friends

Now, About Another “Old Friend,” However…

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Ironically, while I was feting an old friend over the Independence Day weekend, another old friend, this time a college classmate who roomed with one of my very close friends so I spent quite a bit of time with him, used Linked-In to promote a “Medium” essay he seemed to think was worth reading. Foolishly, I read it earlier this week.

Let’s call this old friend “Bobo.” Bobo has had some tough breaks, but he’s smart and resilient and landed on his feet. He did end up on my blacklist for what I consider to be a major breach of ethics and friendship. About 30 years ago Bobo reached out to me when he was visiting D.C. and said he wanted to get together to catch up. When we did meet, he pitched me on a ski resort he worked for as the head of marketing, complete with a promotional package. The meeting had nothing to do with “catching up”: Bobo was using our past relationship to get a contract from the organization I was working for at the time.

The next time he was in town and called me, I ignored him.

The Medium essay was as good an example of Trump Derangement and progressive indoctrination as one is likely to find. Bobo is based in Colorado, and is apparently a Boulder ventriloquist dummy with the Axis of Unethical Conduct drinking glasses of water while he mouths their message. This thing carried the obnoxious headline, “Is 850,000 Fireworks enough?“, so I knew what I was probably in for. Still, the essay was even worse than I expected. As I said, Bobo is smart, or used to be. But here is what he wrote, absent gratuitous quotes from John Adams, FDR, Dr. Mortimer Adler (?), and Thomas Paine, a pompous introduction, and shoehorned in at the end, another promotion of a project he’s involved in, and probably paid to push

Good ol’ Bobo! Here’s the guts of his essay:

“Nearly every day, our social fabric is being torn apart by executive orders, endless lawsuits, and odious Supreme Court rulings cheered on by the current administration. Let’s also put a bookmark in place to visit the fragmented, siloed media landscape that has amplified unimaginable lies, perpetrated false claims, and exaggerated ludicrous conspiracy theories while doing the bidding of dark money moguls and narrow corporate interests. These bad actors are ripe for prosecution. Criminal disinformation is rampant as they continue to mislead far too many Americans. Do I need to remind my readers that FOX News was guilty of knowingly lying to their listeners and paying nearly a $Billion$ fine? The more we learn about the fragmentation of our sources of information and loss of integrity in journalism, the uglier it gets. There is so much more to say about news deserts, food deserts, lack of trust, wealth disparity, homelessness etc. The meta crises are vast and complex… All this chaos is by design and funded by what many call the Big Ugly Bill — supporting the 800-plus pages of Project 2025. The primary architect and author of that project, Russell Vought, is currently the Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB).

“In 2017, at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) Steve Bannon declared that Donald Trump’s cabinet appointees were selected for the purpose of the “deconstruction of the administrative state”. And, that was his first administration. My last article in Medium addressed the issue of accountability — it fell on the deaf ears of Republican Senators….In Trump 2.0, think of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and Elon Musk. This all boils down to fewer public servants looking out for what people care about, like clean water, clean air, food safety, and better schools for our children. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

“…Wondering whether there was anything to be said that hadn’t already been said, concerned that more words would simply be adding trauma to an already deeply traumatized citizenry, I hesitated…. In 1993, we were celebrating our nation’s 217th anniversary of the courageous Declaration of Independence. I had recently returned from the United Nations’ Earth Summit in Rio, where I had been embarrassed by the proclamation of then President George H.W. Bush, whose first words to the assembly and the world were: “The American Lifestyle is non-negotiable”…

“…Celebrating our independence from tyranny and oppression is baked into our cultural heritage. Yet, in the midst of an historic heat wave, ironically fueled by more than a century of polluting our atmosphere, we have a President determined to “set a world record, like you’ve never seen before” by adding 850,000 bombs bursting in air this evening. Let’s find another way to celebrate that doesn’t add one more molecule of pollution to our precious atmosphere… before this administration literally burns down everything they detest.

“Most observers agree we have precious little time left to change; others are certain collapse is unavoidable. The optimists see this as a golden opportunity to redesign everything that is dysfunctional and destructive. A friend recently reminded me that HOPE is a VERB with its sleeves rolled up! With empathy and compassion, courage and heartbreaking bravery we can move beyond this moment of cruel havoc and selfishness…”

As you know, I have been regularly wrestling my fingers to the floor to avoid responding to such junk on Facebook and elsewhere, but this was too much, especially coming from a fellow Harvard grad. I wrote as a reply to his Linked In post that included the Medium link:

Since you asked for feedback, [Bobo], it’s bad form to complain about false media reporting and then to post “that FOX News was guilty of knowingly lying to their listeners and paying nearly a $Billion$ fine.” That’s not true in several ways. 1. Fox wasn’t found guilty of anything: there was no trial. 2. The issue was alleged defamation, not “lying to their listeners.” The First Amendment protects networks from being punished for lying; otherwise, MSNBC and CNN would be indicted every day. 3. There was no “fine.” A settlement is not a fine or even damages.

