“I think that all adds up to a need for investigation of collusion, antitrust violations and price gouging.”

Price gouging is certainly deplorable, but as a self-described environmentalist, Gore might see a silver lining in higher gas prices: They could help achieve what Congress has been loath to promote with legislation — reduced gas consumption by consumers, and hastened development of alternative-fuel vehicles that could cut emissions of greenhouse gases and other pollutants.

In fact, what’s most striking in the political debate over rising oil prices, which began last spring, is the consensus that it represents a national crisis. After all, the inflation-adjusted price of oil in the United States this year hasn’t come close to reaching a historic high: We hit that in 1981, when the price in current dollars was more than $2.50. Even now, most of us pay less than $2 a gallon for gas, while Parisians pay $5, and Londoners pay up to $8. Most of the world’s drivers fold themselves into light, tiny cars that get high mileage, and ration out their car trips frugally, for special occasions. Not us.

When oil and gas prices first began to climb early this year, Congress quickly piled on. Republicans wanted to repeal 4.3 cents of the 18.4-cent federal gasoline tax — which was enacted in 1993 thanks to Gore’s tie-breaking vote. The 4.3-cent increase, it should be remembered, was the legislative vestige of a failed administration effort to introduce an economy-wide BTU tax. Then Republicans remembered that the 4.3-cent tax funds highways, a popular pork-barrel outlet, and they had to shelve that plan.

Next, House Republicans tried to pass legislation forcing the president to cut foreign aid and military sales to countries that “fix” oil prices. But again they were neutralized by fellow Republicans, including colleagues from oil states, who kind of liked oil prices the way they were.

The convenient approach was the one finally settled on: find a foreign scapegoat. Republicans and Democrats could agree on one thing: the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) needed to lower its prices. (We may think of ourselves as democratic, but when the subject is oil, the rest of the world gets very little slack.) In the end, OPEC begrudgingly complied, but U.S. gas prices have stayed high, and in some places continued to climb.

Now it’s Democrats who are agitated about the high cost of gasoline, especially in the Midwest. According to the Washington Post, Democratic congressional leaders have warned Clinton and Gore that anger over rising prices could cost the party its efforts to take back the House and Senate. Among the responses considered: lifting clean-air restrictions in Midwestern states, and tapping into the nation’s strategic petroleum reserve.

And while Republicans have tried to use the issue to bash the Clinton administration, even some cabinet officials have acknowledged a problem. “We were caught napping,” Energy Secretary Bill Richardson has admitted. “We got complacent.”

Truth be told, the U.S. iscomplacent about oil, but not in the way Richardson acknowledged. When the price we’ve become accustomed to is threatened, we step in rather routinely. (Remember the Gulf War, anybody?) Instead, what’s complacent is the unthinking avidity with which we consume the stuff. In Europe, where global warming is taken far more seriously than in the United States, drivers might be forgiven for wondering whether they sacrifice so that their American counterparts can drive Excursions and Broncos and Suburbans — the SUVs that make up an ever-growing portion of the new cars sold each year.

In 1999, the sale of SUVs, pickup trucks and minivans — all conveniently lumped together as “light trucks” by the auto industry in order to avoid the higher fuel-economy standards that apply to passenger cars — amounted to 44.3 percent of all vehicles sold, up from 9.8 percent two decades earlier.

In the same two decades, average fuel economy of new cars sold in the U.S. stagnated, and has actually dropped from a 26.2-mile per gallon peak in 1987 to 24.4 mpg now. Thanks to SUVs, the nation’s new car fuel-economy average is the lowest since 1980, and we spew an extra 240 million tons of global warming gases into the air each year.

This has happened despite an array of technological advances — fuel injection, multivalve cylinders and direct overhead cams — that could have been applied to fuel efficiency but were instead used to propel heavier cars at faster speeds and with greater acceleration. SUV drivers have so far acted as if oblivious to the price of gasoline, even though they pay an extra $27.2 billion a year at the pump because SUVs use fuel less efficiently than cars.

