David Frum boldly wrote off John McCain in a Washington Post column, instructing Republicans to abandon the McCain-Palin ticket to save floundering Senate and House candidates. Half of the McCain team is savaging Sarah Palin publicly. The other half is rushing to her defense. And many onlookers are touting her for 2012. Meanwhile, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal is already booked for a visit to Iowa latter in November.

The vast majority of voters have yet to cast their ballots. The presidential candidates are still campaigning. Ads are still running. But many Republican insiders and some members of the conservative punditocracy are already moving on. This election is, to many of them, passé.

David Frum boldly wrote off John McCain in a Washington Post column, instructing Republicans to abandon the McCain-Palin ticket to save floundering Senate and House candidates. Half of the McCain team is savaging Sarah Palin publicly. The other half is rushing to her defense. And many onlookers are touting her for 2012. Meanwhile, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal is already booked for a visit to Iowa latter in November. And those are conservatives. Isn’t there still an election to be held?

Well, it certainly looks like it is an uphill climb for McCain. But it is more than a little odd that Republicans are already fighting for the inside pole position in the next election before the votes are even counted in this one.

As many of them now fear, this election may mark not just a loss, but a sea change in party affiliation and ideology. So what we’re beginning to see is a collective rush to find a shining knight -- or lady -- who promises better days and the chance for political redemption.

But it is, of course, a fundamentally misguided exercise to plunge into the next election cycle before this one has even ended. Putting aside the adage that the race is never over until all the votes are counted, this rush for the next standard bearer misses the cardinal lesson of 2008: you need to figure out what the election will be about before you find your candidate and set your course.

In this quintessential “change” election, Republicans failed to avoid the same error which Hillary Clinton made. They believed that inexperience would doom their opponent and they convinced themselves an impressive biography would prevail.

It is not evident what the election of 2012 will be about, or what type of candidate will fit the bill for the Republicans four years from now (if they indeed find themselves running against an incumbent Democrat). The issue may be competence, trustworthiness, international peril, “malaise” or, as Donald Rumsfeld so elegantly put it, some “unknown unknown.”

Moreover, if conservatives agree on anything these days, it is that they lack a cohesive vision of conservative governance. Former Reagan adviser Peter Wehner cautions that it won’t be sufficient simply to recycle a Reagan policy agenda, and suggests that a promising “governing vision” would be one that sets its sites on “reforming our public institutions to meet the demands of the 21st century.” Other prominent conservatives believe any talk of reform is “code” for capitulating to a scheme of Democratic-lite policies.

Without knowledge of the terrain or a self-identity, it’s just silly to begin choosing up sides, assembling PACs and exploratory committees and gauging the 2012 field. It suggests that conservatives have not really learned that a presidential candidacy must be about something real, providing answers on what issues are occupying the electorate at the time. And the winning theme is arrived at by assessing the scene and finding, or developing, a candidacy to suit the circumstances.

Republicans need to see this election through and then think about who they are and where the country is headed before searching for the next nominee. Otherwise they are going to wind up with an “inevitable” candidate who fits neither the party nor the country.

I find it's wise to keep a copy of Perle's book An End to Evil (penned with fellow AEIer David Frum three years ago), close at hand. Has helped me through many a crisis.

Just how wrong were the gloomsayers?

The best thing about After Words, the book interview show, is that it pairs an author with someone who knows the subject and often comes at it from a different point of view. The best example of this was David Frum's superb interview of Victor Navasky a year ago, for Navasky's book, A Matter of Opinion. Frum was both respectful and sharp, and the polished Navasky humored him for a while before he grew impatient with Frum's description of the errors of the left, and defenestrated him. I forget the specific exchange, though I do recall that Frum tried to grill Navasky over the alleged anti-Semitism of Nation magazine writers. (Frum and I share a hobbyhorse; he just rides it backwards).

Anyway, last night, the interview went along on data points surrounding Al Qaeda before Wright climbed up to the high board: the despair in the Muslim world. "Islamic societies are in a crisis... All the statistics are so dismal... the absence of knowledge, the widespread illiteracy, all these things create depair..."

