tardiness

Ethics Dunce: Dwayne Johnson, a.k.a. “The Rock’

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

“The Rock,” as actor Dwayne Johnson bills himself, was scheduled for a paid and advertised appearance before a paying “Wrestlemania” event. Admittedly, anyone who pays to see a farce like “Wrestlemania” is one who is fated to be “soon parted” from his money anyway, but nonetheless: Johsnon was two hours late showing for his gig. Unless one is a victim of a terrorist attack or suffers a ruptured aneurysm, there is never a good excuse for being two hours late to any professional appointment (for that matter, any private social engagement either).

As discussed in January when superannuated pop diva Madonna pulled this stunt, for some reason entertainers seem to think they have dispensation to behave like this. A lawyer who is two hours late for a trial is likely to be held in contempt. If I’m two hours late for a seminar I’m scheduled to teach, even once, I’m out of business. One time, in a play I was directing, the star was one hour late for pre-show call, then showed up 15 minutes before curtain. I told him to go home, that his understudy would play his part than night and maybe permanently.

But “The Rock’ decided that the correct response to the well-deserved booing he received from the crowd when he deigned to appear was to bathe himself in attitude, shift focus to a local football hero’s travails, and show no contrition whatsoever. I get it: he was playing a part, as behaving like an asshole is a long-observed staple of the professional wrestling world, and “Never apologize, it’s a sign of weakness,” John Wayne’s credo in “She Wore a Yellow Ribbon,” later adopted by “NCIS” tough guy Jethro Gibbs ( Mark Harmon) as one of his “rules,” is part of the act.

I don’t care. The two-hour tardiness wasn’t part of the act. Johnson’s one ethical response was “I’m sorry.” Whoever advised him to act like an asshole should be fired, unless “The Rock” really is an asshole.

[Note: WordPress’s AI bot believes I should tag this “book review.”]

Morning Ethics Warm-Up, 1/6/2018: The “Too Sick To Come Up With A Good Headline” Edition

/ Jack Marshall / 24 Comments

He’s lucky: he has hair...

Good Morning!

1 A solution to a perpetual problem. I do the mandatory introduction to legal ethics for two jurisdictions. Both are early in the morning,and both have courts monitoring them, insisting that to get credit, attendees must be present for every second of the course. The problem: late arrivals. One of my jurisdictions had a tendency to let late-comers in if it’s just a few minutes, but sometimes it gets ridiculous. Once the line is blurred, when does it get hard again? I have sen the administrators tell a lawyer that she is absolutely the last one who will get a break, only to see another late comer burst through the door panicked, upset, and with a doozy of an excuse…and then another, and another. This is especially ironic because lawyers are ethically required to be on time to court, or else.

In my other jurisdiction, they deal with the problem by absolute enforcement. 30 seconds late, and you have to come back next month. It doesn’t matter why, it doesn’t matter where the lawyer came from (one had flown in from Seoul and was two minutes late). If you arrive after the doors are closed at 9 am sharp, you can’t get credit. This, as you might imagine, often sparks tantrums, tears, threats, and “Do you know who I am?” One furious attendee actually cast a curse on every bar employee in sight. I’m talking about a real curse, right out of the movies, pointing and chanting. Some months we have had more than ten latecomers in the lobby, acting like an angry mob, and threatening a riot.

This jurisdiction has solved the problem by recently telling all who need the course on the bar website and  in email messages that the program begins at 8:30 am, when it really doesn’t. In other words, the solution is a lie: if someone arrives at 8:59, there’s no problem.

Is this ethical?

2. Oh, this was obviously going to be an ethics rain wreck long ago. AG Sessions announced that the Justice Department would not be following the Obama Administration’s policy regarding federal anti-pot laws—which is to say, it would not signal that it wouldn’t enforce the law. As a result,  Corey Gardner, Republican Senator from happily stoned Colorado, announced that he would block any appointments to Justice until the Department charged with enforcing laws agrees to stop enforcing laws. What Sessions did is not the draconian reversal it has been represented as by the Angry Trump Hate Mob, Stoner Chapter. Read the order from Sessions here.

Never mind. Following the lead of California, which has officially announced that it will encourage breaches of the immigration laws, now Colorado wants to impede the functioning of national law enforcement to force the federal government to let another state veto drug laws. This is what we call “a dangerous and irresponsible trend.”

3.  The Tragedy of Joanie Cunnningham. The New York Times Magazine ended the year with biographical sketches, including the sad story of Erin Moran, aka Joanie Cunningham on “Happy Days,” who died of cancer in 2017. It’s an all-too-typical story of a child star with a dysfunctional family who grew up on a set without ever receiving the parenting and support she needed to be able to become a functioning adult. I knew about Moran’s problems after the show ended; I did not know that her bitterness about her fellow cast members stemmed from her feelings as a child that her TV family was a substitute her real family, and that they failed her. Of course, the Cunninghams, Fonzie, Ralph and Potsie had no duty to become Moran’s surrogate family, but I am not surprised that a child actor would feel this way, especially one who was  being neglected and mistreated at home the way Erin Moran apparently was. Interestingly, child actor advocate Paul Petersen has said that his TV mom and dad, Donna Reed and Carl Betz, did act as his surrogate parents in important and beneficial ways.

