Just consider the six New England states, home to a combined 22 House seats. 17 of them are now occupied by Democrats (counting Vermont's Bernie Sanders). The five remaining Republicans are avowed moderates who, by this time tomorrow, could be politically extinct.

Here's a quick look at the prospects of New England's five remaining House Republicans, ranked (subjectively) in order of their vulnerability tomorrow:

1) Christopher Shays (CT-4): Locked in a Gold Coast rematch with Diane Farrell, the '04 opponent he bested by just four points, Shays is now clearly the underdog. His credentials are sufficiently moderate and maverick in nature for what is an increasingly Democratic district, but he picked the wrong issue on which to show loyalty to the White House: Iraq. The ads Mike Bloomberg cut for him are a nice touch, but probably don't mean much to the Greenwich and Westport commuters. Zogby has Farrell ahead by seven points - a good place for any candidate to be, but particularly a challenger. Shays' campaign says their polls have him ahead considerably. But it was a wise politico who once advised us to ignore internal polls - "But," he added, "if you're going to listen to them, shave 8 points off whatever they say."

2) Nancy Johnson (CT-5): Her youthful opponent, state Senator Chris Murphy, is sharp, well-pedigreed, quite personable and very ambitious - someone who was almost certainly honing a future State of the Union address in the bathroom mirror at age nine. Originally, this wasn't supposed to be Murphy's year, since the Johnson, a 71-year-old pro-choice Unitarian, is so closely identified with the state's moderate political traditions. Murphy would put a scare into her, fall short, and then wait for her to retire in another term or two, the thinking went.

But now, Murphy has pulled ahead, with momentum and the anti-Bush national climate at his back. The district itself is an odd mix of Democratic and Republican areas - the result of a 2002 redistricting map that pitted Johnson and then-Democratic Rep. Jim Maloney against one another. It leans Democratic, but President Bush made a strong play for the 5th in 2004, as his terrorism credentials resonated with the Reagan Democrats of the Naugatuck Valley. Johnson has tried to push those same buttons, but it's starting to look like the 5th District's voters have decided not to let the 12-term incumbent pick her own retirement date.

3) Charlie Bass (NH-2): This was not supposed to be much of a race, and the fact that it is spells potentially lethal trouble for the national GOP. Bass, son of a New Hampshire congressman and grandson of a governor, has represented the western half of New Hampshire (read: Nashua, Concord, Keene and the area around Dartmouth College) since 1994, when he unseated Dick Swett, who remains the last Democrat elected to Congress from New Hampshire. Bass, a mild-mannered pro-choice moderate with a respectable environmental voting record, is in many ways a good ideological fit for his district, which has swung decisively to the Democrats at the presidential level in response to the national GOP's emphasis on conservative social stances. Bass has never broken 60 percent in any of his campaigns, but no challenger has come closer than eight points, either - even Swett's wife, who outspent Bass two-to-one in 2002. But now Bass has fallen behind Paul Hodes, the same Democratic lawyer he defeated by 20 points just two years ago. It has long been assumed that New Hampshire's 2nd District would one day fall into Democratic hands - but with Bass, Republicans believed they could prolong the inevitable for another decade or two. It would now be a shock if he hangs on.

4) Rob Simmons (CT-2): Simmons was seen as the most vulnerable Connecticut Republican at the start of this cycle. Actually, of all the Republican incumbents in the country, he represents the most Democratic district-- the Eastern Connecticut-based First gave John Kerry a ten-point win two years ago. That explains why there was chatter this summer that national Republicans would seek to entice Simmons to abandon his re-election bid and instead take Alan Schlesinger's place as the party's Senate nominee - potentially giving the GOP a shot at an otherwise unwinnable seat. Nothing came of it, of course, Schlesinger's refusal to budge being only one of the reasons. That said, Simmons has surprised this fall in a rematch with his 2002 opponent, former state Representative Joe Courtney. Elected in 2000, Simmons has never broken 54 percent in a general election, but he's battled back gamely from some damning poll numbers earlier this year. Zogby now has him ahead by five points, while Research 2000 has the race dead even. Having an "R" after his name in 2006 may yet keep Simmons from clearing 50 percent, but somewhat amazingly he actually has a shot. This race will be an excellent barometer of the size of the Democratic wave tomorrow.

5) Jeb Bradley (NH-1): The second-term incumbent from the Lake Winnipesaukee area may well be the last New England House Republican left standing after tomorrow - and he'll a stroke of luck to thank for it. In September, 1st District Democrats defiantly thumbed their noses at Washington, handing their nomination to a former social worker named Carol Shea-Porter and snubbing Jim Craig, the state House minority leader who had been championed by the DCCC. On the stump, Shea-Porter is inarguably a better candidate than Craig, explaining her chocking win in what was a historically low-turnout primary. But her rancorous relationship with the DCCC has kept them from flooding the 1st District the way they have the 2nd District. On top of that, Bradley is fortified by a slight GOP advantage in the district, which favored Bush by three points over Kerry (thus making New Hampshire's 1st District the most Republican district in New England). For all that, though, Shea-Porter is not far off Bradley's pace. If independent voters are even angrier with the GOP than conventional wisdom tells us - and if the GOP base is as torpid as many claim it is - a win by Shea-Porter, who does not even crack national observers' lists of the top 60 House challengers in the country, is not impossible. And if she does win, it will be mean nothing short of a national catastrophe for Republicans.

The only remotely-conceivable Republican pick-up in New England would be Vermont's open at-large seat. But the national climate makes it highly improbable that the GOP nominee, Adjutant General Martha Rainville, will suddenly overcome what has been a stubbornly persistent deficit in the polls.

The GOP bloodletting in New England probably won't stop with the House, either. If, as expected, Lincoln Chafee loses his Rhode Island Senate seat and Democrat Deval Patrick prevails in the Massachusetts governor's race, about all the GOP will have left in New England will be the governorships of Connecticut and Rhode Island and Maine's two Senate seats. For national Republicans, though, the end of their competitive days in the region comes with a silver lining: With each new census, the Northeast continues to shrink in population and, thus, political clout. But if the polls hold up, that will be pretty small consolation.

-- Steve Kornacki

Yes, Bill Clinton's unpopularity - Time once used its cover to label him "The Incredible Shrinking President", in case you forgot - was the main catalyst for the Republicans' 52-seat pick-up in the House twelve years ago. But those gains in many cases were decades in the making, conservative-leaning Southern districts that had long ago abandoned the national Democratic Party but that had remained loyal to their local congressmen. '94 simply marked the belated realization of Lyndon Johnson's supposed comment when he signed the 1964 Civil Rights Act: "There goes the South for a generation."

