Peggy Noonan

A small sign of the times: USA Today this week ran an article about a Michigan family that, under financial pressure, decided to give up credit cards, satellite television, high-tech toys and restaurant dining, to live on a 40-acre farm and become more self-sufficient. The Wojtowicz family—36-year-old Patrick, his wife Melissa, 37, and their 15-year-old daughter Gabrielle—have become, in the words of reporter Judy Keen, “21st century homesteaders,” raising pigs and chickens, planning a garden and installing a wood furnace.

Mr. Wojtowicz was a truck driver frustrated by long hauls that kept him away from his family, and worried about a shrinking salary. His wife was self-employed and worked at home. They worked hard and had things but, Mr. Wojtowicz said, there was a “void.” “We started analyzing what it was that we were really missing. We were missing being around each other.” So he gave up his job and now works the land his father left him near Alma, Mich. His economic plan was pretty simple: “As long as we can keep decreasing our bills we can keep making less money.”

The paper weirdly headlined them “economic survivalists,” which perhaps reflected an assumption that anyone who leaves a conventional, material-driven life for something more physically rigorous but emotionally coherent is by definition making a political statement. But it didn’t look political from the story they told. They didn’t look like people trying to figure out how to survive as much as people trying to figure out how to live. The picture that accompanied the article showed a happy family playing Scrabble with a friend.

Their story hit a nerve. There was a lively comment thread on the paper’s Web site, with more than 300 people writing in. “They look pretty happy to me,” said a commenter. “My husband and I are making some of the same decisions.” Another: “I don’t know if this is so much survivalism as a return to common sense.” Another: “The more stuff you own the harder you have to work to maintain it.”

To some degree the Wojtowicz story sounded like the future, or the future as a lot of people are hoping it will be: pared down, more natural, more stable, less full of enervating overstimulation, of what Walker Percy called the “trivial magic” of modern times.

The article offered data suggesting the Wojtowiczes are part of a recent trend. People are gardening more if you go by the sales of vegetable seeds and transplants, up 30% over last year at the country’s largest seed company. Sales of canning and preserving products are also up. Companies that make sewing products say more people are learning to sew. I have a friend in Manhattan who took to surfing the Web over the past six months looking for small- and farm towns in which to live. The general manager of a national real-estate company told USA Today that more customers want to “live simply in a less-expensive place.”

Some of this—the desire to live less expensively, and perhaps with greater simplicity—seems to key off what I am seeing in Manhattan, a place still generally with more grievances than grief, and with a greater imagination about how badly things are going to go than how bad it is right now. Many think that no matter how much money is sloshing through the system from Washington, creating waves that lead to upticks, the recession is really a depression. We won’t “come out of it,” as the phrase goes, for five or seven years, because the downturn is systemic, global, and because the old esprit is gone. The baby boomers who for 40 years, from 1968 through 2008, did the grunt work of the great abundance—work was always a long-haul trip for them, they were the first in the office in 1975 and are the last to leave the office to this day—know the era they built is over, that something new is beginning, something more subdued and altogether more mysterious. The old markers of success—money, status, power—will not quite apply as they have. They watch and work as the future emerges.

In New York some signs of that future are obvious: fewer cars, less traffic, less of the old busy hum of the economic beehive. New York will, literally, get dimmer. Its magical bright-light nighttime skyline will glitter less as fewer companies inhabit the skyscrapers and put on the lights that make the city glow.

A prediction: By 2010 the mayor, in a variation on broken-window theory, will quietly enact a bright-light theory, demanding that developers leave the lights on whether there are tenants in the buildings or not, lest the world stand on a rise in New Jersey and get the impression no one’s here and nobody cares.

The New York of the years 1750 to 2008—a city that existed for money and for all the arts and delights and beauties money brings—is for the first time going to struggle with questions about its reason for being. This will cause profound dislocations. For a good while the young will continue to flock in, for cheaper rents. Artists will still want to gather with artists—you cannot pick up the Metropolitan Museum and put it in Alma, Mich. But there will be a certain diminution in the assumption of superiority on which New York has long run, and been allowed, by America, to run.

More predictions. The cities and suburbs of America are about to get rougher-looking. This will not be all bad. There will be a certain authenticity chic. Storefronts, pristine buildings—all will spend less on upkeep, and gleam less.

So will humans. People will be allowed to grow old again. There will be a certain liberation in this. There will be fewer facelifts and browlifts, less Botox, less dyed hair among both men and women. They will look more like people used to look, before perfection came in. Middle-aged bodies will be thicker and softer, with more maternal and paternal give. There will be fewer gyms and fewer trainers, but more walking. Gym machines produced the pumped and cut look. They won’t be so affordable now.

Hollywood will take the cue. During the depression, stars such as Clark Gable were supposed to look like normal men. Physical perfection would have distanced them from their audience. Now leading men are made of megamuscles, exaggerated versions of their audience. That will change.

