It was no place for the timid. We were all in the pilot's lounge bragging about past piloting exploits, or in my case, dreaming about future ones.

One fellow I hadn't met before was being offered a ride with Bill (not his real name), but was turning him down because their divergent political views and tendency to loudly argue them might compromise aircraft safety. A narrow cockpit is no place for a shouting match. I couldn't see it. They actually have more in common than they have differences. To begin with, they are both pilots, they both fly old Piper aircraft of the 1960s and the 1970s, and most important of all, they are both old men with a lot of history in common. Old is a relative thing, but I mean older than my 61 years, which means about the same age as the rocks. I mean men who get up every morning and who scan the ages of the departed in the obituary page, toting up those who are older vs. those who are younger, and feeling spry enough to whip tigers if the older ones are in the majority. If the younger ones rule, then we gloat about beating the odds.

Why should two with so much in common argue about political parties, whose only point of divergence is their rhetoric, which everyone knows has nothing to do with actions? Actually, Bush and Clinton have more in common than Gore and Clinton, although Bush painted them into the same corner in the still continuing campaign. Both Bush and Clinton are party-animal Southern governors with checkered pasts, yet Gore and Clinton's similar intellects mean they won't behave much differently than Bush.

The real disappointment of the late campaign is the taking over of supposed third party choices by a bunch of opportunists hoping for a 5 percent vote total that would allow them access to the political trough. The Greens, in particular, were taken over by Nader, whose name is a mere vowel away from Nadir, the bathos of the lowest, whose credentials as an egotist far outweigh his nonexistent credentials as a conservationist.

This is a man who never drove a car, but took it upon himself, as a means of selling his book, to destroy the Corvair, the most technically advanced car of its day, and who foisted upon us not only the notion of the air bag, but also the notion that we should pay many times the true value of an automobile for the alleged safety benefits of an air bag. I ask you, if air bags are so safe, why aren't they in NASCAR cars, which are occasionally driven into concrete walls at 200 mph by a group of men who survive, on the whole, to an age rivaling that of our civil aircraft pilots?

So, we already have a safe system. Those who wish to be super safe should have a choice between a baby-killing air bag or a true, macho racing driver's shoulder harness at a greatly reduced price. Remember, what we are paying for with air bag is not the $100 replacement value of the bag, but the millions in technology it took to develop it from a figment of Nadir's imagination. It is the automobile equivalent of the Star Wars Missile Defense System in terms of value return for investment.

"But," cry the hand-wringing liberals, "people won't wear shoulder harness."

But they do wear seat belts, now that they are required by law, and if they choose to pay a hundred dollars or so more for the shoulder harness in order to get a discount of several thousand dollars over the air bag, I submit they will wear them. If they don't we merely have survival of the most, rather than the least, intelligent, a positive benefit to all.

Want to really put teeth in the law? Several Scandinavian countries require the seat belt to be fastened by all passengers in the car before the driver's accident injury insurance is valid. Believe me, that causes the driver to look around, and if it's at night he uses a flashlight to make sure. I suspect something like that is already in effect in airliner insurance, or why would they make such a point of instructing us after we already have our seat belts fastened?

Will my two pilot friends whose political views are on opposing sides of the wind sock ever fly together? They are doing it right now in the pilot's lounge, where the wind generated by their arguments would lift the hair on our heads, if we had any left.