20-20 again

It takes a certain level of intelligence to stand in a goose pit when the windchill is 20 below and your toes are so stiff they feel like rolls of nickels.

So naturally there I was seven days ago in a hole in the middle of a cornfield overlooking the Missouri River north of Pierre fearing hypothermia and hoping for my kids' sake that stupidity isn't genetic.

I live in South Dakota for probably the reasons most of you do. It is home. It doesn't have swarms of people, and the people who are here are good. The air is clean. The water is, too. Children can still ride their bikes to the store.

I also live here because I like to hunt and fish. I didn't do either a year ago. That wasn't just stupid. It was lunacy.

One of my earliest memories is of a badger scowling into the headlights of our car as it bounced across a South Dakota pasture in the morning darkness. My dad started taking me duck hunting as soon as I could keep up. He and my two brothers would pack me like they did their hip waders and the steel boxes that held their shotgun shells.

Though our dog – a Dalmatian and Labrador cross whose legs were short and body round – hunted better than one might expect, the job of retrieving what was shot, if it wasn't in the water, often fell to me. I did it without complaint.

You might say hunting restores my vision. Most days I'm stuck inside from the moment I wake till the moment I go to sleep. Mine is a world of gray carpets and yellow fluorescent lights. It is like watching an old color television set all day.

In a cold goose pit on a Missouri River bluff, the world is high definition again. Cornfields glow like bars of gold. Blue bays resemble socks on a baby boy.

In a cold goose pit on a Missouri River bluff, one has the chance to look out – and to look in as well.

One consequence of a hectic life is that we seldom have time to reflect. Because we're always taking stock of someone else's situation – customers, kids, whomever – we never take stock of our own.

That can be a happy consequence. When we're forced to reflect, to flip the light around and shine it at ourselves, to sweep it across the cracks and into the corners of our own lives, what we see can be discouraging and sometimes painful. In a cold goose pit on a Missouri River bluff, there is opportunity to reflect. But it isn't solely pleasant considerations that occur. There is reckoning, too.

In his short novel "The Old Man and the Sea," great American writer and even greater American hunter Ernest Hemingway wrote: "The clouds were building up now for the trade wind and he looked ahead and saw a flight of wild ducks etching themselves against the sky over the water, then blurring, then etching again and he knew no man was ever alone on the sea."

In a cold goose pit on a Missouri River bluff, ties that have come undone can be refastened; plots that have been dropped can be picked up again.

Though still good friends, time has widened the divide between my brothers and me. That, I suspect, is not unusual. The longer our individual histories become, the less they have in common. In a cold goose pit on a Missouri River bluff, our shared story continues, however, and in the process we close our gap.

When I was a reporter fresh out of college, I took a job at a small-town newspaper in Nebraska. There was a copy editor there who hunted. He must have been 25, 30 years older than me.

One fall Monday morning someone asked him what he did that weekend. He said he and his sons went pheasant hunting. Someone asked him if they bagged anything. He said his sons did, but he didn't. He had quit carrying a gun some years earlier, he said, preferring to just walk in the fields alongside his sons.

At the time what he said struck me as pure nonsense. Why would someone go hunting if they didn't actually hunt, I thought?

I see his point now.

You betcha

It is one of my earliest memories. I'm sitting at my grandmother's dinner table. Before me is a plate of lutefisk, and the smell is making me gag.

It is a horrible odor. Combined, not even my older brother's feet, breath and armpits, which at different times I've unwillingly had to whiff when he could stand my annoying ways no more, smell worse than what is in front of me now.

The lutefisk is swimming in butter. I mean this literally. Its slimy texture and the melted butter my grandmother has poured on it send it sailing from one end of the plate to the other at the slightest disturbance. Lifting my fork from the table, I gently poke the piece of fish like someone might a dead rattlesnake or an old beehive.

It jiggles.

The son of a man who, if given the choice, probably would have picked fishing over fame, I have eaten boatloads – again, literally – of fish in my life. Never before has one jiggled. Aghast, I look at the others around the table. They are engaged in polite conversation. None is staring at their plate in disgust.

