COLUMN LEFT : Voter Apathy? No, More Like Voter Disgust : Both the cynical young and the disillusioned old are boycotting this presidential election.

In the past, whenever I’ve wanted to find out what John Q. Public is thinking, I called my father. He voted for Richard Nixon, Barry Goldwater, Nixon again, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan and George Bush. He supported the Vietnam War. This year, however, like a lot of Americans, he isn’t voting for anyone.

Though we’ve disagreed about everything for the last 30 years, we also shared a passionate interest in politics. Now, he longer cares. He feels betrayed by the very Republicans whom he supported all these years. His anger started after Watergate, accelerated after the Iran-Contra scandal, deepened when the United States flouted the World Court’s ruling against the mining of Nicaragua’s port of Corinto, and turned into disillusionment after the S&L; scandals. “They’re all crooks,” he says now. “I thought Nixon and Reagan would be different, but they’ve brought down the country with their corruption.”

Oddly, we now agree on a number of matters. He, too, was disgusted by the nomination of Clarence Thomas for the Supreme Court. (“He wasn’t qualified.”) He believed Anita Hill. The possibility that Roe vs. Wade may be overturned by the Rehnquist court worries him and rekindles nostalgia for the Warren court. “Reagan and Bush packed the court with a bunch of second-rate, right-wing ideologues,” he says. A staunch patriot, he thought Bush’s Gulf War was domestic politics by other means. The primaries frustrated this New Yorker. “Bush, he’s no President. He can’t even speak a coherent sentence.” Do allegations about Bill Clinton’s past matter? “No, I don’t care about that,” he says. This is the man who was scandalized by my youth and anti-war activities. “I’m just not sure he will be a good leader.” What about Brown? “He doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”

There you have it. One man’s view of things as he enters his ninth decade. After a lifetime of political sparring across the dinner table, he’s had it. True, there is nothing representative about this eccentric, iconoclastic father of mine. He’s a small “c” conservative lawyer who helps poor people and wishes the government would get off everyone’s back. But the disappointment and oddness in his face helps explain the low voter turn-out around the country.

People really are mad as hell or, like my father, quietly disillusioned. It’s the same on the right and the left. I argued with many friends in Connecticut and New York, who, willfully ignorant of Jerry Brown’s erratic record in California, cynically cast their vote for a demagogic maverick in order to send a “message.” The fact that this might lead to a Republican look-alike at a brokered convention didn’t matter to them. “Politics is all about, symbols,” they say. “They’re all corrupt.” Yes, but who will benefit from this nihilism?

Many young people in their 20s are supporting Brown because he mirrors their cynical stance toward politics. Politicians should listen to them. Though smaller than the baby-boomer generation, they represent a significant future vote. In Douglas Coupland’s cult novel “Generation X,” three characters of the twentysomething generation drop out of meaningless jobs, exile themselves to cheap bungalows in the Palm Springs desert and entertain each other with apocalyptic tales. One young man explains that his generation has been seized by “voter’s block--the attempt, however futile, to register dissent with the current political system by simply not voting.” To older generations he sends this message: “I want to tell then that I envy their upbringings that were so clean, so free of futurelessness. And I want to throttle them for blithely handing over the world to us like so much skid-marked underwear.” Reared under Republican administrations, these young people, unlike myself, have no vision of a politician who could make a difference.

I don’t know if people in their 20s or 80s will disproportionately boycott the presidential election. But among the many costs we have paid after 12 years of Republican so-called leadership--besides the normalization of corruption, the highest deficit in history, the worst recession since the Great Depression, and the creation of an impoverished, underclass--is creeping political despair.

One of the twentysomething characters in “Slackers”--a cult film about the young men and women who aimlessly wander the streets of Austin, Tex.--explains his generation’s position: “Withdrawing in disgust is not the same thing as apathy.” True enough. But it’s a shortsighted attitude that candidates are going to have to confront in this election.