Nine eleven. Like Easter in our own lexicon, October in the Russian, or the quatorze juillet, the date has acquired a special meaning. Politics, business, much of life for ordinary Americans is now described in pre- and post-9/11 terms. "Nine one one" was what you rang for emergency service, but now, because of the curious local habit of inverting day and month in dates, it is more.
It is a defining point, the moment when America was shaken awake to a consciousness of the dangerous world we all live in. The day when, as President Bush acknowledged, "an illusion of immunity was shattered".
All were touched. And all is invested with a new significance.
Thanksgiving became about America the brave. Buying a car or taking a flight became an act of patriotism, as did going for a weekend break to the theatre in New York. Flags were ubiquitous.
TV series built in new plot-line references to the disaster. Even comedians tested the water with care before launching new Osama material. The latest trendy singles hotspot is a volunteer job at Ground Zero serving coffee to those heroic firemen. Children wear their FDNY baseball caps.
All grist to the politicians' mills. As the Democrats fell in step, President Bush let it be known that he considered so-called "fast-track" trade-negotiating authority a matter of national security. As was digging for oil in the Arctic.
And as he rolled out a new armoury of emergency legislation, Attorney General John Ashcroft bluntly told those who would oppose it they were giving succour to the enemy. Bin Laden may have brought down the WTC, but he never, realistically, threatened the constitution, and yet, those few critics who dared to challenge the national consensus argued, Ashcroft now certainly is.
But they were few. Even on the campuses, hotbeds of the movement against globalisation, opposition was muted and members of the ROTC officer training clubs were reporting that suddenly there was a new acceptability to the wearing of a uniform on campus. Students did protest against the war mood, as did sections of the progressive movement, but in very small numbers.
The burgeoning anti-globalisation coalition of students, workers, NGOs, environmentalists, minorities lost huge sections of its constituency as labour organisations reflected the anger of their base: construction workers, firemen, catering workers, public service workers and janitors had died in their hundreds. Some unions were calling for blood.
Even in the house journal of the left, The Nation, scourge of both reactionary Republicans and weak-kneed Democrats, a bitter controversy raged. Columnist Christopher Hitchens, whose latest but one book is an appeal for the trial of Henry Kissinger on war crimes charges - no wimp, he - duelled with classic anti-imperialist Noam Chomsky over whether the left should support the US campaign. Describing bin Laden as representing "Islamic fascism", Hitchens argued that to blame the US for 9/11 was a moral cop-out in the face of appalling evil.
The truth is, like it or not, a country in real pain, half of which still had real doubts about the post-Florida legitimacy of its President, rallied to George Bush, a figure who seemed visibly to grow in stature, losing almost magically his propensity for gaffes, as he successfully articulated the pain of the country. For the first time his words resonated - America would "bring the terrorists to justice, or justice to the terrorists".
And to his credit, Bush went out of his way to embrace American Muslims, already under attack from bigots. His friends insist this is the real Bush, that all the time, in his own classic malapropism, we had been "misunderestimating" him. "All the doubters and cynics will say he's changed," Governor John Rowland of Connecticut argues. "He's not changed. I'll argue that till death. What you see is what you get." Others make a virtue of Bush's widely perceived limitations. "My personal view is that complexity in a leader is not a helpful thing," Representative Roy Blunt, a Missouri Republican who is a close friend, says, "and certainly not a helpful thing in a crisis."
"It's aged the hell out of him," Governor William J. Janklow of South Dakota, a Republican who for years has been close to Bush and his parents, told the New York Times. "Look at his hair. Look at the lines on his face. It's incredible, the toll. He's the only guy in history who had to take lessons to get that smirk off his face. He's a jokester. But right now he's probably consciously trying to avoid that stuff. He sees the mortality of himself and others. The fact that he lives in a building where an airplane may have been heading to blow him up - that would weigh on you enormously."
What has served Bush undoubtedly most effectively, however, is the cabinet of many talents and much experience with which he had surrounded himself - precisely to counter the charges of insubstantiality on his own part.
Colin Powell in State and Donald Rumsfeld in Defence are poles apart politically, and both were beginning to face criticism for ineffectiveness before September 11th. But both came into their own when it came to reassuring a rattled public and to steadying the boat with regular authoritative public appearances that have been a novel feature of the management of the war at home. Powell's rapid success in mobilising an international coalition stole the initiative from the hawks around Rumsfeld and Vice-President Dick Cheney. Multilateralism appeared to have been vindicated, although its critics in the columns of the right-wing press lost no opportunity to blame Powell's wimpishness for the "slow" pace of the military campaign. In retrospect such criticisms of what was an extraordinarily effective military campaign appear foolish.
The issue that really divided them, however, remains on the table - Iraq, and the expansion of the war aims to toppling Saddam Hussein. It is a road, I suspect however, that Bush will be reluctant to go down guns blazing despite his manifest unilateralist tendencies, manifested again recently in his repudiation of the ABM treaty. Success on the war front, and continued poll ratings for his conduct of it of near 90 per cent, have not been so easily matched domestically, where approval ratings languish in the 60s. Democratic bipartisanship in passing the $318 billion defence budget for next year and in the largely token opposition to Ashcroft's special powers did not survive long on domestic issues, particularly as the President insisted that bipartisanship meant doing things his way.
Mindful of the need to put blue water between them ahead of next year's congressional elections, the Democrats have used their Senate majority to argue that Bush may have won the war abroad but is losing that on the economy and have targeted his tax cuts to huge corporations. This is paying off, but they have a long way to go if they want to block the Bush second term.
Bush has also had a bumpier ride on the anthrax investigation. The wave of letter attacks against the media and politicians seemed to confirm the picture of bin Laden as the ultimate evil, until it gradually dawned that these were almost certainly the work, like the Oklahoma bombing, of a solitary home-grown opportunist, perhaps even ex-military. Above all it served to illustrate the extraordinary vulnerability of American society, not so much to weapons of mass destruction as to the power of fear.
To date only five have died of anthrax, but the psychological effect compounded that of 9/11 and in some ways even surpassed it. The bill in financial terms ran to billions as the Administration rushed to order supplies of drugs for anthrax and even worse horrors like smallpox. Unlike the investigation of 9/11, which within hours produced thousands of leads, the anthrax inquiries have drawn a huge blank.
And if the Afghan war is largely over, as the Administration keeps reminding us, the war against terrorism will go on for years. The return to what has been called "normalcy" can only be partial, as Dick Cheney admitted recently. "Many of the steps we have been forced to take will become permanent in American life," he said. "They represent an understanding of the world as it is, and dangers we must guard against, perhaps for decades to come. I think of it as the new normalcy."
psmyth@irish-times.ie