A "New Yorker" cartoon, circa 1940. Bearded man in a turban, kneeling on a prayer rug by the road, in the midst of his devotions. Beside him, a loudmouth American leans out from a Cadillac convertible and brawls, "Hey, Jack, which way is Mecca?"

It was funny once. The publishers of the "New Yorker" put it in the book of the magazine's best work. It told us that Americans were more ignorant than insolent, and we could laugh at ourselves about it, so it was OK.

This week, the cover of the "New Yorker" was black. You could see the barest ghost silhouette of the lost towers, if you tilted the magazine in the light.

Flags are everywhere. You can't turn in any direction and not see at least six of them. I told Kat, "you're not going to recognize this place when you get back." People are stealing them from one another.

Committed liberals are floundering. An absolutist pacifism is almost impossible to maintain. Even Gandhi, if I read him right, would approve violence in certain cases.

If America had struck back right away with a hail of missiles and bombs -- as I fear Clinton or Gore would have done -- in the general direction of bin Laden, there would at least be some focus for anti-war activity. So far, it reminds me of (another) old "New Yorker" cartoon, this one of a construction site with the sign "coming soon: Acme," and a lone picketer walking past the fence with a sandwichboard reading "Acme will probably be unfair."

When you get to the bottom of it, what rankles my liberal friends most is this surge of patriotism, which they've always associated with vulgar, blind bigotry. Nationalism is the last refuge of a scoundrel, but to them that's all it ever is. And they have ample evidence. Americans didn't distance themselves from unabashed patriotic emotion since the 1950s because they suddenly disliked America. No, we got burned too many times by unscrupulous leaders who used the people's national pride for selfish and destructive purposes. So my liberal friends tend to see the flag as the cloth that is used to strangle the Constitution, and they dislike it.

So they are reflexively antipathetic to anything undertaken by the American military, under a Republican administration, wrapped in stars-and-stripes rhetoric.

A co-worker, conscientious objector, veteran of the '60s anti-war marches, asked me privately, quietly, from the point of view of someone who had studied a lot of history, "don't you think we're overreacting to this?" Then he said something like, "After all, it's not Bataan. " I was kind of shocked. He didn't seem to be considering that this was not a battlefield defeat of military men, but mass carnage of thousands of civilian lives.

All I could think was that he needed to move the attacks off the center stage, to restore the balance of the world he knew, where certain qualities and behaviors were comfortably fitted into their pigeonholes. Now everything's loose.

At San Francisco's memorial service a few days after the attacks, one of the city's supervisors launched into an examination of the "root causes" of the regrettable incident. "America, what did you do, in Africa, where bombs are still blasting? America, what did you do in the global warming conference when you did not embrace the smaller nations? America, what did you do two weeks ago when I stood at the world conference on racism, when you wouldn't show up?" And so forth.

Christopher Hitchens in "The Nation" wrote a blistering critique of this sort of hand-wringing, and it began, "Western governments are responsible for many wrongs in the Muslim world, but that does not justify fascist fundamentalism."

"[T]he people who levelled the World Trade Centre are the same people who threw acid in the faces of unveiled women in Kabul and Karachi, who maimed and eviscerated two of the translators of The Satanic Verses, and who machine-gunned architectural tourists at Luxor. Even as we worry about what they may intend for our society, we can see very plainly what they have in mind for their own: a bleak and sterile theocracy enforced by advanced techniques."

... "[D]oes anyone suppose that an Israeli withdrawal from Gaza would have forestalled the slaughter in Manhattan? It would take a moral cretin to suggest anything of the sort; the cadres of the new jihad make it very apparent that their quarrel is with Judaism and secularism on principle, not with (or not just with) Zionism. They regard the Saudi regime not as the extreme authoritarian theocracy that it is, but as something too soft and lenient. ... (T)he bombers of Manhattan represent fascism with an Islamic face, and there's no point in any euphemism about it. What they abominate about 'the west,' to put it in a phrase, is not what western liberals don't like and can't defend about their own system, but what they do like about it and must defend: its emancipated women, its scientific inquiry, its separation of religion from the state. Loose talk about chickens coming home to roost is the moral equivalent of the hateful garbage emitted by Falwell and Robertson, and exhibits about the same intellectual content."