The new home fashion will be spare. This will be the return of an old WASP style: the good, frayed carpet; dogs that look like dogs and not a hairdo in a teacup, as miniature dogs back from the canine boutique do now.

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A friend, noting what has and will continue to happen with car sales, said America will look like Havana—old cars and faded grandeur. It won’t. It will look like 1970, only without the bell-bottoms and excessive hirsuteness. More families will have to live together. More people will drink more regularly. Secret smoking will make a comeback as part of a return to simple pleasures. People will slow down. Mainstream religion will come back. Walker Percy again: Bland affluence breeds fundamentalism. Bland affluence is over.

Wall Street, or what remains of it, has dealt a catastrophic blow to its reputation in the past eight months of bonuses, bailouts and bankruptcies. What its current leaders, and the young who are lucky enough to be entering business, have to do now is begin rescuing and restoring that reputation.

This will, in fact, be the great work of a generation of American business leaders.

More is at stake than their standing. At stake is the standing of a free-market system that has flourished since America’s founding and made it the wealthiest nation in the history of man.

In his classic “The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism,” the philosopher Michael Novak noted that capitalism is good because, of all the economic systems devised by man, it is the one that lifts the greatest numbers out of poverty. Capitalism is itself not selfish, exploitative, unequal; it wants to grow and produce, bringing more services, more creativity, more opportunity, more ferment and movement—more life. It is not just an economic system, it is a public good.

To Mr. Novak, business is a vocation, a deeply serious one. But it cannot exist in a void. It requires an underlying moral edifice, a knowledge of right and wrong, “a sense of sin.” Greed is not good. Wall Street is a stage, a platform on which men and women can each day take actions that are ethical or not, constructive or not. When their actions are marked by high moral principle, they heighten their calling—they are not just “in business” but part of a noble endeavor that adds to the sum total of human happiness. The work they do strengthens the ground on which democracy and economic freedom stand. “The calling of business is to support the reality and reputation of capitalism.”

Noble. Constructive. Admirable.

When was the last time anyone thought of Wall Street like that?

There was a moment, a very public one well within memory, that was all of those things. And it might help the coming generation of business leaders to keep its lessons in mind.

It had to do with the last time Wall Street was in ashes—literally. It had to do with how they brought it back.

“There was this huge, thunderous bang, and the entire building shook. The skies darkened, there was nothing but ash and smoke.” That’s how Arthur Cashin remembers it. He was on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange as a broker for UBS PaineWebber.

“The floor turned dark,” said Rich Adamonis, a vice president at the exchange. “It was worse than night.”

They were remembering the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, when the towers came down. You know what it looked like—the smoke and debris, the demonic cloud that chased people down the streets.

The exchange never opened that morning, and by the end of the day no one knew when it would. Downtown New York looked like a battlefield, the World Trade Center still burning. There was heavy debris on the roof of the exchange. The entire building was coated in ash. Catherine Kinney, a vice president at the NYSE, thought the facade looked “like nuclear winter.”

On Sept. 12, the heads of the NYSE member firms met uptown at Bear Stearns. All the giants were there—Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, UBS PaineWebber, Salomon Smith Barney, Lehman Brothers, JP Morgan Chase—and representatives from all levels of government, including the Treasury and the mayor’s office. Dick Grasso, chairman of the NYSE, convened and addressed the damage. How many dead in the firms? Who lost their offices? Morgan Stanley, Bank of America and Lehman had offices at the Trade Center—all gone. Firms offered to house other firms. Ms. Kinney: “There was an incredible esprit de corps among all the CEOs. They all sat side by side. They gave each other space on their trading desks and phones.”

To stock exchange staff, it didn’t look as if they could get back up and operating quickly. But they had to. Wall Street was a symbol of America, the exchange an icon of freedom. For Mr. Grasso it was about the bell: when that thing rang, freedom rang. Reopening “was a way for the entire financial community to clasp hands and say, ‘We’re gonna bring a message to the terrorists.’” That message? “You lose.”

They would do the impossible and open the following Monday, five days away. Herculean labors lay ahead. They had to clean up a huge debris field, get generators, reroute and throw in new phone and data lines. Verizon had lost its central switching station, and part of its central office. Public transportation was down, so they’d have to create a shuttle-bus system and get up to 5,000 people downtown, past police cordons and military checkpoints. Tunnels into the city and subway stations had to be tested, support services and food brought into lower Manhattan.

Verizon rerouted circuits, and when they had to, they laid lines in the streets and covered them with rubber. They put huge electrical and phone cables on Broad Street, Exchange Place, New Street.

They exchange knew there would be a huge wave of selling when trading resumed, so they had to be ready for massive volume. If there were any glitches, it would be demoralizing. It all had to work. The world was watching. And this was America.

