Officer Craig Eichhammer, a 31-year veteran of the Williamstown, Massachusetts police department, kept a photo of Adolf Hitler in his locker for two decades without incident. Two years ago, the photo was removed and thrown out when when the department staff moved into the new police station. The presence of the photo was raised as part of a lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in August 2020 by Sgt. Scott McGowan, who claims that he was retaliated against for decrying racial and sexual harassment by the Williamstown police chief.
In his statement to the town manager last year explaining the presence of a photo of Der Fuhrer, Eichhammer wrote that his former partner on the night shift in 1999 was kidded in the station for his supposed resemblance to Adolf. “I stuck the photograph on the locker wall just as one would of possibly hanging a comic strip or picture they thought was funny,” he wrote.
“The photo was out of view and could not be seen even with the locker door open. The photograph was put up for no other reason than a laugh factor poking fun at [his former partner]. The photo was left there and basically forgotten about. It stayed in the same spot for 20 years and no one knew it was there….At no time was it my belief that the picture was nothing more than a figure from a history book,” he added. “I had no ideologies of Nazi Germany, swastikas or anything terrible that happened during WW2. Again, the photo was simply just to get a laugh of the likeness of [his former partner].”
Against my usual proclivities, I am engaged in a war with the CVS that I am not going to back down from, stranding my family members there and leaving my my weapons behind to be used by terrorists. I found it odd that every time I made a purchase at the store, about twice a week, I was asked to “re-enroll” in a savings program that I had participated in for over a year. This required me to click “yes”(rather than “later”) at the end of my transaction. I finally asked a clerk what was up, an he said he would check. The result: checking “yes” did nothing. My membership could not be reinstated at that time. He could not tell me why.
So I asked to see the manager, a nice middle-age woman whom I have known there for years. She couldn’t explain why either. Finally she said, “It’s the machines,” and wrote down a phone number for me to call at CVS’s website. “Excuse me, but why to I have to call because your store’s machine’s don’t work?,” I responded. “I’m the customer, I’m misinformed for weeks, I don’t get discounts I’m supposed to get, and I have to fix your problem? I have to sit through automated phone systems and wait times? You are CVS’s agent. You work here. You’re paid for it. You fix the problem. Don’t foist it off on me. I’m the one being inconvenienced.” At this point, by some sadistic twist of fate, a large, aggressive, loud and belligerent young woman had entered the store near the front counter, and she started addressing me stridently.”Why are you harassing them?” she boomed out. “They aren’t CVS. They just work here.”
“[N]ever assemble an all-white creative team on a production again, regardless of the subject matter of the show…”
——A provision in the “New Deal for Broadway,” an agreement signed by Broadway “power-brokers” pledging to strengthen the industry’s diversity practices as theaters reopen following the nearly 18-month pandemic shutdown.
“A New Deal for Broadway,” was developed by Black Theater United, one of several organizations established last year, the Times story tells us, “as an outgrowth of the anger Black theater artists felt over the police killings” of George Floyd in Minnesota and Breonna Taylor in Kentucky. “Black Theater United’s founding members include some of the most celebrated performers working in the American theater, including Audra McDonald, Brian Stokes Mitchell, Billy Porter, Wendell Pierce, Norm Lewis and LaChanze.”
The pledge was signed by the owners and operators of all 41 Broadway theaters as well as the Broadway League, the trade organization representing producers, and Actors’ Equity Association, which represents actors and stage managers.
The current controversy is similar. Allie Rae, shown above, was a competent and dedicated Boston-area ICU nurse (and a 37-year-old mother of three) until she was was forced out of her medical job after employers discovered her non-traditional sideline, an OnlyFans page with a current following of more than 69,000. She says she started being sexually provocative on the web to relieve pandemic lockdown stress as well as her reaction to being on the hospital’s front lines during the Wuhan peak, sometimes working 14-hour shifts. Actually, maybe nursing was the sideline. After all, Allie says she made over $8,000 in her first month on OnlyFans, and she was making only seven a month as a nurse.
