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AUSTIN, Texas -- Now they're eating the chad! For all I know, they're eating pregnant chad! Call the right-to-life folks! Call the cruelty-to-animals people! I heard it on talk radio, so it must be true. Those people will stop at nothing!

Actually, I didn't quite catch which side is into scarfing chad with salt and ketchup, but whoever it is, you know they'll stop at nothing.

I vote the Republicans the winners in this weekend's Huffy, Self-Righteous Indignation Fiesta Bowl. They were much more indignant about the number of military ballots that got thrown out (presumably favoring their man, George W. Bush) and so managed to imply that all Democrats are (a) anti-military, and (b) unpatriotic, and (c) would cheerfully send Our Young People off to risk their lives while denying them the right to vote.

The D's were reduced to plaintively pointing out Who Went to Vietnam and Who Didn't, but after milking that one for years, the R's now declare that it doesn't count. Hey, even Bill Clinton got to Vietnam over the weekend.

AUSTIN, Texas -- In May 1957, one of the ugliest times in Texas history, the Legislature was debating a long series of bills designed to reinforce the legal structure of segregation.

Henry B. Gonzalez opposed the bills for 22 hours straight -- still the record in the Texas Senate. Ronnie Dugger of The Texas Observer reported:

"A tall Latin man in a light blue suit and white shoes and yellow handkerchief was pacing around his desk on the Senate floor. It was eight o'clock in the morning. An old Negro was brushing off the soft senatorial carpet in front of the president's rostrum. Up in the gallery, a white man stood with his back to the chamber, studying a panel of pictures of an earlier Senate. The Latin man was orating and gesturing in a full flood of energy, not like a man who had been talking to almost nobody for three hours and had another day and night to go.

AUSTIN, Texas -- Here's the challenge: Let's everybody with a dog in this fight -- meaning either pro-Gore or pro-Bush -- be obliged to make the case for the other side for at least 15 minutes.

Because I think we're watching something important, quite aside from the fate of the nation and the future of The World's Greatest Democracy (except for Florida).

In a mild and in some ways not terribly important case (I may have to eat those words), we're watching why wars start. What we see is the constant presentation -- because the media love to polarize -- of people who are apparently incapable of imagining what the situation looks like from somebody else's point of view.

Is it a lack of empathy, sympathy, imagination? A few years ago, James Carville, the Democratic consultant, wrote a book called We're Right, They're Wrong, which is a great title. Since I don't believe in objectivity -- I think that poor Al Gore won this election fair and square and that the Bushies are trying to spin their way into the White House -- I'm not trying to split the difference here, as in, "You know, they could both be right." Possible, but highly unlikely.

During the first several days after the election, many of America's leading pundits were very distressed. Some even appeared to be on the verge of freaking out as they vented major anxieties: It's upsetting that we still don't know who the next president will be! The financial markets could plunge! Other countries won't respect us!

Fortunately, cooler heads -- namely, the public -- prevailed. With the United States in its second post-election week while complicated legal proceedings unfolded in Florida, national opinion polls clearly indicated widespread patience rather than panic. Apparently, most Americans didn't mind waiting for final ballot tallies and court rulings -- despite all the agitation from media commentators frenetically projecting their own attitudes onto the body politic.

"Public happiness," Hannah Arendt once wrote, "is not isolating, but shared. It is the happiness of being free among other free people, of having one's public faith redeemed and returned." Never have I known such intense public happiness. If the Lewinsky affair was good dirty fun, this is good clean fun. Walk down the street and you hear "Gore" or "Bush" or "Florida" on every gleeful lip.

Now that the supposedly democratic "mandate" is being reduced to farce, Americans are having their instinctive lack of faith in the political process rousingly vindicated. Everyone knows that what's true of Palm Beach county -- incompetent technology, human frailty, willful obstruction of inconvenient voters -- is true across much of the United States.

