Was it just us, or was anyone else offended by NBC's account, on the Tuesday evening news, of the disappearance of Madalyn Murray O'Hair? Mrs. O'Hair, for those who may not remember, was the woman who in 1963 helped oust prayer from the public schools. She may not be the most popular person with the average American, but she certainly deserves more respect than she was dealt this week.

   One might have expected a news account about a 77-year-old woman, who once had high public visibility, having dropped out of sight, as well as speculation about her reasons and whereabouts. The news of her disappearance was reported in The Times last April. And one might have expected the fact that her disappearance remained unreported for about a year, apparently because she was estranged from her family, to inspire sympathy or sadness, but certainly not mirth.

   Why, when speculating that Mrs. O'Hair had skipped Austin, Tex., to go to South America, did the network show footage of an unidentified couple kicking up their heels in a South-of-the-Border dance number? Whence the tone of winking familiarity identifying Mrs. O'Hair as a character familiar to anyone who was around in the 1960s and '70s? And what are we to make of the remark about old elephants leaving the herd to wander off to die in solitude?

   Maybe we missed something in the heat of getting dinner on the table, but it seemed the TV set was making a mockery of the news and offering it as entertainment pure and simple.

   Of course, we shouldn't have been so shocked: After all, we get a regular diet of the reverse - entertainment as news - every day.

   No dinner party is said to occur in the easternmost town of Long Island these days without the future of supermarkets being a topic of intense conversation. It is instructive, therefore, even at the risk of wearing out a satiated public, to note developments about shopping centers and, yes, the A&P, in other parts of the world.

Case In Point #1:

   "Shoppers Crowd the Suburbs, As City Centers Fear Stagnation" was the headline on a Business Day story in The New York Times on Sept. 10. It described an attempt to block suburban shopping centers in France by requiring central Government approval for any retail space of more than 11,000 square feet. This was followed by a law subjecting food stores of more than 3,000 square feet to Government approval.

Case In Point #2:

   Again in The New York Times, it was reported that the people of the island of Nantucket, "now that the summer crowds and traffic are gone," are up in arms about a proposed supermarket. It seems as if almost everyone who has spoken out is opposed to a new, private market proposed for the outskirts of town even though the existing supermarkets, A&P and Finast, are said to have long lines and a lack of parking in season.

Case In Point #3:

   Not far away as the crow flies, the prices charged by the A&P have become a hot topic of letters to the editor of the Martha's Vineyard Gazette. An outraged public forced the A&P there to offer the same prices as on Cape Cod for items on sale and advertised on flyers after the newspaper noted that a flyer showed that prices were 60 percent higher on the island for the same items.

What Is Obvious:

   The public appetite for "bigger and better" stores and for name brands at discount, is in conflict with the perceived best interests of existing town centers, where merchants fear unfair competition and lowered business and property values, and traditionalists dread the decline of historic districts and small-town life.

What Is To Be Hoped For:

   A new way to accommodate the new while preserving the old. Let it begin right here.

   No, really, this is too much. Mortimer Zuckerman has been working overtime. On Friday, Mr. Zuckerman, publisher of The New York Daily News among other publications, real estate developer, longtime escort of brainy and beautiful women, and East Hampton man-about-the-benefit-circuit, was married, in Washington, D.C., to an expert on the works of Willem de Kooning. Friends of the eligible Mr. Zuckerman, having written him off as marriage material eons ago, could hardly credit it. In fact, his wedding was eclipsed in the have-you-heard department only by that of an even more famous bachelor with the initials J.F.K. Jr.

   Then came the news that Mr. Zuckerman is among a select clutch of celebrities to be featured next spring, as their real-life selves, in the pages of "Further Lane," a novel by James Brady, who lives guess where and is a former publisher of Women's Wear Daily.

   "Further Lane," which is said to open on the beach at the Maidstone Club, is a murder mystery, and Mr. Zuckerman, we hear, is one of the key suspects. The others include such Hamptons denizens as Martha Stewart, Donna Karan, Billy Joel, George Plimpton, Calvin and Kelly Klein, Peter G. Peterson, and Peggy Siegal.

   Did Mort Zuckerman do it? We'll have to wait till "Further Lane" is published to find out. It seems not at all unlikely, though, considering that on Monday, three days after his marriage, the bridegroom, described by The New York Times as a "ruthless businessman," unexpectedly fired The News's editor-in-chief - thus setting off a whole new round of talk and speculation in which his name is certain to figure prominently.

   Robert Kalfin has directed plays on Broadway, Off and Off Off Broadway, on television, in America's major regional theaters, in Europe, in the Middle East, and as far afield as Siberia.

   But his main claim to fame, and the gig closest to his heart, are the years he spent as founder and artistic director of the celebrated not-for-profit Chelsea Theater Center, an experimental company that debuted in a space at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in the mid-'60s and later moved to various downtown Manhattan addresses.

   "You may hate it, but you won't see it anywhere else," was its in-your-face motto.

Shaky Financial Limbs

   During those halcyon years, Mr. Kalfin said during a recent interview at his house in Springs, he and his company lived so close to the edge there was hardly a moment of respite.

