Only in America could such a terrifying, humbling historical event become little more than a deus ex machina plot device, a thunderbolt from the blue that conveniently resolves a hackneyed romantic rivalry. Haven’t we seen this before? Explosions, sinking ships, tremulous avowals of love …? Oh yeah, now I remember — but this time there’s no iceberg.

To avoid giving offense to any group of potential ticket buyers, “Pearl Harbor” gives us a new, anxiety-free, “shit happens” version of the disaster, a no-fault view exemplified by the movie’s portrayal of Adm. Husband Kimmel, the senior Navy commander in Hawaii. In the movie, Kimmel — a dark, stooped, doughy figure in real life — becomes a clean-cut, prow-faced golden boy who had all the right instincts, but was somehow helpless to escape his destiny. Like all the other pretty heroes and heroines in the movie, Kimmel ended up as a blameless victim of, like, you know, fate.

In contrast, most of the long history of Pearl Harbor revisionism has concerned itself with nailing a scapegoat. The sheer scale of the screwup guaranteed that shrapnel dodging and finger-pointing would ensue, and it became a matter of some political desperation to name one person or group of persons who could take the rap and — not incidentally — let the rest of America off the hook.

The most persistent of the various mythologies that grew out of this frantic buck passing was the belief that FDR not only deliberately provoked the Japanese attack but knew when and where it would occur. The story goes that FDR deliberately kept that information from his commanders in Hawaii so the attack would sway American public opinion from its intransigent isolationism. (No one has quite explained how being alert and prepared to beat off the attack would have significantly diminished its political effect.)

The “FDR knew” conspiracy theory was revived again last week in a tendentious article in the New York Press by the left-wing contrarian Alexander Cockburn, who also revives the usual dishonest rhetorical habits of FDR’s accusers. Cockburn cites, for example, a 1999 article in Naval History magazine that claims to “prove” FDR’s prior knowledge by citing the fact that the Red Cross secretly ordered large quantities of medical supplies to be sent to the West Coast and shipped extra medical personnel to Hawaii before the attack.

These facts, like so many of those cited as proof of FDR’s vile plot, can be explained quite readily without resort to the idea of a conspiracy. FDR had pledged to keep America out of foreign wars. At the same time, he was aware that our diplomatic efforts with the Japanese were only likely to buy us time, not permanently prevent war. No responsible leader could neglect the responsibility to be ready for any eventuality, but FDR also wouldn’t have wanted the press to become aware of the necessary preparations. That would have been a political disaster and might have derailed his effort to quietly enhance our capabilities before war broke out.

Populist horsefly Gore Vidal, in the course of a book review in the Nation in September 1999, and again in a November 1999 (London) Times Literary Supplement article titled “The Greater the Lie,” also lent credence to the “FDR knew” theory by praising — I can only assume without having read — the most notorious recent restatement of the theory, Robert B. Stinnett’s book “Day of Deceit: The Truth About FDR and Pearl Harbor,” first published in 1999 and new in paperback this month. (Vidal also presents the theory in his latest novel, “The Golden Age.”)

Stinnett — whose previous historical work was a suck-up treatment of the elder George Bush’s war years — purported to have new, recently declassified documents to support the idea that FDR was involved in a depraved political plot against our brave boys in uniform. But despite the book’s surface appearance of being an earnest and meticulous investigation — complete with lengthy footnotes and reproductions of dozens of important-looking bits of paper — it’s not hard for a careful reader to see the bilge water pouring out of it.

It’s not just that Stinnett’s “evidence” — if it can be dignified as such — is at best ambiguous and circumstantial. It’s not just that his theory, like most classic conspiracy theories, conflicts with reams of other available evidence and tries to make us believe two or more mutually exclusive things before breakfast. It’s also not just that he — for all his apparently knowledgeable blather and the truckload of “documentation” he dumps on us — apparently doesn’t understand some important realities of cryptology and signals intelligence. It’s not even that it is impossible to believe that Roosevelt — who was, without a doubt, wily and subtle — might have perpetrated such a Machiavellian plot. No, the real reason to think there’s no pony in this pile is Stinnett’s relentlessly dishonest — dare I say “deceitful”? — characterizations of documents, incidents and testimony.

As with other such conspiracy books, “Day of Deceit” received reviews in responsible academic journals like Intelligence and National Security that demolished it, citing its nonexistent documentation, misdirection, ignorance, misstatements, wormy insinuations and outright falsehoods. The consensus among intelligence scholars was “pretty much absolute,” CIA senior historian Donald Steury told me in an e-mail. Stinnett “concocted this theory pretty much from whole cloth. Those who have been able to check his alleged sources also are unanimous in their condemnation of his methodology. Basically, the author has made up his sources; when he does not make up the source, he lies about what the source says.” In other words, even if Roosevelt were genuinely guilty of these charges, “Day of Deceit” couldn’t possibly convict him.

Typical of the kind of porous and dishonest evidence “FDR knew” theorists promote are the “coded naval intercepts” Vidal praised Stinnett for having “spent years studying.” Again, Vidal either never actually read Stinnett’s book or was — in spite of his intellect — somehow dazzled by the book’s hurricane of bullshit exhibits. Stinnett’s supposedly assiduous study of Japanese intercepts amounts to only a series of rhetorical scams. The most contemptible of these comes during his jumbled discussion of whether the Japanese maintained radio silence during the approach to Hawaii. (It is a crucial argument of conspiracy theorists that the Japanese fleet was detected on its way to Pearl Harbor by radio direction finders around the Pacific, and that FDR supposedly deliberately withheld the location and movements of the Japanese carrier task force from his Hawaii commanders. But if the Japanese did not use their radios en route — and they have always insisted they didn’t — they couldn’t have been found by the radio direction finders.)