Ah, those heady days when the U.S. felt ethically justified in toppling governments it didn’t approve of, and “nation building” was still considered practical and virtuous. Today marks the anniversary of the U.S. overthrowing the government of Premier Mohammad Mosaddeq and reinstalling the Shah of Iran in 1953, The Shah was a torturing, oppressive autocrat, but he was our torturing, oppressive autocrat for 26 years, a dependable anti-Communist ally of the United States until a revolution ended his rule in 1979. You should know the rest. Wonder why Iranians aren’t crazy about the U.S.? Today is one big reason. Also on the ethics regrets list is the release of the West Memphis Three on this date in 2011. I wrote about that one here. An excerpt:
“In an ethical system, prosecutors would have made certain the wrongfully convicted men were freed, without any further adversary action. But this was not an ethical system. Instead, prosecutors insisted on a bizarre plea deal in which the Memphis Three agreed to take an Alford plea, a strange, dishonest and much criticized guilty plea in which a defendant essentially lies to avoid an otherwise unavoidable unjust punishment. With an Alford plea, the prisoner or defendant asserts he or she is innocent, but acknowledges that the prosecution has sufficient evidence to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, and thus acknowledges legal, though not actual, guilt. Prosecutors insisted that all three men plead “guilty” in this fashion in order to agree to release them with time served. The judge accepted the deal. Now Echols, Baldwin and Misskelley are free, their lives all but ruined by 18 lost years, thanks to a rotten system. The news media for the most part didn’t bother to explain why the terms of their release was just one more gratuitous assault on their existence by Arkansas legal hacks.”
I’m sorry today reminded me of this case. It still upsets me to think about it.
1. Here’s evidence that the current complaints of antiracism propagandists is a crock: Denzel Washington. I’ve been watching a lot of his movies lately, and a comparison with Sidney Poitier is unavoidable. Poitier was the ground-breaker, the black man who became a genuine movie star in a majority white market, and more than that, did it by holding up the racism and discrimination in American culture for all to see. Nonetheless, he was limited by his race. Poitier always played character’s whose race was central to their roles in the plot. He never played a villain: like many stars, like John Wayne, Cary Grant and Clark Gable, he regarded his career as a continuous work exploring a particular archetype in all of its facets. For Poitier, it was that of the outstanding black man as an outsider in American society. In Poitier’s amazing year of 1967, he was in three hit movies: “In the Heat of the Night,” “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?,” and “To Sir, With Love.” All three featured Poitier as a black man thrust into a biased white environment, and gradually earning respect and some measure of equality. Today the #1 black star is Denzel, and he doesn’t have to play such sanctimonious roles. Race plays a part in many of his movies; he has even played black civil rights activists, like Malcolm X and Hurricane Carter. Washington, however, in part because of Poitier’s work, often plays parts that were written for white actors, and nobody cares. He isn’t afraid to play flawed characters and even brutal ones, like in “The Equalizer.” Washington’s success, and the versatility and range he is allowed to explore in his movies, would have been impossible in Poitier’s prime years. His body of work is proof of how far American attitudes toward race have advances and how unfair and dishonest the Black Lives Matter/ Critical Race Theory narrative is holding that the Jim Crow culture still rules America.
Denzel is also better than Poitier, although it is fair to say that Poitier never had the option of being as versatile as Washington. If Sidney Poitier is cinema’s Jackie Robinson, Denzel Washington is its Willie Mays.
If you need another bit of evidence about how social media wastes our time—and why would you?—consider the uproar over the search for a replacement for Alex Trebek. The original “Jeopardy!” host, Art Fleming, was popular too, and he hung around for 11 years. That was sufficiently long to be briefly legendary; the “Jeopardy!” announcer, Don Pardo, was familiar enough that Saturday Night Live! used him and his unique voice as a running joke for decades. But when Fleming retired, there was no controversy over his replacement, because, seriously, who cares who reads the questions and answers in a quiz show, unless they have a speech impediment or sexually harass the contestants, like Richard Dawson on “Family Feud”? But in the Age of The Great Stupid, everything is a big deal.
After months of celebrity tryouts, kind of like Presidential primary debates, “Jeopardy!” has finally chosen two replacements for the late Alex Trebek. The actress formerly known as “Blossom” and later as Sheldon’s girlfriend on “Big Bang Theory,” Mayim Bialik, will host the prime time version and its spinoffs. Can’t wait for those spin-offs! Bialik is legitimately smart and knowledgeable, and not just compared to other performers: she has a PhD in neuroscience from UCLA. She also, like most successful TV actors, projects a likable personality. And, of course, she’s a woman. I assumed a black host would be found, but Steve Harvey’s already taken.
The kerfuffle is over Trebek’s replacement for the main, daily syndicated edition, which has been around since 1984. The show’s current executive producer, Mike Richards got the job. Richards was not one of the more popular auditioners, but he had one thing the rest didn’t have: the power to choose who got hired. He thought, and thought, and chose…himself! This suggests that the process was rigged.
