The first full week of February 1995 unleashed a portrait of America as hypnotic and threatening as the recent weather.
Two extraordinary trials in New York converged last week with the O. J. Simpson saga to bracket the nation in accounts of grisly murder and terrorism.
The public sacking of baseball continued as players and owners turned aside a presidential overture on the 100th anniversary of Babe Ruth's birth in Baltimore.
Blessed counterpoint arrived from space on that same day as Russian and American astronauts reached out to each other like figures on a heavenly Sistine ceiling.
It was a week of ambient bread and circuses: zany and horrific, diverting and distracting -- and perhaps properly so. The court cases are all too human and important.
Yet, one hardly had time to focus on the reform of government as we know it in Washington. Change and the promise of change there come almost as carefully packaged and hyped as the bicoastal trials, but the significance for America was far wider, apt to last for generations but somewhat less riveting as theater.
Events sent one scurrying for William Butler Yeats, the Irish poet whose descriptions of social turmoil are unmatched.
"Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world. . . .
"The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
"The best lack all conviction, while the worst
"Are full of passionate intensity."
* A man accused of shooting a half-dozen passengers on a Long Island Rail Road train last year defended himself in court, standing before the survivors of his rampage to ask a series of rambling questions which often seemed to have either no point or an obvious answer: For example, why had some of them pretended to be dead in the midst of his attack?
The witnesses said the experience of facing their attacker in such a venue was liberating. All of this was available on CNN.
* Mississippi state legislators passed a bill that would make caning legal. If some thought the image of white guards whipping blacks, or blacks beating whites, was a problem, the bill's sponsor said the job could be given over to Native Americans.
* In another New York courtroom, Siddig Ibrahim Siddig Ali out lined for federal prosecutors what the New York Times called "an audacious plan" to place bombs in the United Nations Building, the Federal Office Building in Manhattan, the Lincoln and Holland tunnels and the George Washington Bridge.
* At about the same time on Monday, the astronauts had their rendezvous in the void of space, loosing bonds not only of Earth but of politics and history. Following an initiative by President Clinton, these heirs to the Evil Empire would now collaborate with decadent Westerners to colonize space.
* The president could win support from the Russians, but Congress, the titans of baseball and the millionaire boys of summer had power. Republican leadership was looking for things to change, but settling the baseball strike, as Mr. Clinton asked them to help do, wasn't one of them.
* All of the sporting news was not bad, for Marylanders at least. The Terrapin basketball team, ranked eighth in the nation, defeated the University of North Carolina Tar Heels, ranked first.
A similar thing had happened on the Heels' home court when Len Bias was the Terps' star. He won that game almost single-handedly. A few months later, he died of cocaine intoxication in his dormitory room. A team, a state and a university fell into a decade-long swoon. The school has done much to recover since then, but nothing seems to work as well as beating Carolina.
* None of this, glorious or grim, competes with The Trial.
The astronaut rendezvous came at 2:20 p.m. Monday, a time when many Americans were watching Nicole Brown Simpson's sister testify in the double-murder trial of the former football star, who is said to be worth $10 million. (Will he be broke when it's over? Will he walk or fry? Do we believe yet that this is happening?)
The world we have is so much more dramatic than the making of a new one.
The U.S. Congress continues with an agenda of change more profound than any since the administrations of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. On Monday, the House voted to give presidents power to weed out and kill individual spending proposals.
Just as astute in packaging as your TV tabloids, sponsors scheduled the vote to coincide with the 84th birthday of former President Ronald Reagan, a champion of the so-called line-item veto.
rTC That change was promised in the famous "Contract with America" during the last election. The fine print is being written now while we wait for a glimpse of Johnnie Cochran, one of O. J.'s lawyers, in his gold-rimmed glasses and $2,000 suits.
D8 C. Fraser Smith is a reporter for The Baltimore Sun.