A HOST OF CONTRADICTIONS

By PICO IYER/ATLANTA

Before a visitor has even left Atlanta's Hartsfield International Airport, he is loudly assaulted by the city's pride in itself: "Awakens as a world leader," says one postcard, among the "American-Made Collectors' Souvenirs and Spoons" in an airport gift shop, and another calls it ''a competitor's paradise." Terminal videos instruct you on how to invest money here, and a large ad reminds you that the born-again town was voted the top American city for "global companies" in 1994 by one magazine and the best city for small businesses by another. Atlanta ("A Star on the Rise," as the logo on its Olympic bid had it) seems tailor-made to play host to the Centennial Olympics, if only because it is so in tune with the Games' unspoken tradition of institutional idealism and business-minded, slogan-wielding hopes of bringing the world together.

Yet all this official rah-rahism hides a blur of stubborn uncertainties. Atlanta, to an uncanny degree, is embodied by its amorphous, computer-generated, somewhat indeterminate Olympic mascot, Whatizit. The city seems a Whereizit that is both Southern and Northern, global and provincial, black run and white dominated--a liberal conservative small town done up in a three-piece suit. The two phrases most closely associated with Atlanta are, after all, "I have a dream" and "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn."

The riddle at the heart of Atlanta has always been how to balance the bright new equality envisaged by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. with the "don't-give-a-damn" romance of the Old South immortalized by Margaret Mitchell. And how to capitalize on a past that is the source of both its magnolia-scented allure and its shame, while marketing itself as a place of the future.

The most surprising thing about Atlanta, in fact, for a first-time visitor, is that the Civil War is being re-enacted here every day, and the issue of racial harmony is the main issue in town, even (or especially) among those who claim it is a non-issue. For decades the city has managed to generate hopeful visions of bodies reaching out to one another across racial lines, from the stories of Brer Rabbit to the 1989 movie Driving Miss Daisy. The Commission on Inter-racial Cooperation was set up here in the 1920s--but at almost exactly the same time, the Ku Klux Klan was reorganized at nearby Stone Mountain.

The city's practical response to such social divisions has always been to put its faith in economics: Be good for business, the so-called Atlanta Spirit reminds its citizens, and business will be good for you. Even the oddly defensive tag Atlanta gives itself--"The City Too Busy to Hate"--rearticulates the hope that busy-ness can paper over resentments. And, to a remarkable extent, the city has made good on its promise: Atlanta is famously the center of the Cable News Network, Delta Air Lines and Coca-Cola; and for four straight years in the '90s, "Hotlanta" led the nation in the creation of jobs.

Indeed, Atlanta's great selling point to the world is as a model of black middle-class achievement. A typical tourist hears over and over about Alonzo Herndon, the half-black slave and barbershop owner who went on to become a multimillionaire and founder-president of the Atlanta Life Insurance Co. The visitor learns about "the largest concentration of ... black colleges in America," and he reads in the Atlanta Daily World (the country's oldest daily black newspaper) about African-American debutante balls. Atlanta has an unparalleled lineage of black political leaders, from former mayors Maynard Jackson and Andrew Young to their current successor, William Campbell; and to this day its police chief, its Congresswoman for the 11th District, and the head of the Atlanta Constitution editorial page are all black.

Yet none of these much publicized success stories can change the fact that a 1990 census found that 43% of Atlanta kids live in poverty and 14,000 homes have no telephone. By certain measures, Atlanta has one of the highest violent-crime rates for a city its size in America. And though these figures are somewhat distorted by artificial city lines (official Atlanta, which is predominantly black and poor, accounts for only 404,000 of Metro Atlanta's 3.5 million people), the fact remains that at red lights, grown men come up to clean your windshield, as in Calcutta or Addis Ababa, and when you enter a fancy restaurant, you may find huddled-up bodies taking shelter on the spiral staircase.

Ever since it began life, in 1837, as a transportation hub called Terminus, Atlanta has been a place of people passing through and a city of a hundred public lives. One of its favorite symbols for itself is that of the legendary phoenix, and it is justly proud of the gleaming atriums and convention centers that have arisen out of the blood and ashes of the past. When General William Tecumseh Sherman burned the city to the ground, in 1864, Atlanta's treasury was left with exactly $1.64 to rebuild; and hardly had it done so when a devastating fire, in 1917, destroyed almost 2,000 more buildings. "The Turning of Atlanta" has been a constant theme here, and though its predecessors as Summer Olympic hosts, Seoul and Barcelona, have similar stories of renaissance, Atlanta's is a typically American tale of never-say-die self-reinvention.

To a newcomer, therefore, Atlanta can sometimes read like a corporate brochure, with rags-to-riches stories its strongest local product: Jimmy Carter, moving from a peanut farm to the White House; Ted Turner, starting a TV station in the basement of a former country club that within a decade becomes the world's largest newsgathering organization; Billy Payne, a real estate lawyer daring to dream of, and execute, the largest gathering of Olympic athletes in history. Such practical idealists--together with universally known champions of human rights such as Carter's former ambassador to the United Nations, Andrew Young--give the city a disproportionately high profile around the globe.

