Clamorous and overpowering, campaign images are vivid as dreams and vanish as quickly. Was it real, that huge white aircraft hangar in Columbus, Ohio, the night before the election? I’d raced there from downtown Columbus’s Nationwide Arena, where President Obama, introduced by Bruce Springsteen and Jay-Z, his voice hoarse and his face worn, had addressed fifteen thousand or so enthusiastic, mostly young supporters.

Amid the clamorous controversies of this election campaign, what strikes one here on the West Bank of the Jordan is the silences. Though the issue of Palestine promises to have a much more vital part in the volatile, populist politics of the Middle East’s new democracies—whose vulnerable governments actually must take some account of what moves ordinary people—here in Ramallah we have heard virtually nothing substantive about it, apart, that is, from Mitt Romney’s repeated charge that President Obama, presumably in extracting from Israel a hard-fought ten-month freeze on settlement building early on in his administration, had “thrown Israel under the bus.”

The first duty of Shin Bet, Israel's feared internal intelligence service, is to be invisible. Its very motto, “Magen VeLo Yera’e,” brands this shadowy organization as the “Defender that shall not be seen.” So it is more than a bit startling to find a documentary film built around interviews with Shin Bet’s surviving directors—not one but all six: Ami Ayalon, Avi Dichter, Yuval Diskin, Carmi Gillon, Yaakov Peri and Avraham Shalom. Persuading these feared professional spooks to sit for on-camera interviews was unprecedented; extracting the details they tell, not only about their shadow war with Palestinian terrorists but their bitter conflicts with Israeli politicians, was historic—and, as the story unfolds, increasingly shocking. I sat down with Dror Moreh, director of The Gatekeepers, to ask him how he did it.

"A riddle wrapped in mystery inside an enigma"⎯ Churchill's comment about Soviet motivations floated into my mind as I read Philip Zelikow's elegant and powerful analysis of American "Codes of Conduct" during our Twilight War. We as Americans stand today before a terrible and indisputable fact⎯that, as Mr. Zelikow puts it, "for the first time in American history, leaders of the U.S. government carefully devised ways and means to torment enemy captives." And though we know an immense amount about how this came to happen⎯the plot lines of who did what to whom, who wrote the memos and who was "tormented" and how, who was smashed repeatedly against walls, who was crushed into tiny confinement boxes, who was waterboarded and how many times⎯we know relatively little about how the momentous decision came to be made. 

Let me begin with what today has been a key word: amnesia. It is a striking word, and it makes a provocative point. When it comes to torture as practiced by the United States during the war on terror, there is certainly amnesia and an ongoing quest on the part of some to encourage and cultivate it.

We are living in the State of Exception. We don’t know when it will end, as we don’t know when the War on Terror will end. But we all know when it began.

When it comes to torture, it is not what we did but what we are doing. It is not what happened but what is happening and what will happen.  In our politics, torture is not about whether or not our polity can "let the past be past"—whether or not we can "get beyond it and look forward."

The first paradox of the torture scandal is that it is not about things we didn't know but about things we did know and did nothing about. Beginning more than a half-dozen years ago, Bush administration officials broke the law and did repugnant things to detainees under their control. But if you think that the remedy is simple and clear -- that all officials who broke the law should be tried and punished -- then ask yourself what exactly the political elite of the country has been doing for the last five years. Or what it has not been doing. And why.

Wir glauben, dass Zeit und Wahlen unsere gefallene Welt reinwaschen werden, aber das werden sie nicht.  Seit November scheinen sich George W. Bush und seine Regierung mit zunehmender Geschwindigkeit von uns entfernt zu haben, ein dunkler Komet auf dem Weg zum Ende des Universums.

We think time and elections will cleanse our fallen world but they will not. Since November, George W. Bush and his administration have seemed to be rushing away from us at accelerating speed, a dark comet hurtling toward the ends of the universe.

On a bright sunny day two years ago, President George W. Bush strode into the East Room of the White House and informed the world that the United States had created a dark and secret universe to hold and interrogate captured terrorists.

