David Beers

In Time magazine, essayist Roger Rosenblatt lashed out against “the vain stupidity” of “ironists” who try so hard to see through everything, they see nothing. One thing we don’t need in this “new and chastened time,” Rosenblatt is certain, is a bunch of ironists.

Well, wait a second. What is irony and why are people saying such mean things about it? Clearly irony is a vague enough concept to have been freighted with a wide collection of negative connotations. The word seems to represent, in the current public discourse, the nihilistic shrug of an irritatingly shallow smartass. (Thus: Wipe that smirk off your face, young ironist, while terrorists are attacking us!) Somehow, irony has come to be a handy shorthand for moral relativism and self-absorption, for consuming all that is puerile while considering oneself too hip to be implicated in the supply and demand economics of schlock. With numb and glib.

If any of this does bespeak a kind of ironic stance, it is one of severe ironic detachment. That’s the low-grade irony Jedediah Purdy made his whipping boy a couple of years ago in his book “For Common Things.” The irony he bashed was “a quiet refusal to believe in the depth of relationships, the sincerity of motivation or the truth of speech — especially earnest speech.” Letterman, Seinfeld, an entire culture bracketed by air quotes had taught Americans that “nothing is real, true or ours. Irony makes us wary and abashed in our belief.”

My first reaction was, and is: Were we ever so callously lost as a society? Not by Purdy’s definition. Put under a microscope, Americans turn out to be mawkish to the marrow. For every Bart Simpson there is an Oprah, for every Dennis Miller a Deepak Chopra. As 27-year-old Purdy was growing up in West Virginia, New York may have appeared the City of Broad Cynics, but when Joan Didion (who lives there) dissected the Big Apple’s tabloid culture of the late 1980s, she found it sentimental to the core. Yes, Seinfeld came to live there, too, but who watched the show to identify with the cast? No, they were us minus the ability to feel and learn, their faulty personal navigations systems throwing them hilariously onto the rocks, unable to steer clear of the reefs even in a sea so placid that “nothing happens.”

My thesis here, that over the past decade ironic farce has been largely consumed as a side dish to sentimental earnestness, is borne out in pretty much every plot in the fiction of Douglas Coupland, from “Generation X” (supposed demon seed of uncaring irony) on. In “Microserfs,” the sarcastic patter of the young entrepreneur is interrupted by Dad at the door. Dad has been laid off by IBM, is reverting to childlike helplessness, is curled up on the couch with the football helmet of his other son, long dead, etc. Wicked nihilism this is not.

For further proof, see what Coupland wrote last week for a Canadian newspaper before we knew irony was dead. Yes, stranded on his book tour in Madison, Wisc., he trains his pop-ironic lens on the place, “serene and boring and blond and far away from big ticket U.S. targets like NASA, Disneyland ” And, no surprise, it’s a lot about Me. “I had this creepy feeling, the feeling that I might have fallen into a science fiction dream, one in which everyone on earth was forced to stay where they were on the morning of September 11, 2001.”

But the windup is idealism of Purdy-pleasing proportions: “Many ecologists say that the best thing that could happen to Western society would be for everyone to stay where they were for 20 years — no travel allowed. This way people would be forced to commit to local communities and issues and be forced to establish roots. … the era of socially and politically disengaged middle class roaming needs to end before true lasting ecological change is possible.”

So fine. Because I doubt shallow cynicism ever really did dominate the national mood, I’m happy to join in the chorus of goodbyes to the über-smartass, the kind of “ironist” so detached that heart and head were all but amputated.

Which, hopefully, now opens the way to a golden age of irony. The real stuff. The kind of irony that drove Socrates’ queries, the irony that lies at the heart of much great literature and great religion, the irony that pays attention to contradictions and embraces paradoxes, rather than wishing them away in an orgy of purpose and certainty. Whoever named Bush’s still murky plan of retaliation “Infinite Justice” was dangerously devoid of irony, not to mention a sense of Islamic theology.

Here is one dictionary definition of irony: “Incongruity between actual result of a sequence of events and the normal or expected result.” That kind of irony might note that America, for all its effort to shine a beacon of freedom throughout the world, is seen as an imperial oppressor by large swaths of the Islamic world. That kind of irony would wonder if in this new battle on behalf of freedom, we may rush to strip away civil liberties. That kind of irony would wonder whether this new kind of war, waged to make us safe from terrorist attacks, might plunge the world into a far more dangerous conflagration.

