LINCOLN, POWELL, AND OLIPHANT

Thomas Oliphant sees parallels in the words of Lincoln, read by Powell, in contemporary Washington. Of course, he misses the main point.

''FELLOW CITIZENS, we cannot escape history."

Normally, Lincoln always works for me, and accompanied by Aaron Copeland's uniquely American sound, he is especially stirring. But hearing Colin Powell read words that have been part of patriotism's essential sheet music for more than 60 years, they were for the first time in my experience a kind of damning boomerang.

At the National Symphony Orchestra's opening concert Saturday evening -- its 75th in a lovely odyssey that traces Washington's gradual emergence from a sleepy company town to a real city -- the choice of Powell, one of the local establishment's favorite figures, and his wife to perform the role of readers for Copeland's Lincoln Portrait was automatic.

But the war in Iraq intruded, causing more than one formally attired guest to glance with surprise at the person next to him or reach for a pen to get down the freshly discovered double-entendres in Lincoln's language.

After a day of stunningly large antiwar demonstrations that surrounded a beleaguered White House while its occupant attended to a more natural disaster, the Lincoln words bit hard.
''We of this Congress and this administration will be remembered in spite of ourselves," observed Lincoln long ago in a written message to Congress after the gore of Antietam but just a month before the Emancipation Proclamation. ''No personal significance or insignificance can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which we pass will light us down in honor or dishonor to the latest generation. We, even here, hold the power and bear the responsibility."

Indeed. The inspiring words of the past mock the poses of the present.

Wrong point. Here is the right one.

As it was, Colin Powell even had trouble selling Lincoln's wish, articulated for the ages after Gettysburg, ''That from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion. That we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain."

Oliphant can't see, because he is hard-wired to believe that the President and his people lied their way into the war, that the war itself is just, and the sacrifice of those who have died is righteous, and the only way to honor them, as in Lincoln's time, is to fight on until victory.