On Values: Conversations with PeggyNoonan.

A specter is haunting America: the specter of old-fashioned values.

A Never mind, for the moment, just what those values are - or were: the important thing is that everybody seems to feel that we've lost them. Know that stomach-dropping feeling when you're in a strange town and you idly reach into your pocket for your car keys and they're not there? If you can summon up that special, omigod disoriented panic, then I think you're close to understanding the current national mood, from the mid-Clinton election to the shift in recent social/historical studies of the American scene to my main subject (see? I always have a subject), the new three-part series on PBS, "On Values: Conversations with Peggy Noonan."

Right: Peggy Noonan. The Svengali - Svengalette? - who crafted all those speeches that convinced so many that Ronny Reagan - the Pinocchio of late capitalism - had a shining vision of a return to the old verities, of morning in America, smelling the coffee, killing the bear in the woods, or whatever he was told to say. She even wrote a book about it, boasting - with justification - that it was she who was the authentic voice of the Great Communicator. So she, already, is hosting a show on old-fashioned values? But we'll get back to Sister Noonan. More important is that her series appears when it does, and where it does: in 1995 and on PBS. Think again and, as an acting coach would say, save the panic of the moment of the missing car keys.

You never thought you'd lose them, did you? Whatever else happened, they were supposed to be there. And then, all of a sudden, they weren't. Now you know why the Republicans cleaned the clock in November '94. They told us they'd help us find the keys.

Maybe it all went goofy in 1933 with the New Deal; or maybe in 1964 with the Great Society; or maybe (ssh! we're not supposed to say this) in 1980 with the Reagan Revolution. Whatever, we've witnessed and continue to witness a decline in what we now, with a quiet and bitter smile, call our culture. Even I, a rapidly aging and unreconstructed liberal, share the vertigo: and as the Yiddish proverb says, when three people tell you you're drunk - lie down.

Now the Newt-onian system of the universe tells us that this malaise can be cured by fixing up the intrusiveness of that bad, bad federal government. My only problem with that - and, God help me, I like Brother Gingrich - is that it keeps things at the same, social-engineering-from-D.C. level that everybody's blaming for our present quandary to begin with. The conservatives are almost right - surely righter, at the present time, than the mummified remains of the liberals - but not right enough. "In times of degeneration," says the Tao te Ching, "wise counselors will arise." And the Tao never leads you astray: enter, or re-enter, stage right, Sister Noonan.

Mind you, I think "On Values" is pretty shoddy stuff. The camera work is strictly early-fifties' talking heads, the dialog (written by Noonan) is as canned as Campbell's Soup, and the preordained conclusion of the whole thing - essentially, folks, we jes' gotta git oursel's back to the things that really matter - is about as helpful as a single Tylenol and as socially incisive as really bad Steinbeck. But yet and still, as my ROTC instructor, Sargeant Crowley. was interminably fond of saying: yet and still, matters that a series even as clumsy and partisan as this one address an issue as critical as this one. After all, the first step in finding your car keys is realizing that they're missing And "On Values" al least does that: tries to talk about what none of the commercial networks, for all their gloss, seem capable of articulating, that we are all walking around, like characters in a surrealist film, with nagging sense of loss in our souls and in our eyes - moral amputees.

The series is three one-hour episodes, titled "Faith." "Family," and "Freedom." In each episode, Noonan interviews three people from various ranges of the spectrum on the question du jour. The first episode, for example - "Faith" - features the Reverend Richard John Neuhaus, a cautious priest; Michael Lerner, the passionate editor of the Jewish journal Tikkun; and Bill Moyers, one of those Southern Baptist boys who hit the D.C. jackpot by a combination of brilliance and the timely choice of coattails. It's like all those jokes that begin, "Okay, this priest, this rabbi, and this minister are in a bar...." The pity is that all these guys - and all the interviewees on the other shows - have really different and really pause-giving things to say: but, through the unrelenting and intrusive presence of Sister Noonan, their differences all become finally a sort of uniforrrt ideological mush. Ever have grits without butter and salt?

God knoweth the Noonan is made for TV. She interviews with a throaty, 900-number voice. And she looks like Sigourney Weaver, dyed strawberry blonde, playing Miss Jean Brodie. But her take "on values" is, in the end, as anemically prim and censoriously smug as that unspiked eggnog of a book, The Book of Virtues. (It's author William Bennett, and Noonan, in fact, should consider doing some gigs as the Tracy and Hepburn of the Frightened Right.) At one arresting point in the second episode, "Family," la Noonan is interviewing an unmarried single-parent mother - author Annie LaMotte - and as Annie, a committed Christian. talks about raising her kid, ol' Peg - also a divorced single parent - interrupts her by saying, in that only-for-you-baby voice, "But you're making it all sound too happy and too wonderful." And Annie, on cuc, shifts her tone and attitude.

Now I hate the idea of divorce, too - and I hate it as only a veteran can. It's like dying, as my wife Celeste says - but you still have to wake up the next day. What offends me about "On Values" is its general, elitist assumption that only the best and most sensitive of us - Noonan, you, and me - feel the emptiness. This is top-down morality, analogous to the trickle-down theory of wealth that Noonan and others re-invented for the Reagan Revolution. And - to formulate a very subtle political/moral position - it's dead wrong.

That very serious, widely mourned man, Christopher Lasch, in his last book, The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy, argued that the social engineers of the post-New Deal era have produced a government that is in conflict with the idea of culture: a set of sterile legalisms of "rights" that in fact wars against the imperatives of "duties." Lasch's book is to Noonan's series as King Lear is to a Road Runner cartoon. Having lost our original certainties, can we regain them by simply making believe the loss never occurred? You want to try to think your car keys back into your pocket? Sei gesund.

What "On Values" does accomplish, though, is at least an opening of the question - and on PBS, the channel that Newt & Co., self-appoited guardians of our moral sense, want to trash. And that's important for those of us who want to live neither in "Father Knows Best" nor in "Married with Children."

A cheer-and-a-half to Noonan, and here's to the agonozing search for vaues - which is, itself, a value.