LOS ANGELES - I needed a break from politics.

Just a short spell on the West Coast, soaking up some plastic culture and Botox glamour.
No thoughts of Washington at all. No cravings for Rummy. No achings for Ashcroft.

It was so relaxing on the Pacific, I even decided to play hooky Friday and go to the first show of "Planet of the Apes."
My column was due in a few hours, but the future was written in pink neon. Anything seemed possible.

I settled in with my popcorn as Mark Wahlberg's astronaut jumped in his Delta pod and shot into space,
calling out "Never send a monkey to do a man's job." He is propelled through time and space and crash lands
on the Planet of the Apes.

As Mark ran around the jungle chased by snarling simians, I began feeling anxious.
Apetown seemed strangely, disturbingly familiar: evolution hurtling backward.
Progress in reverse. An arrogant determination to trash the compacts governing humans.

"Do-gooders," one monkey sniffs. "Who needs 'em?"

When Tim Roth as the human-hating chimpanzee army general announced
"Extremism in defense of apes is no vice," I suddenly got a creepy feeling that I had been there.

Was Apetown Washington?
Was the Planet of the Apes the Bush White House?
Hmmmm, so W. is President Primate.

This was not only a Tim Burton fantasy, it was America's scariest reality show.

W.'s second trip to Europe reinforced his hollow hubris.
He gladhanded the European leaders even as he thumbed his nose at their treaties.

"I know what I believe," he said as he visited the Roman Forum, "and I believe what I believe is right."

Like the monkey planet, Washington looks more and more menacing and antediluvian,
with the Bushies beating their chests and growling.

In 2000, America seemed to be moving along briskly into the future, cooperating with the rest of the world
on international issues, trying to clean up the environment and keep the threat of nuclear war tamped down.

Then the retread Bush crowd swept in and flung us into the same sort of time warp that swallowed Mark Wahlberg.

The president is plunging ahead or behind with his technologically suspect Star Wars defense system, intending
to vitiate the ABM treaty and putting China and Russia on edge and into a closer alliance.

He pressed forward or backward last week with his plan to kill Kyoto, turning America into the haughty sole
holdout as 178 other nations agreed to implement the treaty to fight global warming —as usual, offering
no alternative approach.

Playing to its favorite audience of big business and gun owners, the administration last week blew off a U.N. plan
to enforce an international ban on biological weapons and recently pressured the U.N. to weaken a pact to stem
the illegal flow of small arms, from handguns to shoulder-launched rockets.

The administration has no interest in the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, banning all nuclear test explosions,
and is expected to reject the treaty banning land mines.

W. and his Gerald Ford-era warlords —befogged in a cloud of nuclear waste, carbon dioxide, arsenic and
coal dust —never meet an old idea they don't like.

Even some hidebound Republicans in Congress find the Bush White House too far down on the evolutionary scale.
On Thursday, senators from both parties upbraided E.P.A. administrator Christie Whitman, and said that if the
Bushies refused to act on climate change, they would take matters into their own hands and come up with their
own plan. And on Friday, the House, with some Republicans going against the president, voted to prevent the
Bush administration from easing rules on the levels of arsenic in drinking water.

There was even talk last week that the White House might pull out of a U.N. conference on racism.

During the campaign, W. wouldn't come out firmly in favor of teaching evolution over creationism.
That should have been our clue that he's unwilling to evolve. He is so mired in the past, he almost seems
antagonistic toward the future.

Without giving away the ending of the new version of the classic collision-of-species movie,
I can tell you there's a chilling scene set in Washington.
It shows what can happen when the guys in charge monkey around in the wrong direction.