When Dan Quayle announced his presidential candidacy late last week, he also announced a theme. He would run against the "dishonest decade" of Clinton rule. This is more than payback for those who described the Reagan-Bush years as the "decade of greed." It's an allusion to W.H. Auden's "September 1, 1939," which begins:

I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade ...

Is it coincidence that George Bush's own best bid for Bartlett's (leaving aside "No new taxes") is cribbed from the same poem? "A Thousand Points of Light" came from a reworking--unintentional, I fear--of Auden's last stanza:

Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages ...

("A thousand," of course, is what Auden would have written instead of "ironic" if he had been a bit less ... ironic.)

One would almost think that a Collected Auden was the only book kept in the West Wing during the Bush-Quayle years. But there's even more evidence that "September 1, 1939" is conservatism's great slogan-generator. Allen Weinstein has just titled his history of Soviet espionage The Haunted Wood, after the lines in Stanza 5:

Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.

Washington conservatives don't have an absolute monopoly on the poem. Historian Madelon Powers called her new history of saloons Faces Along the Bar (which "... Cling to their average day" at the opening of Stanza 5), and Larry Kramer's play The Normal Heart comes out of Stanza 6:

What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart ...

But "September 1, 1939" has for the most part been seized by the right. That's odd, given that its author was a lifelong gay who flirted with Communism for most of the 1930s.