. . . AND KEITH JACKSON'S TRIAL

We end the year (almost) with yet another entry for my time capsule. This capsule, buried in a secret location, is intended to give a civilization of the future a glimmer of what life was like in our times. For the capsule, I submit the trial transcript of Keith Jackson. He is charged with having sold drugs across the street from the White House.

The saga of Jackson is now well-known. He was allegedly lured to Lafayette Park by a government agent so that President Bush in a Sept. 5 televised speech could hold up a bag of crack and say it had been bought across the street from the White House. A rapt nation would be shocked and we would all mull the implications: Across the street from the White House!

But Jackson and the circumstances of his arrest will provide something of a Rosetta Stone for people in the future. Here is a young man for whom his city's business-government district was alien territory. In his final year of high school, (a school, incidentally, that had been certified drug free) Jackson, according to authorities did not know where the White House was located: when told, he was overcome by the sensation of eureka: "Oh, you mean where Reagan lives."

A nation worries about illicit drugs -- and rightfully so. It is shocked that such drugs can be bought across the street from the White House, an area teeming with police officers. The president makes his point, even though drug arrests in that area are almost unknown. Viewers all over the country exclaim, My God, Ethel, the White House! Remember, we were there ourselves with the kids in '83.

'Twas, in effect, a lie. But what is equally shocking and, indeed, preposterous, is Jackson himself. Here is a young man, about to enter the job market, whose ignorance -- "Where the {expletive} is the White House?" -- is unfathomable. In modern-day America, he lives in a racially segregated village, as fixed to his own territory as any peasant in a less-developed society.

Jackson is virtually a stateless person, the citizen of no country who lives where information does not reach. In his own city, he does not know the location of the foremost tourist attraction, and he is oblivious to the coming and goings of presidents, a grand event in this town, complete with parades, balls and commemorative license plates. Bush came and Reagan went and Jackson knew nothing about it.

Such a person is a debacle. By now, the American people are inured to the lying and exaggerations of presidents and so, predictably, there was little outcry that the Drug Enforcement Administration was asked to provide a prop for Bush's speech. But there was no outcry, either, about what Jackson represents. He is a somewhat typical Washington teenager, woefully ignorant, tutored in a school system that, it seemed, merely took his pulse. If a beat was found, he was marked present and school aid was requested in his name.

As a government town, Washington relies occasionally on its pool of the uninformed. Juries were impaneled for both Watergate and the Iran/contra affairs consisting of people who had never heard of either scandal. But such people can be found almost anywhere -- and not just when it comes to ignorance of current events.

In New York, the telephone company struggles to find qualified information operators. Stores throughout the country are staffed by clerks who do not know that it's polite to say thank you. Across the country, kids know -- from day to day, it seems -- what sort of sneaker is fashionable, but on achievement tests get bested by children abroad who walk to school barefoot. In Texas, the proposition that student athletes also be student-students was greeted with indignation. We no longer can assume that a high school graduate can even read.

And so the menacing Keith Jackson becomes a sap -- Murphied by the infinitely-square George Bush. A government that never gave Jackson a thought finally found a use for him. The smooth workings of government were unsettled by the unsettled mind of a homeless person living in the president's park and a man of draft age was arrested who did not know the name of the commander-in-chief.

Readers of the future will not believe it -- that's if there are any readers in the future.

Articles appear as they were originally printed in The Washington Post and may not include subsequent corrections.