To note these ironies is to engage yourself in the grave purpose at hand and take some responsibility for helping to think it through — and that’s the opposite of ironic detachment.

Call it, then, Ironic Engagement. One 20-something who championed this is Randolph Bourne, a member of Generation Lost who died of influenza in 1918 at the close of the First World War. Bourne had opposed that war and predicted a spiral of more bloodshed to grow out of it. A brilliant social critic credited by some with fathering America’s counterculture, Bourne considered his sharpest tool irony. “The ironic life is a life keenly alert, keenly sensitive, reacting promptly with feelings of liking or dislike to each bit of experience, letting none of it pass without interpretation and assimilation, a life full and satisfying — indeed a rival of the religious life.”

“The ironist is ironical,” declared Bourne, “not because he does not care, but because he cares too much.”

The First World War, the so-called Great War, wiped away blithe optimism and made ironists of us all, argues historian Paul Fussell. His own ironic awakening came as an infantryman wading through gore during the Second World War, the so-called Good War. Just as there wasn’t much great about the first, there wasn’t anything wholesomely good about the second, Fussell argues in his memoir “Doing Battle.” “I’ve been an enemy for years of the concept of the ‘Good War’ and of all the sentimentalizing that’s done by people who didn’t fight it or who profited from it one way or another,” he told an interviewer for the Atlantic magazine. “It was absolutely necessary. Hitlerism had to be wiped out and so did the Japanese empire, no question about it. But all wars are horrible, and flimsy, superficial war talk is always extremely dangerous.”

If Bourne and Fussell make my case for a new dispassionate and skeptical Ironic Engagement, so too does Jedediah Purdy. He was quoted in the New York Times yesterday saying a little bit of irony might do the country a world of good at the moment: “In peaceful and prosperous times,” irony is a way of “keeping the passions in hibernation when there is not much for them to live on, but another kind of irony can also work to keep dangerous excesses of passion and self-righteousness and extreme conviction at bay.”

Some people, including the droll Michael Kinsley, find it ironic that Purdy would now embrace irony. Actually, however, Purdy said about the same thing in “For Common Things,” where he did side with an intelligent and resourceful irony against “the human reserves of pompous self-seriousness, and the leaden earnestness that always threatens to run molten.”

Yes, it’s going to run pretty molten over the next weeks and months to come, and so we had all better don our protective suits of irony.

Right now we are still, in a sense, sitting in an agonizing funeral and everyone knows it is not appropriate to laugh at funerals. That is why claims that we have entered a new age of sobriety so resonate. It won’t and can’t last. People need room to breathe out, to laugh. But, in one sense, to declare an end to irony is to close the coffin lid on laughter. As New York magazine editor Mark Horowitz said over the weekend, “I think it’s especially funny that the editors of Vanity Fair have become the new imams, spouting moral seriousness and declaring that all frivolity must come to an end. If tourism, real estate and finance in N.Y. collapse, then people will really be earnest and serious. If we lose our frivolity, that really is a victory for terrorists.”

If times do further darken and that frivolity gives way to a blacker form of humor, then a deeper sense of irony will certainly live there, as well. “Northern Ireland isn’t exactly a comedy capital,” allowed Mathew Mallon, writing in the Vancouver Sun on Saturday. But “as all my Belfast relatives will tell you, living in a constant state of terrorist siege tends to sharpen your sense of the absurd and ironic. … Out of misery comes humour, often of an ironic nature. It is a life affirming response.”

The day of the smartass shrug may be over. The sudden death of more than 6,000 countrymen will do that to a culture. But let us hope a golden age of irony, engaged irony, is upon us. It may be all that stands between us and tragic hubris.

By that point Harper had made a kind of toastmaster’s skit out of slagging his country while embracing the American way. Sample: “Canada appears content to become a second-tier socialistic country, boasting ever more loudly about its economy and social services to mask its second-rate status.”