Spinning like that removes an essay from the realm of enlightening commentary to just partisan talking points. A collection of characterizations isn’t an argument. Which SCOTUS opinions to you consider “odious”? I read them all, and they were all legally sound, including the one that rejected the President’s EO ending birthright citizenship.

Meanwhile, how about that Graham Platner?

Linked In made me delete a several hundred words. What I originally had before the Platner sign-off was this:

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An Old Friend Comes To Call…

/ Jack Marshall / 26 Comments

I had a weird Independence Day weekend.

Six months ago an elementary and high school classmate whom I had not seen, spoken to or, frankly, thought about or missed in 50 years contacted me and said he and his family would be taking a cross-country road trip with his 86 foot long trailer in honor of the 250th Anniversary of our nation’s founding. For his D.C. stop, timed to take place on July Fourth, he was wondering if I could accommodate his monster vehicle. (He had checked my Alexandria home’s locale via Google satellite, and saw that there seemed to be a lot of space on my cul-de-sac.)

Let’s call him “Jeff.”

I said “Sure! It would be great to see you!” as a reflex, and promptly forgot about him as well as my commitment.

Well, Jeff arrived as planned after calling me for three days as he drove here. It was immediately clear that he expected me to be his family’s chauffeur, host and tour guide until they departed Monday afternoon. So I was. I took them to museums and D.C. area attractions. I accompanied them to restaurants. They left their trailer and knocked on my door early every morning—earlier than I would usually be up— assuming I was ready to start the day’s events.

This was a weird family. Jeff’s wife (his fourth, I learned) was an Armenian woman 25 years his junior who barely spoke English, and Jeff never indicated that he spoke her language. They had a delightful, happy four-year old boy (whom she dressed like a girl) whom the couple had adopted after his mother, Jeff’s wife’s niece, had been murdered by a serial killer.

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Today’s Trump Deranged Facebook Post:

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Again, such a post is signature significance for Trump Derangement. No one who isn’t clinically ill with this cerebral malady would ever post such crypto-libel. It might as well have read “I am not a cannibal” or “I am Marie of Romania.” There is no evidence, none, that Donald Trump is a pedophile, yet the Trump Deranged believe it anyway. What did Donald Trump ever do to justify this delusion? How does beating Hillary Clinton in the Electoral College translate into likely pedophilia?

Now, the long-time friend who posted this today is an actor, and a communist (he’s one of those who says, “Real Communism has never been tried”) but he’s not an idiot. He’s serious and informed. Yet I would no more post a statement on Facebook that is that batty than I would announce that I am the reincarnation of Mae West. My friend only did it, presumably, because he is certain that none of his friends will think less of him for doing so, and that most of them will agree with him.

Ethics question: Should friends let friends make fools of themselves even if most of the people in their bubble don’t realize it? Isn’t this like noticing that a friend has a big piece of spinach on a front tooth? The problem is that someone who posts something this stupid isn’t likely to listen to reason, logic, or rational analysis. Are friends obligated to try to alert friends when they are behaving foolishly in public even though the likely result is losing that friend?

From the EA Trump Derangement Files: [UPDATED!]

/ Jack Marshall / 53 Comments

The above ahistorical, moronic and infuriating cartoon was posted by a long-time friend and—believe it or not!—a tenured history professor at Georgetown. I am reaching the end of my patience with once smart people deliberately making less-educated people stupid, and for the second time this week (the first was prompted by this Facebook meme) I couldn’t wrestle my fingers to the floor fast enough and responded to my Trump Deranged freind, “Now, you KNOW this is untrue. I know it’s untrue, and I know you know it’s untrue.”

And this is Trump Derangement! People who actually have the education, wit and critical thinking skills to reject false framing and imaginary facts, yet who nonetheless betray their own principles and integrity in order to attack the President. I’m hoping Steve-O-in NJ will gift us with one of his excellent historical retrospectives about how the United States was, at great risk to FDR, aiding Europe in fighting the Germans well before Pearl Harbor, and what the U.S. sacrificed in lives and treasure to indeed rescue Europe as well as that civilization thingy. We also rebuilt Europe with the Marshall Plan and have been bolstering European military defenses ever since.

It’s bad enough for a UK cartoonist to issue that crap, but for a U.S. historian to endorse it? Truly despicable. OK, for me, long friendship plus Trump Derangement and aging brain cells equals forgiveness.

Barely.

UPDATE: There is hope! My old friend the professor reacted to my mild rebuke with a “thumbs up.”

