This week in the saga

On the calendar it is one more fairground rally in western Pennsylvania. At eleven minutes past six on Saturday evening the air over Butler cracks: a bullet grazes the top of his right ear and he goes down behind the podium. Face against the boards, blood running, the fairground screaming above him — and out of the darkening sky comes a voice he has not heard in two years. The ghost of his friend from the East, the statesman felled by an assassin's hand in Nara, calls him by name: get up, Donarudo-kun. Show them who you are. What the fairground sees next becomes the photograph of the age: he rises out of the wall of agents, fist against the sky, blood-streaked, roaring FIGHT! FIGHT! FIGHT! One watcher — a fireman who dove to cover his family — does not go home. On Sunday he writes that God alone prevented the unthinkable; on Monday he walks into the convention hall with gauze on his ear, the documents case thrown out behind him, and names a young senator his heir.