I HAVE A FRIEND who is blind and an advocate for the blind. He refers to his as ''the elite affliction.''

Deafness must be at the bottom of the barrel.

I can hear most things fairly clearly but have trouble distinguishing sounds only in one frequency range. Unfortunately, this is the frequency of human speech. Requests to lower the music or to repeat a phrase are frequently greeted with a pointed display of exasperation. Strange but true.

Last week I was at my daughter's summer camp. The camp is found in an area long recognized as the epicenter of the silly liberal.

Its latest outrage was a display of signing during the camp pageant.

There were the kids, got up as various papier-mache deities of some hunter-gatherer group, and there was a concerned parent, signing away, merrily as a grig, to an audience of parents - none of whom were deaf.

Why, then, was this woman signing?

She was involved in an activity the theoretical utility of which was unquestioned, in circumstances which rendered it both pointless and absurd.

This is how I feel about American democracy.

In both instances I feel it is very much my ox which has been gored.

I, personally, would like to hear the conversation at the restaurant table - though rather deaf, I would prefer cooperation from those of whom I request it. The pointless and good-natured display of universal brother-and-sisterhood in the summer camp signing addresses no problem in which I have an interest.

Neither does the political news.

The media conglomerates lobby for greater monopoly, and the same cesspit that funds their mergers and acquisitions also funds the American politician.

The Republicans will raise close to half a billion dollars in their pursuit of the '04 license. Their program, so far, seems to have been one of gleeful rapine and pillage - bankrupt the poor, dismantle the last vestiges of the New Deal, and distract the populace with a fraudulent threat.

Chemical and biological weapons are not ''weapons of mass destruction'' - they are battlefield weapons, and inefficient ones.

The Bush administration retreats from, ''I didn't do it'' to ''If I did, I didn't mean it''; the third term, however, long the province of the red-handed executive, ''I was temporarily insane, it was a cry for help,'' is denied them.

I must say that, in the light, the plea of the exalted, ''But, but, but, you can't send me to jail; I'm me ... '' seems less of an obscenity than a happy safety value. ''All right,'' the courts respond to the celebrated, ''Not guilty, but don't do it again. Now, go away.''

But the oligarchy cannot plead, for the oligarchy cannot be apprehended. Theoretically, perhaps, but by whom?

The Democrats, as usual, chase their tails and wonder what color tie to wear to display Decision. The administration has labeled the rest of the world irrelevant; the administration is, for the next foreseeable while, the government, and we Americans have ever been incapable of distinguishing between the government and the country. Any residual capacity for such discernment is and will continue to be eroded by the conglomeration of media power. What is a poor voter to do?

The question before us is not ''Who misled Bush?'' the question is how long we Americans, Democrat and Republican, will continue to engage in self-delusive behavior and call it democracy.

Let us either cease the behavior, or let us name it frankly. As we might that of the woman at the summer camp. She was not signing to the deaf, she was waving her arms to make herself feel good.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright David Mamet is the author of three novels.

© Copyright 2003 Globe Newspaper Company.

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