When someone says ''Indians,'' most Americans probably think of gambling-casino operators. So isolationist have we become.

Even Washington's best minds were astonished to learn that the Indians were exploding atom bombs.

On first hearing the news, President Clinton is said to have cried out, ''Thank God they didn't get the H-bomb while Crazy Horse was still on the warpath!''

That, at least, is what President Clinton should have cried out, if only to emphasize how completely he is in touch with the American people.

I am not saying we are so dumb we don't remember that a place called ''India'' can be found on a map by anybody who scored 1590 on the S.A.T.'s.

India is where ''Gunga Din'' was set.

Or was it Pakistan? Whatever.

So after remembering that yes, Virginia, there is an India, Washington biggies were very cross. India had been very rude. That was the considered and official opinion. Very rude.

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If India had been a schoolboy, the teacher would have sent a testy note home to its mother.

Instead, President Clinton is going to cut off India's goodies. That's Washington's usual punishment for countries that irritate it. When you've got a country that needs to be taught a good lesson, cut off its goodies.

Cuba, Iraq, Libya, Iran -- no more goodies for them until they start behaving themselves. This goes double for Cuba, because it has chafed Washington almost beyond endurance by surviving for four decades in spite of having its goodies cut off.

India is not the only country that bores Americans except when it's irritating them. Who can name the President of France, the Prime Minister of Canada? Who cares what's happened lately in Cairo, Athens, Krasnoyarsk?

The people who run the world's big international corporations, that's who. As our most fervent capitalists are always explaining, the future lies in the global marketplace, kids, so don't let hometown sentimentality about American jobs and industry make you do something stupid.

We now have a commercial culture that is totally internationalist and a political culture so isolationist that O. J. Simpson, Paula Jones and Monica Lewinsky -- Americans all -- dominate the media for weeks, months, years.

Two of them have dominated the White House so thoroughly that nobody there thought to wonder what India had been up to lately.

If there had been a fierce cola struggle between Pepsi and Coke for monopoly rights in Calcutta, American business would have known about it immediately. International trouble is the business of American business.

Big-time U.S. businesses with political muscle have forced the politicians to stay awake about matters Chinese, but without smart capitalists leaning on them, the Clinton people seemed to forget that India was around.

So did the press. The media are mostly just as isolationist as the rest of the political culture. Jim Wooten of ABC seems to be the last foreign correspondent left anywhere in the world for network news.

The story that doesn't entertain has a hard time getting coverage, electronic or print. The theme song of the American media these days should be ''Let Me Entertain You.''

Before isolationism became stifling, tube-watching America would probably have seen somebody in New Delhi pointing out that while the U.S. might adore nuclear China, India tended to view it as a potentially hostile power on its border.

Doesn't sound very entertaining, does it?

Most of what passes for foreign news is stuff of the Princess Di variety. Newsstands are infested with it. The networks may stint on coverage of everything east of New York and west of Washington, but give them a Princess Di funeral and they dispatch their anchors across oceans. Anchors, for Heaven's sake! Men who earn nearly as much as baseball players.

Give them a Pope going head-to-head with exasperating Castro, and off go the anchors to Cuba until Monica makes the scene in D.C., whereupon it's ''So long, Holy Father, we hear America crying, 'Monica, you anchors! Give us total Monica!' ''

The rain forest burns. Mexico falls into ruin. India tests an H-bomb. The old arms race begins again.

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