Automatic Transitions

ON October 19, the stock market dropped more than 500 points, the largest one-day drop in Wall Street's history. The chief actors in that demise were small computers, automatically selling and buying, buying and selling, huge blocks of shares. Without any human making any particular decision, machines followed a logic of their own.

As disengaged as people seemed to be from the crash's causes, they were equally disengaged from its consequences. This was not Black Monday all over again. It would not lead to bread lines, or people diving out of buildings. Capitalism would not come up for inspection. The ordinary person on the street was more likely to snicker than despair. Although thousands of small investors were hard hit, everyone identified losses with the young investment banker and his Gold Card.

There was one major change, though. Computer trading would have to be severely curtailed. After all, it seemed a little odd to leave the nation's financial fortune in the hands, or memory banks, of desktop computers.

THE crash was just one of many seemingly major, even cataclysmic, events which tugged at the fundamental structure of this country, and yet seemed to come from nowhere and to lead to a similarly indiscernible destination. We became, or perhaps continued to be, a nation of spectators. Like the stockbroker on The Street who watched a video display terminal handle millions of dollars, we passively watched large events pass before our eyes--perhaps commenting, as often as not, forgetting each one for the next piece of information that happened to come our way.

A frightening bumper sticker slogan was born, characteristic of an attitude arising from the stultifying pattern of major events coming from and leading to nowhere. Kurt Vonnegut's deadening commentary on Dresden in Slaughterhouse Five "So it goes," was transposed into: "Shit happens."

Serious shit to be sure, but still it just seemed to happen, and that was the point.

THE Iran-Contra affair began with a sense that the fundamental precepts of the Constitution were under attack. The government appeared to be run out of the basement of the White House, covertly and with no acountability to anyone. American history dictates that such a major betrayal of public trust would be corrected--like the Watergate impeachment proceedings. After at this is a government by, for, and of the people.

But it seems likely now that collective redemption will be replaced by collective omission. The president says he didn't know. The people who did know say they made a point of letting no one else know. And the one man who might be able to answer just who knew what is dead.

Although the Senate Intelligence Committee found that the administration violated the Constitution, public scrutiny instead focused on what former Sen. John Tower's commission concluded--that the problem lay in something called a management style. Process, process, process.

Meanwhile, charges will likely be dropped against those who sold arms to Iran for hostages and diverted the profits to Nicaraguan contras in defiance of the law. If any of the prosecution's case relies on testimony made before T V, the court has hinted it would drop the entire case. The very fact that we heard the means by which the Constitution was subverted will now ensure that those who subverted it will not be punished.

In the meantime a presidential campaign proceeded. The march to the Democratic and Republican conventions moved along as day follows night, with just as many surprises. There were occasional moments of thrill, when it seemed for a second that something significant might just happen. Pat Robertson beat George Bush, the Vice President, in Iowa. But then Bush won in New Hampshire and everywhere else.

Jesse Jackson won in Michigan, where he drew widespread white support and beat the establishment candidate. Then came Wisconsin--more excitement, huge crowds, and whites saying that a candidate's color did not matter as long as he had something to say. But then Dukakis won, and kept on winning. The two who had the most money, the best organizations, and the least to say, found themselves on their way to the nomination.

Democracy ceases to matter when world events cease to matter, and that's the danger in the year that passed. Does something called the stock market matter to the economy when it can swing wildly with hardly any effect in the end? Does something called politics matter, if people can be elected for surviving rather than inspiring?

Of course it does. At times, the cloud which seemed to make what happened both incomprehensible and irrelevant gave way to light. Judge Robert Bork found that intelligence is not enough in a democracy. The Constitution is not better for being played with like a Rubik's cube. Its power lies in its simplicity, its acknowledgement of the people's right to govern themselves.

That message was easy to lose sight of in a year when so much happened that was treated like it meant so little. But for one brief period, people cared and cut through the minutiae--a Supreme Court seat was denied to a man who had spoken out against civil rights and denounced landmark equal access legislation. But in an irony that was befitting for the year, and surely gave pleasure to the cynics who invented that bumper sticker slogan, Bork was successfully followed by a jurist who, once confirmed, cast a vote challenging the core of federal civil rights doctrine.

And so it went.