And by that point he was well along in his avowed effort to build a new Canadian right-wing base upon (this may sound familiar) gun rights lobbies, anti-choice crusaders, fundamentalist churches and other social conservative groups. In this election, for example, Harper’s Conservatives drew a couple of candidates from Canada’s wing of Focus on the Family, Dr. James Dobson’s hard-right evangelical organization.

Where you tend to find such folks thickest on the ground is Harper’s home province of Alberta, it being Canada’s oil-rich version of Texas. Alberta’s values are so different from those of most Canadians, yet so appealing to Harper, that he once urged his fellow Albertans to build “a firewall” around the province to repel the secular humanist forces stalking the wilds of Canada beyond.

In his new job, of course, Harper is now in charge of the whole of Canada, which means, as someone suggested, that Toronto had better get ready to build its own firewall.

So yeah, U.S. conservatives have plenty of reason to happily assume that Canadians have finally gone all red state up here.

Except they haven’t. Not much at all, really. The funny thing about Harper is that the only way he could win was by talking, and looking, like he wasn’t so very conservative after all.

Never mind all of Harper’s previous talk of privatizing portions of Canada’s government-paid, universal healthcare system. This election Harper was Canadian Medicare’s staunch ally.

Given that the U.S.-led war in Iraq remains profoundly unpopular among Canadians, what about it? Still time to join in, you know? Naaah. Changed his mind on that, too. In a letter he sent to the Washington Times in December, he said, “On Iraq, while I support the removal of Saddam Hussein and applaud the efforts to establish democracy and freedom in Iraq, I would not commit Canadian troops to that country. I must admit great disappointment at the failure to substantiate pre-war intelligence information regarding Iraq’s possession of weapons of mass destruction.”

Some of Harper’s top people do happen to believe in creationism. Well, so what? Harper himself took pains to declare that he, personally, had “evolved.”

As the election wore on, it got pretty comical. Like when the notoriously stiff Harper suddenly traded his crisp white shirts, dark suits and blue ties for a mouse-gray turtleneck. Cool Canada indeed  circa 1978 at the ski lodge.

Meanwhile, the word went out to all Conservative candidates with ardently right-wing views about gays, guns, God, you name it: Stifle yourselves. The pronouncement even extended below the 49th parallel. In the later days of the election, e-mails started landing in the in boxes of American conservative pundits telling them to self-censor their public enthusiasm for Stephen Harper and what he was trying to pull off up here.

The problem, you see, is that nothing can sour a Canadian political candidate’s chances like a kind word from the general direction of George Bush. Proof: Just trying to be helpful, the Washington Times ran a Dec. 2 editorial heralding the coming of Stephen Harper, “the most pro-American leader in the Western world … If elected, Mr. Harper will quickly become Mr. Bush’s new best friend internationally and the poster boy for his ideal foreign leader.”

It’s the kind of endorsement you pray for in Canada — if you’re the opponent. Soon enough the television screens were full of Liberal Party ads quoting the Washington Times’ prediction that a Harper victory would “put a smile on President Bush’s face.” The ad voice-over follows with: “Well, at least someone will be happy, eh?”

Devastating as such ads were, and even with the turtleneck, Harper won. Why, then? I’m guessing you’re not wanting too nuanced a treatise on Canada’s parliamentary democracy, so let’s just boil it down to several facts:

1) The Liberal Party was mired in a tawdry corruption scandal. It involved the laundering and skimming of taxpayers’ money through various fraudulent initiatives supposedly meant to make French-speaking Quebec feel fonder of English-speaking Canada (as if that is likely to happen any time soon).

2) The American motto may be “Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” but up here it’s “Peace, order and good government. ” Catch those last two words. They’re the kicker for a reason. Canadians decided to punish a government for not being good. And they did. Which left the door open for the Conservatives to win enough votes to form a minority government.

3) The vote was split among four parties, with the Conservatives getting only 36 percent of the total vote. The other three parties are well to the left of the Conservatives, and the numbers of seats broke down like this: Conservatives: 124. Liberals: 102. Bloc Quebecois: 51. New Democratic Party: 29. Independent: 1.

Another way to look at it would be:

Conservatives who ran as if they weren’t very conservative: 124.

Everyone else who said they sure were a hell of a lot less conservative than the Conservatives: 183.

