THE YEAR EMOTIONS RULED

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Who would stir himself into a state of lasting disgust at the Marv Albert backbiting assault and underwear case, when one felt certain that Marv would (as he did) show up on Larry King, Letterman and Today to seek redemption by exposure? There was an exchange on the Today interview with Katie Couric that could be read as the clarifying moment of the entire century, let alone the past year, when Couric asked Marv why anyone should believe his version of the sordid events when he had already admitted lying to his former wife and fiance. Albert said, in effect, that while that was so, he would never lie on television.

For at least two decades, to be cool was to be "cool." And then, suddenly, it was not. As with all extreme cultural tendencies, something had to snap, and what began to show up in the mid-1990s was an insistent desire to feel passion again and show us you care. In 1995 psychologist Daniel Goleman published Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ. The best seller was embraced in educational circles because EQ (emotional quotient) offered a way to counter IQ as a standard of intelligence. But it was also a signal that the public at large might be ready, indeed eager, to return to the flagrant emotionalism of the 1960s, though fired by new and different causes.

What causes were available? There was no Vietnam War to protest, no sexual revolution or drug culture to adopt (live free and die), no generation gap worth exploiting. The Gap had become a clothing store, the counterculture reduced to a few average hysterics who thought it exciting to proclaim God dead and the family expendable. As for opposing technology, it seemed out of the question. A decision had already been made to join our machines rather than beat 'em.

With no glaring cause to display mass emotions, anything that happened could qualify. Behold the responses to the death of Mother Teresa, the birth of the McCaughey seven, the au pair trial and, most amazingly, Diana. The public reaction to the septuplets might have been the same in any era; there is always something enchanting and heartwarming about human beings' doing something odd, like producing a litter. Likewise, the loss of so demonstrably selfless a person as Mother Teresa might effect a mass response in any year.

One cannot be so sure that is true of the au pair trial, however, and of its dual outrages--one over too harsh a decision, one over too lenient a one. At issue was justice, or rather injustice, and these days there is nothing like injustice to bring people to their knees or to their feet. People read of so many unjust rewards and unjust punishments--canned ceos walking off with tens of millions while "downsized" employees merely walk off--that they may be on an unconscious search for signs of cosmic fairness.