It made few headlines when Dick Cheney, in the last days of his vice-presidency, dismissed as a caricature the idea that he was "a Darth Vader type-personality".

Scandal is our growth industry. Revelation of wrongdoing leads not to definitive investigation, punishment, and expiation but to more scandal.

You would think first of all of a village fair: the entire community of Germantown, Northwest Philly, taking itself up on the brightest of bright sunny fall days and moving en masse, clumps of people—groups of young men in the obligatory hoodies and low-riding jeans, moms pushing strollers, dads lugging car seats, and everywhere children, from toddlers on up, being pulled along (“You’ll remember this all your life!”)—almost all of them African-American and all melding together, as they crowded toward the entrance to Vernon Park, into a full running, laughing stream.

Panning across the faces of the country’s leaders gathered in the Cabinet Room to confront the “financial crisis” in late September, the camera’s eye moves from the President—looking tired, shrunken, desiccated—to his Treasury secretary and other powerful advisers, and then slowly makes its way down and around the long Cabinet table, trailing over the familiar waxen features of the barons of the Senate and the House, lingering for a moment on the self-consciously resolute face of the white-haired Senator John McCain, and finally reaches the table’s end where it settles at last on the figure of a lean, solitary black man slumped in his seat.

Some stories, ancient and eternal, are inscribed in the world. The Fall of the Hero is one such, an endlessly reenacted drama that turns on the precariousness of greatness and its inevitable overreaching.

You would think first of all of a village fair: the entire community of Germantown, Northwest Philly, taking itself up on the brightest of bright sunny fall days and moving en masse, clumps of people—groups of young men in the obligatory hoodies and low-riding jeans, moms pushing strollers, dads lugging car seats, and everywhere children, from toddlers on up, being pulled along (“You’ll remember this all your life!”)—almost all of them African-American and all melding together, as they crowded toward the entrance to Vernon Park, into a full running, laughing stream.

Scandal is our growth industry. In our era, revelation of wrongdoing leads not to definitive investigation, punishment and expiation but to ... more scandal.

To contemplate a prewar map of Baghdad — as I do the one before me, with sectarian neighborhoods traced out in blue and red and yellow — is to look back on a lost Baghdad, a Baghdad of our dreams.

Sin duda, uno de los atributos agonizantes de nuestra era posterior al 11-S es la necesidad permanente de reafirmar realidades que han sido demostradas una y otra vez, y negadas con la misma obstinación por quienes ocupan el poder oficiel

Surely one of the agonizing attributes of our post–September 11 age is the unending need to reaffirm realities that have been proved, and proved again, but just as doggedly denied by those in power, forcing us to live trapped between two narratives of present history, the one gaining life and color and vigor as more facts become known, the other growing ever paler, brittler, more desiccated, barely sustained by the life support of official power.

We pride ourselves in being realists first of all, and thus we know well, or tell ourselves we do, that “the first casualty when war comes is truth.”

Perhaps it would have surprised George Orwell, poet laureate of the Cold War, to find himself so much in our thoughts in this second decade of the post-Cold War age.

Being invited to deliver a commencement address to the Department of Rhetoric is akin to being asked out for a romantic evening by a porn star.

When my assistant greeted me, a number of weeks ago, with the news that I had been invited to deliver the commencement address to the Department of Rhetoric, I thought it was a bad joke.

In the ruined city of Fallujah, its pale tan buildings pulverized by Marine artillery in the two great assaults of this long war (the aborted attack of March 2004 and then the bloody, triumphant al-Fajr (The Dawn) campaign of the following November), behind the lines of giant sandbags and concrete T-walls and barbed wire that surrounded the tiny beleaguered American outpost there, I sat in my body armor and Kevlar helmet and thought of George F. Kennan.

In November 2003, barely six months into the Iraq War, Specialist Joseph Darby returned from leave and asked a fellow soldier at Abu Ghraib prison to tell him what had happened while he’d been away.

When I look back over the many years of conversations with Carol Feldman, I realize that what brought us together, first and foremost, was our vices.

