The easier it gets the next time. Whereas World War I proved that physical courage just drains after too many demands are made on it. One way to distinguish moral courage from physical courage is that it needs its daily constitutional. Although the risk you run with moral courage is simply being ill-mannered and not knowing when to just lump it.

Now, let me ask you this. Let's turn the tables here. You want to give the Everest people a hard time because the goal that they're striving for is, ultimately, trivial. What about the soldier who's fighting in a stupid war. Now, the poor soldier's there for no good reason. All the poor guys who fought in the Vietnam War, or a German soldier during World War II, the same moral demands are being made on him as are being made on the person he's opposing. Even though the war's stupid. And we'll still call it courage, courage it is.

Yes, but he's still in a war. It's not recreation. He's responding to the call of his group, whether it's a tribe, or a clan, or a nation, or whatever. And that's a sense of duty. I don't envy anyone who's in the situation of feeling a sense of duty to their nation and at the same time mistrusting the people who are making the decisions whether there should be a war or not. But that seems really different than doing it for the sake of amusement.

Would you prefer a culture in which we eliminate absolutely all risks? In the university town I live in, appalling things take place. A group of parents mobilized and went over to the school after a snowstorm, and leveled the snow banks the plows had thrown up because they were 10 feet high and of course that's kid heaven, right? They dismantled them because it was too risky for the kids. Well, to me, that world -- not only does it destroy childhood, but it destroys any possibility for greatness at all.

Which brings us to the presidential campaign. In the last debate, Al Gore mentioned his service in Vietnam four times. On the most obvious level that's a way of pointing out the lack of same on the part of George W. Bush. However, Al Gore was a journalist and not a soldier. Nevertheless, he did go to Vietnam, and George W. Bush didn't even manage to get that far.

He made sure he didn't get that far.

But we're also talking about an election that began with a candidate who many people felt very idealistic about, John McCain, who has an indisputable record of courage. I'm wondering, how important do you think physical courage is in who we want as a leader?

Don't you think the whole McCain phenomenon was at least partly a desire to still pay homage to that virtue? As a last-ditch effort before we gave ourselves up to the Gores and Bushes, people who it's simply hard to feel good about, either one of them.

Nevertheless, his courage still wasn't enough to elect McCain. Maybe we love this virtue, but how deep is our love?

Don't you think that the popular vote -- if it wasn't mediated, if it was a straight-out popular vote without the party faithful rigging it, without all the Bush money -- McCain would win hands down right now if you threw him into the race?

I feel that we believe that at some level the office doesn't matter that much anymore. The country just runs itself. It's so rich that we'll let one group do its little skimming of the profits and hand it out to its buddies. It only matters who's in there if we're in a serious war situation, and that isn't going to happen anymore with the demise of the Soviet Union. So we just don't think it really matters. Except for the distribution of the spoils.

But in our mythopoeic heart of hearts, what we really want from our leader is a John McCain. And yet somehow we don't wind up with that person.

Because the people who didn't want John McCain weren't the People. The People wanted John McCain. I think that the problem was his virtue.

You mean his courage was actually a liability.

That's the reason they called him a loose cannon. The Republicans were scared of him because they didn't think they could control him. He's maverick in every sense of the word. And he's courageous. Which is just what you don't want if you're one of the people who wants to basically have this little cipher there that you own a couple of shares in, and can tell him what to do. And, you don't want McCain because he's unreliable in that sense. Why is he unreliable? Not because he lacks virtue, but because he has it.

Maya Angelou reads from "The Heart of a Woman"