(FORTUNE Magazine) – Still nonchalantly propounding long-winded questions guaranteed not to be answered and maybe even verging on the rhetorical, your correspondent now sidles up to these ones: -- With respect to the Robert Rauschenberg testimony on the Bob Bork nomination, we begin by inquiring who picked this painter to represent the artists of America, next wonder how Robert knows the art world's fears about Bork are ''unanimous,'' pause briefly to tendentiously inquire if Gary Hart is still Rauschenberg's idea of a great leader (he donated 92 lithographs, all instantly hocked, to the 1984 Hart campaign), then sign off by asking politely who is writing the witness's stuff these days and what did this unknown scrivener expect the Judiciary Committee to make of such mysterious pronouncements as: ''Art is one of, if not the most, economical exchanges that dissonant ideologies can negotiate with and understand''? -- Was it the journalist or the source who screwed up in that interpretive New York Times article about SAT scores, the concluding line of which had Robert G. Cameron of the College Board fretting about how hard it would be to get any real turnaround in depressed verbal scores because ''So much of the pop culture and the way people communicate mitigate against improvement,'' or could it have been low-scoring verbalists on the Times copy desk who mixed up ''militate'' and ''mitigate''? -- Four years after Ron's ''evil empire'' speech, do we have to sit here worrying that detente at its dopiest is about to be embraced by the Reaganites, and if the State Department's answer is ''Goodness, no,'' then how could Secretary George Shultz embellish his press conference on the new arms control agreement with a maddening formulation about human rights -- ''Of course, they are very much of a view that this has to be a two-way street, and they raised questions about . . . practices here that they have problems with . . . and I think that's healthy'' -- all plainly implying that U.S. and Soviet human-rights problems are in some sense comparable? -- What could be more principled, and yet at the same time more practical, than leading neoliberal Michael Kinsley's Solomonic conclusion in the New Republic about the wisdom of affirmative action on behalf of ugly people, an issue first raised in the Harvard Law Review and dealt with in a basically derisive spirit in Keeping Up (August 31), Mike's gist being that ugly rights are entirely supportable on the theoretical level (''the justice of the cause is beyond doubt'') and yet hard to swallow as a matter of reality (because we just cannot ''afford to expand the awesome machinery of civil rights litigation into this vast new area'')? -- What will it take to get the mighty American media even mildly upset with the African National Congress, endlessly cast as the good guys in South Africa, and where were the media moguls this summer when ANC Secretary General Alfred Nzo proclaimed that ''the South African Communist party is and always will be a close ally of the ANC,'' a detail that we read about only in the Washington Inquirer, a low-circulation weekly sounder than most on foreign policy? -- Why is Everett Carll Ladd's Public Opinion article (title: ''Where the Public Stands on Nicaragua'') not front-page news, inasmuch as the Iran-Contra hearings left us all thinking that hardly anybody supports Contra aid, with Senator Warren Rudman of New Hampshire getting a ton of sympathetic prime-time coverage for his lecture to Ollie North on the need of solons to follow the people on such matters? Or did nobody notice Ladd's devastating analysis of the questions asked by pollsters, a crucial finding being that they seem to get majorities for Contra aid when the question mentions that the Contras are fighting Communists (vs. weak support when they are simply assumed to be some kinds of rebels fighting an established government)?