In 1992 I went back and took some grad courses in political science. I knew even then that my last book would be about academia so I needed the recent experience.

Near the endo f that semester my sister said to me, “Those students must have been fascinated by your experiences in real law making and politics in Washington.”

I was really astonished that she would say such a thing. My sister got her master’s degree almost forty years before, but surely she would realize how silly such a comment would be! Then it occurred to me that maybe she was not the one being naive.

One “seminar” course required that a student read a book a week. Like every writer, I would check the index and references to see how often my own name and writings came up in those books.

I don’t get much credit, so the references to me were a lot less than any writer would like, but my name came up pretty regulary in the books I was studying. This is not a routine occurence for a student.

Not one student or professor ever asked me one single question about the real running of campaigns or the real making of laws. When I say it never occurred to me that they would, it is a gross understatement.

In fact, if you concentrate on the feact that no one asked me about real lawmaking or real politics, you will completely miss the point I want to make here. The point is what I took FOR GRANTED. If anyone in a graduate course or a seminar had shown the slightest interest in how politics really is, or how laws really are made, I would have been ASTONISHED.

A poll was put up on the bulletin board predicting the results of the coming 1992 election. I got it right, as always, giving a much closer estimate of the percentage each candidate would get than anybody else.

Of course. I had just retired comfortably onthe money I made doing just that.

Nobody even mentioned the fact. I didn’t expect anybody to mention that. I was a pro, so of course I did better.

Now let us remember that my point is not that this was ignored, but that I expected nothing else.

In a real college, real knowledge is just theory. College is a job, and your JOB is to give the answers your professors want on exams.

That is the ONLY job a student has. Asking for real information is as irrelevant in a classroom as telling jokes during class time.

So I thought my sister’s question was completely naive. My thought was, what world are you living in?

I feel exactly the same way when someone comes panting up to me to say some preacher, the man who so convincingly cries about the Glory of God and how important a conscience is, turns out to be a complete psychopath who with women or boys on the side.

Once again, you will miss my point if you think I react by being surprised or, and this is the point, even being bored by a revelation of what I already knew. My reaction is to wonder what world the brethless person lives in.

OF COURSE somebody who makes his living by claiming to be the Mouth of God is a psychopath. How many people who REALLY believe in God and in Heaven and in Hell are going to risk blasphemy every day of the week?

Maybe you have forgotten what Hell and Heaven mean. I haven’t, my Bible Belt background won’t let me.

How in heaven’s name could a man keep a major pulpit and make all the accommodations in the his function of the Mouth of God that he must make on a regular basis and NOT be total psychopath?

This article is long enough.

But what I am trying to get across to you is that I live in a world where most of what people e-mail each other frantically about is less, FAR LESS, than routine.

What you call a scandal is what I learned to take as routine beyond the normal use of the term FOR GRANTED.

This is not an overstatement:

I find it as hard to deal with people who are frantically e-mailng each other about the latest scandal as you would trying to fit into a company where people are shouting to each other, “The sky is blue!”