   Time and again he manned the barricades to fight for his avant-garde theatrical beliefs in the face of funding cuts and public scoffing - somehow, mostly, prevailing.

   The fruits of the financial limbs he went out on for the sake of his artistic vision were loyal audiences and prestigious awards, along with harrowing budget crunches that often cut his seasons short.

   In 1975, the Chelsea won the Margo Jones Award for "the most significant contribution to dramatic art through the continued production of new plays."

   Over the years, it also garnered five Tony Awards, four Tony nominations, 21 Obies, two Drama Desk nominations, and five Outer Critics Circle Awards, among numerous other laurels.

Coup De Grace

   But ironically, after it canceled its 1982 season in order to pay off its debts, it was denied funding for having failed to produce any plays that year. This catch-22 was the Chelsea's coup de grace.

   Remarkably young-looking for his years - in his profession one must remain childlike, he said - Mr. Kalfin was born in the Bronx in 1933. He attended the High School of Music and Art there, where, in something very like a horse trade, he was assigned to play the bass fiddle. "They checked your teeth and hands to match you with an instrument," he explained.

   At Alfred University in western New York State, the two-man theater department exposed him to the works of Brecht, Anouilh, and Giraudoux, prompting him to switch his major from English and psychology to drama.

Wild And Daunting

   With the help of student artists, he recreated Greek ruins and the Roman Colosseum in the college gym, and wrote music for the far-out productions he staged. In his senior year he directed and wrote the score for a musical version of William Saroyan's "Opera, Opera," a wild work starring a singing gorilla and a dead tenor.

   At the Yale School of Drama he studied acting and set design along with directing, and staged "Adam the Creator," an experimental Karel Capek play with a daunting recurrent sound cue: "The destruction of the world."

   Mr. Kalfin mounted his first New York production, H. Leivick's "The Golem," in 1959. A Yiddish classic that questions the morality of loosing a monstrous destructive force into the world, even in self-defense, it coincided with the rise of the Ban the Bomb movement in an America deeply troubled about the probity of deploying atomic weapons.

Barometric Relevance

   "Artists are barometers that register the subconscious fears and dreams of a society," Mr. Kalfin said. "As an artistic director, part of my job is to intuit and present plays that address these unspoken concerns. I was subliminally aware of the relevance of 'The Golem,' and audiences and the press picked up on it immediately."

   When Mr. Kalfin opened his Chelsea Theater Center in 1965, there were few nonprofit playhouses in New York. During the next 10 years their number increased, even as costs escalated and funding sources dried up.

   While many artistic directors veered prudently toward conservatism, Mr. Kalfin and his partners, Michael David and Burl Hash, remained at the forefront of the avant-garde.

   When black separatism threatened integration efforts in the late '60s, these three white producers staged some of the first militant black plays, among them "The Great Goodness of Life: A Coon Show," by Leroi Jones, now Amiri Baraka.

Revolutions On Stage

   A landmark production of Mr. Baraka's "Slave Ship" in 1969 stunned and radicalized even its African American cast, along with audiences and critics.

   As Newsweek's Jack Kroll described it: "On opening night, screaming slaves reached out clawing for help from the New York Times's Clive Barnes, a nausea-racked slave retched realistically in the lap of Norman Nadel of the Scripps-Howard papers, and during a slave auction a little black boy was 'sold' to The New Yorker's Edith Oliver."

   When the women's movement began to sweep the country, Mr. Kalfin gave voice to that revolution, too, producing such feminist plays as "Lady Day: A Musical Tragedy," by Aishah Rahman.

Rave Reviews

   Stopping at nothing to challenge the theatergoer's complacency, the Chelsea also asked Jewish audiences to reflect on the humanity of a Nazi sympathizer, urged young audiences to feel compassion for the elderly, and prodded senior citizens to get with what the kids were up to. It also inspired Americans to discover such European dramatists as Heinrich von Kleist, Jean Genet, and Peter Handke.

   "The communal experience of the theater is where we can find our shared humanity," Mr. Kalfin said. He routinely hired actors, designers, and technicians from divergent cultural backgrounds to work together on productions.

   As the Chelsea expanded operations into Manhattan, its productions garnered even more critical and audience support. Stagings of Jean Genet's "The Screens," Allen Ginsberg's poem "Kaddish," adapted by Mr. Kalfin, Gay's "The Beggar's Opera," and an adaptation of Isaac Bashevis Singer's "Yentl" all received rave reviews.

The Chelsea Years

   Even Broadway stars began to take notice. Among those who went downtown and worked for minimum wages to be involved in the Chelsea experience were Glenn Close, Frank Langella, Christopher Lloyd, and Meryl Streep.

   The producer/director Hal Prince staged a Chelsea revival of the musical "Candide," which had flopped on Broadway, in a radical, environmental set designed by Eugene Lee, the designer of "Sweeney Todd" and "Showboat." "Candide" then made a triumphal return to a Broadway theater that had been gutted in order to replicate his innovative staging.

  In his foreword to David Napoleon's "Chelsea on the Edge: The Adventures of an American Theater," Mr. Prince quotes Mr. Kalfin as saying, "I was naive enough to believe . . ."

