Victor Fleming Was a Genius

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

And attention should be paid.

Victor Fleming is never included in the list of immortal Hollywood film directors. I never understood why, and now I really don’t understand why. Everybody knows, or should, that Fleming pulled off the all-time film directing achievement of helming two deathless classics in two distinct genres in the same year, 1939. The films: “The Wizard of Oz” and “Gone With the Wind.” The closest to that amazing performance anyone else ever came was in 1993, when Stephen Spielberg delivered both “Schindler’s List” and “Jurassic Park.” But Spielberg is automatically in the discussion when great film directors are the topic, and Fleming is not.

I could make the argument that Fleming belongs in that discussion based on his output alone. Though he died at the age of 59 and had only 20 years to create movies in the sound era, Fleming had several other classic films that still hold up: “The Virginian,” “Captains Courageous,” “Treasure Island,” Dr. “Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” “A Guy Named Joe” and “Joan of Arc” in addition to his two 1939 icons. But that isn’t the reason for this post.

Victor Fleming was ahead of his time, way, ahead, in two respects that only noticed recently:

Continue reading →

Ethical or Unethical Quote? President Trump on Nancy Pelosi:

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments


“Nancy Pelosi, the old and broken political hack who Impeached me twice and lost, is finally calling it ‘quits.’ She illegally made a fortune in the Stock Market, ripped off the American Public, and was a disaster for America. I’m glad to see the stench of Nancy Pelosi go!!!”

—President Donald Trump on Truth Social today, responding to the news that Ethics Villain Nancy Pelosi will not run for another term. (What do you really think, Mr. President?)

I was going to frame this as an Ethics Quiz, but thought better of it. Of course a U.S President shouldn’t stoop to this kind of rhetoric, even if everyone else is, about him. “Old and broken,” “hack” and “stench” cross the line into ad hominem, but then that’s Trump, unfortunately. The sentiment, however is deserved, which is why EA designated Pelosi as an Ethics Villain. She has been an unequivocally destructive force on the U.S. scene, from her irresponsible and unethical ushering of Obamacare through to passage without letting it be thoroughly vetted, to her ruinous impeachments (we no longer have a non-partisan impeachment option, thanks to her precedents) to her disgusting performance during Trump’s final State of the Union address in his last term, to the rigged “J-6” hearings. Trump is also correct about her insider trading, though she has the defense of “Everybody does it,” just not as effectively as she did.

Yes, Trump’s message is typical “tit-for-tat” after she called him a “vile creature” and the “worst thing on the face of the earth,” to which “hack” and “stench” seem mild insults in comparison. President still have an obligation to eschew such name-calling and “take the high road,” a principle that Trump either rejects or refuses to acknowledge.

On the other hand, as Captain Hook would never say, everything Trump said is true. So there’s that… Ann Althouse wrote that she was impressed that Trump didn’t slip any sexist rhetoric into his message.

And that, my friends, is called damning with faint praise.

Back Off, Progressives: Dwight David Eisenhower Was An Excellent President In His Time.

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Which is, after all, the only time that matters.…at the time.

I just wrote a long rebuttal to a recently Trump Deranged friend of impressive mind and credentials, who decided to go after, of all people, President Dwight Eisenhower for a speech in which he extolled moral values because, my friend’s Facebook post declared, “in real life the years of Eisenhower’s administration—essentially all of the 1950s—did not even come close to measuring up to the tenets of social, racial, ethnic and sexual justice and economic equity that most of us today believe are the standards of a just society.”

“That is an important reminder for all of us us that times do change,” he continued, “and that as right-thinking as Eisenhower’s words seem on the surface, they were spoken by the leader of a society that was very repressive in many ways—economically, socially, racially, sexually and otherwise.” This, to use the vernacular, pissed me off greatly. Ike has gone higher in my estimation of him as President the more I read about him and especially the more I watch other President struggle with the job he seemed to do effortlessly. (Of course, Ike may be the only one of our Presidents for whom the office could be considered a step down in difficulty and responsibility, after overseeing the Allied effort to save the world in World War II.)

