Maybe we should just make that a standing headline. As you know, Archer, Gov. W. Bush's pick for the job, has this tendency to put his foot in it. He's often disastrously frank, which is sort of endearing.

Last time he got into trouble was for saying Texas has a high teen-age pregnancy rate because the state's Hispanic population does not believe that "getting pregnant is a bad thing."

The Alan Guttmacher Institute says that Texas Hispanics have a higher pregnancy rate than Anglos or blacks, but that the white rate is among the highest in the nation, too.

All this upset the Mexican-American community.

We've all done our best here; whether this thing comes back is out of all of our hands. My wise friend Marlyn Schwartz said that those of us who survive owe a debt -- to Carole Kneeland, Mary Sherrill, Jocelyn Gray and all the others who didn't make it. They would have given anything they owned, any part of their bodies, for the gift of life. We who survive have it, and we owe it to them to cherish it -- joyfully.

The trouble is, I'm not a better person. I was in great hopes that confronting my own mortality would make me deeper, more thoughtful. Many lovely people sent books on how to find a deeper spiritual meaning in life. My response was, "Oh, hell, I can't go on a spiritual journey -- I'm constipated."

In the summer of '92, the Clintons and Gores were on a bus trip in East Texas having a whale of time. As they rolled through the small towns, when there weren't enough people to justify getting out and forming a rope line, the bus would go into a "slow roll" while Bill and Al stood on the steps leading down to the glass doorway, waving at people and letting them get a good look.

At one point, Clinton went to the back of the bus and Gore was left in the doorway by himself, waving and smiling genially at the folks while muttering something like: "Hi there. Bill Clinton wants your vote very much. Right now he's in the bathroom, but he still wants your vote. Hi there."

Of course, it wouldn't seem so improbable to see headlines about "Fun Al Gore" if the media hadn't created the Wooden Al stereotype in the first place (with a little help from Gore in his Mr. Rogers mode).

Meanwhile, we continue to enjoy the faux-naif routine offered by Republicans and their media flunkies: What could Gore mean by "the people against the powerful"?

Behind the carefully crafted media facade, however, advocates for big business had ample reason to celebrate. For them, the two-party system was functioning just fine. No need to worry about the two teams of horses in the presidential race when they're both running in the same general direction.

Past sources of irritation or challenge inside the Democratic Party were, so to speak, subdued. Jesse Jackson was often moving yet also restrained when he spoke to the convention on Tuesday evening. "Old-line liberals had their night," USA Today reported the next day, under a headline that used the derogatory term "old guard" to describe speakers strongly critical of corporate priorities.

Even if you've read enough about it to be skeptical, there are real, actual experts claiming that it's a dandy notion. Generals at the Pentagon bent over double with brass want this thing. And many, many of the politicians of our nation agree that it will be a bonanza of contracts for defense plants in every congressional district.

So there it stands (well, actually, it doesn't -- it keeps blowing up): a monument to our nation's peculiar political and weapons procurement systems.

You may recall that the last time they tested it, the booster thing attached to the kill-thing that's supposed to fly off and hit the incoming missile failed to come apart from its other thingie, and went gerblob instead. (See? Anyone can discuss National Missile Defense.) That cost us $100 million.

And the time before that, it turned out that the Pentagon had cheated to make the missile-hitting missile look good.