   "That tells the entire story as far as I'm concerned," Mr. Prince writes. "The Chelsea years were those of idealism, of confrontation, of public roiling in pursuit of principles; and these years gave way to materialism."

   "I got tired of fund raising," Mr. Kalfin put it more simply.

Streep Sang For Him

   Life after the Chelsea? Mr. Kalfin has traveled all over the world to direct. Among the first ambassador-artists invited to Russia after the fall of the Iron Curtain, he staged an acclaimed version of Leo Tolstoy's "Strider" in Moscow, later presenting a Russian translation of Thornton Wilder's "The Skin of Our Teeth," among other Western plays.

   He directed an English translation of "Strider" on Broadway, and a Broadway production of "Happy End" with Christopher Lloyd and the then unknown Meryl Streep - the only time she sang on stage. He also presented Mario Fratti's "The Cage" Off Off Broadway, and Von Kleist's "The Prince of Hamburg," starring Frank Langella, for PBS's "Great Performances" TV series.

  The peripatetic director also staged a splendid production of David Mamet's "A Life in the Theater" at Bay Street two summers ago, a Russian version of Tennessee Williams's "The Eccentricities of a Nightingale" in Moscow, and the first regional production of the Broadway hit "Death Defying Acts" at the Coconut Grove Playhouse in Florida last winter.

   Mr. Kalfin, not surprisingly, is now in rehearsal for yet another unprecedented venture: New York's 81-year-old Yiddish Folkesbeine Theater has invited him to stage a musical version of a story about a female rabbi in the Ukraine in the 1820s.

   "She built her own synagogue and was so brilliant she had to be stopped," he said. "She was forced into a disastrous marriage and made to have children; she fled. Now there's a new book out about a woman becoming Pope. Things always happen in rushes; artists sense them in the air."

   The work, to be performed in Yiddish with simultaneous English and Russian translations, was composed by an American, John Clifton, who speaks only English, the director said.

Something Wonderful

   "I don't speak Yiddish or Russian myself, but with all sorts of language coaches, I'm training the cast to think in Yiddish. A non-Jewish composer is setting the music, which reads from left-to-right, to Yiddish lyrics, a polyglot dialect written in the Hebrew alphabet, which reads from right to left. Somehow, it will all work out."

   Mr. Kalfin's dream, of course, is eventually to have another theater with a repertory acting company, like those in Europe. "When you have a home, and work with an ensemble, you develop a relationship of trust in which everyone can take the risks that make things exciting," he said.

   "I'm fearless," he concluded. "If you want to try a scene walking on your hands, do it, I say. In Russia, the whole company went to the sauna en masse and talked about the production. I'd like that here. Something wonderful happens, emotionally and psychologically, from being together."

   Independent filmmaking - the lodestone of the forthcoming Hamp tons International Film Festival - has a champion in Alec Baldwin, the actor and Amagansett resident.

   Mr. Baldwin will host a cable television series about the politics of independent filmmaking, including the difficulty of finding a venue for controversial work, called "Raw Footage." Along with the documentary filmmaker Mark Mori, an Academy Award nominee, Mr. Baldwin is also the executive producer of the series, which will begin airing this month.

   "I am a fan of independent films, particularly documentary films . . .," Mr. Baldwin said last week in a telephone interview. "Their films are some of the best films being made . . . unbelievably important."

Modern-Day Politics

   The series is sponsored by the Independent Film Channel. Its first segment will feature R.J. Cutler and David Van Taylor, whose new documentary, "A Perfect Candidate," looks at the 1994 Virginia Senate race between Lt. Col. Oliver North and Senator Charles Robb.

   The two filmmakers will be interviewed and clips will be shown of their new film, as well as of Mr. Van Taylor's "Dream Deceivers: The Story Behind James Vance vs. Judas Priest" and "The War Room," a look behind the scenes of the 1992 Clinton campaign, which was produced by Mr. Cutler and directed by D.A. Pennebaker of Sag Harbor and New York City.

   The first segment will be shown on IFC Monday at 10 p.m., and on Bravo, which operates IFC, on Friday, Oct. 11, at 11 p.m. Bravo is offered on Cablevision, the South Fork's cable service, but IFC is not. Cablevision owns both cable channels.

Focus On Fringe

   The idea to do "Raw Footage," Mr. Baldwin said, came from his and Mr. Mori's recognition that independent films, especially those tackling social issues from a liberal perspective, had little luck finding wide distribution or even air time on public television.

   The Reagan and Bush Administrations, Mr. Baldwin asserted, had stacked the Corporation for Public Broadcasting with conservatives. "There were various filmmakers and films who couldn't get access to PBS" as a result, the actor, who is on the board of directors of the New York City-based Creative Coalition, said.

   Thus, "Raw Footage" will highlight films that otherwise have not enjoyed mainstream viewing, as well as their creators and the problems they face both in making their films and in trying to get them seen. Mr. Baldwin said he and Mr. Mori will not feature filmmakers who do have wide distribution in movie theaters; rather, they will concentrate "more on the fringe."