After noting several incidents that prove little more than that there could have been a late transmission on Nov. 26, Stinnett goes on to say that he, the intrepid investigator, discovered 129 intercept reports that indicate that the Japanese didn’t maintain radio silence during the approach to Hawaii. (None of them are reproduced in the book.) Stinnett then blandly states that these intercepts came from a three-week period from Nov. 15 to Dec. 6. In other words, all of them could have been obtained before the fleet ever left Japanese waters, and before radio silence was imposed. I don’t know how Stinnett could believe that his readers wouldn’t notice this critical detail, but then, most of the book displays little respect for our intelligence.

Nevertheless, like other conspiracy books before it, Stinnett’s was eagerly clasped to heaving right-wing bosoms from sea to shining sea. One enthusiastic reader at Amazon.com, for example, opined that people who could not accept Stinnett’s thesis were obviously “brain-washed with liberal red fascist, left-wing extremist, pagan atheistic infanticidal merchant of death beliefs that won’t let them face the real ugly truth.”

There is probably little hope of reasoning with people like this, but the real problem is that despite dozens of careful debunkings of Stinnett’s book and others like it, the “FDR knew” idea still retains its currency with people like Cockburn and Vidal — who certainly share neither the rabid rage nor the right-wing ideology found in many of their fellow believers. Cockburn (perhaps tellingly) does not even mention Stinnett in his column, yet repeats as gospel many of his most questionable contentions, like the claims of one Robert Ogg — who is linked by marriage to Adm. Kimmel’s family — to have pinpointed Japanese radio traffic from the Hawaii-bound fleet in the North Pacific.

Cockburn and Vidal are certainly intelligent enough to recognize the holes in a poorly supported thesis if they choose to educate themselves about it. But they seem to want to believe it anyway — and, worse, to actively promote it. Many other ordinary people I talked to about the theory also seemed to implicitly believe it, most of the time without having read a single book outlining the accusations.

Why? One theory is that conservative hostility to FDR’s New Deal continues to the present day, and has over time succeeded in slipping the meme of Roosevelt’s political depravity in under the radar of our national consciousness, sabotaging our ability to apply logic to the situation.

Given FDR’s notorious “government interference” initiatives like Social Security, banking and securities regulation, farm price supports and — worst of all — that pesky minimum-wage and collective-bargaining legislation, it’s not surprising that conservative capitalists in the ’30s and ’40s felt a level of hatred for him that wouldn’t be matched until the days of Bill Clinton. (My grandmother, the daughter of a banker ruined in the crash, once told me that the sulfuric name of “Roosevelt” was never uttered at her family’s dinner table. Like Clinton in many ’90s households, FDR was always referred to only as “that man in the White House.”)

To make matters worse, when Roosevelt emerged after Pearl Harbor as the “one who’d been right all along” about our vulnerability to fascist militarism, the isolationist Republican Party — already staggered by the commie horrors of the New Deal — was banished to the ninth circle of political hell for the duration (and then some). It accordingly launched an effort to transfer the ultimate responsibility for the debacle at Pearl Harbor from the military commanders in the field, Adm. Kimmel and Lt. Gen. Walter Short, to the Roosevelt administration.

But given that one of the most fundamental duties of military command is ensuring readiness to meet attack, the only way to completely exonerate Kimmel and Short was to make a case that they’d been deliberately set up. Thus was born the first wave of Pearl Harbor conspiracy theory, which was America’s favorite paranoid fantasy until the Kennedy assassination. It became such a cherished conservative myth that Sen. Strom Thurmond, R-S.C., instigated yet another official investigation of Pearl Harbor (the 10th) in 1995.

Despite that 1995 investigation coming to much the same conclusion as all others before it, the contrarian “FDR knew” meme lived on, and reached its apogee of respectability when the new Republican-dominated Congress recently passed a resolution absolving Kimmel and Short of any responsibility for the tragedy and restoring them posthumously to their highest ranks. It was a move that many people believe was extremely unwise. Military tradition, which runs much deeper than military law, has always held that whatever happens on your watch is your responsibility and that it is your duty to accept the consequences, however unfair they may seem. Congress’ official endorsement of buck passing has not gone over well with everyone.

Truth be told, there was plenty of blame to go around, both in the field and in Washington. The constant tension between ensuring secrecy and giving operational units access to essential intelligence may not have been resolved in the best possible way before Pearl Harbor, and in any case, intelligence functions were tragically fragmented and dispersed. Robin Winks, professor of history at Yale University and author of “The Historian as Detective: Essays on Evidence,” agrees with the conclusions of other investigators that there was a “massive operational failure” to use the intelligence we did obtain to good effect. “I believe we had the information, that it was not understood by those who had it, that those who most needed to have it didn’t see it, and that FDR did not know, though perhaps by only the margin of a very few hours.”

Yet the rumor persists, and is usually based on the idea that we had access to the Japanese navy’s operational codes and not just the “Purple” diplomatic code that was the basis for the famous “MAGIC” intelligence reports. Vidal, for example, makes a typical flat-footed declaration about it (based on the Stinnett book) in his discussion in the Nation: “Although FDR knew that his ultimatum of November 26, 1941, would oblige the Japanese to attack us somewhere, it now seems clear that, thanks to our breaking of many of the 29 Japanese naval codes the previous year, we had at least several days’ warning that Pearl Harbor would be hit.” The idea that we were reading more than consular communications is also obliquely alluded to but not developed in the movie “Pearl Harbor.”

