If you're still paying attention -- and no one would blame you if you weren't -- you know that in the last week a plan has begun to take shape in the United States Senate that would dispose of the impeachment charges against President Clinton in as few as four days. You also know that dismayed conservative politicians and commentators, who see the president they loathe once again slipping from their grasp, have responded vehemently that instead there should be a full-blown Senate trial involving testimony by witnesses and presumably lasting weeks if not months. They're right.

That they're right for the wrong reasons, having to do not with any reverence for the Constitution but bad faith, is neither here nor there. They're right because, first of all, the Constitution calls for it: When it says the Senate "shall" conduct a trial, "shall" does not mean "may" but, in the parlance of the 18th century, "will," and by implication this suggests not an "expeditious" hearing that sweeps matters under the rug, but an exhaustive one. The second reason there should be a trial is that this is no longer simply about Clinton. A trial will also be about the House of Representatives and the Republican Party, and what they did last month and why, and in a much larger sense about the presidency and impeachment itself.

In the most immediate terms, a trial will give the country one final opportunity to assess the charges the House has brought against the president. While House Republicans and the media constantly refer to perjury by Clinton as though the fact of it is incontestable, the case is actually something less than open-and-shut.

Certainly the president perjured himself in the Paula Jones civil deposition last January. But he hasn't been impeached for that; he's been impeached for his grand jury testimony last August. In a Senate trial the House Republicans would have to do something they have declined to do so far, and that's specify exactly what the perjurious testimony was. A Senate trial would remind all who have conveniently chosen to forget it that the president's grand jury testimony openly acknowledged the essence of the accusation against him, and that therefore the perjury charge revolves entirely around matters of detail: exactly when the affair began, exactly where the president touched Monica Lewinsky, whether in his own mind such contact constituted "sexual relations" -- all things virtually every legal expert has said would not, in the real world, warrant prosecution, let alone conviction.

In more far-reaching terms, a trial will test the meaning of representative democracy. Certainly congressmen are not elected to be robots, following public opinion polls slavishly, but impeachment is a constitutional device that by definition must take into account the public will because it exists for the express purpose of allowing the country -- through its elected representatives -- to reverse a grievously mistaken electoral decision. By passing impeachment articles along narrowly partisan lines in defiance of overwhelming public opinion, without allowing a censure alternative to come to the floor for a vote, House Republicans told the country that it simply doesn't comprehend the gravity of the president's misdeeds and that when it understands the matter as well as the more highly evolved minds of the House, a cloud of ignorance will lift and the "dynamic" of the scandal will change.

This was the same thinking that preceded the Republicans' decision last September to release the videotape of the president's grand jury testimony, after which his poll numbers rose six points and Congress' plummeted 12. It was the same thinking that preceded impeachment itself, after which the president's poll numbers rose yet another six points and the Republican Party's fell to the lowest in recorded history.

A trial in the Senate will either finally justify this rationale once and for all or expose it as exactly the sort of arrogance that accounts for people's bitter and growing estrangement from their own government. A trial will reveal whether, after the public rejection of impeachment in the November election, the moderate Republicans in the House initially opposed to impeachment who ultimately fell in line with their party did so because they suddenly became men for all seasons -- "voting their consciences," to quote one of the more droll catch phrases of the past month -- or because they were gripped by a kind of mass hysteria borne from relentless pressure by the party's right wing, about which history will reach its own conclusions in the decades to come. A trial will reveal whether Tom DeLay -- who, as follower of a particularly vicious Jesus, has become the religious right's most dependable congressional ally, and from whose congressional offices the most prominent religious right radio station in Washington, D.C., used to broadcast -- is now in fact the most powerful man in one of the United States' three branches of government.

But finally a Senate trial will provide a truly suitable pageant to what's been an American psychodrama. Unavoidably, in one way or another, a Senate trial would lay bare the three great lies of 1998, which were, in ascending order, the one the president told the American people in January, when he said he never had relations with Lewinsky; the one Gloria Borger of U.S. News and World Report told on PBS's "Washington Week in Review" last Friday night when she said the media "never wanted to write this story," at which point a whole country must have collapsed in convulsive laughter; and the one told so often with such increasing solemnity by the political and media establishment that they may have even come to believe it: that this entire scandal has nothing whatsoever to do with sex.

In a prolonged Senate trial -- every last second of which should be broadcast on television -- this biggest lie will either be repeated at peril to whatever last shred of credibility the establishment still has, or shrewdly jettisoned for good, since the rest of the country knows full well that this matter has everything to do with sex, that sex has provided both context and motive for everything that's transpired. It's what compelled the president to betray his marriage, humiliate his wife and commit the single most spectacularly stupid political mistake of recent memory; and it's what has fueled the rage of the political right by typifying and confirming everything it's always believed about this president.

