Cobb is a woman of impressive dueling credentials — a high-tech consultant who’s also a theological scholar. Her need to “reconcile technology and spirituality … to go inside, uncover the details of that connection,” gives her a healthy respect and skepticism for both worlds. She’s neither a rah-rah technophile nor a hair shirt-wearing hermit. But is that enough? The conundrum of the existence of a universal architect is one that history’s greatest minds haven’t been able to resolve. What hope then is there for someone like Cobb — of whom it may be charitably said that she remains an intellectual heavyweight in training?

More damning still, Cobb doesn’t even seem to be truly trying, substituting factoids for ingenuity. She bangs out truckloads of reference points — synthetic evolution and artificial intelligence and virtual reality — liberally smattering Eastern and Western lore throughout the prose along the way. Yet, ironically for a book about the melding of two disciplines, very little seems to tie together. What Cobb may have hoped would be an overwhelming body of diverse evidence amounts instead to a messy stew of unrelated information, drowning in a sauce of turgid jargon. The exhausted reader is left in the end not with the great “Aha!” of epiphany but with the stoned, 3 a.m.-in-the-dorm-room feeling of quiet bafflement. How else can one respond to declarations such as “Within a holoarchy, holons emerge holarchically” but with a resigned shrug and a maybe a doleful “Say what?”

And that’s a big part of the problem with “Cybergrace” — the head-scratching dryness of it. Cobb may have spent the better part of her career around words, but the double-threat disciplines of high tech and academia are rarely conducive to the development of a gripping writing style. At its best, the book is an ungimmicky, rational contemplation of a broad, serious subject. At worst, it’s a soporific foray into the world of superscripts and ibids.

Cobb’s logic is harder to follow than the trials of Lot: She just keeps throwing examples and theories against the wall, assuming something’s eventually got to stick. Is the fact that Big Blue’s ultimate triumph against Kasparov came not from a faultless, mechanical move but from an inventive, beatable one proof of the “hand of God”? Or is it just evidence that a machine can emulate the mind of man?

Perhaps the last person on earth to have a clear sense of who God is would be a divinity student, but Cobb’s lack of a coherent vision of the book’s title character ultimately makes her text look like so much mental pussyfooting. It’s as if someone tried to write “Moby Dick” without being reasonably solid on what a whale is. Maybe God isn’t so much a creator as a shaper of life, and we can prove it by this! Or maybe God is part of every living thing, and we can prove it by that! And here’s a story about robotics thrown in for good measure!

Cobb gamely strains to cover all the intellectual bases, going so far as to admit at one point her discomfort with using the very word “God” (she later half-jokingly refers to the “big transcendent computer in the sky”). Her anything-and-everything attitude may make her belief in a higher power more palatable to a variety of believers and non-believers, but it also washes out a good deal of the vitality from a provocative subject matter. And it’s pretty tough to know whether to agree or disagree with Cobb’s analysis when she won’t just strike her flag in the sand and say where she stands.

She does drop a few hints here and there. For example, while Cobb alludes to a strong if questioning Judeo-Christian bent, she still feels the need to give gentle nods to Eastern traditions. She uses the story of the Hindu god Indra as a metaphor for the Net and pats it on the head as a “lovely myth.” But she tells the parable of the seed and the good soil as a solid example of evolution in action, and doesn’t even feel the need to mention the story’s New Testament origins. She devotes a tenderly written subchapter to French cleric Jacques Gaillot’s online bishopric Partenia, but tempers her recollection of a Hindu ceremony in India with lip-biting resentment over the travails she had to endure in order to witness it.

Cobb, with her obviously sincere (if multitentacled) respect for the subject matter, may have her heart in the right place. Her brain and spirit may even be close behind. Early on, she speaks convincingly of her desire to fuse her two passions, to prove that the divine and the digital are more than just parallel worlds, running close together but never touching. Her belief may even have merit: When she points out that the word for religion comes from the Latin for “to connect,” it’s a reminder how interactive prayer and ritual are, and how creative and profound the world of technology can be. Unfortunately, her hopefulness translates itself here into a jittery academic eagerness that will never be mistaken for deep spiritual wisdom.

Whether God is in the computer is still anyone’s guess. But if he is, he probably won’t be discovered by such strenuous multitasking.

Belfasters, in war or peace one of the most extroverted and friendly urban populations anywhere, appeared to be enjoying their city with gusto, gleefully driving through that summer’s spectacularly Mediterranean weather on downtown streets that only months earlier had been a labyrinth of barricades and police checkpoints. Jokes abounded about how the Royal Ulster Constabulary, interrogation artists who had distinguished themselves as compressors of skulls and testicles, were now self-consciously shuffling around like beat cops, pointing out faulty taillights and writing parking tickets.

