Last week I was on vacation. As I often do while on vacation, I read a few books. The first three were Under God by Garry Wills, Savage Inequalities by Jonathan Kozol and The Closing of the American Mind by Allan Bloom. Let me clarify: I finished the first (close readers of this column will note that I quoted from its introduction last week), read the second and got through the first 200 pages of the third before getting totally ticked off and deciding my time was better spent devouring Elmore Leonard's Gold Coast.

What strikes me now is that all three books are meant to be persuasive and they go about it in completely different ways.

Wills is, among other things, a classicist, and he likes to present his inquiries (my word for his books on people and cultural subjects) in logical form. Under God examines the phenomenon of religion in American politics. Published in the middle of the Bush years, Wills makes it abundantly clear that politics and religion are inexorably intertwined in our country, and what's more, the founding fathers had rather different ideas as to what "religious freedom" actually meant.

The thing I like about Wills is that he's rarely condescending. He has his moments (referring to the novel ast Temptation of Christ as "silly" even while extolling the virtues of the movie), but mostly his arguments are straightforward and dispassionate. He uses archaic (not to mention arcane) metaphors at times, but I simply consider that part of his charm. In any case, his books aren't quite up to scholarly rigor, but they're close. And he makes his points dispassionately. I guess that's what logic will do to you.

On the other end, emotionally at least, is Kozol. He's been ranting about the downtrodden in society, particularly children, for nearly 40 years. His arguments are almost as tight logically as Wills', but since he's obviously taking sides, I have to step back a second and consider the source. For example, Savage Inequalities is about the worst schools in the country. Literally. He profiled schools in the Bronx, Chicago, East St. Louis, Camden and a few other places. In short, these schools suck. In the cases of Chicago and New York, Kozol rather eloquently makes the point that there are horribly unequal within each district, sometimes right next to each other. And that in every case, the poor get screwed.

His best point (one made over and over) is that money will help these poor schools get better. A number of folks (some, but not all, conservative) argue that "pouring money" into schools just "doesn't work." Kozol spoke to some of those people, and challenged them. In effect, he said, "If money doesn't matter, why don't you cut your funding and give it to these other schools?" The response, of course, is something along the lines of "well, it's our money and we an do what we want with it.

Kozol is quite good at exposing hypocrisy in action.

That book gave me a charge. I mean, I'm ideologically aligned with it to begin with, and Kozol is one of the great crusading writers of the 20th century. The guy has passion, and he can write better than almost anyone. His books would be a joy to read if they weren't so depressing.

Which brings me to Bloom's blunder. Granted, I don't buy the philosophy behind the book. Bloom manages to argue both the "Eastern establishment" and the "conservative values" points at the same time, alienating just about everyone except the Bill Bennetts and William Welds of the world.

The thing is, his logic is horribly sloppy. Granted, I read this book last. So I was used to Wills' intellectual rigor and Kozol's eloquence. Bloom is a hack writer (no sin in itself) and a sloppy essayist (which is more of a problem when you're arguing that people are getting dumber every day). He manages to butcher both facts and arguments on the same page, often enough in the same sentence.

I was already fairly peeved when he claimed that the one true rock hero from 1969 to 1984 was Mick Jagger. Even among the cloistered who might have attended his classes at Cornell and other such universities, there has to have been someone who listened to, say, Led Zeppelin. Or Elton John. Or the Eagles. Or Boston. God knows every college student in the late seventies had heard (and most worshipped) Pink Floyd. The Stones? A bit too pat an argument.

And that's the problem with Bloom. When he's not justifying a grand philosophical point with an anecdote (bringing to mind Ronald Reagan's claim that trees are the greatest source of air pollution), he's taking a minor societal whim and calling it the end of civilization as we know it.

Bloom's big argument, that "relativism" has brought our moral culture to its knees, is just silly. Just as there is no need to believe in any sort of God in order to be a moral being, there is no need to adhere to an absolute moral code in order to have a moral society. In fact, even the youngest child can detect chinks in the traditional moral catechism ("Thou shalt not kill" could never be explained well in any of my Sunday School classes, and "Thou shalt not covet" always sounded like a good idea, but unworkable in the real world).

Bloom's biggest problem is that he's plugging ideology. That's pretty difficult, even if you can write well (which he can't). He argues that society has lost its cultural roots, but he's putting forth a baseless argument. He keeping claiming that the sky is falling and that if we don't go back to his definition of "bedrock values" American society will up and die. That just doesn't stand up to scrutiny. In fact, all this talk about a moral collapse has fallen in. Popular movies are crasser than ever, people can say "shit" on network television and yet two of the major barometers of moral behavior, crime and teen pregnancy, are both falling. Maybe those folks like Kozol (or Marx) who say money really does matter are right.

As Doonesbury put it so many years ago, Marx couldn't get anyone to listen to his ideas. So he hooked up with a hot pamphleteer (a certain Mr. Engels) and voila: Workers of the world, unite!

Talking down and using specious logic is no way to change someone's mind. The trick is to try and persuade people by honest and reasonable means. The problem with most ideological crusaders (like Bloom, and to a much lesser extent Kozol) is that their message comes before the logic. If the logic doesn't work with the "facts" given, it must be wrong.

That kind of thinking is dishonest. And in the end, it's exposed as such.

Jon Worley didn't get to his Scott Turow paperback during his time off, but that puppy is next on the list.