People slept in their offices, on cots in the medical area, on the floor of the chairman’s office, on the couches of a restaurant called the Luncheon Club. They worked overnight and all day.

And all the time they were doing this, they were hearing about friends and relatives who’d died. “The only smiles on Wall Street were in the posters of the missing that the families put up,” said Mr. Cashin.

They tested all the new systems on Sunday the 16th. One after another the big firms reported in from wherever they’d set up shop: Their lines were working.

And so the next morning, Monday, Sept. 17, 2001, the New York Stock Exchange opened with a podium full of firemen, cops, emergency medical workers and elected officials. A Marine Corps major sang “God Bless America.” There was silence. Then a Port Authority police officer, one of the last guys to come out of the pile, began to ring the bell. The others on the podium joined in. And as the bell rang out in triumph, the traders on the floor began to cry and cheer and shout themselves hoarse. Catherine Kinney was below the podium. “Was there a cheer—oh my God, you wouldn’t believe. I cried, I did. And prices start to go across the tape . . .”

America was open for business again.

It was a great moment in Wall Street history.

We all know what followed. A bubble grew, and then burst, and Wall Street was forever altered. In fact it’s not there anymore; it exists merely as a metaphor for “business” and “investing.” Many of the firms that helped Dick Grasso are gone, their CEOs humiliated, as was Mr. Grasso himself, in a salary scandal.

In the years after 2001, they took care of themselves. But that bright shining week, Sept. 11 through 17, they took care of tradition, the exchange and their country.

So maybe wisdom begins there for them, and for those entering and living out lives in business in America: Look only to yourself and wind up with ashes. Know it’s bigger than you and wind up a hero.

But then it begins there for everyone.

Barack Obama was elected in part because of his singularity. There was no one like him. He was a break with the past, not only because of his youth and race but also his cerebral bent, his cool demeanor. He seemed free of the partisan muck. He was hard to categorize because we didn’t have categories for him. This was part of his power. It denied his foes purchase; they didn’t know how to get at him. It allowed others to project on his canvas. After the thickly drawn George W. Bush, he seemed something refreshing: a mystery.

He has been criticized in the past for not being philosophically clear, but Mr. Obama possesses the canny knowledge that in modern politics, clarity can sometimes get in your way. You don’t always want to shoot arrows that pierce; sometimes it’s better to be a great enveloping fog, something your enemies get lost in.

The big thing that has happened the past few weeks is that he’s become more sharply defined. Actions and decisions clarify, and he’s been quite the decider.

In foreign affairs he has shown the impulses of a moderate: watching (Iran), waiting (Iraq), beefing up (Afghanistan), standing down (the nomination of Charles Freeman as National Intelligence Council chairman, which brought more drama than he wanted). His attitude at this week’s summit was one of welcome modesty, which might or might not have tipped into a mea culpa (he agreed that America bears great responsibility for the world economic meltdown, and that some previous U.S. foreign policy attitudes have been poor). Or perhaps that’s a you-a culpa.

In any case, his freshness and persona probably contributed to the fact that the predictable riots, while anticapitalist and antiglobalist, were not in their focus anti-American. This was a welcome relief. It won’t last forever, and let’s enjoy it while we can. Michelle Obama enjoyed a well-deserved triumph, representing her country with grace and elegance. She continued to signal a secret conservatism by demonstrating support for the right to bare arms. I very much wish that were my joke and not that of the editor Jason Epstein.

In domestic affairs, however, in the economy, Mr. Obama’s actions since February have left him not so much more deeply defined as tagged. They can arguably be understood not as a conglomeration of moderate impulses but an expression of a kind of grandiosity. He thinks big! His plans are all-encompassing! There is so much busyness, and so much spending, that journalists have been in an unofficial race to keep track of the flurry of numbers. From Bloomberg News this week: “The U.S. government and the Federal Reserve have spent or lent or committed $12.8 trillion” in new pledges. This they note is almost the value of everything the United States produced last year. The price tag comes to $42,105 for every man, woman and child in the U.S.

I happened to be rereading the economics section of Mr. Obama’s second book, “The Audacity of Hope,” when I read the Bloomberg story. He scores President Bush for contributing to a national debt that amounted to a $30,000 bill for each American. Those were the days!

The tagging was done, definitively, by an increasingly impressive (because unusually serious and sincere) member of the U.S. Senate, who happens also to be Mr. Obama’s friend. Tom Coburn, an Oklahoma Republican, has been close with the Illinois Democrat since their Senate orientation in 2004; he’s the man the president hugged after his big joint sessions speech last month. Thursday, in a column on RealClearPolitics.com, Mr. Coburn wrote, “I believe President Obama has proposed the most significant shift toward collectivism and away from capitalism in the history of our republic. I believe his budget aspires to not merely promote economic recovery but to lay the groundwork for sweeping expansions of government authority in areas like health care, energy and even daily commerce. If handled poorly, I’m concerned this budget could turn our government into the world’s largest health care provider, mortgage bank or car dealership, among other things.”

