Somewhere along the way the spritz became reality, and an escalating daisy chain of outrage ensued. Kahane left for Israel in 1971, taking his attitude with him and projecting it onto Arabs. He was assassinated back in New York in 1990. The suspect is an Arab whose circle of friends later blew up the World Trade Center. One of Kahane’s disciples, Dr. Baruch Goldstein, went on to massacre a mosque full of Arabs in Hebron on Feb. 25. Several days later, an Arab-a “livery-cab driver with an attitude,” police sources said-allegedly opened fire on a van full of Hasidic Jewish children on the Brooklyn Bridge, wounding four, two of whom were not expected to survive. The most telling comment on all this came from Muki Tzur, a leader of the Israeli kibbutz movement: “The group to which Goldstein belonged is very marginal and unusual in Israeli society, but that is the reason he wasn’t taken seriously enough. How did we not see it? How did we not think that such a thing could happen?”

Perhaps the time has come to take all the spritzers and poseurs more seriously. We are living in the Golden Age of Attitude. Rantings reverberate; politics and entertainment conflate. Louis Farrakhan was a calypso performer; his protege Khalid Abdul Muhammad struts his stuff like a gangsta-rapper. Both exist somewhere on the media spectrum between Ice-T and the Ayatollah Khomeini. Brother Muhammad can do his thing for a tiny audience in Baltimore and have it sold as a cassette at Nation of Islam rallies days later. He can lay down some funky meter"hook-nose, bagel-eating, lox-eating . . ."-and the possibility exists that his less ironic listeners will mistake riff for reality, and act on it. Poses struck in Hollywood and on CNN become real fife on the frontiers of civility; “Mad Max” videos become how-to manuals for road warriors in the anarchy of Somalia.

In the February issue of The Atlantic Monthly, Robert D. Kaplan extrapolated from the implosion of public order in West Africa and posited a world slowly overwhelmed by sociopathic street gangs, each with its own charismatic gangsta-meshuga. It seemed a bit much. Civilization had to be more supple than that, more durable than a bunch of spritzers with an attitude. But you have to wonder when months of delicate and, finally, emotionally transcendent negotiating by Jews and Palestinians can be trashed by a lone fanatic with a semiautomatic. in a world of wires and images, it often seems easier to communicate evil-to hype gross differences like pigment and religion-than the more subtle complexities of our common humanity.

All of which represents a profound intellectual threat to the very idea of America. We are not and never have been a multicultural society. We are a multiethnic society that is unicultural. That is an important distinction. The central premise of the American culture is a simple one: our differences as human beings are less significant than the things we have in common. Group identities are irrelevant; individual rights are paramount. The times we have made exceptions to that premise have proved disastrous. The first, and most odious, was slavery. The most recent was a kindly, but misguided, reaction to injustice: that blacks (and later, other “protected” groups) should be given special preferences because of their historic grievances. It hasn’t worked. The acceptance of racial distinctions gave leverage to those, like Louis Farrakhan, who made hay off the differences; it made possible poisonous reactionaries like Meir Kahane. It muddies what should be a clear national message in an increasingly chaotic world, that America represents the antithesis of tribalism.

There isn’t much that we can do about the road warriors of Africa, or even the enduring agony of the Palestinians and Jews, but it does seem time that we consign Louis Farrakhan to his rightful place. He has walked into a leadership vacuum that should be regarded as a national scandal and become the gangsta of choice on college campuses, a trendy demagogue (check out the applause at the mention of the Nation of Islam during last week’s Grammy awards). His notoriety has won him a spate of on-the-other-hand press notices (on the other hand, the Fruit of Islam really does vamp on drug dealers). It is perhaps too much to expect that a leader will emerge who can draw crowds with the message that assimilation is a more honorable goal than aggrievement. But it should not be too much to ask that every public figure treat Louis Farrakhan and his spokesmen, and all those of every race who seek to exploit our differences, with the same unflinching disgust and disdain that Yitzhak Rabin visited upon Meir Kahane’s hateful followers last week: “You are a foreign implant. You are an errant weed. Sensible Judaism spits you out.”