The phrase I come back to, not only about interrogation but the many other steps that constitute the Bush state of exception, state of emergency, since 9/11 is "take the gloves off."

Scanning my memory for especially telling episodes in my friendship with Fritz has brought much pleasure, for my memories are full of laughter and also, of course - this is after all Fritz Stern - much wisdom.

Seldom has an image so clearly marked the turning of the world. One of man’s mightiest structures collapses into an immense white blossom of churning, roiling dust, metamorphosing in 14 seconds from hundred-story giant of the earth into towering white plume reaching to heaven.

For more than two years the United States has been fighting a war in Iraq that was launched in the cause of destroying weapons that turned out not to exist.

The great value of the discussion recounted in the Downing Street memo...is to show, for the governments of both countries, a clear hierarchy of decision-making.

When I was invited to give this speech, I was asked for a title. I dillied and dallied, begged for more time, and of course the deadline passed.

It was October 16, 2002, and the United States Congress had just voted to authorize the President to go to war against Iraq.

Just past dawn on January 30, Iraq's Election Day — the fourth of the US occupation's "turning points," after the fall of Baghdad, the capture of Saddam Hussein, and the "handover of sovereignty" — I stood at the muddy gates of Muthana Air Base outside Baghdad watching the sun rise, pink and full, into a white-streaked sky; then, feeling a sudden tremor beneath my feet, I started abruptly: the explosion was loud and, judging by the vibrations, not far off.

"Issues don't win elections, constituencies do." As this political chestnut suggests, issues serve politicians mainly as a way for them to consolidate constituencies—and "make a majority," as Andrew Hacker puts it.

Between the publication of my article, "Abu Ghraib: The Hidden Story," and the receipt of these letters, and mainly thanks to the President's nomination of Alberto Gonzales to be attorney general and the hearings that followed, we have had a public discussion of the "outrageous memos authored by highly placed administration lawyers" to which Mr. Rivkin refers.

Driving north from Tampa on Florida's Route 75 on November 1, as the battle over who would hold political power in America was reaching a climax but the struggle over what that battle meant had yet to begin, I put down the top of my rented green convertible, turned the talk radio voices up to blaring, and commenced reading the roadside.

At least since Watergate, Americans have come to take for granted a certain story line of scandal, in which revelation is followed by investigation, adjudication and expiation.

"Go to Haiti!" James Chace leaned in close, left hand grasping my upper arm, fixed me with that incomparable stare, raised his right index finger and, like some unlikely fire-and-brimstone New England preacher reincarnated in blazer and khakis, intoned portentously: "Hear me well, young Danner: Go to Haiti!"

It seemed somehow fitting, and fittingly sad, that Colin Powell saw his resignation accepted as secretary of state on the day marines completed their conquest of Falluja

One of the last times I saw James Chace I was standing right here, at this very podium, and he was sitting right…there.

Sad as I am not to be with you this day I take a bit of solace in thinking that Richard would have granted me a dispensation, once he learned that I had spent the last week among voters in the cities and towns of the great state of Florida - studying, as it were, abnormal mass psychology.

It has been clear for several months that the United States is losing its war in Iraq. What remains to be seen is whether Americans will come to realize this fact before the election or after it.

They have long since taken their place in the gallery of branded images, as readily recognizable in much of the world as Marilyn struggling with her billowing dress or Michael dunking his basketball...

What is difficult is separating what we now know from what we have long known but have mostly refused to admit.

Last November in Iraq, I traveled to Fallujah during the early days of what would become known as the "Ramadan Offensive"—when suicide bombers in the space of less than an hour destroyed the Red Cross headquarters and four police stations, and daily attacks by insurgents against US troops doubled, and the American adventure in Iraq entered a bleak tunnel from which it has yet to emerge.

As the war in Iraq enters its second year, Americans find themselves trapped in an epistemological black hole: the war's end recedes into an indefinite future while its beginning grows daily more contentious and obscure.

I am glad that Ambassador Horan finds my article "interesting and accurate, as far as it goes." I must confess that I feel the same way about his letter—up to and including the implication that the writer does not, alas, go quite far enough.

