Unopened Ethics Gifts, December 26, 2025…

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

On the topic of Christmas movies: I missed several this year, despite leaving it to Hollywood to make up virtually my whole celebration. I saw “It’s a Wonderful Life” (really a Thanksgiving movie), “White Christmas,” “Miracle on 34th Street,” “The Bishop’s Wife,” and “Home Alone 2.” Also “The Santa Clause,” and lesser modern efforts like “Four Christmases.”I did not see “The Homecoming” (but will, tonight), and also missed the original “Christmas in Connecticut,” all of the Dickens “Christmas Carols,” “Elf,” which I object to because Ed Asner is a terrible Santa Clause, and “Die Hard,” because it is not a Christmas movie just because it takes place during an office Christmas party. I’d concede that “Die Hard 2” is more of a Christmas movie because the whole plot revolves around holiday air travel gone horribly wrong. (“Sleepless in Seattle,” the Dead Wife movie that I foolishly continue to watch, is a Christmas movie because the plot is set in motion by a child’s Christmas wish.)

I also watched three Christmas horror movies: the excellent original “Black Christmas,” the surprisingly good “You Better Watch Out,” and the violent black comedy “Santa’s Slay,” in which Kris Kringle morphs into a super-powered serial killer, putting a real cramp in the Christmas spirit.

But Amazon Prime Video was responsible for an almost equal Christmas horror: the streaming service has been offering a butchered version of “It’s a Wonderful Life” that is 22 minutes shorter than the original 130-minute film because it cuts out the whole sequence when George sees how awful everything turns out in a world where he’s never been born. He goes to the bridge to kill himself, Clarence the angel intervenes, then George goes back into town to find that his friends and neighbors have chipped in to solve his crisis. That’s like showing a version of “Titanic” without the part where the ship sinks, or “Old Yeller” where the dog doesn’t get rabies.

The excuse has to do with some copyright disputes, but Amazon Prime carries both the full and abridged versions—I know because I watched the full version to write this year’s Ethics Companion. The platform does not clearly explain the difference, however, leaving unsuspecting viewers to click the wrong one.

Meanwhile…

1. A “Don’t Confuse Me With Facts, My Mind’s Made Up” classic! Here MS Now (formerly MSNBC) host Paola Ramos resolutely and condescendingly tells two unusually nerdy guests that there is no scientific evidence of any genetic differences between the black and white races.

The duo is understandably aghast and frustrated as this progressive shill frames their factual statements as vestiges of white supremacy, and that’s that. In addition to being unethical because it’s terrible journalism and science to be spewing into the public discourse, I suspect that the former MSNBC chose those two stereotypical geeks to make them easy targets.

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Christmas Hangover Open Forum!

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

I had a really strange Christmas Day, being a guest of two strangers as I was asked to play the role of surrogate father to a fiftyish neighbor who wanted me to be her guest at dinner with her new boyfriend and his incredibly old mother. My neighbor would not take “no” for an answer, so what the hell. It was better than sitting around in a bleak house having a lot of memories sitting around staring at me.

I had neglected to include Nat King Cole’s signature Christmas song among the ones I highlighted this month, but it’s one that’s appropriate for the whole holiday season, so here it is. I wonder if anyone else noticed that “The Christmas Song,” by Nat, the Carpenters, Dean Martin, among others, or its author, Mel Torme (How must it feel when you are a renowned singer in your own right and the best song you ever wrote is identified with a rival singer?) seemed to get less play on this year than usual. Please tell me it isn’t because the song has been “cancelled” due to political correctness. You know: “Eskimos.”

I once tried to come up with a minimally disruptive lyric change to accommodate “Folks dressed up like Inuits” but the best I could come up with was “Jack Frost nipping at your tits…”

Uh, no.

Nat King Cole is another brilliant, unique vocal artist whose only hold on the culture’s memory is his single Christmas classic. Future generations won’t know what they’re missing. Cole died in 1965, still in great voice at 45. Here’s this marvelous balladeer at his best without chestnuts…

But I digress. If you had any disturbing or amusing encounters with the Trump Deranged yesterday, this would be a good place to relate them. (I did!)

Celebrating the 111th Anniversary of the Strange But Ethical “Christmas Truce”

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

[Good morning! Was Santa good to you? I might as well repost this essay about the Christmas truce; since I only have published it on Christmas Day, some readers might have missed it, and EA, believe it or not, sometimes gets new followers from time to time…]

One of the weirdest events in world history took place on Christmas 1914, at the very beginning of the five year, pointless and stunningly destructive carnage of The Great War, what President Woodrow Wilson, right as usual, called “The War to End All Wars.”

World War I, as it was later called after the world war it caused succeeded it,  led to the deaths of more than 25 million people, and if anything was accomplished by this carnage, I have yet to read about it.

The much sentimentalized event was a spontaneous Christmas truce, as soldiers on opposing sides on the Western Front, defying orders from superiors, pretended the war didn’t exist and left their trenches, put their weapons and animus aside, sang carols,  shared food, buried their dead, and even played soccer against each other, as “The Christmas Truce” statue memorializes above.

