The Kim Potter trial in Minnesota has focused special attention on the recurring incidence of police shootings of motorists after traffic stops. Potter, now an ex-cop, fatally shot Daunte Wright when he appeared to be preparing to flee the stop, because she mistakenly drew her gun and fired it instead of her taser. The news media, as usual, is pre-biased against the police, and its analyses have reflected that, despite the fact that stopping a car has frequently proven fatal for many police officers, and there is ample justification for heightened caution and suspicion when approaching a stopped vehicle. The Washington Post unhelpfully issued a fatuous editorial headlined,“Being pulled over for a broken taillight shouldn’t end in death. Too often, it does.” Yes, indeed it does, and this is virtually always because of a combination of uncooperative and alarming behavior by the motorist and a mistaken, excessive, or poor choice of a response by police in the split second the officer has to assess the situation and act.
One way to prevent what “should” never happen is for police to just allow infractions on the highway and never stop cars. That would work. It would also result in some highway deaths caused by the uninhibited law-breaker that “shouldn’t happen,” but there are prices for everything. This is where law enforcement policy will soon arrive if the anti-police lobby gets its way and police are fired and prosecuted every time a driver sets in motion a sequence that ends in his or her own death.
I feel like Dean established the standard for this holiday standard, written by lyricist Sammy Cahn and composer Jule Styne (“Gypsy,” “Funny Girl”) in July 1945. World War II inspired so many Christmas and holiday songs, notably “I’ll Be Home For Christmas.”
1. Meeting the terms of a still valid 19th Century treaty seems like an ethical imperative, no?Kim Teehee was selected as the Cherokee people’s first nonvoting U.S. House delegate two years ago; now all that is needed is for the U.S. to make good on a deal it struck with the Cherokee Nation in the 1835 Treaty of New Echota, signed by President Andrew Jackson and ratified by the Senate, promising the tribe a non-voting House delegate. There are apparently some details to work out, among them how to respond when other tribes quite reasonably insist that they also deserve this limited representation in Congress, similar to the what D.C. has. One would think that 180 years is enough time for the complexities to be resolved, especially since the Cherokee Nation’s price for the promise of a non-voting House member was The Trail of Tears, when the tribe was forced to move out of Georgia, Alabama and Tennessee to what is now Oklahoma, with more than 4,000 Cherokees dying along the way. There are an estimated 400,000 Cherokees today.
Why has it taken so long for this to become an issue? Well, as for the U.S., it conveniently “forgot” until historians re-discovered the terms of the treaty 50 years ago. The Cherokees hadn’t pressed the U.S. on meeting its treaty obligations because, as the principle chief of Cherokee Nation, Chuck Hoskin Jr. explains, they had other priorities. “Asserting every detail of that treaty was not on their minds,” he says. “It was surviving.”
There’s really nothing special about this tweet from a woman named Kathleen Landerkin. I have friends and relatives who might tweet the same sentiments, if they were, you know, vulgar, uncivil clods. They aren’t, fortunately: I don’t consort with vulgar, uncivil clods. However, the tweet above is significant, because Ms. Landerkin is the current Correctional Training Facility (CTF) Deputy Warden at the Department of Corrections in the District of Columbia, and thus assists in overseeing day to day operations, inmate transportation, and case management at the D.C. Jail. The D.C. Jail is where Donald Trump supporting participants in the January 6, 2021 riot at the Capitol are being kept.
Landerkin has been wildly vocal abut her hatred of al things related to Donald Trump, especially his supporters, and has been tweeting rants and nasty messages about those she creatively calls “deplorables” for years. One of the more provocative comments was this one, from 2018:
Why should anyone care? Well, she has power over the January 6 inmates, and this degree of hostility, which could be fairly called demented, calls into legitimate question her ability to do her job fairly. Or does it? Literally dozens of over-heated tweets were uncovered by an enterprising social media sleuth, so Landerkin took down her account…but not before he reduced them to a video.
