Pubdate: Sat, 10 May 2003
Source: Joplin Globe, The (MO)
Copyright: 2003 The Joplin Globe
Contact:  http://www.joplinglobe.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/859
Author: Michael Kinsley
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/people/Bill+Bennett

BILL BENNETT'S BAD BET

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.

Michael Kinsley is Slate's founding editor.
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