This is Bernard Lewis regurgitated by a new generation, and some of it is true. I have commented often on the lack of reading I observed in Syria. The problem is that it is purely materialistic. The statistics are economic ones, and they often seek to valorize Israel, because it is so modern. Those of us on the left who are concerned with Muslim hearts and minds are not talking strictly about their pocketbooks. Other things beside western progress puncture the spirit of Arabs. Like, injustice.

Zogby knows this, and could have educated a great number of us by expressing this point of view. The closest he got was "Doesn't the loss of control and policies we've perpetrated contribute as well?" He meant, I will bet, the Occupied Territories, and the charnel house that David Frum and John Podhoretz have made of Iraq. But he didn't say so out loud. And Wright then pushed the question aside with another serving of pablum. Zogby had something of a fawning smile throughout. This was a true misfortune, a lost opportunity to extend the dialogue between worldviews...

OK, fair enough. I still call for more Jewish transparency, and point to the Catholic model.

Look at Sen. Rick Santorum, running for reelection in Pennsylvania. Just about every time he's in the press, people talk about what a devout Catholic he is, because of legitimate fears of religious geeks in politics.

Thus, the second paragraph of a recent story in The Hill calls Santorum, "The dedicated Roman Catholic and fierce opponent of abortion rights.." Or there is this dissection in the Jewish Exponent last week of Santorum's belief system:

The press will look at Christian evangelicals all day long, what they believe about blah blah blah. And generalize to a farethewell, make them sound like crazies. And maybe they are. But the press will not look for even an instant at Jewish beliefs surrounding the Middle East. The observant Jew David Frum helped to author our current Syria and Iran policy; he was the Bush speechwriter who collaborated on the Axis of Evil speech. In a recent sermon at a Washington synagogue, Frum described America as "this new Israel, this America, this haven and refuge for so many of the persecuted of the world, including Jews." And said that Israel's "neighbors" were "determined to repeat the work of the Nazis."

I would question the accuracy of that statement. I believe there is a religious component to it. I'd never know about it from the press, though. Frum, bless his openness, chose to blog it.

It's good to hear that they keep the White House cold in winter. But in Washington that doesn't mean much. They should set an example, and let it stay warmish in summer too.

A year ago, in one of the first mini-scandals of the Bush administration, a speechwriter was publicly defenestrated for having the audacity to claim that he had written a phrase for the 43rd President. It didn't matter that the writer claimed to have resigned, and may actually have done so, though almost everyone believed he'd been fired. It didn't matter that the phrase in question-"axis of evil"-was widely derided as simplistic and inaccurate (Mary McCarthy might have said that all three words are lies, including "of"). It didn't matter that the culprit was his wife, who bragged about the phrase in a widely copied e-mail sent to her cocktail-circuit friends. The simple fact that he had admitted to the world that he wrote the speech was enough to ensure his demise. He had violated the code of Presidential speechwriters, who never reveal the secrets of their guild, and he had betrayed the omertà of the Bushes, who never reveal their thoughts or explain their decisions to the press, for fear that an open dialogue might somehow compromise their quest for "freedom."

A year later, a mildly contrite David Frum has written a book about the experience, and of course he's milking it for all it's worth. There are ceaseless interviews and media "availabilities." There's the self-promoting Web site inviting the reader to check in with his fascinating thoughts about publishing a memoir and going on a book tour. There's the soft-focus photograph of Bush on the back cover, strolling toward the agricultural horizon (away from Mr. Frum?).

It must be very strange to be David Frum-or, if you prefer, davidfrum.com. A former journalist and author (he has written on the conservative movement and the 1970's, two topics that go together better than you'd think), he was put to work as an economic speechwriter for an administration with no clear economic policy. A Canadian, he was expected to write movingly of American patriotism, even as he was being incessantly investigated by guardians of the national-security apparatus, who were worried (perhaps justifiably) that there was something fishy about the foreigner working alongside them. Most compellingly, Mr. Frum was a rare and lonely Jew in an administration that thrilled to the sounds of its fundamentalist pronouncements. (The book opens with the first words Mr. Frum overheard on the day of his interview: "Missed you at Bible Study.") A poignant scene describes a service for Jewish staffers at the White House and Mr. Frum's blinking awareness that if one woman had not brought her five kids, the total number of children in attendance would have been in the single digits.

