The title of the "briefing and discussion" that was to be staged last Thursday in a wing of the U.S. Capitol in Washington was intriguing to anyone who has been following California's historic recall election.

"American Democracy's Uncertain Future -- And Is California an Unsettling Vision of Our Democratic Destiny" implied that learned, serious people were to look beyond the hoopla surrounding the recall and seek the deeper meaning of what was occurring in the state.

Former Alabama Congressman Glen Browder, who is an occasional professor at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, was to lead the panel discussion and was to be joined by former Alaska Sen. Mike Gravel, who now runs the National Initiative for Democracy, and Larry Berman, a scholar in the University of California's Washington center. The event's sponsor was the California Institute for Federal Policy Research.

The hourlong session, televised nationally on C-SPAN, was a disappointment for anyone actually looking for insight into Cali-fornia's social and political dynamics, or some penetrating views on how the recall could affect the nation.

It quickly became clear that none of the participants really knew much about either the state or the recall's circumstances. They were merely using it to beat the drums for their own pet causes, such as Gravel's crusade to allow Americans to legislate directly.

There are larger meanings in what's happening in California, but they are being lost in the media feeding frenzy over movie star Arnold Schwarzenegger's bid to succeed Gov. Gray Davis, should the latter be recalled by voters on Oct. 7. Schwarzenegger's first major news conference as a candidate last Wednesday in Los Angeles, dealing with the state's economic and fiscal policies, attracted a bumper crop of television news crews (30 in all), but few of those in attendance were interested in the matter at hand. Schwarzenegger could have been reading names from the phone book and attracted just as much video attention.

The sheer spectacle of what's happening in California is overwhelming its broader import, both to the state and to the nation, which is why Thursday's discussion in Washington was so disappointing, despite its grandiose title.

The essence of the recall is a widespread discontent among Californians with a state government that they see, accurately, as having become increasingly disconnected from the social and economic reality of the state, and thus dysfunctional. They're angry and are taking out that anger on the man who is both head of the government and emblematic of the Capitol's insular and irrelevant politics -- in part because they have no other venue in which to express that anger. They can't even take it out on the Legislature, which has insulated itself from popular will through a self-serving, incumbent-oriented -- and bipartisan -- redistricting plan adopted two years ago.

An even deeper interpretation of the recall is that the Capitol's dysfunction stems from the lack of social cohesion in a society whose complexity, both economic and cultural, grows deeper with every passing moment. When polls find that Californians want neither to cut spending for major programs nor to raise taxes to deal with a huge state budget deficit, they are reflecting that lack of consensus -- and also the lack of the civic leadership to forge consensus.

With no civic direction, politicians retreat into self-serving careerism and special interest trivia. The poster child for the current political climate, perhaps, is one of the hundreds of bills that are making their way through the Legislature in the face of a historic budget crisis, a historic political crisis, a never-resolved energy crisis and less-evident crises in water, transportation, education and housing.

The bill, AB 571, deals with a spitting match between two horse racing operations, quarter horses at Los Ala-mitos in Southern California and harness racing at Cal Expo in Sacramento, over how gambling revenues from satellite broadcasts of their events are to be divvied. It exemplifies the trivial pursuits that preoccupy politicians while major matters go unaddressed -- and explains why Californians are mad as hell about their government.