This charming picture of lethal enforcers suddenly beating their Heckler and Koch machine guns into ploughshares was, however, far away from reality. While tourists were busy discovering the delights of the newly relaxed-looking six counties and journalists ceasing to call Belfast’s Europa Hotel the Beirut Hilton, the RUC was still making arrests the old-fashioned way. As civil rights lawyer Rosemary Nelson was told when she filed a criminal complaint against an officer for injuries inflicted on a client while in custody, “We’ve been doing whatever the fuck we want for 30 years, and 30 years from now we’ll be doing the same.” Another Nelson client, Michael Carragher (whose brother Fergal had been shot dead at a checkpoint), was beaten so severely while detained in one of the RUC’s infamous “holding units” that the doctor who examined him told the interrogators that Carragher needed immediate hospitalization. The doctor’s plea was ignored.

Nelson has filed thousands of criminal complaints against the RUC on behalf of such clients, and every one has been thrown out (though civil courts pay out huge damages daily for the same claims). She has received death threats from the RUC, and lies in bed at night wondering if her three children will witness what the children of her fellow human-rights lawyer Pat Finucane did: their parent murdered in a spray of death-squad bullets as the family sat down to dinner. After all, an RUC officer had predicted Finucane’s death a few weeks before it happened.

It is for such reasons that Friday’s cross-border referendum on the historic Northern Ireland peace accord is an occasion for vigilance as well as for hope. The agreement provides for a democratically elected Northern Ireland assembly; a North-South council of ministers empowered to create cross-border policies in such areas as education, environment, social welfare and economic development; possible early release for prisoners affiliated with Sinn Fein and those loyalist parties that sat at the negotiating table; the relinquishing by the Republic of Ireland of its constitutional claims to Ulster; demilitarization on all sides, from the British army to the loyalist and republican paramilitaries, within two years; and restructuring of the police.

However, these unprecedented fruits of cooperation could fall apart from within, Nelson told me recently, because “there’s very, very little focus on human rights, and I don’t think a political settlement can exclude human rights abuses.”

While the Belfast Agreement mandates police reform over two years, there is no reining in of the broad repressive powers granted the RUC. As Nelson points out, “When someone is picked up by the RUC and taken to a detention center, the right to a fair trial dies right there.” A person can be detained up to seven days with no charges preferred and can be deprived of legal advice for 48 hours. Interrogations often continue day and night, with legal counsel barred from the proceedings. And under the
Criminal Evidence Order, a client’s right to silence can be used in court to corroborate any evidence the police present.

In the weeks leading up to the accord, evidence of the full range of RUC abuses began to emerge. In a report to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, the U.N. rapporteur to Northern Ireland, Dr. Param Cumaraswami, described how the civil and political rights of RUC detainees were systematically suspended. In particular, the U.N. report cited the degree to which lawyers for nationalist political prisoners are targeted by the RUC for harrassment, surveillance and death threats.

Coming on the heels of the U.N. report is a book called “The Committee,” by Irish investigative reporter Sean McPhilemy. The book, published in the United States by Roberts Rinehart, is an expansion of a 1991 British television documentary and it reveals how high-ranking RUC and British Army officers, along with Ulster Unionist businesspeople, clergy and politicians, worked together to select nationalist targets for assassination by loyalist hit men.

Whether and how far the RUC should be reformed is one of the most contentious issues in the referendum campaign. Nationalists, who for years have been plastering the North with signs reading “RUC: 93 Percent Protestant, 100 Percent Loyalist,” see no solution short of disbanding the RUC and building an entirely new police force. Unionists largely believe the RUC to be an effective bulwark against
terrorism. Many “no” votes in Friday’s referendum are expected to come from Unionists who fear that the RUC is going to lose not only its recognizability but even its name. Ronnie Flanagan, chief constable of the Royal Ulster Constabulary, recently enthused to London’s Daily Telegraph that “it makes us proud” to have “a title conferred by royal charter. There are
few policing organizations in the world that enjoy that privilege.”

