Cartoonists portrayed Clinton as a sax-tooting hipster of dubious family values. Conservative pundits sniggered. Even many supporters expressed dismay at the performance. The message rang clear. All too many Americans see musicians as either ne’er-do-wells or nerds. I propose that we rethink this destructive attitude. If we could make playing music as pervasive as jogging, we might soon find music improving our spiritual health as jogging has improved our physical health.

By now it’s a cliche that modern Americans are spectators, not players. We get our sports watching television. We go to the movies to find adventure. For music, we slip on the headphones. That bothers me. I want people to play basketball at the local gym. I want them to go to Asia or Chicago for an adventure. I want them to experience music playing in a garage band or a string ensemble, to know the joy that comes when two or more people use musical instruments to express their innermost feelings in a song that grooves.

Don’t laugh. It is possible. I’m 43 years old and started playing the tenor sax last year. Now I get together each week with three or four friends to play blues in our rhythm guitarist’s garage. We aren’t great musicians, but we know when we hear the world’s best music. It’s on those occasions that one of our tunes starts to cook. Why is it so great? Because it’s not Memorex, it’s live and it’s us-friends communicating in a strange and wonderful language.

All of us, by the way, stand firmly rooted in the middle class. One is a firefighter. One runs a bike shop. Another and his wife own a jewelry company. I’m a bureaucrat. We don’t want to be professional musicians. We’re glad we play in a garage band. We just wish more people did.

Somehow, our entire society has gone wrong where the care and feeding of music and musicians is concerned. The decline began with the advent of the electronic age. Despite continual advances in our technical ability to reproduce music through recordings and broadcasts, America’s musical sophistication maxed out in the 1940s and has plummeted ever since.

There was a day when the masses looked upon playing music as a skill to be nurtured at home and in the community. Our grandparents gathered around the piano in the parlor, played in town bands, sang in the local church choir and danced to music laid down by friends at the Grange hall or neighborhood tavern.

The rise of radio and recordings began destroying that personal relationship with music in the early part of the century. Consumers found themselves faced with a choice between live local amateurs and professional musicians reproduced mechanically. They chose the latter.

The nation’s appreciation for subtlety in music peaked toward the end of the swing era when millions listened to the sweet but musically complex tunes of Benny Goodman and his peers on the radio. As a refugee from the ’60s, I hate to admit that the rock revolution pushed mass American culture one step back toward the Neanderthal, but it did.

We tumbled the rest of the way down the mountain in the ’80s. Today we live in a nation whose children spend gazillions of dollars on rap and heavy-metal recordings made up primarily of a pounding rhythm slammed out on drums and electric bass. With role models like 2 Live Crew and AC/DC, it’s no wonder we don’t value musicians. It’s no wonder we have trouble recruiting kids for the school band. Or that the mass media raise their eyebrows when a presidential candidate blows a saxophone.

The primary ingredients in learning to play a musical instrument are discipline and enthusiasm. Aren’t they just what America needs right now?

Not everyone has the talent of Branford Marsalis, but then you don’t have to be Michael Jordan to shoot hoops in the driveway. A pickup softball game in the park may not have much in common with the World Series, but the right combination of sunshine, people and beer can make that game just as memorable.

Playing music with friends is similar. What a would-be musician needs most is the mere good sense to understand that live music performed by live people is a wondrous phenomenon in which we all should be eager to participate. If you want to play music, you can and should. Buy an instrument, recruit a good teacher and get started. You’ll find plenty of starving musicians eager to help you learn.

The young man who gives me sax lessons is a phenomenal player and teacher with a degree from a prestigious music school. At 27, after 17 years of study, he owns skills and knowledge roughly equivalent to those of a young surgeon or microelectronics engineer. Yet his gigs and lessons earn him less each month than some Middle Americans spend on their car payment.

He and his colleagues have something precious to share, but we lack the good sense to buy it. Why not close the circle? If asked, my friend and musicians like him could instruct us. We might learn to appreciate their music as we play our own; they’d make a living, and we’d grow richer in spirit.

So forsake your CDs, throw off your headphones and take back the stage. Start playing music for yourselves and your friends. You have nothing to lose but whatever ails you. Who knows, you might even change the country.