Even now, there’s no solid evidence that oil-price increases have changed purchasing patterns (though Ford Motor Company’s recent announcement that sales of its Excursion have dropped is a welcome straw in the wind). And company president William Ford’s mea sorta culpa on SUVs last month — he warned that automakers were in line to be “the tobacco company of the 21st century” if they didn’t deal with the environmental and safety problems caused by the gas-guzzling behemoths — did not promise that his company would change its behavior. Still, it was a welcome outbreak of candor in a public dialogue about cars, oil and energy that is usually unencumbered by a high regard for truth.

As it stands, the United States consumes more than a quarter of the world’s production of oil, even though it makes up only about 5 percent of the world’s population. About a sixth of the world’s oil production is used just to power the American transportation sector. Our ever-increasing demand for oil has stretched U.S. refinery capacity to its limits, with the not-surprising result that prices have gone up. Ah, the irony: Just when the free market showed signs of functioning, American politicians got upset.

True enough, gasoline prices typically “rocket and feather”: They go up like a rocket, but drop haltingly, like a feather. It’s for that reason, among others, that a 4.3-cent gasoline tax repeal looked ridiculous. Take away 4.3 cents in federal taxes from the price of gasoline, and the price that consumers pay almost certainly will drop a lot less than 4.3 cents: The oil industry pockets the difference. Oil companies have certainly enjoyed a windfall: A study by Public Citizen released this month found profits on average jumped 300 percent in the first quarter of 2000 — not quite the 500 percent claimed by Gore, but a noteworthy number nonetheless.

But if higher prices accomplish what politicians refuse to consider — forcing Americans to limit their consumption and conserve gasoline — the trade-off is worthwhile. The unjustifiably low price of energy inhibits fuel cell, electric, solar and wind alternatives; and it doesn’t accurately reflect the $95 billion a year we spend on imported oil, or the $50 billion a year we spend on maintaining a military presence in the Middle East.

The biggest cost, however, is environmental. Global warming is a fact: The only argument left is to what degree humans have caused it, and right now most evidence points directly at us. We consume oil price news in the same broadcasts that tell us that polar ice is thawing, that flowers bloom earlier each year and that temperature changes are disrupting animals’ migration and hibernation patterns.

We focus on oil prices perhaps because we think possibly something can be done about them, and do not dwell on ominous and unprecedented events, like Hurricane Mitch, the North Carolina floods or the rise in summer heat, year after year, all across the country. We’re the “what-me-worry?” country, whose lack of leadership in environmental issues makes foreigners wonder why they make the effort to curb greenhouse gas emissions if the most profligate energy user in the world won’t. Here, it’s eat, drink and be merry, and the tune is infectious. Now Democrats are dancing to it, belying their claim to be the true environmental party.

None of this would be worth mentioning, of course, except that Skull and Bones is the unofficial subject of “The Skulls,” a movie to be released this month, and Bush has a leading role in the quadrennial national melodrama.

My Skull and Bones story first: Three decades ago, Yale senior societies struck many people as embarrassments, harking back to an all-too-proximate past when students formed clubs of 15 men to define ever more exclusive circles of the Soon-to-be-Great. All but one of the “above-ground” senior societies (in contrast to the “undergrounds,” which carried no prestige) were housed in windowless, fortress-like buildings that very much lived up to the term used to describe them: “tombs.” Of course, only members could enter them. At Skull and Bones, new members were even said to enact a rebirth ritual (suggesting that the heart of New Age thought in America may be considerably to the east of California). Then, through two meetings a week over the next year, with varying degrees of candor and calculation, they revealed the secrets of their predominantly uneventful lives, such as who they’d slept with and what their ambitions were. Wanting to be president was a common aspiration, though I suspect it hadn’t occurred to Bush yet.

