THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, March 10, 1996 TAG: 9603120423
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J3 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BILL RUEHLMANN
LENGTH: Medium: 81 lines
So much rhetoric about morality, so little result.
See where William Bennett, former Secretary of Education and compiler of The Book of Virtue, was at Regent University recently for a seminar on ``Restoring Civic Virtue.'' He was for it. Meanwhile folks like Robert Dole and Rush Limbaugh are still informing me we need to clean up the movies and restore family values.
Both these guys have seen fewer films and gone through more marriages than I have.
I value the memory of an unimpressed uncle who once advised me, ``Son, when somebody starts talking to you about morality, reach around real quick and see if the wallet's still snug in your back pocket.''
So I admit to a certain crankiness when I find myself confronted with yet another overblown sermon, Integrity (Basic Books, 277 pp., $24), by Stephen L. Carter. He's the Yale law professor who wrote The Culture of Disbelief: How America and Politics Trivialize Religious Devotion. He was against that.
Even Carter starts out with a disclaimer: ``It must seem odd to find a book by a lawyer - still worse, a law professor - on the subject of integrity. So let me make clear that integrity is something I only think about, not something I exemplify. I strive toward it, as I am sure most of us do, but I do not pretend to achieve it very often.''
Pausing here. Wallet secure. Moving on.
No, it does not seem at all odd to find a book by a lawyer on the subject of integrity. What would seem really odd would be to find a short book by a lawyer on the subject of integrity. This one isn't, of course, and if it were cut by half, it would still be too long.
Carter's thesis is that living with integrity requires three steps:
1. Discerning what is right and wrong;
2. Acting on that;
3. Stating you are acting on that.
Christian martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer, among others, scooped Carter on all this some time back. Posthumously, Bonhoeffer's thinking appreciates. So does his prose.
Carter's, on the other hand, schleps along under imponderables of this order: ``Integrity is like the weather: everybody talks about it but nobody knows what to do about it.''
My integrity as a book columnist requires me to state that, when hurled forcibly against a living room wall, Carter's volume can have an impact. My copy of it certainly did. But when I picked it up again, it had an anesthetic effect.
I dozed and dreamed of lawyers running for office.
While Integrity drones along like a training plane at a high level of abstraction, Character Above All: Ten Presidents from FDR to George Bush (Simon & Schuster, 256 pp., $23) manages to remain concretely in the trenches of terra firma.
Editor Robert A. Wilson's collection of biographical essays deals with ideas in action.
``This book was conceived as an act of defiance,'' he says. ``Against the consultants and campaign managers who feel we'd rather read a good bumper sticker than a good book, who believe it's their business, not ours, to elect candidates, who think we are consumed by self-interest.''
His notion: to provide a forum for us to learn from men and women who had studied and reflected interestingly upon the lives of past presidents.
And so Wilson provides a lucid collection of insights, from FDR's abiding confidence in the future and his fellow citzens that enabled him to surpass his disabilities and move the country forward, to the ambiguous patriotism of Richard Nixon that sometimes distinguished and sometimes disgraced him. Among the contributors are Pulitzer Prize-winners Doris Kearns Goodwin and David McCullough, historian Stephan Ambrose and New York Times columnist Tom Wicker.
Raymond Carver once asked, ``We started out such a good people. What happened to us?'' Wilson's response goes some distance toward an answer: ``Our political process does reflect us, as do our politicians.''
The fault, as Shakespeare might revise his observation today, lies not in our movie stars, but in ourselves. MEMO: Bill Ruehlmann is a mass communication professor at Virginia Wesleyan
College. by CNB