Peggy Noonan

Everyone here now asks, “Where will you be?” They don’t say “on Sept. 11.” They don’t have to. Everyone knows. Most everyone has a plan. Some people are leaving town. They just don’t want to go through it again, through the nonstop TV and the weeping families and the memory of the smoke and the sound and the sight of it all. A lot of people are staying, of course. Those who are working, or going to school; those who can’t leave, or won’t. I’m one of the latter. I feel a kind of loyalty to that day, and those who suffered through it, and I’m not leaving.

So on Wednesday, on Sept. 11, 2002, I plan to walk across the Brooklyn Bridge before dawn. I will, as I pass under its two heavy stone towers—the original twin towers of downtown Manhattan, and still the most beautiful—reach out my hand and touch them lightly, as you would the arm of an old friend.

On the Manhattan side of the bridge I will make my way to Ground Zero, and watch the sun come up at dawn. I don’t know why. I just want to see the new beginning of a new day at the place that was the World Trade Center. I want to see the sun rise and light the skyscrapers all around it.

I will carry in my pocket a little metal cross about two inches high, and a little metal heart the same size. They’re twisted and bear burn marks, like pots left too long on the stove.

*   *   *

One night after Sept. 11 I went to a church near the site. I poured coffee for construction workers and Con Ed guys on the overnight shift. A construction worker who’d been at the site since Sept. 11, first trying to find and save people, then trying to clean up, walked up to me. He was a big man in work clothes with a hardhat. He looked beat. He told me he had read my columns, and he told me he’d heard I was here, pouring coffee. He said, “I have something for you.” And he pulled from a soft brown paper bag the little cross and the little heart. He had cut them from a beam that held up one of the towers.

To me they were like an old bullet pulled from the ground of Gettysburg, a treasure of history. When people come to my house and see them on the wall, they’re always silent after I tell the story.

I’m going to bring them with me, back to where they came from, on Sept. 11. I’ll probably look at where the towers used to be and think, “The buildings were here. A year ago today they were here. And then they became the cross and the heart.”

*   *   *

A year ago on Sept. 11 it was so beautiful, just the most beautiful day. The school year had just started, and kids downtown were being walked to class. They heard the first plane. They were walking on the sidewalk when the shadow of the plane passed over them.

Where would we be if the shadow hadn’t come, if 8:46 a.m. that day had not happened? Where would we be if the whole day had been as peaceful as its start?

We’d be where we were on Sept. 10, 2001.

On Sept. 10, 2001 we were, a lot of us, immersed in a national culture—a big, vivid, full-network, broadband, opens-soon-at-a-theater-near-you culture—that allowed us to live knee deep in distraction. What’s on tonight, who’s pitching, when are The Sopranos back, who won, when does the sale start? There was nothing inherently wrong in this—fun is part of life, or should be, and entertainment, art and sports are worthy endeavors. But for a lot of us our emphasis was off. We weren’t paying attention to core things, essential things, first things. We were staring at the peripheral, missing the big picture.

And then Sept. 11 came. The demonic cloud chased modernity down the street. It chased businessmen down the tall and narrow pathways of downtown Manhattan, a city that lives on the periphery of the continent but is at the core of its commercial life, its art, its hedonism and hipness, its focused and full-throttled pursuit of the tangential.

Thousands died. The buildings disappeared. And were transmuted into the cross and the heart.

*   *   *

The heart, to me, stands for the explosion of human sympathy, kindness, forgivingness and generosity that came from the people of our city starting at 8:46 a.m. on Sept. 11, 2001. It’s been—and here I think, oddly, not of an American word but of the highest accolade used by an old friend from New Zealand—brilliant. Brilliant and shining. You all know the stories—the friendliness on the streets, the helpfulness to strangers, the millions of volunteers, the money given, the hands held.

The cross stands for a renewed sense of the centrality of the spiritual in our lives. People say it was fleeting, but I don’t think so, and I base this simply on my interactions with friends, family and acquaintances who are New Yorkers. Something big happened here. The spiritual was reborn. It started with the spontaneous shrines that filled the city sidewalks last September and it has continued with a greater sense of individual pondering. People are thinking about God. I believe I have witnessed from so many people an enhanced sense of the sacredness of ordinary things, and a greater ability to see grace at work in the lives of others, and ourselves.

This week Newsweek had the story of the boy in the red bandana. He was a young man in the north tower who didn’t think first of his own safety after the planes hit, but tried to help strangers. He pointed them to exits in the smoky corridors, led them down the stairs, carried a woman on his back. He was last seen going up the stairs as others walked down. They found out later who he was, a 24-year-old equities trader. Life is rich and unknowable: You don’t know when you’ll accidentally bump into hell, you don’t know what angel you might meet there.

*   *   *

“He was last seen going up the stairs.” Those are famous words here now. Usually we say it about the firemen. It’s going to be a long time before we get used to the idea that 343 of them lost their lives that day. Or rather gave them.

Those 343—they were mostly tough Catholic men with soft hearts from the outer boroughs. They were Italians and Irish and Poles and Puerto Ricans, and they lined up for absolution, received a blessing and ran into the buildings lugging their gear. Their funerals were at Our Lady Queen of Peace, and St. Rose of Lima Church. And sometimes at the funerals they played an old ‘70s song whose title you’ll never hear the same way again: “Stairway to Heaven.”

The other day I got a letter from the mother of Michael Dermott Mullan, Ladder 12, Engine 3, 19th Chelsea. He was a graduate of Holy Cross High School, a registered nurse attending Hunter College School of Nursing, a captain in the U.S. Army Reserves stationed at Fort Totten, and a New York City fireman. He must have been some guy, Michael Mullen. His mother wanted all of us to know who he was. She wrote, “He was dedicated to the well being and protection of his fellow man.” She wrote, “He was second generation Irish by way of County Tipperary, County Down and County Kerry.” She wrote, “He loved his God, his Country, his family and his city.”

Michael Mullan called from his truck on the way to the Trade Center the morning of the attacks. “He called to tell us, ‘I love you. Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye.’ Michael never said goodbye—it wasn’t a part of him to think goodbye, he would always say, ‘See you later,’ or ‘Take care.’ But that fateful day he said goodbye to his family.” His body was found on Oct. 7. Then the Mullan family found out about his last hours. After Michael called home he bowed his head and, with a friend on the rig, prayed. Michael and his crew went to the Marriott Hotel, next to the Trade Center. It had been badly damaged, and later collapsed. They made their way to the upper floors and then were ordered out by their lieutenant. The way was blocked, but they found a path down. Then word came there were two firemen on a higher floor who couldn’t find a way down. “Michael’s last spoken words,” his mother said, “were, ‘I’ll go back and get them.’ ”

He was probably last seen going up the stairs. He was a man of the heart and the cross.

*   *   *

And the flag. For that was the other things that re-emerged, the explosion of America-love.

We had been losing it as a society, and for a long time.

The immigrants of a century ago arrived to a flag flying culture. They were told that they were investing their lives, their futures, their unseen grandchildren in something high and good and decent. Free speech was here, the free practice of religion, democracy, the ballot, free markets—everyone, from the brilliant and altruistic to the bright and merely greedy, could get in on the great bazaar, and make his way. What a country—all that freedom and the streets were paved with gold.

They were taught to love America by the culture all around them—the penny newspapers, George M. Cohan, John Philip Sousa, the nascent movie industry, the stage, the schools—taught a burly America-love.

Which was good. Because when you don’t love something you lose it.

We were losing it. But now the flags are out again, and loving America isn’t considered a faux pas, or evidence of limited intellect. The thing now is to see it doesn’t degenerate into mere conceit: “We’re No. 1, we have the best tanks.” That’s triumphalism. Patriotism is solid and grounded; it holds up the ideal of a nation founded on the equality of men; it has to do with founding documents, guaranteed freedoms, clear rights, stated responsibilities. That’s what the flag stands for.

It’s certainly how Michael Mullan must have seen it. And the boy in the red bandana, too.

And that in the end is my Sept. 11, a trauma that was transmuted into a heart and a cross and a flag. Each expressing a facet of a great and fabled people who are still, one year after, the hope of the world.

