January 7, 1996

ARE any mutual fund investors unhappy? Maybe a few who made big bets last year on foreign markets or gold. But 1995 was one of the best years of the last decade for United States stock and bond funds, leaving most everyone to count their profits. And those who invested aggressively were swimming in them.

IF the movie "Network" were being remade in 1996, the writers would be well advised to modulate the scene where Howard Beale, the messianic anchorman, implores discontented citizens to shout from their windows. In the updated version, Mr. Beale's call-to-arms might be: "I'm mad as heck and I'm not going to take it anymore!" As the curtain lifts on an uncommonly consequential Presidential campaign season, voters, like an unappreciative audience, are still hissing. They are still cross. They are still cranky. But the raw, tomato-hurling fury that has characterized and transformed modern American politics, and brought a self-described revolutionary named Newt Gingrich to the center of the national political stage, has subsided a bit.

FOR A MOMENT -- THE MOMENT OF THE verdict in the O. J. Simpson trial in October -- white America discovered race difference. Film and photographs of reactions to the words "not guilty" proved that blacks and whites don't see things the same. Troubled citizens spoke in shock -- on televised "town meetings" and call-in radio shows, and in letters to the editor -- about the gap between the races. "As blacks exulted at Simpson's acquittal," wrote Henry Louis Gates Jr. in The New Yorker, "horrified whites had a fleeting sense that . . . blacks really were strangers in their midst." Why are blacks and whites so divided? Repeatedly posed, this question was nevertheless vacuous. What needed serious inquiry were other questions. Why are whites so dim about the division between the races? What forces, what processes, lulled white America into assuming that blacks and whites were ever on the same page?

49ers Dethroned

Wrathful cold and sadistic winds imposed their icy will across the New York region yesterday, breaking low-temperature records from Newark to Syracuse and turning some main streets into ghost towns as all but the hardiest souls huddled inside. Emergency medics reported dozens of cold-related calls, homeless people overflowed shelters into daytime drop-in centers and meteorologists predicted worse to come: a blizzard expected to hit the New York area by tonight and possibly dump as much as a foot of snow on the city.