KINDER'S COMMENTARY: SATANIC LYRICS OF MARILYN MANSON: SIGN OF CURRENT DARK AGES?

"How would you know at the time," a writer famously asked some decades back, "whether you were living in a Dark Age?"

One answer: There would be rock stars such as the execrable Marilyn Manson selling lots of CDs and playing to packed houses of teen-age children. Manson played St. Louis this week.

The truly satanic Manson lyrics feature glorification of suicide, violence against women and a celebration of license that will get you diseases with difficult-to-pronounce names, and of whose consequence to her future fertility not one teen girl in a thousand is aware. In a few short years we have gone from Madonna prancing on stage in her underwear and simulating masturbation to Roseanne Barr's contemptible, crotch-grabbing performance of the national anthem to Marilyn Manson, smashing, abusing and torturing animals during his act. Dark Age, anyone?

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This column was frequently critical, during his tenure in office, of former President George Bush. But of him and his World War II generation -- what many call the Great Generation -- it can be said, "They walked always in the paths of honor."

Bill Clinton, Child of the '60s, long ago established himself as the anything-goes president. He and his smug crowd of elites sneer at the square, hardworking Americans in what these bicoastal types call "fly-over country."

It has long been a theme of this column that many among what passes for today's elites are sick, decadent, rotten to the core. This has been reconfirmed by the reaction of many of these elites to the Lewinsky affair. A recent issue of The New Yorker magazine, featuring tortured defenses of the president and relentless attacks on Ken Starr, as though he caused it all, displayed this sickness. Here is how one eastern journal -- and no bastion of conservatism, either -- characterized The New Yorker's series of essays written by effete literary types on the Lewinsky affair. From the New York Observer:

"A man who callously used a young employee as a form of sexual release, oblivious to her pleasure or emotional well-being, emerges from this literary group hug (in the New Yorker) as an old-fashioned lover, an innocent American boy with a passionate heart. ...

"What has led the American elite to this shaky promontory? ... One must dig a bit deeper ... Drunk on 50-year-old wine, seduced by the power of the presidency, they have lost their ability to interpret the present.

"Indeed, we wonder what one of the literary elite would have to say if their 21-year-old daughter was a White House intern and was sodomized and publicly humiliated by a 50-year-old disgusting lecher?"

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Last week, we published a letter from one Dennis O'Neal of Cape Girardeau. Mr. O'Neal alleged that U.S. Rep. Jo Ann Emerson had accepted $5,000 from Harrah's, the gambling company, in her successful 1996 campaign. Next he tried to suggest this writer's support for Emerson's 1998 opponent. The Missouri Democratic Party published the same disinformation on their Internet Web site.

All of us have a right to be wrong on our opinions. None has a right to be wrong on the facts. Here, both are mistaken, false -- wrong on the facts. Emerson, in fact, didn't accept any such contribution. It never happened.

I await apologies from Mr. O'Neal, the Missouri Democratic Party and from a certain nominee for Congress who, one suspects, is behind the smear.

~Peter Kinder is assistant to the president of Rust Communications and a state senator from Cape Girardeau.