As we decline ... Examining 'macaca,' spinach, and other crises du jour.

ANCIENT Romans did not go around saying "Boy, this decline and fall is really the pits," but then they didn't have cable.

The clearinghouse of 24-7 Breaking Alienation had a spectacular late-summer season this year. The school lockdown replaced the high-speed chase as the event certain to be in progress somewhere in the country at any given time. Nancy Grace finally drove somebody to suicide, and Anna Nicole Smith forged a long-overdue bond between herself and the literate world when she woke up in her hospital room and found the dead body of her son: The same thing happens in Cymbeline when Imogen wakes up to find the decapitated body of Cloten in bed beside her.

Benedict XVI may become the first pope to exchange the apologia of the Catholic holy man for the apology of the unholy American congressman. If he does, it will spell the end of the doctrine of infallibility because you can't apologize and be infallible at the same time. The Vatican will argue that the doctrine applies only to rulings on faith and morals, but Benedict was, in fact, ruling on faith and morals when he addressed the difference between Islam and Christianity. The argument that he was not speaking ex cathedra will mean nothing to the most devout Catholics, whose psychological security will be shattered. Such a debacle might prove to be the last straw for doctrinally rigid Third World cardinals and lead to a double papacy like the one in the Middle Ages, when there was one pope in Rome and another in Avignon, except that this time the split will be between Rome and Nairobi.

The spectacle of a pope saying "I didn't really mean it" will also shatter the psychological security of Protestant-atheist elitist conservative neo-royalists like your alienated correspondent, who have had it with "democrazy" and cherish the pope as the only person left in the Western world who can still say "It's true because I said so." Since I don't pray, I can only hope that a full-megillah American apology never passes Benedict's lips. He could get lucky; given Latin's unyielding syntax it may not be possible to translate "to any and all." Something like this happened to John Dryden, which inspired him to make a needless rule that purists still struggle with: You can't end a Latin sentence with a preposition, so don't end an English sentence with one even though you can.

We can also bank on the fact that Benedict is not your ordinary apologizer. No matter what the Muslims demand, we will never have to listen to him explain that he wants to spend more time with his family.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

In my present mood I can't help playing eine kleine schadenfreude musik. I'm not glad that the spinach eaters sickened and died, but I'm not at all sorry that our whole salad-bar shtik might be imperiled. How many times have you heard people give forth an ecstatic moan of "Ummmm" while chomping their way through what, in effect, is a bowlful of uncooked food? Only determined snobbery could wash it down, and that is precisely how it all started. The pop sociologist Vance Packard nailed it in his 1959 book, The Status Seekers: "The best delineator of high status is the tossed salad."

The only salad most Americans knew was cole slaw, or that WASP piece de resistance, half a canned pear topped with a bottled cherry and served on one lettuce leaf that nobody ever ate. A lot of us thought that lettuce, like parsley, was for decoration unless it was hidden in a sandwich. Then along came Fifties prosperity, suburbia, package tours to Europe, bigger and better pseudo-sophistication, and tossed salads, routinely served now in every greasy spoon in the land and eaten by millions who remember to say "Ummmm."

Think of what life would be like if the closet salad-haters of America took advantage of the terrorist scare to convince themselves that al-Qaeda is poisoning everything green and stopped buying it. No more of those incomprehensible pyramid charts recommending five servings of arugula every day. No more coworkers who are cranky in the afternoon because all they had for lunch was a salad. And best of all, a big drop in the population of illegal aliens because they're the ones who pick the stuff.

It's no secret to NR readers that I have never been a fan of George W. Bush. During the 2000 campaign I picked at him in almost every "Misanthrope's Corner," comparing him to the Aflac duck and Ethelred the Unready, and attributing his problems with women voters to his uncanny ability to remind each of us of the Boy Who Sat Behind Me in Homeroom. Back then I could call him a lout because he was only a candidate. Now that he's president I have to be more respectful, so let's just say that I wish he would tone down his air of malevolent jauntiness before the Secret Service has to change Laura's code name to Bride of Chucky.

