The 2025 Complete “White Christmas” Ethics Companion, With a New Introduction

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

2025 Introduction

In the 2022 introduction I wondered whether the 1954 Christmas movie musical “White Christmas” was on the way out of the Christmas movie canon as anti-white racism took root during “The Great Stupid.”  I wrote, “If there comes a time when an innocent musical fable about kindness toward an old hero down on his luck no longer resonates because of the skin-shades of the characters, the values and priorities of American arts and society will have reached a dangerous level of confusion.”

I have been rather blue of late, and a dear friend (and old love) ordered me to watch “White Christmas,” her favorite movie, as a tonic. She was right, as usual: it helped. She had expressed annoyance with earlier versions of the Ethics Companion, arguing that a lot of my complaints were (and are) petty for a feel-good Christmas movie. I think she was right about that, too.

I think I enjoyed the movie more this year than in past viewings because I watched it with a house guest who had never seen “White Christmas” before, and hadn’t experienced the brilliance of the four stars, Bing Crosby, Danny Kaye, Rosemary Clooney and Vera-Ellen often enough to take them for granted. “Wow, what a voice!” he said of Bing. “Nobody dances like that any more!” he said after watching Vera-Ellen tap her way through “Mandy.”An ex-Marine, he got choked up when the old General gets the surprise of his life with many of his old comrades showing up at Christmas Eve to fill his struggling Vermont Inn.

Last year I noted that Bing Crosby had complained that the movie could and should have been better than it was. I agreed with him in my comments last year; now I’m not so sure. How, exactly, could it have been better? The cast was perfect; the sentimental ending works today as much as ever: my house guest was quietly tearful at the end.

One of the most ethical features of “White Christmas” was behind the scenes, an ethical act that allowed it to be made, undertaken by one of the most unlikely people imaginable, Danny Kaye.  Kaye was a major factor in launching my interest in performing, musicals, and comedy, but my research into the real man, when I was in the process of collaborating on a musical about his relationship with his wife and muse, songwriter Sylvia Fine, revealed that the real Danny Kaye was a miserable, paranoid, selfish, mean and insecure sociopath when he wasn’t playing “Danny Kaye,” which could be on stage or off it. In this case, however—and nobody knows why—the abused Jewish kid went to unusual lengths to save a Christmas movie.

“White Christmas” had been conceived as a remake of “Holiday Inn” with the same stars as that black-and-white musical, Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire. Fred couldn’t do the project, so his part was re-written for Donald O’Connor, who became ill so close to shooting that there was no time to retool the whole script and have the film ready for its target holiday release. In desperation, the producers asked Kaye if he would play Bing’s sidekick even though it meant 1) playing a support, which Kaye had never done in a movie since becoming a star 2) playing a role that didn’t’ highlight his special talents (for those, watch “The Court Jester”), and 3) subordinating himself to Bing Crosby, who was indeed the bigger star and box office draw, and 4) most daring of all, exposing his own limitations by doing dance numbers created for Donald O’Connor. Kaye was not a trained dancer, just a gifted mimic and athlete who could do almost anything he tried to do well. Danny demanded $200,000 and 10% of the gross to rescue the project, but he still was doing so at considerable personal risk…and he didn’t need the money, because Sylvia was a financial whiz.

Everyone around Danny Kaye was shocked that he agreed to all of this. Not only did he agree, he also amazed everyone by not playing the under-appreciated star on set, by doing O’Connor’s choreography as well as he did, and by knowing how not to steal focus from the star, something he infamously refused to do on Broadway when he was in “Lady in the Dark” with Gertrude Lawrence.

“White Christmas” was the top grossing film of 1954 and the most financially successful movie musical up to that time. Kaye’s uncharacteristic unselfishness and characteristic versatility made that level of success possible. The secret of why Danny was on his best behavior was another one of his pathologies from an abused childhood: he was always in awe of the superstars like Bing Crosby, and felt inferior to them. (He wasn’t.)

Yes the movie works ; you just have to turn off your brain to fully enjoy it the way it was meant to be enjoyed. It has many high points, musical and comedic, for most viewer they justify the flaws, and we will never see the likes of Crosby, Kaye and Clooney again (and Vera-Ellen was no slouch). I miss all of them, which adds an extra bit of wistfulness to my annual viewing.