But researcher Stephen Budiansky, in an article for the Proceedings of the Naval Institute, details evidence rebutting that contention, which he found while researching his book “Battle of Wits: The Complete Story of Codebreaking in World War II.”

In March 1999, Budiansky found documents that had been declassified some years ago but not yet processed by the National Archives staff, and thus not listed in the finding aids for researchers. The papers turned out to be contemporaneous, month-by-month reports on the progress of the Navy code breakers, each date-stamped, covering the entire period from 1940 to 1941. They showed, Budiansky said, that the first JN-25 code (designated “Able,” or JN-25-A) was laboriously cracked with help from the new IBM card-sorting machines (and some lazy Japanese encoders) in the fall of 1940.

But then, heartbreakingly, the Japanese switched to a new version of the code (“Baker” or JN-25-B — in a typical display of ignorance, Stinnett claimed in his book that there was no such thing as a JN-25-B code) in December 1940, a year before the attack on Pearl Harbor. At that point the code breakers completely lost their ability to read the operational communications. Going back to the drawing board, and with the aid of a supersecret collaboration with British cryptologists in Singapore, the Allies managed to recover a small fraction of the code groups and additives (which changed again that summer) by Dec. 1, 1941 — but most of what they could read by then was numerals, not words.

Yet, in classic conspiracy theory fashion, the rumor that we had access to Japanese naval communications has been sustained down the years by portentous reference to documents like a March 1941 message from Adm. Thomas Hart, commander in chief of the U.S. Asiatic Fleet, which Stinnett reproduces in “Day of Deceit.”

Stinnett claims the message indicates “solutions” to the JN-25 code were being shared with the British. Clearly, however, what is being shared is only preliminary data and some bits and pieces recovered from an accumulation of old communications in earlier additive groups. The admiral, encouraged by the prospect of British help, directs his code breakers at Cavite (Corregidor) to work exclusively on JN-25. The only thing this document proves, then — other than Stinnett’s dimwittedness — is that this crucial Japanese operational code was not solved once and for all in 1940.

Another of the common tricks used to sustain the “FDR knew” theory is the publication of supposed “smoking gun” diplomatic messages in the “Purple” code (a more “routine” consular code) that naval intelligence often waited days to read. These messages were regarded as relatively unimportant and weren’t decoded or translated until after the Pearl Harbor attack — sometimes not for years afterward. It’s a phenomenon Budiansky is familiar with. “It became a joke at the Archives,” he wrote in a message to a military history mailing list, “to see how many people would rush to show John Taylor, the national security archivist, their ‘discovery’ that the U.S. was reading JN-25 before Pearl Harbor … John would point to the date of decryption at the bottom of the sheets and watch the researcher’s face fall.”

One of the things that is most notable about the way the “FDR knew” theory is sustained is that its methodology parallels that of so-called creation science. The trick in both instances is to assiduously ignore all the mountains of evidence in favor of the theory you are trying to disprove and to focus instead on tiny apparent discrepancies and supposed “missing links” in the record. “True to the M.O. of all conspiracy theorists,” Budiansky notes, “the ABSENCE of further documentary evidence actually confirms [the] thesis by proving that a ‘cover-up’ has taken place.”

The conspiracy buffs always point to the fact that there are apparent gaps in numbered message series, that the National Archives has not gotten around to declassifying all the millions of pieces of paper from the war, that certain material provided to congressional investigations in the early days of the Cold War was perhaps too compulsively censored and that some supposedly crucial material is missing, such as the log of the passenger liner SS Lurline’s radioman Leslie Grogan, who claims that he heard Japanese radio traffic in the North Pacific just before the Pearl Harbor attack. (“They were just blasting away.”)

But the SS Lurline was on a southerly route to Honolulu from Long Beach, Calif., so the radio signals Grogan heard coming from the northwest could have been from Japan’s shore-based radio facilities, not the carrier task force. Grogan claims he took his original log to naval authorities in Hawaii after the Lurline arrived on Dec. 3, but they didn’t seem particularly interested. The Lurline’s radio log was checked out of the National Archives without a date or signature sometime in the ’70s, about the time another Pearl Harbor conspiracy theorist, John Toland (“Infamy”), was doing his original research.

But this “mysteriously” missing material could just as easily provide definitive proof that the “FDR knew” gang is full of it. Given that conspiracy theory has become, in the words of Paul Miles, Tomlinson Fellow in the History of War and Society at Princeton, a “cottage industry,” it struck me that some of the documents in question could have been spirited away by people with another agenda entirely. Look at me! I can concoct conspiracies too!

“Anyone who does intelligence history (as I do),” says Robin Winks, “knows it is very difficult, highly technical and open to conspiracy theory, because inevitably some material is missing, and at times some material deliberately lied with a view to disinformation.” For example, and apropos of the SS Lurline material, the Japanese later stated that they attempted to produce bogus radio traffic right before Pearl Harbor in the hope that it would confuse intercept agencies about the location of the silent fleet. It might not have fooled military professionals, but Leslie Grogan was an amateur.

The conspiracy theorists, in parallel with the creationists who maintain that God must have placed fossils in the ground to test his people’s religious faith, also think that Roosevelt and his political allies managed not only to cover up their dastardly deeds but to fabricate thousands of linear feet of documents in order to camouflage the truth. It is perhaps remotely possible that some kind of massive effort of that kind was instituted here in America in the midst of wartime, but unless we want to believe that our former enemies have destroyed or manufactured material to burnish Roosevelt’s reputation, evidence from Japanese archives also backs up the idea that the attack was a surprise to FDR.