Flanagan is also bucking any suggestion that former paramilitaries might be allowed to join a newly configured police force. This is as
unrealistic as it is shortsighted: Apart from the violence emanating from “The Troubles,” the streets of Northern Irish cities have been and continue to be astonishingly safe — and the credit for this goes not to the RUC but to the paramilitaries who constitute the grass-roots law enforcement in their respective communities.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair recently made a move that may help precisely because it provides an equal-opportunity irritant: He named Chris Patten, Britain’s final governor in Hong Kong, as head of an independent body looking to reform Northern Irish law enforcement. Patten is a former Conservative Party MP, so it’s hard to imagine a large nationalist constituency cheering his appointment. But Unionists could find as much to
be worried about: Patten is a Catholic, who as a junior minister to
Northern Ireland once supported the predominantly Catholic Derry City Council’s shortening of its name from Londonderry. And there are other factors that make him an interesting choice: While Patten had the thankless job of lowering the British flag on Hong Kong, he did so only after instituting wide-ranging democratic reforms there that infuriated Foreign Office mandarins who’d been accustomed to running the island like
a fiefdom.

But the huge task of transforming the notoriously sectarian RUC into a representative, accountable policing body with widespread community support will require more than the unusual talents of a maverick Tory Catholic. There will need to be a vigorous international presence, even though many Unionists still
object to any such idea as “outside interference.” They might want to look to South Africa, whose relatively rapid evolution to postapartheid policing required not only considerable outside financial support for training purposes but also
community-policing expertise from the U.S., Japan and elsewhere. Nor was the Mandela government too proud to call upon outside civil liberties scholars to help rewrite South Africa’s criminal laws.

The good news about Northern Ireland is that the 30-year-old war appears to be over. While there will likely be further deaths and acts of destruction caused by the marginalized rejectionist fringes on each side, the Northern Irish people, Protestant and Catholic, are overwhelmingly opposed to a resumption of war.
Recently, when the Protestant demagogue Rev. Ian Paisley tried to address the international press corps about the evils of the settlement, young and middle-aged loyalists drowned out his hellfire rhetoric with shouts of “Dinosaur!” and “You sent one generation of loyalists to prison, you won’t be sending another!”

The sense on the streets of Northern Ireland
is not only that a settlement is a good thing, but that citizens at the grass roots are confident they can sustain it. That feeling will remain only if the day-to-day justice issues are dealt with intelligently and swiftly. If it remains business as usual at Royal Ulster Constabulary headquarters, and Rosemary Nelson’s clients continue to emerge battered and bloody from police interrogation, then the euphoria and the hopes will quickly evaporate.

Behind us is a rocky place filled with misunderstandings. On her part, there was a blind desire for her son to marry a Jew, an inability to view me whole. My own movement to forgiveness and understanding has been slowed by an assumption that I know what I need to know about Judaism. Littered between these two stubborn positions lies the residual guilt of the Holocaust, coupled with a murky, groping understanding on both of our parts of what it means to be a good mother, a good daughter. I’m not sure whether the stark and horrifying tragedy of the Holocaust or the centuries-old wounds between mothers and daughters is the larger gap.

Before our engagement, Andrew’s mother had been neutral to me, simply telling him to be careful “not to fall in love” when we announced our plans to move in together. But things grew progressively nastier after our engagement, after I was no longer a phase. The months prior to our wedding, three years before the trip to Israel, was the period of the Phone War. Many ugly, tearful words were volleyed across late night, cross-country phone connections — “You fucking Jew!” being the most outlandish of all. This is the phrase with which Andrew’s mother predicted I would one day degrade him. How or why these words would come to fall from my mouth she did not foretell.

So stunned were we by her prediction that we needed to make the words our own. “Oy, you fucking Jew,” I say to my husband now with a Woody Allen-delivery. Imbued with the silly sweetness of our prenuptial bliss, with our retreat from maternal fury, the phrase makes him giggle. I have, with great practice and, finally, habit, achieved just the right breathiness to my oy, just the right exasperation, as though I’ve walked six miles to the butcher and Mrs. Kline bought the last chicken.

She said other things as well, all cruel and absurd, all spewing forth from a deep shock that her only son — a son who led the entire service of his Bar Mitzvah in near-perfect Hebrew — was marrying a WASP. With the grace of hindsight, I realize that none of this was about me. At the time, however, I was deeply hurt that she didn’t like me, that she was uninterested in getting to know me. I wanted her to like me for the qualities it seemed we shared: interests in feminist health, travel and good books. This was all much more relevant than my ties — illegitimate at that — to the last kaiser of Germany. For me, the books piled next to one’s bed, the articles cut from the paper, speak legions; where or if one worships says relatively little. But my world spins on a different axis than hers.

So I shifted my attention to a more superficial, yet still winning, list of traits for which I might gain her approval: a balanced checkbook, respectable culinary skills, post-collegiate degrees and child-bearing hips all ranked high. Besides, I argued, it wasn’t as though Andrew had been dating a long line of nice Jewish girls and then I’d come along to sully matters. His mother seemed oblivious to the fact that many of her Deadhead, old-time-musician son’s recent dalliances had been saturated in patchouli oil, ensconced in beads and toting a mountain dulcimer on their way to a square dance. They would have turned many heads at the local shul — and not because they weren’t God’s chosen. But me? My hair was too blond, my forefathers too German (we didn’t even tell her about the kaiser), and I didn’t know gefilte fish from lutefisk.