1. Variety: “West Side Story Falls Flat at Box Office With Disappointing $10 Million Debut”
Of course it did, as I sagely predicted when the project was announced nearly two years ago. First, American musicals are a niche genre for an increasingly elite and rarefied audience. Second, the efforts of critics to hype the movie—it was the creation of two Super Stevies, Spielberg and the recently departed Sondheim, so it had to be brilliant!—rang forced and false as they detailed the oppressive politically correct re-writing of the book by Tony Kushner, like placing the rivalry between the Jets and the Sharks in the context of gentrification and urban renewal, as if anyone inclined to watch a musical cares. Third, the well-publicized decision not to have subtitles for long scenes where the characters spoke Spanish was a red-flag: this is a pandering effort, not a musical. Finally, as Sondheim said in various ways in interviews over the years, making a show of any kind requires a good answer to the question, “Why?” This project had none: “Because the director wants to prove how versatile he is” isn’t one. “Because every movie made in the Sixties is racist, sexist and offensive” really isn’t one. Neither is “Because it’s crucial to remake a movie classic that won 10 Oscars.“
Oh, I’m fine with that; I’m especially fine with a Chritsmas-hater writing such a revealing piece of signature significance. The whole thing is an open admission of bitterness, envy, hate and misanthropy. Here’s the crux of his complaint:
I didn’t like Christmas in part because the steel mill where my father worked had closed. That news did nothing to stop the commercials with shiny, happy, children opening reams of colorful paper to reveal the things that they’d always wanted. The ads seemed to suggest that the more stuff you got, the better person you were. I learned through those commercials that good people got presents and that my family was trash. I took it into me every year like communion.
Sometimes, I wonder what essential part of me is missing. I know that Christmas is supposed to be about family. But as I grew to adulthood and became my own person, I found that family can be challenging when thrust upon you all at once.
Each year around this time, I find it more difficult to balance the awful things we see happening the rest of the year with the joy I’m supposed to drum up near the end of it. With age, it’s harder for me to reconcile the good will we’re supposed to feel toward each other at the holidays with the horrible way we treat each the rest of the year. It just feels fake.
Not surprisingly, he is a committed social justice warrior who is angry about the American cream that doesn’t hand out its bounty in carefully measured equal portions. “The stores where I buy my meager Hungry-Man frozen dinners now explode with silver and red in a gaudy celebration of unchecked, poinsettia-riddled capitalism,” he grumbles.
So he doesn’t get Christmas. I feel sorry for him. But why would the Washington Post decides that this guy’s pathology is worthy of an op-ed?
Oddly, at my local CVS (about which I will be filing official complaint #6 today, with all previous filings stalled and ignored by what is obviously an intentional stonewalling policy) there are three Santa avatars on sale ranging from 4 feet to 8 inches, and all of them are black Kris Kringles. Maybe, as my wife suggested, the white Santas sold already…or maybe Santa is on the way to joining Captain Marvel, Jake from State Farm, Mikey of the Life cereal commercials, Magnum, P.I., Bobby of “Company,” Perry Mason’s investigator Paul Drake and other once familiar white fictional characters in turning female, black or “of color” because…well, just because.Meanwhile, my informal month-long survey of TV fare (including 2021 streamed movies and TV ads) showed more than 50% of all couples portrayed were interracial. That’s almost three times the actual demographic number, so all of those “look like America” demands should be taken with a grain of rock salt. I don’t care, except that I resent having my arm being pinned behind my back by culture dictators in Hollywood and Madison Ave.
1. How did I miss this vibe in the Jussie Smollett fiasco? Before Smollett was convicted of 5 of 6 charges, Jonathan Turley interpreted his weird and defiant defense as a deliberate effort to get a jury nullification verdict. The Professor concluded that Smollett was following the lead of social justice anarchists like Georgetown professor Paul Butler, who wrote in the Washington Post in 2016 that “confronting the racial crisis in criminal justice, jury nullification gives jurors a special power to send the message that black lives matter.” Racist African-American pundit Elie Mystal has advocated the same: black members of juries should refuse to convict black defendants. Turley concluded,
Smollett is the very definition of a race-baiter seeking to use our racial divisions for his personal aggrandizement and advancement. If successful, he would reduce the court to the same narrative-driven reality of our politics and entertainment arenas.
In that sense, Smollett is still playing to his audience. He knows reality is not what is true but what an audience wants to be true.
In politics, Vice President Harris, Speaker Pelosi and others proved that with their protestations over his “attempted lynching.” In the media, not only his story but questioning of his story were cited as evidence of a viciously racist society.
