Last Saturday found us out on the ledge of the 32nd floor with a few other stockholders, waiting our turn to jump, when through an open window we chanced to see a news item on the Fox Channel.

We love Fox News. It's so chock-full of facts which, though seldom strung together in a coherent, or for that matter, persuasive, fashion are often, as in this instance, interesting in and of themselves.

Excusing ourselves from the little group of precipitant optimists who, rashly cheered by the evidentiary pinata disgorged by Colin Powell at the U.N. last week, had, without reckoning on the international yawn to follow, plunged heavily into the market, and were now about to plunge heavily into the street.

Having said our good-byes we climbed through the window and watched with rapt attention as the news team--most of whom appeared to be on loan from the Dallas Cowgirls--revealed that a reproduction of Picasso's Guernica on display at the U.N. Security Council had been covered with a large blue shroud.

The reason for this dissemblance is immediately apparent upon viewing the actual work. It is literally a horror that goes much beyond its ostensible abstraction of Germany's WWII aerial murder of 1600 men women and children in the Spanish town of Guernica. It seeks to condemn all wars.

Though rendered entirely in black and white, the painting is drenched in blood. It is a nightmare into which you are helplessly drawn. Suddenly it is 1937, and you are trapped in a world mad beyond recognition. You stand on the raw ground littered with agonized dead. You are too numbed to run, barely able to lurch out of the path of the stampeding, dismembered and dying animals that screech in fear and fury. Deafened by the roar of planes and exploding bombs you see but cannot hear the mothers screaming for their dead children. Your face is blistered from the heat of flaming buildings and burning bodies. You cover your mouth against the stench of nitrates, flesh and offal. Life seeps from everything that surrounds you. And everywhere sounds the beating wings of the angels of war.

Picasso is trying to make war look like a bad thing.

The painting is hung in a hall where diplomats speak to the press. Given this circumstance, and in view of the upcoming spate of belligerent declamations expected from American officials and their nervously acquiescent allies, U.N. officials felt the painting might be too salient a reminder of the downside of war--which, one is forced to consider, might be the reason it was put there in the first place.

As is the case with much that occurs at the U.N. these days, one instantly suspects the decision was prompted by American concerns that leaving the artwork visible would incur the risk of putting too fine a point on the discussion of war, or worse still, ending it altogether.

Using a highly sophisticated method of intelligence acquisition (standing on the toilet seat so that our feet wouldn't show beneath the stall) your W Team has learned that Bush administration opposition to the painting is both widespread and widely varied.

Secretary of the Apocalypse, Donald Rumsfeld, for example, cites the painting's failure to show the heroic aspect of war, which he bitterly regrets having missed while avoiding combat. The President, who also seems never to have been where the shooting was, doesn't object to the painting per se, but feels it would be more appropriate to feature the work of a better known artist.

Attorney General John Ashcroft, who believes Franz Kafka was a humorist, has spotted in the depicted carnage something he is sure is a nipple, which he intuits to mean that somewhere in the picture there is a breast. Perhaps for reasons of unresolved Oedipal conflicts the Attorney General does not like to see breasts right out there in the open where anyone can do God knows what with them. You will recall his attempt one year ago to cover up all of the overtly mammalian statuary at the Department of Justice--then, as now, with a blue shroud.

No doubt about it, blue shrouds are practically a fashion statement at this White House.

The antipathy that the Attorney General and others harbor for these works is universal, timeless and wholly expressive of the wary apprehension with which all governments view art--for the simple reason that it is dangerous.

Artists, a term we understand to include painters, sculptors, photographers, novelists, poets, composers, musicians, dancers, choreographers, craftspeople, playwrights--in short, the whole shifty bunch--lie awake nights thinking of ways to make the rest of us miserable. And their success in that endeavor makes art one of the principal gateways to the loss of national self-esteem.

These so-called "creative" individuals are constantly on the alert for modes of expression that will point out how stupid and imperceptive the rest of us are. They are constantly searching for examples of good, solid, one hundred percent American values just so they can point out how self-contradictory and smugly malicious are our beliefs.

Artists have the annoying habit of honing an awareness of their surroundings and deliberately paying attention to what is going on around them. This is the last thing governments need. It's difficult enough keeping Joe and Mabel quiet about taxes and missed trash pickups without having some smarty-pants pointing out cracks in the foundation.

Where did all this social criticism come from? What happened to artists who used to think up nice rhymes, wrote stories with morals at the end, and painted pictures you could, for God's sake, understand? Where are the successors to Whistler, Grandma Moses, Alcott, Hawthorne, Browning, and Emerson?

Well, okay, maybe not Emerson.

All these so-called "artists" putting the knock on the Stars and Stripes are helping fuel the growing antiwar movement here and abroad, and having a devastating effect on our international reputation and alliances.

This has not gone unnoticed. For example, Lisa Kadonaga, the wry Canadian political observer whose prolific commentaries seem at times--we hate to say this--a bit liberal, has noted this phenomenon. In speaking of the upcoming war games traditionally held between the United States and its allies, Dr. Kadonaga notes that, at the present rate of disaffection among our international partners, we may not have enough to form two sides.

We may, she says, have to play with ourselves.

The question of how Canadians or other crypto-Europeans feel about us raises serious issues regarding the stability of our international alliances. Might our increasingly bellicose attitudes so embarrass our allies that they turn their backs on us, leaving us to storm alone through Baghdad like Rambo? Would they form alliances against us, shun us as a rogue state?

Or, we suppose, they could just cover us with a blue shroud.