Monica Hesse

Today’s Intellectually Dishonest Dobbs Leak Freakout: “A Lot Of Powerful People Seem To Have No Clue What Motherhood Means” (Washington Post)

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

You have to admit, the pro-abortion hysterics and fanatics are doing a bang-up job proclaiming their fury at the possibility that the U.S. Supreme Court may be about to strike down Roe v. Wade without making anything that hints of a good faith argument on the merits. The latest example of this massive exercise in “appeal to emotion” and “let’s keep the American public as dumb as we can, all the better to manipulate them” is an op-ed by Monica Hesse, the Washington Post’s resident gender bigot. Previously, Ethics Alarms had highlighted her fantasy that Mary, Donna Reed’s character in “It’s A Wonderful Life,” is the “real hero” of the classic (Right–she’s the one who gave up her chance at al education and a career to save her father’s rinky-dink savings and loan so Bedford Falls didn’t become a cesspool under the thumb of the richest and meanest man in town) and this article attacking the Trump White House Christmas decorations and using them to excoriate Melania Trump for existing, sneering that any one who referred to Trump’s First Lady as “elegant” meant it as a code word for “White.” Yes, she’s a race bigot too. I would no more have sampled a Hesse column in the Post than tried a fried centipede as a snack, except the Ann Althouse pointed me to it.

[A side note regarding Ann: she’s written 14 posts including the May 2 entry in which she reported on the leak and proclaimed the looming cancellation of Roe “a calamity.” She has never explained why she thinks it’s a calamity, although in 2006 she opined on what the results of Roe going down might be. She’s a law professor, and her blog has no borders, like this one, which is constrained to examine ethics only. Those 14 posts cover everything from her usual linguistic nit-picking to musing about the leak, but there is no explanation of the “calamity” verdict. That’s irresponsible, and, frankly, cowardly. But I digress.]

Here’s the crux of Hesse’s argument, if you can call it that: the supply chain-triggered shortage in baby formula shows how cruel and ignorant the Supreme Court majority is. She writes,

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Christmas Ethics Stocking Stuffers, 12/25/21

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

One of my favorite Christmas songs, introduced by one of my favorite singers…the remarkable story of “Do You Hear What I Hear?’, written during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, was last told in a  2018 Ethics Alarms post.

1. Because women and minorities must be the “heroes” of everything…Washington Post “gender” contributor Monica Hesse contributed a truly fatuous (but predictable) column yesterday explaining that Mary (Donna Reed) was the “real hero” of “It’s A Wonderful Life,” which  had its 2021 updated ethics companion published here on Christmas Eve. Hesse’s one use to society is to demonstrate repeatedly that if the only tool one has is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. All Hesse’s column shows is that she doesn’t understand the movie or its message despite claiming to love it.  George is the hero of the story, but he doesn’t realize it—that’s the point. Next on the hero standings has to be Clarence the Angel, who does stop George from killing himself, as well as teach him that that he hasn’t been a failure, the misconception that leads George to the bridge. Mary certainly does her part, but reframing the film as one centering on her is like  so many other such distortions during The Great Stupid: it requires woke biases to smother perspective, common sense and facts. Here’s Hesse’s whole case:

When, in one flashback, a market crash threatens to sink the Bailey Building & Loan, whose idea is it to donate George and Mary’s honeymoon funds to keep things afloat? Not George’s. Panicked customers are storming the lobby when Mary shows up with fistfuls of cash. When George wants to throw rocks at an abandoned house, it’s Mary who suggests they restore the house instead. The film’s final, triumphant scene is only made possible because while George’s genius plan to correct his uncle’s error involves jumping off a bridge for the life insurance policy, Mary is racing around town rustling up donations.

Well, A) the honeymoon money was the money George had saved, and Mary offered to give it up without consulting her new spouse: it wasn’t hers to give, as I noted in the IAWL post; B) calling Mary’s determination to renovate a derelict house “heroic” is quite a stretch, and Hesse’s representation of the scene is false. Mary never says she wants to renovate it; she says, “It’s full of romance, that old place. I’d like to live in it,” which sounds more like hyperbole than an expression of dedication to the cause of historic building restoration. Then she picks up a rock and breaks a window. C) Mary’s canvassing for cash would never have led to that grand finale if Clarence hadn’t stopped George from killing himself. Besides, most of Mary’s fundraising was unnecessary: all she needed to do was call up poor Sam Wainwright, whom she and George betrayed and mocked, and exploit his tenderness for Mary and inexplicable affection for George. Sam’s generosity made all the other donations superfluous.

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Morning Ethics Warm-Up, 12/1/2020: Satchel Paige Edition

/ Jack Marshall / 26 Comments

Satchel

Why Satchel Paige? The legendary Negro Leagues pitcher and member of baseball’s Hall of Fame once said, “How old would you be if you didn’t know how old you was?” Satchel wasn’t fooling: having played most of his career when blacks were blocked from the Major Leagues, Paige was still good enough at 42 to join the 1948 Cleveland Indians as a relief pitcher, and was effective enough to be contender for Rookie of the Year. Then he became the oldest pitcher to start a Major League game, shutting out the Boston Red Sox for three innings at the age of 59.

In my case, the answer to Paige’s question would be about 18, or perhaps 10. Surely not the age my arithmetic tells me, which is depressing and a little frightening. Every December first since 2009 has been a day with bad connotations: I found my father dead in his favorite chair that year, when I checked to see if he was going to have dinner with me as we had planned. This year there are two. Well, Dad soldiered on to have 19 more productive and mostly happy years after he reached my age, and he was being treated for cancer by than, and I’m not. There aren’t many ways I can top my father, but at least that’s gives me something to shoot for.

1. Wow. You don’t get to see such naked bias and hate just put out there in the media like this very often…Just think: a Washington Post editor okayed this article attacking the White House Christmas decorations and using them to excoriate Melania Trump for existing. How petty and ugly can a writer be and still get published? I guess it depends on whether or not your target is the Trumps.

The “money quote”: “[T]he defenders of Melania have always insisted on comparing her to her predecessor, Michelle Obama, and it became hard to believe that “elegant” was a code word for anything other than “White.” Melania is “elegant” because she represented a very specific kind of White femininity: silent, lovely, delicately fingering the ornaments that her staff had assembled.” The author is Monica Hesse, the Post’s gender writer. She is a biased, vicious, jerk. It is so obvious that Melania Trump could design Michelle Obama’s White House decorations and Michelle could secretly design the Trumps’, and Hesse would pronounce what she thought was Michelle’s inclusive and brilliant, and would condemn what she thought Melania created.

You know, pretty much the way her paper covered the Obama and Trump administrations.

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