Now that Smollett has been convicted, none of the journalists, pundits and politicians that immediately assumed his ridiculous story was true because bias makes you stupid have had the integrity to apologize or admit that their lack of objectivity helped Smollett advance his hoax. John Kass argues that we need to remember this…you know, as with the Nick Sandmann episode, or what the news media did to Kyle Rittenhouse.
2. Presumed racism? A black couple was shocked when a California appraiser valued their Marin County, California, home nearly $500,000 less than previous appraisals. Suspicious, they asked a white friend to pretend to be the homeowner for a different appraiser, and “whitewashed” their house by removing their family photos and stripping the walls of their African-themed art. The new appraisal came in at $1.48 million, nearly a half-million more than the previous estimate. Based on the discrepancy, the couple filed the suit December 2, along with Fair Housing Advocates of Northern California, alleging that the first appraiser,gave them a lowball valuation because of their race. They are seeking financial damages and asking the court to order the defendants to ensure they won’t discriminate when appraising houses Continue reading →
Burl Ives is one of those long dead artists of yore who would be nearly completely forgotten were it not for an annual revival every Christmas season. He had popular recordings of “Frosty…” and “Rudolph…,” and was featured in one of the Rankin-Bass animated Christmas shows as a singing snowman. The one Christmas song he made his own was “Have A Holly Jolly Christmas, and it’s a pretty annoying one at that. Ives was a fascinating character, a burly ex-NFL player who profitably turned to folksinging in the Thirties. He became famous doing that until he was the definitive Big Daddy on Broadway and on film in Tennessee Williams’s classic drama “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” (Williams wrote the part with Ives in mind), leading to a long acting career.
He was blacklisted during the Red Scare, named names for HUAC and alienated the folksinging crowd. Ives had such a pure, light voice that he had great success with children’s songs (like “I Know An Old Lady Who Swallowed A Fly”), yet on screen and stage he was usually a menacing presence. I always found the image of “Big Daddy” singing “Holly Jolly Christmas” bizarre.
December 13 is one of those banner days for ethics, good and bad. In 2000, Al Gore gave an admirable speech abandoning his efforts to flip the results of the too-close-to-call (literally) Presidential election, the ethics high water mark in his otherwise sketchy career. TIME disgraced itself on this date in 2019 by naming exploited teen mouthpiece for the climate change lobby Greta Thunberg as its “Person of the Year.
The House last week passed the so-called “Protecting Our Democracy Act” by a near strict party-line margin of 220 to 208. The bill seeks to impose new limits on Presidential power, many of which bi-partisan critics of “the Imperial Presidency” have advocated in the past (including me). Amazingly for anything coming out of the House of Pelosi, it’s a mostly good and reasonable bill….but there’s a catch.
“Disturbingly, the last administration saw our democracy in crisis with a rogue president who trampled over the guardrails protecting our Republic,” Speaker Nancy Pelosi said, framing the proposed law as one more partisan slap at the previous President. “Now, Congress has the solemn responsibility and opportunity to safeguard our democracy, ensuring that past abuses can never be perpetrated by any president of any party.”
Uh, but laws are the “guardrails of democracy,” not “norms,” which are merely what most Presidents have done but didn’t have to. The “norms” trope was one of the most transparently false of the Democratic Party phony Big Lies, and frankly I’m sick of explaining why. Here was one exposition on the topic (Big Lie #6), in which I quoted an earlier EA discussion of the topic:
This deliberately misleading talking point comes from the quieter Siamese Twin of Fake News, Fake History. Every President defies previous norms, or makes up new ones, and the stronger the Presidents involved are, the more norms they shatter. This doesn’t automatically threaten democracy…What threatens democracy is efforts to de-legitimize presidential power as an alternative to winning elections…
Steve’s post below discusses the issues posed by this news [from the Smithsonian]:
…In Charlottesville, Virginia, lawmakers decided to transform one torn-down monument entirely, reports Teo Armus for the Washington Post. Instead of storing a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee, officials will melt down the 1,100-pound bronze monument into metal ingots—raw material that can then be used to create new art.
City council members approved the proposal unanimously on Tuesday morning, reports Ginny Bixby for the Charlottesville Daily Progress. Put forth by the local Jefferson School African American Heritage Center (JSAAHC), the plan was one of six considered by lawmakers during months of deliberation.
