  TWO NATIONS   Black and White, Separate, Hostile, Unequal. By Andrew Hacker. 257 pp. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. $24.95.  

The Persistence Of Inequality

  Advising a young reporter how to cover politics without getting overawed, Russell Baker once said: "Just remember: These are all the same guys you went to high school with."   Looking over the class of '92, it is easy to apply this sort of back-to-the-future anthropology. The candidates and their campaigns fall naturally into the same sort of cliques found in high school and college.

FINDING MR. RIGHT: Presidential Politics; In Elections as in Romance, It's Often a Matter of Chemistry

NEW JERSEY has a state tree (the oak), a state bird (the eastern goldfinch), a state animal (the horse), a state flower (the violet), even a state insect (the honeybee). And now, because of the persistence of Maryellen Henion Soriano and a handful of her students, New Jersey has a state fish -- the brook trout.

The trout's elevation occurred in January when Gov. Jim Florio signed Bill 2608 at the Hopatcong Middle School in the presence of Mrs. Soriano and many of the students who were part of the four-year struggle.

How a Teacher and Her Class Landed Their Biggest Catch

  "About this big," a United Nations official says, holding his arms out in a circle. "About a yard across, weighing about a ton."

Iraq Outwitting Bomb Inspectors

  Storm-water runoff is something that doesn't love a wall. And it has been playing havoc with the 110-year-old stone retaining wall that supports Riverside Drive from 98th to 120th Street, separating it from Riverside Park, some 30 feet below.   As a result, the Parks and Recreation Department is planning a $1.6 million repair and restoration project, beginning this summer. The wall is made of schist, in pieces up to seven feet long. It will be taken apart, numbered and reassembled.

POSTINGS: Riverside Drive's Wall; Restoring by the Numbers

  THEODORE DREISER once inscribed a book, "To H. L. Mencken, my oldest living enemy." Those exasperated words summed up one of the most seminal and longest friendships in American letters.   Literary friends walk on eggshells. The demons of jealousy, envy, competitiveness always lurk, and an honest critical opinion is very likely to be taken as a personal affront. William Dean Howells never reviewed a Mark Twain book he didn't like; perhaps this explains the even tenor of their comradeship. Mencken, however, blasted what he thought were Dreiser's subpar performances, accounting for some of the precipitous ups and downs in their relationship. Religious, political and temperamental differences accounted for the rest. Those differences were so marked that it is surprising that they remained friends for nearly 40 years -- minus the time when they weren't speaking to each other.

Mencken and Dreiser: Friends, When Speaking

  Suddenly power tennis is swirling around this austere sport like a Hydra, and the only thing anybody agrees on is that simple evolution has created a modern-day monster that has probably grown too big to be killed.   Power tennis stands accused of snuffing the dialogue on the court, where the artistry has been rendered all but obsolete by strength and technology. It's blamed for shoulder and elbow injuries linked to the stress overload on joints and muscles unable to withstand high-impact tennis. Traditionalists insist the staccato points that masquerade for playmaking are alienating spectators interested in watching more than the radar gun. And everyone seems worried about the next generation of tennis players, lest power replace play and the basics of the sport are forgotten in the quest for pure speed.

Does Power Tennis Make Poor Tennis?

AS Long Island's most prominent planner for more than 30 years, Lee E. Koppelman has often been at the center of controversies.

Now Mr. Koppelman, executive director of the Long Island Regional Planning Board, is about to direct a feasibility study of whether a jetport at the Calverton airport could make economic sense without risking environmental havoc, he is again at the center of a storm.

After 30 Years, Koppelman Is Navigating Another Storm

THE orchestra played Johann Strauss's "Tales From the Vienna Woods," and Hank and Lois Fink waltzed across the dance floor. Mr. Fink, clad in pin stripes and a crisp white shirt, and Ms. Fink, in a knit dress and her best pearl earrings, glided as if on ice. They were dancing, on a recent Wednesday evening, at the Terrace Club in Stamford, one of the latest places to join the surge in ballroom dancing across Connecticut.

From church halls to dance halls to adult education classes, ballroom dancing is on the upswing. Couples in their 30's and 40's say dancing offers an inexpensive, healthy way to relax; single people consider it a way to get close without risking disease, and older people rejoice that they have new places to socialize.

Ballroom Dancing Is (Step, Step, Slide) Back

  The struggle to introduce low-income housing into a working-class neighborhood in this coastal city just west of Los Angeles illustrates the difficulties of providing such housing throughout the state.    The Community Corporation of Santa Monica, a nonprofit home builder, bought four separate parcels in a working-class neighborhood and planned a total of 30 apartments for renters of very low, low and moderate incomes. A group of nearby residents sued to block the project. When the home builder won in lower court, the homeowners appealed.