Linda Goetz Holmes, for instance, a Pacific war historian with the Interagency Working Group at the National Archives and author of the book “Unjust Enrichment: How Japan’s Companies Built Postwar Fortunes Using American POWs,” told me about the findings of a Japanese historian whose research in his country’s recently declassified files only became available in the U.S. in 1998. He revealed considerable documentary evidence of Japanese satisfaction with how well “our magnificent deception” was working in Washington.

Yet the “FDR knew” meme continues to thrive with supporters like Cockburn and Vidal, whose credibility should suffer from such carelessness, but somehow never does. The case of Vidal is particularly shocking, because he prides himself on demolishing cultural mythology, debunking “court historians” and pursuing the truth. Yet he embraces a dishonest “researcher” like Stennitt and lends his literary aura to a tissue of lies.

In 1941, both military and civilian authorities were operating from extremely bad — and, it’s important to note, very racist — assumptions when it came to the Japanese. We simply couldn’t believe that the “little beasts” had gotten the drop on us, or as Stanford historian David M. Kennedy indicates in his book “Freedom From Fear,” that we as a people had made “systematic, pervasive and cumulative” mistakes that led to the disaster.

That there are rational, wide-reaching and comprehensible reasons for our failure to be prepared at Pearl Harbor is not an idea that sits well with most Americans. We’d much prefer to believe that the calamity wouldn’t have happened if we weren’t deliberately set up. In that sense the “FDR knew” theory is very comforting. It essentially absolves everyone except the nefarious Roosevelt and his diabolical cronies; it implies that everyone else, and all their procedures, decisions, organizations and attitudes, were impeccable. If only a better man had been in charge, this fairy tale goes, the yellow horde wouldn’t have succeeded.

Such a view handicaps our ability to learn desperately needed lessons from the debacle. I’d much rather we admitted our mistakes — all of them — so that when future military men and women look out over Pearl Harbor in the morning they will be reminded, as I always was, of how quickly our smug assumptions can be blown out of the water.

Mine eyes have seen the gory pictures
of dismembered babes;
They have pulled them from their mothers,
and then harvested their brains;
They have burned them in incinerators,
dumped them without graves,
While Right goes marching on.

From the beauty of the body,
they are suctioned into bits;
Or they’re sliced in ragged pieces
to a mass of broken limbs;
Or the saline poison stops their hearts
and broils their fragile skins,
But Right goes marching on.

It is also common for pro-lifers to claim that the Supreme Court’s decision in Roe vs. Wade is the equivalent of its notorious ruling in Dred Scott vs. Sandford. The court’s 1857 ruling justified the return of a runaway slave from a free state on the grounds that Africans were private property, subject to their owner’s disposal and discretion, and not legally protected “persons” under the Constitution.

This emotionally powerful but misleading analogy — which deliberately ignores all the most important differences between the two issues — is typical of today’s increasingly sophisticated anti-abortion rhetoric. Grotesque imagery and persuasive misdirection have often succeeded in producing what popular novelist Richard North Patterson, author of the current bestseller “Protect and Defend,” calls “a yawning — and frequently inhumane — gap between myth and reality.” Patterson’s novel is intended to fill that gap.

Against the background of a new president’s controversial Supreme Court nomination, “Protect and Defend” tells the story of Mary Anne Tierney, a pregnant teenager with a hydrocephalic fetus. Tierney is denied a third-trimester abortion by both the law and her parents, even though delivering the effectively brain-dead child at term might endanger her future fertility. With the help of Sarah Dash, a standard-issue Brilliant Young Lawyer, Mary Anne goes to court against her own parents — pillars of the pro-life community — in an attempt to overturn the law. The result is skillful and intellectually thorough, but also far too calculated, conventional and pious.

Patterson wants to educate and persuade his readers politically, and he isn’t afraid to say so. He believes that American politics has fatally distorted the question of abortion, especially the two elements of the issue that are still in the legislative arena: late-term, so-called partial birth abortions, and parental consent. Patterson feels that here the pro-lifers have seized the imaginative initiative, reaching the public first with their own blood-chilling version of “the official story” of late-term abortion. Pro-lifers have, he writes, been able to “intimidate politicians while casting pro-choice activists as, at best, oblivious to the moral implications of abortion, even at its most extreme.” Patterson designed “Protect and Defend” to tell the story of a contested late-term abortion in a way “that was neither pro-choice nor pro-life, but pro-truth.”

Since all of our major religions use storytelling to frame their moral ideas, it makes sense that fiction, popular and literary, plays a role in how we understand moral, and therefore political, questions. As critic Susan Sontag put it in an L.A. Times symposium on “Politics and the Novel” last summer, “If you start with the concept of the truth, then fiction takes its place among other kinds of instructive testimonies.”

Of course the political fiction that lasts tends not to be overtly polemical. From Voltaire’s “Candide” (a kind of 18th century “Forrest Gump”) to Robert Penn Warren’s novel of moral crisis in the political realm, “All the King’s Men,” great literature recognizes the human frailty that propaganda prefers to ignore. Nevertheless, when we don’t have personal experience of certain moral issues, and when we find it hard to imagine being entangled in them, a simple, well-told tale of Good vs. Evil can be much more persuasive than logic.

So it was with Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1852 anti-slavery melodrama “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” Michele Wallace, professor of English at City College of New York, noted in a recent article for the Drama Review that Stowe’s book appeared at a time when the philosophical debate between North and South had reached a deadlock. Republican rationality and abolitionists’ religious arguments weren’t working. “In their place,” Wallace wrote, “Stowe substituted the moral power of sentimentality and domesticity, the authority of the human heart.”

