The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves…..

                                    Julius Caesar, by William Shakespeare

Little by little the look of the country changes because of the men we admire.            

                         Melvin Douglas as Homer Bannon in Hud

In September 1958, Sherman Adams, President Eisenhower’s chief of staff, was forced to resign because he had accepted a vicuna coat and an oriental rug from a friend, Bernard Goldfine, who had business with the government.

It seems quaint to look back at that little drama now when we, as a society, seem to have infinite tolerance for all sorts of corruption and bad behavior. It isn’t necessary to document chapter and verse of the official corruption we’re witnessing, starting with the chief law enforcement officer of the United States, Thanks to the Supreme Court, the American president, acting in an official capacity, has absolute immunity from prosecution for anything he or she may do.

Shielded from any legal consequences for his actions, Trump has issued a cascade of pardons, some that have occurred after timely investments were made in ventures that the Trump family is promoting. Besides allowing convicted criminals back on the street to commit more crimes, Trump’s pardons have also robbed victims of fraud of court-ordered restitutions. Nor is it only Trump who feels empowered to disregard proper conduct. Two members of his cabinet have been fired after carrying on with staff in private and living large at taxpayers’ expense. Public displays of contempt have become fashionable. Cabinet officials appearing before Congress, which is exercising its legitimate oversight function, not only refuse to answer questions but also berate elected representatives.

The President, who is the putative protector of American morality in several ways, may be as profane as he or she may wish in private. In public, however, we expect—or at least we used to expect—our Presidents to speak grammatically and to avoid foul language. Obviously, that’s not what we can reasonably expect from the current White House occupant.

We know all of that, but that’s not the point. The question we should be asking ourselves is what has happened to us? To our standards? It seems naïve and perhaps effete, to blush over public officials’ bad behavior, but what happens in the public arena ultimately is reflected in the public’s behavior. Noble gestures by role models invite the rest of us to emulate their example. Bad comportment, conversely, inspires similar bad behavior. And once norms are violated, it becomes easier to ignore them again.

It goes deeper than that. The idea that the men and women who came of age during the Depression and fought in World War II were the “greatest generation” always seemed a little overblown. But they did answer the call. Some were drafted. A lot volunteered. When the United States entered World War II all four of President Roosevelt’s sons served in the armed forces, in combat, and received decorations for their service. No one named Trump has spent a day in service to his country. It’s no longer expected. We have delegated our fighting to those brave enough—or foolish enough—to volunteer to serve. The rest of us go on with our daily lives, getting and spending.

Gen. Stanley McCrystal, in an interview with The New York Times, observed, “We have a volunteer military now, so it’s largely limited to people who self-selected in [to serve in the armed forces]. But the reality is there is part of our society that goes in the military, and there’s a lot of our society that does not. There starts to be a divide that comes from that, and a resentment. Those are dynamics that you don’t see early in a war, but over time come home.”

The fact is that the notion of public service, which once inspired the Peace Corps along with military service, is no longer in vogue. America has long been a nation of individualists, but the idea that one had an obligation to society, to put oneself in harm’s way in times of peril, or simply as some kind of payback for what we have been given—that idea doesn’t seem to have much currency nowadays. So, a President can remark in private about the “suckers” buried in Normandy after they gave their lives fighting Naziism. That the remark became public didn’t ultimately ruin his career.

Military service as a way to honor one’s debt to society lost its cachet when the United States began fighting stupid wars, starting with Vietnam.  The idea that one had to surrender to the bad judgment of one’s government was tested and found wanting. The Iraq war put the icing on the cake

Or, to change the subject somewhat, look at American movies. In the 1930s, 40s and 50s, we had stars like Jimmy Stewart, playing the aw shucks, small town boy with not much money, but a lot of character. Or Spencer Tracy, solid as a rock, principled, steadfast. Or Gary Cooper, standing alone, firm in his convictions, living by his own code.

Where are the heroes now—or heroines? The characters we get in movies typically are neurotic, troubled, complicated figures. Obviously contemporary movie protagonists reflect reality in a way that movie heroes of the mid-20^th century, didn’t. Stewart, Tracy and Cooper weren’t meant to be realistic. They were role models, ideal men who always came through when the chips were down. Where, other than in Marvel movies with their comic book characters, do we get men we can fashion ourselves after? Or women. Norma Rae was in 1979.

We seem to have stopped believing in ourselves. Once upon a time, naively to be sure, we had faith in our goodness, in our good intentions no matter how much damage we might do to realize them. Now, after Vietnam, Iraq, and more lately Iran, apparently we no longer have that belief. We are tired. Our energy seems to be gone. It’s probably a mark of our lassitude that we have an ignorant, incompetent, narcissistic demagogue directing our government while lining his pockets rather than seeking solutions to the many problems confronting us.

But I digress. We tolerate bad behavior, even revel in it in some quarters. So, it should be no surprise that our public discourse has descended from commonplace rhetoric and rare moments of eloquence to rambling, disjointed soliloquies laced with occasional profanity.

Men and women elected to represent their communities and their states are either too afraid to object, or in agreement with the behavior they witness and applaud.  Nor do they raise objections to the apparent bribery, self-dealing and self-enrichment occurring in plain view. The rest of us may complain, but we seemed resigned to our situation.

We are frequently reminded that we aren’t the first country to be in thrall to a demagogue and would be dictator. The question we have to ask ourselves is why have we surrendered our freedom, self-determination, our agency to a manifestly incompetent, mentally damaged, narcissist?

We are again living in a time of public derangement, akin to the hysteria of the McCarthy era except that the would-be demagogue ultimately was brought down by members of his own party after the public  witnessed his performance live on television.

It may be too soon to say that the damage being done is permanent. It’s difficult, though, to see what has been accepted and then expect events to return to a rational, “normal”. How are we to begin trusting our government again? How can we expect our allies to trust us again? And, perhaps most daunting, when are we going to confront our national debt, now approaching $40 trillion?

Faced with a looming crisis, in his first inaugural address, Abraham Lincoln expressed his belief that it would all turn out for the better in the end: “The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearth-stone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.” As we approach the 250th anniversary of our independence, we can only hope.