According to JSAAHC’s proposal, organizers plan to hold community listening sessions in barbershops, places of worship, schools and other businesses throughout Charlottesville. With community input, the “Swords Into Plowshares” team hopes to select an artist or artists to design a new public artwork by 2024.
The museum has already raised more than half of the $1.1 million required to bring its project to fruition and is continuing to fundraise online. Proceeds will be used to donate the transformed statue back to the city, where it will go on display by 2026.
JSAAHC executive director Andrea Douglas tells the Post that the project “will allow Charlottesville to contend with its racist past.”
***
Something is dead wrong about a museum, which is by nature dedicated to the preservation of the past, even out of the general public view, instead participating in the destruction and rewriting of the past.
You know where they did things like that? The USSR, where art was harnessed to be a propaganda organ of the state, and every museum, gallery, orchestra and dance company was dedicated first to pushing forward the State’s narrative before anything else, and anything that didn’t do that was pushed into the background or destroyed. The world is damn lucky that Russia was able to rebuild the Cathedral of Christ the Savior that was blown up (!) to make way for a “Palace of the Soviets” that never materialized due to WWII. The world is also damn lucky that the Soviets were nothing if not practical, and repurposed most other buildings (including churches and synagogues) rather than destroying them outright, and still didn’t quite dare to destroy things like the tomb of St. Alexander Peresviet (maybe useful as a nationalist hero) or the relics of St. Seraphim of Sarov (though they hid them away for a time). Otherwise, the physical link to all that history would be lost.
Know where else they did things like that? Reformation England under the bigoted rule of Henry VIII and later Cromwell. You can still go to Canterbury Cathedral, but you can’t see the jeweled shrine of St. Thomas Becket. In fact I think the only one of those shrines that didn’t get trashed was the one of St. Edward the Confessor, which no one was brave (or hateful) enough to destroy, and still rests in Westminster Abbey. Know where they’re doing things like that now? Afghanistan under the Taliban, and up until recently the parts of Iraq that were controlled by ISIS.
This won’t be the first, you mark my words. I really don’t like the idea of every city now raising honors to George Floyd as almost all of them did to MLK, who was far more deserving, obviously, I’m also going to be very disgusted if statues of Columbus, some raised by Italian-American communities by public subscription and donation as a thank-you to the communities where they got their start, begin to be melted down and reforged into either apologetic native statues or statues from the new pantheon of martyrs. Continue reading →
After posting Jerry Herman’s insidiously cheery Christmas ditty from “Mame,” “We Need A Little Christmas” yesterday, the earworm kept me awake much of the night but with different lyrics. Consider this post as an exorcism of sorts…
Dust off your values Revue those handy, dandy Pillars of Character! Spruce up your conscience You may get mocked by some but be a patriot now… For we need a little ethics, right this very minute Finding truth is tricky for the media will spin it Yes, we need a little ethics, right this very minute
When they intimidate a jury, let’s help the jurors not to worry…
Re-read old Plato! Make sure that Golden Rule is on your mind again; Don’t be a weenie… Don’t ever ask forgiveness when you’ve done nothing wrong!
For life’s grown a little rougher, grown a little meaner So we must be all tougher while we keep our tactics cleaner With our arguments put forward with a civil, fair demeanor We need to sing this ethics song.
So no rationalizations and no “Everybody does it” And no “tit for tatting” payback: you know why, and it’s because it makes society turn rotten…let’s all find the rot and pause it. We need a little ethics now!
When I first posted this, I reported that the festive scene was from Hamilton, Ontario, and current. I had two sources for that, and this wasn’t exactly worth my time to do a full-fledged investigation, especially since the ethical issues are identical whether the locale is Canada or Krakow. Commenter Edward, below, traced the photo to Tyumen, Siberia, and at least six years ago.
It is still more puzzling than the usual Christmas decorations gaffe. One could imagine a single sleepy city bureaucrat missing the obvious phallic nature of the design, but how many city employees had to pass on the lights to get them to the street?
Was that design really innocent, as some wags are questioning? It’s another Hanlon’s Razor situation, no? Yet wouldn’t a diabolical sex-obsessed designer assume that the attempt at subversion would be caught long before his joke, or whatever it is, ever reached execution? Was this a case of someone deciding, “Hell, we paid for the damn things, let’s just use them”? Or “Maybe nobody will notice!”?