Slowly, I take stock of the situation. I am being asked to eat stinky fish Jell-O. I am, I conclude, in deep trouble.

Superman has kryptonite. I have cod soaked in lye and drowned in melted butter. So if it features a lutefisk-eating contest, I am doomed. But if it is rolls of lefse instead that I must devour or if I am asked to survive atop a glacier for 30 days and 30 nights or, better yet, if I'm pitted in a battle to decide whose stoicism is most stout, I have a good shot at being the next champ of "Alt for Norge."

"Alt for Norge" – All for Norway in English – is a Norwegian reality TV show in which 10 Americans of Nordic heritage travel to Norway to compete in games where they discover their Norwegian roots while viewers discover how far they will go to win 50 grand. The contests are more silly than serious. In the show's debut season a year ago, contestants had to herd cows, row a Viking boat and sing the Norwegian national anthem to the accompaniment of an elementary school band.

They also had to eat a hamburger in two bites, kiss contestants of the same sex and pee on a fence while drinking a beer, which, apparently, is what one does in Norway upon graduating from high school as part of a tradition called russefeiring, where, apparently, for 17 days in May high school graduates go completely bonkers.

"Alt for Norge" is a big hit. Thousands tuned in each week to watch the Americans face off, but it appears what was just as appealing to most Norwegians were the moments when the contestants came face to face with their pasts – like the day one saw the village church where her great-grandmother was baptized – or when they embraced Norwegian culture – like the night they dined on the heads of sheep or the morning some bravely jumped into a bone-chilling fjord … and promptly jumped out.

Under the right circumstances, I could be a shoo-in to win this show. I lived in North Dakota for almost a decade. If that isn't like being marooned on a glacier, I don't know what is. I also am a lefse connoisseur. I know precisely how much butter and sugar and cinnamon to put on it. Granted, I've never actually made lefse, but no one I know makes it better than Sharon Helgeson. My plan is to spend the weeks leading up to "Alt for Norge" training under the 71-year-old South Dakotan in her Langford kitchen – kind of like a Rocky Balboa thing, but instead of running through the hard streets of Philadelphia in the dark and slugging raw sides of beef in a gritty meat locker, I'll be wearing an apron and rolling dough.

The way I figure it, given these advantages, I'm already a good bet to be the last one standing at the end of the next "Alt for Norge." But what will definitely seal the deal is if the show puts contestants to the true Nordic test: a challenge to see whose stoicism runs the deepest.

Norwegians are known for their stoic nature. Gather a group together, and you're liable to witness more emotion from a lamppost. A laundry basket is less reserved. Told they won the lottery or they need a root canal, Norwegians respond the same: "You betcha." Their blood doesn't boil. It congeals.

I'm not quite as imperturbable as that. I don't regard asking another person for the time to be a public display of affection – like some Norwegians do. On the other hand, I am considering this for my epitaph: The less said the better. In a contest to goad "Alt for Norge" competitors into expressing their feelings, I like my chances.

The search for the next 10 "Alt for Norge" contestants has begun. The deadline to submit an application to the Chicago casting company running the search – including a short video explaining what makes you "Alt for Norge" material – is Jan. 10. To be considered, you must be at least a smidgen Norwegian, be between the ages of 18 and 60 and have never been to Norway.

I'm definitely all those. The only place I've ever been is Canada, and while I'm not 100 percent Norwegian, I'm enough that I mutter "uff da" when the snowplow leaves a 3-foot drift at the end of my driveway. Plus, not one of the 10 contestants in the first season of "Alt for Norge" was from South Dakota. (Four were from Minnesota.)

I'd say I'm an obvious choice, and once chosen, there is but a single thing that can keep me from victory.

It will stink if that thing happens.

In more ways than one.

Stick it

Call me a father. Call me a husband. Call me a son.

Call me a teacher. Call me a journalist. Call me a coach.

Call me an American. Call me a South Dakotan. Call me a Vermillion Tanager.

