On July 4, 1914, President Woodrow Wilson delivered an Independence Day address that was to prove remarkably prophetic. Speaking in Philadelphia, where the Declaration of Independence was signed, he declared: “My dream is … that America will come into the full light of day when all shall know that she puts human rights above all other rights and that her flag is the flag not only of America, but of humanity.”

Only days before Wilson spoke those high-flown words, Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand had been assassinated in the obscure Balkan town of Sarajevo. Wilson was unaware of it, but events were already in motion that were to plunge Europe into World War I, and to propel America to the leadership of the democratic world.

For nearly a century afterwards, the American flag was indeed the flag of humanity. We had our faults as a nation, and we made our share of mistakes as a great power. But even our toughest critics had to admit that when it came down to a fundamental choice between freedom versus tyranny, justice versus oppression or humanity versus barbarism, America was on the side of the angels.

If I had to pick the moment when I was proudest of being an American, it would be an occasion in mid-November of 1983, when I was part of the crowd on the White House lawn to welcome President and Mrs. Reagan home from their state visit to Korea. In his remarks on that occasion, President Reagan pulled a surprise: He introduced two doll-like Korean children whom he and the First Lady had brought back to the U.S. to receive treatment for severe medical problems. The President explained that the children were orphans, and that they came from an orphanage for Korean children that our GIs had built with their own money.

I don’t remember all that he said. I just remember that when he finished I was in tears. At that moment, the American flag that waved in that perfect, cloudless November sky was truly the “the flag not only of America, but of humanity.” Who but Americans, I marveled, would have cared as much?

In recent years, I have had occasion again and again to contrast that moment with sickening reports of torture and human rights violations perpetrated by America. Not isolated incidents, not the inevitable by-products of the grim necessities of war, but the result of deliberate, systematic policies countenanced by the highest levels of our government.

I have heard our President admit to the existence of CIA prisons around the world where suspected terrorists have been subjected to interrogation by an “alternative set of procedures.”

I have read shocking reports of innocent people being abducted, held incommunicado, without arraignment and without trial, and subjected to barbarous treatment. All to obtain information that, as it turned out, they did not possess.

So I turn from the speech by President Wilson in 1914 to a speech delivered last week by Senator Hilary Clinton, in opposition to the Military Commissions Act of 2006. Senator Clinton said this: “Have we fallen so low as to debate how much torture we are willing to stomach? By allowing this Administration to further stretch the definition of what is and is not torture, we lower our moral standards to those whom we despise, undermine the values of our flag wherever it flies, put our troops in danger, and jeopardize our moral strength in a conflict that cannot be won simply with military might.”

Senator Clinton is right when she says that we cannot win the war against terrorism by military might alone. In a battle for the hearts and minds of the world, we have to show that we are morally superior to the crazed fanatics who bomb, behead and torture innocent people -- just as we showed ourselves to be morally superior to the Kaiser, the Axis powers and Soviet Communism. By countenancing the use of torture, even “to save American lives,” we are doing more than descending to their level. We are engaging in a kind of moral disarmament. We are throwing away one of our most potent weapons.

We are lowering the flag, and we will pay dearly for it.

Of all the many ironies surrounding Congressman Mark Foley’s forced resignation from office, one of the most delectable is this: While the Republicans were trying to divert the voters’ attention from Mr. Foley’s embarrassing emails to teenage boys, the head of Britain’s Conservative Party was endorsing gay unions.

Speaking at the Conservative Party conference on Wednesday, party leader David Cameron declared:

“There's something special about marriage. It's not about religion. It's not about morality. It's about commitment.

“When you stand up there, in front of your friends and your family, in front of the world, whether it's in a church or anywhere else, what you're doing really means something.

“Pledging yourself to another means doing something brave and important. You are making a commitment. You are publicly saying: it's not just about me, me, me anymore. It is about we -- together, the two of us, through thick and thin.

“That really matters.

“And by the way, it means something whether you're a man and a woman, a woman and a woman or a man and another man. That's why we were right to support civil partnerships, and I'm proud of that.”

There’s no excuse for Mark Foley’s attempting to gratify his gay urges by flirting with minors on the Internet. But there is, perhaps, an explanation: It’s dark and lonely in the closet. It’s also extremely frustrating. If the frustration is deep enough, and long enough, it can drive an otherwise sensible man to do stupid things. If Mr. Foley had been free to marry a man of his choice, instead of having to constantly conceal and repress his own nature, his story might have had a happier end.

The Republicans might be happier as well. They might not be about to lose control of Congress.

But it was the Republicans, let us remember, who have spent the last few years frantically trying to write bans on gay unions into state constitutions and the U.S. Constitution itself –- trying, in effect, to take the issue not only out of the hands of “activist judges,” but any future elected lawmakers who might be disposed to let gays marry. It’s an attempt to buck the tide of history –- never a wise move in politics.

It is therefore poetic justice that Republicans have been done in by their own shameless pandering to the Religious Right.

