COLUMN LEFT : Enraged Also Means Engaged : An American West exhibit has clunky moments, but at least it inspires passionate response.

The war over “political correctness” entered a surreal phase with the commotion over “The West As America” exhibition at the National Museum of American Art, part of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.

Two weeks after President Bush elevated PC to the very forefront of national concern by attacking it during a commencement speech at the University of Michigan, Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) worked himself into a fine froth about the PC horror, as deployed by the Smithsonian. “To see that exhibit,” he shouted at Smithsonian Secretary Robert McC. Adams during a hearing of the Appropriations Committee, “. . . I’ll tell you, that really set me off. . . . Why should people come up to your institution and see a history that’s so perverted?”

It turned out that Stevens hadn’t actually seen the exhibition and was basing his fury on a remark by former Librarian of Congress Daniel Boorstin, who wrote in the comments book available to visitors, “a perverse, historically inaccurate, destructive exhibition.”

As it happens, I visited the infamous exhibition last month. Billed as a reinterpretation of images of the frontier, 1820-1920, it was a fairly decorous attempt to gloss the paintings and photographs of Bierstadt, Remington, Russell and the others with commentary derived from the historical and moral concerns that got such a useful shove forward in the 1960s.

Slabs of prose mounted next to the images invited visitors to conceive of a march to the West more compromised than the art suggested. Some of this commentary even made so bold as to suggest that the opening of the West involved the genocide of native peoples and that painters and photographers had been complicit in such destruction.

Some of this commentary was a mite preachy, in the PC manner--the term “politically correct,” after all, got its start among the left as a joke on those who took commitment to the far edge of self-righteousness. Some of it was also overheated. Irving Couse’s “The Captive,” (imported to Washington from Irvine) depicting 17-year old Lorinda Bewly pent in the teepee of the Cayuse chief Five Crows, “unconsciously,” so the catalogue informed us, “expresses (the white) culture’s fears of miscegenation. This is evident first in the network of intimations that thinly repress an actual sexual encounter.”

To my eye the picture showed a Cayuse Indian, cross-legged and dourly observing Ms. Bewly. He could just as well have been waiting for her to awaken so they could have an uplifting discourse about multiculturalism.

But all of this really amounted to little more than an art historian getting carried away. More riveting by far was the comment book in which Boorstin had scrawled his denunciation.

Its pages bulged with recrimination and applause. “Where are the ‘Buffalo Soldiers’? Again blacks have been left out,” one visitor had written. “A relentless sermon of condescension,” snapped the historian Simon Schama. Said another, “I don’t need to be told that these pictures were propaganda. Fooey! I’m happy with the myth. I cried like a baby at ‘Dances With Wolves.’ I know the scholars and curators would have pooh-poohed my red eyes. My great-grandfather was a sheriff in Kansas in 1874.”

The comments were about two-thirds unfavorable. The book as a whole was encouraging. Most exhibitions consist of people standing numbly in line to get in, numbly in front of “important” works, then numbly in the museum shop that is usually the beating heart of these institutions, unless you count the trustees’ cocktail parties. Here, for a change, was an exhibit that put visitors on their toes, eager to get in on the act.

Much of the PC furor has to do with history, and what sort of history should be taught. As Yale political scholar Adolph Reed recently remarked, “You can’t just pick out the narratives of the people in charge and call it American history anymore.” Much of the fury about the Smithsonian exhibit is really only a prelude to larger convulsions about the upcoming fifth centenary of Columbus’ voyage.

Two final visitors’ jottings in the comment book gesture to those rows to come: “What should be celebrated here are the great achievements and collective glory that spurred the settlement of the West . . . American art should never be a handmaiden to political propaganda.” Next to this, “Columbus’ vision of genocide continues today. P.S. Custer had it coming to him. Free Leonard Peltier!”