Resentment

To paraphrase an old joke, a woman was telling her psychiatrist about her visit home for the holidays."We were having Thanksgiving dinner," she said, "And I made a terrible Freudian slip. I meant to say to my mother, 'Please pass the cranberry sauce.' What came out was, 'You jerk, you ruined my life.' "If that doesn't strike you as funny, it may be because it's a little too close to what actually happens when your family gets together at Thanksgiving or Hanukkah or Christmas or Kwanzaa.Whether we look forward to or dread going home for the holidays, one thing is for sure: Within our hopes and dreams for the perfect Norman Rockwell celebration, the potential for disaster lurks.

By many accounts, Gov. Parris N. Glendening made political hash of his duty to choose a temporary replacement for the late Louis L. Goldstein, the state comptroller and political legend who died July 3.The governor may have squandered a unique opportunity to appear statesmanlike, acting for his detractors like a manipulative pol who can't be trusted to stick with his closest allies.But those who have watched Glendening's career say he has always been one of the luckiest of politicians, a man who sometimes digs a hole for himself but always climbs out smiling.

WASHINGTON -- There was a revealing juxtaposition of events here the other day. The NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund held a dinner honoring the nine people who integrated Central High School in Little Rock 40 years ago. The same day President Clinton met with the Congressional Black Caucus to discuss steps that might be taken to deal with race problems facing the nation today.The NAACP event was a reminder of an extraordinary time when young black people showed stunning courage in their quest for equal opportunity.

"Resentment," by Gary Indiana. New York: Doubleday. 303 pages. $22.95.Oprah won't choose Gary Indiana's nasty, hilarious, scarnew novel, "Resentment," for her book club, but it is an Event Novel nevertheless, a book you can bet your smart friends will read, a big bad tale of celebrities and media hangers-on and hustlers and murderers that takes place mostly in L.A., during the Martinez (read Menendez) murder trial, but also manages to dissect some of the New York literary world's most well-protected names.

HAVRE DE GRACE -- October's here, and as a cold front moves through, the wind is wild with leaves. With the year beginning its slide toward winter it seemed a good time to stop by the Andrew Wyeth exhibit at the Baltimore Museum of Art, and to ponder why the critics resent him so.Possibly it's because Wyeth's paintings are so accessible to those of us who are unschooled in artspeak, yet believe we understand, each in our own way, what he is saying....

Former Washington Mayor Marion Barry's announcement last week that he will run again for the job he was forced to leave in disgrace four years ago -- and the apparent readiness of many Washingtonians to vote for him again -- ought to serve as an object lesson for those in Baltimore who are calling for the head of the embattled city comptroller, Jacqueline McLean.The lesson is that while both Mr. Barry and Ms. McLean suffered very public falls from grace, white and black voters perceive the nature of their transgressions quite differently.

Betty is fed up. "Dave gives more affection to the dog than he does to me," says the 38-year-old mother of three, who recently went back to work as a teacher. His indifference is driving her crazy: He doesn't listen when she talks, refuses to respond when she needs to discuss a problem, and never does anything around the house that he's promised to do.Betty hates nagging. "But Dave won't do anything unless I ask him a dozen times. He thinks his only responsibility is to bring home a paycheck," she says, fuming.

Q: Please give us some idea of what government would look like in a Sauerbrey administration.A: Throughout my campaign, I have used a quote from Thomas Jefferson that to me defines what government is all about."

NEW YORK -- The suspects in the World Trade Center bombing sent a letter around the time of the attack that claimed responsibility and attributed the action to deep resentment against U.S. policy in the Middle East, law enforcement officials said yesterday.The officials said they had determined late last week that the letter from a group calling itself the Liberation Army Fifth Battalion was authentic and that it provided the first insight into what might have prompted the attack.The letter, mailed to the New York Times four days after the bombing and turned over to the authorities, warned of additional actions against American civilian and military targets, including what they described as "nuclear targets."

WASHINGTON -- Thurgood Marshall obviously will be remembered as the first black to serve on the Supreme Court and as the legal counsel for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People who won the case in 1954 in which the court overturned the doctrine of "separate but equal" education. But the tides of his lifetime also teach a lesson about how American attitudes in race keep changing, and not always for the better.Marshall came to the court as the nominee of President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1967 in the wake of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 -- two pieces of landmark legislation that not only codified the rights of black Americans but seemed to define the national ethic on the race issue.

