The Baltimore Sun from Baltimore, Maryland • 23

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 22, 1991 THE SUN 23A OPINION COMMENTARY In the 'Since Magic' Era, a Hope for Moral Honesty By ELLEN Boston. The stories all begin the same way, as If they were marking days on a chart after a life-changing cataclysm: "In the three days since Magic Johnson "In the ten days since Magic Johnson "In the two weeks since Magic On Nov. 7, the superstar with the smile announced that he had tested positive on an exam everyone wants to flunk. We now know he Is carrying the HIV virus and some of his Stardust Is illuminating the corners of the disease we call AIDS. In the S.M.

"Since Magic" Era, we are talking about condoms and the heterosexual epidemic, about penlses and vaginas In their anatomically correct terminology. But in all of this matter-of-factness, we are still having trouble talking about the Psyche and Sex. To be specific, about promiscuity, values and value Judgments. On Day 12 of S.M. Era, on my way to work, I listen to two men arguing on the car radio.

One offers thinly veiled suspicions that Magic "caught it" from men, not women. The other angrily rebuts this attack by citing Magic's reputation as a "womanizer." I walk into the office enth Commandment or none. These elther-ors are laid over the traditional male talk about "the bachelor's life" or "scoring." Wilt Chamberlain, after all boasts a lifetime record of 20,000 women. It may be easier to find a cure for AIDS than to find our bearings. But the outlines of a consensus are there.

After all, few of us believe that protection makes a virtue out of promiscuity. Most of us recognize that premarital sex is here to stay. On the whole, we are happier with the vision of sex as an Intimate exchange, not a sporting event. Instead of choosing a prefabricated value, we can begin to clarify our values. We can approve both condoms and caution.

We can hold some single standard of medical and emotional care-ful-ness. And in the third week of the S.M. Era, we can be grateful for the strengths of the man who has spoken out, without Ignoring his weaknesses. Ellen Goodman Is a syndicated columnist that Magic came from a generation that didn't know the dangers. I wonder if the teacher who answers in such measured classroom tones thinks about these things differently at home.

Does she try to imagine Cookie Johnson's thoughts about the nameless women her husband knew in the years they were "Just" dating? At times It seems that AIDS has made It easier to talk about sex in technical terms and harder to talk about sex In emotional terms. It's polarized some of us and silenced the rest. When AIDS first came into our consciousness, "The Gay Plague," it seemed to splinter off groups of moral and medical absolutists. The moralists talked about sin and the medi-callsts talked about disease. The moralists preached about human behavior.

The medlcalists, in reaction, lectured about viruses. This split has come down to us In different forms. In the debate about condoms In schools, the moralists shaking my head over this character defense. At lunch, a doctor talks about the luck of having Magic as a spokesman for AIDS. He's a man of kindness, a role model for teen-agers.

Something good, says the doctor, may yet come from something god-awful. But over coffee, our conversation shifts from the medical to the personal. The doctor recalls Magic's description of the life he once led: "Before I was married, I truly lived the bachelor's life. .1 was never at a loss for female companionship. I did my best to accommodate as many women as I could.

What kind of life was that, the doctor asks, sheepish and bewildered. But, it Is not a question she asks in public. Later In the day, I spot a story in the paper about a high school student In Texas who asked his teacher why someone as smart and successful as Johnson led that "lifestyle." The teacher told him The Presence of Joy The Costly Pull to Bush's Right By GARRY WILLS Washington. Some newspapers called It a victory for the White House, a defeat for Democrats In the Congress, when the president's veto on the abortion "gag rule" was upheld. But It was a costly victory for the president.

Even many people opposed to abortion did not want to see the First Amendment violated by a federal regulation, one telling a doctor what he or she can say to a patient. The president might profitably have waffled on this, but for one thing: We are already seeing the results of the threat that has arisen on his right. He would give Pat Buchanan ammunition if he backed off from his pledge to oppose abortion. It is the hard core of his own support that he must look to now. Most presidents have the luxury of counting on a firm base of their party's loyalists while they maneuver out toward other constituencies.

