Week of Jan. 22, 2007

There is a moral putrescence peculiar to the denial of genocide. Yet denial's practitioners are all around us. The Sudanese government calls the butchers of Darfur"self-defense militias." The Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, dismisses the Holocaust as"myth." In an official government report, the Turkish Historical Society describes the slaughter of more than a million Armenians between 1914 and 1918 as"relocations" with"some untoward incidents."

Part of the reason the air is so charged now, so highly emotional, is that many of the leaders in the drama seem, lately, to be re-enacting. One senses a number of antiwar politicians are thinking: This is my Bobby Kennedy moment. We are re-enacting 1968. See how I jab the air as I speak against war. On the other side it is 1939, and they are Churchill. See the bulldog gaze and hear the repetition of rhetoric that even then was on occasion overripe. (I know -- sometimes overripe fruit has the sharpest taste and smell. And at least you know it's in the kitchen.)

All this re-enacting is understandable -- we are human, imaginative, damaged. But however legitimate it feels or is, it also further charges the atmosphere. And the atmosphere is charged enough. The great struggle of life is that you are you and this is now. The inspiration of that is that you're not just remembering history, you're making it. It's a blank page. You can fill it with good things.

Let us hope that if Senator Clinton loses, it is because she’s just too Hillary, not because she is a woman, and if Senator Obama loses, it is not because he is black but because he is just too green.

Colleagues hailed me as a cross between Rambo (“It took six cops to hold him down”) and Perry Mason (“He talked himself out of chokey”).