Featured Filmmakers

   The filmmakers so far scheduled for interviews have made documentaries which appear to have a liberal social or political agenda, Mr. Baldwin acknowledged. Conservative documentary filmmakers can get exposure more easily because "they already own their own networks and have their own outlets on television," he said.

   "Most of the people doing the critical thinking just happen to be liberal," added Mr. Baldwin, who has often battled over social and political issues through The Star's letters-to-the-editor section with William Addeo, a conservative Montauk resident who has dubbed himself "The Last American."

   One filmmaker to be featured in the "Raw Footage" series is Freida Lee Mock, of the Academy Award-winning "Maya Lin: A Strong, Clear Vision," whose cinematographer, Don Lenzer, lives in Amagansett. Steven Cantor's "Blood Ties: The Life and Work of Sally Mann," which was produced by Mr. Mori, Barbara Trent's "Panama Deception," and Robert Richter's "School of Assassins," also will be shown.

   Mr. Baldwin said the series would eventually include narrative-filmmakers, and that "down the road we hope the IFC will license the films and show them in their entirety." He added that "the power of television" would allow these films to reach millions of viewers.

   The quality of movies made in American studios had plummeted, he said, adding that motion pictures were made now "with the quickness of television," and that the former distinction between motion pictures, in which more time and thought were invested, and movies made for television "is now obliterated."

   "Just take a look at what kind of films are being made today in the studios," Mr. Baldwin said. "Why are these people who are very bright," he asked about independent filmmakers, not interested in doing "mainstream work?"

   Mr. Baldwin and his wife, the actress Kim Basinger, last winter filmed a documentary for Turner Broadcasting about a program which reintroduced macaws into the Peruvian rain forest. Titled "Black Market Birds" and directed by Robert Drew, it will premiere Wednesday on TBS at 9 p.m.

   Mr. Baldwin is currently shooting "Book Worm" with Anthony Hopkins in the Banff National Park in Alberta, Canada.

   There was a wedding at St. Therese of Lisieux Church in Montauk on Saturday, not a surprising scene on a beautiful fall day. A polished car waited outside the church for the happy couple. Inside, the organ played. Children squirmed in their fancy clothes as the procession moved down the aisle toward the altar. A typical wedding - except that both the bride, who wore a corsage of flowers to match the season, and the bridegroom, who wore a gray jacket that matched his hair, were 90 years old and were celebrating their 70th wedding anniversary with a renewal of vows.

   Three of the bridegroom's four sisters were on hand as they had not been seven decades before when the same Montauk couple, Frederick "Gus"

   They remember Montauk as a place of rolling hills covered only by grass.

   Pitts and the former Hattie Poirier, were first married at St. Philomena Church in East Hampton, now called Most Holy Trinity.

   The date was Sept. 27, 1926, and the wedding was held in East Hampton because there was no Roman Catholic Church in Montauk at the time. Nor was there much family in attendance because neither exactly approved of the union - thought it would never last. That's why on the occasion of their 50th anniversary (20 years ago), they pulled out all the stops - complete with family, even a garter for the blushing bride.

Montauk Past

   Saturday's renewed vows again drew the couple's extended family around them. The relatives included citizens of a Montauk past, whose memories include a small fishing village on the banks of Fort Pond Bay.

   They remember Montauk as a place of rolling hills covered only by grass. Some might even recall the sight of the developer Carl Fisher riding a horse over his newly purchased land. There were a few at the church on Saturday, including the bride, who remember their Nova Scotia homeland. The bride remembers that the Montauk Manor was under construction the year she arrived.

   Hattie Poirier came to Montauk from Nova Scotia in 1926. Later the same year she would marry the young fisherman who had got himself a boat he called the Marie II on which he began his career as a charter fisherman. As a young man he'd fished out of Montauk with his father, Benjamin Pitts. The couple lived in the Montauk fishing village on the bay until the 1938 hurricane destroyed it. They moved to Amagansett for a time, but then resettled in the Shepherd's Neck section of Montauk.

Longtime Friends

   Vinnie Grimes, who was at the church to videotape the whole proceeding, recalled working as a mate for the bridegroom. He was a good fisherman, Mr. Grimes recalled, like his cousins, Ralph and Clancy. The Grimeses are cousins on the Pitts side of the family.

   The McDonalds and the Eckers were represented. They were the kind of friends that became like family a long time ago. Mary Jane McDonald had been a lifelong friend of Hattie Pitts. Her daughters, Frances Ecker, Celina Seitz, and Eva Collins, were there on Saturday. So were Marie McMahon and Pat Schumacher, the couple's daughters. "I am so proud," said Mrs. McMahon.

   Captain Pitts's sisters, Vangy Burke, Mabel Wilson, and Angela George, were there. A fourth sister, Kathryn Loeffer, could not attend.

Good Works

   Also there to watch Mr. and Mrs. Pitts walk down the aisle for a fourth time were Mrs. Burke's daughters, Margaret Lochman and Emily Cullum, and her son, Buddy Burke. Mary Ellen Bennett and Nancy King, Mabel Wilson's daughters, came to watch the renuptials as well. The grandchildren, Annette Anderson and Nancy Snyder, watched in amazement. David Snyder walked down the aisle out in front of his great-grandparents.