Call me idealistic. Call me naive. Call me cynical.

Call me ignorant. Call me parochial. Call me a damn fool.

But don't call me a Democrat.

Democrats have made a mess of things. Under their watch, the American middle class has begun to vanish. Where once one wage earner could support a family, it now takes two incomes and sometimes three or four jobs. There has been an enormous and unprecedented shift of wealth to the most well-to-do. Corporations have been allowed to steamroll workers and swindle shareholders. Going to the doctor has gotten to be so expensive, people pray each night they do not get sick. Soaring tuition costs soon will make attending college a pipe dream for the poor and the sole province of the rich. Instead of solving problems on energy, on immigration, on the environment, Democrats point fingers, and when finally tossed from office, they turn up as lobbyists for polluters and unscrupulous profiteers. They pretend to be champions of the powerless. But it is a pretense only.

Call me a Christian. Call me a sinner. Call me a believer of mercy and grace.

Call me a white male. Call me advantaged. Call me free from the slights minorities face.

Call me a capitalist. Call me a worker. Call me an idiot for once espousing supply-side economics.

Call me a Cubs fan. Call me a Dirty Harry diehard. Call me if an extra ticket to the Boss ever drops in your lap.

Say I'm no Dickens, no Frost. Say Bud Weiser must be my personal trainer. Say I'm a lousy shot and a worse dancer.

But don't call me a Republican.

Republicans have made a mess of things. Under their watch, IOUs have been stacked to the heavens. America started the 21st century as a debtor nation and in all likelihood will end it as one, too. Used to be Republicans kept their hands out of taxpayers' pockets and kept their noses out of other people's private lives. Used to be they despised bureaucratic interference, and the thought of accepting a dime – let alone billions of dollars – from the government sent them into shock. Used to be Republicans stood for self-determination. No more.

Because of them, America has become trapped in a long and confusing war. Because of them, the people I call on the telephone, the content of the e-mail messages I send and the books I check out at the library are not just my own business anymore. Because of their use of tax policy to favor the rich, there is a good chance this generation of children in America will be the first to fail to lead better lives than their parents. In public they scold anyone who does not share their moral code while in private they are perverse. So staggering is their hypocrisy, it sickens.

We have a tendency to label each other. We do it, I suppose, to bring order to chaos, to provide a sense of security. We pin labels to distinguish between us and them. Of course, we are more complex than simple labels. Easy definitions do not do us justice.

So it is a simpleminded tendency we have, and what degree of security we derive from it is a false one. Still, if I must be labeled, take your pick. There are all kinds of them that fit – some that I am proud to wear, others that I regret.

But please don't call me a Democrat, and please don't call me a Republican. I find no difference between them. Only sad similarities that have left people so disillusioned, they have turned their backs on the political process.

I am not one of these people. Not yet. I will vote on Tuesday because I refuse to give up and because I refuse to give in. Perhaps you feel the same way and will vote, too.

In this, call us united.

Hero worship

When my oldest son was a boy, he had a poster of Oakland A's slugger Jose Canseco on a wall in his bedroom. The poster displayed Canseco at the end of an enormous swing, the bat wrapped flat against his back, his torso a corkscrew, the muscles and tendons in his forearms bundled like steel cables. No baseball was present in the image. It existed only in the slight tilt of Canseco's head and the fixed look in his eyes at something far off in the cloudless sky.

For years that poster occupied that wall. Morning and night it was there, no less constant than the sun and moon. The frozen wheat fields of Grand Forks, North Dakota, where we lived at the time, are light years from the cerulean bays of northern California, yet so great was the pull of the mighty Canseco, my son wheeled firm in the orbit of the Athletics – and does even now as a man.

We need heroes. When times turn tempest, heroes give us something to hold onto. Their capacity to stand unshaken against life's scouring winds reminds us and reassures us of our own measure.

Heroes do more than inspire, however. They also serve as templates of noble behavior, as references of that which is right. From them we conceive integrity and mercy and grace, courage and humility and resolve. We conceive generosity and intelligence. We conceive honor and faith.

