(FORTUNE Magazine) – Reading over the testimony of Mary Frances Berry before the Senate Judiciary Committee the other day, one felt that ''Only in America'' was still reasonably safe. In recent times one has often worried about the durability of this feature, long a staple of Keeping Up. The feature depends on a decent supply of news stories in which somebody is asserting rights or expressing views that will strike the modal reader as looney. But what seems demented in one period gets to seem depressingly normal in another. When enough boys assert a constitutional right to play on the girls' field-hockey team, and enough fair-housing activists complain about the term ''master bedroom,'' the behavior begins to look normal, and then where is one?

The news about Mary is that she is now chairperson of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, a denouement rated here as bad for America but great for Keeping Up. It renews one's faith that there are still things that happen literally only in this country -- a thought that barged into consciousness when we read Ms. Berry's opening statement about the commission's vital role in ''sustaining progress toward true equality of opportunity in our nation.'' That line sent us back to her 1982 work, Long Memory: The Black Experience in America, co-authored with John Blassingame of Yale. The book expresses admiration for Soviet freedoms and complains that the press has given blacks a distorted view of same. ''Subjected to a massive barrage of propaganda from the American news media, few of them knew about Russia's constitutional safeguards for minorities ((or)) the extent of the equality of opportunity.'' Your servant is not the only journalist to have raised eyebrows about folks who write such stuff and then go around lecturing about civil rights, but nobody ever pays attention. Hey, it's America.