Autumn in Baghdad is cloudy and gray. Trapped in rush-hour traffic one October morning, without warning my car bucked up and back, like a horse whose reins had been brutally pulled.

We see the world through the stories we tell, and until recently the story most Americans told themselves about the war in Iraq was a simple and dramatic narrative of imminent threat, daring triumph, and heroic liberation —a story neatly embodied in images of a dictator's toppling statue and a president in full flight gear swaggering across a carrier deck.

A year after a tiny band of religious zealots managed with stunning audacity to mutilate the face of America, the world's sole superpower trembles on the threshold of a new imperial season.

In Afghanistan, the targets are running out. Such are the frustrations of the powerful; Joseph Conrad, writing of an African "heart of darkness" a century ago, well understood: "Once, I remember, we came upon a man-of-war anchored off the coast...

After you have spent some days searching for the secret of political legitimacy in Miami and West Palm Beach, you want to go further.

Gaze upward, through the gaseous clouds of rhetoric littering the sky from the campaign that would not end—"I will never let you down," "I will restore honor and dignity to the White House"—and you can spy, casting a shadow on the land like Barthelme's Dead Father, an enormous pair of lips, belonging not to the Vice President or the Texas governor but to a young woman from Beverly Hills who one fateful day delivered a slice of pizza to the President of the United States.

Few of our predilections seem more distinctly modern than the compulsion to name "our era" and thereby claim it.

In foreign affairs, folly is the privilege of great powers, for they alone can be certain to survive it. Last month Americans embarked on a policy of exquisite folly: funding both sides of Colombia's civil war.

Like ill-matched partners in a bad marriage, American politics and American television seem bound inextricably together, unable to escape a relationship that increasingly degrades both partners.

Striding triumphantly down the streets of conquered Srebrenica, General Ratko Mladic announced to a television interviewer that "on this great Serb holy day," commemorating "the uprising against the Turks, the time

Carried forward amid an ocean of cheering refugees in the Stankovic refugee camp, Madeleine Albright could hardly contain her excitement. "We have been victorious," the secretary of state shouted triumphantly to the roaring crowds, "and Milosevic has lost!"

Across this near-exhausted century, imagery recurs. The knock at the door, the forced march, the mass evacuation - expressions now impossible to hear without their attendant echoes.

Six decades ago, in a classroom at Groton, a young man rose slowly to his feet, gazed down at a sheaf of papers in his hand, and began to read.

Standing motionless among their hulking war machines like statues in the dark, 200,000 Croat soldiers dropped their cigarettes, then clambered into tanks and trucks and armored personnel carriers and, in a sudden earsplitting eruption of grating gears, pushed forward into Serb-held Krajina.

Im Juli 1995, während die Menschen in Europa und Amerika Fe- rien machten, wurden in einer kleinen Stadt in Ostbosnien Hunderte von Muslimen mit verbundenen Augen auf Lastwagen und in Busse geladen.

Only now, more than three years after he recorded the interview with CNN's World Report, can one see subtle signs of Richard Holbrooke's discomfort and unease.

Near the lovely North Portico of the White House, on a mild and breezy evening in mid-June 1995, the President and First Lady danced alone.

To the hundreds of millions who first beheld them on their television screens that August day in 1992, the faces staring out from behind barbed wire seemed powerfully familiar.

On May 22, 1995, fifteen months after Bosnian Serbs—bowing to an ultimatum from Western leaders infuriated by the televised carnage of sixty-eight dismembered bodies at Sarajevo's Markela marketplace—had withdrawn their tanks and cannons and mortars from the mountains and ridges above the city, heavily armed Serb soldiers in camouflage uniforms forced their way into a United Nations "weapons collection point"...

Early one February afternoon in 1994, people in Sarajevo shed their heavy coats and hats and poured out into streets and markets, allowing themselves to forget, in the bright warming sun, that from artillery bunkers and snipers' nests dug into hills and mountains above the city hunters stared down, tracking their prey.

