Word: moralizes
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Such are the scenes of morning in the scandal-scarred spring of 1987. Lamentation is in the air, and clay feet litter the ground. A relentless procession of forlorn faces assaults the nation's moral equanimity, characters linked in the public mind not by any connection between their diverse dubious deeds but by the fact that each in his or her own way has somehow seemed to betray the public trust: Oliver North, Robert McFarlane, Michael Deaver, Ivan Boesky, Gary Hart, Clayton Lonetree, Jim and Tammy Bakker, maybe Edwin Meese, perhaps even the President. Their transgressions -- some grievous and some...
America has been through these orgies of moral self-flagellation before. Sometimes the diagnosis was far more dire than the disease. Intellectuals reacted to the TV quiz-show scandals of the late 1950s with an outrage that now seems comically disproportionate to the offense; a prominent political science professor wrote at the time, "The moral fiber of America itself stands revealed." Just as the Iran-contra hearings began as a road-show Watergate, it is easy to find other 20th century parallels to today's eviscerated ethics. As New York Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan puts it, "If you want...
...contributed to the current mood of laissez-faire laxness. Of course, the President, who finds such difficulty in taking responsibility for the conduct of his own National Security Council, cannot be blamed for the indiscretions of a Democratic presidential candidate and the peccadilloes of a popular preacher. But moral leadership "should come from people in public office," argues Sissela Bok, a professor of philosophy at Brandeis University. "Aristotle said that people in government exercise a teaching function. Among other things, we see what they do and think that is how we should act. Unfortunately, when they do things that...
...President's personal decency is not in question. But nowadays, as he stumbles through answers about what he does not think he remembers and skirts the moral issues involved, he seems to have forfeited, indeed squandered, his role as the nation's moral father. Then too, he has helped set the tenor of the times: the man behind the bully pulpit must also be judged by the content of his sermons...
McFarlane's testimony last week conveyed a far different moral lesson: how easily America as a nation has come to accept public hypocrisy. With his uninflected answers and his stolid manner, his face puffy from strain and fatigue, McFarlane radiated the melancholy of moral responsibility. All his enemies were within, as a good soldier tried to square his own misguided conduct with internal standards of honor and integrity. In the depths of his soul, McFarlane had been tested and found wanting, and it was that shame he could not help conveying...