The address is a fine piece of oratory, no doubt. In less than 250 words, it covers all the bases — for a country in the midst of a brutal, soul-sucking war, it gives justification to the struggle. At the same time, it recognizes the ultimate contribution given by the 5,000 men killed during the battle. It is humble in the extreme, while at the same time making it clear why the United States is a great country, despite its current struggle.

On the other hand, the Gettysburg Address is both site- and time-specific. Lincoln makes nine separate references to the battlefield, the people who died there and those gathered to memorialize them. And while he mentions such universal values as liberty and honor, he is very clearly discussing the Civil War, and the people he is commemorating died in a very particular context: on the battlefield, fighting for the future of the republic.

It's hard to see, beyond extreme generalizations, why the Gettysburg Address is at all appropriate for a Sept. 11 ceremony. The people who died in New York City and Northern Virginia were not killed in battle, and were certainly not engaged in a struggle for freedom (except, in a very general way, those servicemen killed at the Pentagon). The current "war," as it were, may be a lot of things, but it's not a civil war, and few people outside of the Bush Administration believe that it is "testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived, and so dedicated, can long endure."

Granted, reading the Address is less about what it says than what it means. It, like all our great documents, stands for the principles upon which our nation rests. But this is circular: The reason it's a great speech is because of what it says, and when it was said. It detracts little from the Address to say that its content has little context for a Sept. 11 commemoration.

But the decision to read the Address is less a simply bad choice than a failure on the part of our political establishment. Rather than make their own speeches, Pataki and friends have chosen the easy route of letting some else's words speak for them. Instead of using the moment to look forward, they dig into the past not just for inspiration, but for crib notes. It's an election year, and no one wants to get caught saying something that might cast them in a bad light at the polls. But because we all revere Abe, using his words as stand-ins for their own gets our politicians off the hook. Unfortunately, it gets them off the hook at the exact moment that we need them to step up to the plate and lay it down for us: In the face of increased government surveillance, what does liberty mean? With Bush looking to invade Iraq without Congressional approval, what does war mean? Things that seemed evident in Lincoln's day are not so today, and it's irresponsible to speak his words without stopping to think about what they mean in the current context.

Lincoln clearly meant the Gettysburg Address to be a memorial, and while it has gone on to mean a lot more than that, it is, ultimately, a speech dedicated to fallen Union troops. It seems, then, all the more inappropriate to borrow Lincoln's words to memorialize fallen civilians some 140 years later. It's as if planners for the World Trade Center monument gave up looking for something new and just built a replica of the Vietnam Memorial, albeit with 3,000 instead of 50,000 names. Don't the Sept. 11 dead deserve their own speeches?

E-mail Clay Risen at risenc@yahoo.com.