Our differences regarding enlargement do indeed remain deep, even after you were generous enough to teach me a number of things in your well-crafted letter -- in particular, what you call the "central syllogism" of European security.

I thought Mark Danner's essay, "Marooned in the Cold War," made a strong case against NATO enlargement, cogently presenting the negative arguments.

Three years have passed since I stood in a tiny market in Sarajevo, notebook in hand, gazing through a chaos of smoke and running feet at the scores of dead heaped about the blood-slick earth.

In the bitter wind and cold of late December 1995, shortly before the coming of Orthodox Christmas, the Serb fathers of Sarajevo began trudging toward the graveyards.

To the hundreds of millions who first beheld them on their television screens that August day in 1992, the faces staring out from behind barbed wire seemed powerfully familiar.

Three years have passed since I stood in a marketplace in Sarajevo, notebook in hand, gazing through the chaos of smoke and running feet at the scores of dead heaped upon the earth.

Scarcely two years ago, during the sweltering days of July 1995, any citizen of our civilized land could have pressed a button on a remote control and idly gazed, for an instant or an hour, into the jaws of a contemporary Hell.

I think I'd like to begin by asking about Iran-Contra the question the Jesuits like to ask when they see a difficult problem, which is: What is its quiddity? What is its "whatness"? What separates it from everything else - in particular, from other scandals?

Inward-gazing and self-absorbed, Americans tend to learn about the world only during times of crisis.

A spectator of the culture wars writes: For a while there, Bob Dole had me worried.

Hypocrisy may be the mother's milk of politics, but there are occasions -- the controversy now being manufactured in Congress over "secret" Iranian arms shipments to Bosnia is one -- when the glass runs over.

That excellence equals beauty was taken for granted by the Greeks, fathers of the Olympiad, and Hassiba Boulmerka embodies the equation's power.

You can do anything with a bayonet, Napoleon is said to have observed, except sit on it.

How can it be that America is on the verge of invading a country already burdened by catastrophe?  What does it take to get killed here?

For besiegers of cities, a child is an especially lucrative target. If the aim is to sow terror among those holding out behind the walls, how better to do it than by murdering children?

American fighter planes in the skies over Sarajevo. To the survivors in the ruined city below, the planes are a familiar sight.

Heading up into the mountains of Morazán, in the bright, clear air near the Honduran border, you cross the Torola River, the wooden slats of the one-lane bridge clattering beneath your wheels,  and enter what was the fiercest of El Salvador's zonas rojas...

Late on a breezy afternoon, Father Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the elected president of the Republic of Haiti, descended from his limousine on Capitol Hill and, accompanied by his entourage of Haitian aides and American lawyers, made his way slowly into the Capitol to meeting room S-116, where a group of senators and staff assistants awaited him.

On a sunny Columbus Day afternoon, Father Jean-Bertrand Aristide, president of the Republic of Haiti, walked slowly down the steps of the Georgetown house in which he has made his home for much of the last two years, and faced a restless crowd of reporters and photographers.

On a sweltering morning in Port-au-Prince, in July of 1915, a party of gentlemen attired in black morning coats, striped pants, and bowler hats strolled past the wrought-iron gates and around the courtyard of the elegant mansion that housed the French legation and pushed through a side door.

It strikes me that "The Future of the Transatlantic Relationship" has quite a considerable past.

Americans are so devoted to democracy and so respectful of its central ritual that we tend to confuse the one with the other. Call it the Election Day Myth.

For a half-dozen years, Iran-contra has haunted American political life. The ghost arose anew on Christmas Eve, thanks to President Bush's pardons, and it is fated to reappear one day soon when Lawrence Walsh, the independent counsel, releases his final report.

During the nineteen-eighties,while Iraqis and Iranians killed one another by the hundreds of thousands in a struggle for supremacy in the Persian Gulf, the United States maintained a vigilant neutrality-or so Americans were assured by the governments they elected.

Less than a year after Americans paraded in the streets to celebrate victory in the Gulf War, the entire conflict, which appeared so cataclysmic at the time, is rapidly receding from view.