But in many ways, the person who best exemplifies the city's curious blend of Dale Carnegie optimism and slightly unseasoned confidence is the Congressman who represents the Sixth District and is now the Speaker of the House (another rags-to-riches story!), Newt Gingrich. With his homemade maxims and his slightly loopy earnestness, his "five simple steps to a bold future" and his dreams of laptops in the hands of the poor, Gingrich is a perfect emblem of the city's old-fashioned futurism. You know you are in Newt-town when even a sex palace advertises MORE THAN JUST ADULT ENTERTAINMENT...A CLUB WITH VISION.

Often, then, Atlanta strikes the visitor as a small town's idea of what a big town should be, a motivational-speaker kind of place, with something of the shiny suspectness of the gizmos advertised in airline magazines. It combines a touching faith in civic virtue with a fierce determination to put the best face on things. On the day I went to the Atlanta History Center, it was, quite fittingly, staging an exhibition of Norman Rockwell's paintings of Boy Scouts. "For some reason or other," the artist was quoted as saying, "I just painted like I would like life to be."

This can give the whole place a somewhat placeless air, like a vast, utilitarian industrial subdivision: the Phoenix of the South. One day in Atlanta I stayed in an area known as Perimeter Center and took Perimeter Center West up to Perimeter Pointe, passing, en route, stores that sounded almost parodically featureless and generic: Computer City, the Cosmetic Center, Home Place, First Union. It is easy to feel here as if you are in some spaced-out office park (to use an apt oxymoron), where there is nothing but mini-malls, megahotels and corporate condominiums (even newcomer Elton John lives in a condo here). When I checked into my "Hotel of Distinction" in one of the Perimeter areas, the receptionist said, "If you want to look around, Perimeter Mall's across the street." What this underlines is that Atlanta is an automotive city that prizes convenience before character and offers the kind of McSuburb amenities best suited to a fast-food life-style. When President Clinton came here in January, he ate at one of the city's most famous institutions, the Varsity, a burger joint that takes up a whole downtown block and boasts a two-story parking lot (though, in true Atlanta style, it also offers long-distance phone cards, a cash machine and a store selling 14 different kinds of souvenirs).

As early as 1930, in fact, a local was saying that "office buildings are to Atlanta...what automobiles are to Detroit," and even then, though Atlanta ranked 29th in the nation in population, it ranked second in office space. Its central location has always made it an ideal transportation center: 80% of the U.S. population is within three hours' flying time from here. And its concentration on service industries and distribution (UPS and Holiday Inns are centered here) has helped make it more recession-proof than centers of heavy industry such as Detroit.

Yet if Atlanta's status as a suburban, almost rural city means that it does not have as many cultural amenities as one might expect, it makes up for that with natural resources. Indeed, the Interstate City is an eminently comfortable place in which to live, and houses on pleasant, leafy streets can be found, at relatively low prices, within a 10-minute drive of downtown. Hills, lakes and mountains are only 25 minutes away, and, at a phone booth, a flyer advertising for a roommate states matter-of-factly, WANTED: MALE TO SHARE RUSTIC 75-ACRE FARM W/STABLE AND LAKES.

The plushest district--and the center of the gracious, almost antebellum Atlanta that the city likes to show to visitors--is Buckhead. In Buckhead magazines like Peachtree ("The Guide to the Civilized South") feature special sections on "The Women of Polo" and glossy pages full of charity balls and coming-out parties, cosmetic dentists and a young woman actually called Memory. One Buckhead mall--Lenox Square--advertises itself on a list with St. Peter's Square, Union Square, Red Square, Trafalgar Square and Times Square; another ("World Class City. World Class Shopping") boasts sweeping staircases and wooden elevators, polished brass and a concierge to direct you to Nail Elite and Hair Artisans, the Civilized Traveller and the Silver Spoon Cafe. It must be said, however, that the same Buckhead hotel that enforces a dress code (jackets are "preferred" for men, even at breakfast) is the place where my $16 Payless shoes were stolen from the corridor.

Yet what Buckhead most vividly dramatizes, perhaps, is the split down the center of the city between Atlanta and Georgia. For if to the rest of the state the capital seems an anomalous Northern transplant (more than half its residents, after all, come from somewhere else), to the boomtown developers in the glass-walled towers the rest of the state seems dangerously slow and Southern.

This adds to the sense that the War Between the States never ended here. Three thousand Confederate soldiers are buried in the heart of downtown, and visitors can take tours led by people dressed as Confederate (or Union) soldiers. Letters to the local paper still rail against "occupied Atlanta," and a debate continues to rage about whether to take the symbol of Dixie out of the state flag. Want ads solicit old Klan outfits, burned Klan crosses and "other civil rights memorabilia."

