I want to write about white male paranoia and figure out What It All Means.

So of course, I start with Hillary Rodham Clinton, the woman who single-handedly forces many males to peek in their underwear every morning to make sure nothing is missing. (In the movie The Crying Game, a woman turned into a man, and, my God, what if it could happen the other way?)

Sunday's Parade Magazine portrayed Hillary Rodham Clinton as an advocate of "accountability, social responsibility, playing by the rules, self-discipline" -- all the things "family values" meant before the Republicans turned the phrase into an ideological mask for "Us vs. Them" politics.

Then, Hillary Rodham Clinton said a few words that caused a Zen meltdown in my brain. "But I am a conservative," she said, ". . . in the true sense of that word -- not in the kind of radical, ideological, destructive way (in which the) term is often used. I was raised to be self-reliant and to be responsible but to know that I was part of a larger community to which I also have responsibilities."

Wow, I said. She's right, and the ramifications for paranoid white males are truly frightening.

All the men who believe that the white male is the most persecuted, picked-on person in the United States -- in other words, the majority of right-wing radio and TV host Rush Limbaugh's audience -- suffer from an identity delusion.

They're actually liberals. They must be; only the far-left wacko faction falls into the "I'm a victim, you're a victim" trap.

Imagine their distress, their misery, when they achieve awareness of their plight. I can already see them peering really hard into their pants, praying to that Great Sex-Change Surgeon in the Sky -- "I want to be more like Hillary, honest I do, honest."

But in the meantime, these paranoid white males are sitting in your classroom and living in your dorm. They're everywhere, every age, and they could go ballistic any minute now.

I know this fact because I just saw Falling Down. In the movie, Michael Douglas plays D-Fens, a slightly insane white guy who has a mega-bad day and turns into a mostly insane guy.

He uses a baseball bat, a knife and many, many guns to vent his rage and frustration on a Korean shopowner, his ex-wife, a few Hispanic gang members, his ex-wife, a Nazi and an elderly golfer, assorted others, a police officer and his ex-wife again. (The message: Paranoid white guys don't like minorities, and they really hate women.)

The movie is a prime example of Hollywood's stupidity. In a dangerously brilliant and depraved move, the makers of Falling Down combined the worst elements of modern Republican thought (or lack of) and multiculturalism (the left's favorite child -- a.k.a "Diversity").

In a movie advertised as "A Tale of Urban Reality," Hollywood gives us a world of us or them, of me vs. all of you, of D-Fens against the world. It's a world populated by rival ethnic, social and economic groups -- all battling for a diminishing piece of the American apple pie.

Actually, I'm putting too much blame on Hollywood; Hollywood is too stupid to realize its stupidity. The problem originates with the Republicans who lapped up Ronald Reagan's and Pat Buchanan's rhetoric and the short-sighted liberals who gorged on multiculturalism and diversity. These two groups came up with conflicting theories that lead to the same result -- a fragmented, divided society. Sound familar? Look around you.

Us vs. Them politics conflict with the basic ideals of democracy. A democracy is supposedly a community where all individuals receive both the freedom and the encouragement to seek out happiness and growth. In a society of us and them, the demons depend on your perspective, but whole groups --homosexuals, atheists, single mothers, ethnic minorities, different social castes -- are refused the freedom and denied the encouragement. Yuck.

Multiculturalism and diversity can also conflict with the ideals of democracy, especially when the focus is on difference instead of equality. In this type of world, racism and sexism still pervade our society, but they go covert and become even harder to force out into the light.

I'll dip into Ellen Willis' book "No More Nice Girls" to clarify my fear of multiculturalism. She's a self-defined "feminist egalitarian" -- a feminist who doesn't want to crucify men but wants men to stop crucifying women -- and I like her politics.

"The most obvious drawback of identity politics (diversity, multiculturalism)," she writes, "is its logic of fragmentation into ever smaller and more particularist groups."

Multiculturalism misses the crucial question. As Willis asks, what is "the legitimate basis of a 'common culture'?" (We live, we love, we die. See, we have at least three things in common.)

If we don't concentrate on this question, we'll spend a lot of time debating whether paranoid white males are legitimate victims. We'll spend hours worrying about which court case will burn down our cities. And I'll repeat the following conversation again and again.

"All men are pigs," a very young 15-year-old female told me while I was at work.

"Isn't that a generalization?" I asked, wondering if she'd been raped or molested, or if she'd just broken up with a boyfriend.

"No," she replied. "It's from 'Roseanne.' "

Now I feel persecuted. Maybe I should buy a gun, but I'd rather reinvent my world.