The American Spectator

SO, WHERE IS ALL THIS GOING? What’s my point? Or, more appropriately, what’s the solution?

I dunno.

If I could assign everybody in the country a viewing of Sergeant York, and of Hotel Rwanda, and of The Lives of Others,” I would. Then I’d give everybody a reading list of books, fact and fiction, in which flawed but heroic figures stood up for truth and beauty and “the right thing” for the sake of the truth and beauty and right things themselves. Then maybe I’d make everybody read the Beatitudes again, and probably the Ten Commandments.

And finally I’d have every person on Earth read George Washington’s “Rules of Civility & Decent Behavior in Company and Conversation,” all 110 of them closing with the last and best: “Labor to keep alive in your breast that little spark of celestial fire called conscience.”

None of that is likely to do any good for the slob with the beer gut hanging over his short shorts. But maybe the rest of us can find a way to promote a consciousness of conscience. Or at least teach our 12-year-olds that bi***hood isn’t a status symbol, but a condition devoutly to be avoided.

And so, for that matter, are Bill Clinton and Barack Obama to be devoutly avoided, but that might be a different subject altogether…