To be defined in this way is not just a negative for Mr. Obama in terms of its criticism, it amounts to being robbed, by a friend, of the vagueness that was part of his power. Mr. Coburn was all the more deadly for being fair-minded: he was tough on both parties as operating in a crisis from “scripts,” with Democrats saying everything is Bush’s fault and Republicans decrying high spending and taxing while failing to abjure earmarks and admit what must be cut.

The great long-term question about Mr. Obama’s economic program, the great political question, is: Is this what the people want? There are economists who believe, and who make a reasonable case, that more money is needed to get the credit system, now frozen like icebergs, flowing in warm streams again. But in terms of leaps in the size of government, including a new health-care system, and higher deficits, and increased borrowing, and debt—in terms of the sheer scope and size of what is being planned—one simply wonders: Is this what the people want?

Different pollsters offer different data. The Washington Post this week put the president’s approval ratings at 60% or higher; the Washington Times had a Zogby poll saying Mr. Obama’s popularity has dipped below 50%; in this paper, the pollsters Douglas Schoen and Scott Rasmussen said the American people “are coming to express increasingly significant doubts about his initiatives,” and placed the president’s approval rating at 56%, “with substantial polarization.”

That last qualification certainly sounds true. So does the assertion that there’s a gulf between the president’s popularity and the popularity of his programs. Messrs. Schoen and Rasmussen had 83% of respondents saying his programs will not work, 82% saying they’re worried about the deficit, 78% worried about inflation, and 69% worried about the increasing role of the government in the economy.

This is a hard time to be president. The questions and issues that arise, their depth, complexity and implications, amount to an almost daily parade of horribles. There is considerable goodwill for the president, and all the polls show considerable support—half the nation in a time of sustained crisis is not a small thing—but one wonders for the first time if Mr. Obama’s support isn’t becoming, in the old phrase, a mile wide and an inch deep. Something has been lost in terms of fervor when one talks to Obama supporters. There is little of the spirit that led FDR’s supporters, for instance, in another great economic crisis, to put signs in their front windows supporting the National Recovery Act. We were a younger country then, and the two crises are not completely comparable, but there’s a lot of wait-and-see out there. There’s also a growing divide observable between the American establishment—of both parties—and the rank and file of Americans living normal, non-politically-obsessed lives. The latter seem more patient, more forgiving toward the president. The former, the establishment—again, in both parties—now commonly voice grave doubts as to his domestic ambitions.

Mr. Obama had a strong closing news conference in Europe, and it looks to have been a successful trip, marked at the end by an air of relative and surprising G-20 unity. The president will get some bounce from it, as they say, and it may be considerable. But then the Europe trip speaks of the part of his administration, foreign affairs, that is marked by an air of moderation, not the part involving ambitions that are grand to the point of grandiosity.

He is willowy when people yearn for solid, reed-like where they hope for substantial, a bright older brother when they want Papa, cool where they probably prefer warmth. All of which may or may not hurt Barack Obama in time. Lincoln was rawboned, prone to the blues and freakishly tall, with a new-grown beard that refused to become an assertion and remained, for four years, a mere and constant follicular attempt. And he did OK.

Such impressions—coolness, slightness—can come to matter only if they capture or express some larger or more meaningful truth. At the moment they connect, for me, to something insubstantial and weightless in the administration’s economic pronouncements and policies. The president seems everywhere and nowhere, not fully focused on the matters at hand. He’s trying to keep up with the news cycle with less and less to say. “I am angry” about AIG’s bonuses. The administration seems buffeted, ad hoc. Policy seems makeshift, provisional. James K. Galbraith captures some of this in The Washington Monthly: “The president has an economic program. But there is, so far, no clear statement of the thinking behind the program.”

This in part is why the teleprompter trope is taking off. Mr. Obama uses it more than previous presidents. No one would care about this or much notice it as long as he showed competence, and the promise of success. Reagan, if memory serves, once took his cards out of his suit and began to read them at a welcoming ceremony, only to realize a minute or so in that they were last week’s cards from last week’s ceremony. He caught himself and made a joke of it. One was reminded of this the other day when Mr. Obama’s speech got mixed up with the Irish prime minister’s. Things happen. But the teleprompter trope has taken off: Why does he always have to depend on that thing?

There is a new Web site where the teleprompter shares its thoughts in a breathless White House diary. It’s bummed that it has to work a news conference next week instead of watching “American Idol,” it resents being dragged to L.A. in Air Force One’s cargo hold “with the more common electronic equipment.” It also Twitters: “We are in California! One of the interns gave my panels a quick scrub and I’m ready to prompt for the day.” And: “Waiting for my boss’s jokes to get loaded for Leno!”

