Corruption of the Jean Pool

By CALVIN TRILLIN

Paul Weyrich, an influential molder of social-conservative opinion, wrote his followers that the public's disinclination to throw Bill Clinton out of office reflected "the collapse of the culture." At first I thought he was being a bit harsh. Then Levi Strauss announced that it's laying off a good chunk of its work force, partly because so many Americans have abandoned authentic blue jeans for designer jeans. That gave me a little more appreciation of what Weyrich was getting at. All of us with an interest in preserving Western civilization have our own notion of what just might be the last straw.

Years ago, I put on the record what I had learned about blue jeans at Southwest High School, in Kansas City, Mo.: "Anybody who wears jeans that are not Levi or Lee is a nerd, a creep, a wonk, and walks like a duck." What binds Weyrich and me together, I realized, is that we believe in an absolute standard of behavior, what used to be called the eternal verities; we deplore what he would probably call relativist morals and I would call a lot of people being willing to go around dressed like dorks.

We both take pride in ignoring the fashions of the times. My wife often tells me that my views on blue jeans are adolescent. That should come as no surprise, I reply, since I acquired them during my adolescence. I have never seen any reason to change them. Anyone looking for a relativist position on blue jeans can look elsewhere.

Weyrich, who says he was the one who invented the phrase moral majority, has concluded from the recent unpleasantness that people who believe what he believes are no longer in the majority, and that their only choice is to drop out of a culture that has become an "ever wider sewer."

Here's where our approaches differ. I've known for a long time that people who adhere to the Southwest High School verities are no longer in the majority. Anytime I go to the movies in a mall I can see with my own eyes that the deviationists are thick on the ground. I go anyway; I like movies. I confine my comments on the other moviegoers to some grumbling heard only by my wife. I'm confident that I'm personally invulnerable to the charms of Calvin KIein or Tommy Hilfiger, but I'm not up to telling other people how to dress.

The Moral Majority was never a majority. A majority of Americans are unwilling to have Paul Weyrich or anybody else dictate to them what is moral and righteous in personal life. In 1992, when the morals police and gay bashers seemed in ascendancy at the Republican National Convention, the public response was so negative that George Bush had to spend the first couple of weeks of the campaign backpedaling.

If Lucianne Goldberg and Linda Tripp and those squirrely lawyers from the Federalist Society had remembered that, they might have realized that they were about to bring nothing but frustration to Paul Weyrich, not to speak of the Republican Party. Instead they must have whooped with joy when the trap was sprung. As I envision that scene, it's Friday, dress-down day in the law firms, and the Federalist Society lawyers are all wearing designer jeans.