Washington is a village gathering for a public execution, unsure what mood to strike. It wants to hang its head low in shame, but it cannot resist the chance to gawp and gossip with friends - to soak up the spectacle, craning its neck for a better look.
The result is a town where people are sombre and salacious, contrite and aggressive - all at the same time. They speak both in sorrow and in anger. They invoke the gravity of the Founding Fathers, but can't forget the chastity of daughters. They are weighed low by the burdens of history, but spun dizzy by the urgent, instant technologies of modernity.
The gallows are ready, but the court is still uncertain. Congress is pitted against the White House but also against itself, split between Republicans and Democrats, between those above party bickering and those immersed in it.
The accused seems equally confused, sending out emissaries to apologise, others to jab their fists, readying for the fight ahead. With the polls showing no "national mood" one way or the other, the US political class is torn down the middle. Individuals are the same, their hearts divided.
The site of execution is Capitol Hill, and the crowds are already gathering. The usual OJ-style encampment has sprung up, the satellite trucks, the camera crews, the forest of "stand-up" positions where correspondents deliver instant updates.
Protesters have arrived, as always, brandishing their banners. "Avoid the Pain - Abstain," proclaimed one, held by Kathleen Sullivan, an Illinois campaigner for "abstinence-centred education". She said that, if only Bill Clinton had followed her advice - and kept it zipped with everyone but Hillary "he wouldn't be in the trouble he's in today." Congressmen have struggled to maintain a different tone. An impeachment trial turns the House of Representatives into the prosecution - with the Senate the jury - and they were all at pains yesterday to show how seriously they take their task.
Henry Hyde, the Republican chairman of the Judiciary Committee which will determine Bill Clinton's fate in the first instance, set the tone in the morning debate, authorising the release of Kenneth Starr's 445-page report on the Monica Lewinsky affair to the public - via the Internet. He invoked the Ten Commandments, the Magna Carta and the beheading of Sir Thomas More, urging his fellow House members to realise that before them was "one mighty task - to vindicate the rule of law."
The House's senior Democrat, Richard Gephardt, responded in kind. "This is a sacred process," he bellowed into the chamber. "It goes to the heart of our democracy. This is not a second election. This is not politics. This is not a witchhunt."
By yesterday morning the consensus born of constitutional gravity had unravelled. Democrats demanded that the Starr report should not be released into cyberspace before the White House had a chance to see it first: why should thrill-seeking computer-nerds read about Bill Clinton's antics with a cigar and a dress from the Gap, while his lawyers could not? Surely basic fairness demands that an accused man see the charges against him? No, said the Republicans.
"What else can that be, except trying to stick a thumb in his eye before the fight starts?" asked an angry Barney Frank, the Massachusetts Democrat expected to be the president's most effective defender on the 36strong Judiciary Committee.
Fellow Democrat and committee member Zoe Lofgren agreed. She's one of the few people who's been round this track before: she was a lawyer aiding the Watergate committee 24 years ago. What's the difference between then and now? "Some of the Republicans are in a celebratory mood and I didn't see any Democrats celebrating in 1974."
For her part, Ms Lofgren has been immersing herself in memories of Watergate, reading the accounts all over again, looking for clues as to how she should behave. She's read the original papers authored by the framers of the Constitution, she's even checked out the precedents in British law on which the impeachment idea was based. Her hunch is that the Clinton case doesn't make the cut. Richard Nixon used the entire machinery of the state, from the CIA to the Internal Revenue Service, to cover up a crime. "Here we have to decide whether having a girlfriend and lying about it destroys our constitutional form of government."