George Will is hectoring America again.

Sometimes, in the middle of the night, I wake up in a panic. My t-shirt is drenched in sweat, my hands trembling. And somewhere I hear a voice whispering:

George Will is using the word "hectoring" again!

I try to ignore George Will. I really do. There's nothing to be gained from reading him, and obviously nothing can be done to stop him. I once considered petitioning Bud Selig to have him banned from baseball, like Pete Rose, but what case could I make? That he uses words like "autodidact" and "folderol" in his springtraining previews? That his definition of a "throwback player" is one who is "no postmodern third baseman, brooding about the indeterminacy of truth"?

Surely Bud Selig already knows these things. If no action has been taken yet, we have to assume that none ever will be. We have to hope for a freak accident: Will is struck by a line drive at Camden Yards, his cranium shatters and cork and rubber balls fly out. The headless body sits there guiltily twiddling its thumbs as the umpires examine the wreckage. Finally, amid boos, the headless columnist is escorted out of the stadium by security. Headline in Newsweek the next day: "Say it Ain't Soporiferous, George!"

That's why I generally stay away from Will. Unfortunately, I frequently come upon him by accident. And almost every time that happens, I find the same thing: the word "hectoring" staring me in the face.

That's what happened this week. I was running a Lexis-Nexis search to see how many different journalists just this week had used the words "George McGovern" and "Howard Dean" in the same article. Your basic survey of the horse racing trend. The answer, as of this writing, was 119.

Number three on the list was by George Will. Entitled "Dukakis Plus 4.4. Percent?" it was a classic of the Will genre. Reading Will makes one admire the run-of-the-mill horse racer campaign journalist for the unpretentious, just-following-orders way he goes about robbing the meaning from our political process.

Because it's one thing to reduce a meaningful election into an idiotic horse race, but another thing entirely to do so on the backs of Proust, Chaucer, Goethe, Grantland Rice, Casey Stengel, Erica Jong and thousands of other disparate and defenseless persons whose speechifying styles you have herded into the death camp of your career, to be ground into bone meal and lampshades. I apologize for this metaphor, but the ambition of Hitler is really the only way to address the scale of Will's pomposity.

And it was all on display in "Dukakis Plus 4.4 Percent?"

The thesis of the piece was that Dean can't do that badly, given that even the pathetic Michael Dukakis got 45.6 percent of the vote?except that maybe Dean could do that badly, given that, just as Detroit is "Cleveland without the glitter," Dean is "Dukakis without the charm."

This borderline coherent proposition wouldn't have been so bad if Will hadn't added that the Dukakis campaign would be "rightly remembered as the locus classicus of political incompetence." Or that "doubts about Dean are causing some Democrats to plight their troth to Wesley (I Never Was a Republican) Clark, who until five months ago had not plighted his troth to the Democratic Party."

This is typical Will. He is a person who looks at a man heading for the Camden Yards restroom and sees the ghost of Hamlet's father. (He will be even more inclined to such imagery if the bathroom attendant receives an unnecessarily high minimum wage). I submit that Michael Dukakis could never accurately be described as the "locus classicus" of anything, not even males of the Dukakis family. And why all this plighting of troth? Could there ever be any reason to drag the language of Arthurian legend into the Iowa caucuses? Even John Updike would be ashamed of such hysterics.

Then there was this description of Dukakis: "Dukakis, a chilly vessel of New England's starchy, hectoring liberalism..."

Will loves the word hectoring. He loves it even more than he loves pointless, self-aggrandizing alliteration ("flits soundlessly across the forest floor of our national dreams," "Pureed pears...a pink paste purporting to have once been chicken," "a heaping helping of union hogwash"), unpleasant disease imagery ("Philadelphia's [baseball] dyspepsia," "FDR's governmental hyperkinesia," numerous references to "historical amnesia"), the dregs of the Dictionary of Difficult Words ("latitudinarian," "fabaceous," "folderol," "querulous," etc.) and intolerable baseball rhetoric ("Mussolini would've opposed the designated hitter").

He even loves it more than the italicized frisson, a nearly annual companion to Will columns whose most recent appearance announced that Democrats get a "frisson of walking on the wild side" from courting southern white trash. Frisson, incidentally, often has a tough time avoiding Will's implacable alliterative urges: a Clinton budget proposal was once a "bugle call calculated to send a frisson through friend or foe," while a more sensible column discussed American plans to prosecute death-camp guards as proving that "American justice...will not close the books on bestiality until the last participant has felt a frisson of fear and is routed from the land of the free."

None of this has anything on hectoring. Will seems determined to force this word into national service the way a similar favorite adjective of his, shrill, has lately managed to attach itself, remora-like, to any and all "liberal" political objectives. I first came across it last year, when I ran a search on journalists who persisted long after the fact in lending credence to the "official" estimate of 30,000 marchers in the January anti-war protest. This Jan. 24 piece of Will's, "Focused on nostalgia, left no longer articulate" featured the author's hypothesis that the entire mass of anti-war protesters retreated from the cold that evening to watch, in their hotel rooms, a live broadcast of a Rolling Stones concert on HBO.

Despite the fact that it was plainly obvious it was Will himself who was watching that broadcast that night, this was enough evidence to demonstrate the anachronistic position of the anti-war crowd: "[Mick Jagger] will soon turn 60, and so, it sometimes seems, will the unsatisfactory rhetoric of today's left." Hector came in later, in an aside about a New York Times abortion editorial: "The Times no longer argues, it hectors."

Will has been pushing hectoring for nearly 15 years. The campaign is not yet won, but it brought some great memories along the way. Back in 1991, he warned that new proposals to ease voter registration would amount to "hectoring people to vote." That was a good one. In noting that most people who do vote are affluent, educated and informed, Will argued that increasing voter participation would result in a "worse" electorate.

It was an outstanding defense of democratic elitism. "To be blunt," he wrote, "smaller usually means smarter." Predictably, Will here argued that the reason people don't vote is not that they are disgusted by the endless stream of full-of-shit identical candidates, but that they're happy. "Low turnouts often are signs of social health," he wrote, noting that voter participation in Western democracies reached its apex in the early years of Nazi Germany.

Hector trudged on. 1995: Will, in yet another baseball piece, decries "hectoring scoreboards."

1996: Bill Clinton guilty of "ineffectual hectoring of China on human rights."

2001: Will blasts Mary Frances Berry, head of the National Commission on Civil Rights (a "hectoring institution") for being a closet communist who once criticized American schools for not pointing out the positive aspects of Soviet society. For this offense, Will condemns her to a living death in a glass case for all eternity: "When Berry goes to Heaven (for her, the Soviet Union with China's educational system), her remains should be treated?she should like this?as Lenin's have been: preserved under glass as a reminder of the exotic fauna that once roamed through American politics."

Yup, it's a heaping helping of hectoring. Hurrah for hoity-toity horse racers!