This is written for you to read when you come back from vacation, either this weekend or next week if that applies. So just park it if you like, and come back.

I want only to say: Welcome back.

Maybe you are tired, and need a vacation from your vacation. Or maybe you’re a little sad that vacation is over—it was so wonderful, like a gift. Or maybe you feel a little disheartened—you planned for months and arrived at the hotel and it rained and the kids fussed and work called and nothing was really . . . peaceful. And that’s what you wanted, peace, harmony and love.

But: Welcome back. Put down your bags. Uncrick your neck. Wonderful things are about to happen.

*   *   *

I have no particular standing to welcome you but someone should, and I have nominated me.

I have been home in Brooklyn the past few weeks. I have been keeping the city safe for you. So has Tomas, who works in the Garden of Eden food shop in Brooklyn Heights. He is from Mexico. He did not have a vacation this summer. He worked, stocking produce and removing products that approached their expiration date. When I talked to him he was spraying the lettuce with water so it would look fresh and bright. He was in a happy mood, and so was I. We have been preparing the city for your return and have had a good time doing it. Everything has been slow and non-intense. Now, as you return, everything will pick up. We’re glad. We missed you.

*   *   *

So: You just got home from the beach, or the lake, or your aunt’s guest house outside Knoxville, Tennessee.

You unlock the front door, walk into the living room and put down your stuff, your gear—dirty clothes, boogie boards, portable CD players, a backpack full of books, a bag of corn.

You open the windows, put on the air conditioner, get the air moving. The house smells unlived in. It smells the way empty houses smell when the real estate agent unlocks the door.

You’ll cook something soon and the house will get back its people live here smell.

You pick up the mail. Bills, circulars, a post card from Paris. Sale day at JC Penney. School supplies at Tarjay.

Realize: It is the beginning of the year. Not the end, but the beginning. This is when school starts. It’s when college begins. It’s when the new secretary begins work, and when the new vice president at the bank takes over Gil’s old office.

It’s when you return to a new year.

It’s when the latest first impressions you get to make will be made. It’s when the government returns, the network anchors return. They will need news. The government will supply it.

It’s when the new leather of shoes smells fresh. You’ll shop for loafers for the kids tomorrow and pick up one and smell it and every autumn of your life will come back—every autumn. You will half swoon.

Autumn is the beginning of everything.

*   *   *

Are you ready to begin again? It takes a bit of courage on some level, doesn’t it?

Don’t worry. No one else is ready either. You don’t have to be. Autumn just comes one night at 3:11 a.m., and you step into it in the morning and are in it and running.

This year the thought of autumn fills me with some kind of longing. On the days now that it’s cooler than 80 degrees in New York I walk with a spring in my step. I miss autumn, my favorite time of year, and the tenderest time in New York. The parks, never more beautiful than they have been the past few years, are at their most beautiful. The Museum of Natural History and the Metropolitan Museum hang big colorful sheets with the names of upcoming shows from their facades. They billow like sails. They move in the breeze. When the wind is high you can stand under them and hear them snap. All the outdoor vegetable and fruit stands have new bounty and color. All the kids are rushing to school in their very newest faded jeans and distressed cotton shirts.

We haven’t had an autumn in New York in two years. We lost last September last year. It was the summer of ‘01, and then before the leaves could turn it was the trauma of ‘01, and we woke up six months later, in the spring. So all those tender leaves—they didn’t register. I would walk along the streets and think of the old song from The Fantasticks: “Try to remember the kind of September when life was an ember about to billow.” It was sad here as summer elided into winter.

But this year we will have autumn, and we will notice it. This is good.

*   *   *

We will of course mark Sept. 11. A big question people here ask is: Will the non-stop all-network Sept. 11 memorials on TV do harm or good? Is it wallowing? Do we need closure? I think for those fully mature, fully stable people who have successfully absorbed the past year, the TV stuff won’t hurt. And for those feeling deep wounds and damage, for those who have not so far successfully absorbed, the memorials may help. In any case they’ll happen, and we’ll watch them.

*   *   *

The other day I walked by Saint Vincent’s Hospital in downtown Manhattan and thought, as I always do when I walk by: This is where they waited for the wounded. The interns and nurses waited outside right here with gurneys for patients who didn’t come. Because so few people were “wounded.” The three thousand were dead. What happened to them? They were exploded into air. They became a cloud. We breathed them in.

None of us here in New York will ever “get over it,” as they say. But most of us have gotten over it. We continued our lives and enjoy them, and if you go to any restaurant in the five boroughs there will be laughing and flirting and people joking and being intelligent and enjoying the food.

*   *   *

The other day I had lunch with two men who run a company that lost 61 people on Sept. 11. Sixty one out of less than 300! They suffered. They were on the 84th floor of Tower Two. A wing from the second plane probably tore into their floor. They’re having a memorial on Sept. 11 and they asked me to speak. I don’t know what I’ll say. No one, really, knows what to say that day. That’s why the politicians and governmental leaders will be reading the Gettysburg Address.

We talked at lunch about what that day had been for them. One, Brian, who had been an office fire marshal, had helped a man trapped under debris and then, he still doesn’t know why, walked down and out of the tower instead of up. He lived. So did the man he helped from the debris. The only person Brian saw walking up in the tower as he was walking down from the 84th floor was a co-worker named Jose. Jose worked in plant management and security. He had a walkie talkie in his hand. He was going up the stairs because he’d heard from another co-worker who was trapped above. He went up to find and help the trapped co-worker. Jose died, and so did the man he was going to help.

A week later Brian had a dream. He dreamt that he was sleeping soundly in his bed when he woke and saw Jose standing at the foot of the bed, dressed in a kind of billowing white shirt, or gown, and he was fine, and he wanted Brian to know it was all all right. Brian was astonished in the dream, and blinked his eyes wide. Then he awoke for real, blinking his eyes wide, with his head off the pillow and tilted forward, as it would have been if he had really been looking at a man standing at the foot of his bed.

Classic wish fulfillment. Or something else.

I asked him what he thought it meant.

“That Jose is all right,” Brian said. “That they’re all fine, all those who died. And that we’ll be fine too.”

*   *   *

People here keep asking each other if they’ve changed since Sept. 11. I say I think I’ve just become more so. Everything is provisional and tentative. Everything is infused with grace. Life can turn on a dime. There are levels of mystery we don’t understand. Life is good in and of itself. These to me are facts that, once you have absorbed them, leave you moving on, and appreciating the moment you’re in, and looking forward to steak and Merlot and the brightness of friends.

*   *   *

Life is here.

It is a new year.

Breathe in that new shoe leather, get those new school supplies, make that pie, rearrange those clothes, get out those suits, retire those sandals, line up those pencils, make that appointment, call that meeting, start that diet, gas up the car. It is good to be alive. Sleep good tonight, and deep. Tomorrow you just might step into autumn, which is the beginning of everything.

The Gore-Lieberman feud is a minor political classic, something to read the newspaper for in this so-far-quiet August. The Republicans are enjoying it because it’s Democrats fighting. Al Gore and Joseph Lieberman are enjoying it because everyone’s watching them, which underscores their view that they’re the two most interesting men in the party. And the other Democrats who are thinking of getting in the ring like it because Mr. Gore may bloody Mr. Lieberman and Mr. Lieberman may bruise Mr. Gore but no one’s hurting them.

To recap: Messrs. Gore and Lieberman have been sparring—feinting and jabbing—as they circle each other in the ring.

Mr. Lieberman says Mr. Gore’s populist strategy in the 2000 elections was “ineffective”—smack! Mr. Gore says this is no time to “stop telling the truth” to the American people—pow! Mr. Lieberman says Americans reject “us versus them” rhetoric—take that! Mr. Gore says centrism is “bad politics and bad principle”—there’s more where that came from, buddy!

