When our role models let us down

David Petraeus, who might have been the most respected man in America, has resigned due to a personal scandal that threatens to turn into a national-security scandal.

Kevin Clash, who took a piece of red cloth and with mysterious alchemy turned it into the most popular character for small children the world has ever seen, has been suspended by “Sesame Street” amid allegations he had an affair with an underage boy.

What do these two wildly disparate gobsmacking revelations over the past few days have to do with one another, aside from the fact that they both involve sex?

They are two more examples of a key cultural shift in American life over the past half-century: the decline of the authority figure.

Begin with generals in Vietnam touting success stories so meaningless they lost the goodwill of a public yearning to believe them, and move on to a senator with a golden family name and martyred brothers fleeing a car wreck and leaving a woman to drown. Continue with revelations throughout the 1970s and 1980s about the shocking private conduct of admired figures from FDR to Dwight Eisenhower to JFK and others.

Then to the 1990s, with one of the most talented football players in history murdering his wife and a stranger, the president staining the Oval Office with reprehensible conduct, the world’s most famous entertainer paying off a child who shared his bed and the Catholic Church revealed to have hidden and protected molesters.

More recently, reputations have been made and destroyed in incredibly short order. John Edwards was unknown until John Kerry chose him as his running mate and thereby gave him a shot at the presidency in 2008. Whereupon he cheated on his dying wife, had a child out of wedlock and had an associate pretend to be the father so his presidential bid would not be derailed.

Or Petraeus — likewise unknown before 2006, though a hotly controversial figure in military circles, until he emerged as the partial deviser and implementer of a daring strategy that turned a catastrophic coming defeat in Iraq into a modest American victory. He was then called upon to work the same miracle in Afghanistan, and then to take over the CIA.

Now, under circumstances that grow muddier by the minute, his career and life and reputation are in tatters.

Clash is certainly an unusual example of an authority figure, as he primarily speaks to small children in a high falsetto — but still, his Elmo is designed to impart messages about communication and emotion, and does so in a mysteriously effective way.

If the accusation holds, Clash will be gone, as will most of what made Elmo so powerful.

The decline of the authority figure is not just present in Washington and Hollywood. It’s everywhere in evidence, from parents who feel free to sue teachers for giving their kids grades they don’t like to monstrous adolescents abusing a 68-year-old bus driver in a viral video on YouTube.

The problem of a world without authority figures is that such people offer everyone a sense of a rational human order — one in which we should listen to others who have, through their accomplishments and (even more so) sacrifices, earned the right to speak to us and basically tell us what to do.

How can we live without that? The example of the bus driver berated by the kids in her charge shows how awful it can be for a country that has lost its respect for authority.

But we can’t live with it either. If Petraeus and others are the authority figures our culture generates, then it should be our first impulse to view them at a distance and our considered judgment that they should not be venerated. Respected for what they can do, absolutely; celebrated simply for who they are, never.

Maybe there was a time when authority figures understood the kinds of personal sacrifices of their own wants and desires they needed to make because of the responsibilities they possessed. Few appear willing to make such sacrifices any longer; we live in an age in which personal expression is paramount and suppression of desire is considered unhealthy, and everyone is affected by that revolution in human conduct.

So what remains? Rather than looking to Petraeus, we should look — as we have looked for a decade or more — at the hundreds of thousands of men and women, most of whose names we do not know, who have chosen a life of sacrifice and service in our nation’s military.

Individually, they are awash in flaws, as we all are. Taken as a whole, they are exactly the authority figures the nation needs and deserves — examples of sterling human conduct that overcome personal weaknesses rather than examples of personal weakness that serve to discredit human achievement. jpodhoretz@gmail.com

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