Feeling lonely?

And let me say this about bowling. In fact, even now, hardly anybody bowls alone. Bowling as we know it derives from an ancient Polynesian ritual called ula maika, in which stones were hurled at standing objects from a distance of 60 feet. Nobody knows why, but 60 feet it remains today. And since bowling got gentrified, with boys replaced by automatic pinsetters, alleys renamed "lanes" and the availability of slim-line plastic contour chairs in multiple pastel hues and compressed-air blowers to cool the warriors' sweaty palms, it has become, as Putnam tells us, "the most popular competitive sport in America."

Bowlers outnumber joggers and golfers by two to one, soccer players by three to one and tennis players by four to one. Ninety-one million of us bowled in 1996, 25 percent more of us than voted in the 1998 congressional elections. What pains Putnam is that fewer of us bowl as members of a team, in a league, in a domain of sociability where "cohorts" develop cooperative habits and skills. While the total number of bowlers in America increased 10 percent between 1980 and 1993, league bowling fell by more than 40 percent.

What he neglects to mention is that many of us who used to go bowling with our families, or on dates, were driven out of the game in the 1970s by the very leagues he celebrates (who monopolized most of the lanes) and the very teams whose dismemberment he mourns (who sneered at civilians). About these teams you should know that their principal business, in green Shantung jackets with Aztec serpent totems and bulging purple stretch pants, was to topple themselves with as many beers as soon as possible. As composer Frank Zappa once observed:

Consumption of beer leads to military behavior. One day you're going to read about some scientist discovering that hops, in conjunction with certain strains of "yeast creatures," has a mysterious effect on some newly discovered region of the brain, making people want to kill -- but only in groups. With whisky, you might want to murder your girlfriend -- but beer makes you want to do it with your buddies watching.

I am inclined to think that such groups have about as much civic virtue as, say, gangbangers, the Ku Klux Klan and the Michigan and Montana militias -- all equally blotto on bottled bile. Putnam himself has observed that religious fundamentalists in general, and Operation Rescue activists in particular, are exceptions to the general trend toward Malaisian noninvolvement. Some of us are actually relieved that the annual membership renewal rate of the National Rifle Association is only 25 percent, that the Promise Keepers can no longer fill a football stadium and that the Christian Coalition and the Moral Majority are as much mail-order consumer causes as the National Audubon Society and the L.L. Bean catalog. Some of us moved to big cities in the first place to escape small-town book burners.

Anyway, with the ebbing of the leagues, those of us who have tried once more to bowl find to our astonishment that we are required to relinquish one of our own street shoes before we will be allowed to borrow, for a price, a pair of ratty rentals. They don't trust us. Imagine that.

And so I come to my last big qualm about this fascinating and meticulous scorecard on "bonding" and "bridging," machers and schmoozers, the rise of rap and the decline of newspapers, these 24 chapters, three appendixes, a hundred charts, a thousand footnotes, this encyclopedia of industrial averages of a market for meaning so bearish that the suicide rate for our youngsters has almost tripled. I wonder if some of our suspicion -- of institutions, of groups and of strangers -- hasn't been thrust upon us like a lousy credit rating.

There is the insurance agency finding a reason to refuse our claim, the HMO deciding we have the wrong disease, the bank-owned credit card company compounding its own interest and the employer who listens in on our phone calls and voice mail, reads our e-mail and computer files, videotapes our workstation and sucks our blood to test for drugs. There is the corporate branding of our commons, the spin-doctor scripting of our public life and the malign neglect of our public schools. There is soft money, hate radio, the gated communities that instruct us what flowers to plant and which colors to paint our gingerbread houses, the malls that abolish our First Amendment right to free speech and assembly and, wherever we look, urban spaces increasingly militarized -- what Mike Davis in "City of Quartz" called "the architectural policing of social boundaries" and "the totalitarian semiotics of ramparts and battlements."

So determined was Los Angeles, you'll remember, to make sure that its upscale downtown merchants would be forever safe from another Watts riot that, starting in the '70s, it became a fortress, with corporate citadels and surveillance towers, elevated "pedways" and subterranean concourses, "tourist bubble" parks and panopticonic shopping strips, residential enclaves like hardened missile silos and libraries like dry-docked dreadnoughts. Add to this a pacification of the human-landfill poor in strategic-hamlet housing projects, urban Bantustans and Bedouin encampments on barricaded streets in inner-city neighborhoods bereft of public toilets ("crime scenes") and zoned against cellphones and whistling, with barrel-shaped bus benches to make sure you can't sleep on them, caged cash registers in convenience stores, bulletproof acrylic turnstiles in fast-food joints, metal detectors in hospitals, lockdowns in elementary schools and curfews that outlaw groups of more than two juveniles from "associating in public view" in their own front yards.

And, as Davis reported in his sequel to "City of Quartz," "Ecology of Fear," it worked. No sooner had Simi Valley acquitted the cops who rioted all over Rodney King than "sentient" buildings with mainframe brains went into prevent mode. Steel gates rolled down over entrances to the great bank towers, escalators froze, electronic locks sealed off pedestrian passages and a financial district prophylacticked against sans-culottes went on happily recycling Japan's trade surplus into Southland turf and surf. Too bad about the Koreans. Too late for the rest of us.

Community for whom? It smells like team spirit. I look at what they have done to us and I am reminded of an old English proverb: "They agree like bells; they want nothing but hanging."

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