Noble Ideals go the Way of the Typewriter as Oprahfication Rules

The Opinion Journal has a more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger Op-Ed about the disappearance of "honor" from our country's set of reflexes. As my daughter's private school here in Boca, whose headmaster has a son-in-law named Tucker Carlson, has the motto "Honor Above All," I thought I'd mourn the passing of another quaint artifact of the past. As the head of the Guggenheim Institute, Josiah Bunting III, puts it in a wonderful intro:

In our culture of therapy, self-absorption and celebrity, "honor" has very little cachet. An abuse of honor--say, by perpetrating a public fraud or acting duplicitously in private life--is but the occasion for the administration of comforting words of understanding, the application of medicines to assuage lingering anxieties and the invitation to appear on "Oprah," the better to explain the forces that, overwhelming meager resources of conscience and character, impelled a dishonorable act. Next may come an invitation to undertake the labor of a book, more fully to explore and expiate the fall from grace. Closure (as it is called) will then, at last, be obtained.

In short, there is no shame in actions once known as dishonorable, and the virtues that supported honor seem moribund. Chastity and modesty--so important to honor in social relations--are treated as relics from Jane Austen and "Little Women." When a high-school girl defends a sexual encounter on the grounds that an American president said that her particular act was not really sex, both she and her role model are, if not completely forgiven, understood to be, as members of the human family, subject to the same vagaries of uncontrollable temptations as you and I.

No shame indeed, as members of Congress demonstrate in another WSJ opinion piece about the by-election to replace Vietnam's top ace [another glance into the past, when honor ruled the military] Randy Cunningham, who utterly disgraced himself and his party and country by taking massive bribes [not the teensy-weensy ones of $100K by Democrat William Jefferson] and ended up in prison.
Dennis Hastert responded to the raid on Jefferson's office in precisely the way a dishonorable discredited leader of a party on its way out of power would do: yammer about the "separation of powers" while 80-90% of the country believes that crooks should not be protected if they are in Congress. In the words of Brendan Miniter:

The broader issue here is that congressional corruption is rampant and Congress is doing little about it. After the FBI raided Rep. William Jefferson's Capitol Hill office last month, Speaker Denny Hastert and other Republicans joined with Democrats in denouncing the raid of the Louisiana Democrat's office, even though the FBI allegedly has a video tape of Mr. Jefferson accepting $100,000 in cash and later found $90,000 of that money in a freezer at his home. It's true that there is a separation-of-powers issue at stake. But constitutional arguments can be abstract and hard for the public to follow. What voters do understand is payoffs with cold hard cash. Do Republicans understand the politics of that?

Honor Above All? What a quaint concept!