AUSTIN -- Bliss it was in that very dawn to be alive. Of course, we all need to behave like grown-ups -- the fate of democracy, great principles and all the money that these people have spent are at stake here. But this episode also has the virtue of being incredibly entertaining, thus providing us with national drama headed for the history books.

Jokes are flying on the Internet. Ehud Barak and Yasser Arafat have offered to mediate the election for us. Slobodan Milosevic called to suggest that Palm Beach County become an independent republic of Serbia. The late-night comics are in heaven.

The political high road is clear, for at least a while. Of course, Al Gore's camp was entitled to demand a recount in Florida. The race was so tight that the recount was triggered automatically under state law anyway. For George W. Bush's camp to sigh impatiently and pretend that the D's are out of line is ridiculous.

Democrats rage against Ralph Nader for cutting into Al Gore's vote. They stigmatize his supporters as irresponsible spoilers. If it hadn't been for Nader, they say, Gore would have romped home in Florida, New Hampshire and still-contested Oregon, and thus captured the White House.

Insults about "irresponsibility" and "reckless sabotage" don't get us very far. What were the big issues for greens in Florida? The Everglades. Back in 1993, the hope was that Clinton/Gore would push through a cleanup bill to prevent toxic runoff from the sugar plantations south of Lake Okeechobee from destroying the swamp that covers much of south-central Florida. Such hopes foundered on a "win-win" solution brokered by sugar barons and the real estate industry and accepted by Clinton and Gore.

A few hours before dawn, the nation's TV networks foisted their second outrageous blunder of the night on the American people. After "calling" the state of Florida for Al Gore earlier in the evening, the same networks announced that George W. Bush had won Florida -- and the White House. With a typical flourish, NBC anchor Tom Brokaw declared: "George Bush is the president-elect of the United States."

But before the sun rose on the East Coast, the networks were correcting themselves again, acknowledging that Florida was too close to call. By then, the arrogance of the television networks had compounded a distressing specter: The Electoral College might end up giving the presidency to someone who came in second in the country's popular vote.

Twenty-four hours after the polls closed across America, the reporters and commentators on the airwaves and cable channels seemed to be reeling from the succession of extraordinary events. Surely, millions of Americans were also stunned, as if the previous long night had been a vivid and protracted bad dream.

Nature's mightiest defender in these United States died Sunday in Berkeley, Calif., 88 years after he entered the world in that same city. His life thus briefly intersected with that of the greatest green champion of the nineteenth century, John Muir, who died in 1914. Thus, the aged Muir and the infant Brower were both alive at the moment of an event that profoundly shaped the imagination of American environmentalists: the flooding of the Hetch-Hetchy valley in Yosemite National Park in 1913.

The inundation of Yosemite's most beautiful feature taught Brower's generation of conservationists that without uncompromising defenders, the industrialization of the West would obliterate everything in its path; even the designation of a national park was no guarantee. As Brower famously put it, When they win, it's forever. When we win, it's merely a stay of execution.

AUSTIN, Texas -- In the long view of history -- always a consoling perspective at a time like this -- the 2000 presidential campaign most likely will rank as a giant waste of time.

Our future depends on The Stuff They Wouldn't Talk About -- economic globalization, global warming, the spread of AIDS, the need for some social control of new technologies and the corruption of our political system. Al and Tipper Gore's big smooch got more ink.

Having set the proper tone of superiority here -- it is now obligatory for journalists to drip disdain on the democratic process as we assist in deforming it -- may I say that I'm mad as hell? Not only has this been a stupid campaign, but it has been a deceitful one.

Gore's reputation as a fibber and an exaggerator is apparently set in stone -- despite the fact that he never claimed to have invented the Internet (although he assisted at its creation), that he was in fact a model for the lead character in "Love Story" (the stiff), that he never claimed he had discovered Love Canal and that he did in fact have to work hard on his father's farm in Tennessee when he was a boy. That's the way it goes in Medialand.