Rarely has the portal, the moment of passage from ordinary to revolutionary time, been so well captured in a single image: At the wheel of the gray BMW sits the young dictator, well-dressed, prosperous, slightly overweight, his face impassive, his shoulders thrown back; he has spent all but five of his thirty-four years in the Palace, fifteen of them as President-for-Life, having been inaugurated, at his dying father's insistence, as a mountainously obese, glassy-eyed teenager.

With the publication of Oliver North's memoirs and the start of the Colonel's nineteen-city tour to promote it, the Iran-Contra affair completed a five-year journey from tragedy to farce and began its inevitable transformation into "product."

Two weeks ago, when Haitian soldiers deposed their country's President, jean-Bertrand Aristide, the United States reacted quickly and forcefully, cutting off foreign aid and freezing Haiti's assets in this country.

Driving south in Haiti one day in the spring of 1986, I passed a great 18-wheeled tractor-trailer speeding north, heard a volley of automatic weapons fire, and, craning my neck to look back, witnessed an absurd and amazing tableau...

Though the Cold War no longer casts its shadow over us, our government has shown little eagerness to surrender the powers it claimed under cover of that shadow.

Like an untreated infection within the political system, the Iran-Contra affair continues to grow, spreading corruption not only into the future but, oddly, back into the past as well.

Three months after United States Marines liberated Kuwait City, the victors of Operation Desert Storm are still being honored across the country.

In November, a year after the Berlin Wall was breached, American troops and airmen by the thousand began leaving the German bases they had occupied for four decades and heading for the Persian Gulf.

For almost four months, the United States has been sleepwalking toward war. Though there are the trappings of a debate -- hearings in Congress, argument and speculation on the editorial pages, discussion on the public-affairs programs -- thus far they have seemed insubstantial when set against the reality of President Bush's military buildup

A year after the Berlin Wall was breached and the "post Cold War era" proclaimed, Americans face the prospect of a "hot war" fought against an enemy that a few months ago they didn't know they had.

Though the rhetoric surrounding the Middle East crisis has softened somewhat since the threats of mid-August, the United States and Iraq remain caught in what President Mitterrand has called the "logic of war."

The last great public scandals of the decade are remarkable, above all, for their inconclusiveness, their strange resistance to closure.

Americans tend to examine distant regimes, and the commitments our government has made to them, only during times of crisis.

Just past ten on a sunny morning last month in Port-au-Prince, four men carrying automatic weapons, two of whom wore the green uniforms of the Haitian Army, strolled into the garden of the Hotel Santos, where Haiti's Council of State was meeting with union and business leaders, and asked for Dr. Louis Roy.

On February 7,1986, the day the dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier and his wife, Michèle Bennett, flew off to exile in France, a crowd of jubilant Haitians invaded the National Cemetery, a vast expanse of concrete crammed with bright-colored tombs — ivory and turquoise and rose --  bearing the names of Haiti's great families.

A few weeks after the fall of Jean-Claude Duvalier, in February, 1986, the statue of Christopher Columbus presiding over the harbor of Port-au-Prince was seized and thrown into the sea by persons unknown, who left fastened on the empty pedestal a sheet of paper with a simple scrawled message: "Pa de blans en Hayti!"

Mornings in Port au-Prince, just before dawn, as the last, scattered gunshots faded in the distance and the outlines of the city began to take shape in the dirty air—tiny houses, painted aqua and salmon; the huge and ghostly National Palace, gleaming white; gray and rust-colored slums, canopied in smoke—my colleagues and I would go off in search of bodies.

Having ferreted out the ''sophisticated rebels'' of Europe from Cardiff to Cracow, H. Stuart Hughes found himself rather nonplussed when asked to suggest their counterparts in the United States.

History, it's said, is written by the winners; but perhaps it's truer to say it belongs to the least reticent. Dean Rusk, on becoming Secretary of State, vowed never to write his memoirs.

On West Germany's ''Day of National Unity'' this summer, a dapper, white-haired, German-born American stood in the Bundestag, facing the President, Prime Minister and other high officials of the West German Government, and spoke about German history.

