Indecent Exposure

So you think we've got trouble now? This is nothing. Give it 20 years, maybe 30, when today's children are running things, and then we'll know trouble.

If there was a shred of innocence left in their warped little hearts and minds--and there is no reason to suspect there was--we have probably driven it out of them over the past two weeks with dispatches that sound as if they were pulled off the walls of public rest rooms.

Kids still young enough to carry lunch pails bearing cartoon characters have seen and heard the lurid stuff of Zippergate everywhere. We have tried to protect them with dashes here and there, but is there a fourth-grader who has seen b---j--- and lost that game of hangman?

"There's no avoiding it," says Dalia Victory, a Sherman Oaks, Calif., mom whose son, Andrew Rahimi, 9, is doing what President Clinton should have done long ago. "Every time the word sex comes on TV," she says, "he covers his ears."

In the cafeteria of a school in Shutesbury, Mass., a sixth-grade boy tells a pal he is thinking of two-timing his girl. "You'll be just like Clinton," the classmate deadpans. Great. Now we've got late-night acts in the elementary schools. Did we want our children to be this jaded?

"His eyes don't seem like they're telling the truth," Cassidy Berlin, 12, a sixth-grader from West Lafayette, Ind., observes of the President. "I was doing my spelling homework in front of the TV. It took me an hour to get it done instead of the usual 15 minutes." But of course. Bill and Monica have added a few words to the vocabulary list.

In Philadelphia, Suzanna Schamber, 10, says that it's good gossip at recess and that nobody is going to talk her out of what she knows in her heart: "He did it. You can tell by the way he's hugging her in the films. They did something they weren't supposed to do, I think in the Lincoln Bedroom." But there's an even more serious offense in all of this, Suzanna warns a nation desperate for sound advice: "Monica wears too much makeup. Big ol' chunks of it."

Just imagine their world. There is smut on the Internet; music comes wrapped in parental advisories; and television finally kills off Al Bundy but keeps the formula alive--take the lowest common denominator and divide by 2--with a succession of centerfolds turned prime-time stars. And now the White House is made out to be just another tasteless sitcom that causes us all, regardless of age, to feel as if we need a vaccination.

Max Favela, 10, a fifth-grader in Pacific Palisades, Calif., got the Monica Lewinsky story on MTV news. "They said this lady accused Clinton of a sex scandal, like Paula Jones. I was shocked." Well, what exactly is the President accused of, Max? "He, like, raped a woman." Unsure of his answer, he confers with his friend Josh. "A sex scandal," Max now clarifies. "Having sex with a lady, and she comes back later and accuses him. Now he's in big trouble."

Try to imagine that this is the first presidency you've known. Kids must think Special Prosecutor is a Cabinet post, with someone always rooting around in bedrooms and closets. With any luck, they have forgotten that Clinton's closest adviser last year was a guy who savored women's toes and helped run the President's campaign while in bed with a hooker.