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AUSTIN, Texas -- Hard to know what to do about the Middle East, although indicting Ariel Sharon for treason might be useful. And listening to presidential debates just makes one want to sigh. Al Gore: There are 1.4 million children in Texas without health insurance. George W. Bush: "If he's trying to allege that I'm a hard-hearted person and I don't care about children, he's absolutely wrong."

Sigh.

So let's consider some interesting stuff about the stock market. Stock options in high-tech companies, you may have heard tell, have created tons of new millionaires and are a splendid means of motivating employees. They also have this nice side benefit: They can cut a company's federal income tax to zero.

The San Jose Mercury News reports that Cisco Systems, Siebel Systems Inc. and America Online paid no federal income taxes in their latest fiscal year, the entire tax bill having been wiped out by tax benefits from issuing options to employees. The pattern is consistent across the high-tech spectrum, with Microsoft Inc., among others, getting a huge tax reduction. Cisco wiped out what would have been a $1.68 billion federal tax bill.

Newton Minow, a former board member of the Federal Communication Commission, wrote a book a few years ago attacking TV and famously saying it had produced "a vast wasteland," inhabited by comatose Americans watching soaps and quiz shows and disregarding pressing problems of governance and the polity. How wrong Minow was! Courtesy of television, these days we have a vibrant democracy of well-informed citizens that would be the envy of Pericles.

I was wandering through a shopping mall in Eureka, Calif., the other day and came upon a gaggle of citizens looking raptly at a bank of TV sets in Radio Shack. Suddenly, they raised howls of excitement. The verdict on the Seminole absentee ballots had just come through. The Eurekans continued to watch, commenting knowledgeably to each other as law professors from Georgetown and Yale did battle over the meaning of the Florida Constitution, the U.S. Constitution and the thoughts of Madison and Hamilton.

One of the great paradoxes of modern journalism is that unusual and extraordinary events seem to be the most newsworthy -- but in the long run, key realities of our lives are shaped by what's usual and ordinary.

The news coverage filling our screens is routinely the product of haste, with little exploration beyond the surface. Generally, the sizzle of the moment prevails -- which is understandable, since novelties tend to be more captivating than chronic situations. But over time, barraged with accounts of the atypical, our society can easily lose sight of what matters most.

"When a dog bites a man, that's not news, because it happens so often," journalist John Bogart commented many decades ago. "But if a man bites a dog, that is news." This assumption is apt to sound like common sense. It's certainly common -- but is it really sensible? After all, we have much more reason to be concerned about dogs biting people than the other way around.

If something happens all the time, it's unlikely to be "news" -- but it ultimately may be far more significant than the latest sensation.

They'd rather die than admit it, but environmental organizations thrive on disaster. They remember well enough what happened when Ronald Reagan installed James Watt as Secretary of the Interior. Hardly had Watt hung his elk head on his office wall before the big green outfits were churning out mailers painting doomsday scenarios of national parks handed over to the oil companies, the Rocky Mountains stripped for oil shale, the national forests clear-cut from end to end.

By the time the incompetent Watt had been forced to resign, the Sierra Club, the National Audubon Society, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Wilderness Society and the National Wildlife Federation had raised tens of millions of dollars and recruited hundreds of thousands of new members. All this money transformed the environmental movement from a largely grass-roots network into an inside-the-beltway operation powered by political operators in Washington D.C.

AUSTIN, Texas -- For those in favor of having this argument like grown-ups, some history may be helpful.

The punch-card voting system has been a consistent election problem for the last 30 years. About 37 percent of Americans still vote on the rickety little plastic tables, punching holes in cards. (Those present at the dawn of the computer era will recall the old "Do Not Fold, Spindle or Mutilate" cards, but you'll have to explain them to your children.)

The cards are then run through machines that are notoriously error-prone -- and, as writer Ronnie Dugger has been pointing out for years, also highly susceptible to manipulation.

None of this is new information, nor has it appeared only after this close election. Dugger wrote a long article for the Nov. 7, 1988, issue of The New Yorker about the potential for fraud and the many proofs of error by this early, proto-computer voting system. The 1988 article contained, among other information, a detailed description of how to rig a Votomatic counting machine.