But this flexibility is considerably impaired if that partisan base becomes wobbly. That Is when presidents have reacted energetically, almost with panic. Franklin Roosevelt is said to have feared a Huey Long candidacy in 1936, one that would have called for more radical action than Roosevelt was willing to endorse. President Carter went after a challenge from Edward Kennedy with a kind of pious ferocity In 1980. Pat Buchanan, expected to enter the New Hampshire primary, knows very well the menace of a revolt among regulars.

He was In Nixon's White House in 1972, where he helped contain an insurgency by Republican congressman John Ashbrook. Mr. Buchanan and Spiro Agnew were deputed to keep the right wing from forming ranks behind Mr. Ashbrook, who was voicing concerns over Mr. Nixon's wage and price controls and his accommodation of "Red China." GOODMAN talk about abstinence and the medlcalists about safer sex.

In the debate about passing out needles to drug addicts, the moralists focus on drug use and the medlcalists on safer shooting up. Now, In the S.M. Era the moralists have captured the market on monogamy while the medlcalists have adopted Mr. Johnson as a heterosexual poster child. The rest of us are rather quiet about the sex in this sexual disease.

The silence is partially out of sympathy toward Mr. Johnson himself. Who among us would yell at a paraplegic because he didn't wear his seat belt? He knows, he knows. It's out of the sense that sex Is private even when someone goes public. And out of the knowledge that you can get AIDS from one partner.

But the poverty of this dialogue about human behavior comes largely out of the choices that we see. In the wake of the sexual revolution we are pressured to be either prudish or approving. To follow the Sev This was the new coalition Ronald Reagan appealed to and based his electoral victories on. It had a basically Wallace-type component all along. Mr.

Duke is now trying to break off that part of the Republican structure, to use it for his own purposes. No wonder he has the White House worried. Richard Nixon won by a plurality in his close 1968 race, because people even more right-wing than he were going to Wallace. President Bush, with all his other troubles, cannot afford to let something analogous happen In 1992. But It might.

Garry Wills is a syndicated columnist of challenges. The first was, "Put on flannel shirt; roll up sleeves." I could have handled that. Then, "Sit In lawn chain open six cans of soda and eat a handful of chips." No problem. The next challenge was to open a newspaper to the sports section and circle the Thursday night basketball score. Having surmounted that task.

"Take each of the sheets of the sports section, crumble them into a ball, and toss them 'basketball style' Into the wastebasket." From a lawn chair this is harder than you think, especially if the wastebasket Is a nine-iron away. Takes practice. Then, "Rise from chair, move to table and hammer two nails Into wood blocks." Mr. Haine had no problem with this. His hobby Is woodworking.

That is how regular a guy Jim Haine is. The finalists also had to finish assembling a model car. You want to know how regular a guy I am? Nothing to it. You call out, "Honey, would you come here a minute?" and you hand her the hammer. The final requirement was the toughest of all: "Apply Aqua Velva after-shave." I applied Aqua Velva on my second date with my wife on May 15, 1942.

1 wanted her to know she was going out with a Regular Guy. She said, "Jack Kllpatrick, If you ever put that stuff on again I will kill you." This explains why I was disqualified in the first round and never got to Manhattan at all. James J. lilpatrick is a syndlcat-ed columnist WN WASIC' J6W4SOH VlcCantme MALLONEE musicians a chance to learn to represent. It Is a gift of rare worth.

The artistic act is elusive. The art of making art resides In artists, and they live only the length of a lifetime. They teach the young in order that artistry not die. Midori, who now lives In New York, came to this country to study at Jullliard. Joshua Bell studied with Josef Gingold.

"I treasure," Joshua says, "his link to the past generations of great violinists: Ysaye, Kreisler, Hetfetz, Elman." Musicians come to Peabody from all over the world and also from all walks all over Maryland. In North Hall before Midori sat young violinists and their teachers in a week when recitals were In progress, as they are this season. Such performance at Peabody is a culmination of lesson upon lesson. Teachers pass to their pupils as a legacy all that they know to teach. Great teachers effect great change through matters very small.