The fact is that Mr. Obama only has two jobs, but they’re huge. The first is to pull us out of an economic death spiral—to save the banks, get them lending, fix the mortgage mess, address unemployment, forestall inflation. TARP, TALF, financial oversight and regulation of Wall Street—all of this is enormously complex, involving questions of scale, emphasis and direction. All else—windmills, green technology, remaking health care—is secondary. The economy is the domestic issue now, and for the next three years at least.

So one wonders why, say, the president does not step in and insist on staffing the top level of his Treasury Department, where besieged Secretary Tim Geithner struggles without deputies through his 15-hour days. Might AIG and the bonus scandals have been stopped or discovered sooner if Treasury had someone to answer the phones? Leadership is needed here. Not talkership, leadership.

Mr. Obama’s second job is America’s safety at home and in the world. Dick Cheney this week warned again of future terrorism and said Mr. Obama’s actions have left us “less safe.” White House press secretary Robert Gibbs reacted with disdain. Mr. Cheney is part of a “Republican cabal.” “I guess Rush Limbaugh was busy.” This was cheap.

A journalist, watching, said, “They are like two people fighting over a torn bag of flour.” It may be hard cleaning it up.

Mr. Cheney’s remarks, presented in a cable interview, looked political and were received as partisan. The fact is he was wrong and right, wrong in that a subject so grave demands a well documented and thoughtful address. It’s hard to see how it helps to present crucial arguments in a cable interview and in a way that can be discounted as partisan. Nor does it help to appear to be laying the groundwork for a deadly argument: Bush kept us safe, Obama won’t. It is fair— and necessary—to say what the new administration is doing wrong, and to attempt to correct it, through data and argument. The Bush administration made a great point of saying, when they were explaining what U.S. intelligence is up against, that the challenges are constant and we only have to be wrong once, fail once, for the consequences to be deeply painful. What the Bush administration was doing, in part, was admitting that they might be in charge when something happened. The key was to do remain focused and vigilant. This is still true.

But Mr. Cheney was, is, right in the most important, and dreadful, way. We live in the age of weapons of mass destruction, and each day more people and groups come closer to getting and deploying them. “Man has never developed a weapon he didn’t eventually use,” said Reagan, without cards, worrying aloud in the Oval Office.

What can be used will be used. We are a target. Something bad is going to happen—don’t we all know this? Are we having another failure of imagination?

A month ago former FBI director Robert Mueller, in a speech to the Council on Foreign Relations, warned of Mumbai-type terrorist activity, saying a similar attack could happen in a U.S. city. He spoke of the threat of homegrown terrorists who are “radicalized,” “indoctrinated” and recruited for jihad. Mumbai should “reinvigorate” U.S. intelligence efforts. The threat is not only from al Qaeda but “less well known groups.” This had the hard sound of truth.

Contrast it with the new secretary of homeland security, Janet Napolitano, who, in her first speech and testimony to congress, the same week as Mr. Mueller’s remarks, did not mention the word terrorism once. This week in an interview with Der Spiegel, she was pressed: “Does Islamist terrorism suddenly no longer pose a threat to your country?” Her reply: “I presume there is always a threat from terrorism.” It’s true she didn’t use the word terrorism in her speech, but she did refer to “man-caused” disasters. “This is perhaps only a nuance, but it demonstrates that we want to move away from the politics of fear.”

Ah. Well this is only a nuance, but her use of language is a man-caused disaster.

Our enemies are criminals, and criminals calculate. It is possible they are calculating thusly: America is in deep economic crisis and has a new, untested president. Why not move now?

Mr. Obama likes to say presidents can do more than one thing at a time, but in fact modern presidents are lucky to do one thing at a time, never mind two. Great forces are arrayed against them.

These are the two great issues, the economic crisis and our safety. In the face of them, what strikes one is the weightlessness of the Obama administration, the jumping from issue to issue and venue to venue from day to day. Isaiah Berlin famously suggested a leader is a fox or a hedgehog. The fox knows many things but the hedgehog knows one big thing. In political leadership the hedgehog has certain significant advantages, focus and clarity of vision among them. Most presidents are one or the other. So far Mr. Obama seems neither.

It is six months since Lehman fell and the crash (or the great recession, or the collapse—it’s time it got its name) began. An aspect of the story given less attention than it is due, perhaps because it doesn’t lend itself to statistics, is the psychic woe beneath the economic blow. There are two parts to this. One is that we have arrived at the first fatigue. The heart-pumping drama of last September is gone, replaced by the drip-drip-drip of pink slips, foreclosures and closed stores. We are tired. It doesn’t feel like 1929, but 1930. People are in a kind of suspended alarm, waiting for the future to unspool and not expecting it to unspool happily.