I continue to believe that using child performers before the age of informed consent is unethical. Continue reading →

Mayor DeBlasio’s Unethical Tardiness

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

White RabbitSince he was elected to succeed Michael Bloomberg as New York City’s mayor, Mayor Bill DeBlasio has earned a reputation for chronic tardiness. He is routinely 15, 30, 45 minutes or more late for appointments and public events, and has shown little resolve to deal with the problem. The most recent instance of  the mayor operating on “DeBlasio time” came yesterday, when he arrived late for a memorial event  to honor  the 260 people who died on American Airlines Flight 587 thirteen years ago. This time he was only 20 minutes late-–not bad, for him–but it meant that he was late for the scheduled moment of silence, which occurred at 9:16 AM, the exact moment the plane crashed in Queens, on November 12, 2001. According to the family member who solemnly rang a bell to signify the moment, DeBlasio’s aides asked her to stall until the mayor graced the gathered mourners with his presence. He is being roundly slammed for the episode, in the public and in the local media.

DeBlasio had excuses, as the habitually tardy always do. Sometimes the excuses are legitimate, and may be in DeBlasio’s case: it doesn’t matter. If you are always late, you forfeit  the benefit of excuses, even legitimate ones. DeBlasio said his boat to the event was delayed by fog, and that he just didn’t get rolling fast enough.  “I was just not feeling well this morning. I had a very rough night, ” he explained. “I woke up sluggish, and I should have gotten myself moving quicker … just woke up in the middle of the night and couldn’t get back to sleep and I felt really sluggish and off-kilter this morning.”

Literally nobody seems to be sympathetic. Wrote Ann Althouse: “He’s an idiot…He thinks people will have sympathy over his struggles with a “rough night.” 260 people died in a plane crash!” Continue reading →

Case Study In Conservative Media Bias: The Department of Education’s “Dear Colleague Letter”

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

corporal-punishment

Ethics Alarms devotes a great amount of commentary to the mainstream media’s left-leaning bias—as it should. The major news media sources in the U.S. have become untrustworthy, too often serve as willing tools of government, specifically Democratic Party-controlled government, policy, which is exactly the opposite of the role they are ethically obligated to play. The right-biased news organizations are just as biased but far less numerous or powerful, and have the unique disadvantage of being generally regarded as biased and unreliable because the mainstream media tells us so with great regularity.

Misleading news reporting is still misleading, however, and a recent example is the conservative news media’s characterization of the January letter that went out from the Department of Education and the Justice Department to school districts around the country regarding discriminatory class discipline. The letter (FULL TEXT here) describes various types of common discrimination, but the part of it that the conservative media has focused upon is its discussion of “disparate impact.” The letter says… Continue reading →

Justin Bieber’s Tardiness: Calling Card Of The Unprofessional Jerk

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Professional on the right, arrogant jerk on the left. Also, anyone next to Cary Grant looks like a troll...

Professional on the left, arrogant jerk on the right. Bonus: Anyone next to Cary Grant looks like a troll…

There is still some confusion how late pop sensation Justin Bieber was for a recent London concert. It may have been as much as two hours, and it may have been only 40 minutes. The ethical verdict on the conduct is the same, however: rude, disrespectful, irresponsible, unfair and arrogant…and inexcusable.

The tardiness is especially inexcusable because the singer didn’t even offer a plausible excuse or one that might prompt some sympathy. He was not kidnapped by terrorists, abducted by aliens, or cornered by a rampaging T-Rex from Isla Sorna. He wasn’t late because he single-handedly rescued a runaway school bus full of kids, or defused a ticking bomb in the London Tube. Justin Bieber was late because he’s an unprofessional jerk who knew that his fans would wait for him until he got there, and so he chose to to get drunk, or get laid, or sleep in, or play Words With Friends with Alec Baldwin, or whatever other selfish conduct suited him rather than meet his obligations as a performer. This is the Star Syndrome in its most obvious and obnoxious form. Continue reading →

Liz Taylor’s Ethical/Unethical Final Joke

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Liz's last laugh

Screen legend Elizabeth Taylor, who drove husbands, producers, directors and co-stars to distraction by her habit of being late to appointments. meetings and film sets, played a joke on her mourners when she arranged to be “late for her own funeral,” scheduling it to start 15 minutes after the announced time.

Anyone who plans a joke for their own funeral generally has my respect and approval. This one, however, is ambiguous as well as funny. Tardiness is disrespectful to those who have to endure it, and often is a sign of arrogance and lack of empathy. Movie stars like Taylor who keep crews and actors on the set fray tempers, inflate budgets and undermine shooting schedules. Being habitually late is being habitually unethical. Continue reading →

The Problem With Multi-Culturalism

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

One of many abominations we can blame on Jimmy Carter is the United States’ blessedly half-hearted embrace of multi-culturalism, which Jimmy and his acolytes believed was enlightenment from Europe when in fact it was a disease. This was linked to the ethical value of tolerance, which was in turn used to bludgeon into submission anyone who committed the politically incorrect crime of criticizing conduct that was antithetical to American values engaged in by citizens from other nations.

Civilization needs standards, and culture is the setting of standards, ethical and otherwise. Multi-culturalism is a compact oxymoron that makes society’s standards schizophrenic, impeding efficiency, fairness, and consensus about right and wrong. “Tolerance” requires acceptance of the intolerable, or in its most common permutation here, tolerating the intolerable practices that progressives would like to see established here, while somehow reasoning that other practices that progressives don’t admire shouldn’t qualify for “tolerance.” Continue reading →

Ethics Heroes: The Texas Commission on Judicial Conduct

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

Thank you, Commissioners, for avoiding the impulse to support a fellow judge, and standing up for decency, compassion, and common sense in the judicial profession.

In a display of arrogance, rigidity and callousness that has justly haunted her for three years, Sharon Keller, the Presiding Judge of the State Court of Criminal Appeals, told a clerk to close down the courthouse on the dot of  5:00 PM on September 5, 2007, knowing well that attorneys were rushing there to file a last-minute appeal to save a prisoner from execution. Once the doors were closed, there was nothing they could do, and their client, Michael Richard, was put to death that night. Continue reading →