A HOST OF CONTRADICTIONS

Before a visitor has even left Atlanta's Hartsfield International Airport, he is loudly assaulted by the city's pride in itself: "Awakens as a world leader," says one postcard, among the "American-Made Collectors' Souvenirs and Spoons" in an airport gift shop, and another calls it ''a competitor's paradise." Terminal videos instruct you on how to invest money here, and a large ad reminds you that the born-again town was voted the top American city for "global companies" in 1994 by one magazine and the best city for small businesses by another. Atlanta ("A Star on the Rise," as the logo on its Olympic bid had it) seems tailor-made to play host to the Centennial Olympics, if only because it is so in tune with the Games' unspoken tradition of institutional idealism and business-minded, slogan-wielding hopes of bringing the world together.

Yet all this official rah-rahism hides a blur of stubborn uncertainties. Atlanta, to an uncanny degree, is embodied by its amorphous, computer-generated, somewhat indeterminate Olympic mascot, Whatizit. The city seems a Whereizit that is both Southern and Northern, global and provincial, black run and white dominated--a liberal conservative small town done up in a three-piece suit. The two phrases most closely associated with Atlanta are, after all, "I have a dream" and "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn."

The riddle at the heart of Atlanta has always been how to balance the bright new equality envisaged by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. with the "don't-give-a-damn" romance of the Old South immortalized by Margaret Mitchell. And how to capitalize on a past that is the source of both its magnolia-scented allure and its shame, while marketing itself as a place of the future.

The most surprising thing about Atlanta, in fact, for a first-time visitor, is that the Civil War is being re-enacted here every day, and the issue of racial harmony is the main issue in town, even (or especially) among those who claim it is a non-issue. For decades the city has managed to generate hopeful visions of bodies reaching out to one another across racial lines, from the stories of Brer Rabbit to the 1989 movie Driving Miss Daisy. The Commission on Inter-racial Cooperation was set up here in the 1920s--but at almost exactly the same time, the Ku Klux Klan was reorganized at nearby Stone Mountain.

The city's practical response to such social divisions has always been to put its faith in economics: Be good for business, the so-called Atlanta Spirit reminds its citizens, and business will be good for you. Even the oddly defensive tag Atlanta gives itself--"The City Too Busy to Hate"--rearticulates the hope that busy-ness can paper over resentments. And, to a remarkable extent, the city has made good on its promise: Atlanta is famously the center of the Cable News Network, Delta Air Lines and Coca-Cola; and for four straight years in the '90s, "Hotlanta" led the nation in the creation of jobs.