Like Clinton, George W. Bush seems to be triggering another belated regional realignment, this time in the Northeast. Just consider the six New England states, home to a combined 22 House seat. 17 of them are now occupied by Democrats (counting Vermont's Bernie Sanders). The five remaining Republicans are avowed moderates, relics in many ways of the days when Rockefeller Republicanism ruled the East Coast. By this time tomorrow, all five could be politically extinct, giving New England an all-Democratic House delegation. And, as with the once-Democratic seats in the South, once these seats leave the GOP column, they're probably gone for good.

Here's a quick look at the prospects of New England's five remaining House Republicans, ranked (subjectively) in order of their vulnerability tomorrow:

1) Christopher Shays (CT-4): Locked in a Gold Coast rematch with Diane Farrell, the '04 opponent he bested by just four points, Shays is now clearly the underdog. His credentials are sufficiently moderate and maverick in nature for what is an increasingly Democratic district, but he picked the wrong issue to show loyalty to the White House: Iraq. The ads Mike Bloomberg cut for him are a nice touch, but probably don't mean much to the Greenwich and Westport commuters. Zogby has Farrell ahead by seven points - a good place for any candidate to be, but particularly a challenger. Shays' campaign says their polls have him ahead considerably. But it was a wise politico who once advised us to ignore internal polls - "But," he added, "if you're going to listen to them, shave 8 points off whatever they say." In other words, Shays probably needs the luck of the Washington Redskins to survive now.

2) Nancy Johnson (CT-5): Her youthful opponent, state Senator Chris Murphy, is sharp, well-pedigreed, quite personable and very ambitious - someone who was almost certainly honing a future State of the Union address in the bathroom mirror at age nine. Originally, this wasn't supposed to be Murphy's year, since the Johnson, a 71-year-old pro-choice Unitarian, is so closely identified with the state's moderate political traditions. Murphy would put a scare into her, fall short, and then wait for her to retire in another term or two, the thinking went. That was earlier this year. Now, Murphy has pulled ahead, with momentum and the anti-Bush national climate at his back. The district itself is an odd mix of Democratic and Republican areas - the result of a 2002 redistricting map that pitted Johnson and then-Democratic Rep. Jim Maloney against one another. It leans Democratic, but President Bush made a strong play for the 5th in 2004, as his terrorism credentials resonated with the Reagan Democrats of the Naugatuck Valley. Johnson has tried to push those same buttons, but it's starting to look like the 5th District's voters have decided not to let the 12-term incumbent pick her own retirement date.

3) Charlie Bass (NH-2): This was not supposed to be much of a race, and the fact that it is spells potentially lethal trouble for the national GOP. Bass, son of a New Hampshire congressman and grandson of a governor, has represented the western half of New Hampshire (read: Nashua, Concord, Keene and the area around Dartmouth College) since 1994, when he unseated the unfortunately-named Dick Swett, who remains the last Democrat elected to Congress from New Hampshire. Bass, a mild-mannered pro-choice moderate with a respectable environmental voting record, is in many ways a good ideological fit for his district, which has swung decisively to the Democrats at the presidential level, a response to the national GOP's emphasis on conservative social stances. Bass has never broken 60 percent in any of his campaigns, but no challenger has come closer than eight points, either - even Swett's wife, who outspent Bass two-to-one in 2002. But now Bass has fallen behind Paul Hodes, the same Democratic lawyer he defeated by 20 points just two years ago. It has long been assumed that New Hampshire's 2nd District would one day fall into Democratic hands - but with Bass, Republicans believed they could prolong the inevitable for another decade or two. It would now be a shock if he hangs on.

4) Rob Simmons (CT-2): Simmons was seen as the most vulnerable Connecticut Republican at the start of this cycle. Actually, of all the Republican incumbents in the country, he represents the most Democratic district-- the Eastern Connecticut-based First gave John Kerry a ten-point win two years ago. That explains why there was chatter this summer that national Republicans would seek to entice Simmons to abandon his re-election bid and instead take Alan Schlesinger's place as the party's Senate nominee - potentially giving the GOP a shot at an otherwise unwinnable seat. Nothing came of it, of course, Schlesinger's refusal to budge being only one of the reasons. That said, Simmons has surprised this fall in a rematch with his 2002 opponent, former state Representative Joe Courtney. Elected in 2000, Simmons has never broken 54 percent in a general election, but he's battled back gamely from some damning poll numbers earlier this year. Zogby now has him ahead by five points, while Research 2000 has the race dead even. Having an "R" after his name in 2006 may yet keep Simmons from clearing 50 percent, but somewhat amazingly he actually has a shot. This race will be an excellent barometer of the size of the Democratic wave tomorrow.

5) Jeb Bradley (NH-1): The second-term incumbent from the Lake Winnipesaukee area may well be the last New England House Republican left standing after tomorrow - and he'll a stroke of luck to thank for it. In September, 1st District Democrats defiantly thumbed their noses at Washington, handing their nomination to a former social worker named Carol Shea-Porter and snubbing Jim Craig, the state House minority leader who had been championed by the DCCC. On the stump, Shea-Porter is inarguably a better candidate than Craig, explaining her chocking win in what was a historically low-turnout primary. But her rancorous relationship with the DCCC has kept them from flooding the 1st District the way they have the 2nd District. On top of that, Bradley is fortified by a slight GOP advantage in the district, which favored Bush by three points over Kerry (thus making New Hampshire's 1st District the most Republican district in New England). For all that, though, Shea-Porter is not far off Bradley's pace. If independent voters are even angrier with the GOP than conventional wisdom tells us - and if the GOP base is as torpid as many claim it is - a win by Shea-Porter, who does not even crack national observers' lists of the top 60 House challengers in the country, is not impossible. And if she does win, it will be mean nothing short of a national catastrophe for Republicans.

The only remotely-conceivable Republican pick-up in New England would be Vermont's open at-large seat. But the national climate makes it highly improbable that the GOP nominee, Adjutant General Martha Rainville, will suddenly overcome what has been a stubbornly persistent deficit in the polls.

The GOP bloodletting in New England probably won't stop with the House, either. If, as expected, Lincoln Chafee loses his Rhode Island Senate seat and Democrat Deval Patrick prevails in the Massachusetts governor's race, about all the GOP will have left in New England will be the governorships of Connecticut and Rhode Island and Maine's two Senate seats. For national Republicans, though, the end of their competitive days in the region comes with a silver lining: With each new census, the Northeast continues to shrink in population and, thus, political clout. The South, meanwhile, is only growing stronger.

If you’re lucky, you’ll get to see David Bouley himself at work in the open kitchen upstairs at Bouley Bakery and Market, 130 West Broadway (at Duane Street), 212-608-5829, where Japanese food is served alongside French/American cuisine. The cooking is superlative, and there’s a sushi bar that offers wonderful hot Japanese dishes as well. No prix fixe, no reservations.

