I don’t know why this particular op-ed brought the headline above vividly into my mind; it would easily have been dozens of other episodes. But as I was reading the standard issue, progressive censor essay in the Times by Jennifer Finlay Boylan (not to be confused with the Boylan who first accused Andrew Cuomo of sexual harassment), my mind flashed back to turning on the lights late at night in the kitchen of an Arlington, VA. house I was renting with four law school classmates in my first year at Georgetown. There were more than a hundred roaches in that room, all over the counters and floor, and they scattered and vanished in seconds. We had seen perhaps one roach in our first weeks in the house. The sight made me physically ill. How did the owners allow such an infestation to happen?

Boylan is a left-wing ideologue who has been outed here before. She’s an English professor at Barnard who periodically spreads her bad ideas in the Times op-ed pages after injecting the poison into the brains of her trusting students. The essay in question was titled, “Can We Separate the Art From the Artist?,” and in it she raises, gingerly, seductively, the question of whether works of art should be torn down like Thomas Jefferson statues if the artists who created them behaved or thought in ways that the progressive thought police found offensive.

Boylan writes,

The past several years have seen a reassessment of our country’s many mythologies — from the legends of the generals of the Confederacy to the historical glossing over of slaveholding founding fathers. But as we take another look at the sins of our historical figures, we’ve also had to take a hard look at our more immediate past and present, including the behavior of the creators of pop culture. That reassessment extends now to the people who wrote some of our best-loved songs. But what to do with the art left behind? Can I still love their music if I’m appalled by various events in the lives of Johnny Cash or Elvis or Jerry Lee Lewis? Or by Eric Clapton’s racist rants and anti-vaccination activism?

Of course, there is no easy answer here.

Of course there damn well is; Boylan and her censoring, culture-strangling fellow bullies just refuse to acknowledge it. The ideas, innovations and artistic creations that have advanced society, human knowledge and inspiration remains exactly as valuable and deserving of honor, circulation and, often, immortality regardless of the personal transgressions of the thinkers and creators. Frankly, I’m sick of writing about this topic and even got bored wading through my own posts about it. Here: in this one about Disney World denying the worth of Bill Cosby’s contributions to humor and entertainment because he is a rapist, I begged,

Stop airbrushing your history, your heroes, your geniuses and your trailblazers, America. It is wrong—dishonest, incompetent, unfair, irresponsible, destructive….and so, so short-sighted and stupid.

It is particularly destructive in the field of popular music, because musicians, like comedians, are typically maladjusted social misfits who are too often unfit for civilized society when they aren’t doing what they are best at. Boylan’s totalitarian reasoning leads directly to bad art by politically-approved artists supplanting transcendent art by creeps. And people like her really and truly believe that’s the better choice. Continue reading →

In Minnesota on November 5, 1862, more than 300 Santee Sioux were sentenced to hang for their part in an uprising that was justified by outrageous mistreatment by the U.S. government. A month later, President Abraham Lincoln commuted all but 39 of the death sentences and granted a last-minute reprieve to one more, but the other 38 were hanged on December 26 in the largest mass execution in our history. This, of course, makes Abe a racist and a purveyor of genocide, so that memorial in Washington just will have to be blown up, that’s all. Fanaticism doesn’t do nuance, or even utilitarianism. But as Ethics Alarms explained here, Lincoln had a civil war to win in order to re-unite the nation and end slavery. The Sioux were collateral damage in a very difficult trade-off but an unavoidable one.

1. In coincidental ethics news relevant to the above...An Oct. 27 New York Times story , perhaps motivated by the fact that Kamala Harris got her law degree from the school, revealed Serranus Clinton Hastings role in Native American massacres during the late 19th Century. Somehow, either the University of California’s Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco’s administrators and donors weren’t aware of their institution’s founder’s sordid history, or chose to ignore it. Now they want California lawmakers to change the school’s name. A press release explained that the Hastings name “is written into state law” and a name change requires legislation, the press release said.

This is called “restorative justice.” But the school also owes its existence to Hastings, who donated $100,000 to start the law school in 1878. Hastings was a politician, lawyer, landowner and California’s first chief justice. What Hastings donated is worth between $2,836,711.48 and $39,924,610.20 today, depending on what standard you use, but whatever it’s worth, Hastings gave a lot of his money to establish the law school. Where’s his justice? The University and its law school graduates have benefited from his generosity greatly, indeed existentially, but the reasoning is that his misdeeds unrelated to the school justify its taking his money and explicitly dishonoring him. This is exactly the logic being used to justify airbrushing Thomas Jefferson out of our history.

2. More on the unacceptable failure of pollsters: In a column for NJ.com, pollster Patrick Murray says that he “blew it” and expresses his own doubts about whether election polls now do more damage than good.

“The final Monmouth University Poll margin did not provide an accurate picture of the state of the [New Jersey]governor’s race,” he writes. “So, if you are a Republican who believes the polls cost Ciattarelli an upset victory or a Democrat who feels we lulled your base into complacency, feel free to vent….I owe an apology to Jack Ciattarelli’s campaign — and to Phil Murphy’s campaign for that matter — because inaccurate public polling can have an impact on fundraising and voter mobilization efforts. But most of all I owe an apology to the voters of New Jersey for information that was at the very least misleading.”

In related news, Ciatarelli is refusing to concede, though the election has been called for incumbent Murphy.

Murray concludes that it might be time to quit polling. “Some organizations have decided to opt out of election polling altogether, including the venerable Gallup Poll and the highly regarded Pew Research Center… Other pollsters went AWOL this year. For instance, Quinnipiac has been a fixture during New Jersey and Virginia campaigns for decades but issued no polls in either state this year,” he says. “Perhaps that is a wise move. If we cannot be certain that these polling misses are anomalies then we have a responsibility to consider whether releasing horse race numbers in close proximity to an election is making a positive or negative contribution to the political discourse.”

Continue reading →