As a result, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” proved to be “the most influential novel of social purpose in the nineteenth century,” according to Bill Andrews, Adams Professor of English at University of North Carolins at Chapel Hill. Abraham Lincoln credited the book — an international bestseller that was promptly adapted for the stage — with significantly increasing abolitionist sympathies in the United States. When Lincoln met Stowe at the White House while the Civil War was raging in 1863, he is said to have greeted her by saying, “So this is the little lady who started this great big war.” Patterson can only dream of having such an impact.

Stowe, like Patterson, always claimed that she tried to present a balanced picture of slavery. True, she did portray several benign slave owners and some relatively contented slaves — and the most beastly character, Simon Legree, was a Yankee — but no one could doubt her novel’s true intent. “Slave holders were not appeased,” Andrews said, “and anti-slavery readers knew a condemnation of slavery when they saw one.” Amazon.com “reader reviews” of “Protect and Defend” indicate that pro-lifers know a condemnation of their position when they see it, too — even before they read it. “It appears that this book is for the left-wingers out there,” said one potential customer from Texas. “Thanks anyway, I’ll pass.”

Patterson takes a more crisp and cerebral approach to his pet issue than Stowe took to hers, but his strategy is more or less the same. He introduces reasonably sympathetic pro-life characters such as Mary Anne’s father, Martin Tierney, the equivalent of one of Stowe’s sympathetic slave holders. Martin personally conducts the court battle to force his daughter to bear his damaged grandson. (Patterson was an accomplished litigator before he wrote the first of a half-dozen legal thrillers, and some of the most effective elements of “Protect and Defend” are its lawyerly intellectual precision and the realistic emotional ups and downs of the trial scenes.)

In the novel’s central trial, Martin Tierney brings in witnesses to testify to the small possibility that Mary Anne’s child may turn out to be normal after all (medicine does make mistakes), and to the idea that even if the baby does prove to have little or no brain, he might somehow be able to live a great life anyway. One physician’s bleak estimate of the danger to Mary Anne’s future ability to bear normal children is characterized as another potential medical miscalculation.

Tierney is essentially arguing that it’s impossible to know the future, so we can’t really judge ahead of time whether terminating a given pregnancy would be “for the best.” Therefore, women must be forced to err on the side of uncontrolled nature, and to let their reproductive chips fall where they may. The fact that most people would not take this radically fatalistic position in any other aspect of their lives — people can opt for a risky medical treatment, for example, without the assurance of a guaranteed outcome — is, apparently, irrelevant.

Though we are clearly meant to grudgingly admire Martin Tierney’s single-minded dedication to life — any kind of life at any cost — we still disdain his actions, because Patterson stacks the deck against him so meticulously. Given the situation the author sets up, Mary Anne’s decision to terminate her pregnancy is just too easy, both morally and rationally. Her case is a flawless object lesson in the pitfalls of legislating on the basis of inflammatory, unexamined, one-size-fits-all assumptions, but so what? Real life rarely offers perfect examples like Mary Anne’s; it tends to be messy. But “Protect and Defend” doesn’t get into those gray areas, or into the larger, grayer area of how involved the state should be — if at all — in the enforcement of “normal” pregnancies.

In fact, Patterson deals somewhat dishonestly with the other, more routine abortions that figure in the book. The story’s young, Kennedyesque Irish-American president, Kerry Kilcannon — who takes the standard liberal “hate it but don’t legislate it” attitude toward abortion — is a case in point. We first met Kilcannon in Patterson’s earlier political novel, “No Safe Place.” (If you don’t want to know important details of the stories in Patterson’s earlier novels, you should stop reading now.)

In “No Safe Place,” Kerry Kilcannon’s bid for the presidency is threatened when his rival in the primaries leaks damaging evidence about him to an abortion rights group. Kilcannon had an adulterous affair with a political reporter, Lara Costello, and — very much against Kilcannon’s wishes — Costello had an abortion and fled the relationship, thereby maintaining both his political viability and her own career. Costello’s defiance of her lover’s wishes is mirrored in “Protect and Defend,” when a well-meaning, pro-life Republican senator’s drug-addled daughter aborts her illegitimate child. Though the men in Patterson’s stories always object strenuously to abortion, they nevertheless benefit from the independent determination of their women to undergo the procedure — benefit, that is, as long as the abortion is kept secret.

Here’s where abortion differs from slavery when it comes to political fiction. Slavery, for most of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s readers — even the people who considered themselves abolitionists — was a distant and abstract thing. The majority had never even met a black person and had no personal stake in slavery as an institution, for or against. In the North, white individuals simply didn’t have to take a position on slavery, and those who did generally approached it as a matter of passionate principle, not lived experience. What Stowe’s story did was furnish her readers’ imaginations with emotionally freighted images — abused slaves and brutal masters — giving them something, in modern parlance, they could “relate to.”

However, most Americans have some kind of immediate experience of problem pregnancy and thus have a genuine personal stake in the abortion issue — even if public dishonesty prevails. There have been some 35 million abortions in this country since it was legalized in 1973, so anyone who thinks he or she has never known anyone who felt compelled to end a pregnancy has probably been lied to at least once. Slavery was a very public, visible institution; abortion, even when legal, is not.