Two, the economy isn’t the only reason for our unease. There’s more to it. People sense something slipping away, a world receding, not only an economic one but a world of old structures, old ways and assumptions. People don’t talk about this much because it’s too big, but I suspect more than a few see themselves, deep down, as “the designated mourner,” from the title of the Wallace Shawn play.

I asked a friend, a perceptive writer, if he is seeing what I’m seeing. Yes, he said, there is “a pervasive sense of anxiety, as though everyone feels they’re on thin ice.” He wonders if it’s “maybe a sense that we’ve had it too easy in the years since 9/11 and that the bad guys are about to appear on the horizon.” An attorney in a Park Avenue firm said, “Things look like they have changed and may not come back.” He contrasted the feeling now on the streets with 2001. “Things are subdued. . . . Nine-eleven was brutal and graphic. Yet because there was real death and loss of life folks could grieve and then move on.” But today, “the dread is chronic. . . . Tom Wolfe’s Masters of the Universe were supposed to be invincible. The pillars of media were supposed to be there forever. The lawyers were supposed to feed through thick and thin. Not anymore.” He quoted Ecclesiastes: “The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning; but the heart of fools is in the house of mirth.” We are worried, he said, “about a way of life, about the loss of upward trajectory.”

The sale of antidepressants and antianxiety drugs is widespread. In New York their use became common after 9/11. It continued through and, I hypothesize, may have contributed to, the high-flying, wildly imprudent Wall Street of the ‘00s. We look for reasons for the crash and there are many, but I wonder if Xanax, Zoloft and Klonopin, when taken by investment bankers, lessened what might have been normal, prudent anxiety, or helped confuse prudent anxiety with baseless, free-floating fear. Maybe Wall Street was high as a kite and didn’t notice. Maybe that would explain Bear Sterns, and Merrill, and Citi.

Gun sales continue up. The FBI’s criminal background check system showed a 23% increase in February over the previous year, a 29% increase in January, a 24% increase in December and a 42% increase in November, when a record 1.5 million background checks were performed. Yes, people fear Obama will take away the guns he thinks they cling to, but a likely equal contributor to what The Wall Street Journal’s MarketWatch called a “gun-buying binge” is captured in the slogan on one firearms maker’s Web site: “Smith & Wesson stands for protection.” People are scared.

They are taking cash out of the bank in preparation for a long-haul bad time. A friend in Florida told me the local bank was out of hundred-dollar bills on Wednesday because a man had come in the day before and withdrawn $90,000. Five weeks ago, when I asked a Wall Street titan what one should do to be safe in the future, he took me aback with the concreteness of his advice, and its bottom-line nature. Everyone should try to own a house, he said, no matter how big or small, but it has to have some land, on which you should learn how to grow things. He also recommended gold coins, such as American Eagles. I went to the U.S. Mint website the next day, but there was a six-week wait due to high demand. (I just went on the Web site again: Production of gold Eagle coins “has been temporarily suspended because of unprecedented demand” for bullion.)

In Manhattan, Catholic church attendance appears to be up. Everyone seems to agree that this is so, though the archdiocese says it won’t have numbers until next fall. But yes, said Joseph Zwilling, the director of communications, “from what I’ve heard anecdotally from various priests,” the pews have been fuller. The rector at St Patrick’s told him Ash Wednesday was “the busiest yet,” with 60,000 people coming for ashes. At my local church at noon mass one day this week, there were 40 people when normally there are roughly a dozen, and the communion line stretched to the back of the church. Something is happening. Yesterday a friend sent the warning of the Evangelical pastor David Wilkerson, of Times Square Church, that a new catastrophe is imminent. This is causing a small sensation in evangelical circles.

To me, one of the signal signs of the times is the number of people surfing the Internet looking for . . . something. One friend looks for small farms in distressed rural areas. Another logs on late at night looking for a house to buy in a small town out West, or down South, or in the Deep South. She is moving all around America in her imagination. I asked if she had a picture in her head of what she was looking for, and she joked that she wanted to go where Atticus Finch made his summation to the jury. I don’t think it was really a joke. She’s not looking for a new place, she’s looking for the old days.

I spoke to a Manhattan-based psychiatrist who said there is an uptick in the number of his patients reporting depression and anxiety. He believes part of the reason is that we’re in a new place, that “When people move into a new home they increasingly recognize the importance of their previous environment.” Our new home is postprosperity America; the old one was the abundance; we miss it. But he also detected a political dimension to his patients’ anguish. He felt that many see our leaders as “selfish and dishonest,” that “our institutions have been revealed as incompetent and undependable.” People feel “unled, overwhelmed,” the situation “seemingly unsalvageable.” The net result? He thinks what he is seeing, within and without his practice, is a “psychological pandemic of fear” as to the future of things—of our country, and even of mankind.