See why Canadians aren’t yet jamming the phone lines to find out how to move to Vermont or Marin County, Calif.?

Some left-leaning Canadians even prefer to take a reassuring lesson from Monday’s vote. After all, the Liberals had been in power for 12 years, were mired in muck, ran by all accounts one of the worst campaigns ever  and still the Conservatives couldn’t muster a majority government, which is what it takes to really call the shots and stay in power for more than a year or two.

And yet. Just two years ago, the perhaps not yet fully “evolved” Stephen Harper made certain Rove-esque statements to a group of influential Canadian right-wingers. In that 2003 address he laid out his long-term strategy for transforming Canadian politics along American, neoconservative lines. Key to building a new, broader base: the hot-button “family values” that Reagan and his successors have pushed so effectively.

“The real agenda and the defining issues have shifted from economic issues to social values,” said Harper. “Many traditional Liberal voters, especially those from key ethnic and immigrant communities, will be attracted to a party with strong traditional views of values and family. This is similar to the phenomenon of the ‘Reagan Democrats’ in the United States, who were so important in the development of that conservative coalition.”

In the speech, Harper told his followers to be patient, to be satisfied with “the incrementalist approach” to fighting the culture war he was proposing. Seen from that perspective, Canada’s new prime minister has just somewhat stealthily moved his country a significant increment further down the neoconservative road.

The day after the election, people were buzzing about when Harper would go to Washington for his photo op, one of those manly, beaming handshakes with President Bush. The ones most eager to see it happen seemed to be the ones gunning to topple Harper’s minority government the first chance possible.

Anyway, your sudden interest in your northern neighbor has not gone unnoticed up here. We’ve all seen that cute map showing “The United States of Canada,” combining your blue states and Canada and cutting loose the red states of “Jesusland.” We did note that Canada’s main immigration Web site got swamped by U.S. traffic when Bush won. And just yesterday the CBC (sorta like NPR) reported that a local law firm, its phone ringing off the hook, is “planning how-to-come-to-Canada seminars” for “Bush refugees.”

Prepare to be welcomed with open arms. Literally, in the case of Marry an American, a wry Web concoction by the editors of Toronto-based This Magazine. Sample: “If George W. Bush is re-elected, single, sexy, American liberals — already a threatened species — will be desperate to escape. These lonely, afraid (did we mention really hot?) progressives will need a safe haven. You can help. Open your heart, and your home. Marry an American.”

Before you pack up the Prius for that endless ski vacation, though, I should warn you. When it comes to political struggle up here, it’s not like you’re going to get a lot of R&R. But more about that in a minute.

No doubt, Canadians feel your pain. Two-thirds of them, according to a Time magazine Canada poll, believed your choice of president would affect their lives at least as much as the election of their own prime minister. And two-thirds were pulling for Kerry versus 19 percent for Bush.

So now that the deed is done, no need to be polite about Dubya around Canadians. Nearly eight out of 10 here say he runs “a rogue nation,” and most adults under 35 believe America has become “a force for evil in the world,” according to another October poll (this one conducted by the Dominion Institute and the Canadian Defence and Foreign Affairs Institute, and reported by the Canwest news service). Global warming, AIDS, even SARS, are more scary to Canadians than terrorism, the survey found. The vast majority would rather spend new tax money on healthcare and education than the military, and 40 percent think Switzerland has it right: “focus on being a great place to live rather than working on international issues.”

How blue can you get, eh?

Can I mention a sensitive name? Ralph Nader likes us so much he wrote a book called “Canada Firsts,” chockablock with Canadian achievements. Guess who invented the first publicly owned utility, the first credit union, the first social club, the variable pitch propeller, pabulum, standard time and the first rotary snowplow? Better believe it.

Along the way, Canada also developed its own political culture, the one you find so alluring just now. Politics is a hardball sport here, make no mistake, but the voter spectators aren’t driven plumb nuts by the game. Part of the reason is the parliamentary system, where the parties and their platforms outweigh cults of personality.

Part of the reason, too, may be a different rural history. In America’s hinterlands, the famous “paranoid style” of politics has been stoked into blazing fear and resentment. But not nearly so much across the Canadian prairies, which historically have given rise to great, empowering cooperative movements. Universal healthcare up here started in Saskatchewan’s wheat basket. It’s the philosophical cousin to the Wheat Pool co-op and the chicken growers’ cartel that makes me pay 10 bucks for a scrawny fryer — but it keeps the lights on in Moose Jaw.

