The administrators of Wake County Public Schools have given me the best gift a fellow could ever hope for: a gilt-edged excuse for begging off any future speaking requests.

I’ve been recruited to speak at Wake school events on numerous occasions over the years. (Don’t be impressed. Anybody with a regular byline in the local paper is fair game for a teacher who feels the need to coast for an hour or so.) My most vivid memory is the, uh, “inspirational” talk I gave to a group of eighth-graders during Career Day. Afterwards, I was escorted to the gym to sit at a table behind a crudely hand-lettered sign that identified me as “Writer,” where I was supposed to extol the glories of a career in letters. I would have, except that a twenty-something vixen at the next table was extolling the glories of being a grocery-store cakemaker — and she offered free samples. The only visitors I had were two boys who were only killing time until they could get close enough to grab a piece of cake and ogle the baker.

But I always found it hard to refuse requests to speak to school groups. It seemed like a civic duty, and besides, the person making the request was usually one of my kids’ teachers, which meant that I refused at their peril.

Well, those days are over. All I have to do now is decline to sign the school district’s new guest-speaker form, and — bingo! — I’m off the hook. No signee, no speakee.

School administrators recently decided that all speakers have to submit to formal guidelines, most of which are innocuous — agreeing to dress appropriately, for instance. But then there’s this:

Materials and presentations must not denigrate any culture, race, gender, national origin, or religion. Also, while factual information on politics, religion, culture, or ethnicity may be presented, proselytizing is not permitted.

I’ve done some back-of-the-envelope calculations, and concluded that under that guideline a speaker can say — nothing. After all, ours is a tender society. We are quivering masses of un-armored protoplasm, wounded by the mildest verbal jostling. Even the seemingly bland greeting of “Good morning!” is offensive to any high school’s Society of Gloomy Goth Depressives, whose culture is firmly rooted in the idea that mornings (and all other things related to life) are bad. Very very bad.

That’s an exaggeration, of course, but not much of one. The guideline above is both absurdly sweeping and intentionally vague. If I mention that some societies practice genital mutilation of young women, but that we in America have another term for it (”criminal assault and disfigurement”), have I denigrated the culture of the mutilators? If I assert that one of the benefits of British colonialism was that the admirable notions of justice and common law took root in many lands, am I proselytizing on behalf of imperialism?

The problem is that everyone’s denigration meter is calibrated differently, and these days the most sensitive meter becomes the standard.

Some public officials have balked at the guidelines, declaring that they’ll skip school events rather than be held to them. That stance brought this response:

“Why would someone not want to sign that form?” said Michael Evans, a Wake schools spokesman. “That’s in place to protect everybody from the speakers to the teachers to the students.”

Not exactly, sir. I wouldn’t sign the form because anyone can see that it’s in place only to protect bureaucrats, not speakers. In fact, it would be used to hang me out to dry if a complaint came in.

Just when I was ready to forgive and forget Barack Obama’s puzzling hardline stance against flag lapel pins, his wife offered this observation last week during a speech in Madison, Wisconsin:

Let me tell you something, for the first time in my adult lifetime, I am really proud of my country. And not just because Barack has done well, but because I think people are hungry for change.

Sigh. Are these two determined to test the patience of everyone who — I know this is crazy — sincerely thinks America is a great country, and maybe even the best ever? I count myself among the members of that group. I’m not a flag-waver, nor do I believe that reflexive, unthinking patriotism is a condition of citizenship. I love my country in the same way I love my children: It can disappoint me, make me to slap my head in frustration, and cause me to want to send it to its room and ground it for the next century or so; but it also can have me marveling at its achievements, swell me with pride when I see it do great things effortlessly and gracefully, and make me want to leap to my feet and say, “That’s mine, I helped make that.”

But the sense I get from Mr. and Mrs. Obama is that their love for the country is conditional; that sometimes they’re ready to drop it off at the orphanage and head for Europe, where people are worldly and sophisticated and prone to believe that the whole idea of country is so déclassé.

I don’t think this is actually true of the Obamas. I still give them the benefit of the doubt. But as Peggy Noonan said a few days ago:

So many Americans right now fear they are losing their country, that the old America is slipping away and being replaced by something worse, something formless and hollowed out. They can see we are giving up our sovereignty, that our leaders will not control our borders, that we don’t teach the young the old-fashioned love of America, that the government has taken to itself such power, and made things so complex, and at the end of the day when they count up sales tax, property tax, state tax, federal tax they are paying a lot of money to lose the place they loved.

And if you feel you’re losing America, you really don’t want a couple in the White House whose rope of affection to the country seems lightly held, casual, provisional.

True, that. I’d prefer that my president not have the directions to the orphanage permanently programmed into his limo’s GPS system.

Newspaper editors are forever reminding their staffs that many libel suits are filed primarily because an unhappy party, after calling the paper to complain about his or her treatment in print, was brushed off or ignored. People rarely want to become plaintiffs in long, expensive legal battles. They just want somebody to listen while they yell.

I thought about that bit of newsroom wisdom when I read that 38 Duke lacrosse players, none of whom were charged in the now-infamous prosecution/persecution, have sued the university for the emotional distress they allegedly suffered when Duke stood aside and let Mike Nifong make a mockery of the justice system. My only complaint is that the lawsuit isn’t focused on the dozens of individual Duke faculty members who — after an emotionally unbalanced stripper made a false claim of rape — immediately assumed the allegations were true, and branded the lacrosse players as violent, drunken thugs.

One professor even wrote the Duke administration a long letter demanding that innocent people be made safe from such vile creatures: “How soon will confidence be restored to our university as a place where minds, souls, and bodies can feel safe from agents, perpetrators, and abettors of white privilege, irresponsibility, debauchery and violence?” the professor asked. (That astonishing letter, written even before the investigation was fully underway, and the Duke provost’s tsk-tsk reply, can be found here.)

Later, when Duke settled the lawsuit filed against it by the three players who’d been charged in the false crime, it shielded those faculty members from any separate legal actions that the players might have been considering.

Now a separate group of players, still smarting from the stigma they suffered on campus simply for being lacrosse team members, come looking for their pound of flesh. They didn’t name Nifong in their lawsuit because his recent bankruptcy filing gives him a certain protection against such civil actions. Nor did they name the stripper/accuser because … well, because she’s a head case. That left the Duke administration, which has only wagged its finger in disapproval at the faculty members who behaved so outrageously in the beginning.

Even though those offending faculty members have suffered virtually no consequence to their behavior, they’ve cloaked themselves in victimhood. Their response to complaints about their actions has been to decry what they see as “attempts at intimidation directed against faculty who comment on larger social and political issues …” In short, they feel no responsibility for helping to whip up the mob against the wrongfully accused players. In fact, one of those faculty members (with no appreciation of the irony of her stance) tolerates no expressions of disgust with her conduct — she reports antagonistic phone messages to the campus police.

“I’m not going to be intimidated into modulating speech,” she says.

No wonder the players have sued. I’d do the same thing if I picked up the phone to complain about my portrayal in the paper, and found that the reporter claimed to be the victim — and that I was the abuser.