As much as I am resisting this new president and his charm campaign, I find myself charmed anyway.
Gee! he says or seems to say. "Gee!" is from a time gone by, when Wally and the Beave were regularly in our living rooms. Even if you were a black kid in a segregated South in the 1950s and 1960s, you thought: Gee whiz!
And now the new president is encouraging us to embrace family values. Most of us, I believe, want to. But, gee! Why do we fail so dramatically?
I saw the other day that some soap actress said that she and the guy she eventually married didn't get really serious until she was pregnant. Huh? Did the cart and the horse get mixed up here?
"Whatever I say that I am, I am." That's what Eminem raps and whether he's racist, homophobic or whatever, he's honored by his colleagues. Three Grammys last week. Hmm.
He's honored, and so, by the size of the book contracts they've gotten, are Bill and Hillary Rodham Clinton in spite of all their questionable behavior like taking furniture from the White House that belongs to the White House and asking for and accepting $190,000 worth of china and other household goods. People still look up to them. And we wonder why kids can turn out so warped?
Also in the news now are the Vermont teen-agers who may have killed at least that's what the prosecutors say the two Dartmouth professors. And there was all this shock because they are teen-agers and, let's face it, they are white and they are from New England.
The other day, I heard a bunch of kids en route to Manhattan talking about the difference between "going out" and "dating" and laughing at their definitions: One means you can still sleep around, that you haven't made a commitment. Hmm.
And as that bunch of teens talked, one said that she had coupons for buying CDs at a discount. Two guys passing by looked at each other the way only the most hip can and said something like, "CDs? Who buys CDs anymore?" Hmm.
They are definitely in a different world than the one I think I'm in and the one that President Bush wants us to be in. While George Washington probably did tell a lie or two or three, and while Abraham Lincoln may not have been as honest as school kids are taught that he was, somehow it feels like life was simpler and values more pure in days gone by. Gee.
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