Three hours out of New York, I start awake to find myself floating over a grotesque landscape - the sickly, reddish-brown hills of Haiti, wave upon wave of blood-dark corrugations, thickly marbled with white sand.

"I don't recognize myself as a satirist,'' said Vladimir Voinovich. ''No, I'm just trying to depict reality.''

It is likely the question was first asked as soon as it could be - that the hope of abolition followed shortly after the task of creation.

Wolfgang Leonhard would seem well qualified to deliver what he promises here -- a ''new policy toward [the] USSR.''

In Haiti, as in many deeply troubled places, it was comforting to identify the national demons with one man, and to assume that his destruction would bring theirs.

An American's distrust of welfare should come as no surprise. Public assistance threatens what is after all the central doctrine of capitalism: that the incentive to work is born of the burning desire to have, and then to have more.

The public schools of America long ago sank to a level of decrepitude guaranteeing them the sort of dogged scrutiny by blue ribbon commissions reserved for a "crisis" both intolerable and permanent.

The immortal power of gossip was already well understood in ancient Greece - "lt too," said Hesiod, "is a kind of divinity" - but it required the particular talents of the present age to make money off it.

Last year Americans spent $30 billion on illegal drugs, while their government spent $1.5 billion trying to shut down their sources of supply.

When a mysterious contagion known as Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome began to kill large numbers of people a few years ago, various moral authorities took solace in the observation that its victims, most of whom were homosexuals or drug addicts, seemed well chosen for divine retribution.

In an age when the peccadilloes of all the traditional idols, from presidents to Miss Americas, are gleefully exposed, athletes totter on their pedestals as the last American heroes.

The book, never a staple American product, seems destined to become a rare and precious object intended only for the cognoscenti who still know how to read.

Almost since its beginning, the nuclear age has defined itself as a tug of war between technicians and diplomats, a match in which the diplomats seem forever doomed to finish in the mud.

Eighty years ago this summer the birth of a new era was announced not by a star twinkling over Bethlehem but by a mushroom cloud rising over Alamogordo. By miraculous intellectual effort mankind had acquired the power to destroy the earth.

Crime long ago emerged as one of those peculiar phenomena of modern life - the permanent crisis.

In the ten years since the last Marine was plucked from the roof of the besieged U. S. Embassy in Saigon, "Vietnam" has come to stand for a good deal more than America's first military defeat.

Disparaging television has long been a favorite national pastime - second in popularity only to watching it.

In the American religion there stands no icon more sacred than the "free market," embodying as it does the belief that Americans must trust in the benevolence of unseen forces to fulfill their destiny of wealth and power. In times of economic unrest, however, when factories close down, workers lose their jobs, and towns become impoverished, the prayers to the mysterious market gods give way to cries of anger and disbelief.

When General Westmoreland hauled CBS into court for libel last year, the American press responded with a flood of sober commentary on a cherished subject - itself.

When in 1947 the UN handed down the Solomonic judgment that to resolve the "Palestine problem" the Holy Land would be divided into two nations bound together in "economic union," the laughter on Sinai must have been loud indeed.

When no less sacred a national symbol than Miss America found herself displayed in a pornographic magazine last summer, the public was duly outraged - at the pornographers, for profiting from a young woman's inexperience; at the pageant committee, for demanding she relinquish her crown; and finally at Miss America herself, for not knowing better.

When Yasir Arafat spoke at the United Nations some years ago with a gun in his belt, he was giving a performance in what has become the terrorist theater.

Almost from the moment the first "contra" was issued his American, made combat boots, the Reagan Administration's secret war against Nicaragua has been embroiled in a vociferous if somewhat bizarre public debate: Congressmen proclaim their outrage, editorialists confess their misgivings, while officials in Washington - who are running the war - blandly "decline to comment on intelligence matters."

"The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem." Thus Walt Whitman, in his 1855 preface to Leaves of Grass, expressed what has been the American poet's struggle from the beginning-to wrest from the land a separate work of art.