The Misanthrope's Corner.

To say that someone "keeps up with current events" is inherently flattering, a compliment denoting seriousness, civic responsibility, and all the other right stuff. An honor student enclosed in a good citizen wrapped in a home owner, you might say.

I used to keep up with current events but now I "follow the news," which, I have begun to sense, denotes qualities of a very different sort. We could play around with various descriptive adjectives -- "furtive" and "hunched" come to mind -- but the best way to define it is to restate what it is that I now follow: the Nooze.

What, exactly, is the Nooze? Well, for starters there's the now- ubiquitous crawl, the ribbon at the bottom of the screen that enables us to follow still more Nooze while we are following the Nooze. The crawl came into being with 9/11, when terrorism took up so much airtime that they had to find some other way of reporting everything else. After a month or so the crawl was no longer necessary, but by then it had become one of America's "instant traditions," like the public hand- holding of presidents and first ladies begun by Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter. Every news show had a crawl, and none dared be the first to stop.

The crawl is now a repetitive, ungrammatical melange of eccentric doings that is impossible to ignore. If terrorists took down another landmark building nobody would notice because we are too busy reading the crawl.

Since becoming a Noozehound, I have been dominated by the crawl in two ways. One is my neverending quest for the Ultimate Crawl. It's my Golden Fleece, my Holy Grail, my El Dorado, and I think I've found it. It sailed across the bottom of the screen a few months ago and there hasn't been anything to match it since.

It said: "A survey of Ukrainian prostitutes found that most took to the streets to avoid office work."

The obvious question here is why anyone would take a survey of Ukrainian prostitutes, and the answer is even more obvious: to have something to put on the crawl. CNN probably sends teams of crawl- fillers to remote corners of the globe to research whether riding bareback on wild ponies affects the testicular-cancer rate in Mongolia. The crawlspace is full of Nooze You Can Use, but it came too late for me. As a college graduate in the sexist '50s, I was consigned to boring office work, and I can testify that nothing makes a woman more desperate than being surrounded by typewriters and calculators when she knows what deus ex machina means. It's a wonder all female liberal-arts majors didn't become tarts.

The other offshoot of my crawl-reading is unbearable suspense. This happens when I glance away from the screen and then look back just in time to see an incomplete crawl. Such as: ". . . one person's caged bird for breakfast." Somebody ate it! Who? Why? I had to find out, and the only way to do it was to sit through the whole crawl again.

I almost made it, but then the phone rang, and by the time I got back to the TV, guess what I saw? ". . . one person's caged bird for breakfast." Dirty bombs were about to go off, the stock market was about to collapse, and my e-mail provider was about to go out of business, but all I cared about was that effin' bird. The mystery was finally cleared up in my third go at the crawl: A bear in some national park ate a camper's pet canary. What they didn't explain is why anyone would take a birdcage on a camping trip.

Once the Nooze people got us hooked on the crawl, they were faced with the problem of how to drag us away from it and make us watch the "real" Nooze. The situation demanded a controversy to make even the most dedicated crawlhead look up at the screen, and the Elizabeth Smart case supplied one: Has kidnapping been sullied by racial profiling?

Why the rich white girl was lionized while countless inner-city abductees are ignored was debated ad nauseam but nobody nailed the real reason. It goes back to the earliest form of entertainment. To ancient Greek playwrights, it was a given that "tragedy" is what happens to kings and nobles. Such class profiling remained a literary convention until the 19th century; protagonists had to be people of substance because they were the only ones whose problems were substantial enough to interest an audience.

In today's egalitarian climate we are quick to proclaim a universal right to tragedy, but we give ourselves away when we blithely refer to the whodunit we just read as "a good murder." We mean exactly what the ancient Greeks meant: mayhem in the VIP set, a corpse who was Somebody, the juxtaposition of violence and respectability that produces the psychic tension found in every "classic" crime. Lizzie Borden was a well-off churchgoer. The Ripper's victims were prostitutes but the backdrop of a puritanical Victorian society provided the respectability. The Black Dahlia was a tramp but her stunning beauty elevated her above the common herd in the public mind. For a crime to grab us, some element of social superiority must be present.

The Smart family has money and status but their real superiority lies in their innocence. Not just Elizabeth, but the whole clan. Their earnest trust, naive goodness, and mindboggling optimism personify a lost national purity that we observe with a kind of dumbfounded awe. The Smarts represent the Old America when no Nooze was good Nooze, and we can't get enough of them. Until they came along, the only altar of lost innocence available to us was documentaries about wild animals. No matter what violence feral creatures inflict on their prey, there is no hate, no evil intent, no crime. Lions are not bigoted, piranha are not alienated, vultures are not bipolar, and there is no such thing as a pedophilic cobra.

Meanwhile, the crawl marches on. Trying to read from left to right while words are moving from right to left got me off the rails during the Amtrak crisis. The crawlspace is a cramped, narrow world, so it was only to be expected that as soon as I saw "ARAFAT MUST GO, BUSH SAYS," I yelled "You train-hating twit!"