Fools

I HAVE followed the trial of Bill Clinton carefully, and of the whole thing I can only say: I don't get it.For those who may not be familiar with the Arkansas governor, the following facts are on the record:Bill Clinton has been elected governor of Arkansas five times. Apparently, the people who know him best -- the voters of that state -- feel he has done something right.In a Newsweek survey, the National Governors Association (the nation's 50 governors) named Mr. Clinton the nation's most effective governor.

Here we are again, confronted by the calendar's arbitrary and impossible insistence that we look back and forward at the same moment. I pray your private rituals serve you and yours well. Meanwhile, for public consumption, as a reader and as an editor, I have never been much impressed by the calendar-driven rituals that newspapers and magazines so often do at year's end and other annual landmark points.So on these pages we have avoided the usual clambakes: Christmas gift lists, summer reading inventories, the year's best this and worst that and suchlike.

Washington.--I woke up Monday feeling like what I was -- an overdone Tennessee smoked ham -- after 10 days of rehearsing and two days of performing song and satire in the 108th dinner of The Gridiron Club.I grew wearier after reading one journalist's query about the real-world significance of an ''old world'' white-tie dinner in which a bunch of ''elite'' journalists make fools of themselves before the titans of industry, the power players of government and assorted other fat cats.Some of us crooners make no pretensions beyond our belief that in a sane and civil society, fun and foolishness must have a cherished place.

This report just in: Everything you know is wrong. Sorry to break the news, but don't feel bad - tomorrow you'll probably believe something completely different. Why, only a few weeks ago, it seems, we all knew exactly what was right and what to think. Then, we held these truths to be self-evident: CEOs were civic role models, the safest place for your kid to play was the front yard, and only fools and knaves didn't have their life savings in the stock market. Pasta and bread were good for you; red meat was bad. Estrogen replacement therapy was heaven-sent for women of a certain age, and arthroscopic knee surgery was a miracle cure for scores of arthritis sufferers.

New York -- He still looks like Peck's bad boy up on charges before Mrs. Jones, the schoolmarm. "Did you put bubble gum in Ruby Sue's hair? Did you dip Polly's pigtails in the inkwell? Did you break that window with your slingshot? Oliver -- what are we going to do with you?"Except that the charges on which the ever-mischievous Oliver Stone has been brought up reflect not yesterday's bucolic but today's brutal America:"Did you accuse your leaders of lying to your generation and wasting them in an unwinnable war?

It's growing dark, and a cold May nor'wester riles the gray Tred Avon as the last ferry leaves Oxford for the less tony environs of the river's far bank.On the crossing, I squint at scribbled directions to Oysterback, the town with "characters we haven't even used yet." Its annual Mosquito Festival is an international beacon to aficionados of Culex pipiens. Oysterback is a fiction, of course. It exists nowhere -- also somewhere every day, on Maryland's Eastern Shore. Mostly it exists in the fertile brain of Helen Chappell -- "last house on the right, past the general store, the one with peeling paint," she said.

When Loretta Stachowski noticed her Canton rowhouse's Formstone facade had cracked and faded, she envisioned a colorful future for the cement house covering that became a part of Baltimore's residential architecture during the 1940s. So a few years ago, Stachowski and her husband, Richard, decided to have the Formstone painted. It was a less expensive choice than the more trendy effort to remove the faux stones that hide many of the brick facades in Baltimore. And Stachowski liked being part of something new. "It's brighter, it's cleaner, and it's different," said Loretta Stachowski, 64, whose South Ellwood Avenue home is done in an ivory and brick-red scheme with black shutters and window planters.

Penni Wilson loves M&Ms. She buys a pack of them every day on her break from her department store job at East Point Mall. The red ones are her favorite."

Austin, Tex. -- AND THE herd of presidential candidates rounds that first curve and heads south -- thundering into Dixie prepared to eat grits and talk down to the populace. We are about to witness the quadrennial political effects of the popular assumption that a southern accent is the equivalent of a low I.Q.One might hope that the enduring stereotype of Southerners as a collection of slope-browed ridge-runners would have been shaken by the results the last time out. You remember 1988, when all the candidates came south and carried on obligingly about the need for a strong national defense, daringly endorsed traditional family values and courageously committed to no-new-taxes.

I WENT to a television station intending to sell something. It was a book, if you must know. "Take him to makeup," commanded a young woman. Her manner made it clear she wanted nothing to do with me, or my book, until I had been taken to makeup.It was another young woman who took me there. This one seemed to be an apprentice, one of those poor young college graduates who, having left their parents bankrupted by tuition, must start at the bottom by taking people like me to makeup.We arrived at makeup without incident.