“Unhappy the land that has no heroes," wrote German playwright Bertolt Brecht. So America seems today.

The nation is drowning in a sea of cheats. Steroid-shooting athletes like Canseco and Olympian Marion Jones litter sport. In government lobbyists loot Washington. In industry corporations cook their books. In religion sinners masquerade as saints. Left behind in the wake of all this duplicity are dispirited spectators, jaded citizens, ruined investors and grieved believers.

We are desperate for a hero. This ache as much as anything appears to be the impetus behind the ascension of Barack Obama.

Without the benefit of pedigree or – initially – political machine, Obama has gone from unknown presidential aspirant to one within a whisper of capturing the Democratic nomination. His support has turned from ripple to tidal wave. He speaks of hope, and in the eyes of those who support him, it is hope that gleams.

McCain's valor, Huckabee's decency, Clinton's brilliance and backbone elicit their own fervor, but it is not the same. The expectations being placed upon Obama are different and greater. To millions of Americans, he is the promise of escape from the fantastic magic show that is their country – where little is left but illusion, where sleight of hand reigns supreme, where trickery is everyday trade.

Each generation has its symbols, those objects that signify the character of that generation. For those who came of age during World War II, it was war bonds. For the generation after it, it was the image of Neil Armstrong stepping onto the moon. For us, it is fine print. Make a late mortgage payment and credit card companies feel excused to raise our interest rates. Go to a physician or a hospital without prior approval and insurance companies refuse to pay. It is all so much dirty pool.

Deceit, of course, is an old affliction. The ancient Greek philosophers oft wrote of it. It blackens the pages of Shakespeare as well. Who in literature, in fact, is more conniving than the poisonous Claudius?

To find parallel to our present treachery, however, offers no comfort. We want someone – or some ones – to lead us out of this desert.

Rest assured. I am under no delusion it will be me. To catalog my transgressions would take the Library of Congress the better part of a year. Indeed, my shortcomings are rivaled by only a couple of umpires I know.

But just because I – and perhaps you – are no hero is no reason to think others cannot be and no reason to cease believing others must be. We need heroes whether we're 10 or 45. The minute we think asking for them is asking too much is the minute we settle for something less instead of demanding something more.

Baseball always has been a reflection of America. Both are expansive. Both are pastoral. Neither wishes to be bound to time. It is a bitter period in which America and its pastime find themselves. In 1988 Jose Canseco hit 40 home runs and stole 40 bases. Never in major league history had that been done. The 24-year-old Canseco had scaled a pinnacle that had proven too steep for even the greatest of the game. On hallowed ground he stood alone. A Titan among lesser gods. But it was all charade. By his own admission Canseco was juiced – pumped full of steroids and human growth hormone. What we praised as majesty was make-believe. He cheated.

So did others in baseball. Perhaps most of them in this era. Perhaps even Roger Clemens – he of the seven Cy Young Awards and 354 wins and 4,672 strikeouts – who has been accused of doing exactly that which Canseco did and who Wednesday, in a sad display of irony, proclaimed to a room full of congressmen his actions have always been honorable.

To a boy growing up on a flat North Dakota prairie years ago, a certain baseball player lit the darkness. In the end, however, it was smoke and mirrors. No actual hero existed. The boy discovered he was deceived, and he blew the candle out.

But the longing in that boy for heroes still burns – and forever will.

Say no more

I'm learning to shut up.

The people who know me will wonder at that revelation. I am no great conversationalist as it is. I never have been. When it comes to small talk, I have an embarrassingly short list: the weather and the Twins. Once I've exhausted those topics, I usually am at a loss for words. I wish it were not so. Trading in small talk puts people at ease. It has a charm – a charm I simply do not possess.

Nonetheless, for 25, 20 and 18 years, respectively, three people on this planet have had to suffer my opinions. I have counseled them on just about everything under the sun. On this and that and the other thing, I have spoken ad nauseam.

