Divided We Fall: Gambling with History in the Nineties.

• Author: Noah, Timothy

Divided We Fall: Gambling With History in the Nineties Haynes Johnson Norton, $25 By TImothy Noah

If any proof were needed that the culture of TV gab is polluting print journalism, this book is it. The author, Haynes Johnson, is a longtime panelist on "Washington Week in Review," and reading his new tome is not unlike clicking the remote from channel to channel. "More than anything else it is fear over the economic future that most powerfully affects Americans." (Click!) "Public schools, once the glory of American democracy, the way to a better life for generations of immigrants and the binding glue of economic and social classes, have become society's dumping ground." (Click!) "Despite the end of legal segregation, de facto segregation still exists." (Click!) "Violence in America is increasing; civility and attempts to reach consensus are declining." (Click!) "Awareness of a new life-threatening menace like AIDS, striking suddenly and spreading through the culture, intensifies apprehension and stress felt by numerous Americans." (Click! Click!)

I don't mean to belittle the pile of urgent national problems through which Johnson rummages; it is real. But it is also by now familiar and deserves from journalists more than the march of platitudes to which it is routinely subjected on TV public affairs shows and, increasingly, in pompous "opinion leader" books like this.

Johnson may bridle at being characterized as a pundit; after all, his longtime print specialty has been writing about social problems through the voices of ordinary, outside-the-Beltway Americans. But the people in this book come across not as individuals whose particular experiences shed new or surprising light on a subject but as two-dimensional stand-ins for various predictable points of view. They disgorge their least interesting opinions (i.e., the ones most likely to fit whatever bland point Johnson is trying to make), and then retreat to the anonymity whence they came. Consider:

* Larry Pugh, who manages a hospital in Waterloo, Iowa: "I see a serious deterioration, almost an eradication, of the middle class that I grew up in." Next ! * Luis Guillen, a Latino senior at the University of Wisconsin: "I have a lot of friends of Mexican descent who refuse to speak English." Next ! * Amy Dickenson, a research assistant (well, all right, Johnson's research assistant, though he doesn't say so until the acknowledgements): "I know that the world I knew as a child, living on a small...