In the Village, at Gusto, 60 Greenwich Avenue (at Perry Street), 212-924-8000, chef Jody Williams makes the best fried artichokes outside of Rome. In fact, most dishes at this chic black-and-white 60’s-style Italian trattoria are superior and authentic. Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s latest venture, Perry Street, 176 Perry Street (at West Street), 212-352-1900, also reflects mid-century glamour in its sleek dining room in Richard Meier’s glass towers. Some of the food is flawless, such as the red-snapper sashimi and a Thai-inspired dill broth that’s one of the best soups I’ve tasted. Over in the East Village at Uovo, 175 Avenue B (at 11th Street), 212-475-8686, Matthew Hamilton’s inventive cooking is rustic with Mediterranean touches: garlic, anchovies, bitter greens and strong, fruity olive oils. His Spanish almond soup is a masterpiece.

In midtown, Alto, 520 Madison Avenue (entrance on 53rd Street), 212-308-1099, is the most ambitious Italian restaurant to open in New York this year (apart from Mario Batali’s much-publicized Del Posto, which is too new to review). Scott Conant is serving the Austrian-accented Italian cooking of the Alto Adige, a mountainous area in the North. The décor is strange, but Mr. Conant’s marvelous, jewel-like food shouldn’t be missed. A few blocks west, Bobby Flay is cooking at Bar Americain, 152 West 52nd Street (between Sixth and Seventh avenues), 212-265-9700, and serious cocktails (no gimmicks) are dispensed at a huge zinc bar. Mr. Flay’s regional cooking presents American ingredients at their best and spices them in ways that bring out rather than mask their flavor. The shellfish cocktails are outstanding.

Another new addition near the theater district, Roberto Passon, 741 Ninth Avenue (at 50th Street), 212-582-5599, serves elegant Venetian cuisine in cheery surroundings. The pastas are excellent, especially the black tagliatelle tossed with clams, mussels and Prosecco. On the Upper West Side, at Onera, 227 West 79th Street (between Amsterdam and Broadway), 212-873-0200, chef/owner Michael Psilakis has reinvented Greek cuisine: Instead of stuffed grape leaves and taramasalata, there is raw meze, and the moussaka is made with braised goat, eggplant, potato and béchamel sauce.

In the Flatiron district, at Laurent Tourondel’s BLT Fish, 21 West 17th Street, 212-691-8888, whole, very fresh fish and lobster are sold by the pound and served with a choice of sauces and vegetables on the side, so customers can mix and match as they please. The ground floor is a New England seafood shack. One of my favorites is the Dungeness crab mixed with avocado and served in a tart grapefruit vinaigrette.

Refined Korean food sounds like an oxymoron, but chef Karen Young at Chelsea’s D’or Ahn, 207 Tenth Avenue (near 23rd Street), 212-627-7777, uses French techniques with traditional ingredients. This stylish hole-in-the-wall serves melting Korean short ribs with a French-inspired horseradish celeriac puree and a spicy chocolate soufflé.

Donatella Arpaia and chef Turibio Girardi pay homage to the cuisine of Puglia at Ama, 48 MacDougal Street (between Prince and Houston streets), 212-358-1707, a hot, young trattoria. There are buttery, grilled baby cuttlefish with clams and porcini and first-rate pastas. Terrance Cave’s HQ, 90 Thompson (between Prince and Spring streets), 212-966-2755, is a convivial new bistro serving modern American cuisine that’s sophisticated but accessible: steak with white polenta instead of fries, roast duck with parsnip purée and orange sauce.

Tribeca’s Lo Scalco, 313 Church Street (at Walker Street), 212-343-2900, is quiet, spacious and elegant. Chef/owner Mauro Mafrici produces magnificent pasta and risotto, as well as a roast guinea hen covered in a burnished layer of artichokes that looks like feathers.

Dan Barber’s Blue Hill, 75 Washington Place (between Sixth Avenue and Washington Square Park), 212-539-1776, now in its 15th year, is New York’s most underrated restaurant. Its casual manner belies the high caliber of the cooking—which gets three stars from me and none from those starchy Michelin Guide inspectors. The produce comes from Stone Barns Farm up the Hudson, where Mr. Barber has a sister restaurant. And no matter what the season, there’s a fabulous chocolate brioche bread pudding.

With Gramercy Tavern, 42 East 20th Street (between Broadway and Park Avenue), 212-477-0777, Danny Meyer and Tom Colicchio introduced a new form of “haute” dining, American style, when the restaurant opened a decade ago. The food is better than ever, and everything feels more relaxed now that heavy brown velvet curtains have been installed in the Tavern’s various dining areas, softening the hard edges and absorbing noise.

Last New Year’s Eve, I dined at Abboccato, 136 West 55th Street (across the street from City Center), 212-265-4000, which serves high-end regional Italian dishes. We began with a coffee cup of lentils topped with Osetra caviar and sour cream. Each lentil symbolizes a coin—good luck for the New Year. We could have drunk a bowl.

New Year’s Eve, of course, is the time for resolutions. Dear restaurant owners, you spend a small fortune on décor; please do something about lighting and noise. Those overhead pinpoints worthy of interrogation chambers and the screeching rush-hour din of so many dining rooms I visited this year don’t make it easy for customers to enjoy your hard-working chef’s good food. Fix the problem, and I resolve not to complain anymore.

If you’re lucky, you’ll get to see David Bouley himself at work in the open kitchen upstairs at Bouley Bakery and Market, 130 West Broadway (at Duane Street), 212-608-5829, where Japanese food is served alongside French/American cuisine. The cooking is superlative, and there’s a sushi bar that offers wonderful hot Japanese dishes as well. No prix fixe, no reservations.

In the Village, at Gusto, 60 Greenwich Avenue (at Perry Street), 212-924-8000, chef Jody Williams makes the best fried artichokes outside of Rome. In fact, most dishes at this chic black-and-white 60’s-style Italian trattoria are superior and authentic. Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s latest venture, Perry Street, 176 Perry Street (at West Street), 212-352-1900, also reflects mid-century glamour in its sleek dining room in Richard Meier’s glass towers. Some of the food is flawless, such as the red-snapper sashimi and a Thai-inspired dill broth that’s one of the best soups I’ve tasted. Over in the East Village at Uovo, 175 Avenue B (at 11th Street), 212-475-8686, Matthew Hamilton’s inventive cooking is rustic with Mediterranean touches: garlic, anchovies, bitter greens and strong, fruity olive oils. His Spanish almond soup is a masterpiece.