The most interesting parts of Mr. Frum's book are the moments when these pressures weigh on him, when he confesses-barely-to the understandable feelings of alienation that ensue. But those moments are few and far between, and most of his book reads instead like a too-eager display of piety by a prodigal son who has been cast out of the garden: Please like me-I'm as patriotic as the next guy! There's a bit of Whittaker Chambers in David Frum-the sense of a troubled wanderer seeking rigid orthodoxies, only to find himself uncomfortable when smothered by their embrace. There's a telling line posted on his Web log: "Was it Otto von Bismarck who said that nothing should be taken as true until it has been officially denied?"

Still, there's much to value in The Right Man . Obviously, the chief draw is voyeurism. All the while professing absolute loyalty, Mr. Frum lifts up the window shade so his readers can peer into the Executive Mansion. We learn some new facts: Mr. Bush is an Eisenhower groupie; he calls environmentalists "green green lima beans"; he wants Americans to drive electric cars powered by nuclear energy. The description of the compound is accurate-more so than a West Wing episode-and generally engaging. The particular accounts of daily life in the White House after 9/11 are vivid and arresting. There are scenes of welcome humor. I loved his description of the bland Air Force One menu, another sign of his ethnic alienation from the Bush team: Serving creamed corn has always been an effective way to screen out possible non-Christians.

Like Mr. Bush himself, the book has some impressive strengths. Mr. Frum's White House experience has given him one very good habit: He writes in short sentences, easy to see on the teleprompter. The result is a relaxing read that should take most Republicans no more than a few hours to get through before petting the golden retriever, going off to sleep and dreaming of tax-free dividends.

But The Right Man also contains more than a few land mines, most of which are left accidentally by Mr. Frum in his haste to prove his centrality to the party line. They should worry anyone concerned about the aimless and contradictory rhetoric of Bush foreign policy. One of the most fascinating sections describes the work leading to the "axis of evil" formulation in the State of the Union speech of January 2002. The first disturbing sign is that chief speechwriter Michael Gerson asked Mr. Frum to come up with the government's justification for war with Iraq. This is bizarre no matter what your politics: Either the decision had been made to invade, but no one knew the reason, or-even worse-the Bush administration was genuinely interested in Mr. Frum's opinion about whether or not to go to war. Last I heard, speechwriters are not supposed to determine the policy of the United States.

At this point, we're treated to a gurgling, conspiratorial screed against Nazis, Arabs and even Mussolini; it lurches chaotically from one decade to another and lumps the entire Muslim world into a single odious category ("the whole stinking bowl," he calls it at one point). Afterward, you want to gently replace the cover on the terrarium so that the snakes and lizards inside Mr. Frum's mind will not escape again. The obsessively anti-Muslim cast of the book does not augur well for the so-called Middle East peace process, which has apparently vanished from American foreign policy for the foreseeable future (Mr. Frum repeats and enlarges Ari Fleischer's Dadaist claim that by building peace, Bill Clinton actually caused war).

Though he tries to be the benign host, Mr. Frum displays a withering sarcasm toward Colin Powell and the State Department, who do not share his view that the world's problems can be easily solved by naked military might. Secretary Powell is an appeaser; Donald Rumsfeld has the only mind that "sparkles." In a flight of historical fancy that's strange even by his standards, Mr. Frum compares Mr. Powell to the timid Civil War general George McClellan. Which makes Mr. Rumsfeld the manly Ulysses S. Grant. Mr. Frum apparently hates the U.N. and the idea of the United States entering into international treaties. If he had his way, we'd soon invade Sri Lanka, Chechnya and Indonesia to root out terrorism-because the whole point of a strong military is to use it.

Quite a few of Mr. Frum's foreign-policy assumptions are naïve, particularly in relation to Russia, China and, of course, North Korea, whose presence in the axis of evil propelled us into the lovely scenario we are enjoying at the moment. One of the first things you learn as a White House speechwriter is that words have consequences, and should not be tossed around lightly. Mr. Frum's friends at the American Enterprise Institute may have enjoyed his authorship of the famous phrase, but the rest of us now have to sort out the mess.