The Struggle to Provide Affordable Homes

CONGRESSIONAL districts are on the move across Long Island, traveling north, south, east and west in a once-in-a-decade redistricting ritual driven by pure politics and population figures recorded by the 1990 Census.

If all goes according to the plans of a State Legislature panel in charge of setting the new lines, the first public view of a Congressional map for Long Island that will last until 2002 will be tomorrow.

Last week, with Republican and Democratic leaders in Albany struggling over how and where to cut three Congressional districts out of the state, delays seemed likely. New York is losing three districts because population growth over the decade in states like Texas, Florida and California are redrawing the national map.

Maneuvering on Redistricting Reaches a Peak

  Bill Clinton and his wife were business partners with the owner of a failing savings and loan association that was subject to state regulation early in his tenure as Governor of Arkansas, records show.   The partnership, a real estate joint venture that was developing land in the Ozarks, involved the Clintons and James B. McDougal, a former Clinton aide turned developer. It started in 1978, and at times money from Mr. McDougal's savings and loan was used to subsidize it. The corporation continues to this day, but does not appear to be active.

THE 1992 CAMPAIGN: Personal Finances; Clintons Joined S.& L. Operator In an Ozark Real-Estate Venture

  Olga Romanova, a middle-aged woman in a babushka, painstakingly stamps out small copper parts for garden tools on a giant, inefficient metal press on the main floor of the state-owned Electropribor factory here. But instead of working for the factory, Ms. Romanova is working for one of the factory's senior executives, who has become an entrepreneur on the side. In effect, he rents machinery and floor space from himself and operates a profitable private business within a state factory.   The arrangement is typical of the creeping privatization in the old Soviet Union, a spontaneous process that is steadily shifting public property to private use, mostly as a result of the ingenuity, energy and adroitness of people like Ms. Romanova's boss, Viktor Todoryk. Nowhere else in the former Communist Bloc nations is privatization proceeding more rapidly today, or with less respect for master plans devised by economists and government officials.

Stealing Toward Russian Capitalism

  When the developers of Caswell Cove, a waterfront community in Milford, Conn. put up the first phase of their project four years ago, the recession was still off shore. The 48 two-bedroom condominiums on the marina there sold out at prices of $240,000 to $325,000, along with 48 slips at $1,000 a foot.    But when Milford Partners tried to build the next phase, few buyers came forward and construction stopped for 18 months. "We had a choice of throwing up our hands and going bankrupt or restructuring the project." said Kevin Bartlett, the only remaining member of Milford Partners, the developers.

POSTINGS: 2d Phase in Milford; Reefing Sails in a Recession

  IT wasn't as if the Yankees shouldn't have known. Long before George Steinbrenner, then in power as the principal owner, agreed to sign Pascual Perez to a three-year, $5.7 million contract, enough warnings had been posted. As if they were highway signs for "speed zone" or "construction, slow."   In 1984, Perez served three months in a Dominican Republic prison after a conviction for cocaine possession.

Sports of The Times; Yankees Didn't Check Time Bomb

  Just when Wall Street had concluded the worst was over for the banks, the rumblings of crisis have begun to arrive from Europe. If the good news for American banks is that the recession has exposed this continent's bad credits, the bad news may be that the process is just getting under way in Europe, where economies are weakening.   Last week, the European financial press was filled with stories of various bank problems. Christiana Bank, Norway's second largest, announced a huge loss and will need another capital infusion. Swedish banks saw their losses mounting and in Spain the central bank had to step in to salvage Banco Ibercorp. The Scandinavian problems appear to be bad loans exacerbated by falling real estate prices. The Spanish losses seem to have resulted more from freewheeling trading gone wrong, with the possibility of an overlay of political scandal.

The Banking Crisis Moves To Europe

THE trumpets ushering the newlyweds out of church have been eliminated from the plans. So have candles and silk bows in the chapel, favors for each of the 275 guests and the elaborate Viennese dessert presentation at the reception. (There will be wedding cake, chocolate-covered strawberries and petit fours.)

Still, the celebration of the marriage of Heide Kneuer, a recreation therapist, and Louis Rizzo, manager of an electrical-supply company, both 25, can hardly be considered low budget. By the time the wedding takes place on May 23, the ceremony at St. Gregory's Roman Catholic Church in Harrison and dinner and dancing at Glen Island Casino in New Rochelle will have cost upward of $55,000.

Wedding Bells Still Ring in a Recession, but More Softly

  The world is full of jolly voyeurs, and they happen to be us: not just solitary types training telescopes on the neighbors but men and women of respectable mien and resume, lawyers, teachers and postal clerks, all happily, guiltily participating in the human condition.   Everyone loves to look, and just about everyone thinks it a bit more delicious if it's a little bit forbidden. Voyeurism has been around from time immemorial, but after the invention of photography it expanded exponentially and embedded itself in the culture as socially acceptable behavior.