I didn’t want to be suckered into all the hype about in-laws and Jewish mothers. Mother-in-law. The word itself is such a stereotype, not at all nice.
It’s legal, clinical. Like a prenuptial agreement, it bespeaks an arrangement of necessity, not love. Besides, I thought, who needed such terminology. This wedding was about Andrew and me, not our families. For some time, I had been imagining our lives unfurled and intertwined with all the good stuff there, like some peopled version of a Pottery Barn catalog. To be
fair, I’d throw in some late-night tax preparation or a colicky baby. But never did I envision a mother-in-law, certainly not one so formidable.

- – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – -

Andrew’s mother’s complete rejection of me and our plans to marry was horrible and painful. It put a stress on my relationship with Andrew at a time when I just wanted to be agog with happiness. It made me hate someone in an all-consuming and exhausting way that surprised and saddened me. Her decision, seemingly overnight, to publicly embrace me and pretend the whole thing never happened was just as baffling. Although it was a pattern Andrew had long predicted, there was nothing in my Annie Hall-like past to prepare me for this biblical sway of emotions.

I still can’t say for certain what happened, but after nearly six months of phone wars or stony silence, she contained her fury. Perhaps she just tired of the fight or began to fear doing further damage to her relationship with her son. Of course I didn’t trust her; none of her seemingly kind and apologetic toasts during the wedding, none of her hugs, felt right to me. What else did she have up her sleeve? My friends and family didn’t trust her either. None of them could place this pleasant, youthful woman with the atrocities they’d been hearing.

Supportive and loyal, many of them still view her as the enemy, inquiring about “the mother-in-law” in tones reserved for particularly horrible landlords and employers. They are shocked, disbelieving even, when I tell them that things are wonderful between the two of us. Since the wedding we have forged a happy relationship. I truly love Jan now and enjoy our frequent phone conversations. Slowly, gently, we have tiptoed toward each other, plying a bond. Last winter she came to visit us in Iowa — my hometown, my birth state, the closest thing to a chosen land that I know, but a place no one in Andrew’s family seemed able to locate on a map when we’d first told them we were moving here. She was open-minded enough to enjoy herself, to like the place and sing its praises. This scored points with me.

Despite this firmer ground, Jan’s proposal of two weeks in Israel sounded interminable, a bit too much togetherness. The occasion was a cousin’s wedding, but really it was the final and ultimate olive branch, a time for Andrew and me to spend with her, uninterrupted by the hassles of holidays. Still, it was Israel, the seat of Judaism, loaded with everything that had originally come between us. “Why couldn’t your family live in Provence or northern Italy?” I moaned. Because, Andrew explained, you can’t suffer enough in those places.

Jan’s sister’s household, about a half hour outside Tel Aviv, was in chaos when we arrived. People were stumbling in from all parts of the U.S. A plane carrying the groom’s twin brother had been delayed by a monsoon in India. Most stressful of all was the anticipated arrival of the bride’s family, expected from the city prior to the beginning of Shabbat at sunset. Dogs and toddlers were underfoot. Boxes of produce, bags of bread and crates of wine formed a maze in the small kitchen. Every bedroom, den and sofa in the modest house was spoken for, and there was a perpetual line for the two bathrooms.

Although I was nervous to be the outsider in this hubbub — the non-Jew, the one who married in, the only person who had never before been to Israel — I soon realized that no one would have time to notice my differences amid the commotion, and I decided to make the most of it. Agreeing to go to the synagogue with Jan for evening services, I changed out of my T-shirt and into the obligatory skirt and hat. We walked down the dusty, cactus-lined roads of the small farming community, accompanied by neighbors who greeted each other in the heat of the week’s end. Our destination was not the stained-glass, beautiful building I’d expected — a relic of a vanished Europe — but a squat, utilitarian structure adorned with an overflowing dumpster. Once inside and situated upstairs with the other women, Jan explained everything to me. At first I stiffened, expecting the voice of a converting zealot or maternal guilt. Instead, she spoke as a fellow traveler who’d been here before. Her words were marked by practicality and good humor, dotted with commentary about the beauty of a particular song or the hypocrisy of the women-upstairs arrangement.

