REFLECTIONS ON A GHASTLY WEEK FOR LOS ANGELES AND AMERICA

There's good news to report this week on the condition of Cape Girardeau County Commissioner Gene Huckstep, who has recently been through a scare concerning kidney dysfunction. Week before last, Gene checked into a Memphis hospital for treatment of blockages to the arteries that serve the kidneys. Early reports had indicated that the right kidney was completely shut down, and might have to be surgically removed, while the other kidney's function was also imperiled by an arterial blocakge.

After extensive tests, famed Memphis cardio-thoracic surgeon Dr. Glenn Crosby informed Huckstep this week that surgery is not indicated at this time. The doctors feel they can correct much of the situation with a strict diet, exercise and other non-surgical treatment.

Insofar as he can be believed, Gene is adhering to their dietary recommendations, and is walking 1.5 miles daily, as the doctors prescribed. Also on doctors' orders, he has reduced his time spent at the County courthouse over his normal schedule for the next month or so.

What isn't clear is how much of this doctors' regimen is strict medical judgment, and how much is due to their dread of enduring an extended period with Gene Huckstep in a hospital bed, and the daily confrontations as doctors make their rounds. Seriously, we're heartened to hear of Gene's good report, and wish him a full and speedy recovery.

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I applaud President Bush's move in ordering the Justice Department to pursue an investigation into possible civil rights violations by Los Angeles policemen in their beating of ex-con and long-time felon Rodney King. As shown on the videotape, the officers' beating of King seemed clearly to be excessive. Thus the additional federal investigation is proper.

That said, other comments are in order. Among them:

1) Nothing, but nothing can condone the sickening violence has seen rioting and looting and arson decimate so many neighborhoods, especially in Los Angeles. The thugs and criminals responsible are extinguishing such job-creating investment as exists in their neighborhoods. Who will want to rebuild there? Who are the immediate losers? If anything, state authorities appear to me to have been slow in deploying the national guard forces they had placed on alert.

2) None of us sat on that jury. None of us knows everything they saw and heard throughout that trial. To state, as so many public officials have (including some lawyers who should know better), that this jury handed down a miscarriage of justice is to state more than the facts allow. It is irresponsible. I'm not saying it is not a miscarriage; I'm saying we who rely on the national media don't have all the facts, and shouldn't try those officers on the basis of media reports.

3) Speaking of media reports, why do the national networks continually refer to Rodney King now cleaned up and trotted out for the TV cameras as "Motorist Rodney King"? The man is a felon, a character known to the cops, a guy who was stopped going 115 miles an hour and who was evidently on PCP on the night in question. He is a big man, whose considerable strength may well have been supercharged by the PCP he illegally ingested.

King is a violent character. Who among us wants to confront such a wild, drug-crazed man?

4) In the back of my mind I recall a schoolmate who became a San Diego cop, and who began a routine traffic stop some years ago, and who minutes later lay dying, shot in the face by a dreadful thug the "motorist" he had lawfully pulled over. At 31 he left a grieving wife and four children, and many friends, and an annual award is named for Timothy Ruopp.

5) If, as seems clear, American blacks feel strongly that our system of justice doesn't work for them, and is biased against them, that is a problem that people of good will must work to rectify. Let's all pull together on this.

6) The political effects of such unrestrained lawlessness are worth reflecting upon. Write it down: when pressed to the wall, people of all races will opt for order, physical safety and seeming stability over chaos, lawlessness and blood in the streets. Example: 1968.

That fateful, violent year was the culmination of three years of lawlessness, riots, arson, assassinations and civil disorder. Result: the first of the great, anti-liberal landslides repeated so often since then. In November, 1968, Richard Nixon smashed the liberal Democratic machine that had dominated American politics since the Kennedy-Johnson victory eight years earlier, winning the White House by a razor-thin margin over Vice President Hubert Humphrey.

Like Lincoln a century before, Nixon was a minority winner, with 43 percent. But add to his vote total the millions won by populist Alabama Gov. George Wallace (13-plus percent), and you have a landslide: the first of the great, value-based repudiations of licentiousness and liberalism that have been repeated so often since.

The other great figure to emerge as a mainstream figure in reaction to the '60s' rioting was a candidate for Governor of California, an easily derided former B-movie actor who, at age 55, had never before sought public office. His name: Ronald Reagan.