And whatever faults “White Christmas” may have, it’s whiteness isn’t one of them.

This is another sad Christmas for me.  Once again there will be no Christmas tree that takes me five hours to decorate, no festive banquet at a table surrounded by family and friends, no stockings or presents…just a big empty house with a needy dog and a lot of scary problems to solve and ticking time bombs to defuse. The sappy Christmas movie that ends with two happy couples, an old man being reassured that his life had meaning and Bing singing “White Christmas” is, as it was last year, just what the psych ward prescribed. I’m trying to count my blessings. What choice do I have? I have no sheep.

1. The First Scene

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Another Dispatch From the Trump Deranged….

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

This is persuasive anti-Trump data, don’t you think?

Yes, the same lawyer friend who posted the previous Occupy Democrats attack on I.C.E. to Facebook just endorsed that brilliant analysis. Scandinavian nations gorging on anti-American propaganda have decided to boycott the U.S. for vacations because they don’t like the government Americans elected? Brilliant. Bite me. Nobody’s telling you to dump your character-suffocating nanny states. You want to eschew the glories of the USA to make some kind of ideological point? Go ahead. It’s your loss, Sven

I don’t think I’ve ever vacationed in a foreign nation whose government I did like. Great Britain is rotting on the vine, but I’d go to see Westminster Abbey, the Tower, the Lake District and the British Museum in a heartbeat if I could afford it. All of Africa is a hopelessly corruption-crippled mess, but I’d go to see landscape and the wildlife. I’ll visit Broadway even after Mamdani turns the Big Apple into worm-eaten mush.

Or maybe the gentle Swedes et al. don’t want to be killed and raped by our illegal aliens, after so many of them have been victimized by their legal ones. Just spitballing here.

I am worried that sooner or later one of these moronic posts is going to cause me to snap and lay out in unrestrained terms how stupid and offensive I find this bombardment of intellectually dishonest and biased garbage by someone whom lots of people look to for enlightenment and perspective. It is an inexcusable misuse of influence and status, and worst of all, it’s boring. Every day, it’s the same thing. He’s still talking about Epstein, for heaven’s sake.

If I snap, I will instantly see my list of friends crater to 12, and probably lose more clients. But I won’t…

I’m trying real hard, as Samuel Jackson says in his epic monologue in “Pulp Fiction,” to be the shepherd here. But I don’t know how much longer I can stand this…

Comment of the Day: “If A.I. Wrote a WAPO Op-Ed Piece to Set Us Up For a Take-Over By the Bots, This Is What It Would Be Like…”

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Jon’s excellent comment began by marveling that the commentariate here at Ethics Alarms doesn’t seem to be vary interested in the artificial intelligence issue, which is the focus of TIME’s annual “Person of the Year” issue. See?

I immediately felt it was a Comment of the Day; now we’ll find out if this essay also inspires apathy and shrugs.

Here is Jon’s Comment of the Day on the post, “If A.I. Wrote a WAPO Op-Ed Piece to Set Us Up For a Take-Over By the Bots, This Is What It Would Be Like…”

***

It’s interesting that this post has only garnered a couple of comments, and your previous AI post on the 7th didn’t get any. Not to oversell it, but AI may be the most important issue ever.  Already entry-level white collar jobs are disappearing.  I heard of a recent study that 13% of such jobs were gone, and that was published back in August. AI is being compared to the industrial revolution in terms of workforce displacement, but exponentially more disruptive since it’s taking place in the span of a few years rather than several decades. As if that’s not enough, there’s serious talk that we may be ushering in an extinction event for homo-sapiens.  On the plus side, though, my AI heavy stock portfolio is doing quite well, thank you.

My own experience with AI has been less than encouraging.  I really hadn’t made much use of it, but last week I was putting together a spreadsheet to project annual returns on some weekly stock market moves I was considering.  Creating the spreadsheet and then populating the data for about 20 stocks was going to take me the better part of an hour, and then updating the data in real time would be difficult.  It struck me that AI might do it better and more quickly than I could.

My first task was to determining which AI to use.  I figured I’d have to subscribe to one of them to get the job done decently and in a timely fashion, so I asked Google which AI was best for real-time data.  The answer both from the Google AI and various Reddit forums was that an AI model I hadn’t heard of, Perplexity, was superior when dealing with pulling information from the web in real time.  I found I could get a year-long free trial, so that’s what I went with.