The brass on both sides—this was a British and German phenomenon only—took steps to ensure that this would never happen again, and it never did.

It all began on Christmas Eve, when at 8:30 p.m. an officer of the Royal Irish Rifles reported to headquarters that “The Germans have illuminated their trenches, are singing songs and wishing us a Happy Xmas. Compliments are being exchanged but am nevertheless taking all military precautions.” The two sides progressed to serenading each other with Christmas carols, with the German combatants crooning  “Silent Night,” and the British adversaries responding with “The First Noel.“ The war diary of the Scots Guards reported that a private  “met a German Patrol and was given a glass of whisky and some cigars, and a message was sent back saying that if we didn’t fire at them, they would not fire at us.”

The same deal was struck spontaneously at other locales across the battlefield. Another British soldier reported that as Christmas Eve wound down into Christmas morning,  “all down our line of trenches there came to our ears a greeting unique in war: ‘English soldier, English soldier, a merry Christmas, a merry Christmas!’” He wrote in a letter home that he heard,

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Flashback: Depressing How Little Has Changed In 16 Long Years…

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

I was looking for an appropriate “Night Before Christmas” post and found this instead, a parody I wrote on Christmas Eve in 2009, the very first year of Ethics Alarms, in reaction to the ethically-tainted passage of the “Affordable Care Act,” which didn’t make health care affordable. I knew the bill was smoke and mirrors and that it would not accomplish what it was supposed to do.  I knew that we would be in one mess or another as a result of the ugly thing, supposedly the signature legislation of the Obama Administration…and sad thing is that it probably was. What does that tell you?

I was struck, as you will be, how much of my mordant satire seems relevant today, and how little has changed.

So let’s travel back to that halcyon year, and the day before Christmas…

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Christmas Eve Ethics Dunce: Jazz Drummer Chuck Redd

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Because he is angry at President Trump and the Kennedy Center board for adding the President’s name to the cultural center, musician Chuck Redd cancelled the Christmas Eve jazz concert at the Kennedy Center that has been a tradition for more than 20 years. “When I saw the name change on the Kennedy Center website and then hours later on the building, I chose to cancel our concert,” Redd told The Associated Press . Redd is a drummer and vibraphone player who has presided over holiday “Jazz Jams” at the Kennedy Center since 2006.

Well, jazz musicians aren’t known for their critical thinking skills or ethics acumen. Let me get this straight, Chuck: you think a fair way to punish Trump and the board for the name change is to disappoint jazz fans in the Washington area who had nothing to do with the decision. Nice.

What an asshole.

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The Tide May Be Turning Against DEI, And It Had Better

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

In the post earlier this week, “Donald and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Week, Part II: The Important Stuff,” one of the items I included as important was Jacob Savage’s disturbing essay on how white males of the Millennial generation were crushed by the DEI policies that even predated the term. He wrote in part,

“As the Trump Administration takes a chainsaw to the diversity, equity, and inclusion apparatus, there’s a tendency to portray DEI as a series of well-meaning but ineffectual HR modules…This may be how Boomer and Gen-X white men experienced DEI. But for white male millennials, DEI wasn’t a gentle rebalancing—it was a profound shift in how power and prestige were distributed.”

The rest of the article was so powerful regarding how white males saw their ambitions and futures hamstrung purely because of their race and gender, with striking statistics to back up his narrative, that it landed like a splash of ice water on the still-raging policy debate. DEI was, and is, simply wrong, unethical, as well as being unconstitutional and illegal. My Trump Deranged Facebook friends keep calling the President “inhuman,” but, strangely, he was the only one with both the power, the guts and the perception to set out to end what has been a cruel form of societally- approved prejudice and discrimination.

I should have devoted a whole post to Savage’s article, but a substack called eugyppius: a plague chronicle did, and expands on what Savage began, well, savagely. He writes,

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Another Christmas Song With An Important Backstory: “I Heard The Bells On Christmas Day”

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

This is one of those Christmas songs with multiple verses, like “Away in a Manger.” The first time I heard it was on one of the Christmas somg slection albums my father used to get free when he worked for Sears Roebuck in the Sixties. There were all sorts of strange selections on those records, like Mike Douglas singing “O Holy Night.” (He wasn’t bad, either.) Johnny Cash’s version of “I Heard the Bells” was on the same album as Mike, I think.

The song began as a poem by the great American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Do they still teach Henry’s poems in the schools? I bet not; I bet he’s a cancelled Great White Man now, and they teach Maya Angelou. Henry wrote a lot more memorable poems than Maya: “Paul Revere’s Ride,” “Excelsior,” “The Song of Hiawatha,” “A Psalm of Life,” “The Village Blacksmith” “The Children’s Hour,” “The Wreck of the Hesperus,” and “The Arrow and the Song.” among others. Like other great American artists, it is Christmas that keeps his memory flickering, at least for those who know he wrote the words to “I Heard the Bells.”