*   *   *

Why are the former allies now foes? You know why. Joe Lieberman thinks Joe Lieberman’s a winner and Al Gore’s a loser. He shares the views of most of the leaders and funders of his party: Mr. Gore is damaged goods, a bad campaigner who wasted the precious patrimony of peace and prosperity, a charm-free zone who took a weird turn in his acceptance speech two years ago this week, abandoning centrist sophistication and embracing Huey Long populism. In the debates with George W. Bush, Mr. Gore seemed like a cross between Frankenstein and Carrot Top. Also journalists, always more important to Democrats than Republicans, do not and never will warm to him.

Mr. Lieberman has a point.

Mr. Gore, on the other hand, feels he plucked Lieberman from the Senate gaggle, got him past the vetting of the left, made him a person in history, the first Jewish vice presidential nominee, and on top of it all he brought the ticket 500,000 votes more than the winners (Messrs. Bush and Cheney) got.

Mr. Gore has a point too.

Mr. Lieberman has vowed that he will not run for the Democratic presidential nomination if Mr. Gore does. He has also told Godfrey Sperling of the Christian Science Monitor that he is “meditating and activating” on whether to run. Sounding a lot like Al Gore, he defined activating as “moving around the country meeting with many leaders, speaking out on issues.” He said he will make a final decision after the midterm elections and before the end of the year.

He says he has no opinion on whether Mr. Gore should run. But everyone knows Mr. Gore is running. So what exactly is Mr. Lieberman doing?

He’s having fun and being serious at the same time. He’s keeping the spotlight, he’s investigating Enron and helping to fashion a Homeland Security Department, and he’s demonstrating to party leaders that he isn’t a creampuff, he knows how to be aggressive on the issues. By taking on Mr. Gore, he elevates himself from Beta Man to possible Alpha Man. Good work for a slow summer.

Mr. Lieberman made it as a moderate. He feels the future of the Democratic Party lies in sympathetic centrism. He sees the vast, vote-rich American middle class as the true potential home of the party. And again he has a point. This is how two-term winner Bill Clinton read the playing field, and if Mr. Clinton knew anything it was popular politics. But while centrism may be the future of the Democratic party, it isn’t the future of Al Gore.

*   *   *

Politics, as they say, is a game of addition. Middle-class appeals expand the party, and unite the country. Populism pierces: Its message is often rousing but inherently divisive. It attempts to divide the electorate between the bad people who think of nothing but themselves, and the good people who seek to help the working class. What of those who seek to help working people through conservative policies? According to left-wing populists, they don’t exist, or don’t really mean it, or are unwitting pawns of economic royalists.

In the 2000 campaign, Mr. Gore figured that he would have to rouse his left-wing base to win. And the way to do that, he judged, was to play to the presumed passions and resentments of the little guy. He can argue now that he was right: He did bring out his base.

Still, when Mr. Gore, whose career had been one of self-proclaimed centrism, went left two years ago, many political observers were surprised, including me. I wondered if perhaps Mr. Gore judged himself to be a rather chilly character, a man who could not approach the electorate with a Clintonesque warmth because . . . he doesn’t have much warmth.

If you don’t have warmth maybe heat is the next best thing. And maybe that’s what Mr. Gore’s turn to populism was all about.

But his populist stance was never a perfect fit. Mr. Gore never made the old rhetoric new. He never made it something alive and pertinent to the moment. He sounded stale, and merely rhetorical. He was like a bright Ivy League student who had gone to a revival of a Clifford Odets play and thought he’d bring the rhetoric home to upset dad. Mr. Gore’s populism seemed cynical, a mere strategy chosen for the maximum gain of the candidate.

*   *   *

The Gore-Lieberman feud also raises the question of whether, in national politics, it’s better to be a Lover or a Fighter. Lovers seem to voters to be driven by a desire to help and protect. The most successful conservatives (George W. Bush, Ronald Reagan) have been Lovers. They may carry the sterner message, but they put it forward with a certain joy and moral confidence. Fighting conservatives don’t last so long or do so well. (Ask Fox News analyst Newt Gingrich.)

But there’s a downside to Lovers. They can get too soft. A few months ago I asked a Republican senator what President Bush should do next. He said, “Veto something.” I asked, what? He said, “Anything!” Meaning: Loverboy ought to show some muscle, jab someone, show ‘em who’s the man.

With Democrats, too, it’s probably true that Lovers flourish and Fighters don’t, at least long term. Mr. Lieberman seems to see himself as a Lover, embracing the middle class. He’s painting Mr. Gore as a Fighter. And Mr. Gore is helping him. Because he likes the pose of the pugilist. His aggression may be joyless but it’s interesting to watch, and makes its own heat. And it can be intimidating. It’s just not inspiring. Unless you’re the left wing of his party.

The pope’s trip to the Americas has ended in Mexico with the canonization of the fabled Juan Diego of Guadalupe, the 464th saint recognized by the church since John Paul’s papacy began. The pontiff has now recognized more saints than all his predecessors combined. His readiness to canonize is in service of an eagerness to evangelize. This is John Paul’s desire: To raise up from as many nationalities, ethnic groups and indigenous peoples as possible a saint who is of them, from them and yet an exemplar of the universal church.

Keep the base and build the base.

Twelve million people lined the streets of Mexico City to greet John Paul the day he arrived—12 million! The church may have suffered in the field this year, but the troops apparently remain.

*   *   *

What did his trip accomplish? Something big. He proved that no matter how healthy or capable-seeming the pope is or is not, he is here, he is loved, he has power, he is a presence. The trip was a reply to those within and without the church who have called for the pope’s resignation or retirement. John Paul said, through his actions, God decides when a pope “resigns”; God will take the pope from the earth, and as long as God keeps the pope here, the pope will fill the shoes of the Fisherman and do the work of the Lord.

I don’t think we’ll be hearing any more calls for the pontiff’s departure any time soon.

By presenting the fact of his presence, the pope demonstrated not his personal power but the enduring power of the papacy itself, and of the church, too, come hell or high water, come scandal or shame.

*   *   *

On the streets of Mexico City they sobbed as he went by. Did you see it on the news? The pope was in the glass-enclosed popemobile, and as he passed, the people who jammed the streets and sidewalks reached out to him with their hands and burst into tears and sobs.

The pope they were reaching for, of course, was not the sturdy, charismatic man in white who had wowed the crowds on his first trip to Mexico as pope, 23 years ago.

This man is old, a caged lion bent and spent.

And still they sobbed and reached for him.

Why?

*   *   *

“The force of his presence was like a blow to the heart.” That’s how the actor Richard Burton described meeting Winston Churchill. I thought of that after I met the pope.

It was late June 2000, and I was visiting Rome to speak to a business group. When I was invited to speak I called a friend of a friend in the New York Archdiocese and asked if I could get a ticket to an audience with the pope. She took down the number I’d be staying at and told me to stand by.

I was to be in Rome for five days, and each day I hoped a call would come. The day before I left, the phone rang in my room, and a young woman with perfectly enunciated English told me that the next morning I would see the pope. “Go to the big bronze doors of the Vatican,” she said, “and wait.”

That’s what I wrote in my notes. No address, just big bronze doors, Vatican.

The next morning at sunrise I hailed a taxi and said in English: “The big bronze doors of the Vatican,” and the driver said “OK!” as if he’d been told that destination before. We drove through silent streets. I was excited. You’re supposed to get less enthusiastic about people as you get older, or at least less moved by them, and be less impressed by them, but that hasn’t happened to me. And the pope was the person I most admired in the world—John Paul the Great. Writer, poet, evangelist, lover of children, comforter of the pained, inspirer of the caged and controlled, resister of fascism, defeater of communism, definer and denouncer of materialism, great foe of the culture of death. A great man of the ages, a man for all seasons and times.

We got to the big bronze doors, and I stood in front of them in the thin morning sun. I knocked. The sound of my knocking seemed tinny, almost comic against the weight of the doors. No one answered.

Soon a young man came by—early 20s, tight black jeans, tight black T-shirt, pierced earrings up and down his ears, pierced earring in his eyebrow, black spiky hair, sideburns shaved to points on the curve of his jaw. We waited silently, looked at each other and looked away. Finally I looked at my watch. “Guess they’re not open yet,” I said.

He nodded and said, “I’m early.”