In midtown, Alto, 520 Madison Avenue (entrance on 53rd Street), 212-308-1099, is the most ambitious Italian restaurant to open in New York this year (apart from Mario Batali’s much-publicized Del Posto, which is too new to review). Scott Conant is serving the Austrian-accented Italian cooking of the Alto Adige, a mountainous area in the North. The décor is strange, but Mr. Conant’s marvelous, jewel-like food shouldn’t be missed. A few blocks west, Bobby Flay is cooking at Bar Americain, 152 West 52nd Street (between Sixth and Seventh avenues), 212-265-9700, and serious cocktails (no gimmicks) are dispensed at a huge zinc bar. Mr. Flay’s regional cooking presents American ingredients at their best and spices them in ways that bring out rather than mask their flavor. The shellfish cocktails are outstanding.

Another new addition near the theater district, Roberto Passon, 741 Ninth Avenue (at 50th Street), 212-582-5599, serves elegant Venetian cuisine in cheery surroundings. The pastas are excellent, especially the black tagliatelle tossed with clams, mussels and Prosecco. On the Upper West Side, at Onera, 227 West 79th Street (between Amsterdam and Broadway), 212-873-0200, chef/owner Michael Psilakis has reinvented Greek cuisine: Instead of stuffed grape leaves and taramasalata, there is raw meze, and the moussaka is made with braised goat, eggplant, potato and béchamel sauce.

In the Flatiron district, at Laurent Tourondel’s BLT Fish, 21 West 17th Street, 212-691-8888, whole, very fresh fish and lobster are sold by the pound and served with a choice of sauces and vegetables on the side, so customers can mix and match as they please. The ground floor is a New England seafood shack. One of my favorites is the Dungeness crab mixed with avocado and served in a tart grapefruit vinaigrette.

Refined Korean food sounds like an oxymoron, but chef Karen Young at Chelsea’s D’or Ahn, 207 Tenth Avenue (near 23rd Street), 212-627-7777, uses French techniques with traditional ingredients. This stylish hole-in-the-wall serves melting Korean short ribs with a French-inspired horseradish celeriac puree and a spicy chocolate soufflé.

Donatella Arpaia and chef Turibio Girardi pay homage to the cuisine of Puglia at Ama, 48 MacDougal Street (between Prince and Houston streets), 212-358-1707, a hot, young trattoria. There are buttery, grilled baby cuttlefish with clams and porcini and first-rate pastas. Terrance Cave’s HQ, 90 Thompson (between Prince and Spring streets), 212-966-2755, is a convivial new bistro serving modern American cuisine that’s sophisticated but accessible: steak with white polenta instead of fries, roast duck with parsnip purée and orange sauce.

Tribeca’s Lo Scalco, 313 Church Street (at Walker Street), 212-343-2900, is quiet, spacious and elegant. Chef/owner Mauro Mafrici produces magnificent pasta and risotto, as well as a roast guinea hen covered in a burnished layer of artichokes that looks like feathers.

Dan Barber’s Blue Hill, 75 Washington Place (between Sixth Avenue and Washington Square Park), 212-539-1776, now in its 15th year, is New York’s most underrated restaurant. Its casual manner belies the high caliber of the cooking—which gets three stars from me and none from those starchy Michelin Guide inspectors. The produce comes from Stone Barns Farm up the Hudson, where Mr. Barber has a sister restaurant. And no matter what the season, there’s a fabulous chocolate brioche bread pudding.

With Gramercy Tavern, 42 East 20th Street (between Broadway and Park Avenue), 212-477-0777, Danny Meyer and Tom Colicchio introduced a new form of “haute” dining, American style, when the restaurant opened a decade ago. The food is better than ever, and everything feels more relaxed now that heavy brown velvet curtains have been installed in the Tavern’s various dining areas, softening the hard edges and absorbing noise.

Last New Year’s Eve, I dined at Abboccato, 136 West 55th Street (across the street from City Center), 212-265-4000, which serves high-end regional Italian dishes. We began with a coffee cup of lentils topped with Osetra caviar and sour cream. Each lentil symbolizes a coin—good luck for the New Year. We could have drunk a bowl.

New Year’s Eve, of course, is the time for resolutions. Dear restaurant owners, you spend a small fortune on décor; please do something about lighting and noise. Those overhead pinpoints worthy of interrogation chambers and the screeching rush-hour din of so many dining rooms I visited this year don’t make it easy for customers to enjoy your hard-working chef’s good food. Fix the problem, and I resolve not to complain anymore.

Many of those mansions were badly damaged and some totally wrecked by the 1938 hurricane, and the ruined structures remained unrepaired and unattended for the duration of World War II, during which there was no possibility of rebuilding them. Those ruins were a particularly spectacular sight in the winter months, when heavy snowfalls transformed them into an eerie frozen wasteland. After the war, many of the houses that were salvageable were rebuilt as hotels or rest homes; the summer people had meanwhile opted for more benevolent locales.

I got to thinking about all this a few weeks ago when I went to see the exhibition called Into the Storm: Expressions in the American Landscape, 1800-1940 at the National Academy Museum in New York, and I've been reminded of it again while following the grim accounts of the most recent hurricane in Florida. What's especially striking about the paintings in Into the Storm is their almost uniform placidity in depicting the violence of nature. There is hardly a painting in the entire exhibition that even hints at the fury and devastation that storms regularly inflict upon the populations of coastal communities. Is it really possible that storms along the Atlantic seaboard in the 19th century and the early decades on the 20th were so much more benign than, say, the recent hurricane in Florida or the 1938 hurricane in New England?

I'm not persuaded that Atlantic storms were calmer in earlier times. What's far more likely is that the conventions of 19th-century American landscape painting were, more often than not, incapable of dealing with either the physical destruction or the psychological trauma that are the inevitable result of these violent storms. Most of these National Academy painters appear to have preferred some version of pictorial romance, allegory or the picturesque to the violent reality.

For example, Jay Hall Connaway's A Maine Storm (circa 1940), was painted in the aftermath of the 1938 hurricane, which for many residents of the Maine coast was a horrific experience. Yet in Connaway's painting we are given buttery, unthreatening waves and tender gray clouds. Asher Brown Durand's Landscape (undated) is similarly a picture of perfect calm in which two figures, one standing, the other reclining, are conducting a leisurely conversation in the open air. John Frederick Kensett's Approaching Storm (1855) is likewise unalarming, a pastoral idyll that features two cows indifferent to the "approaching" storm.

An exception to all this meteorological quietude is Jasper Francis Cropsey's Coast Scene (1855), in which the sky is indeed full of alarming portents and the surf looks dangerous. But for the most part, one's left wondering if a better title for this exhibition might have been The Calm Before the Storm .

We don't usually look to painting to provide us with weather forecasts or documentary accounts of natural disasters, but if a reputable institution invites us to an exhibition focused on a specific theme, it's reasonable to expect that the works in such an exhibition will give us a more or less reliable account of the announced subject. And it isn't as if the history of painting is devoid of some highly dramatic pictorial accounts of great storms.

