AST week, the New York Mets agreed to pay Pedro Martínez between $53 million and $56 million to pitch for the next four years, leaving fans to wonder what management was thinking. Could the former Red Sox star, now 33 and apparently past his physical prime, really be worth that kind of money?

Let’s do the math. Say that he stays healthy and pitches well – an optimistic but not unreasonable assumption. Say he starts 16 home games, and the Mets draw an average of 15,000 more fans at those games than their typical crowd last season – 43,979 instead of 28,979. Figuring $25 a ticket and another $8 a head for the team’s share of food and souvenir sales, parking and so on, Mr. Martínez ‘s direct impact on stadium revenue would be to add $7.92 million for the season. If the bump in attendance turns out to be just 10,000 fans at his games, then the impact would be a more modest $5.28 million.

But that’s not all. More people at the ballpark means the team earns more money from stadium signs and sponsorships. And Mr. Martínez’s presence would presumably lift the Mets in the standings and persuade fans that the team’s owner, Fred Wilpon, is serious about winning, so attendance ought to rise at other games as well.

Stay optimistic and assume that the new general manager, Omar Minaya, isn’t done yet: He signs another superstar or two (think Carlos Delgado), the 2005 team contends for the division title, and the crowds at Shea Stadium grow to rival the 2004 New York Yankees’ average attendance of 47,788 – a gain of about 18,800 a game. That brings us to $50.3 million in extra annual revenue. If we can attribute, say, one-third of this to Mr. Martínez, his incremental contribution would be $16.8 million a year.

Did we crack the nut? Not quite. Major League Baseball has revenue-sharing rules that reroute some money from big-market teams to small; in the Mets’ case, about 40 percent of the team’s incremental revenue. That cuts Mr. Martínez’s contribution down to just $10.1 million a year, well below his average salary of $13.5 million.

So, a bad deal, right? Not necessarily. We’ve left out television. Signing Mr. Martínez will not change the fee Cablevision is obliged to pay to televise Mets games next year, but his presence could affect the success of the Mets’ new regional sports channel venture with Time Warner and Comcast.

Across town, the Yankees have their own cable network, known as YES, begun in the middle of the team’s protracted string of World Series appearances. The Yankees were hot, so the network was hot: in 2001, it was reckoned to be worth around $900 million, more than the team itself.

The regional sports cable market is flooded in New York, with YES, MSG and Fox Sports New York already operating, and there is no guarantee that the Mets’ new network will be successful. But a compelling product on the field would be a big help. If Mr. Martínez can win a lot of games and infuse the team with attitude and charisma, the network could pull in $250 million in annual revenue (most of which can be sheltered from revenue sharing), and it, too, could be more valuable than the team.

Nothing is certain in economics or sports, but some gambles are better than others. With the new network in the offing, this looks like a smart time for Mr. Wilpon to open his wallet for a marquee player like Pedro Martínez.

And if it doesn’t work out as well as the Mets hope, Mr. Minaya can console himself with the thought that the Yankees will be paying Kevin Brown $16 million next year.

Andrew Zimbalist is a professor of economics at Smith College.

BESITY is considered a major public health problem today, but a number of scientists are coming to see it as a comparative blessing, given the alternative. These public heath experts believe, in effect, that America may have traded smoking – a truly lethal habit – for the lesser deadliness of eating too much.

The story of this trade-off can be seen in the data. From 1973 until 1983, Americans were actually growing thinner. During that period, the average weight of middle-aged men fell about two pounds, while that of middle-aged women fell nearly three pounds.

Then the trend reversed: from 1980 to 2000, the average weight of Americans rose by nearly 20 pounds. Everyone got heavier, said Dr. David Williamson, a statistician at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “Competitive cyclists weigh more than they did 20, 30 years ago; HIV patients weigh more.”

Yet the nation also is healthier. Life expectancy has gone up by more than six years over the past three decades, and heart disease, long the major killer, is on the wane.

A big reason Americans are fatter and healthier, Dr. Williamson believes, may be the steep decline in cigarette smoking.

If he is right, the rise in obesity is a classic case of unintended consequences – one of a long list of medical and public health interventions whose full effects could not be foreseen.

For example, Americans once died in great numbers in infancy, or childhood, and women died in childbirth from infectious diseases. Now they don’t – a triumph of public health. But as a consequence, the population is growing ever older, which is in turn creating a host of profound new public health challenges.

“We’re just now trying to deal with the medical consequences” of an aging nation, Dr. Williamson said.

The connection between smoking and obesity is not yet proven, but the statistical correlations are there. From 1980 to 2000 – as body weight was rising – smoking rates fell by 27 percent in the nation as a whole and by 38 percent among middle-aged Americans. (Today, smoking rates have leveled off, Dr. Williamson notes, and there are signs that the obesity rates are leveling off, too.)

“There is no question that smoking affects the epidemic” of obesity, said Dr. Neil Grunberg, a psychologist and neuroscientist at the Uniformed Services University in Bethesda, Md.

Smokers who quit, he noted, gain about 10 to 12 pounds on average, in part because they crave sweet foods and carbohydrates. In addition, Dr. Grunberg said, smokers’ metabolism slows down after they quit.

Dr. Michael Grossman, an economist, and his colleagues at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York have analyzed the economic causes of obesity. They have calculated, based on cigarette tax receipts, that for every 10 percent increase in the price of cigarettes, the number of obese people rises 2 percent. Smoking cessation, they estimate, accounted for 20 percent of the obesity increase in this country.

Dr. Katherine Flegal, a statistician at the National Center for Health Statistics, said the effect may be even bigger, once scientists add the upward effect on average weight of the growth in the number of Americans who, because of the success of the antismoking movement, never smoked in the first place.

One possible explanation, Dr. Williamson said, is that as the number of smokers started to plummet, the demand for calories went up and the food industry began offering and advertising larger portions and more snack foods. “The food industry in general subconsciously picked up on this and went to town,” he said. Soon overeating more became the norm, for everyone, even children.

Over the same period, said Dr. David Musto, a historian of science at Yale, America’s preoccupation with healthy foods – oat bran, broccoli, fish, etc. – also resulted in what he called a “barrage” of pro-eating commercial messages.

In the 1960′s, Dr. Musto said, it was socially imperative to smoke. “A man had to know his brand” of cigarettes, he said. In much the same way, he said, it became socially imperative to eat the right foods – those supposed to be good for you.

“The process of becoming obese is greatly facilitated by a search for health and healthy foods,” Dr. Musto said. “You’ve read that something fights Alzheimer’s or lowers your blood pressure, so why shouldn’t you have a healthy portion?”