Many pundits are worried about the delay in finding out who will become the next occupant of the Oval Office. "That's probably the most crippling blow I've ever seen to a new president," David Gergen lamented on national television. Whoever the next chief executive turns out to be, he has "been denied or robbed of the romance that we have that we associate with the selection of a new president, the crowning of a new president."

For decades, Gergen has spun through the revolving door between government and media elites, working as an image-crafter for presidents and as a commentator for major news organizations. He understands vital dynamics of propaganda. So, it's no surprise that Gergen sounded distraught the other night when he declared: "There's always been an anointment process as we lift that figure up and put him up on a pedestal. There's no pedestal with this election."

Exactly this time a year ago, a truly prescient person monitoring bus, car and plane traffic into the city of Seattle could have predicted that Al Gore's presidential bid faced serious trouble on its left. The mostly young people pouring up Interstate 5 from Oregon and California and other states were the green street warriors who had managed by Nov. 30 to paralyze downtown Seattle and shut down the opening ceremonies of the World Trade Organization (WTO) conference. And these same young people made up the core organizers of Ralph Nader's Green Party candidacy, which denied Al Gore the crucial margin in Florida and New Hampshire.

As the WTO delegates abandoned Seattle in defeat at the end of that tumultuous week last December, many on the left hailed the coming of age of a new coalition. Among its supposed components: the militant greens in the form of Earth First!, Rainforest Action and Direct Action Network; more mainstream green groups such as the Sierra Club and Friends of the Earth; Ralph Nader's citizen's trade campaign; labor's legions mustered in Seattle under the banners of the AFL-CIO.

AUSTIN, Texas -- In our continuing study of PBBUPs (People Behaving Badly Under Pressure), we are witnessing some outstanding performances -- and names are being written down. Many prominent citizens are about to lose their certification as adults. Psychologists, anthropologists and sociologists are all taking notes madly as the Bad Behavior Fiesta Bowl continues.

Here's an interesting example of how a D came to lose it completely because an R had only a loose grip. The Republican in question was Oklahoma Gov. Frank Keating, normally a placid fellow, who was on a Sunday chat show defending his team. They had arrived at the sore subject of the Republican riot at the Dade County Courthouse. (Let it be noted that this has not been certified as a riot -- so far, all we have is the appearance of a riot by some seriously hyperventilating Republicans.)

Keating suddenly blurted out that everything was fine until "the 27-inch-neck crowd" from Chicago showed up and convinced the commissioners to recount.

Five fine specimens of Meleagris gallopavo (wild turkey to you) wandered onto my property here in Humboldt county, northern California, a few days ago. I assume they forgot to check the California Fish and Game calendar which permits a two week window for wild turkey hunters before Thanksgiving. Out came my 12-gauge, and I loosed off a shot, which at some 100 feet did no discernible damage, and after a brief bout of what-the-hell-was-that, the turkeys continued to forage. A fusillade of two more shots finally brought down a 14-pounder. I hung him for four days, plucked him, and by Thanksgiving's end, he'll be history. This was all easier than sporting manuals suggest, where hunters take enormous trouble to decoy the turkeys with fake gobbles.

Wild turkeys haven't been seen in California since the Cenozoic era, but in recent years, two ranchers in my valley imported a few, and now they've begun to appear in our neighborhood in substantial numbers. I've heard reports of flocks of up to a 100 wild turkeys 15 miles up the Mattole river around Honeydew, an impressive quantity, though still far short of the 1,000 birds counted in one day by two hunters in New England in 1630.

After a decade filled with round-the-clock media sensations, we finally ended up with one that's truly portentous. The post-election battle for the White House has stood in sharp contrast to countless ersatz stories that gained enormous coverage during the 1990s. The warfare between Al Gore and George W. Bush is certainly historic -- but this partisan version of a demolition derby may not be as profound as we think.

The sizzling media fixations of yesteryear now seem notably trivial. In retrospect, how would you rank the conflict between skaters Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan? All the obsessive and protracted O.J.-mania? The cable-TV-driven frenzy over little Elian?

After such breathless stories, the network anchors have been proud to report on the truly weighty spectacle of Gore and Bush operatives going all-out. But ironically, the "better" this story got -- the more that Democrats and Republicans clashed, litigated and spun at a frenetic pace -- the farther it moved from the essence of political leverage in America.