It's striking to see the extent to which Bush policy is still controlled by the memory of Bill Clinton. There are the usual distortions of the Clinton record (including the ridiculous claim that Clinton staffers did not have to wear business attire-if you believe that, then I have five ugly suits I'd like to sell you). Mr. Bush and his people, it seems, still feel an abiding insecurity about his predecessor (one wacky moment has Mr. Frum claiming that Mr. Bush has a more powerful id than Mr. Clinton, but has it under better control). Did you know that the prosperity of the 1990's was not because of Mr. Clinton, but the Enron scandal was? Even more implausibly, Mr. Frum tries to link the soaring majesty of Mr. Bush's rhetoric to the speeches of John F. Kennedy. Thanks, but I don't think so.

Strangely, Mr. Frum soft-pedals some of Mr. Bush's best moments; neither his reaching out to Muslims in the aftermath of 9/11 nor his leadership of the war in Afghanistan are ever described in meaningful detail. Mr. Frum also ignores the great tragedy of White House speechwriting over the last 16 months: No speech has been given that asks Americans to make meaningful sacrifices toward the rebuilding of their country or explains to the world what we truly stand for, beyond a few platitudes about freedom and democracy. There's a sympathetic audience out there, billions strong, waiting for that argument to be made.

In "Politics and the English Language," the best essay ever written about speechwriting, George Orwell warned against people whose muddled words add to the muddle of their ideas, and who fail to think through the consequences of the things they say. Beware the euphemism, the boast, the catchy phrase, the tired cliché, the lazy thought that temporarily makes an audience feel snug but ultimately resembles "a cuttlefish spurting out ink." Reading this book, Orwell would smile knowingly, but hardly feel comforted.

Ted Widmer directs the C.V. Starr Center at Washington College. He was director of speechwriting at the N.S.C. under President Clinton.

Beginning in his Nov. 12, 2001, column, Mr. Safire described the supposed meeting between Mr. Atta and Ahmad Khalil Ibrahim Samir al-Ani as the "undisputed fact connecting Iraq's Saddam Hussein to to the attacks."

In subsequent columns, Mr. Safire continued to hammer the point home, citing background sources at government intelligence agencies and defending the Atta-Iraq claim against its doubters.

And there have been doubters. Since the initial October report of Mr. Atta's alleged visit to the Czech Republic, reporters for news organizations-including The Times and Newsweek -have seriously questioned whether an actual meeting took place. Reporters said that no tangible evidence seemed to place Mr. Atta with Mr. Ani at the time of the alleged meeting. They began to question whether the person Mr. Ani met was someone who merely looked like Mr. Atta.

The Times ' own skepticism reached a high point this Oct. 21, when reporter James Risen wrote an article headlined "The View From Prague: Prague Discounts an Iraqi Meeting."

In his piece, Mr. Risen reported that Czech President Vaclav Havel in a phone call "has quietly told the White House he has concluded that there is no evidence to confirm earlier reports that Mohamed Atta, the leader in the Sept. 11 attacks, met with an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague just months before the attacks on New York and Washington, according to Czech officials."

However, Mr. Risen's article ran without a statement from either the Bush administration or Mr. Havel. That caused some second-guessing within the Times newsroom, especially considering the piece itself was about second-guessing. Said one Times source: "When you're aiming to write the definitive story on such a disputed incident, you'd want Havel on the record-and he's not a hard guy to get.

"It really makes you wonder," the source continued, "whether or not we're being careful enough to avoid looking like we're pushing the kind of agendas we've been accused of doing."

Pretty soon, however, a reaction from Mr. Havel came. On Oct. 23, Times stringer Peter Green reported that a spokesperson for President Havel denied Mr. Risen's claim, saying: "The president did not call the White House about this. The president never spoke with any American government official about Atta, not with Bush, not with anyone else."

But the same day that Mr. Havel's denial ran in the paper, The Times published an editorial titled: "The Illusory Prague Connection." Citing Mr. Risen's story, the editorial argued against the United States going to war under "false pretenses." It did not mention the paper's own report of Mr. Havel's denial.

The disconnect between the Oct. 23 Times editorial and the paper's reporting that same day prompted some critics to howl, including conservative author and Weblogger Edward Jay Epstein, whose work Mr. Safire cited in his Nov. 12, 2001, column. "As it turned out," Mr. Epstein wrote, "the scoop itself, and not the meeting, was the fabrication."