No less disarmingly, a city where even the central Underground Atlanta mall posts "Rules of Etiquette" also unabashedly proclaims itself "a nude dancing mecca," where a single escort service lists more than 100 different options in the Yellow Pages, and the giveaway tourist guide, This Week Atlanta, offers boxed reviews of skin houses. Atlanta's strip joints do have their idiosyncrasies (they boast Internet addresses, atm machines and free valet parking, and one, on Corporate Boulevard, actually advertises "corporate atmosphere"), yet the unbroken lines of Girls-R-Fun clubs and joints presenting "250 Platinum Girls" throw some of the city's sobriety into question. When Billy Payne appeared on Moscow TV live (via satellite) this year, extending "a most warm Southern welcome," he was standing just across from the new city jail and next to a topless bar.

Politically, this mix of peachblossom Southern town and go-go Silicone City leads to even greater stresses. The city has, for example, one of the largest gay populations in the U.S. Yet the commissioners of Cobb County, an area of 530,000 people just outside Atlanta, opted out of playing host to part of the Olympics volleyball tournament rather than repeal a 1993 resolution condemning the "gay life-style." And last May the Barrow County Chamber of Commerce voted 13 to 2 against having Somali athletes train there, a move justified in the name of finances but looking suspiciously like old-style racism.

Indeed, to a visitor from California, say, or New York, Atlanta looks strikingly unmulticultural. In an official tally of ethnicities, the Chamber of Commerce proudly cited 32 Aleuts and 41 Guamanians, and it's true that some horse-and-buggy carriages downtown are run by Inshirah Stables, while the malls along the Buford Highway are sprouting ginseng stores and wushu academies. But for the most part, the city is much more monochromatic than a Seattle or Miami, and it may be illustrative that though Atlanta has 300 Japanese companies represented here, it has only 5,000 Japanese residents.

More fundamentally, the city of new beginnings has never quite determined what to do with its black heritage. To a visitor who is neither black nor white, the African-American flavor of Atlanta (everyone from Ray Charles to Gladys Knight came from 'round here) accounts for many of its spiciest cultural attractions, from blues bars like Blind Willie's to a few streets commemorating what one brochure rather giddily calls "the planet's greatest show on African-American hope and heritage."

Yet the fact remains that in the hotels of Buckhead the only blacks I saw were bellhops, and even at an Atlanta Braves game, all the dark skins seemed to belong to vendors or players. When Henry Aaron, the greatest home-run hitter in major league history, closed in on Babe Ruth's record while playing for the Braves, he was the recipient of so unrelenting a hate-mail campaign that he concluded that "all Atlanta had to offer was hatred and resentment." Auburn Avenue, a black "Street of Pride" that was meant to be spruced up in anticipation of the Games, remains a sad strip of broken promises and broken signs. "I'm bitter," says a black Olympics worker. "They still don't do too much for the black folk down here."

As the Games approach, the task before Atlanta is to translate its confidence in itself (as "the Next Great International City") into a true internationalism. The Games' organizers have already given their mascot a radical face-lift. Whatizit has been renamed Izzy, given brighter eyes and equipped with lightning bolts on his sneakers and even an Atlanta rags-to-riches past. Yet a Chamber of Commerce brochure still spells the word "foriegn," and even a conservative booster acknowledges, "Atlanta's not a tourist destination because there's nothing here." True, there is an International Boulevard, but at the intersection of International and one of the city's 43 roads named Peachtree, you will find a Hard Rock Cafe, a Planet Hollywood, a McDonald's and a 73-story Westin hotel: Atlanta, in short, is international in the same way that Coca-Cola is international--by virtue of being an all-American symbol of pop.

Yet for all its limitations, there are still moments, here and there, when Atlanta has a savor all its own. On Sunday mornings when you turn on the radio, you can hear gospel singers and sermons to shake the soul. There is a live baptism on one station, and a "Holy Anointment Feet-Washing Ceremony" on the next; on another channel, a man is shouting, "I been waitin' to whup you, Devil," and on the very next, there is "step-by-step" counsel from a Christian businessman who, "by the grace of God, went from being broke to becoming a multimillionaire."

And on a warm and unseasonably bright morning in January, a whole crowd of civil rights veterans and black preachers, movie stars and President Clinton all pile into the intimate Ebenezer Baptist Church to celebrate the birthday of the city's proudest son, Martin Luther King Jr. A 12-year-old boy leads the congregation in a litany, shaking his finger and speaking from the heart like King himself, and a preacher in the audience stands up and cries, "Do it, God," and "Thank you, Jesus," and "Say it, son!" One speaker after another, talking without notes, shakes the air with fire and conviction. And near the end, the whole assembly, black and white, in yarmulke and ponytail, recording artist and grizzled sheriff, joins hands for a final chorus of We Shall Overcome.

The service lasts 3 1/2 hours, throwing the schedule of the President--and so the whole city--way off. But as King's youngest son, Dexter, a model of managerial calm, concludes, "When the spirit gets going, you sometimes lose track of time." For that moment, at least, in a decidedly Atlantan way, not giving a damn and having a dream mean one and the same thing.