The right to marry is a fundamental human right. So fundamental, in fact, that the law does not deny this right to convicted murderers, rapists and child molesters. Denying it to gays and lesbians is unjust. It stigmatizes people not for what they do, but for who they are. It says, in effect, that no matter how fine and upstanding a person you may be, if you were born a certain way, you are less entitled to the basic rights of a citizen than the most depraved psychopath behind bars.

The leader of Britain’s Conservative Party has endorsed gay unions. Berlin’s openly gay mayor is being spoken of as Germany’s next chancellor. Gay unions or marriages, and gays in the military, are becoming the norms for democratic countries in the developed world.

Early in his administration, President Bush seemed to be moving with the times. He appointed an openly gay ambassador to Romania, who took up his post in Bucharest with his partner of six years by his side. Then the Religious Right jerked Mr. Bush’s chain.

The Religious Right is fighting a losing battle. Conservative Christians might do better to heed the advice of Christian writer Dorothy Sayers. Sayers is best remembered as the author of the Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries, but she also translated Dante’s Divine Comedy and wrote light verse, including this piquant -- and pertinent –- little quatrain:

As I grow older and older
And totter towards the tomb
I find that I care less and less
Who goes to bed with whom.

In honor of Columbus Day, I am offering the poem “Columbus” by Joaquin Miller, the Poet of the Sierras.

Miller, like the Quaker abolitionist and politician John Greenleaf Whittier, is far more interesting as a person than as a poet.

Miller seems to have tried his hand at practically every line of work available on the American frontier: lawyer, judge, pony express rider, reporter, teacher, cook, miner, cowboy and, by some accounts, horse thief.

But the accounts are not always reliable. Least of all the accounts left by Miller himself. Fellow-writer Ambrose Bierce went so far as to call him “the greatest liar this country has ever produced.” Miller, for his part, insisted that he never lied about anything: he just exaggerated the truth a bit.

What is beyond dispute is that Miller was an ardent conservationist and a poet of sorts. What sort of poet he was may be determined from his poem about Columbus, which I remember from my days in elementary school. A teacher of mine, a dear, romantic spinster, read this poem aloud to the class one long-ago October day, with such genuine feeling that I never forgot it.

It’s not a great poem, but I think it’s good fun.

Columbus

It grew, a starlit flag unfurled!
It grew to be Time’s burst of dawn.
He gained a world; he gave that world
Its grandest lesson: “On! sail on!”

Democrats are unhappy that President Bush is attempting to paint them as the party of “cut and run” on Iraq.

They should be thankful that Mr. Bush has no talent for poetry. Otherwise, he might do to them what the English poet Walter Savage Landor (1775-1864) once did to the French politician Francois Guizot (1787-1874).

Guizot was prime minister to King Louis Philippe of France. In the eyes of many, he was too deferential to the opinions of the king, and too slow to appreciate the need for democratic reforms. When Louis Philippe was overthrown in the Revolution of 1848, Guizot fled to England – allegedly disguised as a valet.

He was welcomed into exile by a derisive broadside from Landor, so savage as to be worthy of the poet’s name. Landor wrote:

Guizot, in haste to cut and run,
A lackey’s livery has put on.
But whosoever calls disguise,
In him the lackey’s livery, lies.

At least Mr. Bush is not calling the Democrats lackeys. At least not yet.

Back in February, I noted a news item to the effect that there were then 27.2 million blogs on the Internet, and the number of blogs was doubling about every six months.

I am now reliably informed that there were 50 million blogs in July, so the projected rate of growth has proved reasonably accurate. Blogdom is now 100 times larger than it was three years ago.

But cyber is ephemeral. Attorney Rebecca Bolin reported in the September 10 issue of the Houston Chronicle that that the average web site has a lifespan of 44 days. After which it is lost forever.

Does that mean that there is hope of reducing cyber clutter? Not if Ms. Bolin has her way. In her opinion, cyber should be forever. “We don’t know what will be important in the future,” she writes, “so we have a duty to preserve the entire Internet, just as our ancestors wrapped their scrolls in watertight leather cases for us.”

While the idea of cyber-immortality is flattering to my ego, I can’t believe that anyone is going to be poring over The Speechwriter’s Slant a hundred years from now. But just in case these postings are preserved for posterity, I had better proofread them as carefully as British statesman Benjamin Disraeli proofed the transcriptions of his last parliamentary utterances prior to their publication in Hansard, the British Parliament’s equivalent of the Congressional Record.

As Dizzy put it, “I will not go down to posterity talking bad grammar."

Beloved comedienne and vocalist Anna Russell, who died last week at the ripe age of 94, leaves behind a legacy of laughter and a collection of impish musical satires. Happily, these comic gems will live on through recordings.

The daughter of a British colonel, Miss Russell enjoyed a high-society upbringing in London in the early decades of the 20th century. (High enough for her to be presented at court in 1934.) In time, her upper-crust British accent and aristocratic air would make her on-stage shenanigans all the funnier.

