Fifty-five million people were transfixed before their television sets in July 1987 by the agonistic 21-minute summation of Senator Daniel Inouye of Hawaii of the events of the congressional inquiry into the Iran-Contra scandal. Senator Inouye's text summarized and characterized split national purposes that collided, in which norms and codes of honor and dignity were violated. Inouye's text is a rhetorical situation because it was a response to a circumstance. Citizens will have to determine whether this contemporary rhetoric refers to substitutions of private morality for public morality, private for public knowledge, individualized senses of dignity for communitarian honor, loyalty to one ill-fated star group for allegiance to proven principles, pseudo-event image for reality, and "old coats" for scary childhood shadows. If Aristotle and Burke are right, vis-a-vis democracy and timocracy, then the Ollie North/Iran-Contra debacle was inevitable. And, unless failsafe-guards are instituted in government in which the love of Honor is the ruling principle, many more failures are likely. (RAE)