Photography and the Sin of Voyeurism

  As Hadjayev Hakhverdy washes the corpses of gunshot children and mutiliated adults here at the valley mosque, all the despair and defeat of Azerbaijan seems at hand in his ministrations after four years of undeclared war with Armenia over the disputed enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh.    "I have cleaned 200 since Feb. 26," said the mosque worker, aghast as he wrapped for burial another decapitated male corpse fresh from the war between Armenians and Azerbaijanis, which appears to be setting new standards for carnage and vendetta. "Some are so broken, but we must bury them."

Ethnic War in the Caucasus Finds New Depths of Carnage

  HAD the world turned according to plan -- or, at least, according to environmental-impact statements -- a desolate patch west of Ninth Avenue behind the General Post Office would now be shaping up as a center for some 10,500 workers in two new office towers.   Instead, it remains mostly an open cut, 60 feet below street level, through which a network of tracks runs to Pennsylvania Station. North of this cut is an Edison parking lot ("Garden Events -- Fast In -- Fast Out") and to the south there is a Kinney parking lot. Between them, about 12 people work on the site, or 10,488 fewer than envisioned in the late 1980's.

The Shattered Vision of the Booming 90's

  In a broad new policy statement that is in its final drafting stage, the Defense Department asserts that America's political and military mission in the post-cold-war era will be to insure that no rival superpower is allowed to emerge in Western Europe, Asia or the territory of the former Soviet Union.   A 46-page document that has been circulating at the highest levels of the Pentagon for weeks, and which Defense Secretary Dick Cheney expects to release later this month, states that part of the American mission will be "convincing potential competitors that they need not aspire to a greater role or pursue a more aggressive posture to protect their legitimate interests."

U.S. STRATEGY PLAN CALLS FOR INSURING NO RIVALS DEVELOP

  It has been said of the Balkans that they have too much history, meaning that grievances from the past have been allowed to overwhelm the present, that atavistic passions have too frequently triumphed over sober calculations of self-interest. It is an axiom that comes to mind at every turn amid the wreckage of Yugoslavia, where in the last nine months as many as 10,000 people have been mutilated and murdered, untold property has been destroyed and the economic prospects of 23.5 million people, the population of the six Yugoslav republics, has been ruined in an explosion of bitterness and anger that has defied every standard of humanity, reason and common sense.    Now, the south Slavs -- the Serbs and the Croats, the Macedonians and the Montenegrins, the Bosnians and the Slovenes -- stand once again at a crucial juncture, at a point where they must choose between renewed immolation or the recognition that the history that cast them together a millennium ago offers no sustainable alternative to working out a future in peace.

A Chance to Say Yes or No to Fresh Disaster

  The Potter Building, now a 41-unit co-op with ground-floor commercial tenants that fronts on Nassau Street (Nos. 139-145), Park Row (Nos. 35-38) and Beekman Street (Nos. 2-8), has stood as an 11-story testament to terra cotta since 1886.    To preserve that image, a facelift, costing more than $1 million, is in progress behind orange netting that is draped over part of the Beekman Street facade.(In the afternoon, the screen catches the shadow of the twin-spired Temple Court building across the street.)

POSTINGS: $1 Million Facelift; Preserving the Terra Cotta

WHEN Mattatuck Community College opened in 1967, its hallmark was access. The college in Waterbury was founded on a commitment to open admission, to education at a price so affordable that no student would be shut out for lack of money. Now the college's 25th anniversary celebration is bittersweet.

"We are very concerned by the prospect of the closing of the open door," said the college's admissions director, Louise Summa.

Public Colleges Face Bitter Economics Lesson

  With his sharpest attacks yet, former Senator Paul E. Tsongas is battling to contain Gov. Bill Clinton as the race for the Democratic nomination roars toward the Southern-dominated primary extravaganza known as "Super Tuesday."   On the final weekend before 11 states vote in primaries and caucuses, producing more than a fifth of the pledged delegates to the Democratic National Convention, Mr. Tsongas and Mr. Clinton engaged in a bitter exchange over who was distorting whose record.

March 8, 1992

Headlines from March 8, 1992

The Persistence Of Inequality

FINDING MR. RIGHT: Presidential Politics; In Elections as in Romance, It's Often a Matter of Chemistry

How a Teacher and Her Class Landed Their Biggest Catch

Iraq Outwitting Bomb Inspectors

POSTINGS: Riverside Drive's Wall; Restoring by the Numbers

Billboard 200

Ropin' The Wind

Dangerous

Nevermind

No Fences

Time; Love And Tenderness

Historical Context for March 8, 1992