   The Rev. Raymond Nugent was joined by the Rev. John Traynor, former pastor of the St. Therese Church, in the formalities leading up to the vows.

   The Rev. Salvitore Allesandro, formerly of Sag Harbor, also presided. Later at the reception, Father Allesandro sang.

   Father Nugent praised the couple's faith and spoke of the good works still undertaken by Captain and Mrs. Pitts. Captain Pitts continues to serve as a communion minister during Sunday morning mass, and both Pittses regularly visit sick and house-bound neighbors. A letter was read that had been sent by John McGann, Bishop of the Diocese of Rockville Centre, who wrote that the couple's example shone brighter than "their Montauk Lighthouse."

   Dick Vander Platt waited by the door. He was there to drive the Pittses from the church to Hewitt's Ruschmeyer's restaurant for the reception. He had come from New Jersey and had driven Mr. and Mrs. Pitts from the church on the occasion of both their 50th and 60th wedding jubilees. He explained that he was an early charter customer of Captain Pitts and had remained loyal to him until the captain's retirement at the age of 62.

   There were tears when the bride and bridegroom gave their vows - and a few snickers when they pledged, after 70 years together, to be faithful.

"My Love Affair With America: The Cautionary Tale of a Cheerful Conservative"

Norman Podhoretz

Free Press, $25

To criticize a book not for what it is but for not being a different book doesn't seem quite cricket. Sorry about that, for Norman Podhoretz's new book, his eighth, does engage one. All of his books do; his writing has vitality; his learning is deep, he's immersed himself in the intellectual currents of his time and comes out fighting.

Indeed, this book is a treasure house of anecdotes about the gaffes, the triumphs, the rivalries among the postwar intellectual combatants of America. Fun, especially his rich footnotes.

Yet in relieving himself of some bursting impulse to express gratitude for his lot in life, in his new book Mr. Podhoretz has forsaken, one hopes only temporarily, the soul of the role circumstances (and genes?) have endowed him with - a pundit, an acute social critic, a first-rank exemplar of the intelligentsia.

Making Of A Patriot

After a moving, nostalgic account (the whole first quarter of the book) of his immigrant Jewish family origins in Brooklyn and his transition from a wholly Yiddish environment to mastery of English and its literature, in particular of the rhetoric and discourse of literary-social commentary, Mr. Podhoretz puts up his dukes as always, attacking liberals (in his standard overkill rhetoric they are all "radicals who hate America") and of late even some right-wing reactionaries he now disavows as betraying the land of the free and the home of the brave.

Part Two of his book is titled "The Making of a Patriot" - how he evolved from alienation to adoration of America, sparked by his military service experience and a wrenching rejection of Irving Howe's left-wing critique of capitalist America.

Kristol's Gladiator

Part Three, titled "We Have Come Through," recounts his developing break with his liberal stance and his embrace of the Vietnam War effort as just another valid exercise in the successful containment policy of the cold war, and his attack on the Black Power movement (as he later stormed against affirmative action).

Part Four, "Dayyenu American Style," expresses his gratitude for all the blessings bestowed by his America.

Mr. Podhoretz notes his sea change from the liberal editor of the old Commentary so many of us admired and wrote for to become a remorseless neoconservative, a front line gladiator for the ideology of Irving Kristol et al.

Often telling in his assaults, he scores points as exemplified in such of his earlier works as "Breaking Ranks" and his most recent, "Ex-Friends." Yes, he does score.

Overkill Polemics

But one wonders if ever, on quiet reflection, Mr. Podhoretz would concede how too often he published, supported, in the post-liberal Commentary, pieces of triviality and worse strictly because they offered a peg to assault some liberal stance. Such overkill polemics like those in the periodical Midstream diminish an otherwise serious periodical.

Sure, he sometimes scores well. In, for instance, demolishing Gore Vidal for Vidal's absurd diatribe against American Jews in an article in The Nation charging them, as predatory people, with impoverishing the United States solely to propagandize for more aid money for Israel.

In "Ex-Friends" too he makes plausible attacks, for example against Allen Ginsberg and Lillian Hellman and Hannah Arendt. But why couldn't Mr. Podhoretz resist chiding his mentor Daniel Bell for Mr. Bell's allegedly not tempering his "self-importance"? - Mr. Podhoretz, of all people, to make this cheap jab.

So one is perplexed, at times almost embarrassed, by this "love affair" tone, puzzled why this pugnacious chap is so smitten with, yes, the status quo, virtually blessing it.

It is okay maybe to express thanks to America, as he does in spades, for his spiffy Manhattan apartment, the distinguished wealthy acquaintances and friends he came to mix with, his fine, unique job from the age of 30 as wholly independent editor in chief of Commentary.

It is another thing, though, to ignore America's critical deficiencies, especially when it is prospering, number one in the world, king of the mountain among all nations.