Think back to the spring of 1968. The U.S. is mired in Vietnam. The country is in turmoil. The sitting Democratic president abruptly pulls out of his campaign for re-election, and the leading conservative columnist of the day neither gloats nor does a victory dance. It's nearly impossible to imagine this happening today. We could chalk this up to the deterioration of civic discourse and the rise in political polarization. But it's really part of a much more significant shift that has fractured the right side of the political spectrum.

Researching the effects of divorce, author Marsha Temlock talked to many baby boomers about betrayal, financial turmoil and the sting of gossip. She heard tales of hostility, resentment -- even guilt. Before long, the writer knew she had the foundation of a self-help book for an overlooked audience: The parents of divorcing couples. If roughly a million people get divorced each year in the United States, as many as four million parents may also feel pain, anger and bewilderment when their cherished family vision explodes.

FOR THE NEXT two weeks, France, and the world, will witness the spectacle of an extreme nationalist right-winger as one of two candidates for president. Jean-Marie Le Pen, whose National Front party is built on poisonous resentments, shocked the nation by coming in second in Sunday's first round of balloting, edging out the Socialist prime minister, Lionel Jospin. Mr. Le Pen stands virtually no chance of winning in his face-off with Jacques Chirac, the incumbent, on May 5. But simply by getting to the second round, and muscling the left out of the race entirely, he has set off alarm bells throughout European politics.

JEDDAH, Saudi Arabia - With as many as 15 Saudis numbered among the 19 men suspected of steering jets into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon last month, the mood in this deeply conservative Islamic kingdom has lurched between genuine horror, profound embarrassment, shame, suppressed glee and - increasingly - resentment and bald denial. Beyond the gates of King Fahd's opulent palaces in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia's streets are steeped in angst and confusion - an extraordinary occurrence in a society guided by the iron absolutes of one of the strictest forms of Islam in the world.

To paraphrase an old joke, a woman was telling her psychiatrist about her visit home for the holidays."We were having Thanksgiving dinner," she said, "And I made a terrible Freudian slip. I meant to say to my mother, 'Please pass the cranberry sauce.' What came out was, 'You jerk, you ruined my life.' "If that doesn't strike you as funny, it may be because it's a little too close to what actually happens when your family gets together at Thanksgiving or Hanukkah or Christmas or Kwanzaa.Whether we look forward to or dread going home for the holidays, one thing is for sure: Within our hopes and dreams for the perfect Norman Rockwell celebration, the potential for disaster lurks.

By many accounts, Gov. Parris N. Glendening made political hash of his duty to choose a temporary replacement for the late Louis L. Goldstein, the state comptroller and political legend who died July 3.The governor may have squandered a unique opportunity to appear statesmanlike, acting for his detractors like a manipulative pol who can't be trusted to stick with his closest allies.But those who have watched Glendening's career say he has always been one of the luckiest of politicians, a man who sometimes digs a hole for himself but always climbs out smiling.

"Resentment," by Gary Indiana. New York: Doubleday. 303 pages. $22.95.Oprah won't choose Gary Indiana's nasty, hilarious, scarnew novel, "Resentment," for her book club, but it is an Event Novel nevertheless, a book you can bet your smart friends will read, a big bad tale of celebrities and media hangers-on and hustlers and murderers that takes place mostly in L.A., during the Martinez (read Menendez) murder trial, but also manages to dissect some of the New York literary world's most well-protected names.

WASHINGTON -- There was a revealing juxtaposition of events here the other day. The NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund held a dinner honoring the nine people who integrated Central High School in Little Rock 40 years ago. The same day President Clinton met with the Congressional Black Caucus to discuss steps that might be taken to deal with race problems facing the nation today.The NAACP event was a reminder of an extraordinary time when young black people showed stunning courage in their quest for equal opportunity.

HAVRE DE GRACE -- October's here, and as a cold front moves through, the wind is wild with leaves. With the year beginning its slide toward winter it seemed a good time to stop by the Andrew Wyeth exhibit at the Baltimore Museum of Art, and to ponder why the critics resent him so.Possibly it's because Wyeth's paintings are so accessible to those of us who are unschooled in artspeak, yet believe we understand, each in our own way, what he is saying....

Q: Please give us some idea of what government would look like in a Sauerbrey administration.A: Throughout my campaign, I have used a quote from Thomas Jefferson that to me defines what government is all about."