Outside the mainstream.

Not long ago, I went to a movie that was all too typical of small, independent American films--and not a few big studio productions, too. Spring Forward, written and directed by Tom Gilroy, had a lot going for it--mainly two terrific performances by Ned Beatty and Liev Schreiber as a couple of groundsmen employed by an unnamed town in Connecticut who get to know each other over the course of a year of working together. The seasons of the year are marked, like a medieval calendar, with the imagery of the suburban-bucolic, so that we are constantly aware of the passage of time and the deepening of a friendship, from the arrival on the job of Mr. Schreiber's character, fresh out of the state penitentiary, until the exit from it of Mr. Beatty's character, who has reached retirement age. Both the strength and the weakness of the film is that it consists almost entirely of conversations--about life, the universe, and everything--by these two fine actors.

It is a weakness, and ultimately a fatal one, because Mr. Gilroy's writing is unfortunately given to preachiness. And that's putting it mildly. He has got more messages than Western Union, and not one of them will ruffle a feather of the preening P.C-cocks who decide what it is okay for decent, progressive-minded folk in twenty-first century America to think--and not to think. Are there here and there among us some troglodytic traditionalists, here presumed to be wife-beating, gay-bashing, meat-eating, uncompassionate, sexually puritanical drug prohibitionists and defenders of the Boy Scouts, who still worship at the dilapidated shrines of the Judeo-Christian patriarchy? By God, they'll get told a thing or two in the unlikely event that they should find themselves, as I did, in a darkened moviehouse squinting at their watches and waiting impatiently for Mr. Gilroy's earnest and well-meaning moral lecture to end.

No doubt their annoyance, and mine, will add substantially to the enjoyment that the film affords the comfortable, tolerant, Gore-voting soccer-moms in the forward rows whose heads bobbed with agreement at every word. For the film not only has nothing to say to those who don't agree with its moral precepts, but its whole purpose is also to offend them and shame them for not agreeing--a fact which makes it a failure even in its own terms, since very few disagreers, apart from reviewers like me, will ever see it. But Mr. Gilroy at least has the satisfaction, such as it may be, of having gone to a great deal of trouble and expense to have put on record for like-minded suburban liberals (fit audience, though few) the unquestioned fact that his own views on the moral problems of the day are of the most enlightened sort.

All this is by way of preamble to the observation that the media's views on these same problems are, like Mr. Gilroy's, less for use than for show. Their obsession with religious and racial and sexual tolerance, often almost to the exclusion of any other concern, betokens a sectarian anxiety that can only be assuaged by constant assurances, to themselves and others, that they hold the correct views on these subjects, and that, therefore, decency itself must consist of holding such views. Much of what goes under the name of media "bias" is really this form of media smugness and self-righteousness. And their irritated denials of the bias of their views are the product of a willed belief that, really, there is only one way for decent human beings to roll.

But the media attitude is a reflection of a larger phenomenon of American moral and political and intellectual life. This is the pretence that those kinds of things which are not subject to disagreement among men of good will, or even of basic decency--things like the social taboos against murder or picking your nose--include new taboos against certain kinds of traditional (and traditionalist) beliefs that were once themselves the foundation of public decency, such as a posture of shock and disapproval towards unmarried sex or homosexuality. Having pitched such ideas of decency out of the windows of respectable society in the 1950s and 1960s, liberal-minded people now find them coming back in through the door to pitch them out if they are insufficiently warm and welcoming to the things that shocked their parents.

The willingness with which this pretense has been embraced, for the sake of tolerance and good-will, has provided the opening for ever-thrusting political progressives keen to persuade us that such morally dubious enterprises as the public school bureaucracy or the abortion industry are also things that it is not possible for decent people to disagree about. The media is of course in a weak position to resist such pressure, having already conceded the larger point with respect to race, religion, and sex and being largely Democratic in its sympathies--a point which became apparent last month during the early-onset political turmoil over the challenges by Democrats and allied interest groups to George W. Bush's cabinet choices.

Now the recent history of the senate's exercise of its advising and consenting powers suggests that it is expected that, just as the president has the right to choose his cabinet, the opposition to the president in the upper house has the right to reject one or two of his choices as a kind of shot across the bows for the political wars to come, a reminder that, even with slim majorities in both houses of Congress, the president is not to be given a free hand to do as he pleases. But the media's peculiar brand of hypocrisy requires that this kind of trophy-hunting by the opposition should be seen not as a mere political trial of strength but as a highly principled crusade against the avatars of (what else?) political indecency.