“Macbeth”

From The Ethics Alarms Signature Significance Files: Andrea Mitchell’s Idiotic Tweet

/ Jack Marshall / 26 Comments

Mtchell tweet

No Andrea, you arrogant, incompetent, disrespectful partisan fool: it’s Shakespeare, from one of the Bard’s most famous and best known tragedies, “MacBeth,” and perhaps the best known speech from that play, by MacBeth, in Act 5 Scene 5.

There would have been a time for such a word.
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

Continue reading →

From The Ethics Alarms “Deceit Is Lying, And Stop Saying It’s Not!” Files: Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred Is An Ethics Dunce, So Is Craig Calcaterra, And Since They Are Both Lawyers, They Should Know Better

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

My goals are modest. Before I die, I would like to be able to say that my cyber-output on ethics accomplished a few basic things. One of them is a greater public understanding that deceitful statements—you know, like “I did not have sex with that woman,” or my recent favorite, knife-murderer O.J. Simpson saying  at his parole hearing, “I’m in no danger to pull a gun on anybody. I’ve never been accused of it. Nobody has ever accused me of pulling any weapon on them”—are lies. Not “technically true,” not “lawyerly phrasing,” but lies. Yesterday one lawyer who should know better incorrectly told his readers than another lawyer who engaged in deceit wasn’t lying. I’m sick of this.

I’m sure most of you don’t know or care, but the sad Miami Marlins, the National League baseball team recently taken over by a group headed by former Yankee shortstop Derek Jeter, has been selling and trading off its best players to pare expenses to the bone. This is a long-term strategy called “tanking,” in which a team rebuilds by playing horribly and getting high draft choices for a few years, eventually building up a young, cheap talent base of a winning team. A team’s fans tend to despise this approach, and Marlins fans more than most, since this is the third mass sell-off in the team’s short and ugly history.

MLB commissioner Rob Manfred appeared on Dan LeBatard’s ESPN radio show yesterday to discuss the most recent recent Miami fire sale.  LeBatard asked Manfred directly if he was “aware of Jeter’s plan to trade players and slash payroll.” Manfred ducked and weaved, and said, “We do not approve operating decisions by ownership, new ownership, current owners or not, and as a result the answer to that question is no.”

LeBatard called  this a lie, responding, “You can’t tell me you’re not aware of this…were you aware of this?”  Manfred then said, “No, we did not have player-specific plans from the Miami Marlins or any other team . . .” He also said that the league did not see a payroll plan from the Marlins “until two days ago.”

Yet  the Miami Herald reported after the interview:

A source directly involved in the Marlins sales process, after hearing the Le Batard interview, said, via text: “Commissioner said was not aware of [Jeter] plan to slash payroll. Absolutely not true. They request and receive the operating plan from all bidders. Project Wolverine [the name for Jeter’s plan] called on his group to reduce payroll to $85 million. This was vetted and approved by MLB prior to approval by MLB. Every [Jeter] investor and non investor has the Wolverine financial plan of slashing payroll to $85 million. Widely circulated.”

Here NBC baseball blogger Craig Calcaterra, formerly a practicing attorney, and thus accorded some credibility on such topics, wrote, Continue reading →

The Ethics of “Improving” Mark Twain

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

From Publishers Weekly:

“Mark Twain …defined a “classic” as “a book which people praise and don’t read.” Rather than see Twain’s most important work succumb to that fate, Twain scholar Alan Gribben and NewSouth Books plan to release a version of Huckleberry Finn, in a single volume with The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, that does away with the “n” word (as well as the “in” word, “Injun”) by replacing it with the word “slave.”

“This is not an effort to render Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn colorblind,” said Gribben, speaking from his office at Auburn University at Montgomery, where he’s spent most of the past 20 years heading the English department. “Race matters in these books. It’s a matter of how you express that in the 21st century.”

No law can stop Gribben and NewSouth from doing this vandalism to Twain’s classics. The two books are firmly ensconced in the realm of the public domain: no longer subject to copyright,  Huckleberry Finn and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer can be published in Pig Latin or with all the characters transformed into Martians. Still, it is wrong, obviously wrong and inexcusably wrong, and the most responsible thing any of us can do in the name of respect for literature, authors, American history, and education is to say so as vociferously as possible in as many ways and media as possible, so no misguided, politically correct fool will ever be tempted to do anything like this again. Continue reading →

Ethics Hero: Campbell Brown

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Almost nobody is ever fired anymore. Obviously sacked Presidential staff, agency heads and Cabinet officials announce that they are leaving to “pursue other opportunities” or to be with their families. (Recent glaring example: Desiree Rogers, who “resigned,” just coincidentally after being instrumental in allowing two gate-crashers into a White House star dinner.) Nobody believes it, of course. The same is true of actors fired from movies, TV shows, and plays for being wrong for their parts or just impossible bt work with, who then announce that it was a “mutual decision.” All of this is intended to avoid the stigma of losing a job because, well, the individual just wasn’t delivering as hoped or promised. It doesn’t work, of course: nobody is fooled, but the charade simply adds to the public belief, increasingly justified, that everyone lies, all the time.

So although Campbell Brown’s stark honesty about why she is leaving her low-rated CNN show shouldn’t be anything special, it is. Continue reading →