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 91 november 21, 1998 These youngsters recognize that smart or powerful is not necessarily the same as good. L ike so many in our nation, I have found President Clinton’s personal difficulties, not to mention the intense public scrutiny of them, all too unsettling. I spend my time with the young. From time to time, when I can get away from my college responsibilities, I teach in an elementary school and a high school. I have been troubled by what I’ve heard from those youngsters of varying backgrounds. They, like the rest of us, have kept trying to make sense of this important leader of ours, a lawyer from an important law school and winner of an important award thattookhimtoanimportantuniversityacross theAtlantic.Hereiswhat I heard from a seventh-grade class in a junior high, all the youths about twelveyearsold,onthebrinkofadolescence.Iwastryingtoteach“current events,” and was having no difficulty getting a class to talk about our country’s present-day news. A usually perceptive youth who is normally quiet now talked and talked, a voluble response on his part to what he heard at home and in the neighborhood. “Ican’tbelievethisguyClinton,thispresident,”theladdeclaredamid laughs and murmurs. After encouragement by me to speak his mind (I had a tape recorder going), he offered a blunt, moral skepticism. “How 92  can a guy who’s got as far as he has, way to the top, be so dumb? He’s won the country, and he’s made a dope of himself. He may lose his job any day. He can’t control himself. All those brains and he ruins himself! It goes to show you, just because you get way up there you can get totally lost, so you go down the drain, and everyone’s watching.” In reply, a girl sitting two seats in front of this speaker speaks her mind: “He is just a wise guy—you can see it on his face. He smirks, and he thinks people don’t catch on. I feel sorry for his daughter, she seems nice. I wonder what she’s thinking—what she’d say if she was right here, with us? He’s a type, you know, the president, the kind of guy who hasn’t learned to grow up, to control himself—fooling everyone, but he fools himself, that’s what, and so it’s a big price he’s paying.” I hear more and more young Americans in their own thoughtful, provocative manner unpretentiously mixing moral and psychological analysis as they approach one riddle after another. I hear those youngsters say that smart or powerful is not necessarily the equivalent of good, that age and authority don’t always go with good judgment or self-control, and, not least, that adulation of a big shot can be dangerous. Hence the need, as one student put it, to “watch out if you start putting all your dough in some dude’s basket, and he goes and runs away, and you’re left with nothing.” After which he adds, “So you should go find some place to pray, and there you don’t bow before a politician who’s full of himself.” As I listen I feel sad for all of us in the room, for our country. I am annoyed later, as the boys mock the president with sexual language, mock his impulsivity and its satisfactions with tough street talk, and as the girls laugh at Monica Lewinsky, make fun of her office liaison and, indeed, summon a cynical, sexual language with respect to her pleasures and purposes. These crudities are in the minds of millions of us across this  93 land—jokes and more jokes as we try to comprehend a big story featured day after day in print and on videotape. “What do you think?” I was eventually asked by members of my class and fellow teachers in that school. I tried to be tactful and protested my ignorance of the parties involved, even as I was asked about them, their psychological nature, their mental life. I told the class, finally, that I agreed with some of what I’d heard them say, in class and out of it. I tried to expand upon “psychology,” on the way our passions overcome our common sense, our better judgment. I was, in fact, lecturing in what I hoped was a vernacular that was not academic or off-putting. I was trying tonodtotheirintuitionswhiledeclaringmymoralfeelings,myawareness of life’s complex and...

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