A teacher watches a tiny, cramped hand scrape a bow across a string. Through waves of memory, the teacher feels her hand cradled by still another, reaching even farther back through a sea of remembrance to the feel of fingers curved into an arch. "Ah," says the teacher, gently shaping small knuckles. "Soften We think of music as a matter of the past tense. Most musicians have long careers behind them; much of the classical repertoire is centuries old.

But music schools like the Peabody Institute, a division of Johns Hopkins University, remind us that music plays a role in the present. Young musicians, like Midori, remind us also of its future. your fingers." The hand relaxes and draws the bow again. The strings ring. An unbroken flow of pedagogy winds through the oceans of time.

On the day Midori came, she did not teach a master class, for she had been practicing at Peabody all morning and, within a few hours, would play with the BSO. The Baltimore Symphony this fall premiered a work by its resident composer, Christopher Rouse. "Karolju" Is deliberate re-presentation of carols, each from a distant time and place. His creation was to be. Mr.

Rouse said, "an oasis of Joy." At 42, Mr. Rouse is still a young composer. Midori and Joshua Bell are even younger. Peabody performers are younger still. "It is very hard to do anything right," Midori told her rapt audience, who again nodded their heads.

"But I am never nervous on stage." She has a presence that comes to those who create "an oasis of Joy." With age comes, year by year, greater wisdom to understand Joy and more knowledge of how to translate a welling up of Joy Into the reading of a text. But Joy itself is available to all who touch art those who are very great and those who are still very small. Barbara Mallonee teaches writing at Loyola College. By BARBARA The great are sometimes very great and sometimes very small. In the soaring space of a symphony hall, the violinist Midori looks momentarily lost.

But on any stage, she has presence. In her presence, a roomful of young musicians at the Peabody Conservatory last spring grew silent as Dean Eileen Cline and Rebecca Henry, chair of the preparatory string department. Introduced Midori. She had made her concert debut at age 1 1 Now 19, Midori Goto (she never uses her last name in public) stood at the foot of the stage in North Hall with its high windows and bare wood floor to talk with schoolchildren, high school boys, adolescent girls, at least one of whom, like Midori, hopes fervently to grow taller than her mother. Midori laughed as she shared that wish later, walking across a plaza where the warm sun beamed down.

During the group Interview, her remarks had been more to the point. Who is her favorite composer? Performer? "Well," she prefaced each response and then smiled: she really likes them all. How much does she practice? Practicing, she tells them, Is Just like reading or other pleasures. "If I'm home, I like to practice all day." What does she do when she is not practicing? She reads, cooks, knits, listens to music: always, the music Is going on somewhere." She has a collection of 2.000 compact discs. In New York, concerts abound.

For the 85 concerts she gives each year, she studies eight or nine concertos. The life and work of each composer, the style of each period, the interpretations that notes and dynamics invite. She plays music as happily as she plays with her little brother, her puppies, her friends. Clearly, she is happy, the emphasis on the present tense. We think of music as a matter of the past tense.

Most musicians have long careers behind them; much of the classical repertoire Is centuries old. But music schools like the Pea-body Institute, a division of Johns Hopkins University, remind us that music plays a role In the present. Of the 5,000 students enrolled this year in Peabody programs, 543 are registered in the Conservatory and more than 2,000 pre-college youngsters take lessons in the Peabody Prep. Few among them will attain the stature of Midori or of 23-year-old Joshua Bell, who performs Mozart with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra tonight, though 11 -year-old Hillary Hahn, a former Peabody pupil now in her first year at the Curtis Institute, Is to make her debut with the BSO on Dec. 21.

Fame, however. Is not the end of music study. Performance is the plum, and performance is decidedly a matter of the present tense. There Is a tension to live performance that Is Immediate and wonderful. "I feel most myself when I'm on stage," Midori told the young musicians, and they nodded their heads.

They, too, love to perform. Artistic performance Is a coveted and fleeting thing, a work of art that hovers for Just moments and then is gone. Technology beguiles us into believing we can hold fast the present for the future, but we cannot. Technology only replicates. It is art which represents.

For the duration of a song, a cantata, a march, a symphony, the present, embodying the past, fans out. suffused with the tension that comes when one stretches a span of time to be apprehended. As though it were brand-new, the work of Bach, of Mozart, of Copland, of Eu-bie Blake washes like waves across sand until the sound disappears and all is silint again. Peabody gives to all its young One result of that effort was that Mr. Nixon had to give up his hope of substituting John Connally for Spiro Agnew.