By the time we walked home, the night was fully settled. It was after 9 and the air had cooled. The Shabbat meal awaited us. Seated across from the bride’s family, I tensed at their disapproving looks. Although I’d been through several such meals in the States, I worried that I wasn’t keeping pace. Letting down my self-reproach, I realized it was they who didn’t know the schtick. They were secular Jews, and the prayers and order of the evening were a mystery to them. For the first time, they were seeing the family, the religious practice, the depths of belief into which their daughter was marrying. Their discomfort was palpable, especially to me.

Over the course of the visit to Israel, Judaism began to appear to me on a continuum. The bride’s secular parents, like many Israelis, existed on one end of the spectrum. The ultra-Orthodox neighbors with their covered heads and starched white shirts were at the other pole. In between were all sorts of metamorphosing points, people in flux with their spirituality. Even Andrew’s Israeli cousins were spread wide across this map. Aliza had just returned from India, where she’d lived on an ashram and studied a form of Buddhism; still, she insisted in the clear, sure tones of a 23-year-old that she could never marry a non-Jew. And Avi, the handsome twin brother, had studied in the States and now lived in Moscow, a seeming sea of cultures and beliefs.

And then there was Jan. During one tearful phone call prior to our wedding, Jan asked Andrew whether I would convert. This seemed ludicrous to me not only because I didn’t believe in a Judeo-Christian God but because converting inferred that I had something from which to move. As a former boyfriend’s father — a crusty Irish Catholic judge who obviously thought little of me — had derisively put it, I was a secular humanist. Jan cared little for the fate of my soul at that time; her concern was for her unborn grandchildren. If one plays by the rules, children aren’t Jewish unless their mother is. She hadn’t come this far in life to see her line broken by a faithless daughter-in-law.

What’s the big deal, I’d wondered. Nonsensical rules and regulations just so someone can wear the mantle of Jew. From my American vantage point, so not entangled by thousands of years of history, this seemed ridiculous. But Israel made me think differently. Of course there is its antiquity, oldness on a scale I couldn’t grasp. What really helped me to comprehend Judaism and its pull for my mother-in-law, however, was not a visit to the Wailing Wall or any temple but shopping in a Tel Aviv supermarket near midnight on a Saturday.

The place was packed. I’d only seen American markets approach this level of turmoil on the day before Thanksgiving. “What is going on?” I asked the bride-to-be, who seemed oblivious to the throngs. “Shabbat is over,” she answered. “People go out now.” Even from her non-practicing perspective, this made total sense. As I tried to avoid the oncoming, food-laden carts, it dawned on me: Here’s an entire country of people held together not so much by a religion but by a shared history. Pulled apart and beaten down, they’ve managed to stay intact, even if that means grocery shopping together in the middle of the night. I know it sounds absurdly simplistic now, but removing the Old Testament from the picture and focusing instead on these nocturnal shoppers helped me make sense of the etymology of Jan’s desire for a Jewish daughter-in-law. There even seemed to be some rightness in her stance.

But she had moved far beyond her original disapproval of my religious roots or lack thereof. At her nephew’s wedding, she included me in every photo and regaled me with family tales. It didn’t bother her, or even occur to her, that I was the only non-Jew among the 500 guests. I gladly let her guide me through the ceremony, comfortable and happy to be alone with her as Andrew danced with his cousins. Together we watched the signing of the ketubah, the unveiling of the bride, the breaking of the glass.

During the ceremony, the couple stood under a chuppa — a prayer shawl that had been Jan’s father’s — held aloft by male friends and family. Many times over the course of the night I heard from different people how everyone in the family had been married under this same shawl. Everyone wasn’t really everyone since Andrew and I had wed under a canopy of trees with a fiddle band playing behind us and a Buddhist friend leading the vows. Whether this was a polite omission or an honest mistake I didn’t know, but the message seemed to be that with our mixed marriage and different ways, we weren’t quite family.

I was hurt because I wanted to be part of everyone. I too had moved a great distance over the course of 10 days. My outsider’s introversion had been transformed into a magical feeling that I was living in some Gabriel García Márquez novel. The characters were so fully drawn, the setting so rich, one couldn’t help but desire to step into the narrative. While not at all regretting my own wedding, I could finally grasp, without anger, Jan’s disappointment in that ceremony and in me. I told her such as we stood under a flowering tree, watching her sister’s family and their new in-laws tentatively embrace. “You had the most beautiful wedding ever,” she said, taking my face in her hands. “And you are the most wonderful daughter I could ever have gained.” She kissed me. We held hands and did not readily let go.

I wish that every failed relationship in my life could be mended as easily as this. I’ve never experienced forgiveness on this level and it’s hard to describe it without sounding like, well, a zealot. I suspect that with our newfound comfort Jan and I will experience other snags of familiarity. And the grandchildren threshold, full of possibilities for fresh misunderstandings, is yet to be crossed. For now, though, I am more than content to have made this journey around the world with her.