“Do you have an appointment here?”

“Yes,” he said. “I’m going to see the pope.”

He was from Canada, he said. He writes rock music and is an aspiring musician. He was in Rome for work and asked his bishop back home if he could see the pope.

I told him I had done the same.

Little by little they came, our motley crew. A hearty, high-colored middle-aged man with an Australian accent, in a sober black suit, his wife and teenage children. They looked like the richest Catholics in Sydney. Then a Polish family in full native costume—dirndles, braided hair, pleated white dresses and blue cotton bows. Soon there were more than a dozen of us.

Suddenly, silently the great bronze doors opened, and we were gestured in by a man in a janitor’s clothes. He hustled us up the stairs, past Swiss Guards in their black-and-red uniforms. Up a series of marble stairs, to the right and up some more, then a landing from which one looked down great marble halls. Then up another floor until we were ushered into a huge and stately room of white-gray marble.

Here waiting were more people. There were about 30 of us in all now, and we lined the room standing against the walls. The room filled with excited chatter. I had stuck with my heavy-metal Canadian, and the Australians had stuck with us.

My Canadian looked at me and said, with some urgency, “What do we do when we meet him? How do you meet the pope?”

It hadn’t occurred to me to think about this. I shrugged and said, like a happy American idiot, “I think you shake his hand.”

“You do?” he said. “I thought you, like, kiss it, or bow.”

“I don’t know,” I said, and turned to the Australian burgher to ask him when suddenly there was silence. Like a blanket of silence had fallen on us. And we all looked in the same direction and suddenly two great doors were opening soundlessly, and then there was a rustling noise, and we stood straight up.

*   *   *

And he entered. John Paul the Great. Massive and frail, full and bent—a man like frail marble. He was dressed in white robes, a white beanie on his white hair. He walked slowly, a cane in his right hand, his head tilting forward. The face expressionless—the Parkinsonian mask.

He stepped into the room and the room burst into applause.

And suddenly there was singing. It was a group of dark-haired young nuns dressed in blue. They almost levitated at the sight of him and they had burst into song. He stopped in front of them and his head went back and his chest filled. Then he took his cane and shook it at them merrily and said in a baritone that filled the room, “Philippines!”

Feel-ah-PEENZ.

And the nuns exploded with applause because they were indeed from the Philippines and he had known. They one after another knelt on the floor as he walked past.

Now he looked at another little group and he shook his cane comically as he passed them and said, “Brah-SILL!”

And the Brazilians cheered and started to cry.

And the pope moveed on, shuffling now, and he walked by an extraordinary looking young man—coal black hair, thick and cut so that it was standing straight up. It looked like Pentecost hair. He was slim, Asian, in the dress of a seminarian. He had been watching things dreamily, happily, his hands in the attitude of prayer, and then the pope stopped, turned and held his cane toward him.

“China!” he said.

And the young man slid to his knees, bent toward the floor and moved to kiss the pope’s shoe.

And the pope caught him in an embrace as if to say No, I am not your hero, you are my hero.

And from nowhere came to me the electric charge of an intuition. I felt with certainty that I had just witnessed a future saint embrace a future cardinal of Beijing.

And my eyes filled with tears.

The pope proceeded down the line, nodding and patting, and when he got to me I jerked into a kind of curtsy-bow and touched his right hand with my hands. Then I bent and covered his thick old knuckles with Chanel No. 23 Red Raspberry lipstick.

I couldn’t help it. I think I said, “Papa.” He nodded. He was probably thinking, “Oh Lord, another lipstick leaver.” And then he pressed into my hand a soft brown plastic envelope bearing an imprint of the papal seal. When I opened it later I saw light and inexpensive rosary beads, the crucifix of which carried an aluminum Christ on the cross, his broken body ungainly and without grace. It is this depiction of Christ that the pope carries at the top of his crozier, the long silver staff he uses when he walks into the world.

I still have the picture of our meeting. I never saw anyone take it and was surprised to receive it in the mail. I look gooney. Like a happy gooney woman transported by bliss.

*   *   *

The last person in line was the Canadian rocker. When the pope came to him, he bowed and kissed John Paul’s hand. “I have written music for you,” he said. He showed the pope a sheet of music, beautifully done by hand and laminated. It had a title like “A Song for John Paul II.”

The pope looked at it and said, “You wrote?”

And the rocker, rocking, said, “Yes, for you.”

The pope took it, walked 10 feet away to where there was a big brown table, and signed it in a big flourish—Johannes Paulus II. And came and handed it back.

And then he walked on, and out of the room.

There was silence again until it was broken softly by my rocker. “This is the greatest day of my life,” he said to me. And my eyes filled with tears again because I knew it was true and because it is a privilege to be there on the best day of another human being’s life.

We were ushered out and I went into the streets of Rome and in time hailed a cab and told the cab driver all about it. I was so excited I left my eyeglasses on the seat. But I still had the rosary beads, and they’re here with me right now, right in front of me on my desk.

*   *   *

So when I saw those sobbing, reaching Mexicans I knew what they knew. When you see the pope something happens. You expect to be moved but it’s bigger than that and more surprising. It feels like a gaiety brought by goodness. It feels like a bubbling up. I think some people feel humbled by some unseen gravity and others lifted by some unknown lightness.

It’s like some great white dove flutters from your chest, emerges and flies upward. And you didn’t even know it was there. And all this leaves you reaching outward, toward one who is broken, ungainly, without grace. And it fills you with tears. Or so it seems to me. At least that was my experience.

I am thinking about the moment in history in which we are immersed, and as usual my mind turns to the words of a great writer of the movies. In Robert Bolt’s screenplay of “Doctor Zhivago,” Lara and Zhivago, near the end of their drama, are huddled at his family’s old estate in the Ural Mountains, waiting for the local Bolsheviks to descend. All seems lost, all exits blocked. The wolves of the forest howl with foreboding. Lara comes awake in the night and begins to weep. “This is a terrible time to be alive,” she says. “Oh no, no,” says Zhivago in all his innocence and belief. “It is a wonderful time to be alive.” Life itself, whatever the circumstances, is good; it is a miracle no matter what.

He is right. She is right. It is a terrible time to be alive, it is a wonderful time to be alive.

It is wonderful right now. And not terrible but deeply, almost dazzlingly, strange. And we must take note.

*   *   *

You are perhaps reading this at the beach, or after a day at the pool, or at home in your den near midnight as you sneak a bowl of Häagen-Dazs frozen yogurt with fresh strawberries. You are comfortable, well fed, well clothed; the air conditioner hums. Everything feels normal. Everything is! Which is why you haven’t gotten your brain fully around the fact that we are living through abnormal times.

We are living Days of Lore. Days of big history. We are living through an epoch scholars 50 years hence will ask about and study. (Yes, I think there will be scholars 50 years hence.) They will see us, you and me, as grizzled veterans of something big. Which is funny since we don’t even see ourselves as soldiers.

This is the lore I grew up with, the folklore of an earlier era that brought with it pictures we still carry in our heads: The Great Depression came (bankers jumped from windows, men sold apples on the street). Then came the Dust Bowl (dark and whipping winds leave farms and families uprooted; John Steinbeck’s Joads move to California). Then the war, World War II, the big one (a million newsreels, films and pictures from Henry Luce’s Life magazine).

But we are living through an era just as big. Bigger, perhaps, or so ultimately I fear. And we haven’t fully noticed. The collapse of the bubble, the fall of the market, the sinking of the AOL Time Warner empire (once known as the great house of Luce), the emptying of retirement accounts, the declarations of the biggest bankruptcies in U.S. history—this is the stuff of Lore.

A picture to put in your head: The founder and former CEO of the sixth largest cable company in America, which is the great cable country, is hauled away in handcuffs, charged with looting his company of hundreds of millions of dollars and bilking investors of billions. John Rigas of Adelphia Communications, 78 years old, does the perp walk in Manhattan surrounded by photographers. His thick white hair stands up uncombed, his eyes seem perplexed, dulled by enormity. He looks like a defrocked priest.