Here, with minor edits to protect the guilty, is what I posted in response to that slap at Ike:

***

But this is the purest form of Presentism, and a grossly unfair assessment of Ike, one of our most under-rated and effective Presidents. It is always easy to go back and condemn figures of the past who did not have the benefit of many decades of accumulated experience and wisdom; easy and wrong. It is by this standard that we saw efforts in demented regions like San Francisco (and our own) to strip historical honors from, among others, the Founders, because they were not sufficiently psychic to reject their society’s and culture’s mistaken beliefs, such as the inherent inferiority of other races to theirs.

 I’ve studied Eisenhower’s own writings and those about him. His vision of the Presidency was that his job was to protect and preserve the culture, not change it; that the culture would evolve and change in its own time, when society was ready for it. As a result, Eisenhower led a United States that honored and trusted its institutions at a level that seems astonishing today. He had a great part in that.

Nobody accused him of being a “king,” but in Boston, even then a bulwark of the Democratic Party, kids listened to “Hail to the Chief” on the most popular children’s show (creepily titled “Big Brother”!) as a photo of Ike appeared (the one above, in fact) on the screen and we “toasted” the President of the United States with a glass of milk. The Horror.

Continue reading →

Open Forum! Round Three?…

/ Jack Marshall / 50 Comments

After a long period of wan responses to the weekly Ethics Alarms free-for all, the last two installments have been historically lively and erudite. I am hoping for another round of equal quantity and quality.

I would like someone to explain to me the strange phenomenon of the EA collective posts, like this one yesterday combining 6 topics to which I would usually devote full individual posts to, attracting such few comments. It is one of the reasons I suspended the practice of doing one of these every day. I know if the MIA veteran EA commenter Eeyore were still roaming this blog, the photo of Sydney Sweeney in all of her—well, something—would have inspired a reaction, and probably a funny one. (I miss Eeyore.)

Anyway, let’s see if you can keep the streak of superb open forums going….

“Ick,” Ethics, or “Woo Hoo!”, and Other Briefly Noted Ethics Matters of Various Weight

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

1. Sydney Sweeney has been the source of dubious controversies several times this year, most notably when her ad for a jeans company played with the double entendre evident in saying she had great “genes.” Since she’s white and stacked, see that means she’s a white supremacist, or something. The silver see-though dress she wore on a recent “red carpet” launched a different controversy, though also one involving her extreme feminist charms. Conservative pundit Megyn Kelly, hardly one to hide her own curves, declared,

“So she was on the red carpet last night and she decided to show off her number one asset, which, contrary to the American Eagle jeans ad, is not really her jeans, it’s her enormous breasts, which are spectacular. No one would take that away from her. But, controversial opinion, I object to this. I disapprove of the dress she wore because it’s completely see-through. You can see her entire nipples. She reminded me of Kim Kardashian, who overshares and then takes away the thing that is the sexiest, which is every guy’s hope to be the one who actually sees them for real, and leaving little to the imagination.” 

Gee, you can be more articulate than that, Megyn. Let me try to help out. It’s not a flattering look at all, and just coarsens the culture, potentially corrupting young women in the process. The grotesque display reduces a woman, a human being, to just a pair of mammary glands. It’s not just degrading to Sweeney, who has presumably consented to being so dehumanized, it degrades women in general and men who are frozen in the headlights. My verdict is that this is “Ick” more than ethics, but it’s a close call.

Continue reading →

Ethics Quiz: My Father’s Dream Prank

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

My father, Jack A. Marshall Sr. was always remarkably fatalistic about death, much to the chagrin of my mother. She was never amused when he repeated his supposed desire to be displayed sitting in a chair, eyes open, at his wake with a metal plate in the floor in front of his casket that would trigger a recording when mourners stepped on it. Then a recording would boom out in his voice saying, “Hello! I’m so glad that you came!”

Dad was half-kidding, but only half. My father hated the solemnity of funerals and found open casket wakes barbaric. Yet I have to believe he would have been secretly honored by the send-off the military gave him when he was buried at Arlington, with the horse-drawn caisson, the riderless steed and the 21-gun salute.