Whatever the reasons, “the central difference” between Canada and the United States, writes political philosopher Joseph Heath, “is that the majority of Canadians have no ideological opposition to government.”

Heath’s book “The Efficient Society” is his attempt to explain why, year after year, the U.N. Human Development Index ranks Canada among the tiptop nations on earth to live, well ahead of America in most respects. “We do not love the state, but neither do we fear it. Thus we get all the benefits of a loosely regulated economy while also enjoying the massive improvements in social welfare that can be organized and delivered only by government. This has proven to be a winning formula.”

Boring, I know. Except Canada keeps cranking out social experiments way too daring for Americans. Same-sex marriage? Legal in six provinces. Guns? Gotta be licensed and registered. Kyoto? Check. Executing prisoners? No way. School funding? Tying that to local property taxes would be illogical, so poor neighborhoods get the same school funding as rich ones, or more. Cannabis? Canada was the first nation to allow marijuana as medicine, and our Senate says pot should be legal. Heroin? Um, I go by a government-funded safe-injection site on the way to work every day in downtown Vancouver. Soon a trial experiment prescribing the stuff to hardcore addicts will be underway.

Still bored? What if I told you the crack smokers are jealous? They want their own safe smoking rooms and have organized a protest.

Maybe you figure the reason you didn’t hear so much about this before is that Canadians are famously self-effacing. Don’t believe it. Michael Ignatieff, the international affairs darling of the New York Times and a Canadian now roosting at Harvard, boasts that his home and native land has, of all the nations on earth, done the best at solving civil unrest by negotiating the delicate balance between group rights and individual ones.

And Joseph Heath hardly holds back. Canada isn’t just the efficient society. It is “perhaps the most efficient on Earth,” which is why “life in Canada is so good.” It’s a hot brand these days, Cool Canada, sold by a slick new Web site called CanadianAlternative.com. Its slogan: “Progressive. Prosperous. Inclusive. Feel at home in Canada.”

I guess what I’m driving at is, when you get here, don’t bring the typical American attitude that I hastily unpacked and wore to social gatherings. I’m talking about believing Canada is lucky to have you. Your American pluck, verve, swagger, whatever. It doesn’t wear well, especially now that Bush has worn it out. A more Canadian credo: Power grows out of a barrel of passive aggression. As the new Yank in town, your route to popularity lies in just making a lot of fun of your backward origins and expressing a latent but suddenly blossoming fascination with hockey.

Don’t point out, either, Canada’s complicity in America’s global reach. To harp on the fact that Canada depends on America to buy more of its exports than anyone else, or that America’s massive military has, in unseemly ways, enforced global economic arrangements that benefit Canada is to really cast a pall over a salmon barbecue party.

It’s kind of embarrassing for Canadians that they buy a lot of their military gear secondhand (a rusty old submarine fobbed off on them by the Brits recently caught fire, killing a sailor off the U.K.) And, true, by leaving it to America to run up the big weapons tab, Canada has forfeited much chance of being a real player when the world gets carved up at the big security summits. But then, that leaves a hell of a lot of public funds for spending more, er, efficiently on that ongoing Switzerlandization project.

I guess the last point I’d make, despite all the exciting stuff at the top of this note, is that I hope you’re not expecting to arrive here and settle into some kind of relaxing political hot tub. It’s more like ice fishing a tad too late in the spring. The bluish surface keeps shifting beneath your feet, and you never can feel sure it’s not about to give way.

Canada’s got its right-wing media barons, its right-wing think tanks, its tax revolters and Bible Belters. Its biggest province by far, Ontario, is digging out from a nine-year neoconservative reign sold as “the Common Sense Revolution,” which left infrastructure crumbling, social programs slashed, homeless ranks swelling after welfare rolls were purged. Even before that, if you didn’t like Reagan, you wouldn’t have liked his Irish conservative soul mate of the same era, Prime Minister Brian Mulroney.