That perp walk, that look, are as much a picture of our times as bankers jumping from windows and Okies selling apples on the street.

All this financial woe, all these economic headlines, take place against a backdrop of a Pentagon attacked, of falling towers and America at war.

Sort of. We know it’s going on, but unlike World War II few of us feel it. Do you know anyone who has died or been wounded in it since Sept. 12? Most of us experience the war as an abstraction, a background against which pundits occasionally explain that an event is occurring.

But it is an abstraction taking place within a new time, the Era of Weapons of Mass Destruction. An era in which the nature of war and warfare has changed utterly, an era that promises, truly promises, bad pain ahead.

*   *   *

The sitting president, our leader, was nine months into a new presidency when history’s assault began. He is friendly, intelligent, funny, not deeply experienced in terms of his personal experience but deeply experienced in terms of watching up close the experiences of his father and of the president before his father.

He was elected legally but with fewer votes than his opponent, a new-age whack job who, upon his loss, grew a beard and came to look like a portly Gilded Age banker. This man will have his rematch.

And there is the current president’s predecessor, who seems more and more like Warren Harding, president as the Roaring ‘20s came to a screeching halt—handsome, gray-haired, wayward, blame-deflecting and, as Alice Roosevelt Longworth memorably said, “a slob.”

*   *   *

The Mideast pot boils high, the Gaza front heats up, Osama remains uncaught or is dead.

There is strange weather: forest fires historic in their size and destruction, weird temperatures—134 degrees, according to news reports, in a California town two weeks ago—earthquakes, landslides, floods, hail, melting glaciers, weird thunder, weird darkness, everything but locusts . . . and then the Chinese report locusts. Signs, portents of signs, wars and rumor of war.

Time magazine does a cover on Christians who are wondering, for the 2,014th time in history, if we are in the end times, and Christian Web sites buzz with this question: Is God taking the institutions on which we normally lean away from us one by one in order that we might learn to lean more completely on him?

*   *   *

The great man of the age, a giant, the old pope, comes to our continent, to Canada, and arouses now a thing he never inspired, pity. Well, pity and awe. The Toronto Sun called the trip “a stubborn act of courage” and said his arrival was “magnificent.” On Wednesday when a little girl was pushed forward to greet him on behalf of the children of Canada, she seemed to flinch, accepted his kiss and fled in tears. Her mother later said she was so moved she wept. But she seemed frightened to me, and understandably. Why would God allow the slow public withering of the man who fills the shoes of the Fisherman just as the Church rocks with crisis? Is God allowing the beauty and gallantry of John Paul’s soul to be obscured and hidden from us by the now-rough outer shell? Why? Is the pope bearing the woe of the world outwardly, for all of us to see? What does his suffering mean? What are we to learn from it?

Meantime in the Church the pope leads, a gathering of American lay Catholics is held in Boston. They seek to wrest some control from the hands of the bishops, and good luck to them. They call themselves “Keep the Faith, Change the Church.” The group is only five months old but it draws 4,000 Catholics to its first conference. They gave an award to a priest who has for years acknowledged and uncovered sex abuse within the church. The priest told them that the clergy sex scandals are equaled in their horror “only by the bloodshed of the Inquisition.”

Equaled only by the Inquisition! There’s a man who isn’t afraid to define.

*   *   *

A congressman who regularly fills the Capitol with his deranged banter and whose head looks like the last sanctuary of tree squirrels is expelled this week from the House, the second man to be so removed since the Civil War. The vote was 420-1, the holdout being the congressman famous for being assumed to have murdered his young lover.

And Wednesday came reports that an asteroid hurtling toward earth could hit us in 2019. Which gave me cause for optimism. Think of all our warring parties. We’d come together to battle the asteroid, pooling our best talent and sharing our genius, wouldn’t we? And then once we blew the asteroid up, and had a party, and felt safe, we’d get back to fighting again.

*   *   *

It is amazing that all of this is happening, isn’t it? This rush of history. Amazing that we are aware of it, see it, shake our heads over it as we eat the Häagen-Dazs, and don’t see it.

Maybe we are living in a perceptual warp, in a time when so many stray images and thoughts are coming at us that none of them successfully and completely come to us.

Five hundred years ago there was Agincourt, a battle that changed Europe’s history. And yet most of Europe slept through Agincourt, far from its fields. Most of Europe continued in peaceful oblivion to the fact its life had changed. Word spread but slowly. By the time an old lady living in a hut in Winchelsea heard the news, the news was old, which meant she already knew how the story ended: The world did not end. Her tree hadn’t shook.

She absorbed the new information by imagining what it was like, and by picking up reports from the gossip of travelers over fires in homesteads acres away. Months away. Years away.

Now we hear of an Agincourt a day. And we don’t know what the outcome will be. We don’t know how the story will end. We don’t know if we’ll be able to say: Yes, but the world did not end.

*   *   *

This is big stuff, isn’t it? I don’t know where to go with it. Do you? I have a sense of our initial and surface duty to the facts at least as I’ve presented them. That we know, first, that we are living in a time of Lore. That we pay attention. That we see the oddness of our time. That we recognize its majesty and bigness, and assume that we were made as big as the time we were born in. That we plow ahead. That we do our best. That we keep our head, talk to God, say our prayers, set an example. That we take notes. And not only park them under a heading that we won’t remember but print them out, too, and past them in a book. That we remember that each day, every day, we go into the world and either make it a little bit better or a little bit worse. And maybe you’re in a time of life now that you’re making it better. And maybe that’s good.

It is hot in New York. It is so hot that once when I had a fever a friend called and asked me how I felt and I said, “You know how dry and hot paper feels when it’s been faxed? That’s how I feel.” And how I felt all day yesterday. It is hot. We feel as if we’ve been faxed.

I found myself fully awake at 5 a.m. yesterday and went for a walk on the Brooklyn Bridge. Now more than ever the bridge, with its silver-corded cables and dense stone casements, seems like a great gift to my city. It spans. In the changed landscape of downtown it is our undisturbed beauty, grown ever more stately each year. People seem to love it more now, or at least mention it more or notice it more. So do I. It’s always full of tourists but always full of New Yorkers, too.

I am struck, as I always am when I’m on it, that I am walking on one of the engineering wonders of the world. And I was struck yesterday that I was looking at one of the greatest views in the history of man’s creation, Manhattan at sunrise. The casements were like medieval arches; the businessmen with umbrellas like knights without horses, storming the city walls; and the walls were silver, blue and marble in the light.

And all of it was free. A billionaire would pay billions to own this bridge and keep this view, but I and my jogging, biking and hiking confreres have it for nothing. We inherited it. Now all we do is pay maintenance, in the form of taxes. We are lucky.

The sun rose in haze, its edges indistinct, but even at 6:30 a.m. you could feel it heavy on your arms and shoulders. When I looked at it I thought of what Robert Bolt called the desert sun in his screenplay of David Lean’s “Lawrence of Arabia.” He called it the Anvil.

*   *   *

As I rounded the entrance to the bridge on the Brooklyn side, a small moment added to my happiness. It was dawn, traffic was light, I passed a black van with smoked windows. In the driver’s seat with the window down was a black man of 30 or so, a cap low on his brow, wearing thick black sunglasses. I was on the walkway that leads to the bridge; he was less than two feet away; we were the only people there. We made eye contact. “Good morning!” he said. “Good morning to you,” I answered, and for no reason at all we started to laugh, and moved on into the day. Nothing significant in it except it may or may not have happened that way 30 or 40 years ago. I’m not sure the full charge of friendliness would have been assumed or answered.

It made me think of something I saw Monday night on local TV and thought to point out somewhere along the way. They were showing the 1967 movie “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?” with Katharine Hepburn, Sidney Poitier and Spencer Tracy, the slightly creaking old drama—it was slightly creaking when it first came out—about a young white woman and a young black man who fall in love, hope to marry and must contend with disapproving parents on both sides. It’s held up well, and parts of it seemed moving in a way I didn’t remember, and pertinent. Sidney Poitier, who has always brought his own natural standing to whatever part he’s playing, had a lovely kind of sweet intelligence, and everyone in the movie was physically beautiful, in the way of the old productions of the old Hollywood.