One need only think of a master like J.M.W. Turner (1775-1851), who painted some of the greatest storm scenes in the history of Western art. The painters represented in Into the Storm are conspicuously lacking in the aesthetic faculty Henry James once described as "the imagination of disaster"; Turner possessed it in inexhaustible abundance. Without it, the depiction of storms is bound to remain, well, becalmed-which is to say, merely academic.

Among 19th-century American writers, Herman Melville was greatly endowed with "the imagination of disaster", as every reader of Moby-Dick has reason to know, but among the 19th-century American landscape painters there was no comparable figure.

Adding to the placid character of Into the Storm , moreover, is a subsection of the exhibition devoted to the mostly postcard-size paintings and drawings of William Trost Richards (1833-1905), another landscapist of limited interest.

Into the Storm: Expressions in the American Landscape, 1800-1940 remains on view at the National Academy Museum, 1083 Fifth Avenue at 89th Street, through Oct. 10.

In the Era of Globalization, there has developed what I think of as the "Sexagonal Trade." The only commodity involved is engraved paper and proxies therefor. Think of it in terms of one of Rube Goldberg's fantasy gadgets: 1) I.M.F. money is sent to countries in trouble, where it is 2) confiscated by local kleptocracies, or appropriated by a variety of agencies fronting a game of credentialed usury, and 3) manumitted to a currency laundry like the Cayman Islands, then 4) to a "clean currency" market and 5) thence back to the I.M.F., to be put to work again 6) "structurally adjusting" the economic affairs of some other beleaguered Third World nation to begin the cycle all over.

Like its triangular forebear, the Sexagonal Trade involves, principally, persons of color. Like its three-sided predecessor, our six-sided model involves the enslavement-actual in some cases, virtual in others-of those persons.

If you want to see how it works, you cannot do better than to put pedal to the metal and go see Life and Debt , a prize-winning documentary by Stephanie Black now playing at the Screening Room. I read about it in the New York Press -unaccountably, I missed Stephen Holden's glowing five-star review in the Paper of Record-and rushed to the theater where it was then playing.

I did so because Life and Debt is about Jamaica, and what the I.M.F. and the W.T.O. and bent pigs like Carl Lindner of United Fruit have done to the place. Anybody who has read this column for any meaningful portion of the 14 years I have been writing it must know how I feel about Jamaica. We are talking about a 40-year love affair.

But that's not the whole story here. Yes, after seeing it, I got on the phone to other people who have houses at Round Hill and Tryall to tell them that anyone who has an investment of heart or wallet in Jamaica has got to see this film. Yes, I hope that Bob Pittman, who loves the island as I do, will find a way to get it on HBO. Yes, I hope that Ralph Lauren, who's the "king" of Round Hill, sees it. Mr. Lauren uses Jamaica all sorts of ways in his fashion-and-lifestyle empire, but not as a manufacturing resource, and maybe this will make him think about that . Yes, I hope that any of us with a shred of clout or influence will do what we can to make it hot for the corporatist sonsofbitches that do what's been done to Jamaica.

What makes Ms. Black's film so interesting and so provocative is that it is both site-specific and yet transcendent. It isn't the whole story: It contains an on-camera interview with former Jamaican Prime Minister Michael Manley, shot not long before he died, in which Manley is incisive about the I.M.F. but somehow fails to mention his ill-judged flirtations with communism and Castro in the 70's, which brought down a mess of trouble upon his unhappy country. Nor is the ascendancy of the narcotics trade in the Jamaican economy given due weight. But one cannot ask for everything.

Be thankful for what Ms. Black has given us: not a political-protest film, not in tone or attack similar to the Seattle protests or the anti–Big Mac movement in France. In only one scene do people take to the streets, and I think Ms. Black includes this moment in a measured, cautionary way, to remind us that when you grind virtually the whole of a population down to zero economically, then the few who are left with anything to lose stick out. As I tried to remind those silly young people who put together Bright Young Things -a disgusting book that is the single best argument for a 100 percent inheritance tax that I know of-if you insist on calling attention to your wealth and advantages, it will occur to others to come and take them away from you. A lesson I would not think lost on one of the authors, the child of a principal lawyer for the Rockefellers, a family not known to favor boastful, worldly ostentation-but we seem to be living in an era when the thirty- and fortysomethings appear to have forgotten what little they bothered to learn at Brown or wherever they went to study Gucci.

There are no manifestos flashed on the screen in Life and Debt , no angry young people. The Jamaicans we meet are mostly people of a certain age, who went decently and honestly about their work for decades and now find their lives in ruins-the kind of "ruin" Adam Smith may have had in mind when he speculated as to how much ruin may be in a country. If I may paraphrase another great American with a hand in Jamaica's plight, former Citibank chief executive Walter Wriston, the old petrodollar recycler: "Countries don't go broke, people do." Of course, if you can find enough people, it adds up to a country.

Life and Debt shoves no politics in our face, which makes it all the more riveting. It just gives the facts. It shows the human face of "structural adjustment" (along with "family tennis" and "native entertainment," the most ominous word rubric in English). It counts the money costs and then personalizes them.

Powdered milk costs 57 cents per whatever to produce in this country; thanks to the I.M.F., it is sold-if it were the "free-trade" U.S., the phrase would be "dumped"-in Jamaica for 27 cents, decimating the local dairy farmers and causing their herds to be sent for slaughter. Stanley Fischer of the I.M.F. speaks in reasonable tones-I would call him a reasonable man, in the same wise that Marc Antony described Brutus et al. as honorable men-but his soft, superior voice, with just a hint of Afrikaans about it, prescribes calamity for those nations unlucky enough to have no friends in court or in Congress.

What this movie is about is what I believe to be the great issue of our time: whether we are going to let giant corporations, with governments and governmental agencies and cooperatives fronting for them, run our lives. Whether we are going to permit them to continue to earn hatred for this country around the world as they search for that extra mill or farthing for the bottom line. Whether it is the I.M.F. in a place like Jamaica, or the Federal Appeals Court for the District of Columbia in the matter of U.S. v. Microsoft, the outcome seems clear. The object of the exercise is to clear the way for corporations to do as they please. If they encounter resistance, the shock troops of the "free market" are sent ashore-peacekeepers commissioned by Uncle Sam.

This is what has concerned me about the Bush Project from the day of his nomination. There are too many Big Company men and women on the team. I know about Big Companies. I have sat on their boards, helped arrange their finances. I came of age in the Era of the Organization Man. I can think of no group of people better equipped-on their own say-so, if nothing else-to fend for themselves. I know of no group of people less acquainted with the notion of the "public good." Most of them don't know how to spell it, any more than they acknowledge that U-period-S-period spells "us" and not just " Us! " (the plural of "Me! Me! Me!").

