Evil

You didn't think Lewis Black was going to let convention week go by without stirring the political pot on his weekly The Root of All Evil show on Comedy Central. This week's topic: Red States vs. Blue States. The question: Which is the greater threat? Black's "history" of conservative and liberal geography is worth a tune-in by itself: "The Civil War ended in 1865, unless you live in the South." Unfortunately, I can't find another line to quote that wouldn't offend someone. But one of the jobs of a comedian, especially a political comedian, is to push the boundaries and make us uncomfortable enough to rethink our beliefs and prejudices - and cable TV is the place to do that.

PARENTS have long suspected that it's the evil, subliminal messages in rock lyrics that make teen-agers act the way they do.Receiving these messages is not easy. You have to play the record backwards at least 20 or 30 times before you start feeling weird, and that's assuming you've consumed at least a quart of strawberry wine.I remember, sort of, playing the Beatles' "Magical Mystery Tour" album backwards many, many times one night to find clues about Paul McCartney's "death." I was absolutely certain that I heard the words "Paul is dead," though my friend, Keith, who was drinking Jim Beam at the time, was of the opinion that the lyrics actually said "Haul out Fred."

" Cain," by James Byron Huggins. Simon & Schuster. 398 pages. $23."Wind roared with the wrath of a wounded god as the granite gateway of the grave shattered. Ancient air, hot with subterranean strength, flowed from the broken portal, and age-old volcanic dust rose around them like a vengeful, resurrected ghost."With this exhausting display of alliteration, James Byron Huggins begins "Cain."O.K. So Satan (released on an archaeological dig from a tomb cursed by King David) enters this dead man, Cain, who has been re-engineered by military scientists to be superhuman and indestructible -- the ultimate weapon, a supersoldier.

In a television season filled with shows that have that musty smell of your grandmother's attic, "Good & Evil" comes on like a breath of a different odor.Give this new ABC comedy credit -- it's different. This is not another half hour from the tried-and-true cookie cutter that's carving out most of the season's new shows.Which is not to say that "Good & Evil," which premieres tonight at 10:30 on Channel 13 (WJZ), does not hearken back to its historical roots. But its family tree is slightly demented as the patriarch is the offbeat serial comedy "Soap," and the matriarch is Susan Harris.

For some years now, young American directors have been remaking Hitchcock badly, and wearing their failures as a badge of honor. Phil Joanou's "Final Analysis" is only the most recent travesty.Of course, they fail because they don't get it. What made Alfred Hitchcock great wasn't the fancy camera work or the tricky plots, but the subtle way he found of expressing insidious emotional states, of icily building dislocating ideas atop each other until he had constructed a grand edifice of suspense and perversity that was at once mesmerizing and unsettling.

ON July 14, 1989, I witnessed the execution of Horace Dunkins Jr. in the Alabama electric chair.He was black, poor and somewhat retarded. Through years of correspondence and then visits, he had become a dear friend. A jury of 12 white women had found him guilty of the murder of Lynn McCurry, white, 26, mother of four.A number of times that evening I thought about Lynn McCurry, about her terror and anguish. She had been tied to a tree, raped and then stabbed 66 times. I thought of her husband and those children left without their mother.

"LIBERTY FOR the Iraqi people," President Bush told us in September 2002, "is a great moral cause and a great strategic goal. The people of Iraq deserve it." The goal of our invasion of Iraq was not some narrow and self-centered purpose, but rather a lofty one of freeing the Iraqi people from years of oppression. Indeed, the early rhetoric of the war went even further, placing it within the context of a global war on terrorism. The flip side of this lofty moral purpose is that the enemy, Saddam Hussein, necessarily must be evil.

Citing low ratings, ABC has pulled the plug on "Good & Evil." The new sitcom, starring Teri Garr as the nasty heiress-apparent to a cosmetics empire and Margaret Whitton as her sweet sister, has its last scheduled airing Wednesday. The network has not decided on the fate of the remaining five episodes or what will replace them in the 10:30 p.m. Wednesday slot."Evil" was a Nielsen nightmare, averaging an 8.0 rating and 14 percent audience share after five showings. (Each rating point equals 921,000 TV homes.

Washington. - This Memorial Day weekend comes in the 50th-anniversary year of the end of the Great War and between V-E and V-J days. Because the word ''memorial'' means ''something that keeps remembrance alive,'' it is good to recall what World War II was about and what we have not learned from it.With the discovery of the Nazi death camps, the world was shown humankind's capacity for great evil when we choose to live without restraints. Anne Frank's romanticized view that ''in spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart'' is the unblemished faith of a child, not the brutal reality of history.

JUST AFTER John Ashcroft announced the first indictment for the Sept. 11 attacks, CNN picked out a telling detail. Zacarias Moussaoui, they said, had been very polite as he applied for flight lessons and bought knives. He called women "ma'am." The anchor seemed to find it hard to believe that a monster of evil would say "ma'am." Or perhaps he just thought that we, his viewers, would be surprised by that. One disturbing feature of the videotape in which Osama bin Laden and friends celebrate the terror they've wreaked is the normalcy of the conversation, as if it was a bunch of guys talking about the Ravens game over beer rather than killers talking about their atrocity.