Skull and Bones’ prestige rested on the illustriousness of its membership rolls, which included such luminaries as Henry Stimson, Herbert Hoover’s secretary of state; Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart; New York governor and diplomat Averill Harriman; Time magazine founder Henry Luce; “Hiroshima” author John Hersey; and William Sloane Coffin Jr., Yale’s outspoken chaplain. The place took itself so seriously that members were obligated to leave the room if a nonmember mentioned its name: huffy decampments by Bones men were occasionally witnessed. In addition, there were rumors: Skull and Bones’ assets made it the largest corporation in Connecticut, we heard, and each member was guaranteed a lifetime annual stipend of $20,000. Nobody knew whether the rumors were true, but they lent the place an aura of raw wealth and power.

I learned I was going to be “tapped” for Skull and Bones after being summoned to a meeting with Delaney Kiphuth, Yale’s director of athletics, of all things. I met him in his office in the cavernous Payne Whitney Gymnasium, whose dark neo-Gothic design seemed to echo the foreboding Bones motif. Kiphuth, himself a Bones alum, told me I would be among the first 15 members of my class to be asked to join. I asked him why I ought to. He said he couldn’t answer, as Bones men were not allowed to reveal any aspect of their proceedings. Instead, he produced a biography of Stimson, and pointed to a passage in which the great statesman extolled Skull and Bones. Because Stimson, a member of the Class of 1888, liked it, so should I.

On my way out, Kiphuth did something I thought was interesting: he told me I’d be tapped on the designated society “Tap Night,” 8 p.m. on a Friday late in April, unless I specifically told him I didn’t want to join. I was not so immune to the lures of prestige that I’d written off societies entirely — indeed, I was leaning towards Elihu, the sole above-ground society that was headquartered in an actual frame house with windows. Kiphuth’s statement sounded so opaque and inflexible that my immediate reaction was “Why bother telling him no?”

On the night before Tap Night, a fellow student who was a photographer freelancing for the New York Times told me the paper was planning a story about Tap Night, and asked if I knew of good photo prospects. I told him to come by my room a little before 8 p.m. He was therefore present when, precisely on the hour, I heard scuffling outside the door and then a loud knock.

When I turned the knob, the door instantly swung open and hit the wall with a smack. A hulking middle-aged man in a suit and thick glasses — he looked like a thuggish banker — burst across the threshold, followed half a step later by a guy I knew from Elihu, whom he had shoved out of the way. (I never did understand the point of that. Did he think I’d choose Bones because he got to me first?) As flashbulbs popped, he swung his arm across my shoulder as if bearing a cudgel, and yelled, “Skull and Bones, accept or reject?”

“Reject!” I answered. Nothing happened. The Banker stared at me as if I’d misread the script.

“Reject!” I yelled, louder this time. The Banker turned around and ran, apparently now focused on assaulting the next candidate on his list. My Elihu friend straightened himself out, took a deep breath, and, smiling, asked me to join Elihu. I never did find out the Banker’s identity, but the next day his face was on the New York Times’ second front page, in an action shot capturing him as he struck my shoulder while blocking his rival with his hip. “Skull was first,” the caption read, “but he chose Elihu.”

Bush, on the other hand, joined Bones. Bill Minutaglio reported in “First Son,” a George W. Bush biography, that Bush considered joining the evocatively named “Gin and Tonic,” but was swayed when his father, then a congressman, conducted the tapping ritual himself. The elder Bush’s membership in Bones probably was the sole reason George W. was chosen, since W.’s only distinction at Yale was that he was president of the Yale chapter of Delta Kappa Epsilon, the jock fraternity where the beer on the floor was an inch thick on Saturday nights. It was in that capacity that Bush presided over the coat-hanger brandings of 40 new frat brothers, and publicly defended the resulting half-inch-wide wounds as “only a cigarette burn.” Even discounting Bush, however, Skull and Bones apparently endured a lackluster year: The place was so unpopular that it allegedly tapped 60 or 70 classmates to secure its allotted 15 members.

