The man behind the clown makeup, Victor Trujillo, 40, says degenerate clowns enjoy greater freedom of speech than straight-faced commentators in ties. Now that Brozo has a prominent place under the nation's big top, Trujillo aims to use it to speak out on the people's behalf. "Comedy has always seemed the best way to deliver hard news," Trujillo said. "And within the realm of comedy, the best personality is one who is not vulnerable to attack. Brozo is misogynous. He is an alcoholic, a drug addict, irresponsible and dirty. There's nothing anyone can call him that he has not called himself." It is a little early to judge the Brozo show a hit, but its ratings in Mexico City have so far outstripped those of its rivals.

Yet with all due respect to Karl Rove's claim that his boss George W. Bush is no different from what he always was, what happened on that most fateful day obviously effected a transformation in the new President. One hears that Bush, who entered the White House without a clear sense of what he wanted to do there, now feels that there was a purpose behind his election all along: as a born-again Christian, it is said, he believes he was chosen by God to eradicate the evil of terrorism from the world. I think it is a plausible rumor, and I would even guess that in his heart of hearts, Bush identifies more in this respect with Ronald Reagan—the President who rid the world of the "evil empire"—than with his own father, who never finished the job he started in taking on Saddam Hussein.

Consider: the campaign against al Qaeda required us to topple the Taliban regime, and we may willy-nilly find ourselves forced by the same political and military logic to topple five or six or seven more tyrannies in the Islamic world (including that other sponsor of terrorism, Yasir Arafat's Palestinian Authority). I can even go along with David Pryce-Jones in imagining the turmoil of this war leading to some new species of an imperial mission for America, whose purpose would be to oversee the emergence of successor governments in the region more amenable to reform and modernization than the despotisms now in place. Like Pryce-Jones, I can also envisage the establishment of some kind of American protectorate over the oil fields of Saudi Arabia, as we more and more come to wonder why 7,000 princes should go on being permitted to exert so much leverage over us and everyone else.