Mr. Ambassador (High-Level Frank Rich Alert)

Flashback: It is the year 2000, and Public Cultural Enemy No. 1 is a rapper named Eminem (aka Marshall Mathers III), who has ascended from America's closest approximation of hell (aka his hometown, Detroit). His abundant use of the words ''bitch'' and ''faggot'' has aroused the full spectrum of P.C. police, left and right. The violence in his songs is echoed by headlines of his own arrest on gun charges in two consecutive public brawls. And since he is white, he can't be ghettoized: his music is saturating the suburbs at a faster clip than that of black hip-hop artists. Congress, inflamed by Columbine and looking for scapegoats, rounds up the usual suspects for hearings.

But now it is two years later, and on a muggy late summer evening, Eminem is performing before his fans in the Detroit suburbs, the last stop of his 2002 Anger Management Tour. A high point of the show is a song in which he exults in his role as universally despised spokesman for alienated Middle American youth. ''White America! I could be one of your kids!'' Blahblahblahblah....

I'm not going to waste my time with our finest social commentator since Mencken, but it is quite obvious why this newspaper immortal engaged in an exercise in automatic typing just from the last paragraph:

For now, though, he seems more in demand as a star than ever. As ''8 Mile'' was awaiting its premiere, every establishment TV show from ''Today'' to ''60 Minutes'' was approaching Marshall Mathers. Lynne Cheney and Congressional scolds notwithstanding, even the United States government has joined the Eminem bandwagon: this summer it started broadcasting his songs in the Middle East as part of its propaganda campaign to enhance America's image to young radio listeners in the Arab world.

First, it allows Frank to kiss up top Howell Raines, who's learning how to rap (no more fuddy-duddy articles about boring classical music in THIS paper!); and second, it allows the greatest newspaperman since John Peter Zenger to attack the EEEEEEEEEEVIL of Republicans and the manifest hypocrisy of American government. He kills two birds with one stone -- and his readers with trendy boredom.

Sorry Howell, you still haven't given back Walter Duranty's Pulitzer.

There is hope, however. A Times story on rap reads, "...[W]ith rap album sales even more depressed than the music industry as a whole...."

Who says the Times doesn't run good news?

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