SORRY doesn't cut it.

The recent U.S. Senate apology for lynching is too little, too late, and subject to serious doubt about its sincerity.

At this point, the main beneficiaries are not the victims of lynching or their families, but the senators who now can claim the moral high ground when they look for African-American constituents' support.

From 1890 to 1952, seven presidents asked Congress to adopt anti-lynching laws, and more than 200 bills were introduced. None ever passed, leaving millions of African-Americans exposed to lynch mobs who did their vicious deeds with impunity.

Congress refused to create a legal prohibition, contributing to the climate of popular opinion surviving to this day that black people don't matter - a race of disposable men.

It was not uncommon for so-called law enforcement officers to record in their official reports that the perpetrators of the lynchings were unknown. Those were official lies. In the small towns where the events occurred, the lynchers were indeed known, sometimes even as sworn deputies and peacemakers.

If the lynching was scheduled, everybody came. The butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker - and their children. Minors were admitted to the show.

Neither black Americans, white Americans, nor other Americans really appreciate the enormity of the atrocities committed.

I confess that when I first wrote about lynching for our Sunday opinion pages a few years ago, I was astounded by the pure callousness of the lynchers, the casualness of the spectators and the evilness, senselessness, lawlessness and sheer magnitude of the lynching phenomenon.

The Ku Klux Klan enjoyed a general immunity from arrest, but it wasn't just the Klan that executed black men with impunity - ordinary citizens became the raging mob.

Between 1882 and 1968, lynching claimed the lives of nearly 5,000 human beings, almost all of whom were black men.

Born in Plainfield and raised in Jersey City, playwright, actor and performance artist James Scruggs lays out the whole tragic tableau in a one-man show he calls "Disposable Men." The series of set pieces is now playing at the Here performance space, an off-off Broadway theater at 145 Sixth Ave. in West SoHo.

Go see this imaginative multiscreen production before it closes on July 2. Be ready for a visual and emotional jolt.

I would personally reach in to my own pocket to buy tickets to "Disposable Men" for the whole Senate - and send a limo for Sens. Trent Lott and Thad Cochran of Mississippi, who didn't vote for the lynching apology. Their state had the most lynchings. Cochran said he didn't personally do anything that he feels the need to apologize for.

Scruggs captures the essence of the horrific attacks on and torturing of black men, whose lives were so devalued that mobs of ordinary people felt comfortable maiming them, mutilating them and displaying their body part in the windows of downtown shops.

No matter where you sit in the theater, you are drawn in sometimes as a witness or spectator and at other times as a willing participant.

Ambling stiffly onto the stage in the character of a worn-out old man, Scruggs hands out little pill cups to a few audience members as he proceeds with a monologue in the voice of a survivor of the Tuskeegee syphilis experiments.

He explains that he and others were led to believe doctors they trusted were treating them for "bad blood."

Little did the 399 mostly illiterate Alabama men know that they were the government's lab rats, unwittingly dying for a cause. Unbeknownst to them, Public Health Service researchers withheld treatment and were only interested in tracking the complications that developed as they marched toward death from end-stage syphilis.

Then, from out of nowhere in the middle of the Tuskeegee sequence you hear the voice of President Bill Clinton issuing a public apology for the experiment.

"What the United States did was shameful. And I am sorry," says the voice with slow deliberate sincerity.

By contrast, last week's congressional apology rings hollow.

"Clearly, it doesn't change anything, but I think that certainly it's a start," Scruggs said in an interview this week. "One woman said afterward that she doubted our government would torture black men for 40 years. But it did happen."

The logical extension of the disposable-man phenomenon is modern-day racial profiling, ultimately ending in alienation, massive incarceration and death.

If there is a flaw in this piece, it is the embarrassment of riches - the multiple images and actions that sometimes crowd out thought that's needed to savor the meaning. I've seen "Disposable Men" three times and with each visit discover something new.

Record Columnist Lawrence Aaron can be contacted at aaron@northjersey.com. Send comments about this column to oped@northjersey.com.