In Washington, President Barack Obama nominated Sonia Sotomayor to be a United States Supreme Court justice -- his first appointment to the high court. A few hours later, in San Francisco, a majority of judges on the California Supreme Court upheld Proposition 8 -- the voter-approved definition of marriage as the union of one man and one woman.

 While it had been widely expected that the president would appoint a woman to replace retiring Justice David Souter, Federal Appeals Judge Sotomayor was immediately described in the press and celebrated by Latino political leaders as the nation's "first Hispanic Supreme Court justice."

 More pointedly, if the Senate confirms the appointment, she will be the first unmarried (and divorced) woman on the Supreme Court.

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The fallacy of American capitalism is the equation of our economic status and our mental well-being. In a country where we routinely define ourselves by our job, an economic downturn must lead to a psychological downturn. Right?

It becomes oddly pertinent to observe that, as the country faces an economic calamity unequaled since the Great Depression, the employees of the failed brokerage houses and banks in New York are not clustered on the ledges of skyscrapers above Wall Street. (I am afraid if they were, the cry from below would be "Jump! Jump!") The pope of Ponzi, Bernard Madoff, is required by a federal judge to wear an ankle bracelet not because he is a danger to himself, but because the judge fears that Madoff will skip town.

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For a generation, the cultural and political left has, to its credit, forced institutional America to acknowledge complexity -- the nation's many colors and sexualities and ethnicities. The trouble with the left's sense of complexity was that it was dumped into a nondescript drum labeled "diversity," a word that meant less and less the more that it was used.

The immediate conclusion drawn by political analysts from Super Tuesday's big headline, "Hillary Clinton Wins Latino Votes," was that Hispanics refused to support an African-American candidate, and that all is not well among "people of color" (another cheap term from the multicultural dictionary).

In fact, people of color do not walk in lock step, are not necessarily united in their goals by their tincture or free from competition with each other. In fact, Hispanics, particularly immigrants -- legally or illegally here -- often find themselves, as newcomers, in fierce competition with working-class blacks and whites at the meat plant hiring office.

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Indeed, illegal immigrants, who were supposed to live a shadowy existence, belong to neighborhoods and to church congregations that were willing to stand alongside them. And most important: Many millions of illegal immigrants have U.S. relatives, sons and daughters, in-laws, cousins, grandchildren.

That family tie is the lesson of these parades. In Houston and Boston, in Phoenix and in San Jose, Calif., what we saw were not exactly "protests," nor were they political demonstrations, primarily. We were seeing huge family gatherings, celebrations of the clan.

In Los Angeles, I saw a veritable platoon of young women with baby strollers, the babies asleep or not, the women chatting, as though they were headed to the grocery store. I saw carnival balloons and comic oversize sombreros. I saw the Mexican Virgin of Guadalupe floating on somebody's shoulders. I saw the flags of several nations, often, of course, Mexico's. On one Mexican flag, an old man with an Indian face had taped the photographs of his sons, serving in Iraq.

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No one is a pope through and through. It is a role to be played in any of several ways. Karol Wojtyla took the role in a robust way, manly, more warrior than ascetic; never fussed with his skirts. He played the pope for the age of television, and fully one-half of the people alive on the Earth remember no other in the role. Cardinals and diplomats as stage supernumeraries; the planet his audience. He seemed never without an intuition of the camera. Kissing the tarmacs of airports!

Puritans, who do not trust the value of the theatrical, scorned the pop vulgarity of some of the trappings of his papacy -- the "pope-mobile," for example. It didn't matter. The pope-mobile served him, as did the pop music, the lights, the robes, the staging -- religious convocations modeled upon rock concerts. Indeed, the other night, Peter Jennings said of him, "He is not only the pope, he is a rock star." Jennings, of course, meant superstar -- the concept formulated by the pope's fellow Slavic genius, Andy Warhola.

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Like other Catholics, however, I have never regarded it as much of a secret that many priests are gay -- repressed, knowing, closeted, whatever.

Sociologists of the church have noted a growing proportion of gay priests, especially since the second Vatican Council. Sociologists tell us that the priesthood was often the refuge for the pious, troubled gay teenager. By becoming a priest, the boy could transform his guilt and disinclination for marriage into a life regarded as heroic by children and grandmothers alike.

In recent decades I have heard a growing candor, from priests I know, about their own homosexuality, tales of "special friendships" in seminaries and, ominously, stories of homosexual cabals in the Vatican or high church offices.

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Nowadays, I turn on TV and hear Americans gamely stumbling through the national anthem. At an intersection yesterday, I saw a Lexus carrying a socialite alongside a pickup with a kid who was absorbing the thump-thump-thump of rap music -- both cars wearing the Stars and Stripes.

Everywhere I walk in San Francisco, in shop windows, signs of uniform size, identical lettering, proclaim: United We Stand.

Odd. I had always assumed the reverse: That the strength of America derives from our variety and disparate opinions. Which is to say: Disunited We Stand.

