FROM AUDREY HEPBURN TO MADONNA...IS IT PROGRESS?

A couple of Sundays ago, I had the tube on, listening to Charles Kuralt's "Sunday Morning" program as I got ready to go to church. Audrey Hepburn had just died, and Kuralt closed the show with a moving tribute to that wonderful actress, the very embodiment of elegance, innocence and timeless charm.

Audrey Hepburn was all of those. Would she make it today?

I was born in the mid-'50s into an America that still had some sense of modesty and, yes, of an outdated notion called shame. We did not have the profound coarsening, the utter disrespect for others that so pervades our culture today.

Is it progress? I submit that these issues are not disposed of by reciting pieties about freedom of expression and the First Amendment. What of the state of our culture?

What does it say about our culture that in a couple of generations we have traveled from cultural icons Grace Kelly and Nat King Cole, David Niven and Audrey Hepburn, all the way to Ice-T, Sister Souljah and Madonna? From Stan the Man and DiMaggio, the Yankee Clipper, to today's pampered multimillionaires? From a Hollywood that had censors, to a decadent entertainment community that defends "artists" who produce "art" that advocates murdering police officers?

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One man who saw clearly into the madness of modern society was that wonderful Englishman, the late, great author, critic and Christian apologist, Malcolm Muggeridge. A recent article in the American Spectator laid out Muggeridge's view of a terrible irony of modern life. The article said:

"Long before he knew what he believed, Muggeridge knew what he disbelieved, and he continued in one way or another to be preoccupied with his `revulsion against the liberal mind ... and all its works.' There is something in the liberal mind, Muggeridge insisted, that constitutes a kind of `death wish', so that by a strange irony, we get a continuing revelation of what the poet Blake called `Fearful Symmetry.'"

Years ago, Muggeridge foresaw it all, this "Fearful Symmetry":

Illiteracy increases with expenditure on public education, the demand for sedatives with increased leisure or affluence, and crimes of violence with libertarian schemes to prevent them and rehabilitate their perpetrators. The more pacifists and internationalists in the world, the more belligerancy; the more free speech, the less truth spoken; the more maternal and child care, the more fetuses aborted and thrown away with the hospital waste. Oh, the terrible inhumanity of the humane!

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One presidential decision of this past week should not go unnoticed. A few days ago, President Clinton reversed a longstanding policy of the U.S. government that HIV-positive aliens are barred entry into our country. Question: Will America be made a better place by having more AIDS patients?

All of which serves to underscore the fact that AIDS is the first communicable disease in world history to possess civil rights. It is a disease whose origin is purely behaviorly based. It's the first communicable disease that we have not quarantined, even as certain morbid sexual practices have contaminated the public blood supply and placed innocent people at risk even killing a few.

Such public health measures as we have successfully enacted against its pitiless spread such as the closure of San Francisco's bath houses, scenes of fantastic male-on-male promiscuousness have been enacted over vehement objections of the militant "gay rights" lobby. All of which makes you wonder about the first president of the post-World War II generation, who never served in the military himself, and who is now determined to force the gay lifestyle on career military officers nearly unanimous in their opposition.

Let's be clear: What is now being demanded in the name of "gay rights" goes well beyond mere toleration. What is now embraced is an uncompromising demand, of unqualified acceptance, of a profoundly radical agenda.

What is also clear is that this President takes his advice not from Generals Powell and Schwartzkopf but from Barbra Streisand, Linda Bloodworth Thomason and their pals in the Hollywood Left.

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They're much more liberal underneath and will prove it when they're elected.

Former South Dakota Sen. and 1972 Democratic presidential nominee George McGovern, speaking of the Clinton-Gore ticket during the Democratic National Convention last July.

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Remember Sen. McGovern's quote this Wednesday evening when you watch President Clinton explaining to us all how we need to pay still higher taxes.