…the policy would be that every member of the cast, staff and crew would have to be vaccinated and show proof of it. They would, of course, be free to refuse, which is their right. But they still would have no right to work on the production, and to endanger the health of others essential to the show’s success. You can’t rehearse with social distancing, nor with actors wearing masks.
I’ve seen viruses run amuck through casts and ruin shows. Your rights stop when they start adversely and unnecessarily affecting my business and projects. Take your own risks and good fortune to you, but don’t impose them on me.
(Incidentally, I would never produce or direct the show you see above. I consider it unethical to put shows on stage that I can’t stand watching and listening to myself.)
I’ll answer the first query in Null Pointer’s excellent Comment of the Day on the great congee cultural appropriation brouhaha: “I’m not sure I understand why the woke mobs are throwing fits on Asian people’s behalf.”
There are two reasons. One is part of the Wuhan Virus Ethics Train Wreck. In order to tar President Trump as a racist before the 2020 election, the Axis of Unethical Conduct (the unholy and undemocratic “resistance,” Democrats and the news media alliance), claimed that what we knew pretty much then and now know almost certainly now, that the pandemic originated in China’s Wuhan province, nonetheless was racist to speak out loud because so many idiots were attacking Asian-Americans as a result of telling the truth. This was accompanied by absurd inflations of the actual number of such attacks without any evidence in most cases that the attacks there were had any nexus to calling the Chinese virus a Chinese virus.
Thrilled nonetheless to finally have a platform from which to cry “Victim!” like women, blacks and Hispanics, some Asian-American activist groups gleefully embraced the new discrimination fable, neatly sidestepping the inconvenient fact that a disproportional number of the attacks on Asians were carried out by African Americans.
The second reason the woke mobs are throwing fits on Asian people’s behalf is to avoid dealing honestly with the approaching reckoning for elite colleges and universities that are making Asian-Americans real victims of discrimination as the pursue unconstitutional affirmative action policies.
I work almost exclusively with Asians, mostly from India. I have never, not once, ever heard any of my Indian coworkers say ANYTHING about cultural appropriation or condone any woke causes. On the contrary, they are almost all quite eager to share their cultural traditions and cuisine, and eager to learn about American culture and cuisine.
I’m not sure I understand why the woke mobs are throwing fits on Asian people’s behalf. I work almost exclusively with Asians, mostly from India. I have never, not once, ever heard any of my Indian coworkers say ANYTHING about cultural appropriation or condone any woke causes. On the contrary, they are almost all quite eager to share their cultural traditions and cuisine, and eager to learn about American culture and cuisine.
They put on little performances during the Hindu festivals to show off the dancing and food and fashions. They are always inviting me to go to Indian restaurants and explaining which part of India the different foods come from and how to eat them.
They also love going to the American holiday events and partaking in our traditions. When one company I worked for had a gingerbread house-making contest for Christmas, all my Indian coworkers went and happily made gingerbread houses and proudly showed them off. There were no tantrums about Christian holidays, white oppression, or anything else the Woke like to have fits about. Just fun and little houses made out of cookies.
1. Black Lives Matter…This is truly a date that will live in ethics infamy, or should: on July 13, 2013, the acquittal of George Zimmerman, accused of murdering Trayvon Martin in 2012, prompted Oakland, California resident Alicia Garza to post a message on Facebook containing the phrase “Black lives matter.” Garza said she felt “a deep sense of grief” after Zimmerman was acquitted (as he should have been and had to be based on the evidence.) She said she was further saddened that many people to blamed the victim, Martin, and not the “disease” of racism.
As has marked the soon to emerge Black Lives Matter movement, facts didn’t matter to Garza. Martin was the aggressor, and was the only one of the two parties involved who made race-related comments prior to the confrontation. Zimmerman shot Martin in self-defense, and the prosecution’s own investigator testified to that fact. Never mind: Patrice Cullors, a Los Angeles community organizer and friend of Garza’s, read her post and replied with the first instance of #BlackLivesMatter, which quickly “went viral.” Garza, Cullors and fellow activist Opal Tometi built a network of community organizers and racial justice activists using the clever but misleading name Black Lives Matter, and the phrase and the hashtag were used by grassroots activists and protests all across the country, many of them based on false narratives implying racism where no evidence of it existed, as in the deaths of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, George Floyd and others. It is now a powerful and profitable, if intellectually dishonest and divisive, force in American culture and politics. The damage the movement has already done is incalculable; the damage it will do is frighteningly uncertain.