Offering advice to them was easy at first: Streets have to be clear before being crossed. Straws do not belong in noses.

It is not so easy anymore.

When children are little, their problems, typically, are, too. We can fix what ails them. If they need pointing in the right direction, we can do that because more often than not, we know which direction is the right one.

My kids and I shared the same compass for the longest time. It was my compass, built from my experiences, aligned to my ideals, to those magnets of truth that I thought I had discovered in the course of navigating a life. Lately, however, it has occurred to me that my compass might be wrong.

It would have been worthwhile to have known this earlier. I perhaps could have spared a certain son the certain misfortune of entering college – and leaving – and entering college – and leaving – and entering college – and leaving. It was clear to him – but not to me – that he preferred work to school, that the education he desired was the real-world kind, that what I had found inspiring in academia, he found dull.

If I had known what I do now – that what is north to me is not north to all – I also might not have protested so openly when my daughter quit playing basketball after her sophomore year in high school. It was clear to her – but not to me – that basketball is a game. It is supposed to be fun, and when it ceases being fun, when it grinds but never gives, it is time to devote one's energies elsewhere.

I make no secret of the worth I place on education and sport. Hang around me long enough and you'll think it a tribal chant. So for this son and for this daughter, these had to be hard decisions because though we sometimes think they meet indifference, a father's suggestions are never dismissed. They are not channeled away but are instead absorbed like rain falling on dry earth.

Elroy Berdahl knows the great weight of words. A character in the novel "The Things They Carried," Elroy owns the Tip Top Lodge on the banks of the Rainy River in northern Minnesota. It is Elroy whom Tim O'Brien meets on a late August afternoon in 1968 as the young man contemplates disappearing into Canada to dodge the Vietnam War, and it is Elroy who stops him by taking Tim fishing and by keeping his mouth shut.

It is a memorable scene – 81-year-old Elroy and 21-year-old Tim in the middle of the river, Ontario on one side, Minnesota on the other. During the six days Tim stayed at the resort – alone, just he and Elroy – he never tells Elroy why he is there. And Elroy never asks. But Elroy knows because Elroy is 81. Finally, when the two are fishing, Tim can stand it no more and starts to weep so immense does the pressure of his predicament become. Elroy says not a word.

I thought of Elroy Berdahl a couple of weeks ago when I visited a different son at college who is at that point where he must decide what he wants to be. He appears to be weighing a career in either the sciences or the arts. I can tell he is conflicted. I can see it in his eyes. Truth be told, I have a preference. It is one based on what I think I have discovered about life, and though I was tempted to share my thoughts, I kept them to myself.

These are voluble times. If we do not have a cell phone shoved in our ears, we're lit by the blue glow of a TV while some talk-show chatterer blathers about everything and nothing.

Never has talk been so exalted. Never has silence been so scorned. What Elroy Berdahl understood, however, and what I only now am beginning to understand is that in life there are certain decisions people must make for themselves. No one can make the decisions for them.

At these moments we ought to just shut up even when we think we know the correct course and even – and maybe especially – when those people are our children.

Bunch of dopes

Some say smoking dope is harmless.

Tell that to the family of Mateo Bejar. The police commander and three of his men were murdered Wednesday in broad daylight on a highway in the Pacific resort town of Zihuatanejo. Mexican drug cartel members wielding AK-47 and AR-15 assault rifles tossed grenades and fired more than 200 rounds into their vehicle, setting it on fire. The bodies of Bejar and his men were found burned inside.

Or tell that to the family of José Luis Ortiz. Mexican drug traffickers killed the 3-year-old boy in January after mistaking his green-painted home in a Tijuana slum for one of the same color on the same street belonging to a police officer they were seeking. They shot José as well as his father Mainol and his mother Eugenia Velasquez while they slept in the bed they shared.

Once they recognized their mistake, the cartel members found the home of the police officer. They killed him, his wife and 11-year-old daughter, too.