When I moved to British Columbia in 1992, imagine my surprise that the birthplace of Greenpeace had elected as its leader a Christian fundamentalist who owned a theme park called Fantasy Gardens. Scandal cleared the way for his replacement: a real live social democratic government. For a decade, the New Democrats survived relentlessly negative media, infighting and a rough economy until scandal cleared the way for a neoconservative government. Which immediately plunged itself into massive debt by issuing a huge tax cut to the rich. Sound familiar?

Over the last three years, I, California child of Reagan, have been forced to endure Laffer curve déjà vu, to watch British Columbia’s true-believer neocons hand over publicly owned, profitable assets, including a whole railroad, to private companies, many of them with names you will recognize, for many are American. Homeless and food-bank numbers are up, and B.C.’s “Super Natural” forests are being mowed down at a record rate, their raw logs shipped posthaste south of the border to U.S. mills.

“It’s like going from Texas to Sweden to Texas,” I told mystified American friends on a recent visit. “I’m developing political whiplash.”

So no, don’t arrive here expecting refuge from the battles waged and lost so devastatingly this time around in the United States of America. The same battles rage, in their own Canadian way, right here. And the fate of the American expat can be to feel like the canary in the coal mine, constantly wanting to sound the alarm that Canadians, having made such precious gains, seem determined to fumble them away out of restlessness, inattention or pique.

Tempering that cold reality (and did I mention Canada can be damn cold?) is a spirit more deliberative, more accommodating — yes, more civil — living in the Canadian political soul. It means that while Democrats search America today for any sign of hope, they would find in Canada many, many reasons for optimism.

Anyway, the key’s under the mat. Get yourself a good lawyer and let yourself in.

All of this construct collapsed in a smoking heap as the assault on America’s institutions of military and financial power apparently went off as diabolically planned. On CNN, anchor Judy Woodruff, her eyes stricken, kept asking Pentagon and congressional experts how such destruction could be visited upon “places we thought invulnerable.” What to say, she asked, to Americans feeling “betrayed” because they thought the United States was the safest country in the entire world. There is no reassurance available to Woodruff or her viewers, of course, because there was never any rational reason to believe the United States out of harm’s way.

Nevertheless, this psychology of immunity was carefully reconstructed after Vietnam, after, that is, certain decisions by U.S. leaders left ordinary Americans with too many dead sons. As the nation shrank back in weary horror, president Jimmy Carter thought he knew how to reassure that safety and calm now lay ahead. He tried to shift America’s foreign stance away from the aggressively interventionist postures of Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon before him — and soon found himself looking ineffectual in Central America, Afghanistan and Iran. The sight of Americans held hostage in Tehran by Muslim fundamentalists didn’t play. Americans already felt weak and vulnerable; what they wanted was to feel strong and invincible.

That is what Ronald Reagan so clearly understood. And that is what, through words and images and budgets, he delivered to the national psyche. He set about mounting the largest peacetime military buildup in American history, including the B-1 and Stealth bombers and 16,000 new nuclear warheads to be added to a variety of new missile systems. That was the “strong” part. The “invincible” part was called the Strategic Defense Initiative, dubbed Star Wars. If his saber rattling at the Soviets meant an increased fear of nuclear attack at home, Reagan offered his space shield, “the means,” he said in a televised speech, “of rendering these nuclear weapons impotent and obsolete.” One version would use X-ray lasers pumped from nuclear explosions aboard satellites. It was named Excalibur.

Almost everything that has come after that speech of March 23, 1983, has worked to confirm, rather than undermine, the message that America was free to involve itself in other nations’ troubles without bringing the violence of war home.

We have, of course, the prime lesson of Desert Storm, the showcase for all those high-tech weapons systems Reagan funded into existence. In the days just before, America held its breath at the high casualties predicted. Public support split right down the middle even as the first jets strafed Baghdad. But with every new image of robot “smart” bombs doing the dangerous work, with every grinning U.S. aviator speaking of a “turkey shoot,” public support zoomed up. By the time CNN panned over the smear of immolated Iraqi bodies on the 60-mile stretch of road out of Jahra, Kuwait, the verdict was clear. America was able to wage war on a grand scale against the fourth largest army in the world and suffer only a handful of casualties among its own fighting ranks.

