Ourselves as nonfiction

Clearly, this was not advantageous terrain from which to launch a winning argument. Between what passes today for schoolyard chit-chat and children's programming (with a few well-intentioned, scarifying public-service spots thrown in), almost all kids these days, as noted psychologist David Elkind puts it, "know more than they understand." The question for parents is not how they came by information that would have once been deemed inappropriate for all but the most jaded adults, the question is how to handle it when they do.

"So..." I asked my wife. "How'd you handle it?"

"Sadie (our 10-year-old)," she said, "wanted to know exactly how he got AIDS. So did Charlie. They already knew the slogans." She began ticking them off on her fingers. "'What you don't know can kill you,' 'Don't die of embarrassment,' and one or two others."

What they don't know, aware as they are that transmission of the disease often involves sex, is precisely what sex is about. That is, their understanding of the matter takes no account of the unfathomable element of passion. It is based not on any steamy miniseries, but on the antiseptic yet dramatically compelling PBS model--the "little sperm that could" making its way upstream against all odds to fertilize that egg. Indeed, as of the other day, they were not sure sex was even possible outside of marriage.

Yet one thing they had come to grasp, beyond any question, is that this thing called sex can be lethal--the biological equivalent of a roaring drunk behind the wheel. Scary. Bad.

In a sense, of course, unsubtlety is the point. In the world as we find it, in the era of the lowest common denominator, it is assumed, probably accurately, that a cautionary message can no longer be conveyed via anything resembling reason.

But, concerned as we must be about the short term, we are, as ever, shockingly oblivious to potential consequences. The matters at hand--the vagaries of human connection, the appeal of recklessness--are complex almost beyond description. Yet, by the millions, we allow our children to have them addressed--to draw their very definition of intimacy--to clumsy proxy. This despite the fact that. in greater numbers than any prior generation in history, we've been there ourselves.

Mama tells me you were talking about role models," I put it to my daughter later that evening, tucking her into bed.

She nodded. "Zoe said hers is Annie Oakley, and Jill said Barbara Bush."

"Oh, yeah?"

"A couple of the boys said Magic Johnson. Kenny likes Bill Clinton," she offered an indulgent smile, "but that's only because his parents do. They're glad he wouldn't go to Vietnam." She paused, "What do you think of Bill Clinton, Papa?"

It was the week after the surfacing of Clinton's Vietnam-era letter, and yeah, on the one hand, I very much saw Kenny's parents point. The guy had revealed himself to have once been among our generation's best and brightest, someone "working every day against a war I opposed and despised with a depth of feeling I had reserved solely for racism in America before Vietnam." Hell, if Lincoln had written the same thing during the bitterly controversial Mexican War, there's little question that historians would today take it as further evidence of his greatness.

On the other, ever since the letter's release, the candidate, assiduously seeking to distance himself from his earlier self, spoke little on the subject but public relations-exe. Which is to say, as Lloyd Bentsen might put it, "We know Abe Lincoln--and Governor, you're no Abe Lincoln."

It hardly bears repeating that this is the core of so many politicians' dilemmas these days: that they so often come off less like statesmen than as part of the problem--out for themselves, ready to refurbish any fact that proves inconvenient.

But what is far less frequently observed--what is, finally, so much harder to face--is that we are hardly blameless in all this. It is the quirky genius of the American system that, even in their most glaring shortcomings--their patent insincerity, their capacity to reinvent themselves to meet any contingency--our politicians are truly a reflection of ourselves.

In fact, in his effort to negotiate his way around this draft business, all but shrugging off the letter's author as "a twenty-threeyear-old boy," Clinton called to mind nothing so much as we contemporary parents, facing kids suddenly old enough to ask the hard questions about our past.