Men in particular are unlikely to know whether their female friends, co-workers or relatives have ever had an abortion, and they sometimes assume — if they even think about it at all — that the “good” women they know have never even considered the option. In those subcultures where abortion is most strongly condemned (the fundamentalist community, for example), the secrecy runs even deeper, which reinforces the political sanctimony. Thus we have the Amazon reader who thought that it was “over the top” for Patterson to portray three out of more than a dozen women in his book as having had an abortion.

The pro-life movement papers over this secrecy with a story as reductive as the romanticized and symbolic struggles of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s characters. In the pro-lifers’ favorite fairy tale, women seeking abortions are always the equivalent of Simon Legree: selfish, cruel and opportunistic. Their sexual irresponsibility, the story goes, results in pregnancies they find merely “inconvenient,” and therefore these “bad” women should pay for their sins with pregnancy and childbirth.

Meanwhile, real women, sensitive to this widespread mythology, often avoid admitting their own experiences with abortion or even their intimate knowledge of another woman’s abortion decision — unless they can hedge it with elaborate disclaimers of disapproval. Given this climate, an abortion in a political candidate’s past is guaranteed to sink his or her career, which is probably why Patterson lets Kerry Kilcannon and his fiancie “get away with it”: Lara’s abortion remains a secret and Kerry is able to maintain his virtually faultless public image. But by sparing Lara and Kerry the ordeal of public exposure, Patterson reinforces the idea that abortion is unspeakable. Of course, Roe vs. Wade defined the choice to have an abortion as a private matter. But the sad truth is that as long as abortion remains secret there’s no way to counteract the pro-life movement’s campaign to brand all women who seek abortions as capricious and morally unserious.

What’s even worse is the way Patterson lets his heroes off the hook, that is, by means of an unlikely confluence of coincidences involving, among other things, blackmail, a lone gunman and a well-timed diversionary scandal (though, naturally, Kerry’s underlings handle all the dirty work, just as Lara took on terminating her pregnancy all by herself). Because Kerry and Lara are too damn lucky, they never actually have to confront the unsolvable conflicts at the intersection of our unrealistic ideals, the public pretenses that we indulge in to maintain them and our “bad woman” abortion myths. The one woman whose past abortion gets plastered all over the newspapers in “Protect and Defend” is one of those naughty, alcoholic, irresponsibly sexual teens the pro-lifers seem to feel would most benefit from an enforced pregnancy. She winds up drunk and dead. Of course, if Kerry and Lara weren’t quite so lucky, they’d be dragged through the mud too, and Patterson wouldn’t deliver the happy ending his kind of fiction is required to have.

The African-American writer James Baldwin once famously dissed “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” and the whole tradition of “protest novels” in American literature — including, shockingly, those of his mentor, Richard Wright — for, as Bill Andrews put it, “schematizing American reality,” concentrating on “issues” and what was essentially sociological observation rather than the portrayal of full, individualized human beings. Protest novels, Baldwin lamented, tended to reduce all of America “to the compulsive, bloodless reality of a guy named Joe.” Ironically, this kind of simplification tends to reinforce the pernicious stereotyping it protests.

Likewise, Americans want our political campaigns and legislative battles to be a variation on the melodrama of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” and “Protect and Defend,” the equivalent of exciting Western shootouts, desperate romantic rivalries or come-from-behind sports sagas. We want to believe that virtue, however severely challenged by the forces of evil, will inevitably triumph and that losers just weren’t “good” enough, and therefore didn’t deserve to win. And to win, a hero or heroine has to be truly good, almost perfect except for a few likable shortcomings.

That’s what makes for satisfying genre fiction and movies, but the laws that protect and regulate abortion don’t get applied to perfect, fortunate characters like Mary Anne Tierney and Kerry Kilcannon; they dictate the lives of real, flawed, unlucky people. And as long as Patterson is writing about “ideal” cases like Mary Anne and Kerry, no matter how balanced he tries to be, he’s not writing about the reality of abortion, and he still encourages us to believe that the world would be fine if we could just “fix” a few things politically, by tinkering here and there with our communal machinery. Meanwhile, our individual struggles with these official myths — and especially the secrets we keep — remain unchallenged and unchanged.

Apparently the tax burden this evil internationalist scheme has laid upon my acquaintance made it impossible for him to live his life to the fullest, even in his particularly upscale subdivision of my own overpriced Charleston suburb. Did I know, he asked, that Kennedy was shot because he was planning to dissolve the Fed, and that conditions in this country today parallel those which led to the rise of Hitler?

Welcome to Freeper World.

My neighbor’s astonishing take on history and economics was just one of the bizarre views from the day, ending in an emotional evening banquet to raise funds for Linda Tripp’s legal team. Tripp, speaking publicly for the first time since impeachment (which she set in motion by surreptitiously recording the anguished ditherings of presidential fellateuse Monica Lewinsky) and just days after criminal wire-tapping charges from the Monica tapes were dropped against her in Maryland, promised to continue her fight against the Demon Spawn, aka the Clintons. They had made such a shambles of her life, Tripp said, that she would never recover, economically or emotionally.

Yet she seemed remarkably cheerful Saturday, freshly face-lifted and looking forward with optimistic glee to getting more Clinton depositions on videotape in the course of her irony-impaired civil suit against the White House for — yes — invasion of privacy.

