THE MISANTHROPE'S CORNER.

Florence King

Miss King can be reached at P. O. Box 7113, Fredericksburg, Va. 22404.

Have you noticed? America has a new all-purpose word: "surreal." Derived from Surrealisme, the French literary and artistic movement known for fantastic imagery, improbable events, and incongruous juxtapositions, it means "having an odd, dreamlike quality."

It got its start in the Gulf War when it was used to describe the greenish glow that filled our TV screens when we bombed places at night. At that time our all- purpose word was "awesome" but the rockets' green glare subjected it to overkill so some commentator varied it with "surreal."

It turned out to be an ideal Nineties word; foreign enough to qualify as multicultural, sensitive enough for a neutered poet, and, from the onomatopoeic point of view, its unmistakable sound of something writhing quietly made it a natural addition to the vocabulary of political correctness.

"Surreal" proved so popular that it quickly worked its way up the food chain- literally-serving as a description of everything from the nocturnal shine of crocodile eyes to Dolly Parton's bust. Its popularity was perfectly timed to enable us to describe things that really were surreal, such as the photos of Mars, but as the decade progressed the word degenerated into a synonym for "unusual."

Clinton's definition of sex, Monica's definition of love, Hillary's definition of marriage, Linda Tripp's definition of friendship, Lucianne Goldberg's definition of literary agent-all were called surreal. We built up such a head of surrealism that Clinton, to distract us from his surrealistic troubles, began bombing places at night, filling our TV screens with another round of greenish glows that everybody promptly dubbed surreal.

We always do this. Give us a catchphrase or a concept and we pounce on it, grind it down, wear it out, and leave it in pieces like a toy on Christmas morning without ever finding out what it was. This is how the Numbing of America works. It just so happens that we are surrounded by things surreal but we have lost the ability to react to them.

Making Americans react used to be a simple task. William Randolph Hearst ruled that readers of his papers must say "Gee whiz!" when they saw the front page, "Holy Moses!" when they read the second, and "God Almighty!" when they turned to the third. He could never get a rise out of us today because when everything is surreal, nothing is surreal-not even the following:

"The Navy has maintained that pregnancy at sea does not hurt readiness."

"Some female Marines are complaining they can't stand in formation at the six- month mark of their pregnancies because the Corps doesn't provide an ample maternity uniform."

"Arkansas agreed yesterday to hire 400 more female guards in men's prisons and let them do everything from stopping rapes to monitoring the showers."

"In some respects, companies view affirmative action as a helpful management tool to keep them from getting sued."

Don Imus on Mike Barnicle's plagiarism: "He's obviously sloppy and lazy. But you shouldn't be fired for that."

Laurence Leamer, author of The Kennedy Women: When Eunice Kennedy Shriver's husband was ambassador to France, a French secretary on her staff said, "If you're not mentally retarded, you can't even get invited to this embassy."

Surreal begets surrealer. The numbers-game charge that blacks have been irretrievably harmed by "400 years of slavery" means that slavery began in the 1590s and remains on the books today.

The "fighting men and women" construction of pundits bending the knee to the feminist thought police has infected the general public, producing letters to the editor with such statements as "the men and women who fought at Iwo Jima and Belleau Wood." Stand by for Veracruz and Little Big Horn.

When Michigan became the sixth state to allow the blind to hunt assisted by guides and laser-sighted weapons, Thomas Schermer, a blind hunter, said: "I might not be able to see the deer, but I'll guarantee you that in those last seconds before I shoot, my pulse will be just as high as in the days when I could."

We progress. Fifteen years ago William F. Buckley Jr. was universally castigated for saying that blind yachtsman Jim Dixon should not be allowed to sail the Atlantic alone. Now that institutionalized surrealism has given us the armed and dangerous blind, I predict that drivers' licenses will be next. If you doubt it, consider this: Icarus never said he had a "right" to fly, only that he could. This is the difference between American surrealists and the modest kind.

From surreal to surrealer to surrealissimus invariably leads straight to Mary McGrory, who eulogized one of the toads under the penumbra known as the Supreme Court: "Justice Brennan never was hung up on the Framers' intent."

The most publicized eulogy to Brennan came from Thurgood Marshall Jr.: "He had the biggest heart of anybody in the building." This is the sort of thing that should upset us but doesn't, yet on a deeply unconscious level it does, because even the most brainwashed American instinctively knows that nothing is more dangerous than a judge with a heart-or an emotional surgeon, or a vulnerable engineer, or those "flexible, sensitive" warriors Betty Friedan called for when she lectured at West Point.

So much surrealism is couched in these misbegotten tributes that we can no longer recognize chaos. The anxiety that afflicts Americans comes from the gnawing, inchoate sensation that we are all at the mercy of a society driven by emotional decisions, personalized actions, and subjective thought processes.

A regular reminder that the cold comfort of objectivity is a thing of the past are the terrifying TV appearances of Jo Ellen Demetrius, the "Jury Lady," who earns her living advising lawyers how to pick jurors whose prejudices, disappointments, resentments, fears, crotchets, tics, and twitches will result in a "favorable" verdict.

Gee whiz! Holy Moses! God Almighty! Will no one rid us of this surreal Vestal?