SETTING A TERM TO DISGRACE

Surgery has granted Linda Tripp a kinder, gentler face. Monica Lewinsky is eating more prudently. Charlie Hustle garners a tad more sympathy, but not a plaque in the Hall of Fame. John Rocker will soon be declared rehabilitated, if not absolved. Regardless, America will still not be kind to the ratted-on and spat-upon.

I have lived through Watergate. An impeachment. The Kennedy boys toying with Marilyn Monroe. Peep-show hearings into the bedroom mores of Supreme Court and Cabinet candidates. I have lived through the scandalizing and defamation – often deserved, occasionally not – of public personae whose frailty and foibles feed America’s insatiable appetite for schadenfreude, that delightful German word that loosely translates as “delight in someone else’s troubles.”

Schadenfreude. If you are wise, you ignore it. If you are lucky, you avoid it. If you are its object, you die a thousand deaths only to be resurrected to someone else’s salacious jokes. If you are like most of us, publicly you eschew it, privately you relish each tawdry new detail. A society that revels in scandal must always have a new bogeyman in the wings to slake its blood lust and to reassure it that real evil ever lurks more menacingly "out there" than "in here."

Let us not trivialize the consequences of wrongdoing and moral corruption. Avarice, unbridled ambition, and illicit lust are acts of public or personal betrayal that deserve accountability and recompense.

But, the punishment that the subjects our public scorn and derision have withstood also should not be trivialized. Society has contrived an elaborate extralegal ritual of humiliation that is bent on utterly destroying any last pretenses of dignity and humanity to which a public wrongdoer might cling:

The social and moral implications of wrongdoer and wrongdoing become a topic for sanctimonious debate on Nightline and Face the Nation. Camera and microphone invade every private dimension of home and family. Then comes the requisite expose on 20-20 and Geraldo's smarmy recitation of the litany of horrors to a self-righteous audience. The ritual is complete, as one becomes the butt of jokes in Leno monologues or the Letterman Top Ten. By then, one has been so demeaned into evil/laughing stock incarnate that s/he enters the national vocabulary as a pop adjective of derision: “Don't let your kid become a Pete Rose." "As a friend, she’s a real Linda Tripp."

The relish with which we savor the downfall of people of influence and honor is an impulse that inheres in the darker side of human nature. It is the stuff of beasts victoriously circling their prey before moving in for the kill.

The only chance we have to distinguish ourselves from lower forms of animal life is to create a countervailing "rite of reconciliation," a national temperament that is just as zealous in its desire to welcome the penitent as it is to humiliate the sinner. We know only too well what one must do to fall from grace. We have little if any sense of what one must do to regain public honor.

What must Monica Lewinsky do to stop being a synonym for fellatio? What penance must Pete Rose perform to again be invited to membership on the boards of charitable organizations he supported? Should we not at least ponder the time that should elapse, the quantum of worthy deeds one should perform, the changes in demeanor and attitude one should evince, before a person who has betrayed the public trust can re-ingratiate him- or herself as a respected member of society?

This rite of reconciliation, however, cannot be merely an empirical formula of the sum of elapsed time, good deeds, and brownie points. Likewise, we must forever put aside infantile notion that a splashy, media-hyped jailhouse conversion followed by a tell-all book ballyhooed on Oprah and Montel is the only acceptable transit ticket from sinner to saint. In fact, it is little more than another snack to feed society's insatiable appetite for dirty laundry and public spectacle.

No, the real rite of reconciliation demands more from the well-scrubbed faces in the pews than it does from the sinner. It calls us to account for all the righteous Judeo-Christian virtues we piously affirm each Saturday and Sunday, only to betray them each Monday through Friday – virtues like acceptance, forgiveness, tolerance, abhorrence of sin but not of sinner, the granting of second chances and the benefit of the doubt. Creating a rite of reconciliation means to forge a communal mind set that demands no more penance from those we have condemned than we would want demanded of us, were we someday to be held accountable for all the lofty values we have preached with our lips but then denied by our insensitive and self-serving deeds.

People who have now fallen from grace, the ones we were only too eager to strip of their dignity and humanity, deserve a chance, maybe even two, to regain our trust and our respect. Let us hope that we will be there to greet them as jubilantly with our hearts as we were with our tar and feathers.