Wall Street Week.

Have you ever had one of those Friday nights when you come home especially flattened and, being the conscientious type, you zone out watching Jim Lehrer? Too spent to even click the remote. you watch in numb fascination as a completely bizarre media form--Wall Street Week--grabs you by the lapels and dares you to turn away.

Here the Town & Country set--men in pinstripes, women wearing silk scarves the size of baby quilts around their shoulders-gets down around a mahogany table and talks reverentially about "the market" and what it's going to do next. Such speculation became especially fevered as the market soared this fall to previously unimaginable levels.

With all the spontaneity of Kabuki theater, and a level of self-congratulation unmatched by Disney/Cap Cities annual reports, Wall Street Week follows a rigidly ritualized format, presided over by its harlequin-faced and gratingly smug host, Louis Rukeyser. There is a weekly incantation: Wall Street is wise, Wall Street knows all, and if "the market" is happy, then all Americans should be, too.

Rukeyser, the grand shaman of capitalism, opens the weekly show with his personal readings of the market's tea leaves. "The market" here isn't a thing, or a set of transactions: It's anthropomorphized, kind of like a god--I'd say Thor--and he'd better not be crabby. Two things especially make him cross: interference from the government, and "over-cautious" investors, otherwise known as members of the bear" cult. These are sworn enemies of the 'bull" cult, whose prayers the market has been responding to with unprecedented largesse.

Rukeyser's opening monologue is always encased in some suffocating metaphor that he thinks is terribly cute--one week, stocks are like cold cuts; the next. 'the market" is like a movie star. Just recently, for example, we learned that with the market having gone up 28 percent in value in just four months, "investors float like the shipwrecked in World War II, in an environment as comfortably padded as the life preserver named after Mae West." But don't think that the show is just for the rich. It's dedicated, insists Rukeyser, to "letting the average person know that, contrary to what you may hear elsewhere, there really is big money to be made in the stock market."

Rukeyser, an elder of the bull cult, declaims against the bears, whose concerns about an imminent crash that would especially hurt the small investor are "erroneous" and "look sillier week by week." In fact, it's time for "sensible folks to invest more of their money in foreign lands." (East Timor, perhaps? Indonesia?)

After Grand Master Rukeyser attributes the market's happiness to the fact that "idiocies" like government stimulus packages have been defeated and socialism is "in such international disrepute" that no one uses that "horrible word" anymore, he introduces us to three experts. They have titles like Chief Investment Manager for Myopia Asset Management, and say things like "there is no reason to assume vulnerability here other than a normal correction." ("Normal correction" seems to be the bear cult's doublespeak for "big stock-market crash.")

Then, a lesser shaman comes on--say a woman who is an expert on tampon stocks, or a new hotshot authority on squid futures from the brokerage house Biddle, Bamboozle & Butkis--and with all the animation of a sawhorse, tells Louis and his viewers which companies he or she "likes," as in "I'm liking Firestorm toys right now" or, "No one is liking the Lippo Group now."

But Wall Street Week is hardly the only media outfit that mystifies the market. Right after the election, The New York Times reported that the stock market "thinks a renewal of the political status quo was the best possible outcome" while the bond market "did not join the celebration." Wall Street "applauded loudly for gridlock," and summing up Thor's reactions to the results, one market analyst gushed, "Wall Street loves it!" In another account, Wall Street "breathed a sigh of relief" after election day. The market was especially relieved because a Republican Congress was going to prevent that wild-eyed, trust-busting radical, Bill Clinton, from interfering in affairs best left to--you guessed it--the market.

This is the market as Yahweh-omniscient, beneficent, infuriated by ye of little faith.

The conservatives love to drub rock and rap music for coarsening American sensibilities. But how coarsened has public discourse become when downsizing, higher unemployment, and the export of American jobs overseas is routinely a source of exultation for "the market"?

Worshippers of the market gloss over the ongoing, massive redistribution of wealth upwards. And in their giddiness, the marketeers also minimize the hazards of high altitudes. One analyst gushed on Wall Street Week that the environment for stocks was as great as in the 1950s. I'd say, go back a few more decades. Just remember that the last time "the market" was so ecstatic after an election was in November 1928.