From 1962, when Jack Kennedy took on the steel companies, until the 1980's, Big Company thinking-what's-good-for-General-Motors thinking-was relegated to the margin. But the entrepreneurial interregnum is over, partly a homicide victim (the complete abandonment of antitrust), partly dead by its own hand (the dot-com bubble). The men in gray flannel are back. At the I.M.F., they wear gray, too.

See this movie, Life and Debt. Then tell yourself that, of course, something like that could never happen here. And keep telling yourself.

If books were shelved according to the cadence of their titles rather than by the names of their authors, Benjamin Anastas' new novel might find itself wedged between Narrative of the Planting of the Massachusetts Colony and Wonder-Working Providence of Sions Saviour in New England. Both of those were written before 1695. Who publishes "faithful narratives" any more? Who still writes about pastors? Mr. Anastas' title sounds lifted from the syllabus of a graduate seminar on the social history of 17th-century Puritans.

Colonial authors wrote "faithful narratives" and expected to be taken literally. But in 2001, no title containing the word "faithful" can ever be transparent. Mr. Anastas knows this, and the novel he has written (set in present-day New England, but fully conscious of its heritage) is as skeptical as those earlier works were devout. Mr. Anastas' novel questions anything promising complete fidelity. So if his theme is faith, in most senses of the word–spiritual, social, sexual–his lesson is that faith is as elusive as any narrative that purports to plot its course. In his first novel, An Underachiever's Diary , he evoked this quite literally: The object of the narrator's affection–the girlfriend of his own twin brother, the intelligent and beautiful ideal always beyond his grasp–was named Faith.

That earlier novel was a slim, first-person account of a well-meaning but mediocre hero who could not live up to the high standards of his angelic brother. For his second book, Mr. Anastas has broadened his scope: His frame is no longer the complaint of one protagonist, but rather the cross-section of a whole community. Here the main figure is Bethany Caruso, a frustrated and lonely wife living in an unnamed suburb near Boston. She has two children and a devoted husband whom she no longer loves. Bethany has exiled him to a room above the garage where, ensconced with his soft-core pornography collection, he pines for the wife who will not have him.

For years, Bethany has been suffocating from boredom. In the past, her only anodynes were Zoloft and marijuana supplied by the local teenage dealer. But everything changes when the local Pilgrims' Congregational Church imports a new pastor, Thomas Mosher, who is black (or half-black–his father was white). Immediately, Thomas becomes a subject of fascination for the community: The congregants struggle to interpret his esoteric sermons, the local women swoon and Bethany Caruso falls furiously in love.

But this isn't at all how it happens in the novel. A faithful narrative would probably tell the story sequentially: Bethany is miserable, Reverend Mosher arrives, they fall in love, he disappears. Instead, the novel opens with one long sentence–spanning four pages and comprising the entire first chapter–which anxiously recreates the parish's confusion in the wake of the disappearance. The narrative voice of this opening chapter is hardly the official record we might expect from a faithful narrative; it is, rather, the language of gossip. As the first sentence spirals on and on, we begin to realize that if this narrative is going to be faithful to anything, it will be only to the frantic and chattering energy of a town consumed by the mystery of its pastor's disappearance.

Soon Bethany emerges from this morass of confusion as the novel's main consciousness. Since the narrative constantly jumps back and forth in time, we meet her at the moment of Thomas' disappearance–long after the two have begun their affair. It is Mr. Anastas' skill that we accept and identify with Bethany immediately. She is a restless wife, beleaguered mother, minor wine addict and clandestine lover of the leader of her congregation: all at once, yet authentic in each. But as with Emma Bovary, everything about the heroine seems at the service of her vigorous will, specifically her will to love. In the fictional world of the bored small-town or suburban wife, the only possible flight is through the imagination towards passion. In Emma's case, the tragedy of this passion is gradual: We are subjected, step by step, to her abandonment by one lover and her disillusionment with another. But in Mr. Anastas' version, since he begins at the end–after the pastor has disappeared–we first encounter Bethany already bewildered and lonely: "She missed the pastor terribly, and wanted, if nothing else, just to hear his voice …. Suddenly, with this last thought, it dawned on her maybe, just maybe, weaning herself from the Zoloft had nothing at all to do with her volatile mood (although it couldn't help matters); it had been years, of course, since she had known anything to compare her desperation to, but wasn't she in love?"

Mr. Anastas makes a point of sketching in the small-minded congregants and busybodies of the community; he has a gift for rendering minor characters as something more than caricatures. But the center of his suburban world is his confused suburban wife. Bethany is the only major figure in this novel; although we meet the pastor in numerous flashbacks, his mysteriousness and ultimate disappearance make him a void in the middle of the novel. (The fact that he's black is a bit puzzling, too. Mr. Anastas wants to lay bare the true attitudes of a "liberal" white community towards its black pastor, but this is never quite fulfilled: One forgets about his race altogether.)

The Faithful Narrative of a Pastor's Disappearance places an unhappy and faithless suburban wife at the heart of a suburban novel in order to ask certain questions about suburbia. What is the role of the church in a landscape of banality? Can we transcend monotonous drudgery through love–even when that love is transgressive?

Bethany's condition is not only suburban desolation, but an acute awareness of that condition. Often it seems as if she knows not only Emma Bovary and Hester Prynne (another Massachusetts woman with a clergyman lover), but also Cheever, Updike, White Noise and the rest of the suburban canon. Bethany's will and intelligence are precisely what give this novel life, but at times her extreme self-consciousness, her realization of herself as an archetype and a figure, cause some suspicion in light of her station.

This is mediated, however, by a real generosity and tenderness on Mr. Anastas' part. Though there are certainly satirical elements in the book–mainly in the form of foolish minor characters–his comic vision is primarily a charitable one. So although his epigraph comes from Jonathan Edwards, you get the sense that his characters are condemned not so much to hell as to a sort of purgatory of fitness classes, Nintendo and Count Chocula. Mr. Anastas zeroes in on people who have lost faith–an adulterous wife, a pastor whose devotion to God is fading–and nevertheless shows them to be more heroic than their circumstances might normally permit. In fiction, it's often when a character's faith begins to wane that our faith in that character as somehow real is born.

Aaron Matz has reviewed fiction and literary criticism for The Observer and The American Scholar .

This, of course, is what they said about the 1992 Democratic primary. And the 1988 Democratic primary.

They were wrong then-Michael Dukakis and Bill Clinton were the obvious nominees by the time the primaries got to New York. This time around, there's a bit of truth to the hype, but only a bit.