Mr. Agnew had done valuable service In opposing Mr. Ashbrook's bid. David Duke presents a different kind of threat, but one that could be even more Important. If he enters the race, he will be like George Wallace, the man who was squeezed out of the Democratic Party in 1968 but went on to win 14 percent of the general vote.

In the spring of 1968 he was winning almost a third of the national vote in some polls, appealing to the same kinds of discontent with minorities, supposedly By JAMES J. cord and the Heartbeat, but none of them knew a recipe for meatloaf. As It happens I try not to be vain about these things my meatloaf is widely acclaimed. Its base is not barbecued pork, as you probably have been taught. My meatloaf begins with two pounds of chopped chicken livers, to which one adds onions, carrots, celery and one low-cholesterol egg.

all blended with bread crumbs and hot salsa. Top with ketchup three minutes be- The Styles and Attitudes of a 'Regular Guy coddled by government, that Mr. Duke has tapped into now. Some have called Mr. Duke the outgrowth of the Willie Horton appeal in 1988, a growth Mr.

Bush himself planted and watered In his last campaign. But he is the continuation of something more basic. Spiro Agnew had to appeal to Wallace's voters during Mr. Nixon's first term using strident rhetoric written for him by Pat Buchanan (that name again). After the attempt on Wallace's life in 1972, his vote was absorbed into the Nlxon landslide of that year, hurrying the switch of Southern Democrats to the Republican Party.

KILPATRICK but these subjective things are tough to anticipate. The Judges asked, "What is your favorite reading material?" In an elimination round in Connecticut, every nominee answered, "The columns of William F. Buckley so they rephrased the question. On a replay the 50-plus guy won with "The Katzenjammer Kids." We oldsters know a thing or two. Well, the questions went on and on.

If these regular guys had more spare time, what would they do? Spend it with their family, natch. What would they want their children to be when they grow up? A quarterflnalist made the mistake of saying "member of Congress" and they threw him out of the hall.) The politically correct answer to. "What's your idea of the Ideal vacation?" was, "Fishing with my kids while the wife cooks the 'burgers." In addition to the interviews, the contestants had to survive a series Washington. It was a lucky break for Jim Halne that I didn't make it to New York City on the 15th. He comes from Newport, Wash.

He's 62. I could have sent him to the showers. Mr. Haine was one of four finalists in a contest run by Aqua Velva and Good Housekeeping. He didn't win.

A single fellow from West Homestead, won. The object was to name the nation's most regular "regular guy." I had been nominated in the over-50 classification that is the one that Mr. Haine won and among us over-50s I am as regular as they come. It was a tough contest, but when the going gets tough, the tough get going. In the final round the Judges put 20 questions to each of the regular guys.

Some of the questions were ridiculously easy, for example, "Name four teams In the Big Ten Conference." Right off the bat I could have named the Redskins, the Lakers, the Twins and ah the Capitals. The club plays out of Madison. This was another cream-puff: "Name four penalties in football." Penalties are imposed in football for such fouls as balking, foot-faulting, traveling, and kicking the ball out of the rough. A typical penalty is five minutes in the box. As the questions got tougher, the finalists ran into trouble.

"How much do you owe on your Sears card?" The proper answer was $45.20 for a tool chest, and I don't know that any of the guys got It right Most of them could name tnree models of Chevrolet automobiles, such as the Taurus, the Ac- To the question, 'What would contestants want their children to be when they grow one quarterflnalist for Most Regular Guy made the mistake of saying 'member of They threw him out The politically correct answer to, 'What's your ideal was, 'Fishing with my kids while the wife cooks the fore putting It on the table. Serves four. But back to the contest. "What does the bumper sticker on the back of your vehicle say?" The right answer was, "My bumper sticker doesn't say anything. It Just sticks there." Ho, ho.

That question was a tricker. "What Is your favorite season and why?" I believe the correct answer waj. "Summer, because Joe Montana is pitching for the Giants,".