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So where does that leave us? The writer and philosopher Laurens van der Post, in his memoir of his friendship with Carl Jung, said, “We live not only our own lives but, whether we know it or not, also the life of our time.” We are actors in a moment of history, taking part in it, moving it this way or that as we move forward or back. The moment we are living now is a strange one, a disquieting one, a time that seems full of endings.

Too bad there’s no pill for that.

It is late in the morning one day last December.

A plane is in distress, it’s lost one engine and now two and it’s going down, and people on the ground hear the sound, look up, say, “That’s going awful low,” and whip out their cellphones. You could see the pictures they took later on the news.

It sounds like Chesley Sullenburger and US Airways Flight 1549, but that was five weeks later. This was the military jet that went down in San Diego; this was the story that ended badly.

Then this week it took a turn. And looked at a certain way, the San Diego story is every bit as big, and elements of it just as deserving of emulation, as Sully saving all souls when he put down in the Hudson.

It’s Dec. 8, 2008, 11:11 a.m., and a young Marine pilot takes off from an aircraft carrier, the USS Abraham Lincoln, on a routine training flight. The carrier is maybe 90 miles southwest of San Diego. Lt. Dan Neubauer is flying an F/A-18 Hornet. Minutes into the flight, he notices low oil pressure in one of the two engines. He shuts it down. Then the light shows low fuel for the other engine. He’s talking to air traffic control and given options and suggestions on where to make an emergency landing. He can go to the naval air station at North Island, the route to which takes him over San Diego Bay, or he can go to the Marine air station at Miramar, with which he is more familiar, but which takes him over heavily populated land. He goes for Miramar. The second engine flames out. About three miles from the runway, the electrical system dies. Lt. Neubauer tries to aim the jet toward a canyon, and ejects at what all seem to agree is the last possible moment.

The jet crashed nose down in the University City neighborhood of San Diego, hitting two homes and damaging three. Four people, all members of a Korean immigrant family, were killed—36-year-old Youngmi Lee; her daughters, Grace, 15 months, and Rachel, 2 months, and her 60-year-old mother, Seokim Kim.

Lee’s husband, a grocer named Dong Yun Yoon, was at work. The day after he’d lost his family, he humbled and awed San Diego by publicly forgiving the pilot—“I know he did everything he could”—and speaking of his faith—“I know God is taking care of my family.”

His grace and generosity were staggering, but there was growing local anger at the military. Why was the disabled plane over land? The Marines launched an investigation—of themselves. This Wednesday the results were announced.

They could not have been tougher, or more damning. The crash, said Maj. Gen. Randolph Alles, the assistant wing commander for the Third Marine Aircraft Wing, was “clearly avoidable,” the result of “a chain of wrong decisions.” Mechanics had known since July of a glitch in the jet’s fuel-transfer system; the Hornet should have been removed from service and fixed, and was not. The young pilot failed to read the safety checklist. He relied on guidance from Marines at Miramar who did not have complete knowledge or understanding of his situation. He should have been ordered to land at North Island. He took an unusual approach to Miramar, taking a long left loop instead of a shorter turn to the right, which ate up time and fuel.

Twelve Marines were disciplined; four senior officers, including the squadron commander, were removed from duty. Their military careers are, essentially, over. The pilot is grounded while a board reviews his future.

Residents told the San Diego Union-Tribune that they were taken aback by the report. Bob Johnson, who lived behind the Yoons and barely escaped the crash, said, “The Marines aren’t trying to hide from it or duck it. They took it on the chin.” A retired Navy pilot who lives less than a block from the crash and had formed, with neighbors, a group to push the Marines for an investigation, and for limiting flights over University City, said after the briefing, “I think we’re out of business.” In a later story the paper quoted a retired general, Bob Butcher, chairman of a society of former Marine aviators, calling the report “as open and frank a discussion of an accident as I’ve seen.” “It was a lot more candid than many people expected.”

This wasn’t damage control, it was taking honest responsibility. And as such, in any modern American institution, it was stunning.

The day after the report I heard from a young Naval aviator in predeployment training north of San Diego. He flies a Super Hornet, sister ship to the plane that went down. He said the Marine investigation “kept me up last night” because of how it contrasted with “the buck-passing we see” in the government and on Wall Street. He and his squadron were in range of San Diego television stations when they carried the report’s conclusions live. He’d never seen “our entire wardroom crowded around a television” before. They watched “with bated breath.” At the end they were impressed with the public nature of the criticism, and its candor: “There are still elements within the government that take personal responsibility seriously.” He found himself wondering if the Marines had been “too hard on themselves.” “But they are, after all, Marines.”