The right simply can't get out of its mind the very image of Clinton leaning against a wall in the West Wing of the White House as there hovers before him, at a level somewhere down near the tip of one of those ties she gave him with such devotion, the bobbing raven tresses of the National Nubile, thankfully blocking from view the abominable act being performed. It's this image more than anything else that's driven the right's obsession with destroying a presidency it never believed was legitimate to begin with, and all the expressed consternation over perjury and "obstruction of justice" -- a charge absolutely no honest person can take seriously -- is as much legalistic obfuscation as the president at his most notoriously slick.

It's interesting that as the rhetoric of moral outrage against the president has escalated, the public has embraced him more. To have listened to some of the language used against Clinton not only by Republicans but by terrified Democrats, whose censure resolution in the House was in many ways more unforgiving than the impeachment articles drafted by the Republicans, one wonders what verbal nuggets of indignation could possibly be left for a Moammar Gadhafi who shoots down airliners over Scotland. Thus, a Senate trial would either force us to confront what William Bennett has suggested -- as recently as this past Sunday on CNN -- is our moral bankruptcy, or would implicitly ratify a national sense of morality that conforms to real life even if not to Bennett's more uncompromising tastes.

In a Senate trial we'll come face to face with the greatest secret of 1998, which is our secret self. As the sanctimony has been ratcheted higher and higher with ever greater fury, one hypocrite after another decrying the president as reprehensible, deplorable, disgusting and sick, a country full of good people with bad secrets has thought to itself: They're talking about me. And to a president who has politically survived one crisis after another by his sheer empathy with people, the people have returned the favor, empathizing in return: Clinton may be a rogue but he's their rogue. In retrospect it's not particularly mysterious that three months ago people watched the videotape of a president squirming his way through questions no one in a free country should have to answer and related to him in a way that they will never relate to Ken Starr, who makes their skin crawl.

In the last analysis then, there should be a Senate trial because if this scandal is really cultural, as has become the conventional wisdom, and if all things cultural in the 1990s are really about the 1960s, as George Will has been insisting ever since hippies beat him up on the way to school 30 years ago, then those of us who have been too long on the defensive should finally stop sniveling and man the barricades. It's time for the rest of us to finally define the national cultural conflict not as that between morality on the one hand and sex and drugs on the other, as the paragons would have it. It's time for those of us who are indeed children of the '60s -- for whom a war in Southeast Asia was not an extension of American ideals but a breach of them, for whom the basic institutional amends of a white society to the descendants of that society's black slaves was not liberal guilt but a reasonable attempt at justice and self-redemption, for whom "Otis Blue" and "Blonde on Blonde" were soundtracks not of hedonism and decadence but passion and liberation, and yet whose sex lives have been no more or less interesting than anyone else's and who can count their drug experiences on the fingers of one hand -- to start defining the conflict on our own terms, as between the values of justice and democracy and those of authoritarianism and theocracy. To this end it would be well to call as witnesses every single last one of those who played a part in the psychodrama, from the president to Judge Starr to Linda Tripp to Lucianne Goldberg to Betty Currie to our sexual Joan of Arc, Monica Lewinsky herself. It would be well to see the thong in all its glory, preferably on Monica rather than dangled abstractly in midair, so we might best understand its narcotic effect on the president; to enter into the record the cigar as Exhibit B; to relive each moment of Oval Office rapture, and if it isn't realistic to expect an exact reenactment, it doesn't seem too much to ask of Monica a small ecstatic demonstration -- a sigh, maybe, a moan. It's likely to be the only true thing said in the United States Congress since Illinois Rep. Abraham Lincoln told the House, "There are few things wholly evil or wholly good," in 1848. Such a moan would be the Jeffersonian moan of happiness' pursuit, and once the trial is over and William Orb has slapped a technobeat on it, it should provide a national anthem for the new century to come, and in those pathetic midnight moments while clandestinely checking out my wife's Victoria's Secret catalog I can listen to it and feel, for the first time in years, like a real American.

The arguments by liberal Democrats that the Senate should brush all this aside for "more important business" is ludicrous. There is no business more important, or even remotely as important. A Senate trial should be not truncated but rather as long as possible; nothing could be more appropriate for America in 1999 than that it last all year, right up to the stroke of midnight Dec. 31 when the last senator casts the final vote. The impeachment of President Clinton should go to trial because this is the way, on Millennial Eve, we'll finally find out who we are, our national identity too long paralyzed somewhere between Tom Paine and Cotton Mather, as opposed to who those in power keep telling us we are. Their vision of us is what is really on trial here, and whether Clinton survives as president is of far less consequence than what we learn; it's time for us once and for all to decide whether we're really willing to go on relinquishing to others our vision of America or whether we're ready to stop acting like defendants and ready to start acting like plaintiffs, prosecutors, hanging judges.

Let's rumble.