August 8, 1993

The Chicago Bears held their annual pig roast here in training camp last Wednesday. It was a day for the locals -- giddy each year over the Bears' presence -- to meet the players, take pictures, obtain autographs and enjoy a first peek at just how strong or weak their adopted favorites might be in 1993. No Bears were stuck with a fork and roasted over the coals along with the pig.

WHAT baseball needs right now is more Nolan Ryans and Robin Venturas and fewer Bud Seligs and Donald Fehrs and Richard Ravitches. What we need is more fights on the pitching mound and fewer threats in the perpetual labor struggle. Fehr and the Players Association are talking about throwing a pre-emptive strike in September, getting the owners during the pennant race before the owners get them next March. This would be dumb. This would be really dumb.

Union leaders are fighting for the Clinton Administration to include a role for organized labor in its definition of the workplace of the future, and to enact provisions that will help revive the union movement in the United States. But the Administration is not ready to go that far, even though labor gave strong support to Mr. Clinton's campaign last year.

THE margin could not have been thinner or the stakes higher. One switched vote in the Senate or the House of Representatives, and Bill Clinton would have lost his economic package and perhaps his Presidency. So all the bargaining in the great souk on Capitol Hill over the last three months, all the searching for backbone by legislators terrified of the electoral guillotine, clearly was worth it. Thursday's and Friday's gut-wrenching roll-call victories represented a down payment on Mr. Clinton's campaign and inaugural promises to get the country moving again. Failure would have made the President look impotent on the economic issues that stand quite clearly at the center of national politics. He has avoided that, although the urgency of taming the deficit has allowed him little room for the innovative programs and redirection of Government that he and his party are committed to seek.

AS the first officially designated drought since the mid-1960's sweeps across the Island, browning lawns and withering foliage, farmers on the still-agricultural East End are feeling the effect. They are feeling it in the neck, the back, the arms and the legs as they cart the irrigation equipment from field to parched field, and in the wallet for the extra hands needed to help, and for the fuel to operate irrigation pumps at peak capacity, often for more than 18 hours a day.