Until today, I have known evil only as a nameless, intangible haze. Like a drowning man, I have been unable to say which part of my surroundings was destroying me, because of course it all was.

Only today has the fatal, amorphous toxin that overwhelms me finally crystallized briefly into one representative image of foolishness and decay.

I am talking of course about the Barbra Streisand collectible stamp.

The $2 stamp was issued as legal tender for the nation of St. Vincent and the Grenadines, a West Indian island chain consisting mainly of the 133-square-mile island of St. Vincent.

With a $2 stamp, you could mail the entire island of St. Vincent to another island.

In fact, this country is so small their stamp was not even about Barbra Streisand overall. They could afford to commemorate only a portion of Ms. Streisand's career -- specifically, her 1993-94 U.S. tour.

I now quote from an ad that ran recently in the Bergen Daily Record:

``If you missed out on Barbra Streisand's sold out tour of 1993-94,'' (which I did) ``this is your lucky day.'' (Yow!) ``A limited number of official postage stamps commemorating this historic tour are being made available to the general public.

``These limited edition postage stamps were handed out to everyone who attended Streisand's Dec. 31, 1993, show at the Las Vegas MGM Grand, the opening performance in her last U.S. tour.''

What do we know about this obscure string of islands that generously contributed some of their stamps to the needy concert crowd at the Las Vegas MGM Grand? Well, as of 1987 (when my atlas was printed), it had a population of about 113,000. Their economy at that time was based on the export of bananas, and on average, each citizen made about $500 a year during the 1993-94 concert season.

By contrast, as I vaguely recall, tickets for one of those Barbra Streisand concerts cost about the same as a new Buick Skylark.

I'd like to know what concert promoter had the kind of pull to bring off this particular vanity project. Doesn't it bother anybody but me that some agent at William Morris or some such place has the ear of world leaders? That Luxembourg might issue a savings bond to commemorate Weird Al Yankovic's next swing through greater Pittsburgh?

I mean, high-level corruption is one thing; everyone in the greater New York metropolitan area takes that with their coffee.

But if you're going to toss away your principles, you should at least do it for something creative and indelible -- a secret diamond mine, an insane hallucination about astronauts and Jefferson Davis.

To manipulate a smaller nation in the cause of Barbra Streisand? That's like assassinating the president to impress Whoopie Goldberg.

What makes this such a clear evil is that, whatever strange deal lies behind this stamp, no one considers it an international embarrassment. Seven years later, the stamp is simply being collected and traded -- justified, in the newspaper advertisement, by the number of Golden Globes that Streisand owns.

And without our outrage to restrain these dark forces that wolf down other cultures, this sort of thing could easily catch on in the United States itself, and government actions could start marking other obscure events in the history of easy listening.

You may find this frivolous now.

But when you see that first Neil Diamond ``September Morning'' Release Party Panzer Tank rolling down your street, or find yourself locked away forever in The ``Art Garfunkel Christmas Album'' Federal Penitentiary, then you'll chant right along with me:

U.S. out of my record collection!