On Oct. 31, Mr. Safire himself entered the fray, writing: "I suspect that the coterie around President Havel-the great former dissident we all admire-despises the prime minister, the interior minister and the Czech intelligence agencies. In Havel's name, that weakening coterie misled a fine reporter and lashed out at the rest of the government's officials by making them out to be publicity hounds of war."

But even if Mr. Havel hadn't called the White House to say he was dubious about the Atta meeting, it didn't mean he thought such a meeting occurred. As Mr. Green's Oct. 23 article pointed out in its second paragraph, a spokesman for the Czech president "said Mr. Havel was still certain there was no factual basis behind the report that Mr. Atta met an Iraqi diplomat, Ahmad Khalil Ibrahim Samir al-Ani, here in April 2001. In an interview last month, Mr. Havel told The Times that he knew of no proof that the two men had met. 'I definitely wasn't at this meeting,' Mr. Havel said with a laugh."

While he jumped on his denial of a phone call to the White House, Mr. Safire didn't mention the report of Mr. Havel's continued doubt in his Oct. 31 column. That prompted some at The Times to wonder if the columnist was only picking out pieces of information that agreed with his own stance. "Safire's been trying to push a view that's been consistently disproven in the news pages," one Times source said.

Messrs. Safire and Risen did not return calls seeking comment. A Times spokesperson said the paper stood by the reporting of both stories. As for the Times Oct. 23 editorial, the paper's editorial-page editor, Gail Collins, said: "The [Oct. 21] story hasn't been retracted, and our editorial was based on the paper's reporting."

As for Mr. Safire's assertion that Czech officials had taken Mr. Risen in, Ms. Collins said: "Everyone knows we do not hinder or edit the columnists. Their voices are their own voices."

Of course, it's tough to separate the debate over Mr. Atta's meeting from the growing ideological divide over U.S. action in Iraq. Proponents of a military invasion have questioned the motivations of those who doubt the encounter, believing their skepticism was designed to cool momentum for military action. Those opposed to a U.S. invasion have asked if the Atta meeting was simply an easy thing for pro-invasion voices to point to-a way of justifying a war with Iraq as revenge.

But has the Atta meeting's importance in the war debate been overstated? Some journalists now believe that parties on both sides of the debate have moved on to other discussions.

"For the longest time, it [the Atta meeting] was used as the one and only piece of hard evidence," one Pentagon correspondent said. "Over the past several months, they [civilian Pentagon officials] dropped it. They know they don't have the smoking gun. They basically stopped making the connection between Sept. 11 and Iraq and have turned to more general connections between Al Qaeda and Iraq."

James Hoge, editor of Foreign Affairs , said that the alleged Atta meeting's importance-mainly in riling up the support of the American public-had passed.

"The emphasis has now shifted to the U.N. as a source of legitimacy," Mr. Hoge said. "As long as we can prove Iraq's involvement with weapons of mass destruction, we're going to get a resolution we can live with and go forward. You don't need the rest of this stuff."

Call it The Truth About Arthur . On Oct. 30, New York Times Company chairman and New York Times publisher Arthur D. Sulzberger Jr. jetted to Paris to try and romance back the staff of the International Herald Tribune .

Only a week had passed since the Times Company gobbled up the Herald Tribune for itself, ending a 35-year partnership with The Washington Post . Staffers at the Herald Tribune fumed, believing that the Times Co. had manhandled its former partner and forced the sale. They also worried about being shut down-and replaced with an international edition of The Times .

But according to sources present at the publisher's meeting, Mr. Sulzberger-who was accompanied by top Times Company executives Russell T. Lewis and Michael Golden-brought no bad news to the City of Lights. He told the group he hoped to put color on the front page. More importantly, Mr. Sulzberger said he didn't plan any changes in the staff … as long as the new single-ownership Herald Tribune started to make a profit.

Spokespeople for the Times Company and Herald Tribune executive editor David Ignatius both declined to comment.

But sources at The Times remained pessimistic about the paper's long-term future. Sources there believe that The Times would like to move forward with an international edition eventually-leaving the Herald Tribune 's status in doubt.

There are optimists, however. Washington Post ombudsman and former Herald Tribune executive editor Michael Getler felt the paper could meet Mr. Sulzberger's profitability demands.

"It's very feasible," Mr. Getler said. "It should be profitable. For a number of years, it was profitable. For an international newspaper, these past two years have been exceptionally difficult, because they're faced with recessions in the United States, Europe and Japan.

"I don't think it's unreasonable for The Times to want a profit," Mr. Getler continued. " The Times has always expected all of their properties to be profitable-including the Herald Tribune ."

Danielle Crittenden, start your Hotmail! National Review editor Rich Lowry has hired former George W. Bush speechwriter David Frum to write a regular back-page column for the magazine and contribute a Weblog for the magazine's online site.

Back in February, Mr. Frum-a former editorial-page editor at The Wall Street Journal -left his post with the administration under unusual circumstances. Around the same time that Mr. Frum left his job, Slate 's Timothy Noah disclosed that Mr. Frum's wife, writer Danielle Crittenden, had written to friends in an e-mail: "I realize this is very 'Washington' of me to mention, but my husband is responsible for the 'axis of evil' segment of Tuesday's State of the Union address."

The disclosure led some-most notably CNN's Robert Novak-to question whether Mr. Frum had actually quit, or had been pushed out by a red-faced Republican administration.

Since his departure, Mr. Frum's been working on his book The Right Man: The Surprise Presidency of George W. Bush , due out in January.

When asked about the "axis of evil" incident by Off the Record, Mr. Frum demurred, saying: "I can't lift the curtain about what's going to be in the book."

As for the Review job, he said: "I hope I'm coming back to it with new insights and understanding."

Recently, three prominent sports columnists-Rick Reilly and Steve Rushin from Sports Illustrated and Steve Serby from the New York Post -introduced fancy new mug shots to go along with their columns.

Messrs. Reilly and Rushin went casual, shedding their power suits and ties for Friday office wear. The toothy Mr. Reilly now sports a sweater vest and rolled-up shirt. Mr. Rushin, too, has a sweater, and sits with his legs crossed Indian-style, looking a little like Lily Tomlin as Edith Ann.

As for the white-haired Mr. Serby, he's dropped his smart-ass, smug scowl for a … smile.

We called in the experts-Glenn O'Brien, who pens GQ 's "Style Guy" column each month, and Esquire creative fashion director Stefano Tonchi-to evaluate the columnists' new looks.

"When were these replaced?" Mr. Tonchi said of the Sports Illustrated scribes. "It looks like something that could have happened five years ago, in terms of style. They basically went from a Brooks Brothers–Paul Stuart look into a Banana Republic or more like a J. Crew kind of attitude."

"You can hear the photographer or the publicist saying, 'More casual! More relaxed! Like you are at home!'" Mr. Tonchi said.

Mr. O'Brien thought Mr. Reilly looked "more aggressive and less bemused" in his new photo, and said Mr. Rushin seemed "a little bit more manly in the new one."

"He looks a little twinkly in the old one," Mr. O'Brien said. "He definitely looks more of a sports guy than in the old one."

As for Mr. Rushin's pretzel legs, Mr. O'Brien said: "It's kind of odd for a contributor to show [his] body. I guess he must not like his face."

And Mr. Serby's happy-guy makeover?

"I like the old picture," Mr. O'Brien said. "I guess I was attached to it. It reminds me of when [former Jets quarterback] Richard Todd punched him in the face. But I guess everybody has to age sometime.

"It's a hard thing when you have a picture on a column," Mr. O'Brien continued. "I think Cindy Adams is the role model-she never changes. I don't think you have to change. Steve Serby could have stayed 38 forever."

Finally, some late-breaking vagina news. Sources at Elle magazine said that Gilles Bensimon, the magazine's publication director-and ex-husband of supermodel Elle Macpherson-has been irking members of the staff by insisting that the magazine do a piece on vaginas with a photograph included for the January issue.

Sources said that Mr. Bensimon gave the order as Elle 's editor in chief, Roberta Myers, was out on maternity leave. Sources said that after staffers came up with a conceptual think-piece about the subject, Mr. Bensimon suggested that the story had to be more service-oriented, one that dealt with, among other things, "smell" and "taste." ( Burp! ) As the piece goes to press, people at Elle have started to wonder about newsstand repercussions.