It all makes for an odd and not entirely satisfactory coda to the antismoking crusade. But on balance, Dr. Williamson points out, a nation with an expanding waistline is in far better shape than one with a cigarette in its mouth. Obesity may be bad, he said, but the health effects of smoking are far worse.

“I sure would like for people not to be obese,” Dr. Williamson said. But, he added, if they got that way because they don’t smoke, then “maybe the sky isn’t falling quite as much as we think it is.”

t was a series of unfortunate events.

How did we get to this sudden moment of cautious optimism in the Middle East? How did we get to this moment when Egypt is signing free trade agreements with Israel, when Hosni Mubarak is touring Arab nations and urging them to open relations with the Jewish state? How did we get to this moment of democratic opportunity in the Palestinian territories, with three major elections taking place in the next several months, and with the leading candidate in the presidential election declaring that violence is counterproductive?

How did we get to this moment of odd unity in Israel, with Labor joining Likud to push a withdrawal from Gaza and some northern territories? How did we get to this moment when Ariel Sharon has record approval ratings, when it is common to run across Israelis who once reviled Sharon as a bully but who now find themselves supporting him as an agent of peace?

It was a series of unfortunate events.

It was unfortunate that Ariel Sharon, whom tout le monde demonized as a warmonger, was elected prime minister of Israel. After all, as Henry Siegman of the Council on Foreign Relations reasoned in The New York Review of Books, “The war Sharon is waging is not aimed at the defeat of Palestinian terrorism but at the defeat of the Palestinian people and their aspirations for national self-determination.”

It was unfortunate that George W. Bush was elected and then re-elected as president of the United States. After all, here is a man who staffed his administration with what Juan Cole of the University of Michigan called “pro-Likud intellectuals” who went off “fighting elective wars on behalf of Tel Aviv.” Under Bush, the diplomats agreed, the U.S. had inflamed the Arab world and had forfeited its role as an honest broker.

It was unfortunate that Bush gave that speech on June 24, 2002, dismissing Yasir Arafat as a man who would never make peace. After all, the Europeans protested, while Arafat might be flawed, he was the embodiment of the Palestinian cause.

It was a mistake to build the security fence, which the International Court of Justice called a violation of international law. Never mind that the fence cut terror attacks by 90 percent. It was the moral equivalent of apartheid, the U.N. orators declared.

It was a mistake to assassinate the leaders of Hamas, which took credit for the murders of hundreds of Israelis. France, among many other nations, condemned these attacks and foretold catastrophic consequences.

It was unfortunate that President Bush never sent a special envoy to open talks, discuss modalities and fine-tune the road map. As Milton Viorst wrote in The Washington Quarterly, this left “slim prospects” for any progress toward peace.

It was unfortunate that Bush sided openly with Sharon during their April meetings in Washington, causing the European Union to condemn U.S. policy. It was unfortunate that Bush kept pushing his democracy agenda. After all, as some Israelis said, it is naïve to export democracy to Arab soil.

Yes, these were a series of unfortunate events. And yet here we are in this hopeful moment. It almost makes you think that all those bemoaners and condemners don’t know what they are talking about. Nothing they have said over the past three years accounts for what is happening now.

It almost makes you think that Bush understands the situation better than the lot of them. His judgments now look correct. Bush deduced that Sharon could grasp the demographic reality and lead Israel toward a two-state solution; that Arafat would never make peace, but was a retardant to peace; that Israel has a right to fight terrorism; and that Sharon would never feel safe enough to take risks unless the U.S. supported him when he fought back.

Bush concluded that peace would never come as long as Palestine was an undemocratic tyranny, and that the Palestinians needed to see their intifada would never bring triumph.

We are a long way from peace. But as Robert Satloff observes in The Weekly Standard, Israel’s coming disengagements “will constitute a huge leap – both in psychology and in strategy – rivaling the original Oslo accords in historic importance.” And the U.S. is already raising millions to help build a decent Palestinian polity.

We owe this cautiously hopeful moment to a series of unfortunate events – and to a president who disregarded the received wisdom.

hat’s the strongest force in the universe?

Some people will say gravity. But that would be wrong. Gravity, physicists say, is intrinsically puny and gets its overwhelming oomph only from the fact that everything, even energy, contributes to it. Which isn’t much consolation, admittedly, when you drop, say, your trusty college edition of the complete annotated works of William Shakespeare on your foot.

An astronomer quoted in this newspaper a few years back said that jealousy was the strongest force in the universe.

Now we’re getting closer.

I’d like to convince you, at the possible cost of my reputation as a cold-eyed observer of cosmic affairs, that it is love.

I learned this from a squirrel, some years ago, when I was living up in the Hudson Valley. An Eastern gray squirrel, Sciurus carolinensis, to be precise, since this is the science section. She was sitting on the corner of the roof in the rain, bedraggled and sopping wet, staring at me with holy fire in her little dark brown eyes.

This was on the third day of a siege of what had started as a nuisance and was now terror.

It had begun with an occasional scratching sound in the bedroom ceiling. Our first thought was mice in the crawl space running under the peak of the roof. But the only access was through vents at either end. Sure enough, when we went outside and looked up there was a hole in the vent. Some animal had chewed its way in.

It was the home of my girlfriend Catherine. She had built it only a few years before, slaving through the summers and weekends to do all the finish work with her own hands. She rightly felt violated.

We sent an S O S to her brother, who is a builder, and he came over with a 25-foot ladder, climbed up and announced that there was a nest of ripped-up fiberglass inside.

He nailed a new vent into place and went home.

And so we woke up the next day to the sound of chewing. The vent was just over the window and there was a squirrel spitting splinters as she tried to get in. We had nailed her babies inside.

We went out and threw stones at her. She retreated to a nearby tree and sat there squawking at us.

Maybe she will give up, we told ourselves, in a moment I’m still ashamed of.

She didn’t. I went outside and stood in the rain looking up at the roof. The squirrel glared back down accusingly. I didn’t have the heart to throw another stone at her.

“She’s eating my house,” Catherine said, giving me a look not unlike the squirrel’s.

I slunk off and found a listing for animal trappers in the yellow pages. A tall guy I immediately nicknamed Daniel Boone showed up the next morning in a fur hat and knee-length boots. He climbed up the house with a long-handled net and quickly emerged with six baby squirrels. He set them in a trap in the woods near the house. They were spitting and growling.

He said, “Don’t put your hand in,” and went off for coffee.

As soon as he was gone the mother emerged from the woods. She scurried up the ladder into the house and then back out even faster, and ran through the woods up and down trees looking for her babies, winding up in the trap amid a renewed chorus of squawking.

Daniel Boone came back and took them away, he said, to new home in the woods on the other side of the Hudson. I have no reason to doubt his word.