Or tell that to the families of the soldiers whose headless bodies were scattered on a thoroughfare in the Mexican state capital of Chilpancingo in December. The drug traffickers who killed them left a sign near the bodies that read: "For every one of mine that you kill, I will kill 10."

More than 500 police and 5,500 drug traffickers were murdered in Mexico in 2008. Their killings as killings go have been extraordinary. Dozens have been decapitated. Some have had their tongues cut out. Others have been found blindfolded and gagged and shot in the head or bound and burned and shot in the head.

In its National Survey on Drug Use and Health, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services estimated 55,000 South Dakotans smoked marijuana in 2006. Eighteen thousand used cocaine or other illegal drugs.

Minnehaha County Sheriff Mike Milstead is on the board of a group of law enforcement officials from six states working to stop drug trafficking in the Midwest. He says most of the marijuana smoked, most of the cocaine snorted and most of the methamphetamine injected in South Dakota can be traced to Mexican drug cartels.

"It's almost a civil war," Milstead says of the violence between the cartels – and between the cartels and Mexican law enforcement.

Drug users like to claim theirs is a victimless offense.

Tell that to the families of the five Ciudad Juarez police officers who were gunned down a week ago by Mexican drug traffickers threatening to kill one officer every 48 hours unless the police chief of this city across the Texas border from El Paso resigned. He did.

Or tell that to the family of the Tijuana police officer who was murdered recently after Mexican drug cartel members hijacked a police radio frequency and said in reference to him: "You're next, bastard. ... We're going to get you." Two hours later he and another police officer were found bound and shot in the head.

Or tell that to the family of Mauro Enrique Tello Quinones. The retired army general was kidnapped this month after being asked by the mayor of Cancun to root out the drug cartels in that Caribbean city. He had been on the job a week. Before they shot him in the head, cartel members broke both of his arms and legs.

Or tell that to the family – what is left of it – of Carlos Reyes López. Hooded gunmen killed him and his wife and his mother and his children and his nephews – 11 family members in all – 14 days ago inside their home in the ranching community of Monte Largo in retaliation for drug arrests that Lopez and his elite state police unit had made in recent weeks. Some of the children were killed as they hid under their beds.

Drug violence has claimed another 1,000 lives in Mexico so far this year. To date the drug cartels have confined most of their murdering to Mexico although the five men found dead in an apartment in Birmingham, Ala., in August had some of the earmarks of a cartel killing: slit throats, gags and blindfolds.

Elsewhere, kidnappings and home invasions thought to be tied to Mexican drug cartels are occurring almost daily in Arizona while on Tuesday Texas Gov. Rick Perry asked Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano for 1,000 more troops to keep cartel-sponsored violence at bay.

At the root of this ruthlessness, of course, is money.

Mexican and Colombian drug cartels, according to the U.S. Justice Department, collect at least $18 billion and possibly as much as $39 billion each year from the sale of illegal drugs. In comparison, the gross domestic product of South Dakota was $33.9 billion in 2007. At the top end of the Justice Department estimate, illegal drugs in Mexico are bigger business than all the business in South Dakota combined.

In a sense, the seven drug cartels in Mexico are competing for market share. But they take an approach Main Street businesses do not: They kill.

Might the cartels – or the street and motorcycle gangs in the United States through which they distribute much of their drugs – someday resort to carnage to carve up this country like they are doing their own?

Lt. Steve Haney of the Sioux Falls Area Drug Task Force doesn't rule out the possibility. "There is so much money to be made," says the commander of the task force, which a week ago seized almost $300,000 of marijuana and methamphetamine from one Guatemalan and six Mexican drug traffickers in a major bust. "It all comes down to greed."

And to people who think the only person their drug habit is hurting is them.

Shame on us

On the day New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer was holed up in his Manhattan apartment, accused of frequenting thousand-dollar hookers though married and the father of three, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported one in four teenage girls in America has a sexually transmitted disease.