In today's nation of wartime unity, television comedians, newspaper columnists, Berkeley politicians and everyday loonies -- indeed, anyone who might voice an eccentric opinion about Sept. 11 and our government's response -- have been called down by their fellow Americans as unpatriotic.

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All is not well along the spectrum of America's rainbow, despite the tendency of some on the political left to describe "blacks and Latinos" in one breath. From Miami to Dallas to Compton, blacks and Latinos are engaged in a terrible competition for the meanest jobs; for the security of Civil Service positions; for political office; for white noise. It is no exaggeration to say that African-Americans have paid the price of Hispanic numerical ascendancy. In Los Angeles, for example, the famous "black neighborhoods" have suddenly become Hispanic -- immigrant, Spanish-speaking.

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This week, in his first public ceremony at the presidential residence, Mexico's new president, Vicente Fox, apologized to his country's children who, for decades, have been scorned for going to the United States in desperate search of work and for survival. "The times are gone when Mexico viewed the emigrant and the emigrant's children with resentment," Fox said.

As a biblical confession, Fox's statement wasn't all that much. But in the history of Mexico, here was an important admission. For generations, Mexico has tended to cast itself as a victim in history and, thus, an innocent in the great world.

Mexico has most famously imagined itself in the figure of the Indian maiden, ravished by the 16th century conquistador. After independence from Spain, three centuries later, Mexico suffered various European invaders. Worse than any European was the United States -- the Gringo -- who absconded with half of Mexico's territory.

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Most Americans do not read the New York Times. But the Times is the newspaper that reflects and shapes elite liberal thinking, especially on the East Coast. So it is worth noting that, for the last six weeks, the Times has been running a series called "How Race is Lived in America," concerned exclusively with how "whites" and "blacks" perceive one another.

How should we expect the omniscient New York Times to settle all scores? Time and space forbid! But here we are in the new century and it is clear to just about everyone that our country has become Latino and Asian; and miscegenation among races is increasing. With citizens from every corner, America is creating a global society, the first in the world.

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Beyond this summer's baseball scores or news of PGA tournaments or tennis matches, something is going on in the world that newspapers and television sportscasters barely know how to report as "sports." But this week the wise guys with orange hair and blue sports jackets at ESPN and ABC Sports are heading out to San Francisco, to televise what they call "The X Games" -- a tournament of rock-climbing, bungee-jumping, sky-surfing, street luge and other death-defying exploits. It's an odd idea, since extreme sports have arisen in opposition to regular athletics.

In many extreme sporting events, it's true, there are celebrities, even organized competitions. But while other American kids might want to get into the NBA and make a million bucks, most persons who are addicted to extreme sports belong on a very different page of the morning paper -- not the sports page, but maybe the religion page, instead.

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Last week's midday murder of Paco Stanley, Mexico's beloved comic and TV talk-show host, forced millions of Mexicans to recognize reality: Mexico has become a violent, criminal society. Over and over, Stanley's bullet-ridden minivan was shown on TV.

Within a day, Mexico City's attorney general announced that Stanley (in whose face were embedded 26 rounds) was in possession of cocaine at the time of his death. Suddenly Mexicans were forced to wonder if Paco Stanley's real life was more complicated than his TV persona.

The disjunction between reality and illusion is not only a Mexican problem. While the U.S. Border Patrol has tried to stop Mexican peasants from slipping into San Diego, American teenagers have developed a taste for a style of professional wrestling known in Mexico as lucha libre. Luchadors specialize in sequins and bluster and high-risk acrobatics. And while some American nativists may still worry about Spanish becoming our second language, the more important language coming from Mexico is a surreal grammar of love. Or haven't you noticed? "Days of Our Lives" is suddenly starting to look like a Mexican telenovela with nuns and magic and the demonic -- all part of the drama of love.

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Immigrant Americans -- Ellis Island Americans -- spoke of Europe as "the old country," glad to be out of it. But it took only a generation for their sons and daughters to forget the reasons their parents left. By the 19th century, native-born Americans were feeling embarrassed by the rawness of this country. "All educated Americans, first or last, go to Europe," opined Ralph Waldo Emerson. And newly rich Americans went to Europe for the "grand tour" -- anxious for culture, to marry a title, learn how to read a French menu or, at least, to gaze upon something older than anything they might find in Pittsburgh.

This terrible, dark European century began, as it is ending, with bloodshed in the Balkans. Between then and now came the slaughter of a generation in the trenches of World War I, the Nazi ovens and Communist purges, to say nothing of English vs. Irish or Greeks against Turks or, today, skinheads in Bavaria prowling the streets for anyone who might not be Aryan.

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In recent years, Republican politicians and their partisans in the media have been flirting with the so-called religious right. They assumed that the future of their party and their own vain ambitions rested with the likes of Pat Robertson and Gary Bauer and Jerry Falwell. It was a foolish assumption.