"This just shows the ongoing struggle between the sensibilities of an older French man," one Elle source said, "and young American women editors."

Mr. Bensimon, when reached by Off the Record, said the piece was a sort of history of feminine care, um, down there-from the Romans and the Greeks to the "Brazilian" and denied ever saying it should deal with "smell" or "taste."

Asked about possibly offending people, Mr. Bensimon said, "The opening picture doesn't reveal anything and the illustrations we use are from museums. I don't see anything offensive …. It's a good story. It's not a vagina story. It's more of a bikini story, I would say."

The Seventies: The Age of Glitter in Popular Culture , edited by Shelton Waldrep. Routledge, 317 pages, $20.

In his acknowledgments to How We Got Here , David Frum pays his respects to his late mother, Barbara Frum, "who glimmered glamorously through the 1970's in her Zandra Rhodes gowns." I felt an instant rapport with this faceless, fashionable woman. In 1974, I had stitched together a rather nelly throw-pillow from a scrap of Zandra Rhodes printed silk taffeta. But this coincidence alone could not fully explain my fixation with the deceased Mrs. Frum.

In the course of reading Mr. Frum's fascinating book I realized I was nothing more than a down-market version of the author's mother. I had floated through the entire decade (my 20's) without addressing any of the serious issues of the day. I glimmered with the aid of large amounts of alcohol and poppers. I kicked off the decade at the Isle of Wight Pop Festival, where, thanks to debauched exhaustion, I slept through most of the Jimi Hendrix performance and woke up just in time to hear folksy Joan Baez belting out "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot." Eucch! But at least I was there.

I capped off the decade in Los Angeles with a glimmering conviction for reckless driving. I was apprehended while wearing Vivienne Westwood plaid bondage pants. The L.A.P.D. officers forced me to walk in a straight line with my legs strapped together. I can still remember them shrieking with laughter as they clung to each other like a couple of schoolgirls. Glimmer. Glimmer.

I mingled and giggled through the intervening years, never reading a newspaper or watching TV. I was more of a magazine person: Interview and Vogue were particular faves. This trendy inertia spared me the horrifying truths that are so hypnotically catalogued in Mr. Frum's book. I thoroughly recommend this book to anyone who, like myself or Mrs. Frum, devoted the 70's to funstering and is now ready to confront the decade's appalling realities.

I always thought the 70's were "a glorious moment of guiltless hedonism." Mr. Frum doesn't: "The record of the years 1965 to 1980 is blotted by the abandonment of a desperate ally to a ruthless enemy (South Vietnam to the communist North), the collapse of educational standards, the dissolution of the ideal of racial equality into rancorous arguments over special privileges, the discharge of hundreds of thousands of mentally ill people to fend for themselves on the sidewalks, rampant drug abuse, the shattering of millions of families by divorce, and the savaging of America's cities by crime and disorder." When I read Mr. Frum's gritty synopsis I felt as if somebody had turned off the mood lighting at 54, slammed on the fluorescent strips and plugged in the vacuum cleaners.

Quelle horreur ! I was too busy "kickin' down the cobblestones, lookin' for fun and feelin' groovy" (Remember "The 59th Street Bridge Song," from the 60's?); I had no idea America was sinking "into a miasma of self-doubt from which it has never fully emerged." Mr. Frum shredded my myths and preconceptions like so many expired party invites.

Apparently, the 60's weren't so groovy, either. "Despite all that fantastic footage of stoned young people rolling in the Woodstock mud, the 1960's were not the era of sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll"–"the No. 1 song of 1969 was 'Sugar, Sugar' by the Archies."

Evocative trivia, skillfully deployed by Mr. Frum, adds to his punchy journalistic style. Re prudery: "Virna Lisi tore up a contract with United Artists in 1968 rather than appear in the skimpy costumes designed for Barbarella ." Re woo-woo alternative thinking: " New York magazine reported in 1978 the case of a man who had stopped wearing eyeglasses because he had decided to 'take responsibility' for his bad eyesight." Re the changing socioeconomic profile of cult members: "A 1971 study of 31 Hare Krishna devotees found that the average income of the families in which they had been raised exceeded $20,000, a solidly middle-class income at the time." There are more juicy tidbits in these pages than there were stray pubic hairs in the shag pile at Plato's Retreat.

