Maven University

The Death of Shame by Pete Hammil
New York Daily News; New York, N.Y.; May 11, 2003 "But shame is like everything else; live with it for long enough and it becomes part of the furniture."
Salman Rushdie, "Shame," 1983 The sense of shame is a kind of cement in any decent society. The fear of shame reminds each of us that some things must not be done. You don't become a criminal because you would bring shame to your family. You don't employ muscle against the weak. You don't beat up women or prey on the old. You don't father children and then abandon them. You don't cheat or swindle because exposure would coat you with the tar of shame. You don't preach high ideals and live a lie. But it's clear that we are now awash in shamelessness. It's clear that the sense of shame needs to be revived and the shameless held to account. Consider some obvious examples. Here is William Bennett, lay preacher to America, neoconservative crusader against liberal moral softness. In his best seller, "The Book of Virtues," he listed "self-discipline" as the premier commandment. And what do we now learn? He is what we called in Bennett's native Brooklyn a degenerate gambler. He was welcomed to the high-roller suites of casinos, where he was wined and dined and pointed toward the slot machines. Into the slots, he poured more than $8 million. "It is true that I have gambled large sums of money," Bennett said in a press release. "I have also complied with all laws on reporting wins and losses. Nevertheless, I have gambled large sums of money, and this is not an example I wish to set. Therefore, my gambling days are over." But surely Bennett understood that at least a few people knew that the self-proclaimed advocate of self-discipline was a shameless moral fraud. The casino people knew. His accountant surely knew. Most important, Bennett knew. He was wandering the country preaching to the gullible for $50,000 speaking fees, and there he was a few nights later, in the Bellagio in Las Vegas or Caesars in Atlantic City, pouring the speaking fees into machines with the pathetic hope of seeing three lemons in a row. Bennett surely gets this year's Elmer Gantry Award. Obviously, Bennett is not alone. There is shamelessness all over the business scandals, too. Enron, WorldCom, ImClone and the rest. All were driven by men without a sense of shame. They knew they were high-class swindlers. They knew their fancy homes and ludicrous perks were gained by fraud and deception. They knew that their accounting systems were elaborate lies, used to entice innocent investors. They went on doing what they were doing, devoid of a sense of shame, right up to the moment the cops came calling. Other forms of shamelessness permeate society at its highest levels. Vice President Cheney took five draft deferments to avoid serving in Vietnam. He once famously said (in 1989): "I had other priorities in the '60s than military service." Even the deferments are not the problem. Some perfectly honorable people, convinced of the immorality of that war, took as many deferments as they could get. But they did not come back 30 years later to address veterans groups in martial speeches about the necessity of war. Cheney has made these speeches, but he was not forced to make them. He could have simply said, "No, I have no right to whip up the veterans, since I chose not to be a combatant myself. They served, I didn't, because I had better things to do. Let a veteran speak to veterans." We don't know if such a thought ever crossed Cheney's mind. Probably not. By the time of the runup to the war in Iraq, shamelessness - not shame - was part of the furniture. Consider, too, the spectacular landing made by President Bush on the deck of the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln. There he was when it was over, in his "Top Gun" costume with all its buckles and slots and projectiles, grinning that boyish grin. The moment was the photo op of the week, maybe of the year. But nobody had the temerity to ask how Bush managed to avoid true combat in Vietnam by getting himself into the Texas National Guard. Nobody mentioned that he simply walked away from the last two years of his National Guard duty, making himself technically AWOL. A man with a sense of shame would have turned down the image-monger who dreamed up the landing on the Lincoln and said (if only to himself), "I can't do that, man. I ducked the real war." But no, off he went into the wild blue yonder, totally devoid of shame. What was important was the image, not the reality. What was important was what he said in all those tough-guy war speeches, not what he actually did. The shamelessness remains general. Cheney's old firm, Halliburton, is now revealed to have been awarded a secret contract that will pay the company $8 billion in the reconstruction of Iraq. It got this without competitive bidding. The original cover story was that it would put out oil-field fires. There were very few oil-field fires. Now the terms of Halliburton's enrichment appear much broader. With a sense of shame, the Bush administration would have glanced at Cheney and said, "Anyone but Halliburton." But no, they met in some secret office and signed the papers. William Faulkner once said that the best stories are the ones we are most thoroughly ashamed of. Each of us carries a few of those stories. But there would be far more of them if the sense of shame were completely abandoned. Perhaps poor Bill Bennett, after laboring in the depths of some dark moral cave, will emerge with a new volume: "The Book of Shame." No doubt it would blame the liberals or the 1960s, but the examples of shamelessness are much closer at hand. We need to bring back shame. Fast.