Most of the GOP moralists were male, many of them were white, some of them spoke with Southern accents. On Sunday morning talk shows they wanted us to know what they thought about feminism and homosexuality and abortion. They promised salvation, something they described vaguely in pastel colors as an America governed by "traditional family values."

Americans -- to their credit, many Americans -- would have none of it. They recognized the politician and the media huckster for what he was. Voters in Alaska and Hawaii may not have been willing to legalize gay weddings, but a larger number of Americans did not need Trent Lott's preachments on homosexuality -- for example, his recent comparison of gay life to kleptomania.

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In recent years, Republican politicians and their partisans in the media
have been flirting with the so-called religious right. They assumed that
the future of their party and their own vain ambitions rested with the
likes of Pat Robertson and Gary Bauer and Jerry Falwell. It was a foolish
assumption.

Most of the GOP moralists were male, many of them were white, some of
them spoke with Southern accents. On Sunday morning talk shows they
wanted us to know what they thought about feminism and homosexuality and
abortion. They promised salvation, something they described vaguely in
pastel colors as an America governed by "traditional family values."

Americans -- to their credit, many Americans -- would have none of it. They
recognized the politician and the media huckster for what he was. Voters
in Alaska and Hawaii may not have been willing to legalize gay weddings,
but a larger number of Americans did not need Trent Lott's preachments on
homosexuality -- for example, his recent comparison of gay life to
kleptomania.

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A young man, Matthew Shepard, is pistol-whipped, tied to a fence and left to die in the Wyoming night. The girlfriend of one of the two men accused of the crime explains to a reporter that Shepard had embarrassed her boyfriend by flirting with him at a bar.

Let's assume that the flirtation actually happened. It's not, in any case, a new defense. It isn't the first time vacant-eyed youths have been excused of murder by juries by claiming an unwanted homosexual advance. The question left begging is this: What does it tell us about heterosexual insecurity that a gay wink in a bar would unleash such murderous rage?

For all our talk about sex, despite Sigmund Freud and Dr. Laura Schlessinger, despite our postmodern promiscuities and the porn industry that is our nation's mass entertainment, despite our jokes about our philandering president, we know surprisingly little about the mysteries of sexuality.

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That still seems to be the case. Referring to Clinton's latest alleged scandal, Molly Ivins, a feminist journalist in Texas, declares in her cowboy prose style: "I, for one, do not think the president's sex life has squat to do with his job."

I disagree. I think Americans had every right to know that President John F. Kennedy was having an affair with a Mafia moll. Kennedy's famous libido, so carefully protected by the Secret Service and by crony journalists, jeopardized the entire nation.

History is full of famous disparities. The cruel dictator dotes on his granddaughters. The eminent educator abuses his children. But such lives are gross distortions. For us, there cannot be this clear line separating our public from our private life. The kind of people we are in private should influence the kind of people we are in public. And vice versa.

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Americans, especially non-Catholic Americans, tend to admire this pope. A former Time magazine "Man of the Year," he seems exceptional among world leaders -- a man of fierce moral principle who speaks his mind. Americans, too, see him as the anti-communist pope, the Polish freedom fighter who provided critical support for the Solidarity trade union movement that overthrew the communist regime there.

But this same anti-communist pope has also been a fierce critic of capitalism -- particularly the cruelties and social Darwinism of the free-market economy.

The Polish pope belongs more to the communal East. After demonstrations against his papacy in Holland and Germany in the 1980s, one sensed his growing disdain toward the individualist and decadent West. Financially, the church worldwide is largely supported by the United States and by Germany, by dollars and deutsch marks. But the great strides for Catholicism are being taken in the Third World, in Africa and Asia and in a resurgent Eastern Europe. Not in the West.

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It was all typical of the way we have debated affirmative action for years. Both sides ended up arguing about race and ethnicity; both sides ignored the deeper issue of social inequality. Even now, as affirmative action is finished in California and is being challenged in many other states, nobody is really saying what was wrong with affirmative action: It was unfair to poor whites.

Americans find it hard to talk about what Europeans more easily call the lower class. We find it easier to sneer at the white poor -- the "rednecks," the trailer-park trash. The rural white male is Hollywood's politically correct villain du jour.

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Last week, however, the Mouse was a hero to many in what is loosely called Hollywood's "creative community." Editorial writers sang Mickey's praise too. "The Mouse Makes a Stand," thundered the New York Times in a lead editorial. ("The Walt Disney Company demonstrated that it would not accept censorship as the price of doing business in China or anywhere else." )

For weeks now, the rumor on the financial pages had been that the Disney Company was under pressure from Chinese government officials. Disney is the co-producer and the distributor of an upcoming film biography of the Dalai Lama being directed by Martin Scorsese.

As China looms on the horizon as the major economic force of the next century, Chinese officials are increasingly disdainful of American "cultural imperialism" -- versions of history that might differ from Beijing's. In sum, China regards its seizure of Tibet in the 1950s as an internal matter and sees any glorification of the Dalai Lama, Tibet's exiled leader, as provocative in the extreme.

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