Ignores Our Failures

Self-affirmed intellectual that he is, a lifetime notoriously outspoken analyst of public affairs, how in evaluating and lauding America can he sidestep consideration of such manifest failures as the absence of health care for some 40-plus millions; its faltering and all-too-often-apartheid public education system; the centuries-long deprivations of our inner-city ghettos; the intractable poverty of our lowest-income citizenry; the growing disparities in income and wealth in America, gaps more extreme than in all other first world industrialized nations?

Never a word of dismay from Mr. Podhoretz, so ready to catch out other pundits if they err, over the inevitable social costs of our triumphant laissez-faire capitalist market system, and his acquiescence in the airhead Reaganist doctrine dear to his fellow conservatives that always "the government is the problem," an especially confounding tenet for such an avid patriot of our Republic.

Would Not Be Silent

As I have written elsewhere, worth repeating I believe, imagine rigorous scholars of the American sociopolitical culture devoted to responsive commentary such as Edmund Wilson, Lionel Trilling, Walter Lippmann, Reinhold Niebuhr, Daniel Bell, Murray Kempton, Arthur Schlesinger, even Irving Kristol carrying on about their "love affair with America."

Confident of their good will, secure in their learning, they simply would not be silent at the spectacle of any blatant social deficiencies.

The litany of these deficiencies now constitutes a staple in the press. Today's New York Times, on my lap, repeats such familiar statistics as that the bottom four-fifths of American households, some 217 million folks, earn a bit less in after-tax income than the richest 1 percent; that nine-tenths of the nation's income growth in 1999 went to the richest 1 percent of American households.

Not Much Gained

The centrist, respected Economic Policy Institutes' latest report (Cornell Press), after documenting the encouraging news about our generally booming economy, notes that the latest American national poverty rate (1998) is still a disturbing 12.7 percent, "just one-tenth of a percentage point less than in 1989 and one full percentage point higher than in 1979."

The economist Jeff Madrick, the brilliant economics correspondent of The New York Review of Books and chief editor of the economics journal Challenge, cites in a recent New York Times column that the typical (median) employed worker in the 25-34 age group earned 13 percent less in 1998 (latest data available) than did the median workers of the same ages in 1973, and that the 35-44 age group earned 9 percent less than their counterparts 25 years earlier.

Children In Poverty

It's comparatively not all roses for many Americans, especially for the outrageous five million children in poverty. And Mr. Podhoretz surely must know that datum. How can a responsible analyst ignore this? Nirvana, indeed.

Mr. Podhoretz is especially condemnatory of affirmative action, which his fellow conservative Colin Powell backs for helping thou-

sands of young blacks into the middle class. It would be interesting to have Mr. Podhoretz react to Mr. Powell's addendum about the "affirmative action" provided to lobbyists achieving discriminatory tax loopholes, tax relief, and government subsidies for private profit corporate ventures.

Similarly, given the universal consensus that our public education system suffers from too-large classes, a shortage of qualified, decently paid teachers, decrepit plants, and poor student performance, one would think Mr. Podhoretz might vent criticism of the fact that only 2 percent of federal government spending is applied to education, the buck passed to beleaguered, so-often-uneven local governments.

A Marshall Plan size national government investment is needed, irreconcilable with any massive tax reduction as advocated by Mr. Podhoretz's conservative confreres.

Unnecessary Trip?

Mr. Podhoretz tells us in his new book's introduction how he came to love America so much, especially after brief military service:

"America deserved to be glorified with a full throat and a whole heart . . . that is exactly what I want to do here . . . the story of how and why my love affair with America developed, how it ran through a rough patch, and how it then emerged with all doubts stilled and reservations removed."

Is this trip necessary or even sensible? I think not.

Edward T. Chase, who has had a house in East Hampton for over 50 years, is formerly the editor in chief of New York Times Books and New American Library and editorial vice president of Putnam and Sons.

Norman Podhoretz has a house in East Hampton.

   Kitty Carlisle Hart took the stage at the Bay Street Theatre Saturday night and for one delicious hour talked and sang and thoroughly charmed a packed house. She entertained and educated as well, in a personal chronicle of the American musical theater drawn from a long and intimate association.

   The wife of the playwright Moss Hart, the actress was both friend and confidant to almost every composer and lyricist from the 1930s - when "there were 70 New York theaters and as many as 50 musicals running simultaneously" - until the early '60s.

   We're talking serious greats here: Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, Jerome Kern, Richard Rogers.

A Polished Act

   Ms. Hart also included in her narrative and reminiscences such ordinary greats as George Abbott, Oscar Hammerstein, Alan J. Lerner, Frederick Loewe, Lorenz Hart (no relation), Florenz Ziegfeld, Ira Gershwin, Kurt Weill, Stephen Sondheim, and, naturally, Moss Hart ("Why does that name keep cropping up?" she wondered).

   It is a polished act, and one that is easy to follow because Ms. Hart, in a strong, comforting, and cultivated speaking voice, keeps things simple. Her sense of humor and self-deprecating manner captivated. Asked, for example, to audition for the Moss Hart-Cole Porter musical "Jubilee" by singing "Just One of Those Things," she confided, "I didn't get the part, but I got the man!"