Just as Skull and Bones reflected the declining fortunes of Yale’s traditional elite on an institutional level, Bush embodied the phenomenon in personal terms. His SAT scores (published in the New Yorker in November) were substantially below the class median; he unquestionably gained admittance simply because his father and grandfather were prominent Yalies. Yet ’68 was Yale’s first class with more public school than prep school graduates; the notion of developing “well-rounded” men of property and power, which had guided Yale’s admissions policy for generations, was being supplanted by a preference for the intellectually skilled. Bush was outnumbered. I doubt I ever exchanged more than a few words with him, but I remember the smirk: to me it bespoke a kind of complacency, a smug confidence that he belonged at Yale because of his family and prep school background.

Yale was a fascinating place, bursting with turmoil and innovation, yet Bush wasn’t interested. Astoundingly, last year he even told a Washington Post reporter that he was unaware of antiwar activity during his undergraduate years at Yale.

In his presidential campaign, Bush has argued that his behavior before his conversion to born-again Christianity is irrelevant, as if the over-40 Bush bears no relationship to the younger one. It’s an odd presumption, particularly in a campaign preoccupied with “character.” But more to the point, it’s mistaken. In his complacency and sense of entitlement, Bush strikes me as unchanged. At Yale, he drank and played intramural sports; now he has religion and plays intramural politics. He has run his campaign as if it were an afterthought, its result already having been decided by Republican kingpins and corporate donors.

What’s missing is the sense that Bush has overcome adversity or learned from experience. Until he became Texas governor on the strength of his modest charm, he was borne from one tottering business venture to another by investors who saw value in his name; his numerous setbacks carried no consequences. Now, not too surprisingly, his political maneuvering seems mechanical, unguided by conviction. Indeed, one reason John McCain’s biography strikes so many people as outsized is that Bush has no biography at all.

As Bush careens from “compassionate conservative” to “reformer with results” to defender of right-wing values, from embracing Bob Jones University (before the South Carolina primary) to saying “I didn’t mean it” (afterwards), he may be finding biography a more useful and elusive attribute than he’d assumed. But biographies, it turns out, aren’t inherited, and don’t come with membership in Skull and Bones.

The American Academy of Pediatrics has been widely criticized — most recently by the New York Times’ Gina Kolata, among others — for declaring on Aug. 3 that pediatricians should tell parents to keep children under 2 from watching TV.

My response to the recommendation is that it’s right-on. Why would any parent want to subject a 2-year-old to TV? Certainly nothing good will come of the experience, and a growing literature indicates that the impact will be negative.

There may be many reasons parents allow their children to watch TV: because they need a break from child-care duties, they need some time for themselves or because the child wants to. These are understandable reasons, perhaps even arguments against the AAP’s recommendations. Yet they don’t challenge the substance of the report’s conclusions. They just underline the lack of healthy alternatives our society offers overburdened parents.

The AAP has been criticized for failing to ground its findings in science, but that strikes me as a narrow view of science. It is true that no study reveals damage to toddlers who watch TV, but according to Dr. Miriam Bar-on, one of the statement’s authors, that’s chiefly because no studies have addressed the question. Even so, many other studies show the problems that befall older children who watch TV: an increased chance of obesity, poor school performance and aggressive behavior (in response to exposure to violence). Furthermore, the AAP based its conclusion on investigations into the brain development of children under 2. Recent research, the AAP said, “shows that babies and toddlers have a critical need for direct interactions with parents and other significant care givers for healthy brain growth and the development of appropriate social, emotional, and cognitive skills.”

Which is precisely what TV doesn’t do. Children under 2 are just beginning to walk, talk and think. For better and for worse, the world is open to them: smells, colors, textures all stimulate them. What they see is often near their fingers, since they can’t yet focus fully on the surrounding panorama. Put them in front of a TV, however, and they do none of the things their genes are prodding them to do. They’re not walking, they’re sitting. They’re not talking, they’re silent. And many studies of TV’s impact on children’s brains suggest that they’re not thinking, either. Maybe they’re mesmerized by the flashing of the cathode-ray tube or the rat-a-tat array of images; their brains revert to producing languid alpha waves, as the TV images change before the children have a chance to process them. In commercials, images change every two or three seconds; a toddler’s brain takes at least twice that long to process a single image. Younger children don’t even know that what they’re watching isn’t “reality”; it’s just another form of reality to them.