The poet’s oldest son Charles, a lieutenant in the Union Army,  he was seriously wounded in November of 1863 during the Battle of New Hope Church. Longfellow had begged his only son not to enlist to fight the Rebels. When the terrible news arrived, the poet was still mourning the death of his second wife in a fire two years earlier.

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Stop Making Me Defend Chevy Chase!

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

I didn’t know until this morning that Chevy Chase was left out of Saturday Night Live’s anniversary reunion show this year, SNL50: The Anniversary Special, Chevy Chase. I don’t know because I stopped watching the show many years ago when it stopped being a cultural satire program without a political agenda and converted to an all-woke, all-progressive, anti-Republican Axis member like all the other late Night Shows. In SNL’s prime, however, when Don Pardo was still the announcer, I never missed an episode.

In CNN Films’ upcoming documentary, “I’m Chevy Chase and You’re Not,” the original “Saturday Night Live” “Weekend Update” host reveals how hurt he was that he was left out of the program. “Well, it was kind of upsetting actually,” Chase says. “This is probably the first time I’m saying it. But I expected that I would’ve been on the stage too with all the other actors. When Garrett [Morris] and Laraine [Newman] went on the stage there, I was curious as to why I didn’t. No one asked me to. Why was I left aside?” “Why was Bill Murray [hosting “Weekend Update” on the show] and why was I not? I don’t have an answer for that.”

Oh, I bet Chevy does. He was disliked by much of the cast and regarded as a toxic asshole. But that shouldn’t have mattered, and it was petty and wrong for the producers to snub him.

By purest coincidence, I wrote and co-directed my own 50th anniversary reunion show this year. We invited everyone who had ever been involved in the organization’s productions, and if they were willing, I worked them into the performances, no mean feat if I do say so myself. Did I personally like everyone we invited? No, of course not, nor did several prominent performers care much for me. That didn’t matter, and shouldn’t have mattered. The production was a salute to the group itself and its continued success and longevity. Every single key figure in its history available should have been on that stage or participating in the project.

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It’s “Do You Hear What I Hear?”Time…Happy Christmas Eve Everyone!

/ Jack Marshall / 25 Comments

It’s the day before Christmas, and all though my house, there’s no sign of Christmas, but I’ve no right to grouse…

…because it’s my choice to be solitary and miserable this season. Two days ago my adult heir gratuitously sent me a hate bomb that was the most hurtful communication I have ever received from anyone. Given that this individual lives rent free in an apartment in my house and is over 30, I expected just a teeny-weeny bit of, if not gratitude, respect. Uh, no. This was only the latest joy-extracting event this holiday season: I also just wounded my leg (the same one that put me in the hospital in July and hasn’t healed completely yet), I was fired from my oldest ethics gig (as with the unexpected attack from downstairs, the reason is obscure) and the number of administrative Swords of Damocles hanging over my head since Grace died last year have increased rather than diminished, as was my grand plan for 2025. So I’m taking pleasure in other people’s Christmas, including yours. So you better have a great one. Tonight I expect to be playing bridge with three ghosts.

Or heading to the bridge, like George Bailey.

Below is an updated and rewritten version of my earlier post about my favorite modern Christmas song, “Do You Hear What I Hear?” When I still had a professional theater company to oversee, I wrote and directed a musical revue called “An American Century Christmas.” It was staged like one of those old-fashioned TV Christmas specials, with the set decorated like a Christmas living room, and celebrity guests arriving with gifts.

I stuffed everything I loved about the seasonal entertainment into the thing: the scene in “The Homecoming” when John-Boy gets his tablets from his father; the scene in “It’s a Wonderful Life” when George gets emotional realizing that he’s in love with Mary while talking to Sam (Hee-haw!) Wainwright on the telephone; Danny and Bing standing in for the Haines Sisters and singing “Sisters:” a reading of “The Littlest Angel;” the Peanuts kids and Snoopy decorating Charlie Brown’s sickly tree. I don’t think anyone liked that show as much as I did, but so what. It made me happy. Even remembering it now makes me happy.

The first act finale was a rousing rendition of “Do You Hear What I Hear?” The song means a lot to me, and I’ll be blasting the original version tonight.

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Remembering “Lynch v. Donnelly,” When SCOTUS Saved Public Manger Scenes With “The Reindeer Rule”

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Before you make a public statement that will guarantee that you will become a poster-mayor for the usual “War on Christmas” battles, it might be wise to check legal history regardless of which position you take.

Mayor Miko Pickett, the “historic” first black mayor of Mullins, South Carolina, ordered this season’s Nativity scene removed from a public parking lot due to “separation of church and state.” The town happily ignored her. Not surprisingly, she had based her decision on “diversity” and “inclusion” principles and the “separation of Church and State.”

Naturally, she opted for the politically correct “Happy Holidays.” But the mayor may have had a point.

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