Today I learned that someone actually carried out my father’s threatened posthumous prank, but even in worst taste than what he proposed. The Wills, Trusts, & Estates Prof Blog reveals that Irish grandpa Shay Bradley, a Dublin native, arranged that after his death in 2019 a recording of his voice would be played at his funeral from inside his grave. Mourners heard repeated banging noises that sounded like they were coming from the interior of the coffin. “Hello? It is dark in here! Let me out! I can hear you! Is that the priest I can hear? I am in the box, can you hear that?” his voice could be heard shouting, in apparent panic.

Hilarity ensued.

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day:

Is executing such a prank at a funeral ethical?

Continue reading →

NYT Subscriptions Surge, Meaning That Journalism’s One-Way Bias and Ethics Rot Is Not Going Away Soon

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

In a post yesterday, I wrote, in the final note on the ethical implications of this week’s election results,

“None of this would have unfolded in quite the same way, I am certain, without a corrupt journalism sector that has totally abdicated the duty of its profession in favor of partisan propaganda. I am more convinced than ever that the Republic will not function efficiently or engender responsible citizenship until there is news media commitment to fair, objective, responsible, unbiased and honest communication to the public of what it needs to know to make intelligent decisions about their governance. There has been some progress toward that end this year, but not nearly enough.”

Well, evoking William Barrett Travis when Santa Anna demanded the surrender of the Alamo, the New York Times “answered with a cannon shot.”

“The Times’s Profit Jumps With 460,000 More Subscribers” the headline today reads. “The Times now has 12.33 million total subscribers to all of its products. It has said it is aiming for 15 million by the end of 2027.” The article (gift link!), which you can read yourself if you have the stomach for it, has lots of other good news for the Times bottom line,

Continue reading →

Ethics Hero: Singer Tish Hyman

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

In an ethics seminar I recently described how conduct could be legal but unethical (example: lying) and ethical but illegal (civil disobedience). Singer Trish Hyman decided that a little disturbance of the peace in a Gold’s Gym’s cafe area was the best way to draw attention to the gym’s unethical (and stupid….but woke, so it’s okay) practices regarding dangling penises in women’s changing rooms, so she shouted out her complaint raucously and made sure it was recorded.

The Beverly Center Gold’s Gym revoked the singer’s membership after she complained that a transgender wannabe woman (“with a big dick”) being in the women’s dressing room. “Today I was naked in the locker room. I turned around, and there was a man there. Boy clothes, lip gloss, standing there looking at me, and I’m butt naked,” Hyman said in a video posted on TikTok.

Continue reading →

Ethics Observations on the Nov. 4 Election Results

/ Jack Marshall / 24 Comments

Never mind the political significance of last night’s pretty much nationwide Democratic Party sweep of the major state and local elections: The password is “ethics,” as they used to whisper on Allen Ludden’s classic TV game show. So let’s look at the ethics…

Observations:

Continue reading →

Unethical Quote of the Month: Ethics Villain Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Cal.)

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

“[H]e’s just a vile creature, the worst thing on the face of the Earth.”

—-Former Speaker of the House, current House member and Ethics Villain Nancy Pelosi, describing Donald Trump and doing her part to amplify hateful partisan rhetoric and point the public toward from political violence.

Pelosi was even challenged on the assertion that the President of the United States is “the worst thing on earth”during her interview with CNN’s Elex Michaelson last night. “You think he’s the worst thing on the face of the Earth?” Michaelson asked incredulously. Worse than war, cancer, child rape, ebola, cannibalism, terrorism, “Fear Factor,” pineapple on pizza and Sydney Sweeney?

“I do, yeah, I do,” Pelosi, who is a disgrace, responded, doubling down. “Because he’s the President of the United States, and he does not honor the Constitution of the United States. In fact, he’s turned the Supreme Court into a rogue court. He’s abolished the House of Representatives. He’s chilled the press.” 

Why, says Nancy, the President has chilled the press so much that CNN broadcasts disgusting and denigrating hyperbole by his political foes! (Did you know that Donald Trump lies all the time?)

Continue reading →