THE CHAIRMAN.

Last year, my middle son, in eighth grade and encountering his first fairly serious American-history course, indignantly reported that the whole subject was incomprehensible. I was shocked. What about Gettysburg and the Declaration of Independence and the Selma-to-Montgomery march? Just look at my textbook, he said, and when I did I saw his point. His class had got up to the eighteen-forties. What I expected was a big beefing up of the roles of Sacagawea and Crispus Attucks, and, in-deed, there was some of that. But the main difference between my son's text and that of my own childhood was that somebody had made the disastrous decision to devote most of it to what had actually happened in American history. There were pages and pages on tariffs and bank charters and reciprocal trade agreements. I skipped ahead, past the Civil War, hoping for easier going, only to encounter currency floats and the regulation of freight rates. Only a few decades into the twentieth century did it become possible to see the federal government's main function as responding to dramatic crises and launching crusades for social justice, instead of attempting to referee competing claims from economic interests.

Even now, if one were to reveal what really goes on behind the pretty speeches and the sanctimonious hearings in Washington, what you'd find is thousands of lawyers and lobbyists madly vying for advantage, not so much over the public as over each other: agribusiness versus real estate, banks versus insurance companies, and so on. The arena in which this competition mainly takes place is regulatory agencies and commissions and the congressional committees that supervise them. It's an insider's game, less because the players are secretive than because the public and the press--encouraged by the players, who speak in jargon--can't get themselves interested.

One corner of Washington might be called F.C.C. World, for the Federal Communications Commission. F.C.C. World has perhaps five thousand denizens. They work at the commission itself, at the House and Senate commerce committees, and at the Washington offices of the companies that the commission regulates. They read Communications Daily (subscription price: $3,695 a year), and every year around Christmastime they grumblingly attend the Chairman's Dinner, at a Washington hotel, where the high point of the evening is a scripted, supposedly self-deprecating comedy routine by the commission's chairman.

Of all the federal agencies and commissions, the F.C.C. is the one that Americans ought to be most interested in; after all, it is involved with a business sector that accounts for about fifteen per cent of the American economy, as well as important aspects of daily life--telephone and television and radio and newspapers and the Internet. And right now F.C.C. World is in, if not a crisis, at least a very soapy lather, because a good portion of what the angry public thinks of as the "corporate scandals" concerns the economic collapse of companies regulated by the F.C.C. Qwest, WorldCom, Adelphia, and Global Crossing, among others, are (or were) part of F.C.C. World. AOL Time Warner is part of F.C.C. World. Jack Grubman, the former Salomon Smith Barney analyst who seems to have succeeded Kenneth Lay, of Enron, as the embodiment of the corporate scandals, is part of F.C.C. World. In the past two years, companies belonging to F.C.C. World have lost trillions of dollars in stock-market valuation, and have collectively served as a dead weight pulling down the entire stock market.

This year, an alarmed and acerbic anonymous memorandum about the state of the F.C.C. has been circulating widely within F.C.C. World. It evokes F.C.C. World's feverish mood ("The F.C.C. is fiddling while Rome burns") and suggests why nobody besides residents of F.C.C. World has thought of the commission in connection with the corporate scandals. The sentence I just quoted is followed by this explanation: "The ILECs appear likely to enter all l.d. markets within twelve months, while losing virtually no residential customers to attackers since 1996, and suffering about 10% market share loss in business lines to CLECs." It's a lot easier to think about evil C.E.O.s than to decipher that.

Even in good times, F.C.C. World pays obsessive attention to the commission's chairman. In bad times, the attention becomes especially intense; and when the chairman is a celebrity F.C.C. World devotes itself to full-time chairman-watching. The current chairman, Michael Powell, is a celebrity, at least by government-official standards, because he is the only son of Colin Powell, the Secretary of State. Unlike his father, he has a kind of mesmerizing ambiguity, which generates enormous, and at times apoplectically toned, speculation about who he really is and what he's ...