BANKING ON PAIN SORRY, CHANDRA, WE CAN'T HELP IT.

Byline: Joseph Honig

DEAR Chandra:

It has been 104 days since friends and family have seen or spoken to you. Their sadness must be staggering, unimaginable to parents whose own children, young or grown, are safe and free from harm.

Meanwhile, many of us of, millions of strangers, busy ourselves in that sorry pastime of grief without personal consequence.

It is much the same as having a good cry over someone else's troubles. Feeling vicariously blue over some faraway tragedy - the death of a princess, a handsome and rich young American's air crash at sea - never goes out of style. We always need dinner talk.

That we didn't know you, can't imagine your hopes and joys and possibilities, matters little to those who speak your name.

For in a summer without a war or domestic disaster, your disappearance has become our national icebreaker, the talk of the beach and barroom. Not to mention the airwaves.

You have ceased to be a real person. You are a diversion.

And you are an industry.

Sleek, attractive men and women spend hundreds of hours in front of lights and cameras entertaining us with theories about how you seem to have fallen off planet Earth.

Scores of ex-prosecutors, detectives, criminalists and the most laughable of psychics wield shards of evidence, halaked suspicions and the weakest of hearsay in cable television's talk wrestling matches.

Ratings are up, revenues also, for the spectacle of excitable people answering unknowable questions.

All this while photographers and technicians bank O.J.-sized overtime checks.

Not surprisingly, your fellow citizens lap it all up like punch at a garden party.

For we love a good cry seasoned with third-person terror. As long as it's not happening to us. As long as our spouses and offspring are safe in their beds when the late news announces your own ravaged family still hopes for your return.

Sorry, Chandra, but you are the newest star of that sorry American phenomenon we call reality television. You are a woman who's become a soap, a serial, an ongoing drama pitted against game shows and drama and MTV. You are grist for a talk radio machine that begs callers to cry out for vengeance against your lover, that pitiful liar writer Jerry Nachman says ``has managed to make adultery look like homicide.''

And then there are the jokes.

No, Chandra, no one, at least no one on television, makes sport of what may have happened to you. Comics are too canny, too smart to be caught directly wringing laughter from your fate. There would be letters. There would be an outcry. Somebody somewhere could mention those vanishing notions of taste, decency and compassion.

So diversions are called for. Misdirection plays enabling humorists of varying talents to be topical. Your lover is the punchline. His use of constitutional protections provokes peals of laughter. But the fact that you are nowhere to be found is at the center of each narrative. And still the audiences laugh.

I wonder how your parents feel if and when they've heard those jokes. I am sure the comics add to their pain. Surely they will not laugh if, years from now, those same entertainers seek smiles from someone else's misfortune.

But many of the rest of us, no doubt, will. We will also watch hours of uninformed speculation from experts with titles and degrees. We will call in and write in while eagerly awaiting unfounded leaks.

Since Lindbergh's baby, up to Princess Diana and John F. Kennedy Jr., we've been eager to embrace other people's misery, maybe more so than we attempt to understand our own.

Sorry, Chandra, we just can't help ourselves. When it comes to pain, we are a nation of customers.