March 3, 1991

IN the 1968 film "The Swimmer," Burt Lancaster decides to swim across Connecticut -- from one backyard pool to another. As he moves through the yards of the Fairfield County rich, they barely look up from their cocktails to take note. Fast forward to "Stanley and Iris," filmed 20 years later in Waterbury. It opens as the camera takes in sweeping views of the factories, houses and clotheslines of a working-class city starting its day. In this picture of Connecticut, people don't have built-in pools; they toil in a large commercial bakery.

TWO dozen high school students barely flinched as they watched blood coursing through tubes leading from a patient's arm into a hemodialysis machine and back again. "It's like a washing machine for blood," Dr. William Chenitz of St. Michael's Medical Center here said of the device, which does the work that the patient's kidneys no longer can. The teen-agers recently visited St. Michael's from nearby Central High School to see medical technology firsthand and to discuss the case of another patient, a 32-year-old woman on dialysis, a former drug addict who has tested positive for the AIDS virus. Her treatment had raised some serious ethical questions, including whether the Government should pay the cost of dialysis for all patients regardless of their prognosis.

After Operation Desert Storm there will be an American imperium in the Middle East and we shall be healers. Such is the promise of what will come to pass when the guns fall silent. This is a return to an old theme. Pick up the American trail in Iraq and Kuwait and trace it back from today's expedition to the first American ventures into the Arab and Muslim realms. The themes recur, the history telescopes easily. Always there is the promise that over the horizon -- two or three camel days away, as the Arabs of the desert would have once put it -- there will be bliss: the distant power giving something of its innocence and optimism to a region burdened by its feuds and obsessions. And always there is the response of that world: dependence and resentment, attraction to the power from afar and the need to cover up the attraction and the dependence. Americans don't know the realms of Islam with any great intimacy and authority. The United States has been an unsteady presence in that region: bursts of intense activism alternating with periods of benign neglect. We have tended to think of Arab and Muslim societies as places that the Europeans knew and understood. We stand in awe of the great craft of the British writers and travelers, of the curiosity that took Richard Burton, T. E. Lawrence, Gertrude Bell, Freya Stark and Wilfred Thesiger deep into the lives of strangers. But there is not much in the diplomatic record to sustain a presumption that the Europeans divined the Muslim world and its wellsprings with any great wisdom or precision, or that the conduct of European imperial affairs was made any wiser by the books and the travelers. For its part, the United States will have to learn more about that world under the gun, as it were. There is no assurance that our texts will serve us any better than Europe's texts served her in the Muslim domains, or that we will walk away from this expedition with the sense that we have come to know that world as it really is.

AFTER years of study and inconclusive debate about school desegregation in the state, the enrollment in 140 of Connecticut's 166 districts remains 90 per cent white, with 80 percent of the minority-group students concentrated in 10 per cent of the school systems. Now, as the General Assembly confronts the state's nagging fiscal problems, the lawmakers are also studying a report calling for school desegregation. Meanwhile, the outcome of a lawsuit that is scheduled to come to trial this spring could force action on the issue, possibly leading to busing and changes in district boundaries. The recently issued report of the Commission on Quality and Integrated Education, appointed by former Gov. William A. O'Neill, recommends that the state help local districts phase in voluntary programs to integrate their schools. After 17 months of study, the 28 commissioners called for the diversification of public schools by transferring students among districts, creating magnet schools, enrichment programs and multicultural curriculums, and improving teacher training.

The United States wants to maintain a much larger American military presence in the Persian Gulf region than it had before Iraq invaded Kuwait, officials said. Page 19.