How We Got Here is also enlivened by a confetti cannon of nifty statistics: "Americans who turned 18 between 1971 and 1975 were three times as likely to kill themselves as those who turned 18 between 1962 and 1966"; "The West Side Los Angeles telephone book for February 1970 discloses 135 psychologists' offices; in February 1980 there were 233"; "One's chance of being robbed, raped, assaulted or murdered nearly tripled between 1960 and 1980"; "Reported crime rates more than doubled between 1960 and 1970, but the total number of criminals in prison actually fell , from 212,953 state inmates in 1960 to 196,429 in 1970." Even the less bracing stats are somehow illuminating and quite adorable: "By 1980 almost a quarter of American households contained only one person." Sounds like nothing a bit of house-pooling couldn't put right.

Seventies nostalgia typically celebrates the polyester esthetic–not Mr. Frum. He happily rails at the "vast tsunami of schlock" that "roared through American homes in those years." He recalls with a certain snootiness the " 'Coreentheean leather' of the Chrysler Cordoba touted by actor Ricardo Montalban in a commercial that every junior high school boy learned to mimic." According to Mr. Frum, the average American basement is filled with, "unspooled eight-track cassettes, discarded pieces of orange modular chesterfields; spongy nylon Pierre Cardin track suits; clock radios that snapped after the third use." Mr. Frum is refreshingly judgmental: a very un-70's thing to be.

Like Camille Paglia, Mr. Frum shows us that insightful pop-culture dissection can, and probably should, be accessible, entertaining and straightforward; sadly, The Seventies: The Age of Glitter in Pop Culture , a collection of essays edited by Shelton Waldrep, assistant professor of English at the University of Southern Maine, proves that it is not always so. Given the ephemeral topics it covers (the New York Dolls, American Vogue , black action movies, etc.), I fully expected to inhale The Seventies in a weekend. I had not taken into account that the essays are all written by academics. Ten days later, I was still struggling, dictionary in hand, with 120 pages left to go. After a while, the juxtaposition of history's cheesiest moments with heavy-duty analytical verbiage began to sound like an haute-couture form of academic camp.

Example No. 1, from "The Wayne's World ing of America," by Stephen Rachman: "Nevertheless, whether parodic or mimetic, through the performance of ecstatic listening, what was formerly Queen becomes "classic" Queen; Wayne's World not only spawned the contemporary commercial revival of 'Bohemian Rhapsody,' it initiated through an example of ritual listening the song's canonization." Whaaaaaa?

Example No. 2, from "Introducing the 70's," by Shelton Waldrep, on Sandra Bernhard's shtick: "… credited neither to postmodernism nor the eclectic eccentricity, but to the 70's as the time that established a performative self-definition free of naturalistic sources of intentions." You've go to be joking, ducky!

Example No. 3, from "The Returns of Cleopatra Jones," by Jennifer Devere Brody: "Cleopatra Jones seems to challenge certain cinematic practices that have circumscribed the representation of black women on film in purely domestic and domesticated spaces." Domestic and domesticated! J'adore!

The mania for Foucaultian double-speak is a poor way of safeguarding the continuing inclusion of pop culture studies in university curriculums–i.e., "I'm writing my doctorate on Mariah Carey–but nobody will be able to question it because it will be incomprehensible. Now, if you don't mind, I need to get back to watching MTV in case one of her videos comes on."

Near the end of Mr. Waldrep's book, like well-deserved rewards, are two readable contributions. There's an interview with KC (of Sunshine Band fame), by Randolph Heard–"Our sound was bright and happy. Like sunshine is bright and happy." And then there's my favorite, Vince Aletti's oral history of disco, "The Dancing Machine," which consists of 71 short quotes from the likes of Barry White, Kathy Sledge and Loleatta Holloway. What a relief, after slogging through 317 pages of challenging verbosity, to come upon Gloria Gaynor's response to the decade: "I like fun clothes–sparkle blouses and all."