There's an art to being obnoxious. Benvenuto Cellini, Rabelais's Gargantua, Shakespeare's Falstaff, and the Renaissance stock character of the miles gloriosus gnawed on whole joints of greasy meat, threw the bones all over the banquet hall, and gave the serving wench a lot more than a backrub, yet for all their excesses they never offend. The secret of their lovability is flair, but elected politicians are afraid of flair. It's too eccentric, too egotistical; they can't afford to risk it so they hold back and work without the safety net of grandiose behavior.

In St. Petersburg, when the urge to be obnoxious came over Bush while at the table with Tony Blair, all he had to work with were a Parker House roll and a pat of butter, so he chewed them as noisily as he could to give himself a blase air of swaggering confidence: mouth-slapping as un-realpolitik.

He's starting to get embarrassing. The cackling, the nicknaming, the winking, the sudden grinning lunge across the lectern, the master-of-ceremonies patter at press conferences, the finger-wiggling wave--the whole barrel-of-fun business finally got him into big trouble this summer when U.S. News came out with the incredible story about his alleged overriding interest in, shall we say, natural gas, and the pleasure he allegedly takes in greeting new staffers with his very own ruffles and flourishes just for the fun of watching them blush.

The White House denied the story with such dignified brevity that I believe the denial. The story subsequently vanished, but that's not the point. Nothing vanishes anymore; everything is "out there," trailing links as long as a comet's tail. On any given day it could come back to stay, and then we will have two F-words.

The bizarre death of Steve Irwin sent a shudder round the world, mingling the chastening terror of an ancient mythological curse with the sophomoric idiocy of the worst of the Jaws spin-offs. Commentators intrigued by odds said that the circumstances of Erwin's death couldn't come together again in a thousand years, but they were wrong. It happened again the very same month, right where I live, in Virginia, when George Allen became his own stingray.

In a single unguarded moment the down-home Allen campaign turned into classical Greek tragedy, the Fates working at warp speed as a mother with a secret and a son ignorant of his bloodlines came face to face with the dreaded Macaca, long dormant in its cave but sprung now to ravenous life to devour all who uttered its forbidden name.

Allen denies that he learned the word "macaca" from his Tunisian mother even though it is traceable to that part of the world. His mother also swore that she had never heard the word and had no idea what it meant. After an unbelievably clumsy attempt to pass "macaca" off as a nickname for a haircut invented by his staff, Allen settled on the explanation that he had invented the word himself. Whaddya know? Just popped into his head, he told Tim Russert. "Oh, it's just made up."

Words don't pop into the head, they pop out of it--specifically, the subconscious--where they have been all along. Maybe Allen really believes he made "macaca" up, but I know I've heard the word before. Ever since the story broke I've been racking my brain and frittering away my time trying to nail it, so if "macaca" pops out of my subconscious it probably popped out of Allen's too.

It sounds like something from one of the countless historical novels I devoured in junior high school, e.g., Yankee Pasha by Edison Marshall, about a 19th-century American naval officer who infiltrates a Turkish harem. I've ordered it and several others on interlibrary loan and intend to fritter away still more time re-reading them.

Another possible source are the movies of my childhood, which I intend to re-watch. They fall into six categories: French Foreign Legion; Soldiers of the Queen; anything starring Sabu; Tramp Steamers (scum of the earth in merchant marine; lowly native cabin boy dies saving ship and lives of crew who abused him); Heat Waves (Somerset Maugham remittance men in white linen suits drinking gin and tonic served by native houseboys); and Safaris (great white hunter escorts frigid Englishwoman through jungle, saving her from her daily brush with death as loyal native guide cries "Bwana, come quick! Missy carried off by macaca!").

Why am I doing this? Because it's what alienated people do to take our minds off the decline and fall of the United States.

Florence King's NATIONAL REVIEW columns are collected in STET, Damnit!: The Misanthrope's Corner, 1991 to 2002. She can be reached at P.O. Box 7113, Fredericksburg, VA 22404.