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From the Res Ipsa Loquitur Files: A Democratic House Member Says White Children Should Be Taught To Feel Guilty About Their Skin Color

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

What this says about her party and its ideological moorings is obvious. So is what it tells us about anyone who would vote for someone like this to have any power or influence over our society. We have had the “gotcha!” privilege debate here extensively in the 20-teens, and it was insufficiently slapped down to prevent the DEI and “presumed racism” pathogens.

The ethics mystery is why anyone white swallows this crap? I can see the advantages to minorities, since they can, by accepting it, absolve themselves of all failures, misdeeds and shortcomings. However, whites (and men) who fall for this argument are agreeing to be metaphorically hobbled, like Kunta Kinte in “Roots.” Worse, they are endorsing the hobbling of their children too.

I get why extreme, ruthless, unethical progressives push such garbage: it’s a means to an end, and the end is power. I do not understand why anyone privileged with a functioning brain and critical thinking skills tolerates officials like Stalker, never mind actually voting for her.

More on Trump Derangement and I.C.E.

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

I still am noodling about how exactly to define Trump Derangement beyond listing the symptoms. I’d say, for example, that a retired and distinguished lawyer re-posting with favor a typical Occupy Democrats Facebook rant qualifies as one. This particular Occupy Democrat post—is that group worse than Move-On, better, or the same?—expressed outrage over “US citizen and Army veteran George Retes'” testimony to Congress over (if he is to be believed) a mistaken arrest and abusive treatment by I.C.E., as it mistook him as an illegal immigrant. Naturally, since he was recruited by Democrats to impugn the agency, my friend (and a somewhat famous classmate who has been engaging in what I would call borderline unethical conduct by regularly attacking his former client, President Trump) automatically accepted his account over that of Homeland Security, which in a release rebutted Retes’ claim as well as that of others who have been cited by critics as being falsely detained or arrested.

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Unethical Quote of the Week: Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

“My understanding was that independent agencies exist because Congress has decided that some issues, some matters, some areas should be handled in this way by non-partisan experts, that Congress is saying that expertise matters — with respect to aspects of the economy, and transportation, and the various independent agencies that we have. So, having a president come in and fire all the scientists, and the doctors, and the economists, and the PhDs, and replacing them with loyalists and people who don’t know anything, is actually not in the best interest of the citizens of the United States.”

—-Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, making the case for a technocracy that directly contradicts the structure of government dictated by that U.S. Constitution thingy, in her questioning of  U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer during this week’s oral argument in “United States v. Slaughter”.

As Professor Turley archly comments in his post on Jackson’s classically totalitarian belief that the proletariat can’t be trusted and must be guided by supposedly wise and beneficent “experts” (like her), “Jackson simply brushed aside the fact that the president is given authority to execute the laws and that the executive branch is established under the Constitution…The use of “real-world consequences” seems to overwhelm any true separation-of-powers protections for presidents against the administrative state. It also allows the Court to delve into effective policy or legislative impacts in support of the expert class over what are framed as ignorant or vengeful presidents.”

To state what should be obvious about the so-called “expert class,” they have proven themselves to be very partisan and therefore not sufficiently trustworthy for Congress to bestow on them “independence” from Presidential oversight within the Executive Branch. We have seen that experts like university professors and scholars are overwhelmingly biased and partisan, that scientists are biased and partisan, that doctors, lawyers, economists, psychologists, judges and, yes, ethicists are biased partisan. The concept of the non-partisan, independent expert is a convenient ideology-driven mythology, and anyone paying attention to what we have witnessed in our country, society, and culture over the past couple of decades has to admit that it is as believable as Santa Claus.

Let me add in closing that the arrogance and smug entitlement that radiates from Jackson’s “people who don’t know anything” is staggering, obnoxious, and ironic. She’s a Supreme Court Justice and apparently doesn’t know what the Constitution means…

In Which I Call Ann Althouse’s Expressed Hatred Of “The Little Drummer Boy” & Raise My Hatred of the Bing Crosby-David Bowie Duet

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

I was pleased to see today that bloggress Ann Althouse devoted a post to how awful “The Little Drummer Boy” is. She wrote, quoting from a post from an earlier Christmas season,

“[I]f you ever feel like giving me a gift, and you think all you’ve got to give is that drum number you’re threatening to perform, realize you are making a mistake. There’s also the gift of silence. I’d prefer that. I know baby Jesus reputedly appreciated the gift of drumming — according to that nasty song — but consider the possibility that Jesus was just being nice. I know, politeness is a quality alien to infants, but — come on! — it was Jesus! Put the damned drum away.”

