San Diego; seen from afar.

NEW YORK, AUGUST 16

I wasn't there, and was all the more anxious for such news as I could get. I knew that the young, animated woman on board planned to telephone to her mother in Seattle, nine time zones away, so the next morning I asked whether she had had any news of "the convention." "What convention?" she asked curiously. A companion, later in the day, remarked the wholesomeness of such unconcern. "In Sweden, 90 per cent of the people vote because the government is everywhere a part of their lives." In America people can forget the government.

Well, not quite. But the point is well taken. My friend lives a few weeks in the summer in Provence, and I learn that there, as indeed everywhere else in France, a CD recording costs $21, exactly twice the American price. How is that? Tariffs, plus internal trade agreements. The sanctions against price-breaking are pretty complete: legal, economic, and social. Only divine disapproval is missing. "It costs me $85 to fill the tank of my car." At $6 a gallon, the middle class is circumspect about big cars or, for that matter, carefree driving vacations, let alone commuting to work in one's own car. But what about the staples? "Coffee and sugar are more expensive." The next time one looks at ostensibly comparable incomes, French/American, bear these in mind, as also that heavy though the tax load in America is, in France it is half again as heavy.

But then the political tradition in France is heliocentric. "Le Roi gouverne par lui-m - me" Louis XIV reminded his subjects. I write a few blocks from where Napoleon was born, in Ajaccio, Corsica. His mother's house is well marked, but that is for the benefit of tourists. Napoleon did not believe it would ever be necessary to spell out his name, no more is it necessary to label the circadian phenomenon "Sun" when it rises in the morning. On the grave at St. Helena where his body rested before its triumphant return to Paris there is no marking, none at all. Granted, there had been a quarrel when he died. The British wished to engrave on the tombstone, "Napoleon Bonaparte," but the French aide would have none of it --the plebeian surname. Just plain "Napoleon," he insisted. After all, nobody goes to Versailles to see where Louis Bourbon lived. But the British were the jailkeepers, and they settled on writing nothing on the marble.

In America, our leaders surest of their longevity in citizens' memory take the least pains in posthumous self-identification. Jefferson did want to remind passers-by that he was the author of the Declaration of Independence and of Virginia's statute for religious freedom, and the father of the University of Virginia: he did not bother to note down that he had also been President of the United States, thinking the office more or less trivial in a society in which government's powers were supposed to be rare and specified. The self-effacement of Franklin Delano Roosevelt was in a contrary perspective. His tombstone, whose text he dictated, does not dwell on his four elections as President, merely listing his name and dates of birth and death -- because FDR died thinking of himself (probably correct) as the personification of the new America, the welfare state. The Plaza in Paris renamed in memory of Charles de Gaulle reminds visitors that he was the head of the French Resistance, the Founder of the Fifth Republic, and President of France. He told an aide, shortly before resigning his office -- a year and a half before his death -- that for five years there would be "souvenirs," after that nothing. But that was a depressed retreat from the French leader as the embodiment of France. The real de Gaulle was the one in memory, who no more doubted his importance than Julius Caesar, Alexander, or -- Napoleon.

Well, that's the way it is in America. Trimmed back to one hour of prime time on the nets after struggling unsuccessfully with gavel-to-gavel coverage for years. In 1976 Senator John Glenn gave the Democratic keynote address and it was covered by all three networks. A day later it transpired that the combined audiences of ABC, CBS, and NBC brought in fewer viewers than were got by New York station WPIX, which concurrently ran Casablanca, for the 14th time.

They rail about Americans who don't vote. Calmer critics of American civic informality are disappointed by Americans who don't vote for the right candidate. But, when all is said and done, it is a sign not of indifference to public concern, but of acknowledgment that public concern -- concern for the res publica -- is much less important, and should be, than remembering to call one's mother from Corsica to find out how she is, and report that her daughter is well, happy, and productive.