The politicians who preach morals to Americans, wrote H. L. Mencken in 1926, tend to be fanatics, not statesmen.
Boy, could we use Mencken these days.
The undermining of freedom in the name of morality, an old streak in American politics, is the fastest growing political movement of our time. It was honed by Richard Nixon, celebrated by Ronald Reagan, and the torch was recently passed to the movement's current reigning high priest, William Bennett.
Mencken might have tried to survive years longer if he'd known he could live to see the day when Wal-Mart shaped the content of American music and then received profuse thanks for doing so by people desperate to abdicate responsibility for raising their kids to somebody - anybody - who might take it off their busy hands.
Mencken lived to roast posturing and censorious politicians, especially the value-spouting sort. He would have drooled to write about William Bennett's transition from failed bureaucrat to modern-day moral crusader.
Mencken had few absolute articles of faith, but one of them was this: When politicians start talking morality, grab your wallet and your children, and run for your life.
Last week in The New York Times, Bennett co-authored an op-ed piece, with C. DeLores Tucker of the National Political Congress of Black Women, in which they celebrated Wal-Mart's right to "refuse to stock compact disks with lyrics and cover art that it finds objectionable." This, he wrote is "news worth celebrating on the popular culture front."
It's certainly good news for him. Bennett has ridden the morals-and-culture horse to become a multimillionaire peddling expensive books of moral tales for children. After reviewing movies with Bob Dole in the presidential election campaign, he's now the king of the talk show circuit, co-director of a group called Empower America, and said by political writers to be possibly jockeying into position for a run at the presidency in 2000.
If Bennett feels Wal-Mart should be free, he doesn't feel that way about MCA. The entertainment conglomerate is now owned by the Seagram Company, whose CEO, Edgar Bronfman, actually flew to Washington earlier this year to assure Bennett that MCA-owned Interscope Records (the label Bennett pressured Time Warner into selling last year) would put its albums through a "comprehensive review process" for offensive content.
But two of Interscope's current best-selling rap albums, Tha Doggfather, by Snoop Doggy Dogg and The Don Killuminati: The 7 Day Theory by Tupac Shakur (recorded under the name Makaveli) don't meet Bennett's standards of wholesome entertainment. He claims they glorify violence and degrade women. "When I saw this stuff," Bennett huffed this week to the Times, "I thought, 'He did not keep his word.'"
No mainstream journalist seems to have noted the inherent contradictions in Bennett's notions of corporate freedom - namely that companies should be free to ban stuff he doesn't like but not to sell stuff other people might like.
Here is a Menckenesque spectacle if ever there was one, one that captures the truly bizarre state of America's values battles. The heir to a liquor fortune and the architect of America's failed drug and public education policies are slugging it out over what kind of music should be created and sold.
This issue - culture and children - has become so loopy that all our conventional political wires seem to have been crossed. We're in a kind of social meltdown, rationality swept away by rhetoric, cheap values-talk mesmerizing journalists and overwhelming reality.
Boomers who once thought themselves revolutionaries are rushing to endorse ratings systems, and V-chip and blocking software, to sanitize their kids' culture. People who call themselves conservatives are happy to give giant corporations the right to make their cultural and moral choices. Liberals obsessed with free speech are happy to take it away from rappers. Bennett is eager to defend Wal-Mart's right to sell the products it chooses, but he doesn't believe Time Warner should have the same right to sell the rap CDs it chooses, or that TV networks should have the right to air the talk shows they want.
Since journalism has few working values of its own these days, it's happy to turn staggering amounts of airtime and newspaper space over to Bennett, who has become our modern-day William Jennings Bryan, once a presidential candidate and the lead prosecutor in the Scopes "Monkey Trial" of 1925, in which Bryan tried to jail a schoolteacher for teaching evolution because it conflicted with the Bible.
Under brutal cross-examination by lawyer Clarence Darrow, Bryan explained that he knew Darwin's theories were wrong because God told him so. Bryan sputtered inconclusively when Darrow asked if God might have spoken to Charles Darwin too.
The way it worked, Darrow explained to the court, was that God talked to Bryan, and Bryan told the world. The famous cross-examination, faithfully re-created in the play and movie Inherit The Wind, was one of the great blows on the side of truth and freedom in this century. But clearly not a lasting one.
Mencken, who covered the trial for The Baltimore Sun, presciently invoked Bennett when he wrote of Bryan: "What animated him from end to end of his grotesque career was simply ambition - the ambition of a common man to get his hand upon the collar of his superiors, or, failing that, to get his thumb into their eyes. He was born with a roaring voice, and it had the trick of inflaming half-wits. His whole career was devoted to raising those half-wits against their betters, that he himself might shine."
Those who argue that history repeats itself are on the money. Here we are at the end of the 1990s, surrounded by millennial techno-jabber from our gurus and political leaders, preparing to tramp across that bridge to the 21st century when we are, in fact, still slugging out the same fundamental issue debated in Dayton, Tennessee in July of 1925: Are we free to create, think, and decide for ourselves? Or must we submit to the arrogant and self-righteous notions of those who presume to know what is moral for us?
Darrow's lesson has been forgotten, but it's still good as gold. God talked not only to William Jennings Bryan, but to Sam Walton, and now he talks to William Bennett, who passes on to the rest of us what is good and virtuous and what isn't.
