May
13, 2003, 12:10 p.m.
Bennett and His Enemies
One
turns to his critics.
he
sad business of William Bennett requires discouraging commentary. There
is, first, the existential point, which is that Bill Bennett is through.
We speak, of course, of his public life. He is objectively discredited.
He will not be proffered any public post by any president into the foreseeable
future. He will not publish another book on another virtue, if there is
any he has neglected to write about. It is possible that the books written
by him on the subject, sitting in bookstores, will work their way to the
remainder houses. These are the consequences of the damage he has done
to himself. It could always be that his inherent talents will prevail
over undiscriminating fate. There are those who hope it will be so.
A second question
immediately arises: Has justice been done? Only in a raw parsing of the
term, because what he did can correctly be deemed a private act immune
from retributory sanction. It was wanton behavior, indisputably, but it
was his own money being dissipated. The manner in which this was done
raises eyebrows. If he had spent millions in decorating costs, his story
would merely have been the tale of one more spendthrift. There is something
about gambling when done other than on a scale associated with gin rummy
and bridge, that is inherently censorious. Sensible criticism focuses
on the unbounded character of his dissipation. When connected to stories
of arrivals at casinos at three o'clock in the morning, to pump the $500
slot machines until dawn, what is depicted is addiction at pathological
levels. The public thinks to reproach such conduct, not to okay it under
the libertarian rubric.
That said, one turns
to his critics. And the first question has to do with their startling
apparent indifference to the means by which the disclosures were done.
When Senator Gary Hart was photographed setting out with his mistress,
there was justification of a kind because he had specifically taunted
the press with the challenge to track him down and expose him. There was
nothing of that nature, that we have been told, that justified worming
one's way into the records of casino transactions involving William Bennett.
And that brings up the question: Who is handing down judgments against
the casinos in Las Vegas and Atlantic City that gave out such information
as his critics, in a different mode, would join in denouncing as arrant
invasion of privacy? Even brothel keepers are bound by tradition to keeping
the curtains drawn. Would Newsweek and The Washington Monthly
publish the names of patrons of a bawdy house? Perhaps they would on the
understanding that that which is revealed requires, by modern canons of
journalism, to be publicized. But are we expected to applaud those who
install secret cameras and listening devices in slot machines?
And the lesson to
take from it all is more than simple addition to the infinite databank
of sinners sinning. It is the evident delight taken by what has happened
to William J. Bennett. It justifies itself by spurting out that we have
here the simple joy of holding hypocrisy to the flame of public ridicule.
There's the procedural problem for Bennett critics who hold that private
behavior is private behavior and should no more justify the impeachment
of Bill Bennett than of Bill Clinton. But we cannot shake off the special
animus here. What some critics are saying is that Mr. Bennett is the nation's
premier secular catechist of virtue, and that the bigger they come the
harder they fall.
But that is a superficial
examination of the matter. At root is a protest against the very credentials
of virtue. And that isn't something being done by libertarians, it is
the creeping vine of philosophical libertinism. There are people out there
who don't want to say they are opposed to virtues, but who don't really
want other people around to postulate the need for virtue. John Adams
said 200 years ago that the American experiment would not succeed unless
the people cultivated virtue. To say such a thing in modern times is privately
disdained as officious piety. To have engaged in the practice of praising
virtue and to have profited from the commercial returns of doing so is
deemed doubly offensive.
Preachers should
limit their earnings (as Billy Graham once did, to $15,000 per year),
or give it all away (as Archbishop Fulton Sheen did). A critical community
beguiled by Playboy philosophy winces at declamations on virtue, and rejoices
in exposures of weakness — even if unprepared to judge what was done
as inherently reproachable behavior. What Clinton did, you see, wasn't
so bad, what was bad was getting caught; so with Bill Bennett, which loses
to those critics the moral leverage available to those who are prepared
to weigh these matters in terms of: virtue, and the absence of it.
<% dim printurl
printurl = Request.ServerVariables("URL")%>
he
sad business of William Bennett requires discouraging commentary. There
is, first, the existential point, which is that Bill Bennett is through.
We speak, of course, of his public life. He is objectively discredited.
He will not be proffered any public post by any president into the foreseeable
future. He will not publish another book on another virtue, if there is
any he has neglected to write about. It is possible that the books written
by him on the subject, sitting in bookstores, will work their way to the
remainder houses. These are the consequences of the damage he has done
to himself. It could always be that his inherent talents will prevail
over undiscriminating fate. There are those who hope it will be so. 