This is not recalled as an indictment of that war’s aims, nor certainly in sympathy for Saddam’s despotic rule. The point is to note the enormous disconnect communicated by Desert Storm. America could act with impunity, leaving Americans to turn their gaze back to the domestic pleasures of a surging economy.

Naturally, the war would leave a residue of hatred in Iraq among those not only bombed but among the tens of thousands more starved and killed by disease due to years of sanctions, but this was not much of a concern for Americans because to us it seemed to be a fact without immediate, personal consequences. Every once in a while, as the years unspooled, President Clinton would order the firing from some aloof aircraft a cruise missile into a military target in Iraq, a measure which inevitably killed some of the populace surrounding the target, but risked no American lives. And news of the event would quickly evaporate from page and screen in this part of the world.

When the World Trade Center towers blew up for the first time in 1993 the lesson was again perversely reassuring to our psychology of immunity. The towers, so technologically sound, stood. The losses were tragic but on the scale of a train wreck, nothing bespeaking “America under attack.” The culprits were caught and they looked the part of catchable crooks, with a blind leader no less. Security was beefed up and life went on.

When the Federal Building in Oklahoma blew up, the lesson was, for different reasons, again perversely reassuring to the psychology of immunity. After a spasm of concern that the Jihad had really come to God’s country, it was learned that the perpetrator was one of America’s homegrown nuts. He had not attacked from without. He had bored from within. And the nation’s sleuths, so smart, so high-tech, had caught him in record time.

America is now presided over by a president who is the son of the commander in chief of Desert Storm, and who has proposed his own “Son of Star Wars.” His secretary of state, who conducted Desert Storm, crafted the Powell Doctrine, which holds that the military shall never involve itself in a war unless the enemy is clearly defined, the U.S. public is clearly in support, and the firepower available is so overwhelming as to assure victory with a minimum of casualties. This is a relatively new definition of the threshold for war, and speaks to how gingerly U.S. leaders feel they must treat their citizenry’s feeling of safety and well-being. There hasn’t been much appetite for risk, not for a long time, not since Vietnam.

And so George W. Bush has made his top military and foreign policy priority the creation of a $100 billion mechanism for knocking down a handful of missiles lobbed at America by one or another “rogue nation.” The psychological need for such a national missile defense system was well spelled out in the New Republic by senior editor Lawrence Kaplan. America must play policeman in an unruly world, Kaplan asserts, yet Americans aren’t likely to go along if the risks seem too tangible at home. A Bush National Security Council expert frets aloud that without NMD, countries with nuclear long-range missiles could “hold American and allied cities hostage and thereby deter us from intervention.” A Rand report calls missile defense “not simply a shield but an enablerof U.S. action.”

“In other words,” sums up Kaplan, “missile defense is about preserving America’s ability to wield power abroad. It’s not about defense. It’s about offense. And that’s exactly why we need it.”

But selling Americans on the dream of a world kept in line, and reshaped, by America will be a lot tougher now. Our psychology of immunity blasted, we are likely to examine the consequences in a far harsher, new light.

What yesterday’s terrible events demonstrate, for example, is the folly of believing a shield against “rogue nations” is anything but a psychological illusion. Given that some 50,000 people worked in the World Trade towers, the death toll may well reach nuclear proportions. And if Osama Bin Laden’s shadowy multinational underground is in fact responsible, the enemy is nothing like a nation, rogue or not.

Yesterday, in between the gut-churning images of jumbo jets crashing into New York’s monoliths and the carnage and wreckage below, there began arriving TV scenes of Palestinian men, women and children cheering the news. The sight was made even more chilling by the sight of their supposed leader condemning the act in a quivering voice. The celebrants, who live in a neighborhood wracked by fighting over the last year, are but the latest to live far, far from the daily lives of Americans, and to believe that they are at war with the United States. The people of the United States either did not know it, or we knew it but felt sure it could not affect us right where we live. Neither can be true anymore.

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Deepak Chopra, the spiritual instructor who appears on Larry King and Oprah, the alternative healer with the handsome looks of a Bollywood movie star, the personal source of inspiration to Michael Jackson, Naomi Judd and Bill Clinton, has sold 10 million books.

Here is some of what Chopra, a former endocrinologist in Boston hospitals, believes and teaches: