Approval Hell: Americans are an accepting people, to a fault.

HAVE you noticed that Americans no longer use the word shocked except when imitating the Claude Rains character in Casablanca?

His signature line is a favorite of media pundits who like to show off their knowledge of how Washington really works: "He was shocked, shocked to find bribery and influence-peddling!" Even though the Rains character was a suave sophisticate and thoroughgoing cynic, his line is used regularly in group discussions when one commentator wants to make another look naive, e.g., "I see you are shocked, shocked to learn that the FBI lied."

The line has become our national catchphrase, our water-cooler jibe of record, but it wasn't always so. Casablanca came out in 1942 but the line lay dormant until cable television came along and began showing old movies on a regular basis in the 1970s, when, as it happened, we acquired a great many things to be shocked about. We could not say so, however; the moment anyone said "I am shocked," somebody would interrupt with "I am shocked, shocked." If you said it on television, the studio audience was liable to titter and return a whispery wave of "shocked, shocked."

Being shocked soon died a natural death. The spirit of the times would tolerate only broadminded, compassionate condemnation, so we had to come up with an acceptable expression for it. We settled on "troubled" and "concerned," which soon oozed into "troubled 'n'concerned," and remembered to toss in "tough love" when it would fit. These sufficed for a while, but as time went on and the cultural scene coarsened we needed something stronger, stricter, something almost ... well, impatient.

We found it, and it quickly took over the tube. Turn on any talk show and you are sure to hear it thunder forth in all its vituperative glory: "inappropriate behavior." The beauty of this one is that it is syllabically constructed to lead naturally into a spinsterish little sniff, making it ideal for Alan Colmes, and its prunishness allows our lips to set in an expression of serene disapproval before anyone has time to suspect that we might be more shocked than we appear.

Now we need something stronger than "inappropriate behavior," but we have nothing to put in its place because disapproval of any kind is now seen as proof of an intent to interfere with the offending party's civil rights. We are approaching the idea, as yet unborn but implanted in our collective subconscious, that coming out against anybody for any reason can, if debated long enough, be made to seem unconstitutional.

The Constitution has nothing to do with it unless you wish to count the freedom of speech that started us down this road. Laws per se are a side issue; we are increasingly being governed by the television talk show, an electronic juris without prudence wherein debate itself is all that is necessary to effect any desired change: "I talk about it; therefore, it's coming."

A MADE-FOR-TV MOMENT

One of the coming attractions is already here. Three years ago when sodomy laws were struck down, polygamists began to stir, arguing that the right of sexual privacy just won by homosexuals extended to themselves. But linking polygamy to homosexuality did not sit well with anyone, including gays, and the "consenting adults" argument did not catch on.

Now, however, polygamists have hitched their wagon to a star--or rather, some western sheriffs and prosecutors have ever so kindly done it for them. Aware that pedophilia is the most emotion-fraught topic in America, the lawmen announced that they are going after Warren Jeffs and other renegade patriarchs, not for polygamy per se but for child molestation, based on their history of taking minor girls to wife.

Talk about your made-for-TV moment. In one grand, self-defeating move the lawmen have created what was lacking before: Good Polygamists and Bad Polygamists. Americans will accept the distinction without question because so many TV sound stages contain two sofas facing each other, and there are two sections to Larry King's table. Anyone with lingering doubts will be brought round by that verbal holy water that we always sprinkle over such gatherings: The Vast Majority of ...

"The vast majority of polygamists," the host will intone, "live quietly, pay their taxes, contribute to their community, and ... practice family values." That will draw a laugh at first, but once moderators get used to saying it without gulping the whole country will go along and be duly impressed, because the Vast Majority of is a hypnotic phrase. Americans are comfortable with majorities, the very word makes us feel secure; ergo, as Descartes used to say, if there are enough Good Polygamists to have a majority, they can't be too bad.

Once the Bad Polygamists are locked up, we will reason, why shouldn't the Good Polygamists enjoy full legal rights to go on living quietly, paying their taxes, contributing to the community, and practicing family values? After all, it's their religion. And besides, they're consenting adults ...

THE NEXT STEP

The partial legalization of polygamy will bring out the incest lobby. Nobody knows how big it is or much of anything else about it, but we can be fairly certain how they will flack their cause. People with repugnant agendas are necessarily partial to the tu quoque argument, so stand by for the sentence, It's Already Happening.

They mean the yours-mine-ours makeup of today's divorce-prone families. Leaving teenage step-siblings and half-siblings alone in a house while both parents are out chasing the American Dream could turn into a sexual nightmare and doubtless has. Then there are the growing numbers of individuals being conceived in something other than the good old-fashioned way. It's possible that someday the progeny of artificial inseminations, test tubes, petri dishes, and surrogacy could meet and mate without knowing that they are consanguineous. Enter the embryonic makings of the "We're all guilty" argument.

