Pubdate: Sun, 04 May 2003
Source: Slate (US Web)
Copyright: 2003 Microsoft Corporation
Contact: http://slate.msn.com/code/fray/theFray.asp
Website: http://slate.msn.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/982
Author: Michael Kinsley
Bookmark: www.mapinc.org/people/Bill+Bennett (Bennett, Bill)

BILL BENNETT'S BAD BET

The Bookmaker Of Virtues

Sinners have long cherished the fantasy that William Bennett, the virtue 
magnate, might be among our number.

The news over the weekend--that Bennett's $50,000 sermons and best-selling 
moral instruction manuals have financed a multimillion dollar gambling 
habit--has lit a lamp of happiness in even the darkest hearts.

As the joyous word spread, crack flowed like water through inner-city 
streets, family court judges began handing out free divorces, children lit 
bonfires of The Book of Virtues, More Virtuous Virtues, Who Cheesed My 
Virtue?, Moral Tails: Virtue for Dogs, etc. And cynics everywhere thought, 
for just a moment: Maybe there is a God after all.

If there were a Pulitzer Prize for schadenfreude (joy in the suffering of 
others), Newsweek's Jonathan Alter and Joshua Green of the Washington 
Monthly would surely deserve it for bringing us this story.

They are shoo-ins for the public service category in any event.

Schadenfreude is an unvirtuous emotion of which we should be ashamed.

Bill Bennett himself was always full of sorrow when forced to point out the 
moral failings of other public figures.

But the flaws of his critics don't absolve Bennett of his own.

Let's also be honest that gambling would not be our first-choice vice if we 
were designing this fantasy-come-true from scratch.

But gambling will do. It will definitely do. Bill Bennett has been exposed 
as a humbug artist who ought to be pelted off the public stage if he lacks 
the decency to slink quietly away, as he is constantly calling on others to 
do. Although it may be impossible for anyone famous to become permanently 
discredited in American culture (a Bennett-like point I agree with), 
Bennett clearly deserves that distinction. There are those who will try to 
deny it to him. They will say:

1) He never specifically criticized gambling.

This, if true, doesn't show that Bennett is not a hypocrite.

It just shows that he's not a complete idiot. Working his way down the list 
of other people's pleasures, weaknesses, and uses of American freedom, he 
just happened to skip over his own. How convenient. Is there some reason 
why his general intolerance of the standard vices does not apply to this 
one? None that he's ever mentioned.

Open, say, Bennett's The Broken Hearth: Reversing the Moral Collapse of the 
American Family, and read about how Americans overvalue "unrestricted 
personal liberty." How we must relearn to "enter judgments on a whole range 
of behaviors and attitudes." About how "wealth and luxury ... often make it 
harder to deny the quest for instant gratification" because "the more we 
attain, the more we want." How would you have guessed, last week, that 
Bennett would regard a man who routinely "cycle[s] several hundred thousand 
dollars in an evening" (his own description) sitting in an airless Las 
Vegas casino pumping coins into a slot machine or video game? Well, you 
would have guessed wrong!

He thinks it's perfectly OK as long as you don't spend the family milk money.

2) His gambling never hurt anyone else. This is, of course, the classic 
libertarian standard of permissible behavior, and I think it's a good one. 
If a hypocrite is a person who says one thing and does another, the problem 
with Bennett is what he says--not (as far as we know) what he does. Bennett 
can't plead liberty now because opposing libertarianism is what his sundry 
crusades are all about.

He wants to put marijuana smokers in jail. He wants to make it harder to 
get divorced.

He wants more "moral criticism of homosexuality" and "declining to accept 
that what they do is right."

In all these cases, Bennett wants laws against or heightened social 
disapproval of activities that have no direct harmful effects on anyone 
except the participants. He argues that the activities in question are 
encouraging other, more harmful activities or are eroding general social 
norms in some vague way. Empower America, one of Bennett's several 
shirt-pocket mass movements, officially opposes the spread of legalized 
gambling, and the Index of Leading Cultural Indicators, one of Bennett's 
cleverer PR conceits, includes "problem" gambling as a negative indicator 
of cultural health.

So, Bennett doesn't believe that gambling is harmless. He just believes 
that his own gambling is harmless.

But by the standards he applies to everything else, it is not harmless.

Bennett has been especially critical of libertarian sentiments coming from 
intellectuals and the media elite.

Smoking a bit of pot may not ruin their middle-class lives, but by smoking 
pot, they create an atmosphere of toleration that can be disastrous for 
others who are not so well-grounded. The Bill Bennett who can ooze disdain 
over this is the same Bill Bennett who apparently thinks he has no 
connection to all those "problem" gamblers because he makes millions 
preaching virtue and they don't.

3) He's doing no harm to himself.

 >From the information in Alter's and Green's articles, Bennett seems to be 
in deep denial about this. If it's true that he's lost $8 million in 
gambling casinos over 10 years, that surely is addictive or compulsive 
behavior no matter how good virtue has been to him financially. He claims 
to have won more than he has lost, which is virtually (that word again!) 
impossible playing the machines as Bennett apparently does. If he's not in 
denial, then he's simply lying, which is a definite non-virtue. And he's 
spraying smarm like the worst kind of cornered politician--telling the 
Washington Post, for example, that his gambling habit started with "church 
bingo."

Even as an innocent hobby, playing the slots is about as far as you can get 
from the image Bennett paints of his notion of the Good Life. Surely even a 
high-roller can't "cycle through" $8 million so quickly that family, 
church, and community don't suffer.

There are preachers who can preach an ideal they don't themselves meet and 
even use their own weaknesses as part of the lesson.

Bill Bennett has not been such a preacher.

He is smug, disdainful, intolerant. He gambled on bluster, and lost. 
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MAP posted-by: Jackl