I believe that, ultimately, questions of what is right and wrong require the individual to measure himself against absolute standards of ethics and responsibility. Not that any one of us ever completely measures up to those standards; but you can't set your compass, moral or otherwise, by a shifting North Star. Our generation has become so comfortable watching itself being defined according to polls and ratings and surveys, in the Dow or on the NASDAQ, in the outcome of elections or in public propositions or referenda, that we have sunk into a sort of general relativism, in which all issues are determined by majority vote or a public display of the lowest common denominator: We learn, according to the syndicated lesson taught by Jerry Springer, that while all of us are flawed, we who are watching are not nearly as flawed as the poor souls he parades in front of us. Which may, if the lesson is repeated often enough, teach us that, rather than struggling toward an ideal of perfect behavior, we can always console ourselves with the examples of those even weaker than we are.
By our failure to judge or act decisively on moral issues as individuals, we contribute to a collective caricature of tolerance; a universal lack of discrimination (in the qualitative sense of the word), in which almost everything is reduced to a form of entertainment: murder, suicide, theft, adultery, corruption, perjury, bigotry; and, of course, the efforts of law enforcement to bring the perpetrators to justice. Those constitute one half of our entertainment diet, while watching prosecutors and defense lawyers battle it out in the courtroom coliseum, that makes up the other half.
And it hardly seems to make much difference any more whether the chase is real or fictional, or whether the courtroom drama was created by a playwright or a legal "dream team." Those parodies of justice, in which race, money and superstardom are used to undermine our jury system, are not merely distractions; they overwhelm our ability to focus on reality. We have, on a per capita basis, more people in prison than any other industrial country in the world. And all too many, if not most of those prisoners, are there as the result of a 10-minute plea-bargaining session in some courtroom corridor. The O.J. Simpson trial had nothing to do with the way that most Americans experience our legal system. It was a show, a display of legal narcissism