The Big Bro pleaders will try to force the enemies of incest into a politically incorrect corner. This is easy to do, guaranteed to happen the first time one of them charges that incest causes "birth defects." There are no defective children now; they are differently abled, cerebrally challenged, they have special needs, and if you dare say otherwise their mothers will kneecap you. So will the governor of West Virginia.

Getting incestuous couples to appear on TV will be hard to do (at least at first), so the Big Bros will use examples from the past to show how well things can turn out. The most obvious examples are Victoria and Albert. True, they were only first cousins, but you have to crawl before you can walk over hot coals. The incest lobby will sing the praises of their deliriously happy marriage. They will point out that the eldest child, the Princess Royal Victoria, inherited Albert's extremely high intelligence. That the second child, Edward, Prince of Wales, though no scholar, was a natural-born diplomat and people-person who, as Edward VII, could have schmoozed Europe out of World War I had he lived a few years longer. That the other seven children were all sane and healthy. True, Prince Leopold died young from hemophilia, but that came through the maternal line alone and had nothing to do with whom Victoria married. And last but not least, that the youngest, Princess Beatrice, lived until 1944, dying at the ripe old age of 87, far exceeding the life expectancy of someone born in 1857.

On it goes. When they bring in the Egyptologists to hold forth on brother-sister marriages among the pharaohs, the History Channel gives up and goes out of business.

Next we will be treated to a discussion of incest complexes by Neo-Freudians, Third-Wave Freudians, and aging Second-Wave feminists who jump at the chance to go on TV and attack him all over again, just as they did back in the Seventies. This debate is memorable for what happened to a distinguished psychoanalyst who took part: His screen ID had him as "Eddie P. Rex," compliments of the same people who give us the spelling howlers on the crawl.

By now no American in his right mind would utter a word about birth defects, not even in politically correct language, but a morbid fascination with deformities remains, spiking whenever one of the movie channels airs Hawaii. The incest lobby interprets this as a need for more "education," and suddenly, anyone who has anything good to say about consanguinity--never mind whose--becomes television's idea of a first-class "get." Pressured by the Bros, producers fill up their shows with horse-breeding experts from all over the English-speaking world; gnomelike, bowlegged men and leathery women all saying, like Mrs. Tarleton in Gone With the Wind, "You can breed a mare to a brother or a sire to a daughter and get good results if you know your blood strains."

Listening to horsey people talk about the only subject they ever talk about does us in. By now the entire country is in a propaganda coma. Deciding that the time is ripe for the big push, the Bros persuade a pharaoh wannabe to tell his story on an audience-participation daytime show. "Wanting to marry my sister is part of who I am," he bleats, and the mostly female audience nods in sympathy. By the time he finishes some of them are in tears, and in the question period one of them kicks off with, "I respect your right to love your sister ..."

'A LITTLE DISPLAY OF AFFECTION'

If you think I'm making all of this up, consider the following letter to the editor that appeared in Entertainment Weekly in response to their cover story, "Oh, Brother!"

I simply cannot believe the attention Angelina Jolie's affection toward her brother is receiving. It is completely ridiculous and truly sad. It should not be considered "out of the ordinary" to care so much for someone who is tied to you by blood as well as by friendship. There are far more important things for reporters to write about than a little display of affection toward one's family. Get real.

Calling the behavior in question "out of the ordinary" is an understatement. On Oscar night, after announcing, "I'm so in love with my brother right now," Jolie locked lips with him in an obviously moist kiss that went on far, far too long. Like everyone I know who watched the film clip, I recoiled. When the celebrity press exploded with stories about it, Jolie's brother, James Haven Voight, issued a statement: "They [reporters] are going into a realm where it's something that's almost ugly, rather than something that can be beautiful. If that is unusual these days, that's sad."

Whatever is or is not going on between them, I am not worried that Jolie and James will popularize the brother-sister act among teens. The lurid Jolie is not their mother's Murphy Brown, nor Dan Quayle's either, but rather a Morticia look-alike in danger of becoming a laughingstock.

What does worry me is the disappearance of the "J'accuse" spirit from the American character. Our reluctance to disapprove and condemn, the insipid pride we take in our refusal to be "judgmental," our eagerness to fashion maudlin excuses and rationalizations for the behavior of people we don't even know, our bottomless capacity for suffering fools, and our history of never meeting a "right" we couldn't respect.

This country has gone to Approval Hell. If we don't get out of it, we are going to be shocked, shocked out of it.

Florence King's NATIONAL REVIEW columns are collected in STET, Damnit!: The Misanthrope's Corner, 1991 to 2002.