It’s a perversely seductive, irritating form at that, a kind of sophisticated sensory deprivation. Only two senses — sight and hearing — are involved, and they’re over-stimulated. Even then, visual stimuli, which arise from a meager three-color palate of phosphors, overwhelm auditory ones. Some people argue that toddlers learn language skills from television, but the evidence doesn’t support this. In an interview, Bar-on cited studies indicating that toddlers learn language when they interact with other humans, not TVs. Even children who watch “Sesame Street,” which purports to teach language, learn only if other humans are sitting next to them, repeating the TV words aloud. Of course, “Sesame Street’s” producers acknowledge that the program isn’t even directed at kids as young as 2.

Imagine the child who is being read to, compared to another who’s watching TV. One enjoys contact with another person; the other’s chief relationship is with a machine. (Even if caregivers try to discuss TV programs with their 2-year-olds, the effort is bound to be futile: According to Bar-on, children can’t even distinguish between commercials and regular programming until they’re 8.) The reading interaction proceeds at the child’s pace; the TV’s pace is imposed and often frenetic. One child hears the beauty of the language as invested by the reader; the other hears a disembodied, often cacophonous miscellany. And one has the choice of hearing the same story, over and over again, each time imagining between the lines, conjuring up a different aspect of its world, while the other’s programs are arbitrarily imposed. Books stimulate the imagination, while TV, the most literal of mediums, dries it up — that’s why we read the book before we see the movie.

It’s intriguing that the AAP’s policy statement has become a front-page watershed in the long-running argument over the worth of TV, for ultimately we’re faced with a question of values, a moral choice. Experts can try to measure the damage done by TV, but they can’t answer these questions any better than we can: Do we want to allow TV-land’s strangers access to our children’s minds when we so resolutely protect our kids from strangers in public? Do we mean to inculcate small children with the values of consumerism, TV’s overriding ethos? Or do we camp them in front of TV sets chiefly because we’ve given up on finding satisfaction — for them and for us — in the unmediated world?

In truth, for all its nearly platitudinous merit, the AAP policy statement strikes me as a political document, an earnest but calculated warning. Bar-on says drafting the statement was a two-year process involving “significant” peer review, “multiple” revisions, and approval by the academy’s board of directors, and she stresses that the AAP “really doesn’t want to make parents feel guilty.” Perhaps it’s for that reason that the statement advises them to expose children over 2 to “media education” instead of simply keeping the TV off.

But there’s nothing magical about turning 2: The problems that arise when toddlers watch TV merely deepen as they grow older. The only thing wrong with the AAP statement is that it doesn’t go nearly far enough.

These days, however, the Magazine is more likely to inspire neither anticipation nor dread, but indifference. It is a thinner and smaller product whose advances are overwhelmingly cosmetic: the advent of color, more white space, only one story per issue that jumps pages. However, while that one story may run 7,000 or 8,000 words, no other story is longer than 2,000. Some, like historian Jonathan Spence’s recent piece on China’s Three Gorges Dam, read as if truncated in mid-thought. And whereas the Magazine once routinely carried seven or eight feature stories of several thousand words each, it now typically runs only four, including all the stunted ones.

Increasingly, the Times Magazine looks like every other magazine issuing out of New York, with light matter at the front, features in the middle, and a short essay on the inside back page. The Magazine’s version of that essay is called Lives, apparently a synonym for “trifle.” Not long ago, for example, Lives readers were treated to a new mother’s 900-word exposition turning on her startling observation that she must carry more possessions when she travels with her baby son than she did when she was single.

