[Michael F]

I just ran across this opinion piece by Stephen L. Carter that I found thoughtful.

Apologies for the paywall, but Bberg does give 10 free views a month.

[James Brancheau]

Hey Michael~ he lost me at The Usual Suspects, which is vastly overrated. And being quotable? An episode of Game of Thrones has more quotable material. Or Caddyshack. I think this idea of cancelling people out, or however he put it, stinks. And the Kevin Spacey/Michael Jackson thing doesn't really work. But, re Jackson, his overall point, I agree.

[Michael F]

Hey James,

I appreciated Carter’s honest wrestling with the issues. Even if I come down against cancellation, I do feel the shadow on the work. As Carter says, maybe the best we can do is make the decision personally, and just for ourselves.

M

[Julie Steiner]

Same story, different setting:

Why haven’t major institutions cut ties with the Sackler family?

Some snippets from the article:

No American family today has developed a larger gap between its dueling public personae than the Sacklers. On the one hand, they have cultivated a reputation as leading philanthropists and cultural benefactors. Their name graces a gallery at the Smithsonian and wings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Louvre and the Royal Academy. They’ve funded more than a dozen endowments or academic centers at universities and hospitals around the world, including research centers and facilities at Yale, Harvard, Tufts, Columbia, Cambridge and Oxford.

On the other hand, through a string of recent journalistic exposés and court proceedings, the Sacklers have emerged as the embodiment of corporate avarice, relentlessly pursuing profit at the cost of human life. They are the founding family behind (and have long constituted the majority of the board of) Purdue Pharma, the maker of OxyContin, the prime accelerant of the opioid epidemic. Since its introduction in 1996, the drug has generated some $35 billion in revenue for Purdue and an estimated $4 billion for the Sacklers. Last June, a lawsuit filed by the Massachusetts attorney general alleged that members of the family knowingly and aggressively pushed the devastatingly addictive painkiller onto doctors and patients, without telling them of the risks. They failed to alert authorities to widespread reports of abuse and even sought to shift blame for the opioid crisis onto addicts. “We have to hammer on the abusers in every way possible,” Richard Sackler, then president of Purdue, wrote in a February 2001 email made public in the Massachusetts lawsuit. “They are the culprits and the problem.” That same month, after learning that a federal prosecutor reported 59 deaths from OxyContin in a single state, Sackler wrote to Purdue executives: “This is not too bad. It could have been far worse.”

Activists have called on institutions that have received Sackler largesse to strip the family’s name from their buildings. A petition demanding that Harvard cut ties with the family has gathered more than 14,000 signatures. The mayor of Somerville, Mass., voiced support for this remedy on Tufts’s campus as well: “I think there needs to be a serious discussion about removing the Sackler name.” But as of now, no major institution has done so. (The most prominent institution to recently break ties with the Sacklers wasn’t a philanthropic entity but a financial one — a hedge fund they invested in.) It’s easy to understand this inaction as a sort of moral failure, and in the future, institutions should reckon with the message they would convey by accepting a Sackler donation.

The article points out that we've been here before:

As Anand Giridharadas chronicles in his book Winners Take All, for significant swaths of society, “after-the-fact benevolence” has come to justify “anything-goes capitalism.” We have embraced a moral system in which corporate benefactors contribute to social ills by “operational daylight” and then promote the good they do by “philanthropic moonlight,” as Giridharadas put it. Too often, the imperative for corporate social responsibility kicks in only after the profits have been made. The realms of capitalist accumulation and charitable redistribution are kept conceptually segregated.

There are moments in history when the contradictions between those two realms are too great to be ignored. During the first Gilded Age, for example, when an emerging corps of “robber barons” channeled industrial fortunes toward educational, religious and cultural institutions, “tainted money” emerged as one of the period’s most contentious moral issues. Workers, for instance, debated whether it was appropriate to patronize the libraries that Andrew Carnegie, whose fortune derived in part from ruthlessly breaking the unions at his steel mills, had constructed across the country. And in 1905, a gift of $100,000 from John D. Rockefeller to a Congregationalist missionary society sparked a widespread and contentious public debate about whether acceptance of the gift constituted an endorsement of the Standard Oil magnate’s ruthlessly monopolistic business practices. It’s not surprising that in this second Gilded Age, similar issues are arising once again.

[Allen Tice]

As to The Usual Suspects, I enjoyed Spacey’s role as Verbal at the time. Enough to buy the DVD. Raise five fingers everyone that remembers the meme “Who is Kaiser Soze!?” which saturated east coast high school and university talk for a whole year. Spacey was weird! Just like a super bunco artist needed to be. Not my kind of human at all, but there, voila, he was. Like in the zoo. I haven’t made up my mind about him. Nor shall I for a while. This is not a vote in favor of his offscreen deeds. I don’t at all like his recent attempt at an exculpatory YouTube video. So self-centered.

[James Brancheau]

It's just creepy, Michael, this kind of shunning. Anyone who commits a crime, esp of this magnitude, should pay for it. And maybe that's the genesis. That the privileged don't. But the art, the performances, shouldn't be, actually can't be, cancelled. And MJ is in a whole other criminal universe than Spacey. From what I know. Which could be wrong. But not being able to distinguish the difference is a problem. Maybe even scary.

Yeah I like Spacey in that too, Allen, but the movie hasn't aged well, imo.

[Michael F]

I saw this article about a week ago and have been meaning to post it re: the Sackler family's charitable donations.

Behind every fortune there is a great crime. -- (inspired by) Balzac