OR THE PAST WEEK, I've been carrying around an ad from The New Yorker: ''Fact: Almost everything you learn today will be obsolete in 12 months.''
The cheery ad is, of course, a statement about the high-tech economy. The state-of-the-art software you are struggling to conquer today won't be worth its space on your hard drive next spring.
But as the presidential race lurches to Election Day, it reminds me of the obsolescence of the high-political campaign. Everything we are learning today will be - OK, may be - obsolete in 12 months. Or one month.
This year we've had the luxury, and I do mean luxury, of a trivial political pursuit. In the midst of peace and prosperity, there are actually days when the loudest debate is about whether anyone is picking up the phone for the pollsters.
Some of the trivia of the political information age comes courtesy of a dangerously bored media.
In the week between debates, they let us know that Bush wore cufflinks and Gore did not. We discovered that Al's shirt collars were narrower than George's.
After endless and vaguely patronizing analyses of the women's vote, we even got equal opportunity insults to the men's vote. Why do men like Bush more than Gore, you wonder? The New York Times cites the California car quiz: If George were a car, he'd be a Maserati, while Al would be a Volvo. Press save.
Of course, cars and fashion are planned to be out of style in a season. But even investigative journalists this year are grinding their teeth on political snack foods:
Gore did not go down to Texas with the head of FEMA - the Federal Emergency Management Agency - to tour the fires. He just held a press conference there. Gotcha!
Bush could not have read ''The Very Hungry Caterpillar'' when he was a child. It wasn't written until he was in his 20s. Gotcha back!
But trivia is not the only reason this campaign may be obsolete as soon as it's over. For all our obsession with the speed of change, we have forgotten how vulnerable we are to it. We have forgotten how what goes up - the economy - can come down. We have forgotten that peace is fragile and the world is a dangerous place.
Sometimes when I listen to the wrangling over a projected surplus - $25 trillion? $4.5 trillion? $350 billion? - I suspect that Americans from baby boomers to the echo generation have been lucky or spoiled. We've had no war on our soil. It's become easy to believe that our own entrepreneurial cleverness keeps the economy afloat and the stock market aloft.
In political life anyone who wonders aloud whether these are our good old days will be declared guilty of scare tactics or that great American sin: pessimism. And in a season when David Letterman jokes move polls and a sober Ralph Nader does ''Saturday Night Live,'' there is still a politically incorrect idea: Maybe it's time to take politics seriously.
I venture this thought because the world - a place that has barely made a cameo campaign appearance - has begun to intrude. In one week a revolution in Serbia turns out Milosevic and turns in Vojislav Kostunica, a man whose name I could neither recognize nor spell in September. In the same week the peace process in the Middle East disintegrates and old animosities break out, threatening an unholy war in the Holy Land.
These are stark reminders that we don't just choose a president for the good times. Indeed, the good times can take care of themselves. We elect a president for troubled times. We pick the man who will be waked up in the middle of the night with decisions to make.
In the trivial campaign Gore has been dubbed the class know-it-all and Bush the class clown. A laugh on both their houses.
In a campaign of factoids, Gore the Volvo is mocked for reciting the names of the countries that once formed Yugoslavia. Bush the Maserati is mocked for flubbing Milosevic.
But in a serious campaign, when tough questions rise through the surface of cynicism, there is a big difference between a man who sometimes seems too big for his britches and a man who is clearly too small for the job.
George W. has an ad of his own running in a dozen states. In that ad, he faces the camera in an open shirt saying, ''I trust you.'' That's a fine slogan for the good times, for an economy on a roll and a world without crisis. But in hard times the question that matters is, Whom do we trust?
Fact: Almost everything else we learn will be obsolete.
Ellen Goodman's e-mail address is ellengoodman@globe.com.