Free Republic is a loose, grass-roots style organization founded in 1996 by Jim Robinson, a Fresno, Calif., conservative. Its mission, as explained by Bob Johnson, the slender, well-spoken head of the fledgling activist arm of the organization, is to “reverse the trend of unconstitutional government expansion” and bring about “a restoration of our constitutional republic.” Specific, long-range goals include the repeal of the 16th Amendment, which established the IRS, and the complete withdrawal from the United Nations. Intermediate goals include the rollback of gun control laws, dissolution of “unconstitutional” government departments, renunciation of many international treaties and repeal of regulations on business. However, according to Johnson, these ambitious efforts won’t succeed if the organization fails to reach its primary goal of “ending liberalism as a significant cultural influence.” In pursuit of that aim, it is bent on “leveling the playing field” in the media, and “balancing” the media’s supposed 80-20 slant in favor of liberalism.

Johnson also plans to hit the “Achilles heel of the left”: funding. Most left-wing organizations are not only generously supported by government money, Johnson claims, but by private entities who hand out grants, matching funds and other bennies to liberal causes. “Why,” Johnson asked the assembled Freepers, “do we buy products from an organization that is giving money to our enemies?” He thinks those corporations should be induced to stop the handouts, or to give right-wing entities an equal amount.

Finally, Johnson said, the right needs to “retake our institutions,” such as education, and higher education in particular, which is “dominated by liberals, fascists, communists, Marxists and other assorted luminaries.” Young people these days come out of college with a “headful of mush,” Johnson claims, and it takes them at least 10 years to “solidify all that Jell-O in their brains.”

To quicken the congealing of liberal minds from rubbery picnic desserts into more respectable concrete blocks, Free Republic’s busy Web site offers article reprints and media archives, as well as a lively — some would say virulent — forum for public discussion and “critical analysis” of current news and political issues. Free Republic has vociferously supported Tripp from the beginning of the impeachment crisis, calling her a “Hero and Patriot,” and leading the effort to fund her legal defense. It’s no wonder she felt comfortable making her first speech to the Freepers, because, as her lawyer Joe Murtha told us, she was sure what she said before these fiercely loyal partisans would not be criticized or harshly judged.

Not that criticisms and harsh judgments of other players in the impeachment drama are in short supply at Free Republic. One of the most startling aspects of their rhetoric is their poisonous, personalized, visceral hatred of the Clintons, particularly the hysterical expressions of outraged horror and disgust they direct toward Hillary Clinton. The aggression aimed at the president, supposedly the greatest criminal mind to ever occupy the White House, is almost jocose in comparison.

Freepers will, as they actually did Saturday, stand en masse and bellow in unison, making a bullhorn of their hands: “Bill Clinton! We have you surrounded! Drop the cigar, step away from the intern, and come out with your pants up!” But when it comes to Hillary, the humor takes on a seriously hostile edge. She is “Queen Hillary the First,” the moral equivalent of Hitler and Stalin, and, it seems, the worst thing that ever happened to the United States of America.

Yet only liberals assume the worst about their fellow human beings, says Van Jenerette, a candidate for the Republican nomination in South Carolina’s First Congressional District. In the course of a rousing stump-style lesson on the “divinely inspired” Constitution, Jenerette floated a common Freeper concept of the philosophical differences between left and right. Conservatives, he said, are self-disciplined people who follow rules, have a conscience, uphold a moral code and assume that other people are just like them, and therefore don’t need to be supervised. Liberals, on the other hand, have no internal mechanisms of belief, no value structures (“William Jefferson Clinton is an example of that”), and because they assume that others are immoral ghouls like themselves, they naturally think people need to be watched and “micro-managed.”

I was confused. Conservatives might not think people need to be supervised, but they demonstrate an alarming propensity to declare that liberals need to be controlled. (The inescapable conclusion, of course, is that they don’t think liberals are really people.) It is also a truism of political science — or at least it was when I used to teach it — that conservatives think human nature is inherently selfish and naughty (remember Original Sin?), and it’s the fuzzy-headed liberals who think people are naturally good. Jenerette’s speech made my head spin.

Before Linda Tripp arrived at the banquet that night, one of the people at my table described the “disguise” he’d seen Linda wearing as she passed by him earlier in the evening. She’d looked like a “scarecrow,” he said, wearing a funny black straw hat and a black trench coat. I thought that was peculiar indeed, given that the day’s glaring, Deep South heat would cause anyone wearing a black coat to melt down into a puddle of saline and rendered lard.

She must be desperate not to be recognized, I thought (as I added to my own ample stock of lard with the marvelous dinner featuring Southern classics like pork barbecue, fried chicken, coleslaw and corn custard), but surely such a get-up in this climate would only call attention to her.

When Tripp entered the room some time later (greeted with a standing ovation and a chant of “Linda! Linda! Linda!”) she was wearing the black hat, perched on the back of what looked like a varicolored ash-blond wig that curved curiously around her narrow, heavily made-up face. One of the reporters I talked to at a table in the back assured me that the thick, too-shiny lankosity on her head was her real hair. He was a man, though, and perhaps a Linda partisan (he made some friendly remarks to her later), so I took his opinion with a grain of salt. Not that I would accuse a fellow journalist of pulling my leg or anything.

Tripp had on a black coat-dress incongruously belted with a wide, studded cummerbund of brown leather, like a fancy weight-lifter’s back support. The delicate skin under her eyes was still stretched and sunburned-looking from the surgery, but leaving aside the makeup and the clothes, she looked good: pleased at the adulation she was receiving, a little sweaty with excitement and quite self-assured, like an aging movie star surrounded by fans.

