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32 J. Value Inquiry 1 (1998)

handle is hein.journals/jrnlvi32 and id is 1 raw text is: A The Journal of Value Inquiry 32: 1-4, 1998. 1 O © 1998 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands. EDITORIAL Morality Play The United States has been remarkably successful throughout the century in exporting entertainment. If the product has seldom risen to the levels of high culture, it has nonetheless had enormous effect on popular culture. In music, musical theater, film, and television, American sensibilities and taste have had ubiquitous appeal. With the Presidential doings and undoings, however, we have a spectacle on a world stage that cannot help but capture a large audience. The elements of sex, power, intrigue, ambition, stupidity, duplicity, and hubris generate even more heat than the mix of the same elements in Gone With the Wind. Not that this is a case of life imitating art: Margaret Mitchell's characters were too concerned with a sense of honor to make that plausible. They were also too likeable. But the passions that brought world- wide audiences to the book stalls and the box offices are winning television ratings for a self-avowed worldly audience. It is all a matter of values. Scandal is common enough in politics. Arguably, more significant scan- dals have already reared up with the current administration in Washington, and more may surface. But the morality play being performed is astonishing. I do not mean the morality play of the leading figures and the assorted bit players, dramatic as it is. I mean the morality play countenanced by the audi- ence as the scandal unfolds, at least in its early stages. If polls taken shortly after the news broke are correct, many people explicitly believe that adultery is not objectionable, though lying may be, notwithstanding that adultery is a form of lying or that the televised comments made by the President at his own choosing would make lying an inevitable concomitant of any adulterous behavior. They also believe that sexual relations between the chief execu- tive of the government and a young intern are a private matter not subject to public sanction, though sexual relations between middling managers of corporations, not to mention chief executives, and entry-level employees are subject to public scrutiny and criminal sanction. Their attitude is much the same with respect to the Commander-in-Chief, though they do not demure at courts martial of officers for extra-marital affairs. As well, they believe that while the office of the Presidency affords a powerful role model, the President