I am Ghengis, a Mongolian monk troubled by what I see in your great country. Widely I gape about outfit worn by Britney Spears at MTV Video Awards. But no matter. Cheeky entertainments for restless populace. Hola! Yet of soon appearing presidential debates, much sorrow! How Great American Society elect leaders by such television? Much strangeness! Big noise salary men in undertaker garment standing stiffly, speaking boiled plate before ugly plastic pillar. These finest specimen of human race? Hola!

Like some ancient ritual whose meaning and function has long been forgotten, the presidential debates are observed every four years. When you see the past debates all in a row (as I did a few nights ago on PBS) there's something genuinely disturbing about the whole business. First come the Kennedy/Nixon debates in 1960, followed by a sixteen-year lull (Nixon took a pass in '68 and '72 - can you blame him? - while Johnson refused in '64). Then come debates in '76, '80, '84, '88, '92 and '96.

As the evening progresses, the debates begin to resemble an extremely boring, unstable game show in which we get to choose the "leader of the free world." We choose our man because (a) he is better looking, (b) he is better at acting like he knows what he's doing, or (c) he manages to get off one good (preferably nasty) line. The richest, most powerful country on earth - the Big One - and our fate hinge on slips of the tongue and make-up artists. Video, after all, is unsparing in its scrutiny of skin, hair, and fear.

We all know that Kennedy won the 1960 debates because he was more relaxed in the cool new medium of television, but it's still a shocker to see how twitchy and creepy Nixon looked under the klieg lights - like a psychotic industrialist in a George Grosz cartoon. Eyes darting furtively, fake smile slipping into a grimace, flop sweat pouring off his face. Most unsettling of all was his five o'clock shadow ineptly covered with Lazy Shave -making it look as if his inner blackness were bleeding through.

Jack is cool and unflappable, but even he looks like a badly sculpted wax work, especially now that we've gotten into the touchy/feely, what-cereal-do-you-eat, Oprahland style of presidential interviews. (Hey, after watching a whole night of debates I'm starting to like the Oprah format.) And it's disconcerting to hear Kennedy's cold-war rhetoric and see, beneath that stiff composure, the fervor of a war monger who would eventually drag us into the Bay of Pigs and Vietnam.

Ross Perot is an equally scary sight. A piranha on two legs in a bad suit. Those marsupial ears and the crazy eye that seems to be running away from him (combined with his rat-tat-tat delivery and metallic Texas twang) remind us that we got off easy with Clinton. But at least Perot shoots from the hip. Or should I say the lip? Most of his memorable one-liners seem to literally explode out of the side of his mouth. ("The party's over and it's time for the cleanup crew." "There are guys who couldn't get a third shift at the Dairy Queen driving BMWs and selling drugs." "Sure, I don't have any experience - in running up a four trillion dollar debt.")

Another candidate for Scariest Looking is Dan Quayle. He wears way too much makeup, including gobs of white lipstick that stick in the corners of his mouth, making him look dry-mouthed and desperate (and which, in the four years between debates, nobody manages to correct).

These are not debates in the classic Oxford Union sense; they're skits, and, not surprisingly, those performers who can deliver their lines most effectively win the day: "There you go again" (Reagan to Carter in 1980 and again, shamelessly, to Mondale in 1984); "Senator, you're no Jack Kennedy" (Lloyd Bentsen to Dan Quayle in 1988); "I will not exploit for political purposes my opponent's youth and inexperience" (an aging Reagan to Mondale in 1984); and "It's not his age, it's the age of his ideas that I question" (Clinton about Dole in a town-hall style debate).

Most of these shots had obviously been rehearsed - although only Clinton was honest enough to admit it. For Clinton, the idea that the debates are pre-packaged is a given. He doesn't seem to think that having your lines prepared ahead of time is a bad thing. He's also smart enough to know that we're smart enough to have figured it out. Reagan just stonewalls the interviewer, Jim Lehrer (who interviewed most of the participants after their debates, and who will be moderating all three upcoming presidential commission debates).

There are some surprises in the Lehrer interviews. Bob Dole seems like a genuinely nice person (this doesn't work at all for him in the debates). He's a funny guy, but in context there is something creepy about his humor, like an undertaker cracking a joke.

And George the First is at his best when he's telling Lehrer how much he despises the debates. "Was I glad when the damn thing was over? Yeah. Maybe that's why I was looking at [my watch]. Only ten more minutes of this crap. And you can use that," he tells Lehrer. "I'm a free spirit now." Then, as an afterthought: "Maybe if I'd said that then, I'd've done better. But you're on guard. You don't want to make a mistake. You don't want to say anything that's going to offend."

Elections are won and lost on these gaffs. Dole's contention that Democrats caused World War II, Ford claiming Eastern Europe wasn't under Soviet domination, Carter lusting after other women in his heart (and quoting Amy on nuclear disarmament). Some of these things seemed minor at the time, but tiny mistakes were magnified exponentially.

What the debates are really about is the Squirm Factor - how these guys are going to behave on the head of a pin. The classic case being the 1976 Ford/Carter debate in which the sound went out for 27 minutes and the two of them just stood there, too terrified to talk or sit down or even move. Each was terrified of making a mistake so they just stood at their podiums staring at the news panel (who, by the way, got to sit down). While the engineers looked for that blown transformer, the candidates stood paralyzed behind their wooden tubes like the characters in Beckett's Happy Days, buried up to their necks in sand.

Can this possibly be the summit of terrestrial behavior? A million years of hominid evolution has lead to ... this? It's all so dismal and drab. What about sumo wrestling? How about spectacular outfits with feathers, conch shells, exotic displays?

We scrutinize their faces for signs of life. We want them to be cool but not actually robotic - like Dukakis and Perot. Reagan usually comes off the best because he gets into his role. Clearly no smarter than Dubya, his talent was in being able to portray someone smarter than himself. The oh-so-patient pauses, the genial responses are those of a thoughtful person. He seems to be mimicking FDR's avuncular fireside chats, or perhaps he is playing the title role in Mr. Deeds Goes to Washington.

Like George the First sourly says, "It's all show business." Spin meisters calculate what the various correspondents are going to ask and come up with a pocketful of clever comebacks. The trick is to get back to your boilerplate laundry list as quickly as possible. But what does it all have to do with being President anyway? Do we really want to choose our chief executive by who first rings his buzzer? By his make-up? By his ability to mask the pure terror of appearing before 40 million people? He's not even allowed crib notes, fer chrissakes!

We greet the appearance of Admiral James Stockdale (Perot's running mate in '92) with a sense of (comic) relief. During the vice-presidential debate, that manic face of his comes on camera saying exactly what we are thinking: "Who am I? Why am I here?" We never do find out. Lehrer fills us in by telling us that Stockdale was a prisoner of war, a leader of men. Unfortunately, his experiences seem to have left him with a few screws loose. Which is precisely what Ghengis the monk, my buddy from Mongolia, likes about him.

Ghengis favors a Stockdale/Perot ticket. Or, if possible, a ticket featuring Dan Quayle and Laura Bush. Turns out he saw her on Larry King Live last night and was hypnotized by her red lips and green dress. But who, he wants to know, was that guy sitting next to her?

George II, I tell him.