Of course, this happens to everybody. But somehow I thought that with all her stylistic flexibility, Madonna, like David Bowie before her, would be exempt from the process. And in some ways, thanks in part to all those costume changes, she is. Madonna is not quite yet a caricature of herself, unlike Robert Smith of the Cure, Boy George or Michael Jackson (all of whom also had hits in 1983); nor is she a somber and wrinkly dinosaur, like Neil Young, Bruce Springsteen or Bono.

After all, unlike those artists, Madonna’s contributions have been more than just musical: One way or another, she’s pretty much been directly responsible for the broadening of sexual mores in American media over the past decade, paving the way for things like the sight of Jimmy Smits’ butt on “NYPD Blue” and Ellen coming out of the closet, as well as the more sexually explicit cheerleading routines at football games and the blatant use of the word “penis” on television news.

Now some of those things are good, some are bad and most are fairly unimportant. But an enlightened individual can see the connection between those things and the fact that the general population today is less fearful and better equipped to confront without flinching things like AIDS, teen pregnancy, condom-use and abortion — and for that, Madonna should be proud. She always strove to be more than a pop star, and given that her chosen field of play has been dance-pop, the fact that she’s succeeded at all is a pretty awesome achievement.

People sometimes question Madonna’s input on her albums, citing the numerous musical collaborators cited on their sleeves as proof that she is merely some kind of manipulative conductor of other people’s talents. But Madonna must contribute something beyond mere vocals, because her body of work over the years is emotionally and artistically cohesive; it sounds like the work of one artist, and “Ray of Light” is no exception. That said, where Madonna has shown the most growth in the last few years has been as a singer. On a strictly technical level, her singing on “Evita” was wonderful, and on “Ray of Light” it’s even better, a pure and evocative stream of sound.

Produced by ambient artist William Orbit (who remixed “Erotica” and “Justify My Love,” in addition to songs by Peter Gabriel and Depeche Mode), the record seeks to push the bounds of electronica a bit — and does a much better job of it than similar efforts by U2, Bowie and the Rolling Stones, for whom “going electronica” meant “hire the Dust Brothers and be done with it.” Unfortunately, the ideas are much more interesting than the reality. Gone are Madonna’s usual indelible grooves and hooky melodies; in their place is a spooky amalgam of technical skill and sentimentality, a strangely inert combination.

“Ray of Light” is also clearly inspired by the trip-hop of Portishead and Sneaker Pimps, but where those bands match their detached musical vision with bleak, deadpan vocals, Orbit’s soundscapes don’t quite meld with the sweet, lyrical romance that is Madonna’s forte. The single, “Frozen,” is a good effort — and I appreciate her super-literal interpretation of trip-hop’s innate emotional coldness — but elsewhere, the concept falters. “Skin” and “Candy Perfume Girl” have disco backgrounds barely diluted by lots of dubby samples, drop-outs and sporadic acoustic guitar and string additions.

“Ray of Light” seems unlikely to capture the attention of those 15-year-old girls who haven’t really journeyed with Madonna beyond the “Material Girl” phase of her existence: It’s simply not upbeat enough. Moreover, it’s sentimental lyrics just miss being sophisticated enough for real trip-hop fans: “Give yourself to me” and “Freedom comes when you learn to let go” are pretty banal things to put into such eerie music. Likewise, “Kiss me, I’m dying” sounds like an outtake from a Garbage song.

But “Ray of Light” is certainly not garbage, by any means. It is a flawed but beautifully crafted piece of conceptual art, and it does have some highlights. One of the best songs is the title cut, which is sung in a much higher key than most of the other songs and thus lacks the pomposity that seems to be Madonna’s main contribution to the ambient genre. “Shanti/Ashtangi,” which uses Indian raga beats and Sanskrit, was inspired by Madonna’s newfound love of yoga (or perhaps a familiarity with the trendy band Cornershop), and despite its New Age affectations, it’s the song with the most compelling groove on the album.

That’s about as sexy as Madonna gets on “Ray of Light”; she has removed all mentions of earthly love as the wellspring of lust and passion and replaced them with more spiritual reflections on the Power of Love. But alas, these very reflections work to negate some of the best aspects of her art. “God has sent me a gift,” she sings on the LPs smarmiest song, “Little Star,” “of flesh and blood.” Such a corny sentiment seems terribly conventional — but then, despite her ability to piss off David Letterman, Madonna has always been kind of conventional at heart. Indeed, her success has lain partly in the fact that she’s never underestimated how easy it is to shock America. If she hadn’t combined her slight subversions with the conventional imagery of Catholicism, she’d never have gone anywhere at all.