   Ms. Hart showed on Saturday she still can reach the high notes, with not too much less effort than in her Metropolitan Opera roles ("Die Fledermaus" and "The Rape of Lucretia") or on Broadway ("Champagne Sec," "On Your Toes"), or the movies (she was in the Marx Brothers classic, "A Night at the Opera").

Famous Legs

   Gracefully, she punctuated her anecdotes with songs, accompanied on the piano by Alex Rybeck, himself a veteran of Broadway musicals. Among other favorites, the audience appreciated "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes," "My Ship," "Always," "September Song," and the closing number, sung in lovely voice, Rogers and Hammerstein's "Something Wonderful."

   Though she concentrated on her own theatrical career, Ms. Hart did not neglect stage history from other periods - ragtime, vaudeville, the advent of "naked people on stage."

   "Tin Pan Alley," she explained, was a leg of West 28th Street "where all the composers worked, and so named because of all the noise they made."

   Kitty Carlisle Hart is somewhere in her 80s now, yet trim, slim, fit of figure, stylish - elegant, even - energetic, gracious, and ramrod-straight. She mentioned "legs" a number of times. She was famous for hers, and they are still among the best gams struttin' a stage - octogenarian or otherwise.

   It's no coincidence that her knee-length, midnight-blue dress showed them off!

   She is, it seems, always on the move, as tireless offstage as on. She served for 25 years on the New York State Council on the Arts, 20 of them - from 1976 until she stepped down earlier this year - as chairwoman. In 1991, President Bush awarded her the National Medal of Arts.

   If the warm and frequent applause and a standing ovation were any indication, Ms. Hart disappointed only those who waited too long to buy tickets to her show, the offspring of a series born at the Metropolitan Museum of Art that is to travel to New York and several other cities.

   She could have filled the house all over again with just the people who were turned away at the door and on the telephone.

   Paul Ickovic, a collateral descendant of Franz Kafka, is known to followers of photography as a chronicler of Eastern Europe's emergence after the collapse of Communism.

   His moody black and white prints perfectly captured the vulnerability and sadness of the newly free Czechs, capturing their uneasiness while leavening it with a touch of laughter.

   In his new series, "Between Men and Women," at the Nabi Gallery, Mr. Ickovic takes a vacation from Iron-Curtain angst to visit Western romance, capturing flirtatious glances, secret trysts, and enduring love in Manhattan cafes, on Mexican beaches, and in the back streets of Havana.

Incongruity By The Seine

   You wonder how many discarded rolls of film, how many wasted shots it took to come up with these few dozen photographs. Was it sheer chance that he was on the banks of the Seine when that plain, grossly fat woman, wearing nothing but a large necklace and a tiny bikini, strolled by?

   Or had he hung out there all day, ignoring strolling families, running children, and old geezers in suits, waiting for this one incongruous apparition?

   She eyes the camera with suspicion - we look back in amazement.

   As good street photographs do, these evoke an emotional response while allowing the viewer to write the narrative.

   When it comes to love and sex - where the more we learn, the less we find we know - there can never be too many visual primers.

   There's a wonderful shot of a couple eating in a diner. The elderly man leans to one side, absorbed in his newspaper. The woman, all tweed suit, pearl earrings, and well-lacquered hair, gazes off into the distance with a quizzical look. An army of ketchup, sugar, salt, pepper, and mustard bottles stands between them.

   The mood is there - you make up the story.

   In a Chinese restaurant in Boston, a young couple are gently embracing. The plates and chopsticks on the table, however, indicate they were originally sitting opposite one another.

   Or there's an ugly beach in Malaga, still showing signs of trampling by the summer hordes but now completely empty except for an elderly couple in the foreground with their arms around each other.

Melancholy With An Edge

In another charming shot, a handsome, shirtless stud leans against a glass-covered billboard. He seems to be flirting with the photographer, but then you see the reflection of a pretty girl in the glass behind him.

   Mr. Ickovic establishes place and atmosphere with great economy - the edge of a doorway, a crumbling arch, an iron lattice. Even when the pictures have an edge of amusement, there is a sense of bittersweet melancholy to them.

   Gray skies and dimly lit interiors set the mood. The occasional flash of sunlight seems almost disrespectful.

   Inevitably, Elliott Erwitt's book "Between the Sexes" springs to mind (and some of the pictures in this show seem to tip their hat to Erwitt's wry humor). But when it comes to love and sex - where the more we learn the less we find we know - there can never be too many visual primers.

A previously unknown species of mouse belonging to the Old World genus Mus was recently found in the mountainous regions of Cyprus. Our common house mouse, Mus musculus, the one so glorified, prettified, and given the power of human speech in all of those Walt Disney movies and Hollywood cartoons, is also from the Old World and a very close cousin of the Cypriot mouse.

The Greeks and Turks have been haggling for generations over the Mediterranean nation. Meanwhile, the new mouse, probably a resident since long before any human resident, went about quietly doing what it had to do to survive, unmindful of the never-ending struggle for supremacy being waged around it.

Scientists are always finding new species, but new mammals are rare: Fewer than one a year is discovered. A new species of bird was recently uncovered in Africa. Many new species of frogs and lizards, collectively called herptiles, are found each year, particularly in Southeast Asia, Oceania, and South America. And the deeper and wider we explore the oceans and remote rivers and lakes, the more new fish species we dredge up, such as the new shark species found a month or two ago in the western Pacific.