I note that in the description of the movement on the allegedly objective History.com is that it is “simple and clear in its demand for Black dignity.” That’s laughable (but then, historians) since the name is anything but clear, and deliberately so. It stands as a false accusation against American society and non-black citizens that black lives do not matter to the rest of the population except the woke, and thus has spurred the attack on the nation’s legitimacy by purveyors of Critical Race Theory and the “1619 Project.” The seemingly benign slogan deftly avoids contradiction and makes dissent perilous (“What, you don’t think black lives matter, you racist?“) while being used to justify Marxism, censorship, reparations, race-based hiring, promotions and benefits, and other discriminatory activities and policies.
2. In a related July 13 note, this was also the date, in 2015, when Sandra Bland was found hanged in her cell. Bland’s name is also among those used as a BLM rallying cry, and like so many of the others, that is based on a presumption of racism and other facts unproven. On July 10, 2015, Texas State Trooper Brian Encinia pulled over 28-year-old Bland, an African American, for failing to signal a lane change. She refused to cooperate; he was unprofessional. The officer arrested her and took her to a nearby jail. Several days later, she was found dead, and an autopsy concluded she had hanged herself with a plastic bag.
Of course, Bland’s family and friends suspected that the official report of her suicide was a cover-up, because police are racists. But Bland was a police confrontation waiting to happen. She considered herself a Black Lives Matter activist, writing in one social media post, “In the news that we’ve seen as of late, you could stand there, surrender to the cops, and still be killed.” That’s ironic, because if she had just accepted the minor traffic stop without fighting with the officer, she might be alive today. Bland had at least ten previous traffic-related encounters with police in Illinois and Texas; she had been charged five times for driving without insurance, four times for speeding, and once each for driving while intoxicated and drug possession. Her last conviction was for shoplifting, and she owed $7,579 in unpaid fines at the time of her death. Encina was fired, and Bland’s family received the obligatory wrongful death settlement, in this case almost $2 million.
Alexander Hamilton died on this date in 1804, in a bizarre episode in U.S. history with profound ethical and political implications. There Aaron Burr fatally shot dead the nation’s first Secretary of the Treasury and essential political thinker in an illegal duel at Weehawken, New Jersey. It was, of course, unethical to break the law, especially for these two men, who qualified as national leaders. Hamilton’s son had died defending his father’s honor in 1801 at the exact same spot (What was Alexander thinking?)
According to Hamilton’s “second,” Hamilton deliberately fired his weapon into the air rather than at Burr, a gentlemanly gesture and also a profoundly stupid one, if Hamilton believed half the things he had said and written about Burr’s character for years. This was why they were dueling, after all. Burr’s second claimed that Hamilton fired at Burr and missed, and the more I’ve thought abut this, the more I’ve come to believe that this is the more likely scenario. Hamilton was anything but naive, reckless or stupid. Yes, he was a crack shot, but anyone can miss. Even if the gesture of “throwing away his shot” as “Hamilton” puts it, would have impressed some adversaries and been seen as a display of mercy and an offer of reconciliation, it made no sense at all with this adversary. Moreover, Hamilton considered Burr a threat to the nation—he was right about that—why wouldn’t he shoot him? Whatever really happened, Burr, who had the second shot, killed Hamilton with a ball that went through his stomach into his spine. Hamilton died the next day.
This ended Burr’s political career: Would killing Burr have ended Hamilton’s? Probably, but Burr was the one who had issued the challenge. Maybe Hamilton would have been excused by the public. Maybe he would have ultimately become President; all the Founders of his magnitude except Ben Franklin did. For good or ill, Alexander Hamilton would have been a strong and probably transformative leader. But if he hadn’t died at Weehawken, it’s unlikely that we would have “Hamilton” the musical….
1. Baseball, hotdogs, and a bystander hero. Dr. Willie Ross, the father of Washington Nationals pitcher Joe Ross, saved the life of a choking fan midway through yesterday 10-4 Giants win over Washington at Oracle Park in San Francisco. Ross saw that a female spectator was choking, and when Ross came over to her seat to check on her, she couldn’t talk. Ross helped dislodge two pieces of a hot dog by using the Heimlich maneuver, then reached into her throat to take out the third and final piece. The woman, who is a nurse, could breath and speak at last. Ross received a standing ovation from nearby fans.
Ethics Alarms 