This is the season when suburban males grab their rifles and don fluorescent-orange caps to pursue the whitetail deer in the sweet-smelling woods of the Adirondacks.

No wonder feelings run high, and the lawn, as a canvas for personal expression, engages the suburban American male at the deepest possible level.

"A question on a timed exam that requires calculating winning percentages in basketball gives an advantage to white suburban males over other groups," he said.

LAST fall, for the first time in years, I looked at my lawn with the kind of pride suburban males are expected to feel toward their expanses of grass.

This sympathetic regard for participants in various forms of American youth culture - especially young, white suburban males - is a thread that runs through several other of the festival's offerings.

Dr. Wally Shaw, a respected anesthesiologist and America's top-ranking amateur film maker, thinks the problem may be biological, and the 35-year-old suburban male seems most vulnerable.

They're young white suburban males, and look harmless enough, but sneaky.

Unbeknownst to the men, Cathy is actually a sociology graduate student writing her thesis on the "adolescent fantasies of the adult suburban male."

At root: is the modern suburban male irrevocably different from his forebears, or are some of his more sensitive qualities not much more than affectation?

Perhaps this is why the most violent of gangsta rap has found its largest audience among white suburban males.