More Non-Traditional Casting Double Standards Hypocrisy: “Whitewashing ‘Little Shop of Horrors'”

Here is another installment of a frequent topic on Ethics Alarms: non-traditional casting, DEI casting, and and virtue-signaling stunt casting just to appear woke. The position here as a long-time stage director who has been responsible for some audacious non-traditional casting in my time (I once cast the role Cole Porter with a woman) remains unchanged: if it works and the audience enjoys the show as much or more than it would have with a traditional casting choice, then all is well. (Full disclosure: casting Cold Porter as female did NOT work. At all…)

The mission of any stage production is to be fair to the show’s creators and make the production as effective theatrically as possible, not to make political or social statements that get in the way. (Prime example of the latter: this.)

Curmie sent me a link to “Yes, You Can Whitewash ‘Little Shop of Horrors’, But Please Don’t” at Chris Peterson’s Onstage blog. I love the musical (my old high school doubles tennis partner, Frank Luz, co-starred as the sadistic dentist in the original off-Broadway production and the cast album) based on the wonderful 1960 Roger Corman camp movie classic. I thought its creators would revive the genre, but Disney snapped them up (“The Little Mermaid”; “Beauty and the Beast”) and then half the team, Howard Ashman, died.

Peterson cites the license-holders’ quite reasonable casting note:

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The Great Stupid Rolls On: Remarkably, “Finger Gun 5” Surpasses the Original and All the Previous Sequels In Cruelty and Hysteria

This is where the “Do Something!” mentality regarding guns gets us.

Ethics Alarms has covered four previous instances where demented and incompetent school officials in Tennessee have yielded to panic as the justification for policy and expelled—not merely suspended, but expelled—-for a whole year, a 10-year-old boy after he pointed his finger in the shape of a gun and made mock “machine gun” noises.

I reviewed the history and the abject stupidity of this plot last September in “That Bomb “Finger Gun” Should Have Never Been Made At All: How Did We End Up With ‘Finger Gun 4’??” and I am not feeling all that well this morning, so excuse me for not rehashing this idiocy again: that post is pretty thorough. It recalled the original school administrator finger gun hysteric’s “comment “justification” that it was important for an unlicensed finger gun wielder to “understand the implications of the gesture”, to which I responded as I ruled the school’s conduct child abuse,

What implications of the gesture? That he is about to shoot bullets out of his finger? That he intends to kill someone with all the firepower an unarmed 6-year-old can muster? That he is making a mimed reference to a Connecticut school massacre he probably doesn’t know a thing about? Why should it matter what his “intent is? It’s a hand gesture! It isn’t vulgar or threatening except to silly phobics in the school system.

and concluded, focusing on “Finger Gun 4,” in which that idiot school administrator cited the current “climate” as justifying the suspension of another six-year-old,

Here’s the climate: teachers and administrators see their roles as cultural revolutionaries and believe schools should be turned into breeding grounds for future progressive voters who think the United States is racist, abortion is a right, open borders are compassionate, income redistribution is essential, reparations must be made, and guns are evil, along with whites, men, and Republicans. The implications are that no responsible parent should entrust their kids to public school.

The justification for this instance of “Do something!” grandstanding is a new state law that had only recently gone into effect. It was passed after a former student shot and killed six people at The Covenant School in Nashville (Look! The Barn Door Fallacy!) and requires students to be expelled for at least a year if they “threaten mass violence” on school property. Of course, no one in their right mind thinks that a 10-year-old making his hand into a gun-like shape is seriously threatening anyone, but these people are not in their right minds.

They will, of course, all be voting Democrat in November.

___________________

Pointer: Reason

More From the Harris “She Isn’t What She Is” Campaign

First, the obligatory “How can anyone look at themselves in the mirror and support this woman and a party that would try to win an election by hiding what its Presidential candidate believes?”

Now the latest bit of deliberate obfuscation:

In April 2019, Senator Kamala Harris supported an electric vehicle mandate when she co-sponsored the Zero-Emission Vehicles Act of 2019. The bill, which was introduced by fellow far-left Democrats Senator Jeff Merkley and Representative Mike Levin, was promoted as a “bold plan for transitioning the United States to 100% zero-emission vehicles.”

Yet today, Harris’s director of rapid response, Ammar Moussa, wrote that “Vice President Harris does not support an electric vehicle mandate” and that any statement by Donald Trump and J.D. Vance that she does is a “lie.” Of course, the easy way to settle the issue would be for Harris to submit to questioning from reporters so she could explain how legislation designed to force the nation to have “100% zero-emission vehicles” isn’t a mandate, or why she now believes her 2019 position (announced as she was running for the 2020 Presidential nomination and thus a sop to the climate change hysteric Democratic base) was a wrong one, or why she disagrees with the Biden tailpipe emissions rule issued by the EPA that would by design force car manufacturers to significantly reduce the production of gas-powered cars. “The regulation would essentially require automakers to sell more electric vehicles and hybrids by gradually tightening limits on tailpipe pollution,” that relentless critic of Democratic polices, the New York Times, reported last March.