Madonna also makes being a 39-year-old woman look pretty darn good. But that, alas, is not enough. To be a truly evolved human, Madonna would have to change mentally as well. According to her most recent Vanity Fair snow job, having a child has caused Madonna to reassess her values, a process that — according to VF’s unctuous reporter — emerges on “Ray of Light” as the inevitable “newfound maturity.” But Madonna’s insistence on finding herself proves to be a boring theme, and “Ray of Light” has an irritatingly saintly atmosphere. “When I was very young/nothing really mattered to me/but making myself happy,” begins, “Nothing Really Matters.” Guess what Madonna has learned? “Love is all we need.” There is also, she says later, “no greater power/than the power of goodbye.” Huh? “Mer Girl” is a lengthy and far too expository piece of writing in which Madonna twitters, “I ran through the forests/I ran past the trees/I ran and I ran/I was looking for me.”

If having a child has allowed Madonna to find herself, then more power to her. But sometime around 1995, the lady began to lose me. When she began blah-ing on at length about her great admiration for and identification with Nazi sympathizer Eva Peron, I started to feel a little queasy about her intellectual integrity. I really needed “Ray of Light” to be a good LP to put the lady back on her pedestal — but unfortunately, once that chink of doubt creeps in, it stays there, an entirely unwelcome guest. I’m not ready to recant on Madonna just yet; but I’m beginning to think that maybe, when it comes to pure pop, the 15-year-olds really do know best.

Apart from the domestic hurdles the proposed deal faces here, it could also be scuttled by America’s closest ally of all — Israel, which has formed a consortium with Russia to sell Turkey high-tech helicopters with no human rights strings attached.

The U.S. initiative reflects concern about the political and economic problems currently plaguing Turkey, which has served as a crucial Middle East staging post for the U.S. From Turkish bases, American warplanes patrol the skies over Iraq. Turkey is also the gateway to the oil-rich Caspian region of Central Asia, and is the geographical and cultural crossing point between the Islamic world and Europe.

While Turkey is one of the more democratic and economically powerful countries in the region, senior U.S. policy makers fear that the country’s progress is being undermined by its violations of human rights, especially toward its minority Kurdish population. It was this issue that prompted the European Union recently to slam shut Turkey’s entrance to the rich bloc of nations, prompting a sense of outrage and shame among Turks.

U.S. officials believe the attack helicopters may serve as a tempting carrot to induce Turkish Prime Minister Mesut Yilmaz to implement long-promised human rights reforms, including a halt to torture, the release from prison of critical journalists and opposition parliamentarians and an end to the state of emergency in the southeastern corner of the country, where the Turkish army has been waging a fierce war against Kurdish rebels for the past 13 years.

Turkey, eager to buy the U.S. helicopters, has pledged to meet the administration’s criteria for the sale. Two weeks ago, Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights John Shattuck, one of the architects of the initiative, flew to Turkey for further discussions with political and military leaders on the reforms and how the United States will monitor their implementation.

“There is a recognition on the part of everybody involved that Turkey’s human rights performance has got to be improved,” a senior administration official said. “It can’t be cosmetic.”

But some lawmakers, human rights groups and arms control experts are skeptical. Turkey has made such promises before, they say, only to ignore their commitments once they received American weapons. These critics are anticipating a bitter battle on Capitol Hill if American companies win the contract and the administration tries to push through the sale without substantive proof of human rights improvements.

As if to confirm their doubts, Turkish prosecutors recently ordered the
arrests of the popular mayor of Istanbul and the entire 57-member
leadership of the People’s Democracy Party, one of the country’s few legal
pro-Kurdish organizations, on charges of incitement. Late last year, the
courts outlawed the Islamic-oriented Welfare Party — which headed a
minority government for a while — as a threat to Turkey’s secular
tradition. Meanwhile, the army has continued its campaign against the
Kurds, imprisoning leaders and banning their political activities.

According to human rights activists, the military campaign in the southeast
has left more than 2.5 million villagers displaced from their
villages and thousands dead. The war also has drained the Turkish economy
and fueled the rise of anti-Western Islamic fundamentalism.

Administration officials do not downplay the risks involved with the
initiative. But they argue that a number of factors have come together to
make the administration’s initiative both timely and promising.

First, Turkey, a member of NATO and one of America’s closest allies in the
Middle East, has determined that it needs the helicopters to bolster its
aging fleet and already has issued its $3.5 billion tender, the largest
contract Turkey has ever offered.