Of particular interest to speechwriters is Miss Russell’s side-splitting impersonation of a harried women’s club president trying to introduce a visiting pianist. It is a textbook example of how not to make an introduction:

“Normally our social chairman would introduce our guest artist. But she’s been in bed for a week with the doctor.”

[LAUGHTER]

“I think you’re very unkind! She’s having a horrible time!!!”

Originally trained as a singer, Miss Russell got her first big break in the 1930s, when asked to substitute for the lead soprano in a British production of Pietro Mascagni’s opera, Cavalleria Rusticana.

Unfortunately, it turned out to be a break she didn’t expect. When the action called for the tenor to throw her to the floor, she twisted her ankle and fell backwards, knocking over the scenery. The ensuing laughter ended the performance and her operatic career, but made her aware of her considerable gift for comedy.

In the years that followed, Miss Russell would demonstrate that gift in such hilarious spoofs as “Wind Instruments I Have Known”, “Arias for Loud Singers With No Brains”, “How to Write Your Own Gilbert and Sullivan Opera”, and her irreverent analysis of Wagner’s Ring des Nibelungen, which became her trademark

Eventually, Russell’s analysis of the Ring acquired a cult audience so devoted that her fans would recite the punch lines along with her whenever she performed it.

Wagner worshippers were not amused but, paradoxically, the better one knows the Ring, the more one appreciates Russell’s delectable inside jokes. As, for example, when Russell explains the significance of Sieglinde yielding to Siegmund’s amorous advances in Act One of Die Walkure: “She’s married to Hunding – so it’s immoral. And she’s Siegmund’s own sister – so it’s illegal. But that’s the wonderful thing about grand opera: you can do anything you want as long as you sing it.”

In the end, though, the joke was on the purists. Wagner’s cycle of four Brobdingnagian operas takes about 15 hours to perform. Miss Russell managed to make this intimidating work both intelligible and entertaining to a mass audience in about 15 minutes. As speechwriters, it’s worthwhile for us to study how shrewdly she was able to compress such a wealth of thematic material into a few well-chosen and witty words.

Note: Russell’s “Ring” is available on the Sony CD, “The Anna Russell Album.” You can find it on Amazon.com. But if you die laughing at it, don’t say I didn’t warn you.

“Schadenfreude” is a German word that is difficult to translate into English. Roughly, it means taking perverse pleasure in another’s trouble.

A friend of mine in Vienna, Austria emailed me earlier this week to tell me that this word pretty well describes European attitudes towards America’s difficulties in Iraq right now. As the Europeans see it, America went into Iraq in disregard of European opinion, and is now paying the price for its own arrogance.

Well, that’s one way of viewing the situation. But just a couple of days after I received this email, the Wall Street Journal printed a public threat that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad issued to the European powers last week.

Ahmadinejad said this: "We have advised the Europeans that the Americans are far away, but you are the neighbors of the nations in this region. We inform you that the nations are like an ocean that is welling up, and if a storm begins, the dimensions will not stay limited to Palestine, and you may get hurt. It is in your own interest to distance yourself from these criminals [Israel] . . . This is an ultimatum."

Europeans may disregard such warnings as so much bombast, intended more to appease Islamic extremists than to seriously threaten Europe. But then, they took the much same attitude toward another crazed anti-Semitic dictator over 70 years ago. Too late, they realized that they should have taken his rantings seriously.

Much of Europe is already within the reach of Iranian missiles. Those missiles may well have nuclear warheads before too long. If that happens, Europeans may look to America for support – only to discover that America is not only “far away”, but too full of schadenfreude to care. Schadenfreude cuts both ways.

In this day and age, democratic nations need to stick together in the face of nuclear blackmail from terrorist states, regardless of our differences. Schadenfreude is a luxury that none of us can afford.

Even as children they were late sleepers,
Preferring their dreams, even when quick with monsters,
To the world with all its breakable toys,
Its compacts with the dying;

So begins “The Undead”, a haunting poem by Richard Wilbur that grew out of the poet’s love for classic horror movies, especially the 1931 film version of Dracula, starring Bela Lugosi.

But the poem is more profound than the movie. With his poet’s insight, Wilbur finds vampires to be paradoxical and pitiful rather than frightening:

Strange
That their utter self-concern

Should, in the end, have left them selfless;
Mirrors fail to perceive them as they float
Through the great hall and up the staircase;
Nor are the cobwebs broken.

In the end, Wilbur concludes:

We cannot be much impressed with vampires,
Colorful though they are;

Which, if mistrusted, has no savor;
To prey on life forever and not possess it,
As rock-hollows, tide after tide,
Glassily strand the sea.

The next time I watch Bela Lugosi lodge his famous protest, “I neffer drink … wine”, I don’t think I’ll find it quite as funny. Vampires desperately seek immortality, but what they end up with is a half-life that is as pale and flickering as their celluloid impersonators in the movies.

Happy Halloween.