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PARADISE POSTPONED Spying on pre-election America through the Keyhole of Martha's Vineyard, the Democrats' summer resort where Ted Kennedy had his little misfortune with a lady friend at Chappaquiddick, leaves one wide-eyed with alarm. It is like seeing a friend relapsing into a fit of derangement without knowing whether it is going to be passing or permanent. The Vineyard - a beautiful, exquisitely preserved, 20-mile long island, five miles off Cape Cod - is an ideal vantage point; in a sense it is a microcosm of the contradictions, hypocrisies and moralistic extremes that are being whipped to the surface as the election cyclone begins to spin over the country. The island has become an advanced model of an environmentally, socially and politically correct community. The politics of the place are incorruptibly Democratic. Anyone feeling a tingle of sympathy for George Bush or the Republicans learns to suppress it, like some shameful secret. Crime, if not unheard of, is rare. While 22 people were murdered in Los Angeles alone last weekend, in Martha's Vineyard people leave their doors open when they go off to the beach. Here, everything is immaculately organised. Speed limits are graded from 20 to 45 mph, extra parking at island events laid on by courtesy of the "pro-choice" abortion lobby. Yet, as on the mainland of America itself, beneath this surface decorum yawn huge contradictions. One end of the island is "dry", the other is "wet". This particular contradiction can be resolved by buying the booze at the wet end and consuming it, publicly and legally, at the dry. The same moral absolutes confront each other on the beach: a few yards from the daughter of the all-American family in her prim, Twenties-style, one-piece bathing suit, you stumble across simian, dangling man playing volleyball in the buff. As in America itself the extremes confront you, starkers, at every step of the way. In Martha's Vineyard, as in the rest of America, there is the same permanent stand-off between private and public, with the private invariably coming off best. Being an advanced democratic community is not seen by the islanders as in any way incompatible with restricting access to their superb, semi-deserted beaches to house-owners or their tenants. Segregation is not by race or class but by property, which in this expensive area amounts to much the same thing. There are few black visitors to the Vineyard. In the Democrats' summer paradise the masses are not made to feel at home, on the faultlessly pragmatic grounds that it would no longer be a paradise if they were.