Second, Clinton policy aides say, Turkey has indicated it would prefer to
buy the Super Cobra, made by Bell Textron of Fort Worth, Texas, and Apache,
produced by McDonnell Douglas/Boeing of Mesa, Ariz., partly because the
U.S.-made aircraft are considered the best, and partly because Turkey,
smarting over the rebuff from the European Union, does not want to give the
business to a European manufacturer.

Third, such a sale would deepen the political and strategic relationship
between Turkey and the United States, a development that has become more
attractive to Ankara since the E.U.’s rejection.
All these elements, together with Yilmaz’s public pledge to “bring human
rights in Turkey to the highest level,” have given the administration a
degree of leverage that it hasn’t had before, the officials say.

The administration first broached the offer last November, when Turkish
military commanders met in Washington with senior State Department and
Pentagon officials. Quoting Yilmaz’s pledge, the Americans said that in
exchange for improved Turkish performance in a dozen areas of human rights
concerns, the administration would permit U.S. companies to compete for the
helicopter tender. In addition to ending torture, restrictions on free
speech and the state of emergency in the southeast, the suggested list of
improvements also includes greater police accountability, reopening of
human rights offices, resettlement of villages and economic aid to refugees.

Within a matter of days, administration officials said, the Turkish
generals agreed.

Yilmaz followed up in December with a visit to Washington,
where the same list of concerns was presented to him. Pentagon officials
say the list was the only item on the agenda during Yilmaz’s meeting with
Defense Secretary William Cohen. When Yilmaz met later with President
Clinton, the Turkish leader went through the list again, pledging improved
performance in all areas. According to officials who were present at the
White House meeting, President Clinton replied, “We just want you to do
what you say you will do.”

On Dec. 23, the State Department granted a marketing license that allows
American companies to compete for the Turkish contract. Turkey is expected
to announce the winner in the spring of 1999.

That gives the Turks a year to prove they’re serious about improving their
human rights performance. Officials say the Turks have been made aware that
the final judge of their performance — and any proposed U.S. weapons sale
– will be Congress, which can signal its opposition to the sale within 30
days of its announcement. A two-thirds majority in both houses is needed to
override the president on the sale.

“The Turks tend to think our Congress is like their parliament, that when
push comes to shove, the government always can get a congressional stamp of
approval,” one official said. “That isn’t the case here.”

Indeed, opposition on Capitol Hill toward the administration’s initiative
is already building. One senior senatorial staffer questioned the sincerity
of the human rights component, saying it was “tacked on” to enable the
administration to give American companies the green light to bid on the
contract. “They’ll try to get the Turks to improve their performance, just
as they have in the past,” the staffer said. “But in the end, if there
haven’t been any improvements, they’ll just dream up some.”

Perhaps the strongest opponent of any arms sales to Turkey is Sen. Paul
Sarbanes, D-Md. In previous years, Sarbanes, who is Greek by heritage and
backed by the powerful Greek lobby in Washington, has held up several
proposed arms sales to Turkey, and congressional aides say he will fight
any helicopter sale as well.

“I can’t see any big weapons sales coming by that won’t encounter huge
opposition,” one aide said.

In an effort to garner support, Assistant Secretary of State for Europe
Marc Grossman and Shattuck held a briefing recently for human rights groups
and arms control experts, stating that Washington will be looking for
“significant progress in all areas over the next year.” But what, some of
the activists present wanted to know, constitutes “significant progress”?
Another major concern expressed by participants was how the administration
would enforce its pledge to monitor the use of the helicopters once
they were in Turkey’s hands. Administration officials admitted the details
had not yet been worked out and that some of the items on the list, like
the use-monitoring clause, could be “deal-breakers.”

Meanwhile, lobbyists for the aircraft industry are preparing to weigh in on
Capitol Hill, arguing that a rejection of the Turkish contract would cost
15,000 jobs and force companies like McDonnell Douglas and Bell Textron to
close down assembly lines. “If [the U.S] threatens to make them buy from
somebody else, then what they do is buy from somebody else,” says Joel
Johnson, a lobbyist for the Aerospace Industries Association.

Highlighting Johnson’s concerns, a new bid for the Turkish contract
recently came in from an unexpected quarter: a Russian-Israeli consortium
that is offering the Kamov KA-50 attack helicopter packed with
super-sophisticated Israeli avionics. Israel, which has won contracts to
modernize Turkey’s fleet of F-4 and F-5 warplanes, also offers financing,
which the United States does not. Some officials have expressed concern
that the Russian-Israeli bid could undermine the administration’s Turkey
initiative.

“You know they’re not going to bother the Turks about human rights,” said
Johnson, sounding wistful. “The Turks and the Israelis understand each
other.”