In its study the CDC tested 838 girls ages 14 to 19 for four infections. It found 26 percent of the girls – chosen at random from a 2003-04 national health survey – had at least one of these infections: human papillomavirus, which can cause cervical cancer, chlamydia, which can lead to infertility, trichomoniasis or genital herpes.

The study marks the first time the CDC has tested teens for more than one sexually transmitted disease. Based on its findings, it estimates more than 3 million teenage girls in America have an STD.

The finger pointing started almost the instant the study aired. Planned Parenthood directed its at the Bush administration. "The national policy of promoting abstinence-only programs is a $1.5 billion failure, and teenage girls are paying the real price," said Planned Parenthood Federation of America President Cecile Richards.

Others found fault elsewhere. Nora Gelperin of the Web site Sex, Etc., which aims to educate teens about sex, told the Washington Post: "Sexuality is still a very taboo subject in our society. Teens tell us that they can't make decisions in the dark and that adults aren't properly preparing them to make responsible decisions."

Are millions of teenage American girls contracting sexually transmitted diseases because they are being told nothing about sex? Or is it because they are not being told enough about sex? Or is it because sex is all American teenagers – girls and boys – ever hear about?

In a nation prone to obsess, sex is our supreme obsession. It drips from the TV, oozes from the radio, seeps from the Web and the pages of magazines and books. We are fixated on it. It is a drumbeat that never breaks, and the message is anything but subliminal: Sex doesn't just sell; it satisfies.

Which, of course, is often untrue and which, of course, the 370,000 unwed teenage girls and at least some of the 1.3 million unmarried adult women who become pregnant in the United States each year can attest to. So, too, can the almost 10,000 American women who will contract AIDS/HIV this year – 80 percent of whom will get it through heterosexual contact – or the more than 100,000 women in the nation who have the virus that so far has claimed the lives of almost 100,000 of their peers.

Nonetheless, sex is portrayed as some kind of panacea. It is the Holy Grail of happiness, and once found, the clouds open and the blues blow away. In the midst of this media blitz, this barrage of bosoms and butts and bodies braided in bed, what other impression could American teenagers get than that theirs is a copulation-crazed country? Is it any wonder they are wondering what the fuss is all about?

Nor did Eliot Spitzer help to quiet the hysteria.

If only for the pained expression his wife wore while standing next to him, Spitzer's fall from grace this week for soliciting prostitutes was lamentable. But the true tragedy can be found in the federal court complaint against the prostitution ring Spitzer called on for his call girls and, in particular, in the wiretapped conversations described in the document between the principals of the ring and the young women who worked for them.

In one conversation a recently hired prostitute confided "she had never done anything like this before" and was afraid her family might find out. In another the owners of the ring complained about a different prostitute who had missed an appointment and speculated she might be on drugs. To which one of them replied: "A lot of these girls deteriorate to this point." A subsequent conversation has the owners grumbling about another prostitute who had left an appointment earlier than she should. They suspect she didn't stick around because she had children to pick up from school. "As a general rule," one of them said, "the girls who have children tend to have ... a little more baggage going on."

Young women who turn to prostitution and teenage girls who acquire sexually transmitted diseases might seem disparate. But how they feel about themselves might be closer than we think. Certainly, each shares a significant characteristic if not an origin: the failure of men in America – young and old – to honor women and to do them no harm.

On her MySpace page the 22-year-old woman identified in the days since as the prostitute whom the 48-year-old Spitzer invited to the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, D.C., on Feb. 13 writes: "When I was 17, I left home. It was my decision and I've never looked back. Left my hometown. Left a broken family. Left abuse. Left an older brother who had already split. Left and learned what it was like to have everything, and lose it, again and again. Learned what it was like to wake up one day and have the people you care about most gone. I have been alone. I have abused drugs. I have been broke and homeless."

American corruption personified and collective was on display this week. That Eliot Spitzer would add to the misery of a woman not much older than a teenager herself and who, by her account, has borne a miserable life is shameful and sad. That one quarter of teenage girls in America have sexually transmitted diseases is, too. That we prefer to be titillated rather than to take action might be the saddest and most shameful note of all.