(The minor news note in the evening was that Tripp and her lawyers only recently discovered, on May 25, that the Department of Defense inspector general had determined that Tripp’s Pentagon bosses, Ken Bacon and Clifford Bernath, had violated the provisions of the Privacy Act in telling New Yorker reporter Jane Mayer that Tripp had not reported a youthful arrest on her application for employment. In spite of the IG’s determination, the DOD Office of General Counsel asked the Department of Justice to authorize private counsel for Bernath at government expense to fight Tripp’s civil suit, as his error had been made in the course of his official duties. Tripp’s civil lawyers, David Colapinto and Stephen and Michael Kohn, wrote to Attorney General Janet Reno on Saturday, requesting that the authorization for private counsel be denied, and any money that had already been spent on Bernath’s defense be returned.)

The surprising thing about the Freepers, given the surreal quality of their rhetoric and their alarming obsession with the Clinton Reign of Terror, is that they seem, on the whole, to be Very Nice People. They are not twitching freaks. You don’t have to wear cloves of garlic or pack heat to feel safe among them. They are friendly, verbally accomplished and for the most part apparently intelligent people. Skewing generally older and more prosperous than the general population, they have sparkling eyes, good senses of humor and engaging smiles. They display emotion as freely as Miss America contestants, weeping with joy, weeping with anger, weeping with deeply felt patriotic reverence for the sacrifices of our forefathers and Linda Tripp’s unspeakable sufferings.

They struck me as the kind of sweet, well-dressed and peripherally charming crowd you’d find in a suburban Presbyterian church on any given Sunday. These people, in short, don’t demonstrate any immediately visible sign that they are — as we used to say in the Air Force — “et up” with their own peculiar sense of themselves. But, as with the Presbyterians, once they start talking, you begin to catch on.

Linda Tripp did a lot of talking. She told a piteous tale of being misunderstood and vilified by the press, of how her personal appearance was used against her, her ugliness being emphasized, she claimed, as a means to discredit and demonize her in general. I’ll buy that. It was ever thus. Appearances count, and we tend to perceive people we don’t like as physically unattractive. It’s an old game, and women take a bigger hit.

But it apparently doesn’t occur to Tripp that the distaste much of the press felt for her might have been based upon their own genuine feelings about her and her actions. She seems to think that the media’s opinion of her as an ugly, perhaps jealous woman who betrayed her pretty young friend was entirely the fault of the “spin” projected from the Clinton White House.

Tripp also shares the Freepers’ total disgust for/obsession with Hillary Clinton. “We have all,” she said, referring to herself and other Clinton accusers, “been in the cross-hairs of Mrs. Clinton, whose orchestration of [our] destruction is well known in the White House. She calls the shots, she spearheads the strategy, and she … is … in … charge. Please don’t ever doubt that.” Tripp’s main objection to Hillary seems to be that she became a “de facto co-president … whose power and influence only increased each and every time the president found himself in trouble.”

During the question and answer period following her formal talk, she noted in an answer to a question about Al Gore that Hillary had even originally wanted to occupy the vice president’s traditional office in the West Wing. Tsk tsk.

Tripp was also queried about her observations of the personal relationship between President and Hillary Clinton. “Did she manhandle him?” the questioner asked, drawing a laugh from the crowd and a loud aside from someone up front, opining that Hillary might “beat him like a rented mule.” More hilarity ensued.

Finally Tripp was able to answer the question, outlining the way she was able to observe the first couple from her few months near the Oval Office early in the first administration, and later when she was shuffled to an office nearer Hillary’s.

“I saw signs,” Tripp said, “that Mrs. Clinton, on some level, loves her husband. I saw no signs, on any level, that Mr. Clinton has any respect or feelings for his wife.” No one, Tripp seemed to be implying, could possibly love such a slavering monster as Hillary — not even her long-term partner in crime.

Speaking of unrequited love, someone asked about Tripp’s grand jury testimony that Kathleen Willey had an initially thrilled and smiling reaction to the president’s alleged “sexual assault.” It was clear that Tripp was choosing her words carefully. “Kathleen and I don’t dispute what happened at all,” she said. “We dispute, if anything, her reaction to it that day. And I think over time — and she’s had several years to put this in perspective — I think what she has come to learn is that this wasn’t a romantic encounter of any kind. In fact, it was an abusive encounter, and she felt very used.”

“So I don’t think that we see things so differently when you look at it through the lens of time. Perhaps, as many seem to be, she was flattered by the attentions of the president of the United States. I can’t figure out why, but there are women who like that sort of thing.” She went on to say that “the bottom line” was that Willey was assaulted, and “no one believed her.”

It’s interesting that Tripp, with her professed abhorrence of “spin,” would deploy such an egregious example of it in order to support Willey today. But it seems that Tripp, too, has “reconsidered” the past. What we want to believe about one thing (“President Clinton is the antichrist”) will alter our perception of the truth about something else (“Kathleen Willey is Polly Pureheart”). It’s as if both the left and the right are looking into a funhouse mirror warped by their prejudices, and thinking they see the enemy, but really only seeing a distorted version of themselves. It’s not unlike my friend at lunch who somehow sees the mad, inflationary Germany of the 1930s reflected in the relatively calm and prosperous present. He doesn’t like what he thinks is happening, so evil must be afoot.

Not just some routine political annoyance, a mere swing in the pendulum, but the worst, most fiendish kind of evil. It’s interesting that the far left vilifies Clinton almost as fiercely as the right does, because he hasn’t been, from their point of view, as politically correct and supinely liberal as he should have been.

I found myself thinking, too, of the all peculiar alliances that have caused the far right and far left to climb into bed with each other, in recent campaigns against things as varied as pornography and Kosovo. My neighbor was taken aback when I said his concept that the media contained nothing but institutionalized, self-serving distortions was amazingly similar to that of a famous “leftist”: Noam Chomsky.