teacher at Miramonte Elementary School in the Los Angeles community of Florence-Firestone, who was charged with 23 counts of committing lewd acts on children after over 400 photos were discovered by a CVS clerk, showing pornographic conduct involving his students (age 7-10) over a five year period. Berndt, now being held on $23 million bail, regularly told his students that they were going to play a “tasting game,” in which children were blindfolded and, in some cases, gagged with tape, authorities say. They were then fed the teacher’s semen, administered to them on a blue plastic spoon and, according to one alleged victim’s father, on cookies.

I can’t wait to see what tomorrow brings, can you? Continue reading →

“Pay-What-You-Can” Ethics

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

A live performance of Jules Feiffer's "Little Murders" at a regional theater in Arlington, Va. that holds "pay-what-you-can" performances over the periodic objections of its artistic director, me.

Toronto Star ethics columnist Ken Gallinger does a pretty good job today answering a query from a financially strapped theater-lover who feels guilty about attending “pay-what-you-can” professional stage productions. “…My husband says paying less than full fare takes advantage of the theatre company. Technically, we could pay the ticket price; we still have access to credit. And there are things we could cancel…What do you think?” asks the inquirer.

Gallinger explains the benefits to the company of not having a sea of empty seats facing the actors, and also how discount tickets have promotional value to theater companies. All true: the theater companies wouldn’t offer “pay-what-you-can” if they didn’t think it was in their companies’ long term interest. There are other benefits that Gallinger doesn’t mention. For example, the increased audience size still contributes to the average audience statistics that a non-profit company can use to seek advertisements and to argue for community foundation grants.

Even this wouldn’t cover the topic, however. “Pay-what-you-can” and other discount ticket programs are essential if theater companies are going to meet their own ethical obligations to the community, and if live theater is going to survive at all. The ticket prices at most large, established regional theaters are, in a word, unconscionable. Justifiable perhaps, since live theater costs more to produce than can be paid for by box office receipts, but still unconscionable. Continue reading →

Unethical Quote of the Week: Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz

/ Jack Marshall / 38 Comments

“Passionate, organized hatred is the element missing in all that we do to try to change the world. Now is the time to spread hate, hatred for the rich.”

—-Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz, a retired professor from Cal State East Bay, addressing a rally this weekend of the Occupy Oakland  group, which fought police in a pitched battle that ended with 400 arrests.

I said that the Occupy movement would end badly, and it is, not that it should have taken advanced psi-powers to divine that a protest based on ignorance, envy and anarchy with no practical and constructive proposals to offer would eventually end in violence, anger and ugliness. Hate is what it has come down to now, and the party and supporters of the President who came to office promising hope are now pinning their hopes on a sad movement fueled by hate. To say that the protests are also unethical is to flog the obvious. They have cost communities millions of dollars that will be made up in cut services; they have soiled parks and public places, they have provided a meeting place for thugs, vagrants, criminals, and worse ( an Occupier was arrested over the weekend for strangling his parents), and they have embodied a cultural rejection of personal responsibility.

Not to mention an escape from reality.“The fact that everyone now talks about the 99 percent, the 1 percent – that shows Occupy’s won,”  Carter Lavin, 23, of Oakland told the press. “The debate was about debt, not jobs. Now it’s about jobs.”

Sure, Carter. Continue reading →