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Wait, WHAT? Ethics (and Constitutional) Dunce: Carlsbad, California

From the London Times (Pointer: Ann Althouse):

“Carlsbad, a surfing hot spot near San Diego, has decided to prohibit people from lighting up inside apartments, condos and other shared buildings where multiple families live. From January residents will not be able to smoke or vape cannabis and nicotine products indoors or on balconies, porches and decks. The law does not apply to single-family homes or hotels and motels…At least 84 of California’s 483 municipalities — including Beverly Hills, Cupertino and Pasadena — have enacted similar bans in multi-family private residences, according to the American Nonsmokers’ Rights Foundation…Many residents in Carlsbad said the smoking ban would improve public health while making housing more pleasant despite concerns over how it will be enforced. Due to limited resources police will not enforce the law, but landlords and other tenants will be able to take legal action against anyone smoking indoors.”

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This Story Alone Should Be Sufficient to Make Any American Who Wants To “Save Democracy” Vote Against Harris…

Meta Platforms CEO and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg told Congress this week that the Biden administration “repeatedly pressured” his company in 2021 to censor content related to the Wuhan virus, including posts by mere mortal Americans.

In response to questions from the House Judiciary Committee, Zuckerberg confirmed that the Biden administration tried to censor his social media company and therefore probably the others as well.

“There’s a lot of talk right now, about how the U.S. government interacts with companies like Meta, and I want to be clear about our position,” Zuckerberg said in a letter to the committee. “Our platforms are for everyone — we’re about promoting speech and helping people connect in a safe and secure way.” 

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“Nah, There’s No Mainstream Media Bias!” Two Glaring Examples…

1. The former reliably progressive, Democrat-supporting Rolling Stone reporter Matt Taibbi nicely exposed the Washington Post’s astoundingly flagrant Democratic operative Phillip Bump (EA dossier here) on Taibbi’s substack. (I have been temped to subscribe, but…)

In “Note to Philip Bump: The Washington Post columnist speaks on CNN; a brief reply” he writes:

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Unethical Tweet of the Month: Actor Bradley Whitford

Just remember, the Ethics Alarms position is to strive as much as possible to remain unbiased regarding a performer’s art regardless of his or her demonstrated political orientation or revealed personal character flaws. I enjoy Bradley Whitford as an actor.

But only an unethical, bullying asshole would write a tweet like that.

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Is Marco Bisbikis The Most Unethical Lawyer Ever?

How could a lawyer be more unethical?

As unethical, sure: I am confident that there have been other lawyers who are tied with this Michigan lawyer for the title. But more? Consider:

Marco Bisbikis, a Michigan lawyer in good standing, worked as an attorney for the Dan Hutchinson and his wife, wrote himself into popular Oakland County jeweler’s will while he was preparing it for his client, who was also under the impression that his attorney was a loyal friend. (Can you blame him? Who wouldn’t trust a face like that?)

Then Bisbikis paid a hit man to shoot and kill Hutchinson so the lawyer could inherit millions of dollars in a trust fund. On June 1, 2022, outside an Oak Park pawn shop, the hit man did just that. Bisbikis and the hired killer, Roy Larry, were convicted of first-degree murder, conspiracy to commit murder, solicitation of murder, and felony firearm and in June they were both sentenced life in prison. Two other men involved in the plot were convicted and sentenced last year.

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Ugh! Ethics Dunce—AGAIN—: University of Houston Law Professor Renee Knake Jefferson

This is an example of why I am disgusted with my field and chosen profession. Just last month I designated Jefferson, a legal ethics professor among other things, as an ethics dunce for her blatantly partisan and biased commentary. This time, it’s personal.

Seeking to find a reliable, trustworthy, accurate source of legal ethics news and developments (since the demise of the excellent legal Ethics Forum, I am reduced to the scattershot, overwhelmingly left-biased commentary on the APRL listserv), I subscribed to the professor’s substack, Legal Ethics Roundup, taking seriously her promise that it would supply a “Monday morning tour of all things related to lawyer and judicial ethics.” But the Legal Ethics Roundup I received this morning, like all its predecessors this month, cheerfully informed me that “For the month of August, the Legal Ethics Roundup is on pause.”

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Ethics Observations On the Sale of Babe Ruth’s “Called Shot” Jersey for $24 Million

The jersey worn by baseball legend Babe Ruth when he “called his shot” in Game 3 of the 1932 World Series sold over the weekend for $24.12 million, setting the auction record for most expensive sports collectible. The previous record price for any sports collectible was the $12.6 million that a rare mint condition Topps 1952 Mickey Mantle card fetched in 2022. Babe’s jersey far eclipsed the $10.1 million a Michael Jordan Chicago Bulls jersey from Game 1 of the 1998 NBA Finals achived at auction that same year, the record for athletic attire until Babe broke it, like he shattered so many records when he was alive.

The sale raises many ethics issues, but the main one is that the exorbitant price is almost certainly based on a fabrication, a lie. It is similar to paying millions for the axe little George Washington used to cut down his father’s cherry tree.

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