While perhaps there are as many as a thousand new vertebrates waiting out there yet to be found, there are thousands upon thousands of unique invertebrates waiting in the wings. The large majority of them are insects, the largest group of animals in the world by far, but there are almost as many new-to-science marine and aquatic invertebrates out there to keep our zoologists going for centuries to come.

The big challenge, of course, is to find them before they're gone. Each year we lose as many species as we find new ones. We only hear about the larger ones; an insect or jellyfish gone extinct does not make the news. The plant kingdom is as rich in species as the animal kingdom, and the higher plants, the ones with leaves and flowers that are the most obvious, are no exception.

While a typical acre of South Fork forest may contain as many as 25 different species of trees, shrubs, and vines - what we call "woodies" - an acre of rain forest in the backwaters of the Amazon has close to a thousand. With so many different plants packed into such a small area, it is understandable why so many have been overlooked in the past and are just now turning up.

Not counting the viruses, bacteria, fungi, and protozoans - the so-called protests - there are at least two million distinct species already cataloged, almost all of them as specimens in museums or living in zoos.

A species is a form of life differing in a number of ways from every other form of life. The most obvious criterion for separating one closely related species from another, say, the Norway rat, Rattus Norvegicus, from the brown rat, Rattus rattus, is the ability of one to interbreed with the other and produce viable young that can also interbreed with one another and produce viable young, and so on, down the line.

Sure, the donkey, Equus asinus, can be interbred with the horse, Equus caballus, to give rise to the mule, but the hybrid produced from this mating is not fertile. Such interbreeding almost never occurs in nature, to wit, in parts of the West where feral donkeys and wild horses share the same range.

We say that in nature one species is reproductively, or genetically, isolated from another. Locally, there are ponds in which spotted salamanders and tiger salamanders breed side by side; they are very closely related members of the same mole salamander genus, Ambystoma, but they never interbreed. Green frogs and bullfrogs are closely related members of the rain frog genus, Rana. There is nary a pond of the hundreds on the South Fork that doesn't have both breeding at the same time, yet they never interbreed. They are reproductively isolated.

Here on eastern Long Island, eight different aster species may be flowering at the same time in the same area; bees and other insects may be intermingling back and forth with members of each species. Undoubtedly some cross-pollinations between species must be occurring, yet when seeds from them germinate, we only find the stiff-leaved aster, calico aster, late-flowering aster, or New York aster coming up, never a late-flowering-New York aster combination, or a combo from one of the other pairs.

Such observations have become one of the founding blocks of the notion of "intelligent design," as opposed to the Darwinian idea of "natural selection."

It's only been 15 years or so that species can be easily typed and separated from each other by comparing the DNA in their chromosomes or other cellular organelles. The DNA of the Cypriot mouse, when matched against that from the house mouse, was shown to be different.

Further DNA testing will show how different the two are. The number of changes is an indication of how long the two species have been separated from each other, in this case geographically separated. The one may have stemmed from the other, or they both may have come from a common ancestor no longer with us. The more unmatched nucleotide pairs, the greater the time of isolation.

As far as physical anthropologists and biologists can determine, there is only one extant human species, and that species is the only surviving such member of the genus Homo since at least 20,000 years ago. All six-billion-plus of us have genomes that are almost identical in every respect.

Barring the presence of unique physical problems and age differences, all six-billion-plus of us can interbreed to beget new humans. East Hampton Bubbies can just as easily breed with Asians or Eskimos and produce viable young as with other Bubbies. In fact, if it weren't for such outbreeding the modern human would be a sorry stock, beset with so many inborn physical and mental frailties and immunological ineptitudes by now that we could almost be wiped from the face of the earth by a single dread disease in a generation's time.

That will never happen. But we could be wiped out by a genetically and culturally fostered disposition, one that is found in very few other animal species and never to the extent it is found and cultivated in us humans. True, neighboring meerkat clans in Africa raid one another, as do some baboon and chimpanzee tribal groups, but only a few if any clan members lose their lives by way of such raids.

Not so with the human species. We've been raiding one another, and viciously so, since we left the Garden of Eden, and before, no doubt. Our internecine strife shows little sign of paling; millions of us the world over are lost to fighting, either directly or indirectly, each year.

It's been going on for millenniums, with little promise of abating. World government, politics, religion, science, education, and medicine practiced in their most modern and progressive forms don't seem to be able to mollify or mitigate this terrible tendency of ours to contend with one another in injurious and harmful ways.

While this warring predisposition, more than our intellect or our language, may have gotten us to the moon, the planets, and beyond, it is the same one that has put us on the threshold of eternal oblivion. The rub is, there doesn't seem to be much we can do to overcome it before it overcomes us.

Perhaps Huxley was right in "Brave New World," but only begrudgingly. A soma a day might just keep us from becoming the youngest species to ever become extinct. We have to do something to stop the killing, but what?

Questions and comments can be sent to Mr. Penny at [email protected].