Yes, all four candidates would love to win New York, but only one, Bill Bradley, absolutely must-and even if he does, he'd need lots of help elsewhere to claim March 7 as the beginning of a comeback. The other three can afford a loss here, particularly if a defeat in New York is matched, no, overwhelmed, by a victory in winner-take-all, delegate-rich California. The New York Republican establishment, on the other hand, will have no reason to be so sanguine if their favorite son of the South, George W. Bush, winds up blowing his once-commanding lead here. There are two errors those with dreams of Federal appointments try very hard to avoid: backing the wrong horse, and failing to deliver for the right horse. If some New York Bush supporters wish to sample life in the Beltway, their man had better win the nomination, and had better win here.

It was with relevancy in mind that New York switched its primary to early March. The notion, since replicated in other states, was to force candidates to pay attention before the rushed nominating process was wrapped up. Thanks to relentless pressure from news cyclists, political parties now try to decide on their Presidential nominees as quickly as possible. A quarter-century ago, long before cable-television political talk shows, states with late primaries exerted disproportionate influence on the nomination process. Campaigns were fought to the bitter end. It was good to be a California Democrat in 1968, when Robert F. Kennedy and Eugene McCarthy battled over the last primary before the convention.

California's last-in-the-nation primary is now among the many in early March, a development that has foiled New York's desperate attempt to persuade candidates of the Empire State's grand importance. For the hulking presence of the Golden State overshadows this onetime political powerhouse of the American Century. The four candidates weren't exactly ubiquitous in New York in late February, either in person or on the air. Greater prizes lay elsewhere-the West in particular.

New York's seemingly inexorable decline into the middle of the pack among big states-just another Pennsylvania or Ohio-should temper the talk of those who insist that the state still counts among vote-counters. Sure, the city will remain important as a source for money and exposure. But otherwise the state will be indistinguishable from other large Rust Belt states. Gone are the days when to be a New York governor or senator or veteran Congressman was to be a Presidential candidate in waiting. The power that New York held in 1944, when both Presidential candidates were New York Governors (Franklin Roosevelt and Thomas E. Dewey), isn't coming back. New York's 33 electoral votes very likely will decline by two or three after the 2000 census, continuing a trend that began 40 years ago.

Of the 25 fastest-declining metropolitan areas in America, four are in New York. Eleven are in New England or in mid-Atlantic states like Pennsylvania. Meanwhile, eight of the 25 fastest-growing metropolitan areas are in the states that have supplanted, or are about to supplant, New York in total population and electoral votes: California, Texas and Florida.

After this election cycle, New York simply won't be able to stand on its own and demand the attention of Presidential candidates, not when there are rewards to be reaped in the Sunbelt. The solution ought to be clear, except that it would require an unprecedented and perhaps impossible degree of regional cooperation-and some pride-swallowing on the banks of the Hudson.

If candidates are to be persuaded to pay greater attention to northeastern Rust Belt issues, they are more likely to be impressed by a northeastern regional primary than an earlier-than-thou primary in New York.

March 7 approaches that ideal, with much of New England joining New York in going to the polls. But there has been little effort to link the states and their shared concerns together. Imagine for a moment a primary in which New York, New Jersey, all of New England and Pennsylvania are at stake. No Sunbelt worshiper could get away with ignoring the region's specific concerns, from public transportation to urban decay.

Then again, we live in an age when petty tensions between Gov. George Pataki and Gov. Christine Todd Whitman of New Jersey have paralyzed the Port Authority. Perhaps we deserve our descent into irrelevancy.

Just Revenge , by Alan M. Dershowitz. Warner Books, 322 pages, $29.95.

Reading In Search of American Jewish Culture , I was reminded of the elderly family friend who used to argue so avidly and present such formidable evidence "proving" that all the great figures in Western history–Shakespeare! Columbus! Henry Ford!–were (deeply, I'd say) closeted Jews. If only he had lived long enough to consult Stephen J. Whitfield's book, which compensates for its less than earth-shaking central thesis (America influenced the Jews and vice versa) by providing a moderately entertaining and at times eccentric consideration of these thorny questions: Which famous American cultural figures were Jewish? (Everyone, apparently, from Sendak to Sondheim, Mamet to Midler, from Rodgers and Hart to Leiber and Stoller, and, of course, "film critic Pauline Kael, whose parents had come from Warsaw …") Who, despite what you've always thought, wasn't Jewish? (Oscar Hammerstein's mother, "a Presbyterian, had him baptized as an even more upscale Episcopalian.… But his social and professional circle was so inescapably Jewish that, if any American could be said to have shaped Jewish culture without actually being Jewish, Hammerstein would be a prime candidate.") And which literary works are not quite … Jewish enough? (Mr. Whitfield criticizes the 1955 Broadway production of The Diary of Anne Frank for "its evasion of the distinctively Jewish character of the ordeal in Amsterdam."

As it turns out, these questions are even more challenging than we might have supposed, especially if the interlocutor is, like Mr. Whitfield, an academic. First, we have to define our terms. What is culture? What is Jewish culture? What is Jewish music? (At the first International Congress of Jewish Music in Paris in 1957, musicologist Curt Sachs offered the following answer: "'that music which is made by Jews, for Jews, as Jews.' This definition sounds simple and incontestable. But its ambit is dubious.… When popularity is a key to financial security, when aristocratic or royal patronage has evaporated, music composed and performed only for Jews guarantees poverty. (Not that the prospect of destitution should affect the definition)."

And what, for that matter, is a Jew? Mr. Whitfield's attempt to distinguish the observant and the orthodox from those with a casual, gene-determined predilection for the occasional matzoh ball leads him to quote authorities ranging from Isaiah Berlin to Lenny Bruce, and to venture into some fairly murky territory. ("[T]he more it becomes apparent that identities are learned rather than given, contingent rather than secure, historically positioned rather than inherent, the stronger the temptation to discern porousness even before the granting of civic equality.")

No matter. It's less likely that you'll read Mr. Whitfield for illumination or provocation than for the giddy brio with which he bounces between high culture and low, and for the sections in which he reveals a peculiar affection for certain cultural artifacts that we (leading the sheltered lives that we do) may never have heard anyone praise at such length. How long has it been since a friend sat you down for a disquisition on the virtues of Show Boat ? When was the last time someone you know expounded upon the cultural and emotional climate that produced "Take Me Out to the Ball Game"? "Albert Von Tilzer (né Gumm) knew so little about this particular diamond business that when he wrote the lyrics to 'Take Me Out to the Ball Game,' he had never been to one. Perhaps that is why his plea was so personal."

To Mr. Whitfield's credit, his view of culture is sufficiently wide and generous to embrace masterpieces, like Phillip Roth's American Pastoral , and unredeemed schlock, like the songs of Barry Manilow. But at no point does he dip low enough to include a work like Alan M. Dershowitz's new novel, Just Revenge , a performance of breathtaking and almost unimaginable crudeness and vulgarity.

