Wall Street Week.

• Author: Douglas, Susan

Have you ever had one of those Friday nights when you come home especially flattened and, being the conscientious type, you zone out watching Jim Lehrer? Too spent to even click the remote. you watch in numb fascination as a completely bizarre media form--Wall Street Week--grabs you by the lapels and dares you to turn away.

Here the Town & Country set--men in pinstripes, women wearing silk scarves the size of baby quilts around their shoulders-gets down around a mahogany table and talks reverentially about "the market" and what it's going to do next. Such speculation became especially fevered as the market soared this fall to previously unimaginable levels.

With all the spontaneity of Kabuki theater, and a level of self-congratulation unmatched by Disney/Cap Cities annual reports, Wall Street Week follows a rigidly ritualized format, presided over by its harlequin-faced and gratingly smug host, Louis Rukeyser. There is a weekly incantation: Wall Street is wise, Wall Street knows all, and if "the market" is happy, then all Americans should be, too.

Rukeyser, the grand shaman of capitalism, opens the weekly show with his personal readings of the market's tea leaves. "The market" here isn't a thing, or a set of transactions: It's anthropomorphized, kind of like a god--I'd say Thor--and he'd better not be crabby. Two things especially make him cross: interference from the government, and "over-cautious" investors, otherwise known as members of the bear" cult. These are sworn enemies of the 'bull" cult, whose prayers the market has been responding to with unprecedented largesse.

Rukeyser's opening monologue is always encased in some suffocating metaphor that he thinks is terribly cute--one week, stocks are like cold cuts; the next. 'the market" is like a movie star. Just recently, for example, we learned that with the market having gone up 28 percent in value in just four months, "investors float like the shipwrecked in World War II, in an environment as comfortably padded as the life preserver named after Mae West." But don't think that the show is just for the rich. It's dedicated, insists Rukeyser, to "letting the average person know that, contrary to what you may hear elsewhere, there really is big money to be made in the stock market."

Rukeyser, an elder of the bull cult, declaims against the bears, whose concerns about an imminent crash that would especially hurt the small investor are "erroneous" and "look sillier week by week." In fact...