I know I have written on EA in the past about how I rank Christmases by how many times I have to listen to the Harry Simeone Choir recording of that song. Ann also quotes Washington Post satirist Alexandra Petri’s column condemning “The Little Drummer Boy, in which Petri wrote in part,

“I cannot stand it. Nothing will fix it, even the application of David Bowie to it. Every year I say, ‘I hate this song,’ and every year people say, ‘Have you heard David Bowie’s version?’ Yes. Yes, I have. It is still an abomination.”

EVEN the application of David Bowie to it? That is, beyond question, the worst rendition of the song in existence, and I would rather pluck out my eyes and puncture my ear drums rather than experience that monstrosity by Bowie with Bing Crosby’s complicity ever again. Here’s what I wrote about the “creepiest totalitarian lyrics to a Christmas song that was already bad” in 2022:

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Ethics Quiz: The Kamala Harris Bust

/ Jack Marshall / 25 Comments

I did a Danny Thomas spit-take when I read that Kamala Harris, in an interview with the New York Times, proudly proclaimed herself “a historic figure.” Harris noted the tradition of creating a marble bust for every U.S. Vice President after they leave office, saying: “There will be a marble bust of me in Congress. I am a historic figure like any vice president of the United States ever was.”

This has sparked mass mockery in the conservative news media and social media.

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day:

Is this mockery fair?

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Now THIS Is A Frivolous Lawsuit…

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Ethics Alarms has mentioned before the fact that it is very difficult for a lawyer to violate Rule 3.1 in the Rules of Professional Conduct, which prohibits frivolous law suits and appeals. The ABA version of the rule, “Meritorious Claims & Contentions,” states,

“A lawyer shall not bring or defend a proceeding, or assert or controvert an issue therein, unless there is a basis in law and fact for doing so that is not frivolous, which includes a good faith argument for an extension, modification or reversal of existing law. A lawyer for the defendant in a criminal proceeding, or the respondent in a proceeding that could result in incarceration, may nevertheless so defend the proceeding as to require that every element of the case be established.”

Why is it hard to violate the rule? It is because even the most desperate “Hail Mary” law suits sometimes win. “Good faith” simply requires that the attorney bringing the suit honestly believes it might succeed, which means that it helps if he’s an idiot.

The last time Ethics Alarms suggested a law suit was sanctionably frivolous was in 2020, when Alan Dershowitz sued CNN for what was just typical sloppy, biased CNN reporting. The First Amendment protects news outlets from defamation suits by public figures unless the defamatory news is deliberate and malicious. I flagged another 3.1 violation in 2019, when a lawyer filed 49 appeals for the same client in a condo dispute despite the fact that multiple judges had rejected his arguments and said, in effect, “Don’t come back here again with this crap!”

Today I learned about a frivolous sexual harassment lawsuit by a female lawyer against another lawyer at her former firm. As an epitome of frivolity, it takes the metaphorical cake.

Her complaint alleged that the man ogled and stared at her, took photographs, and generally created a hostile work environment by his unwanted attentions.

The defendant is blind.

SCOTUS Finally Figures Out That It’s Unethical To Ignore the Constitution

/ Jack Marshall / 24 Comments

Well, the majority of the Supreme Court, anyway.

Yesterday the U.S. Supreme Court hosted arguments in Trump v. Slaughter, which challenges the constitutionality of the “independent agencies” Congress has voted into existence over many decades. Their leaderss are not under the control of the President of the United States, though they are considered part of the Executive Branch. Go figure.

President Trump fired FTC Commissioner Rebecca Slaughter, not for cause, as authorized by the FTC statute, but because her service was “inconsistent with this Administration’s priorities.” Slaughter refused to leave office, setting up a constitutional showdown.

The New York Times concluded from the argument, “Justices Seem Ready to Give Trump More Power to Fire Independent Government Officials.” The momentum shifted when Justice Gorsuch (above, left) said, “I’ll put my cards on the table. Maybe… there is no such thing in our constitutional order as a fourth branch of government.”

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