Out of curiosity, I turned to microfilm to peruse a Magazine issue published when I was a college senior. The feature stories appearing on the date I chose at random, March 17, 1968, were all longer than any current Magazine story except for its cover centerpiece. Among them were profiles of behavioral psychologist B.F. Skinner, movie mogul Darryl Zanuck, German media magnate Axel Springer and comedian-turned-activist Dick Gregory. Ted Sorensen, once President Kennedy’s special counsel, wrote on the Vietnam War as an issue in the 1968 presidential campaign. Luigi Barzini, author of the bestselling “The Italians,” held forth on divorce in Italy. Altogether, the contents were far more substantial, if less flashily presented, than what the Magazine offers now.

The tribulations the Magazine has endured since then haven’t all been a consequence of editorial incompetence. Indeed, much of what befell it was outside the control of any editor. For one thing, the ’60s — civil rights, Vietnam, drugs and the counterculture — happened. Just as the Establishment itself began to crack and crumble, the Times’ stature as the reasoned voice of the Establishment slowly eroded.

The Magazine has also suffered from its peculiar relationship to its companion daily. Virtually every successful magazine reflects the vision of a dominant editor: Think of Harold Ross’ and William Shawn’s New Yorker, Arnold Gingrich’s Esquire or Helen Gurley Brown’s Cosmopolitan. (Even Louis Rossetto’s Wired, for all its garishness and enthusiasm for cupidity, embodies a palpable vision that gives the magazine coherence.) Times Magazine editors, on the other hand, have had to fend off interference from the daily’s managers while at the same time procuring an adequate budget and maintaining access to the Times’ reporters, the authors of many of their stories. Until the mid-’60s, the Magazine was insulated from some of these concerns by Lester Markel, the Times’ legendary Sunday section editor who ran his domain as an independent fiefdom, but since then Magazine editors have had an uneven record in this regard. Jack Rosenthal, the Magazine’s current editor, calls relations with Times reporters “an immensely complicated area.”

Rosenthal first edited the Magazine in the mid-1970s, then became an editorial writer and won a Pulitzer Prize in 1982. After a seven-year stint as editorial page editor, in 1992 he returned to the Magazine, which was mired in one of its periodic crises. Rosenthal won commitments from the Times’ publisher to spend more money and used the funds to expand the Magazine’s use of color and increase writers’ fees. At the same time, Rosenthal invited Adam Moss, former editor of the defunct New York weekly Seven Days, to help him rejuvenate the magazine. Moss’ title is editorial director, subordinate to Rosenthal, yet Rosenthal refers to Moss as his “complete partner.”

The 61-year-old Rosenthal and the 39-year-old Moss make an improbable team: One Times reporter calls their leadership “schizophrenic.” To many Times staffers, Rosenthal represents substance without flair, while Moss stands for flair without substance. Rosenthal is “square, heavy, plodding, while Adam is the New York club scene,” one says. The Magazine’s earnest but often leaden international stories suggest Rosenthal, while the confetti-like squibs in the front of the Magazine, the splashes of color, the bizarre fashion stories and the Lives column all evoke Moss. To be fair, both men warn that their contributions to the Magazine don’t adhere to this pattern at all, but they also decline to elaborate. What seems unquestionably true is that their collective product does not embody a coherent vision, but instead feels slight, as if their respective strengths cancel each other out.

It doesn’t take much imagination to deduce Rosenthal’s thinking: If the Magazine needed rejuvenation, why not hire people who could make it more hip, more “contemporary”? To that end, in the last few years he has recruited not just Moss but editors from the New Yorker, Harper’s, New York, Lingua Franca, Spin and Outside. One consequence is that within the Times, the Magazine is increasingly perceived as alien, less concerned with the newspaper’s journalistic traditions than with concocting a new formula, however facile, for success. A few months ago, for example, the editor of the Lives column told writers that he was seeking “celebrity” contributors, as if celebrity had not already displaced insight in one media venue after another. It’s as if, in its drive to be up-to-date, the Magazine has sacrificed its excellence, its concern for quality. The Magazine may have two heads, but it has lost its bite.