There was a bit of dialogue that packed a wallop. Spencer Tracy as the father of the would-be bride is pressing Mr. Poitier on whether he has considered the sufferings their mixed-race children might have to endure in America. Has he thought about this? Has his fiancée? “She is optimistic,” says Mr. Poitier. “She thinks every one of them will grow up to become president of the United States. I on the other hand would settle for secretary of state.” Those words, written 35 years ago by the screenwriter William Rose, may have seemed dreamy then. But in its audience when the movie came out would likely have been a young, film-loving Army lieutenant named Colin Powell who, that year, was preparing for a second tour of duty in Vietnam. And now he is secretary of state. This is the land dreams are made of. Does that strike you as a corny thing to say and talk about? It is. That’s another great thing.

*   *   *

Late Tuesday, on a subway ride from Brooklyn to the north of Manhattan, I resaw something I’d noticed and forgotten about. It is that more and more, on the streets and on the train, I see people wearing ID tags. We all wear IDs now. We didn’t use to. They hang from thick cotton string or an aluminum chain; they’re encased in a plastic sleeve or laminated; they’re worn one at a time or three at a time, but they’re there.

I ponder the existential implications. What does it mean that we wear IDs? What are we saying, or do we think we’re saying? I mean aside from the obvious.

I imagined yesterday the row of people across from me on the train, looking up all of a sudden from their newspaper, their paperback, their crossword puzzle book, and answering one after another:

“It means I know who I am,” says the man in blue shirt and suspenders.

“It means I can get into the building,” says the woman in gray.

“It means I am a solid citizen with a job.”

“I am known to others in my workplace.”

“I’m not just blowing through life, I’m integrated into it. I belong to something. I receive a regular paycheck.”

“I have had a background check done by security and have been found to be a Safe Person. Have you?”

I wonder if unemployed people on the train look at the tags around the other peoples’ necks and think, Soon I hope I’ll have one too. I wonder if kids just getting their first job at 17 will ever know that in America we didn’t all used to be ID’d. Used to be only for people who worked in nuclear power plants or great halls of government. Otherwise you could be pretty obscure. Which isn’t a bad way to be.

I work at home on my own and do not have an ID. But I am considering issuing myself one and having it laminated at the local Hallmark shop. It will have a nice picture and a title—President, CEO & CFO. I will wear it on the subway and when I get home I will hold it up in front of my doorbell, which I’ll rig so when I swipe the tag my front door pops open. Then I’ll turn to the friends I’m with and wink. “I know people here. I can get you in.”

*   *   *

A month ago there were news reports of a post-Sept. 11 baby boom. Everyone was so rocked by news of their mortality that they realized there will never be a perfect time to have kids but we’re here now so let’s have a family. I believed the baby=boom story and waited for the babies.

Then came the stories saying: Nah, there is no baby boom, it’s all anecdotal, there’s no statistical evidence to back it up. And I believed that too. But I’ve been noticing something for weeks now. In my neighborhood there is a baby boom. There are babies all over in Brooklyn. It is full of newborns, of pink soft-limbed infants in cotton carriers on daddy’s chest. It is full of strollers, not only regular strollers but the kind that carry two children—double-wides. And triple-wides. In the stores and on the streets there are babies cooing, dribbling, staring, sleeping. I see them and feel a rush of tenderness. I want to kiss their feet, I want to make them laugh. Kids are always looking for someone to make them laugh. The sight of any dog can do it. The sight of another baby can do it. The sight of an idiotic adult covering her eyes with her hands and moving her hands away quickly can do it. I would know.

I don’t care what anyone says, there have got to be data that back up what I’m seeing: that after Sept. 11, there was at least a Brooklyn baby boom.

*   *   *

A dream boom, too. The other day I spoke with a friend I hadn’t seen since the world changed. He was two blocks away when the towers fell, and he saw everything. We have all seen the extraordinary footage of that day, seen it over and over, but few of us has seen what my friend described: how in the office buildings near the World Trade Center they stood at the windows and suddenly darkness enveloped them as the towers collapsed and the demonic cloud swept through. “It was total darkness,” he told me. But the lights were on. They stood in his office wearing wet surgical masks. They couldn’t go out, but inside their building the smoke worked its way into the air conditioning. So they turned it off and stood there sweating and watching on TV what was happening two blocks away.

Did you see those forced to jump? I asked.

“Yes,” he said, and looked away. No descriptions forthcoming.

Have you had bad dreams?

“Yes,” he said, and looked away. No descriptions forthcoming.

I thought about this for a few days. My friend is brilliant and by nature a describer of things felt and seen. But not this time. I spoke to a friend who is a therapist. Are your patients getting extraordinary dreams? I asked.

“Always,” he laughs.

Sept.11-related?

“Yes,” he says, mostly among adolescents.

I asked if he was saving them, writing them down. He shook his head no.

So: The Sept. 11 Dream Project. We should begin it. I want to, though I’m not sure why. I think maybe down the road I will try to write about them. Maybe not. I am certain, however, that dreams can be an expression of a nation’s unconscious, if there can be said to be such a thing, and deserve respect. (Carl Jung thought so.)

To respect is to record. There is a response function at the end of this column, and you can use it to send in your Sept. 11 related dream—recurring, unusual, striking, whatever. (If you are a psychiatrist, send as many as you like—without identifying your patients, of course.) I will read them, and appreciate them and possibly weave them into a piece on what Sept. 11 has done to our dream lives and to our imaginations, when our imaginations are operating on their own, unfettered, unstopped, spanning.

Maybe he was thinking Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country. Maybe it was visceral, not so much thought as felt, and acted upon. We don’t know because he won’t say, at least not in public. Which is itself unusual. Silence is the refuge of celebrities caught in scandal, not the usual response of those caught red-handed doing good.

All we know is that 25-year-old Pat Tillman, a rising pro football player (224 tackles in 2000 as a defensive back for the Arizona Cardinals, a team record) came back from his honeymoon seven weeks ago and told his coaches he would turn down a three-year, $3.6 million contract and instead join the U.S. Army. For a pay cut of roughly $3.54 million dollars over three years.

On Monday morning, Pat Tillman “came in like everyone else, on a bus from a processing station,” according to a public information officer at Fort Benning, Ga., and received the outward signs of the leveling anonymity of the armed forces: a bad haircut, a good uniform and physical testing to see if he is up to the rigors of being a soldier. Soon he begins basic training. And whatever else happened this week—Wall Street news, speeches on the economy—nothing seems bigger, more important and more suggestive of change than what Pat Tillman did.

Those who know him say it’s typical Tillman, a surprise decision based on his vision of what would be a good thing to do. When he was in college he sometimes climbed to the top of a stadium light tower to think and meditate. After his great 2000 season he was offered a $9 million, five-year contract with the St. Louis Rams and said thanks but no, he was happy with the Cardinals.

But it was clear to those who knew Mr. Tillman that after September 11 something changed. The attack on America had prompted a rethinking. Len Pasquarelli of ESPN reported last May that the “free-spirited but consummately disciplined” starting strong safety told friends and relatives that, in Mr. Pasquarelli’s words, “his conscience would not allow him to tackle opposition fullbacks where there is still a bigger enemy that needs to be stopped in its tracks.” Mr. Tillman’s agent and friend Frank Bauer: “This is something he feels he has to do. For him, it’s a mindset, a duty.”

*   *   *

“I’m sorry, but he is not taking inquiries,” said the spokeswoman at Fort Benning. She laughed when I pressed to speak to someone who might have seen Mr. Tillman or talked to him. Men entering basic training don’t break for interviews, she said. Besides, “he has asked not to have any coverage. We’ve been respecting his wishes. And kinda hoping he’d change his mind.” Mr. Tillman would, of course, be a mighty recruiting device. The Army might have enjoyed inviting television cameras to record his haircut, as they did with Elvis. But Mr. Tillman, the Fort Benning spokesman says, “wants to be anonymous like everyone else.”