We had to replace some clapboards and nail wire over the vent to prevent a recurrence of the invasion, and that was the end of it, sort of.

That squirrel’s glare still haunts me. Especially now that I’m a parent myself.

In October, David Gross, a newly minted Nobel Prize physicist, wondered if science would one day be able to measure the onset of consciousness in an infant.

He likened that shift to what physicists call a “phase change,” a microscopic adjustment that makes a macroscopic difference, as when water freezes to ice, or the atoms in a magnet line up.

But I wonder if we could measure the onset of love. Surely that is a phase change, too, a physical shifting of the internal firmament.

Now you might say I have some nerve imputing feelings as ethereal and high-flown as love to a toothy spitting pile of fur and bone with a brain the size of walnut – rats with a bushy tails, as squirrels are often called out in the unromantic countryside. Surely this is just another example of the kind of egregious anthropomorphizing that makes us identify emotionally with animals, robots, the Mars rovers, our cars.

But tell me you’ve never been taken in by a smile. Human love, biochemists say, is a sort of oxytocin drunk, an addiction to the hormones our partners, real or desired, release in us.

We anthropomorphize ourselves, in other words. Why not a squirrel?

As far as I know, we are both testimony to the marvelous possibilities inherent in the assembly of myriads of atoms. Richard Feynman, the iconoclastic Caltech physicist, once said that if he could pass one piece of knowledge on to future generations it would be that everything is made of atoms. He meant not to diminish “everything,” but rather to ennoble and make us appreciate the talents of atoms.

In another twist on the subject of love and physics, three-quarters of a century ago, in 1925 to be exact, Erwin Schrödinger, an Austrian physicist, went off to a Swiss resort with a mysterious woman friend, and came back with an equation that describes matter as a wave spreading throughout all space. Schrödinger’s equation is now the basis of quantum mechanics, which is the foundation of modern physics.

In principle, physicists like to say, Schrödinger’s equation explains all of chemistry and thus all of life, including squirrels.

But when they say it, they mean it as a joke. The equation hasn’t been solved except by numerical approximations for anything more complicated than a hydrogen atom – one proton and one electron. As for life, Joel Cohen, a population biologist at Rockefeller University, wrote in an essay in the online journal Public Library of Science Biology that entirely new realms of mathematics would be needed to cope with the complexity of the living world, but I think he’s being optimistic.

As a glance at any morning’s headlines will tell you, we understand next to nothing.

Or as the refrain to “Albert Einstein Dreams” by Naked to the World put it:

Just because I’m Albert Einstein doesn’t mean I understand

The ever-expanding universe between a woman and a man.

If I knew, or had half a clue, I’d be much more famous than I am.

So I’m willing to believe in squirrel love. As for human love, I used to wonder if I had it in me to chew down a house. Until my wife, Nancy, and I adopted our daughter, Mira.

A baby sitter, whom we did not know well, disappeared with her for a few hours, and I rampaged through every store and playground on the Upper West Side only to have them show up back at the apartment on time wondering what the fuss was about.

So now I know.

n the second floor of the Adoré, a cozy little coffee shop just below Union Square, a large man was snugged into the corner. He appeared every inch the writer, with a clutch of papers, a steaming cup of café au lait, and a look of intense concentration framed beneath bushy eyebrows, even though he was just staring at the menu.

Garrison Keillor, 62, is a very accomplished writer. A former staff member at The New Yorker and the author of several novels, he takes his role as a writer very seriously. But he has this side job, as ringmaster of “A Prairie Home Companion,” a live radio show he founded on Minnesota Public Radio 30 years ago, that has at its very center a monologue, “The News From Lake Wobegon,” that he makes up each week on the fly. There is never a written script.

Mr. Keillor is on a bit of a media tour in support of his program’s anniversary, and the celebratory DVD that has been made to recognize it, but is not one to get excited about quality time with the press. In fact, he seems about as cheerful facing a press interview as someone wedged in next to the pastor at a supper in a church basement in Pine River or Cloquet, Minn., straining to make conversation about the upcoming handbell choir performance. He hasn’t even seen the DVD.

It is not that Mr. Keillor lacks interest in people – his show and writing are full of nuanced, sometimes devastating examinations of the human condition – but he appears not all that keen on their actual presence. (Then again, in August, Mr. Keillor will be a host on a one-week “Prairie Home Companion” cruise to Nova Scotia. A deluxe suite for the week can cost more than $6,000. “I can’t think of a better way to spend the dog days of August than sailing to the Canadian maritime provinces with like-minded odd people,” he wrote on his Web site. Go figure.)

Part of the reason Mr. Keillor loves New York, he says, is that it is full of people, but not long on human interaction. “It’s great peace and quiet here,” he said. “In St. Paul I know a lot of people, and it’s always kind of tumultuous.” Continuing, he added: “New York is a city where when I walk down the sidewalk and hoof it around town, things come to me, things just strike me. Can’t really explain that. Maybe if I walked along a gravel road in North Dakota things also would strike me, but New York is pleasanter than that gravel road. So I love to come here.”

He still has an apartment on the Upper West Side, he said, a legacy of the time he spent here, when he left behind the radio show in Minnesota in 1987, moved abroad and then settled in New York when he came back to the United States. He was sincere in his effort to leave “Prairie Home Companion,” but quickly found he missed the weekly grind of building a show from scratch.

“I knew almost right away,” he said. “I had the idea that I had really made a bonehead move. One of the great bonehead moves of my life. There have been two or three. And that was one of them. I went off to Copenhagen. And I tried to write a novel, which was really pretentious, and I was digging a hole and getting deeper into it. But I managed to find my way back.” Mr. Keillor currently lives in St. Paul, where he is married to a Minnesotan, Jenny Lind Nilsson, and 33 weeks out of the year, he spends the week coming up with a live radio show.

Four million people tune in each week for “Prairie Home Companion,” a show that in addition to its genre-defying musical selections – bluegrass, folk, gospel and classical music all show up – uses the prism of Lake Wobegon, a mythical Minnesota town full of taciturn Norwegian bachelors, as a way of talking about life for the rest of us. There is nothing modern, or sassy, or particularly universal in it, which makes its pleasures and its success all the more unlikely.

And it has been thus for three decades. On July 6, 1974, Mr. Keillor first broadcast the show in front of 12 people. Now, each year, 100,000 people buy tickets to see the program live at its base in the Fitzgerald Theater in St. Paul, or in its sold-out performances around the country.

Mr. Keillor is a charming, winning radio host, mixing self-effacement and an increasingly musical bass – “I just like to sing harmony with younger women” – to make a show that swings though all sorts of improbable musical collaborations and the kind of radio drama that died everywhere else 50 years ago.

“Prairie Home Companion,” some of its listeners believe, is a civic and cultural good, a throwback that manages to be a church of the air without ever being preachy, narrated by an apocryphal, but totally believable Minnesota Lutheran persona who rarely drinks, never smokes but still manages to describe the world in wry, funny ways.

“It’s keeping something alive that otherwise might perish,” Mr. Keillor said. “And that is the idea of live variety entertainment on the radio. But it’s also the separate parts of it, I think. Some of the dramatic sketches, the cowboys and Guy Noir, keep alive a certain kind of comedy on radio that otherwise might disappear. And so we’re keeping our finger in the page for other younger, finer, handsomer people to come along and discover and make something really good out of it.”

Mr. Keillor is a version of the American personality who ends up stapled to something bigger than he is, a kind of contemporary Walter Winchell, though less interested in dirty linen than making merry about clean living. “In the beginning, your career is all about you,” he said. “You crave awards and recognition. But then you come to realize that you played some small part in bringing up people. Small people went to sleep to the sound of your voice, riding their cars with their parents. They looked forward to the monologue because when it began, the parents stopped arguing and turned up the radio.”

And indeed there is something about that monologue – his voice, then and now, is an amazing instrument, powerful enough for him to step up to the microphone and simply wing it, knowing only that it will always end the same way: “That’s the news from Lake Wobegon, where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.”

Although the strength of the monologue varies from week to week, it is a feat that makes the scripted jokes of a Jay Leno or David Letterman very much besides the point; it is a timeless, extemporaneous document of how we live that proceeds without the crutch of actual news. If you listen close, you can almost hear Mr. Keillor’s heavy lidded eyes dropping closed beneath huge eyebrows as he slips into a narrative reverie. Mr. Keillor, who is not prone to bragging – he is a Minnesotan, after all – is convinced that spoken words are what most people remember best.

And then he proceeds to demonstrate that the storyteller’s voice, unannotated by visual information, can paint a picture that will not soon be forgotten. In explaining why someone who makes part of his living by being resolutely a Minnesotan could be so riveted by New York, he recalled his first trip to the city in 1953, with his father. He was 11.

“In Brooklyn, people would bring their families down into the park with blankets and sheets,” he said, his voice slowing. “And they would stake out a little spot on the grass. And they would lie there and sleep. Thousands of people in the park. And a few men sitting on benches around the perimeter sitting and smoking and talking. I never saw anything like it before or since.”

As much as he loves New York with the fervor of a Midwestern immigrant, his loyalty is clear. After Mr. Keillor concluded his interview with a reporter at the Adoré, a woman from rural Minnesota dropped by his table to declare herself a fan. He was genuinely interested in what she had to say, and the fact that she is from where he is from, and yet was standing there in a restaurant in Manhattan.

“What appeals to me about Minnesota is that it has a stubbornness, it has a persistence. It treasures its own landscape,” he said. “People who live in Minnesota really love to stay. They’re not migrants. They’re not people who are going to fold their tent in another year and go elsewhere.”

Or even when they do, they will always be back.

orresters Beach, Australia

WHEN Viktor Yushchenko sat down on Sept. 5 to his bowl of soup at the summer house of the deputy chief of the Ukrainian government’s intelligence unit (the successor to the old Soviet K.G.B.), he may well have been supping with the devil.

For weeks afterward he suffered a bizarre cascade of symptoms – prostration, crippling abdominal pains, a swollen liver and disfiguring lesions on his upper body and face-all indicative of a violent internal process that was variously described as an infection (possibly viral, and probably herpes) and gluttony (overindulgence in exotic foods). Mr. Yushchenko gradually recovered enough health to return to his campaign for the presidency of Ukraine, but the man who donned the orange scarf and stepped back up to the microphone had taken on the appearance of a scarred and bloated roué.

And there the matter stayed, until Mr. Yushchenko’s protestations that he’d been poisoned were finally investigated outside his own country, by a team in a Vienna clinic headed by Dr. Michael Zimpfer. When Dr. Zimpfer’s findings were made public on Dec. 11, the world sat up and took notice.

The headlines gave us two vital pieces of information: poison, which we all understood, and dioxin. Dioxin? It sounded like some sort of chemical; it even sounded vaguely familiar, like something you’d buy at the plant nursery. As the days passed we read everything we would ever need to know about the properties of dioxin, without discovering the answers to the deeper, more troubling questions of who administered it, and why. Not, why try to hurt Mr. Yushchenko, but why use dioxin to do it?

It is curious and unsettling in 2004 to be reading about the attempted assassination by poison of a prominent political figure. Murder by poison has largely been relegated to the history pages, principally because science has overtaken the great advantage that the poisoner of old had over his pursuers: the ability to hide his work beneath the normal calamities that afflict human life.

Death by degrees of pain and wasting could (particularly in the 19th century) be laid at the door of organic disease, and there were few if any tests for the suspicion of poison. In the 21st century the game is desperately hard to play, unless, as in Mr. Yushchenko’s case, you apply the first rule of the old poisoners’ handbook. Choose a substance that nobody can identify. Find an obscure environmental pollutant that infects the air around smelting and recycling plants and concentrate it into a small vial.

Poisoning is not an amateur’s game. There is art and a good deal of cunning to perfect before one can claim admission to the guild. Graduates of the old poisoning schools grappled with the same compounding problems as modern chemists and apprentice chefs in five-star hotels. Will the powder mix with the liquid? Will the oil separate into a greasy film? Have I cloaked the telltale smell under enough aromatic spices? And what about the taste?

Our senses are not trained to discriminate what is hidden under camouflage. Studying the contents of your plate looking for odd colors has never been a reliable gauge of what is normal. Arsenic, for instance, is red, yellow, green or white depending on its chemical bedfellow. And what of poison’s smell? Prussic acid smells like almonds, hemlock smells like a family of mice, oleander like chocolate, and arsenic in cocoa like supper on a cold night: there are no reliable pocket guides to assist the novice. To his wife, dioxin smelled like “some kind of medicine” on Mr. Yushchenko’s lips.

Poisoning is an up close and personal crime. The victim is deceived into swallowing a toxic dose concealed in a benign carrier like food or drink, thereby betraying one of the foundations of all social dealings between fellow humans, the assumption of benign intent. In Ukraine, the rules of hospitality demand that the guest eat and drink heartily at the host’s table, even when he suspects the host of ill intent.

As a matter of course in an earlier century, Mr. Yushchenko might have taken his own poison-taster to the dinner party at the dacha. Poison-tasters trained their wizard eyes on every stage of meal preparation, following each dish from kitchen to table to mouth – sometimes adding a little theater to their performance by the application of crystals and feathers, but, in essence, using the highest acuity of their native senses.

I have in my own collection a poisoner’s ring, which is hinged on one side and has a hollow compartment concealed under a large amethyst. With practice I have perfected a party trick of dropping a small piece of fizzing vitamin tablet into my dining partner’s wine glass. It is surprisingly easy to distract someone long enough to flip the hinge, let the sliver fall and watch until the bubbles subside. How simple was it, one wonders, to slip dioxin, which is easily absorbed in fat, into the jug of cream destined for Mr. Yushchenko’s soup, or, stealing from a later chapter of the poisoner’s handbook, to coat his spoon, or plate, with an invisible layer of chemical?

A chemist at University College, London, wondered why a peculiar substance like dioxin was chosen in the first place. “If you really want to kill someone you use cyanide or ricin or strychnine,” wrote Dr. Andrea Sella in The New Scientist.com, “If you use something weird I guess it’s just that much harder to find.”

Why indeed? Cyanide, strychnine, arsenic, and the extensive pharmacopeia of the plant and serpent kingdoms have provided the staples for poisonous intent for centuries. Cleopatra was an adept at empirical studies into the effects of snakebite on slaves. She is said to have found the mineral poisons too slow and too liable to cause grimacing and color changes in the corpse.

Other prominent poisoners, like Madeleine d’Aubray (the Marquise de Brinvilliers), and the unknown visitor to Napoleon’s exile on Elba, have found arsenic perfectly suited to their plans. The marquise took quite a shine to the poisoning art and, after practicing on charity patients at the poor hospital, endowed arsenic with its cynical alias “inheritance powder” (poudre de succession) when she fed her father and brothers her special soup.

And here we circle back to the question, why use dioxin? There are many ways to classify poison. Arsenic and hemlock, for instance, are slow killers; they take their own terrible time. Cyanide and strychnine are quick though not merciful. Dioxin, we discover, is a slow accumulative poison, expressing its mauling effect on human physiology over months, years, perhaps a lifetime.

What if the intention was not to kill Mr. Yushchenko but to injure him in ways that mimic a fall from grace, like superimposing the ruined face of an alcoholic onto a once handsome man? This is a glimpse, I suspect, into the secret world of chemical warfare, the successor to the old poisoners’ guild, and even, perhaps, a peep behind the shreds of the Iron Curtain. Steady doses of dioxin cause cancer and premature aging.

Dioxin, then, seems tailor-made to topple an Adonis from his plinth, which, for someone in the public eye is a kind of death. The sweet twist of this unhappy business is that the plot has been exposed. Mr. Yushchenko’s face will heal with time. The same cannot be said for the disfigured mind that brought poison to the table.

Gail Bell, a pharmacist, is the author of “Poison: A History and a Family Memoir.”

XTERIOR BRIDGE OVER POTOMAC RIVER – NIGHT

CLOSE SHOT – Rummy is standing by the railing, staring morosely into the water. The snow is falling hard. Feeling a tap on his shoulder, he wheels around and wrestles an old man with wings into a headlock.

OLD MAN: Ouch! Tut, tut. When will you learn that force doesn’t solve everything?

RUMMY: Who the dickens are you?

OLD MAN: Clarence, Angel First Class. I’ve been sent down to help you.

RUMMY, squinting: You’re off your nut, you old fruitcake. You can’t help me. I was a matinee idol in this town, a studmuffin. Now everyone’s turned on me – Trent Lott, Chuck Hagel and that dadburn McCain.

CLARENCE: No more self-pity, son. I’m going to show you what the world would have been like if you’d never been born.

Clarence, who can fly now, takes Rummy’s hand and they soar over the icy Potomac to the Pentagon. Beneath the glass on the desk of the defense secretary is a list of members of Congress and their phone numbers.

RUMMY: Who put that there?

CLARENCE: Sam Nunn. He’s the defense secretary. Sam consults with Congress. Never acts arrogant or misleads them. He didn’t banish the generals who challenged him – he promoted ‘em. And, of course, he caught Osama back in ’01. He threw 100,000 troops into Afghanistan on 9/11 and sealed the borders. Our Special Forces trapped the evildoer and his top lieutenants at Tora Bora. You weren’t at that cabinet meeting the day after 9/11, so nobody suggested going after Saddam. No American troops died or were maimed in Iraq. No American soldiers tortured Iraqis in Abu Ghraib. No Iraqi explosives fell into the hands of terrorists. There’s no office of disinformation to twist perception abroad. We’re not on the cusp of an Iraq run by Muslim clerics tied to Iran. Here’s Sam. He’s with the chairman of the Joint Chiefs.

GENERAL SHINSEKI: We got some good news today on the National Guard, sir. Recruiting is up 40 percent. With the money we saved killing that useless missile defense system, we up-armored all our Humvees.

RUMMY, fists and jaw clenched: Grrrrrrr…I want to see Wolfie!

CLARENCE: Sam never hired any of those wacko neocons. Wolfowitz is a woolly headed professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, and a consultant to Ariel Sharon. Richard Perle was never in charge of the Defense Policy Board, so he was unable to enrich himself through government connections, or help Ahmad Chalabi con the administration. Perle stayed an honest man, running a chain of soufflé shops. His soufflés were so fluffy he became known as the Prince of Lightness. Doug Feith never worked here, either, so he never set up the Office of Special Plans to spin tall tales about W.M.D. and Qaeda ties to Saddam. And he never bungled the occupation because there was no occupation. Without you to swoon over in a book, neocon doyenne Midge Decter became a fallen woman, like Violet.

RUMMY, dyspeptic: Holy mackerel! Take me to Dick!

CLARENCE: Dick and Lynne run a bait, tackle and baton-twirling shop in Casper, Wyo. You didn’t exist, so you never gave him those jobs in the Nixon and Ford administrations, and he never ran for Congress or worked for Bush 41 or anointed himself 43′s vice president. W. chose Chuck Hagel as his running mate. So without you and Dick there to dominate him, he was guided by his dad and Brent Scowcroft, who kept Condi in line. Colin Powell was never cut off at the knees and the U.N. and allies were never bullied. There was never any crazy fever about Iraq or unilateralism or “Old Europe.” Here’s Colin now, heading for the Oval Office.

POWELL: Merry Christmas, Mr. President. With the help of our allies around the world, we have won the war on terror. And Saddam has been overthrown. Once Hans Blix exposed the fact that Saddam had no weapons, the tyrant was a goner. No Arab dictator can afford to be humilated by a Swedish disarmament lawyer.

RUMMY: Goodness gracious, I’ve heard enough now. I’m going home. Unless you’re going to tell me my wife is an old maid, because I wasn’t around to marry her.

CLARENCE: Oh, no. Joyce lives across the street from your old house on Kalorama Road. She’s happily married to the French ambassador.

“Auld Lang Syne” swells as we FADE OUT.

ONDION, France — One warm afternoon in the late 19th century, two middle-aged office clerks met on the same bench of the Boulevard Bourdon in Paris and immediately became the best of friends. Bouvard and Pécuchet (the names Gustave Flaubert gave to his two comic heroes) discovered through their friendship a common purpose: the pursuit of universal knowledge. To achieve this ambitious goal, they attempted to read everything they could find on every branch of human endeavor and, from their readings, cull the most outstanding facts and ideas. Flaubert’s death in 1880 put an end to their enterprise, which was in essence endless, but not before the two brave explorers had read their way through many learned volumes on agriculture, literature, animal husbandry, medicine, archeology and politics, always with disappointing results. What Flaubert’s two clowns discovered is what we have always known but seldom believed: that the accumulation of knowledge isn’t knowledge.

The desire to know everything on earth and in heaven is so ancient that one of the earliest accounts of this ambition is already a cautionary tale. According to the 11th chapter of Genesis, after the Flood, the people of the earth journeyed east, to the land of Shinar, and decided to build a city and a tower that would reach the heavens.

“And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men builded. And the Lord said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do. Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.” According to the Sanhedrin (the council of Jewish elders set up in Jerusalem in the first century), the place where the tower once rose never lost its peculiar quality and whoever passes it forgets all he knows. Years ago, I was shown a small hill of rubble outside the walls of Babylon and told that this was all that remained of Babel.

If Babel symbolized our incommensurate ambition, the Library of Alexandria showed how this ambition might be achieved. Set up by Ptolemy I in the third century B.C., it was meant to hold every book on every imaginable subject. To ensure that no title escaped its vast catalog, a royal decree ordered that any book brought into the city was to be confiscated and copied; only then would the original (sometimes the copy) be returned.

A curious document from the second century B.C., the perhaps apocryphal “Letter of Aristeas,” recounts the library’s origins. To assemble a universal library (says the letter), King Ptolemy wrote “to all the sovereigns and governors on earth” begging them to send to him every kind of book by every kind of author, “poets and prose writers, rhetoricians and sophists, doctors and soothsayers, historians and all others, too.” The king’s librarians calculated that they required 500,000 scrolls if they were to collect in Alexandria “all the books of all the peoples of the world.” Time exacerbates our greed: by 1988, the Library of Congress alone was receiving that number of printed items per year, from which it sparingly kept about 400,000.

But even this (by our standards) modest stock of a half-million books was too much for any reader, and the librarians of Alexandria devised a system of annotated catalogs for which they chose works they deemed especially important and appended a brief description to each title: one of the earliest “recommended reading” lists. In Alexandria, it became clear that the greater your ambition, the narrower your scope.

But our ambition persists. Recently, the most popular Internet search service, Google, announced that it had concluded agreements with several leading research libraries – Harvard, the Bodleian at Oxford, Stanford, the New York Public Library – to make some of their books available online to researchers who won’t have to travel to the libraries or dust their way through endless stacks of paper and ink. Millions of pages will be waiting temptingly for their online readers and (to refer back to Genesis) “nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.” No doubt the whole of the ghostly stock of Alexandria (which vanished in the seventh century) can now be summoned up with the mere tap of a finger.

The practical arguments for such a step are irrefutable: quantity, speed, precision, on-demand availability are no doubt important to the scholar. And new technologies need not be exclusionary. The invention of photography did not eliminate painting, it renewed it, and no doubt the screen and the codex can feed off each other and coexist amicably on the same reader’s desk. All we need to do is remember the corollaries to the arguments in favor of a virtual library: that reading, in order to allow reflection, requires slowness, depth and context; that leafing through a material book or roaming through material shelves is an intimate part of the craft; that the omnipresent electronic technology is still fragile and that, as it changes, we keep losing the possibility of retrieving that which was once stored in now superseded containers. We can still read the words on papyrus ashes saved from the charred ruins of Pompeii; we don’t know for how long it will be possible to read a text inscribed in a 2004 CD. This is not a complaint, just a reminder.

Bouvard and Pécuchet’s ambition is now almost a reality and all the knowledge in the world seems to be there, flickering behind the siren screen. Jorge Luis Borges, who once imagined an infinite library of all possible books, invented a Bouvard-and-Pécuchet-like character who tries to compile a universal encyclopedia so complete that nothing would be excluded from it. In the end, like his French forerunners, he fails, but not entirely. On the evening on which he gives up his great project, he hires a horse and buggy and takes a tour of the city. He sees brick walls, ordinary people, houses, a river, a marketplace and feels that somehow all these things are his own work. He realizes that his project was not impossible but merely redundant. The world encyclopedia, the universal library, already exists and is the world itself.

Alberto Manguel’s latest book is “A Reading Diary” (Farrar Straus & Giroux). His study on the idea of libraries, “The Library at Night,” will be published next year.

ONDON — What does Osama bin Laden want?

The vexing question emerged again last week with the release of an audiotape on which the Qaeda leader seems to be speaking. On it, he applauds the Dec. 6 attack against the United States Consulate in Jidda, Saudi Arabia, and urges the toppling of the Saudi royal family.

The tape indicated that Mr. bin Laden has apparently moved the fomenting of a revolution in his Saudi homeland toward the top of his lengthy and ambitious wish list, which also includes the reversal of American foreign policy in the Middle East, the retreat of the American military from the Arabian Peninsula and the creation of a Palestinian homeland.

Mr. bin Laden has advocated these sea changes before. What intelligence officials and terrorism experts find particularly remarkable in his recent pronouncements is a shift in style from the raw anger and dark imagery of the post-9/11 days. They say he has subtly tempered his message, tone and even persona, presenting himself almost as an ambassador, as if he sees himself as an elder statesman for a borderless Muslim nation.

Earlier this year, he offered a truce to European governments that withdraw their troops from Iraq. In a message released just before the presidential election in the United States, he gloated that the war in Iraq and the “war against terror” were primarily responsible for record American budget deficits. Instead of talking about exacting blood from his enemies, he offered a sober discussion of the bleeding of the American economy.

Perhaps most striking is Mr. bin Laden’s expression of frustration. Like any politician on the stump, Mr. bin Laden craves the ability to deliver an unfiltered message to his audience. Speaking directly to Americans in the pre-election address, he complained that his rationale for waging a holy war against the United States was repeatedly mischaracterized by President Bush and consequently misunderstood by most Americans.

To change this, Mr. bin Laden is testing what he apparently believes are more mainstream themes, while trying to dislodge the entrenched American view of him as a terrorist hell-bent on destroying America and all it stands for. In the pre-election address, Mr. bin Laden said Mr. Bush was wrong to “claim that we hate freedom.” He added: “If so, then let him explain to us why we don’t strike, for example, Sweden.”

That remark surprised some counterterrorism officials and terrorist experts, who said the Al Qaeda leader rarely injects sarcasm into his public pronouncements. They took it as a signal that he was trying to broaden his appeal, particularly to moderate Muslims and possibly even some Americans.

What they cannot say is whether the less strident approach means that he has changed his goals and is less of a danger or that he is just laying the groundwork to justify a new attack against the United States. But they are listening closely and debating an important question: Is Mr. bin Laden committed to destroying America, or has he become more pragmatic, trying to begin a rational foreign policy debate about its presence in the Middle East and even appealing to Americans’ pocketbooks?

“Osama is not a man given to humor, but when he told this joke about Sweden, I think it showed his frustration that Americans are not listening to him,” said Michael Scheuer, a former senior C.I.A. official who tracked Mr. bin Laden for years and is the author of “Imperial Hubris.” “We are being told by the president and others that Al Qaeda attacked us because they despise who we are and what we think and how we live. But Osama’s point is, it’s not that at all. They don’t like what we do. And until we come to understand that, we are not going to defeat the enemy.”

The bin Laden messages are a historical rarity: a foreign leader speaking so directly and frequently to his enemy. Mr. bin Laden has spent 25 years honing his message, and began to address an American audience in the mid-1990′s. Since Sept. 11, 2001, he has delivered 17 messages, while his top lieutenant, Ayman al-Zawahiri, has made 12. That amounts to a message from a Qaeda leader every six weeks.

Intelligence officials are divided on what the two men are trying to accomplish. Some believe they are the leading advocates for what is increasingly being called Qaedism, an anti-Western gospel that they hope will inspire attacks all over the world. Others say the messages are intended to be jihad pep talks, or veiled triggers for new attacks.

Some believe these messages were used that way before the commuter-train bombings in Madrid in March and the bombings of British targets in Istanbul in 2003. Some messages have bluntly threatened new terror strikes; on April 15, Mr. bin Laden warned that an attack would strike any European country that failed to withdraw its troops from Iraq within 90 days. (No country complied, and no Qaeda-linked attacks have occurred in Europe since then.)

Mr. bin Laden’s attempt to engage Americans is occurring while his message to drive the United States out of the Muslim world is resonating with those among the 1.2 billion Muslims who believe the Qaeda leader eloquently expresses their anger over the foreign policies of the United States and Israel. In recent years, he has emphasized the Palestinians’ struggle. “His genius lies in identifying things that are easily visible and easily felt by most Muslims,” Mr. Scheuer said. “He has found issues that are simple, and that Muslims see playing out on their televisions every day.”

But Mr. bin Laden also wants Americans and Europeans to heed his messages and urge their leaders to change their Middle East policies. This has not happened and probably will not happen. “He is tuned out by most Americans and Europeans, and it’s begun to really annoy him,” said a senior counterterrorism official based in Europe.

In his pre-election address, Mr. bin Laden seemed irritated that interviews he gave to Western journalists in the 1990′s went largely unheard by most Americans. He appeared to suggest that if American leaders had listened to his warnings that the United States must change its foreign policy in the Middle East or face the consequences, the Sept. 11 attacks could have been avoided.

Analysts say Mr. bin Laden’s repeated refrain is that Al Qaeda’s strikes are retribution for American and Israeli killings of Muslim women and children. “Reciprocity is a very important principle in the Islamic way of the world,” Mr. Scheuer said. “They judge how far they can go by how far their enemy has gone.”

What stood out in the pre-election message was Mr. bin Laden’s bid to reinvent himself. He traded his battle fatigues, his AK-47 and a rough-terrain backdrop for a sensible sheik’s garb, an anchor desk and a script without a single phrase portending a clash of civilizations. No longer was he reflecting on his own possible martyred death in the “eagle’s belly” – the United States – as he did in 2002, nor did he threaten another spectacular attack against America.

Instead, he said the United States could avoid another attack if it stopped threatening the security of Muslims. He spoke at length about what he sees as the true motive for the Iraq war – to enrich American corporations with ties to the Bush administration. (He cited Halliburton.) And he spoke of bloodshed, but this time metaphorically, about the American economy.

He mocked the United States’s budget and trade deficits, saying that Al Qaeda is committed “to continuing this policy in bleeding American to the point of bankruptcy.” And he said that the 9/11 attacks, which cost Al Qaeda a total of $500,000, have cost the United States more than $500 billion, “according to the lowest estimate” by a research organization in London that he cited by name.

“It all shows that the real loser is – you,” he told Americans, according to a transcript by Al Jazeera, the satellite network.

Peter Bergen, a CNN analyst who interviewed Mr. bin Laden in 1997, said, “The talk revealed bin Laden to be sort of a policy wonk, talking about supplemental emergency funding by Congress for the Afghan and Iraq wars, and how it was evidence that Al Qaeda’s bleed-until-bankruptcy plan was working.”

Jessica Stern, a Harvard professor who lectures on terrorism, said she was most surprised by Mr. bin Laden’s detailed comments about the American economy. “It seemed as if he was trying to appeal to more moderate Muslims, who might have found his 1998 fatwa to kill all Americans morally repulsive,” said Ms. Stern, the author of “Terror in the Name of God: Why Religious Militants Kill.” “His message on this tape is not nearly as offensive. He talks about Americans having a choice – it is up to us to decide whether we will support a foreign policy that he says is bad for our economy and bad for the Islamic world.”

Mr. bin Laden first turned his attention to Saudi Arabia in the early 1980′s. He began demanding that the United States withdraw its troops from the Arabian Peninsula, home to the holiest Muslim sites. The American military presence in Saudi Arabia officially ended in 2003, months after a Qaeda-linked terror group launched a series of attacks inside the kingdom.

Analysts say Mr. bin Laden believes that it will be much easier to overthrow Arab regimes if they are not supported by American power. And he wants to encourage the current upheaval in Saudi Arabia, though analysts say they are unsure why he has suddenly made it a priority. Saudi Arabia has killed or arrested hundreds of militants, but there are cells still capable of carrying out attacks there.

“He sees Saudi as one of the places where he might be successful,” said Matthew Levitt, a former F.B.I. terrorism analyst. “And he realizes there is tremendous potential in terms of societal issues that breed radicalization.”

Does Mr. bin Laden’s more moderate style mean there is less risk of a terrorist strike on American soil? Intelligence analysts are unsure. More than one analyst discerned an ominous warning embedded in his milder pre-election address.

“In Islamic jurisprudence, the warning is important,” Mr. Bergen said. “And if we don’t respond, it’s our problem and our fault. He’s putting the ball back in our court. Maybe this is all rhetorical and they don’t have the ability to launch another big attack. But he intended to tell us that if we choose to completely ignore him, which is a very viable option for us, then we are going to get hit again.”

pastor in Raleigh, N.C., took out a full-page newspaper ad in November exhorting Christians to shop only at stores that included “Merry Christmas” in their promotions.

In Mustang, Okla., parents last week voted against an $11 million bond for schools, after the superintendent excised a nativity scene at the end of the annual Christmas play. They then erected their own manger outside the auditorium, with signs saying “No Christ. No Christmas. Know Christ. Know Christmas.”

And in Kansas, The Wichita Eagle published a correction this month, noting that the tree lighted at Winterfest was the “Community Tree” not a “Christmas tree.” After protests, the mayor last week declared himself “not a politically correct person” and announced that next year there would be a Christmas tree.

If the demands to “Bring Back Christmas” – or, in the words of one group in California, “Save Merry Christmas” – seem louder and more insistent this year, they are. The debate over how to celebrate the holiday without promoting religion is as perennial as a poinsettia. This year, however, conservatives, who have long pushed to “put the Christ back in Christmas,” say they have been emboldened by election results that they took as affirmation that most Americans share not only their faith but also their belief that the nation has lost bearings.

But the demands to bring back Christmas are not simply part of an age-old culture war, with the A.C.L.U. in one corner and evangelicals in the other. There is also a more moderate force, asking whether the country has gone too far in its quest to be inclusive of all faiths. Why, they ask, must a Christmas tree become a holiday tree? And is singing “We Wish You a Merry Christmas” in a school performance more offensive than singing “Dreidel, Dreidel, Dreidel“? “It’s political correctness run amok,” said Lynn Mistretta, who with another mother in Scarborough, Me., started BringBackChristmas.org. “I’m not for offending anyone, but we’re excluding everyone, and everyone feels rotten about it.”

Over the years, schools, governments and even department stores have toned down the mention of Christmas after complaints from Jews and others who felt excluded by a holiday they did not celebrate. “The basic proposition is that people have the right to send their children to the public schools without having them evangelized for someone else’s religion,” said Douglas Laycock, a law professor at the University of Texas in Austin. Those opposed to even secular celebrations of Christmas, he said, “see the increasing strength of the religious right and worry about everything they’ve gained over the last generation being rolled back.”

But even many liberals say there is silliness in the way schools in particular try to avoid offending anyone. One school chorus in Chicago, for example, sang “We Wish You a Swinging Holiday” instead of a “Merry Christmas.”

It’s not just Christmas. Ms. Mistretta and Lynn Lowry say their frustration started with Halloween, when the Scarborough schools said their children could not wear costumes. In February, they observed “Friendship Day” to avoid talking about the saint in Valentine’s Day. And in December, instead of Christmas, it was a literacy parade with children dressing as their favorite literary characters (sending parents to find Halloween costumes.) Ms. Mistretta said her son came home saying he was afraid to wish his friends “Merry Christmas.”

She acknowledged that many non-Christian parents recall feeling excluded as children, and don’t want their own children to feel the same way. “It makes me sick to hear of any child feeling that way, 30 years ago, today, or in 30 years.” she said. “But there’s no way we can respect each other’s traditions if we don’t talk about them.”

In Maplewood, N.J., some parents worried that they’d become a national laughingstock after the school district banned Christmas carols, even instrumental versions, sending the brass ensemble and choirs to rehearse new repertoires just days before their performances this month. Even “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” was out, because it mentions Christmas Eve.

“It’s worse than silly, it’s a great disservice to music education,” said Tom Reingold, the father of two, who is Jewish. “There’s a way to teach music and not make it coercive.”

John W. Whitehead, president of the conservative Rutherford Institute, calls it the new Golden Rule: Thou Shalt Offend No One.

“I think what you’re seeing is people are waking up and saying, ‘Wow, you can’t sing a Christmas song anymore,’ ” said Mr. Whitehead, whose group has for the first time in almost a decade re-issued its “Twelve Rules of Christmas” booklet outlining ways to legally include religion in Christmas displays and observances. “What really burns them is, they see Kwanzaa, they see Hanukkah, they see Frosty and they see Rudolph, but they don’t see ‘Oh Come All Ye Faithful.’ “

Of course, for many conservatives, this controversy is not just about Christmas; it’s a way to talk about a whole float of issues. Bill O’Reilly warned viewers that store clerks no longer saying “Merry Christmas” foretold the imminence of “a brave new progressive world” where gay marriage, partial birth abortion and legalized drugs run rampant.

“Some people see this as a marvelous opportunity to heat up the culture war,” said Charles Haynes, a senior scholar at the Freedom Forum’s First Amendment Center, and the author of its guide outlining acceptable mentions of religion at Christmas. “It’s an opportunity to trigger deeper emotion and frustration that are not really about Merry Christmas, but about what kind of country we are.”

The Alliance Defense Fund’s “Christmas Project” radio ads demonize the American Civil Liberties Union, insisting “It’s O.K. to Say Merry Christmas.” (The A.C.L.U. says it never said it wasn’t.) Rightmarch.com is urging those angry about what it calls the attack on Christmas to send money to “help us spread the word of conservative activism from sea to shining sea.”

Conservative leaders everywhere trade tales of outrage: Candy canes banned! A school won’t allow red and green napkins!

Many of these stories are more legend than truth. The A.C.L.U. defended the child in Massachusetts who wanted to distribute candy canes with a religious message. And what about that school in Kirkland, Wash., where a performance of “A Christmas Carol” was canceled because of Tiny Tim’s line, “God Bless Us, Everyone”? Well, the superintendent said the performance was canceled because the group wanted to charge admission, against school policy.

But no matter. As a radio ad for the Alliance Defense Fund warns, “If we don’t do something, they’re going to steamroll us parents and get rid of Christmas like it never happened.” School boards report that parents are pre-emptively filing complaints, only to discover that school policy does allow religious music or Christmas cards.

In the meantime, some efforts at inclusiveness flounder. In Wichita, some Jews complained that the “Community Tree” lighting was held on the first night of Hanukkah.

The plea from many is for both sides to relax a bit. As Mr. Haynes, at the Freedom Forum, said: “Sensitivity is not hostility to Christianity on the one hand. And on the other, Christmas is not always oppression.”

But as the nation becomes more religiously diverse, it is also becoming more religiously divided, and some say neutrality may not be possible.

“Our constitutional system is to leave the government neutral and leave it to families and churches and synagogues,” Professor Laycock said. But, he said, that can be hard in a society with many different faiths or no faith at all.

“All sides want the government on their side,” he said. “They don’t really want the government to be neutral.”