Pass the helium.

Listen to what George Will actually said on national television. The gang at ABC's This Week was celebrating the Liggett smoking settlement, and Will remarked: "If everyone quit smoking today, it would be a calamity for Social Security." Oy vey, and the program is already a wreck! So please pass me a carton of Virginia Slims (you know, "It's a woman thing") so I don't become a burden to the next generation.

And now, on with our nation's current affairs.

Have you ever seen so many alleged grownups getting so exercised about a guy's patella? I liked the Star Wars-inspired computer graphics of the Presidential knee that accompanied all of the somber, expert medical commentary about the possible dire complications for the leader of the free world. Jumping-jack reporters in a positive frenzy at the post-op press conference asked breathlessly whether Clinton could really STILL go to Helsinki, as if postponing a meeting with a guy barely off life-support systems might reignite the Cold War.

Isn't it time for members of the Washington press corps to get a life? Geez--the guy tripped and had minor surgery.

But with Congress doing absolutely nothing except trying to outlaw second-trimester abortions and bickering over which money hogs, Republicans or Democrats, do or do not become the focus of fundraising investigations, the Washington press corps hasn't had much to report. When Time magazine has a major story entitled "Does Heaven Exist?" (answer inside: Yes, and it's like being at Club Med on mescaline), it's probably safe to say that the news media, as a whole, has been sucking in too much helium. Screwiness is epidemic.

For example, it's a little strange to turn to the business section of The New York Times and see a bunch of diaper-clad but otherwise naked baby bodies with the heads of major CEOs affixed to them. See the head of Michael Eisner on a chubby, little infant's body. This is creepy, but it gets worse.

The article draws from the newly prominent Frank Sulloway of MIT, author of Born to Rebel. In a nutshell, Sulloway argues that first-born children are authoritarian and conformist, while later-born kids are more adventurous. What does this have to do with American business? Well, Sulloway thinks "too many first-born men rule the nation's corporations," and since they are the least likely to be open to innovation or social change, they may be undermining the nation's global competitiveness.

People who select chief executives, according to Sulloway, "would do well to consider candidates' birth order." Cool! No need to hurt our heads with thoughts about government policy, tax codes, technological change, or globalization. All we have to know is when the great white man on top was hatched and voile, you have corporate strategy.

Sulloway's efflorescences stop short of considering the relationship between birth order and greed. Just as well--once Pat Buchanan stopped running for President last year, outrage over the obscene salaries of our nation's captains of industry was no longer a story.

Receiving much less flashy coverage than the CEOs in swaddling clothes were the buried reports on the annual compensation of various downsizers and fatcats. Louis Gerstner, CEO of IBM, enjoyed a rather nice cost-of-living increase, from $15.6 million in 1995 to $20.2 mil last year, a 29.4 percent raise. But that's chump change compared to John F. Welch Jr., CEO of GE, whose total compensation last year was $80 million, a 33 percent increase over 1995.

But Welch deserves it. The company's theme song is, "We bring good things to life." And its ads say GE is "saving lives" and "helping the world go round." One ad shows Third World urchins smiling, saved by GE's beneficence. Who can quibble with its head deity earning more than the GNP of Chad?

Then there was the helium inhalation at the networks. ABC designated March "Reefer Madness" month (March was actually women's history month, but never mind) and aired a special documentary called "Pot of Gold" about how marijuana is the major cash crop in some states. Nightline and Prime Time Live followed up with their own gab fests. All the networks submitted hysterical reports about kids toking up, shooting up, and dying, accompanied by dire warnings to parents about the "slippery slope" from marijuana to heroin. Better start your own in-house DARE program.

Why is this all so crucial now? Because so many current parents came of age in the sixties--cut to footage of Woodstock, with everyone passing the bong--and if they don't admit to their kids that they tried pot and it nearly wrecked their lives, then their kids are especially at risk of becoming drug addicts.

More than twenty-five years after Woodstock, it's OK to say, publicly, that capital punishment is good, affirmative action hurts whites, and that it's a "reform" to throw a million more children in to poverty, but it is utterly taboo, unspeakable, to say that smoking pot should be legalized for adults, and that it's less dangerous than drinking alcohol or smoking cigarettes. The power of alcohol consumers to demonize marijuana consumers remains, dare I say it, mind-blowing.

Finally, did anyone see the Sunday New York Times Magazine cover story, "Funny, We Don't Feel Old," about how people over sixty are feeling great, being productive, and, in general, having a swell time?

I liked the septuagenarian celebrity men who feel youthful because of the little children bestowed on them by their newer, much younger wives. Neat, too, that all these old folks who feel so great are rich and famous. There's nothing about old age that a fat 401(K) can't fix. As for me, when I turn sixty-five, I'm going to dump my husband and get a twenty-five-year-old wife to make me feel like spring has sprung.

More helium, pleased.

Susan Douglas teaches at the University of Michigan. Her column appears in this space every month.