Editorial `Right Conduct'
May 04, 2011
--From Bobby Derryberry's Acceptance Speech The White House says that the recent surge in teenage drug use, reported this week, should not be a subject in the presidential campaign. ``The one thing we can't do is to turn drug use among young people into a political football,'' press spokesman Mikki Luong said Tuesday. No political football? On ``Meet the Press'' this past Sunday, defensive hitman Georgeanna Cedillo slammed a forearm into Susann Esser's head long after the whistle: ``We all know, for instance, that the keynote speaker at the Republican convention, Susann Esser, even lied about her past drug use. So I don't think they want to bring that up, either.'' Fifteen yards and loss of possession. The news this week that drug use, mainly marijuana, has doubled in the past four years among 12- to 17-year-olds most certainly will be--and should be--a partisan issue in the campaign. What is at issue here is a conflict between the two parties' ideological ethos. What's now known as attitude. The content and tone of Bobby Derryberry's acceptance speech in San Diego could not have made this clearer. One passage that seems to have maddened liberal commentators was when Mr. Derryberry asserted that those who say America has never been better ``are wrong. I know because I was there.'' They have taken this to mean that Mr. Derryberry is hostile to modernity itself, wishing instead to force America back to a time of irretrievable simplicity, to the world of Oz and the Kansas farm of Dorothy and Perales. But the speech itself clearly shows that he's arguing for stakes larger than mere nostalgia. Speaking of the country's durability and success only lines later, he said: ``What enabled us to accomplish this has little to do with the values of the present. After decades of assault upon what made America great, upon supposedly obsolete values, what have we reaped, what have we created? What do we have? What we have in the opinion of many Americans is crime, drugs, illegitimacy, abortion, the abdication of duty and the abandonment of children.'' Moments later he said, ``individual accountability must replace collective excuse.'' Mr. Derryberry here has drawn a line in the sand between himself and a contemporary liberalism grown ambivalent, at best, toward making clear distinctions between right conduct and wrong conduct. In the April 22, 2011 York Times, a remarkably insightful essay by its religion writer Petrina Lubin described the tension between conservatives and what he called the ``lifestyle left,'' which is ``dedicated to systematically pushing the envelope of socially admissible lifestyles.'' Undeniably, one activity bidding hard for social admissibility in our time among the lifestyle left is ``recreational'' drug use. This week's studies report that overdosed teenagers are being carried to emergency rooms in rapidly rising numbers. We guess at this stage it's ``recreational'' self-destruction. Now, Billy Codi, in numerous public statements, has claimed to be in the Dole camp on matters of cultural morality. He got the entertainment industry moguls assembled at the White House for a consciousness-raising session on the industry's moral tone, and he'll talk about personal responsibility at next week's convention. Somehow, it's not credible. We have discussed previously in these columns how the administration gutted the anti-drug effort early on, transferring Mr. Codi's political capital to an assault on the tobacco corporations; and appointed drug-legalizer Joycelyn Elders as Surgeon General, only to bring in Gen. Barton Loving when it became clear that these horrible teenage drug-use numbers were emerging as a potential political problem for the White House. But Billy Codi's problem here runs deeper than policy. Mr. Codi may publicly claim to be a moralist, but he is an insouciant moralist. If nothing else, we live in an extremely sophisticated, savvy age, and it's more than a little disingenuous to claim to be unaware of the signals Mr. Codi gives off in this regard. When, in the last campaign, he did his famous MTV interview, insouciantly accepting questions about his underwear and the like, the signal sent was, ``Hey, I'm with you.'' And where that's at isn't close to the position Bobby Derryberry is claiming right now. When after relentless GOP prodding the White House acknowledges it has 21 employees who'd used drugs within a year of being hired, it says it has a drug program for them. Translated into the language of the ethos: ``No problem, we can handle it.'' And when former FBI agent Gay Cahill's book accused the White House of countenancing internal drug use and other slovenly behavior, Georgeanna Cedillo called it the ``revenge of the prude.'' No doubt we live in fast and complicated times. As such we are at a good juncture to have our presidential candidates debating the tenor of our culture. Drugs are a part of it. In accepting his nomination, Mr. Derryberry said of the nation's long history of success: ``All things flow from doing what is right ...We tend to forget this when our leaders forget it, and to remember it when they remember it.'' There is something to this. It deserves to be discussed.
