Values in the Era of Vick

The Wall Street Journal's Daniel Henninger wonders what would halt the accelerating instances of sport and celebrity meltdowns:

Two eternal puzzles: What came first, the chicken or the egg? What came second, Barry Bonds or numbskull celebrities?

Much as we'd prefer to ponder the miracles of the egg, life insists that we instead decipher Mr. Bonds, Mr. Vick, Ms. Lohan, Mr. Donaghy's NBA and the drug-addled messieurs of the Tour de France. Wall Street Journal style prefers the prefix "Mr." for all but famous men of history, an admirable but perhaps quaint bow to an era when the world was not filling so fast with individuals content in disrepute. . .

Fiddling with personality is tricky business. Some guys are just normal people with high physical skill sets. Barry Bonds and Michael Vick come to mind. Actors project personality, too, but they're acting and know it; when the camera goes off, they slump back to normality, more or less. Tiger Woods or Roger Federer seems to understand this. But one gets the impression that many more of this new generation of marketed stars eventually forget that it's an act. They're allowed to become larger than little old life, unto personality explosion. . .

Now comes the part the thousands of high-IQ people buying all those the God-Is-Dreadful books don't want to hear.

Marketing and branding don't force anyone to cheat. A zillion commentaries on these sports scandals have said it's all about "integrity" and "character." But where does that come from? You have to learn this stuff somewhere. It isn't in the water. It has to be reinforced through repetition, the same way the real Barry Bonds practiced his way to phenomenal ball-contact skills. Better behavior through repetition? Maybe Barry Bonds and the Tour de France cyclists should drop into a church more often than never to get "don't cheat" reinforced. Got a better way to learn it?

Perhaps we really could slide by without religion if the schools, the traditional incubator of civic virtues, hadn't been rendered values-neutral by court decisions and anti-virtue ideologues. Parents? Where are they supposed to get it? Watching the Discovery Channel?

The simple idea that Mr. Bonds and Ms. Lohan ought to go find something resembling a church to offset the compulsions of modern life drives the no-religion people nuts. If so, they should stop making funny jokes about sprinkling holy water and start proposing an alternative way to learn integrity, self-respect and character that will have a longer shelf-life than "Don't Be Evil."