I haven’t been paying that much attention to the Bill Bennett “debacle”. Mainly because I don’t really care. I don’t like him. He is a moral conservative, a scolding conservative, and that is my least favorite kind of conservative. Andrew Sullivan wrote a great piece on moral scolds some years back. It’s a very good read. Articulates exactly my problem with the “Nobody has any moral compass these days” brand of conservatives.
This moral obsessiveness was the creation of Kenneth Starr and something far larger than Kenneth Starr. It was the creation of a conservatism become puritanism, a conservatism that has long lost sight of the principles of privacy and restraint, modesty and constitutionalism, which used to be its hallmarks.
This scolding, moralizing conservatism is one with a lineage; it is the construction of a cadre of influential intellectuals who bear as much responsibility as anybody for the constitutional and cultural damage this moment may have already wrought. And they will bear an even greater responsibility if the ultimate victim of this spectacle is the reputation and future of conservatism itself.
I read Bennett’s book The Death of Outrage (sorry Dad) when it first came out. I bought it because I was so embarrassed by Clinton at that time, I couldn’t help but see the squirming human beneath the Presidency, and it was horrifying. If the man bit his lip in regret one more time, I thought my head might combust. So I thought Bennett’s book might provide some “you are not alone” solace. Instead, I was treated to a diatribe about how our society has no more values anymore, how everything is going to hell, how nobody cares about the right things anymore.
Bill, when you say “the death of outrage”, you just mean that you don’t feel that people are outraged by the things that outrage you anymore. PLENTY of people still are outraged about stuff … but you disagree, and so they all must be idiots, and you are a wise sage on the mountaintop.
Also: don’t wag your finger. Clinton wagged his finger because he was trying to save his ass (I still cringe at the thought)…but Bill Bennett wags his finger to admonish me. He wants to REFORM me. Reform all of us. It’s obnoxious.
I’m just one woman, but I know that the people I know, my friends, my family, all care about living a good life. A life of integrity. They want their kids to grow up to be productive, happy. Some of us even go to church regularly! So … who the hell is Bennett talking about with such a blanket generalization?
I’ve never been a prissy girl. Or a prude. I have a free and independent lifestyle, I’m single, and have been so for longer than I care to admit. I have friends from all different walks of life. I’m an artist. I probably have more gay friends than straight friends.
So Bill Bennett is too sanctimonious for me, he makes way too many assumptions about the right way, the moral way, the right values to have, blah blah. I believe that there is such a thing as morality, morality that is not subjective and not relative. I agree with him. But yearning after the legendary good old days when children respected their parents and families ate dinner together and people went to church and had the “right” values seems foolhardy, ahistorical, and downright simple-minded. People in the 1940s had tormented family lives. You just never heard about it! Parents beat their kids. But nobody talked about it. Black people couldn’t vote. Talk to THEM about the Utopia of the 1940s.
Read Catcher in the Rye. Read Tess of the D’Urbervilles. Read Anna Karenina. Read Oliver Twist. There is no utopian past. It does not exist.
The “What has happened to the youth of today” crowd are unwilling to admit that they just don’t GET why everybody listens to Eminem and Britney Spears, that they no longer are cool, that they will never be cool again, and because they don’t GET it, then they must criticize it, because they do not understand it.
There’s no big mystery why “kids today” love Eminem and Britney Spears. Because they fucking rock. In interviews, she comes off as very sweet and down-to-earth, and young teenagers can see themselves in her. We, as adults, can be all cynical and above it all, but to a 15 or 16 year old girl, Britney Spears probably seems very cool.
And Eminem: I still have not recovered from the Eminem fever which took over my life starting last year. And if you listen to a song like “Till I Collapse”, and you can’t GET why teenagers listen to him, and lose their minds, and cry when they go to his concerts, then you have never been young. Or, if you have been young, then you have completely forgotten what it is like to be a lonely teenager, with an aching heart, trying to find your way in the world. Because THAT is who Eminem talks to. Directly. He skips the parents, and goes right down to the kids. And they KNOW that. They can HEAR that.
I get very impatient with people who scold me. Who take it upon themselves to scold the entire world. Whose reason for living is to scream at other people, “This world is going to hell in a handbasket!”
Dude, if you’d just stop screaming about that handbasket, then maybe your schedule would clear up a little bit, so that you could actually have some FUN. Why do you care so much about how other people live their lives? I care if people murder people, if people run a crackhouse on my block, I care if people break the law, I care if children are abandoned or abused. But I do not care what music they listen to. I do not care who they have sex with. I do not care if they are married or unmarried. I do not think that it’s my business to teach the rest of the world the proper way to live.
The part of me that loves a good joke can find the humor in Bill Bennett penning The Death of Outrage by day, pontificating on the evils of our morally bankrupt society, and by night…gambling MILLIONS of dollars.
“What is this world coming to? Does nobody have any sense of outrage about anything anymore?”
( “Can I have 300 dollars in change, please?”)
“There are no more values. All anybody cares about anymore is material possessions.”
(Ka-ching, ka-ching …)
“Bill, honey, time to go to prayer meeting!”
“Hang on a second….have to finish up this chapter.”
(“Yes, hi, 500 dollars in change, when you get a second…”)
I don’t really care what Bill Bennett does, and I don’t care whether you gamble or not … although Michele, over at A small victory, has a very good essay about gambling, and the effect it has on family members. It opened my eyes a bit. I haven’t known any real gamblers. This is very illuminating:
Gambling is not merely a sin. For something to be a sin, you have to subscribe to the religion that holds it as such. For some people, gambling is simply a vice. And for others, gambling is a disease, a home wrecker, a short trip off of a long pier in which the person who drowns is usually someone other than the gambler.
See, it’s not about the millions Bennett poured into the casino slot machines. Bennett is a man who preaches the sanctity of family. A person with a gambling problem cannot possibly practice that preachiness.
Gambling consumes time the way a twister can consume a town. Gambling is an acid that eats away at the very core of your family, destroying it from the inside out.
So who knows what is to become of Bennett, now that it appears he’s just another moral-scold who is also a raging hypocrite. There’s something fascinating, on a psychological level, about it all.