Right now he has 13 weeks of basic training ahead of him, then three weeks of Airborne School, and then, if he makes it, Ranger School, where only about a third of the candidates are accepted. “It’s a long row,” said the Fort Benning spokesman, who seemed to suggest it would be all right to call again around Christmas. Until then he’ll be working hard trying to become what he wants to become.

Which I guess says it all.

Except for this. We are making a lot of Tillmans in America, and one wonders if this has been sufficiently noted. The other day friends, a conservative intellectual and his activist wife, sent a picture of their son Gabe, a proud and newly minted Marine. And there is Abe, son of a former high aide to Al Gore, who is a lieutenant junior grade in the Navy, flying SH-60 Seahawk helicopters. A network journalist and his wife, also friends, speak with anguished pride of their son, in harm’s way as a full corporal in the Marines. The son of a noted historian has joined up; the son of a conservative columnist has just finished his hitch in the Marines; and the son of a bureau chief of a famous magazine was commissioned a second lieutenant in the Army last month, on the day he graduated from Princeton.

As the Vietnam-era song said, “Something’s happening here.” And what it is may be exactly clear. Some very talented young men, and women, are joining the armed forces in order to help their country because, apparently, they love it. After what our society and culture have been through and become the past 30 years or so, you wouldn’t be sure that we would still be making their kind, but we are. As for their spirit, Abe’s mother reports, “Last New Year’s, Abe and his roommate [another young officer] were home and the topic came up about how little they are paid [compared with] the kids who graduated from college at the same time they did and went into business.

“Without missing a beat the two of them said, ‘Yeah—but we get to get shot at!’ and raised their beer bottles. No resentment. No anger. Just pure . . . testosterone-laden bravado.”

*   *   *

The Abes and Gabes join a long old line of elders dressed in green, blue, gray, white, gold and black. Pat Tillman joins a similar line, of stars who decided they had work to do, and must leave their careers to do it. They include, among others, the actors Jimmy Stewart, Clark Gable and Tyrone Power in World War II; sports stars Ted Williams and Joe DiMaggio in the same war; and quarterback Roger Staubach in Vietnam. It is good to see their style return, and be considered noble again.

And good to see what appears to be part of, or the beginning of, a change in armed forces volunteering. In the Vietnam era of my youth it was poor and working-class boys whom I saw drafted or eagerly volunteering. Now more and more I see the sons and daughters of the privileged joining up.

That is a bigger and better story than usually makes the front page. Markets rise and fall, politicians come and go, but that we still make Tillmans is headline news.

I mark the coming holiday remembering the words of a friend of Samuel Johnson, who said, “I meant to be a philosopher, but happiness kept breaking through.”

Tomorrow is the Fourth of July, and we must celebrate. Let us hold high a single sparkler to honor those American institutions that, in this interesting year, did not flounder or fail. Much has been said of those that did—Wall Street, big business, big accounting, the Catholic Church, the FBI and CIA. But most didn’t. Some stayed good and some improved and some seem to summon a metaphor: While the towers of the institution tottered, the men and women who worked within them took the stairs two at a time, hauling 80 pounds of gear to save the structure.

So: Let us hold a single sparkler to the lights that didn’t fail.

The U.S. military. Honored more than ever across the country and the world. They’re not just tough, they’re smart and brave, and to the extent we dig our way out of the current crisis they’ll be the ones with the shovels and pails.

Cops and firemen. Once patronized, now poster boys, and rightly so. They’re exemplars of courage and sacrifice, especially the firemen. What they did at the towers last September was like what was done at Omaha Beach on D-Day: They raced to fight a battle and proved we’d win a war.

Airline pilots and stewards. Under incredible stress, in a fearful time, without combat pay, they get us seated, settled and flying safely and in style. They have tons of guts. They do their jobs in spite of terror threats, pressure from family and friends to get out, and Department of Transportation rulings and methods that seem almost deliberately designed to encourage the bad guys and discourage the responsible.

The men and women of newspapers. We forget until history reminds us. But there are times when the lengthy, detailed, independent coverage of the great newspapers, and the gutsy work of reporters and editors, is irreplaceable. The past year reminded us of what Thomas Jefferson said: Given the choice between government and a free press, he’d take the free press.

American television. More news shows, more stations, more networks means more voices, more views. Only 20 years ago Big Media still had a monopoly on information, greatly pleasing those who found stimulation in bland, gray-suited corporate liberalism. It’s changed. Now more than ever we need options, now more than ever we have them. And: On Sept. 11, reporters and crews on the ground in New York literally risked their lives to get the story and the pictures.

Television entertainment. Once MGM had “more stars than there are in heaven,” but now the great studio of our time is a cable outfit. HBO will be studied by future social historians who’ll ponder the cultural impact of groundbreaking drama from “The Sopranos” to “Six Feet Under” to “Oz.” No network has reached such a consistently high level of product excellence since William Paley’s CBS, in the first golden age of television when his shop was called the Tiffany Network.

American wit. From Conan to Dave to Jay to Comedy Central. It more than thrives, it keeps the country together each night as comics and writers tear apart What Isn’t Working Now.

Science and medicine. Research labs, new treatments, technologies, medicines. All continue as the best in the world. Some day someone really will cure cancer. It will happen here.

The Internet. On Sept. 11, it was the light that didn’t fail. Phones in New York and Washington went down but the Internet kept humming. Separated parents, children and friends instant-messaged news of their safety, or wrote last words. And within the Internet this year the rise of a new institution:

Blogging. The 24-7 opinion sites that offer free speech at its straightest, truest, wildest, most uncensored, most thoughtful, most strange. Thousands of independent information entrepreneurs are informing, arguing, adding information. Imagine if we’d had them in 1776: “As I wrote in yesterday’s lead item on SamAdams.com, my well meaning cousin John continues his grammatical nitpicking with Jefferson (link requires registration) ‘Inalienable,’ ‘unalienable,’ whatever. Boys, let’s fight. Start the war.” Blogs may one hard day become clearinghouses for civil support and information when other lines, under new pressure, break down.

Local government. The federal government tends to flail about at the beginning of national crises but local governments continue doing what they do: seeing that traffic lights work, garbage is hauled, libraries stocked. Local governments provide the basic services of protection of person and property. They did their job this year.

The local church. Whatever is happening in the higher structure, chances are the ministers, priests, nuns, rabbis and brothers on the ground in your hometown are doing the work of God. They’re like airline pilots and stewardesses: They’re saving the institutions they represent by doing their daily work with professionalism and love.

American abundance. From the farm fields to your table it all still worked, and shows no signs of weakening. A friend wrote the other day: “Have you tasted the peaches this year? So sweet they’ll make you cry, the best in years. Tomatoes too.”

The American Dream. Our greatest institution. Our greatest tradition. It proceeds apace. Individual dreams continue to flourish, and we chase them with a freedom of movement, an encouraged creativity and a sense of possibility that remain unparalleled.

The other day I went to the oath-taking ceremony for new citizens at the U.S. District Court in Brooklyn. There were hundreds of people in saris, in skullcaps, in suits made in Romania. There was a hugely pregnant woman from Nigeria, dressed in a red-and-white plaid cotton dress; there were young Eastern European women in too-tight pants from the Gap; there were young men in gym clothes. The usual mix from all over the world. They were so happy to be joining what others of us were lucky enough to be born into. They knew they were in the right place doing the right thing, and changing their lives for the better.

New Americans. We hold high this sparkler for you.

Three scenes.

It is a spring day in the early 1990s and I am talking with the head of a mighty American corporation. We’re in his window-lined office, high in midtown Manhattan, the view—silver skyscrapers stacked one against another, dense, fine-lined, sparkling in the sun—so perfect, so theatrical it’s like a scrim, like a fake backdrop for a 1930s movie about people in tuxes and tails. Edward Everett Horton could shake his cocktail shaker here; Fred and Ginger could banter on the phone.

The CEO tells me it is “annual report” time, and he is looking forward to reading the reports of his competitors.

Why? I asked him. I wondered what specifically he looks for when he reads the reports of the competition.

He said he always flipped to the back to see what the other CEOs got as part of their deal—corporate jets, private helicopters, whatever. “We all do that,” he said. “We all want to see who has what.”