Ethics Quiz: Victor Davis Hanson’s Head-Exploding Pro-Trump Essay

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

Over at RealClearPolitics, conservative scholar and pundit Victor Davis Hanson has an essay that I fervently believe is spot-on regarding what he calls “the Trump counter-revolution.” Of course I do: it tracks exactly with what I’ve been writing here for more than a decade, the primary difference being that Hanson’s views carry a lot more weight than mine do. The “money quote” in the essay, its conclusion:

Enraged Democrats still offer no substantial alternatives to the Trump agenda.

There are no shadow-government Democratic leaders with new policy initiatives. They flee from the Biden record on the border, the prior massive deficits and inflation, the disaster in Afghanistan, two theater-wide wars that broke out on Biden’s watch, and the shameless conspiracy to hide the prior president’s increasing dementia.

Instead, the Left has descended into thinly veiled threats of organized disruption in the streets. It embraces potty-mouth public profanity, profane and unhinged videos, nihilistic filibusters, congressional outbursts, and increasingly dangerous threats to the persons of Elon Musk and Trump.

All that frenzy is not a sign that the Trump counterrevolution is failing. It is good evidence that it is advancing forward, and its ethically bankrupt opposition has no idea how, or whether even, to stop it.

Oh, those words give me a BINGO! orgasm. I am now in the processes of fighting the impulse to post Hanson’s essay on Facebook, knowing full well that it will lead to mass fury among 90% of my friends, have me unfriended and cancelled, even cause some associates to pull out of a major theatrical project I’m involved in. Posting it would run directly into Cognitive Dissonance Scale reality.

And yet…I put up with far more triggering (for me) content from them literally every day without protest. I don’t cancel them or unfriend them, any more than I reject friends and relatives when they have contracted a pernicious disease. Do friends let friends remain tunnel-visioned, bubble-bound, biased and ignorant?

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day is…

Should I post Hanson’s essay on Facebook, knowing that it will change the minds of no one, except perhaps changing the minds of valued friends to conclude I am not fit for human contact?

R.I.P Walter “Rip” Claassen (April 6, 1962 – March 24, 2025)

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Ugh. The ethical dilemma of the impossible friend.

Today was Rip Claassen’s birthday, and also the day I learned that he had died of a massive stroke two weeks ago. Rip was involved in many aspects of my life: he was my son’s homeschooling tutor and his first employer, he was the costume designer that I turned to most frequently as artistic director of The American Century Theater, and I also hired him as a stage director on a couple of occasions. He was a very talented, sweet, kind and sensitive man.

He was also a very eccentric man with a lot of problems. That photo above is how he looked and often dressed in his later years, but Rip—and this not unusual for a costume designer—was likely to wear the damnedest things, including pajama bottoms, in public. He was, as he would usually tell you soon after he met you, what they used to call an Asperger’s sufferer—apparently Asperger was a Nazi or something, so the name has been “cancelled”; I don’t what the condition called now—which means that he was bad at reading social cues and tended to get obsessed with certain topics to the extent that he couldn’t focus on anything else. But Rip did a marvelous, courageous job of coping with and minimizing the damage caused by this malady, and I respected him for that. In fact, I urged him to market a service of helping parents of children with that autism-spectrum problem. (He never did.)

Rip bought a theatrical supplies business which he promptly drove into bankruptcy with his quirks. Grace and I loaned him a substantial amount to help him buy the business (okay, it was Grace’s idea), and it was money we never saw again. After that disaster, Rip started asking us for more “loans”—not just us, but my wife was generous and sympathetic to a fault. Eventually, it was the only reason we ever heard from him: he was desperate, the wolf was at the door, he was homeless, nobody would hire him. I gave Rip pro bono legal services and other assistance, but after handing over a couple hundred more dollars that we really couldn’t spare, I finally convinced Grace that we weren’t going to take his calls and emails any more. The Marshalls were having their own problems, and a friend in need who only contacts you to fill that need is a perplexing friend indeed.

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Ethics Zugzwang Exemplified: The “Friend in a Lousy Show” Conflict

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

I’d be surprised if I haven’t posted on this before, but a recent advice column article about the issue made me realize that the common conflict almost all of us with friends in the performing arts face routinely is as perfect example of the phenomenon I have termed “ethics zugzwang” as there is.

A theater reporter in the New York Times wrote a column titled, “My Friend’s Show Was Kind of Terrible. What Do I Say When I See Them? (You can always consider telling the truth, but it may not be advisable in this case.) [Gift link!] He breaks down the options as,

  • “Tell the truth, as a form of tough love.
  • Find something to say that is appreciative but also incomplete.
  • Lie.”

After reporting on interviews with performers and others in show biz, the reporter concludes that the most ethical option is “Lie.” He concludes, “So what to do? The consensus among those I spoke with is that the best way to be a friend is to be supportive. Leave the critical feedback to other people and other settings. ‘I think the move is always to lie,’ said the musical theater composer Joe Iconis . ‘Whether you enjoyed the show or not, if you’re actually a friend to the person who is part of the production, your job is to say ‘great job, fantastic show.’ I have never once appreciated a friend who came to a show of mine and offered unsolicited negative comments.’”

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A Few Random Thoughts Post Grace…[Expanded]

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

  • Friends are a problem for me, always have been. Someone wrote that friends come in and out of your life like waiters at a diner, and that no doubt accurate description has always bothered me. For a long time, I prided myself on keeping in touch with friends from grammar school, high school, college—and eventually lost touch with more and more of them, feeling guilty about each one. At the same time, I’m uncomfortable with overt displays of friendship, even as I tear up at the finale of “It’s a Wonderful Life.” My father, who had exactly four close friends over his entire life (not counting his best friend, my mother) was the same way exactly. So I can blame him.
  • It’s hard to gauge heartfelt condolences from the pro forma variety, isn’t it? I’m hearing on Facebook from some people who have mostly ignored me for years. I know this is a ritual of civilization that is important for re-establishing our commonality and bonds as human beings. Yet it sure seems weird that it takes a tragedy to activate the impulse.
  • One of my oldest friends heard about Grace and announced that he was going to drive down from Connecticut to help me cope with everything unless I ordered him not to. So he’s coming. I have a few friends who are like that, just a few. I suppose nobody has too many more, friends who come to one’s aid because they want to and not because they feel obligated.
  • None of the above in any way diminishes my genuine gratitude for the lovely and caring condolences (and even flowers!) I have received   from many of you on EA and privately. I have only met a handful of you face-to-face, after all—and one of the few I ended up banning from the blog. You have no obligations to me: the fact that you would express what you have touches me greatly. I am on the cusp of descending into an all-time orgy of second-guessing and self-doubt, but so far, at least, you have kept me out of the abyss.

Added: I just had my first conversation discussing Grace’s passing with someone who should have felt close to her after a life-long, supposedly close family relationship. I might as well have been relaying a baseball score. By any normal calculus, my wife’s death should have affected this individual nearly as much as it does me. Yet in our conversation I’d guess 25% of her contribution was laughter. (I’m not that funny.)

None of this was exactly a surprise to me after many years of interactions with this woman, but it does give me some insight into Grace’s seemingly inexplicable insecurity and anxiety. It took a great deal of restraint for me to avoid asking, “What is wrong with you?” I know—defensive reactions, everybody deals with grief differently, blattily blah (as Grace used to say).

I really don’t think she cares. She’s a sociopath.

An Ethics Puzzle From “The Affair”…

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

This would normally be an item in a Warm-Up or the equivalent, but I haven’t had time for them lately, so I’m going to let the issue fly solo.

In “The Affair,” the protagonist’s best friend assesses the problems that have befallen him as the result of said affair, and offers him $50,000. The adulterous husband (his wife and the friend has been an inseparable threesome in college) protests, but the friend, who is rich and just became richer (he’s a hedge fund whiz), insists. He has the money, and he won’t miss it, and what are friends for?

A couple years later, the protagonist, who has a best selling second novel and is suddenly rolling in money, fame and opportunities, has an argument with his old friend and benefactor at a party. The freind, insulted at his treatment, says, “You seem to forget you that I gave you $50,000!” He adds, “And you never paid me back!” The author protests, “That was a gift!” His friend responds, “Yeah, well you have the money to pay me back now!”

Thoughts:

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Mid-Day Ethics Tidbits, 11/4/2020: Sort-Of Post-Election Edition, With Yummy NONE Election-Related Items!

/ Jack Marshall / 36 Comments

1. Ay Caramba! Does anyone think that former Playboy model Eva Marie has a legitimate complaint because she was kicked off a Southwest flight along with her seven-year-old son for wearing this outfit on board?

Eva Marie

I don’t. She said she was “humiliated and embarrassed” when a Southwest Airlines flight attendant told her she couldn’t board looking like that. I don’t believe it for a second. She was seeking publicity. “When they threatened to remove me off the plane if I didn’t have a change of clothes, I felt completely humiliated, embarrassed and highly offended,” the Instagram influencer said of the incident. “I’m an A list member for SWA and have a credit card with the airline and I have perks that allow any person traveling with me to fly free because of my high status with the airline. So even as being a loyal customer with them, I felt like the other women on the plane were judging me based on my attire and they were saying my breasts are too large,” she added. “Well, that’s something I can’t help.”

No, you shameless jerk, they were judging you because you won’t observe even minimal social conventions, like not going out in public looking like a stripper mid-routine. If she is a “high status” member of the airline, then she is presumably aware that it has a dress code. It is overwhelmingly likely that she pulled this as a stunt to gain Instagram users  to “influence,” and exploited Southwest to do so.

The airline would be fair and reasonable to ban her from flying.

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