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!"