No wars? No news? No problem. We still have invasions today. Of media hordes, tracking Tiger Woods endorsements. We still have a military. Its primary purpose in the 1990s seems to be to serve as a theater of war between the sexes. Strategy is what gets executed in court and on TV. Espionage is the Globe supermarket tabloid setting up Frank Gifford at a New York hotel. The front is a Marv Albert press conference.

“People know that it is a small time,” writes George W.S. Trow in “Within the Context of No Context,” a short 1980 book republished this year. “They assume that the small things they hear discussed are gossip because they feel, correctly, that the things they hear and want to hear and insist on hearing are beneath history.”

Are we all beneath history, entertaining ourselves into a stupor? Scandal-mongering is ancient. Men (and increasingly women) have always thought too often with a part of their anatomy that is not their brain. And the people around them have always loved to gossip about human frailty, no matter how important the other events of the day. It makes life fun.

But the gulf between what intrigues us and what directly affects us is widening. Last week, for instance, the country had a choice: chatter about what Marv Albert and some woman might have done to each other in a Virginia hotel room - or about what President Clinton and Trent Lott did do to millions of uninsured American children across the river in Washington, D.C. It was no contest. For now, anyway, Americans are fat, sassy and always hungry for more cheese.

Juicy stories can have fiber. Kelly Flinn’s saga is a lot more significant than - blast from the past - Joey Buttafuoco’s. But we do have an Importance Gap, and it’s worsened by the communication revolution. The “data smog,” as author David Shenk calls our wired lives, wafts in on the same cable, modem, screen. Media blur: EddieMurphytransvestiteRussialoosenukes. When news oozes 24 hours a day it’s not really news anymore. The TV becomes ambient noise. The newspaper becomes wallpaper. Finding the patterns of importance becomes hard. It’s easier - and more profitable - just to make the consumer gape. Young men and women who went into journalism hoping to be Woodward and Bernstein find themselves ersatz Walter Winchells writing for an audience of ersatz rat packers.

To extend the shelf life of mainstream gossip, inquiring minds - from newsrooms to chat rooms - take refuge in debating “the rules,” formal or informal. Last week alone we thrashed over how they applied in cases as diverse as adultery in the military, the New York Knicks’ bench-clearing, and whether a girl who didn’t want to wear a cup should be allowed to play catcher in Little League. The worst rule to break is the informal one against hypocrisy. The cackle, the frisson, the journalism lucre all come from exposing it. The message to celebrities is clear: if you say one thing and do another, prepare to be devoured. Kathie Lee Gifford promotes her family on her dopey show? Drop an H-bomb on her. She and Frank and Cody and Cassidy asked for it.

So now we can all get our jollies following the story of the bite marks found on the back of the woman described as Marv Albert’s friend. Can any story possibly compete with the vigorous denials and soon-to-come teeth molds of the man handling the NBA play-by-play? The answer, of course, is Yesssss!! Michael Kennedy was rescued by Eddie Murphy who was rescued by Frank Gifford (Michael Kennedy’s father-in-law), who was rescued by Marv Albert. Celebrities in trouble can usually do nothing but pray for other celebrities to step in it, which doesn’t take long.

Here things get trickier. Noncelebrities in trouble are well advised to try to become celebrities, as Kelly Flinn did with the help of her spinmeister lawyer, Franklin Spinner. Even “60 Minutes” is easier than a military tribunal. On the other hand, noncelebrities who aren’t in trouble but become celebrities usually fall into trouble as a result. The man who rescued that baby from the well in Texas, one of the biggest news stories of the 1980s, later committed suicide.

In Chechnya not long ago, Lee Hockstader of The Washington Post found himself in a ditch with rifles pointed in his belly. Fearing for his life, he lied to his captors that he once interviewed Sylvester Stallone. “You really know Sly?” they asked with wonder, releasing him. His life saved, the reporter went back to filing the kind of foreign dispatches that too many people aren’t reading. Should have filed on Sly - he’d have gotten better play.