Having written The Vanishing American Jew: In Search for Jewish Identity for the Next Century and that classic of self-celebration, Chutzpah , Mr. Dershowitz is himself something of a soi-disant expert on Jewish culture. Here he gives us a courtroom melodrama in which Abe Ringel–the hero of a previous Dershowitz thriller and, one can't help thinking, a stand-in for the author–gets the chance to try his dream case. His friend Max Menuchen, an aged, dignified, sympathetic Holocaust survivor, has learned that the Lithuanian officer who ordered the massacre of his family is alive in America. The old man concocts an elaborate revenge scheme, and when Max is accused of engineering the Lithuanian's death, Abe agrees to defend him.

It's difficult, really, to fully describe just how dreadful the novel is. Unable to distinguish between dialogue and exposition, Mr. Dershowitz treats us to passages like the following, in which Max relates a childhood memory: "'We must have looked strange,' Max said with a warm smile as he remembered the scene. 'A portly old man with a flowing white beard and a fur hat, crawling around a dark attic, while his 18-year-old grandson, wearing a black suit and a yarmulke, with curly sidelocks and the beginning of a never-shaved beard, held a flickering candle.'" With no apparent interest in narrative verisimilitude or psychological credibility, he muddles up dramatic moments like this one: "'I could never forget your eyes!' Max bellowed as his hand, with a will of its own, smashed against Prandus' face.… Prandus cringed in fear, not from the force of the blow, but from Max's words. As he watched the powerful man's face twitch, Max heard King Lear's terrible words: 'Tremble, thou wretch, that hast within thee undivulged crimes unwhipped of justice …'"

But the novel's literary flaws are the least of it. What's galling is the righteousness with which Mr. Dershowitz advances his shaky moral agenda, with its explicit and disturbing endorsement of vigilante justice. ("My hope is that I have written a book that may lead a few people to better understand and empathize with the victims of the worst crime ever perpetrated by one group of human beings on another." The uses to which he puts the Holocaust are appalling; the mass murder that Max recalls seems not just generic but, detail for detail, suspiciously reminiscent of a similar scene in Night , by Elie Wiesel.

In Just Revenge , American-Jewish culture has been brought to new and previously unplumbed depths by Mr. Dershowitz's egregious attempt to reduce the Holocaust to a bad lawyer joke.

The sobbing horde's identification with Louise was not because she appeared as innocent as all that. It occurred despite her obvious involvement in the infant's death. It sprang, like the inner-city identification with O.J., from a sense of injustice embedded like original sin in American life. Some people have it made, and others don't. When we open that can of nematodes, all hell breaks loose. It's enough to break the heart, to discourage feminists who may have believed that certain battles were won. Put Barry Scheck together with a smoking gun, and he'll find six expert witnesses to tell you that the gun is really a pastrami sandwich, and the burning in your eyes is nothing more than an allergic reaction to the prosecution blowing smoke in your face.

No cool heads in Boston, that's for sure. Watching Louise Woodward on television protesting her innocence, I saw a young, flat-faced, not especially appealing girl who might simply have been immature and unable to take the wearing discipline that caring for young children demands, your own or somebody else's. Her face was masked. She did not deserve to be in jail for life because she did not intend to harm the baby. On the other hand, she hardly deserves the cheers of her supporters. No reasonable person can believe that the baby shook himself right into a fatal hemorrhage.

Listening to Deborah Eappen on Larry King Live , I saw a young doctor, slightly tight (and why not), a little too precise and clean to win the public's empathy, struggling to keep herself together after a great loss. Science as a field does not attract types who emote easily, who splash their feelings this way and that. Female doctors have learned control. In a male doctor, we admire this and give them our trust; in a woman, sometimes we interpret their control as coldness. Parts of the public confuse display of emotion with virtue, as if the loudest cry comes from the most truthful throat. Long ago, we determined guilt or innocence by the ability to survive torture. If you burned up, you were guilty. If you lasted through the drowning or whatever, then you were innocent. The public's sympathy seems to be less sophisticated than we think.

That said, the attacks on the Eappen family occurred because of deep-rooted jealousy and hurt pride. The woman who chooses to stay at home with her child feels feels dissed by her successful counterpart, and the woman who goes to work fears she has hired the wrong person-a Louise Woodward, for example. This division in our country has split women into warring camps. Each fears the other has a better life, made better decisions.

What we have forgotten is that choice was always the point, that home or work could be had at different times in a woman's life, that no decision is permanent. The right way to raise a child has not yet been found. Miserable kids with school phobias and eating problems come from mothers who stayed at home; stutterers and bed-wetters, shy ones and dumb ones, come from mothers who were out at work. Ax murderers and con artists were produced in the good old days when all mothers were at home; serial killers and kids who can't read come out of day-care centers or were nanny-raised.

It all depends, and on what it all depends is still a great mystery. Winston Churchill, Virginia Woolf and Franklin Roosevelt were all nanny-raised. Charles Dickens was sent to work at age 12. Adolf Hitler was not raised by an au pair.

The Woodward case, of course, sends shivers down the working woman's spine. Paranoia seems a fair and suitable response to the headlines, first because everyone can see that in the sweet heart of the stay-at-home woman seethes hatred for her working sister. Also, each working woman must fear: Is the nanny cross? Is the day-care center changing diapers promptly? Is the nursery school sacrificing rabbits in bloody satanic rites? Fears, rational and otherwise, are keeping us up at night. Why don't we have good, low-cost day care for everyone? Why haven't we created strong political pressure for it? What made us focus on who hits on whom in the workplace rather than on who will take care of the children?

Even if we had good day care, every mother would still worry. Distrust and anxiety are part of the parental territory, and there is no remedy for it. Louise Woodward has reminded us of what we try to deny. Disaster is always one shake away. Little children can evoke big angers. If the children are not yours and you don't love them as you love yourself, anything can happen. The miracle is that it mostly doesn't.

The fact is, many children have always been taken care of by nannies, many of whom were saner or more careful or more loving than the mothers who hired them. Many children have now been raised in partial or full day care. In an economy such as ours, the workplace is jammed with parents who worry about the welfare of their kids while they are away. The truth is, children have long been taken care of by other, usually less fortunate, sometimes resentful, women. There seems to be no way around it. Every working woman depends on someone working at a lower wage who will take care of her kid in formal or informal groups.

If there is a utopia out there on some other star where child care isn't a problem, please hear our distress call: Mayday, Mayday, over.

This nanny should have had a little jail time. Clever lawyers got her off. I wonder what kind of mother she will be. I wouldn't want to be her child or her mother. As for the Eappens, I wish them more children, privacy, a good life. For the rest of us, we at least know what country we live in: one in which reason hangs by a thread, and justice is at the mercy of conjurers and held hostage to a furious public, fickle in its love, hysterical in its affections, dangerous in its moods.

Remember, Mary Poppins was the au pair from heaven.