Second scene: It is the mid-’90s, a soft summer day, and I am crossing a broad Manhattan avenue, I think it was Third or Lexington. I am doing errands. I cross the avenue with the light but halfway across I see the switch to yellow. I pick up my pace. From the corner of my eye I see, then hear, the car. Bright black Mercedes, high gloss, brand new. The man at the wheel, dark haired, in his 30s, is gunning the motor. Vroom vroom! He drums his fingers on the steering wheel impatiently. The light turns. He vrooms forward. I sprint the last few steps toward the sidewalk. He speeds by so close the wind makes my cotton skirt move. I realize: If I hadn’t sprinted that guy would have hit me. I think: Young Wall Street Titan. Bonus bum.

Third scene, just the other night. I am talking to a shrewd and celebrated veteran of Wall Street and Big Business. The WorldCom story has just broken; he tells me of it. He has a look I see more and more, a kind of facelift look only it doesn’t involve a facelift. It’s like this: The face goes blanched and blank and the eyes go up slightly as if the hairline had been yanked back. He looked scalped by history.

For years, he said, he had given speeches in Europe on why they should invest in America. We have the great unrigged game, he’d tell them, we have oversight and regulation, we’re the stable democracy with reliable responsible capitalism. “I can’t give that speech anymore,” he said.

*   *   *

Something is wrong with—what shall we call it? Wall Street, Big Business. We’ll call it Big Money. Something has been wrong with it for a long time, at least a decade, maybe more. Probably more. I don’t fully understand it. I can’t imagine that it’s this simple: A new generation of moral and ethical zeroes rose to run Big Money over the past decade, and nobody quite noticed but they were genuinely bad people who were running the system into the ground. I am not sure it’s this simple, either: A friend tells me it all stems from the easy money of the ‘90s, piles and piles of funny money that Wall Street learned to play with. That would be a description of the scandal, perhaps, but not the reason for it.

At any rate it no longer seems like a scandal. “Scandal” seems quaint. It is starting to feel like a tragedy. Not for Wall Street and for corporations—it’s a setback for them—but for our country. For a way of living and being.

Those who invested in and placed faith in Global Crossing, Enron, Tyco or WorldCom have been cheated and fooled by individuals whose selfishness seems so outsized, so huge, that it seems less human and flawed than weird and puzzling. Did they think they would get away with accounting scams forever? Did they think they’d never get caught? Do they think they’re operating in the end times and they better grab what they can now and go hide? What were they thinking?

We should study who these men are—they are still all men, and still being turned in by women—and try to learn how they rationalized their actions, how they excused their decisions or ignored the consequences, how they thought about the people they were cheating. I mention this because I’ve been wondering if we are witnessing the emergence of a new pathology: White Collar Big Money Psychopath.

*   *   *

I have been reading Michael Novak, the philosopher and social thinker and, to my mind, great man. Twenty years ago this summer he published what may be his masterpiece, “The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism.” It was a stunning book marked by great clarity of expression and originality of thought. He spoke movingly of the meaning and morality of capitalism. He asked why capitalism is good, and answered that there is one great reason: Of all the systems devised by man it is the one most likely to lift the poor out of poverty.

But, he asserted unassailably, capitalism cannot exist in a void. Capitalism requires an underlying moral edifice. Without it nothing works; with it all is possible. That edifice includes people who have an appreciation for and understanding of the human person; it requires a knowledge that business can contribute to community and family; it requires “a sense of sin,” a sense of right and wrong, and an appreciation that the unexpected happens, that things take surprising turns in life.

Mr. Novak was speaking, he knew, to an international intellectual community that felt toward capitalism a generalized contempt. Capitalism was selfish, exploitative, unequal, imperialistic, warlike. He himself had been a socialist and knew the critiques. But he had come to see capitalism in a new way.

Capitalism, like nature, wants to increase itself, wants to grow and create, and as it does it produces more: more goods, more services, more “liberation,” more creativity, more opportunity, more possibilities, more unanticipated ferment, movement, action.

So capitalism was to Mr. Novak a public good, and he addressed its subtler critics. What of “the corruption of affluence,” the idea that while it is moral discipline that builds and creates success, success itself tends to corrupt and corrode moral discipline? Dad made money with his guts, you spend it at your leisure. The result, an ethos of self indulgence, greed and narcissism. The system works, goes this argument, but too well, and in the end it corrodes.

Mr. Novak answered by quoting the philosopher Jacques Maritain, who once observed that affluence in fact inspires us to look beyond the material for meaning in our lives. “It’s exactly because people have bread that they realize you can’t live by bread alone.” In a paradoxical way, said Mr. Novak, the more materially comfortable a society becomes, the more spiritual it is likely to become, “its hungers more markedly transcendent.”

Right now Mr. Novak certainly seems right about American society. We have not become worse people with the affluence of the past 20 years, and have arguably in some interesting ways become better. (Forty years ago men in the New York City borough of Queens ignored the screams of a waitress named Kitty Genovese as she was stabbed to death in an apartment building parking lot. Today men of Queens are famous for strapping 60 pounds of gear on their back and charging into the towers.)

But it appears that the leaders of business, of Wall Street, of big accounting have, many of them, become worse with affluence. Or maybe it’s just worse with time. I think of a man of celebrated rectitude who, if he returned to the Wall Street of his youth, would no doubt be welcomed back with cheers and derided behind his back as a sissy. He wouldn’t dream of cooking the books. He wouldn’t dream of calling costs profits. He would never fit in.

*   *   *

Mr. Novak famously sees business as a vocation, and a deeply serious one. Business to him is a stage, a platform on which men and women can each day take actions that are either moral or immoral, helpful or not. When their actions are marked by high moral principle, they heighten their calling—they are suddenly not just “in business” but part of a noble endeavor that adds to the sum total of human joy and progress. The work they do builds things—makes connections between people, forges community, spreads wealth, sets example, creates a template, offers inspiration. The work they do changes the world. And in doing this work they strengthen the ground on which democracy and economic freedom stand.

They are, that is, patriots.

“The calling of business is to support the reality and reputation of capitalism,” says Mr. Novak, “and not undermine [it].”

But undermining it is precisely what the men of WorldCom et al. have done. It is their single most destructive act.

*   *   *

Edward Younkins of the Acton Institute distills Mr. Novak’s philosophy into “Seven Great Responsibilities for Corporations”: satisfy customers with good services of real value; make a reasonable return to investors; create new wealth; create new jobs; defeat cynicism and envy by demonstrating internally that talent and hard work will and can be rewarded; promote inventiveness, ingenuity and creativity; diversify the interests of the republic.

As for business leaders, their responsibility is to shape a corporate culture that fosters virtue; to exemplify respect for the rule of law; to act in practical ways to improve society; to communicate often and openly with investors, pensioners, customers and employees; to contribute toward improved civil society; and to protect—lovely phrase coming—“the moral ecology of freedom.”

*   *   *

To look at the current Big Money crisis armed with Mr. Novak’s views on and love of capitalism is to understand the crisis more deeply.

Businessmen are not just businessmen. They are not just moneymakers. Businessmen and -women are representatives of, leaders of, exemplars of an ethos and a way of life. They are the face and daily reality of free-market capitalism.

And when they undermine it with their actions they damage more than their reputations, more than the portfolios of investors. They damage and deal a great blow to our country. They make a great and decent edifice look dishonest and low because they are dishonest and low.

When we call them “thieves” or “con men” we are not, with these tough words, quite capturing the essence of the damage they do and have done.

It would be good if some great man or woman of business in America would rise and speak of that damage, and its meaning, and how to heal it. It would be good if the Securities and Exchange Commission held open hearings in New York on what has been done and why and by whom, and how they got away with it until they didn’t anymore. It would be good if the business leaders of our country shunned those businessmen who did such damage to the very freedoms they used to make themselves wealthy. And it just might be good if some companies, on the next casual Friday, gave everyone in their employ the day off, with just one assignment: Go read a book in the park. They could start with “The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism,” and go from there.