By contrast, he says, when the economy came crashing down, “nowhere did we see a board come out and say: ‘This is what happened, these are the decisions these particular people made, and this was the result. They are no longer a part of our organization.’ There was no timeline of events or laymen’s explanation of how a credit derivative was actually derived. We did not see congressmen get on television with charts and eviscerate their organization and say, ‘These were the men who in 2003 allowed Freddie and Fannie unlimited rein over mortgage securities.’ Instead we saw . . . everybody against everybody else with no one stepping forth and saying, ‘We screwed up.’” There is no one in national leadership who could convincingly “assign blame,” and no one “who could or would accept it.”

This of course is true, but somehow more stinging when said by a serviceman.

*   *   *

The White House this week was consumed by extreme interest in a celebrated radio critic, reportedly coordinating an attack line with antic Clinton-era political operatives who don’t know what time it is. For them it’s always the bouncy ‘90s and anything goes, it’s all just a game. President Obama himself contributes to an atmosphere of fear grown to panic as he takes a historic crisis and turns it into what he imagines is a grand opportunity for sweeping change. What we need is stabilization—an undergirding, a restrengthening so things can settle and then rise. What we’re given is multiple schemes, and the beginning of a reordering of financial realities between the individual and the state.

The Obama people think they are playing big ball, not small ball, and they no doubt like the feeling of it: “We’re making history.” But that, ironically, was precisely the preoccupation of the last administration—doing it big, being “consequential,” showing history. Watch: Within six months, the Obama administration will be starting to breathe the word “legacy.”

What they’re up to will win and hold support, at least for a while, until the reaction.

But is it responsible? Or is it only vain?

Anyway, all honor this week to the Marines, who were very much the former, not the latter.

Washington

A mysterious thing happened in that speech Tuesday night. By the end of it Barack Obama had become president. Every president has a moment when suddenly he becomes what he meant to be, or knows what he is, and those moments aren’t always public. Bill Safire thought he saw it with Richard Nixon one day in the new president’s private study. Nixon always put a hand towel on the hassock where he put his feet, to protect the fabric, but this time he didn’t use the towel, he just put up his feet. As if it were his hassock. And his house.

So with Mr. Obama, about four-fifths of the way through the speech. He was looking from the prompters to the congressmen and senators, and suddenly he was engaging on what seemed a deeper level. His voice took on inflection. He wasn’t detached, as if he was wondering how he was doing. He seemed equal to the moment and then, in some new way, in command of it. It happened around here:

“The eyes of all people in all nations are once again upon us—watching to see what we do with this moment; waiting for us to lead. Those of us gathered here tonight have been called to govern in extraordinary times.”

“Called to govern” is one of those phrases that lift you out of the grimy proceedings of government and into something loftier. Is that how he sees it? Such a call is “a tremendous burden, but also a great privilege,” one entrusted to few. He quoted a letter from a 14-year-old girl named Ty’Sheoma Bethea of Dillon, S.C., whose beat-up school needs help. We’ve seen this sort of thing done before—the reading of the letter from the child, or the mother who needs health care—and more often than not, it is gratingly corny. But this wasn’t. Miss Bethea wrote, “We are just students trying to become lawyers, doctors, congressmen like yourself and one day president, so we can make a change. . . . We are not quitters.” She borrowed money for the stamp, and sent it to Washington.

“We are not quitters,” Mr. Obama repeated. Then, to Congress, “I know that we haven’t agreed on every issue thus far. . . . But I also know that every American who is sitting here tonight loves this country and wants it to succeed. That must be the starting point for every debate we have in the coming months, and where we return after those debates are done.”

Anyway, it was in there somewhere that he became the president. And it wasn’t just bearing or dignity, which he has by nature, it was more mysterious. He put on the cloak.

The speech was a success in terms of optics, as journalists, political operatives and dreadful people who are once again calling Washington “this town” now say when they mean “what normal humans see on TV.” Michelle Obama was inspirationally beautiful, and if you had arms like that, you’d go bare-sleeved in February too.

In terms of policy, the jury not only is out but will be for some time. Years ago I wrote of an Italian woman in my neighborhood who made spaghetti every day. When I asked how you tell it’s done, she showed me: You take a strand and fling it against the wall. If it’s done, it sticks. If it’s not done, it falls off the wall down the side of the stove. You keep flinging till one sticks. At the end of the day that is Obama’s recovery plan. Cash infusions for the banks, fling. Tax increases, thwack. Pork—excuse me, public investment—splat. When we look back years from now, we’ll see what stuck.

And who got stuck. And how that helped or hurt.

But the larger point that Mr. Obama had to communicate, and it’s something forgotten or overlooked by political sophisticates, is this: Someone’s in the kitchen. Someone’s cooking. In a time of crisis, someone’s in charge. That’s what he had to demonstrate Tuesday night. And he did. This will do him good.

At a White House backgrounder the day of the address, an Obama aide said the speech was deliberately meant not to be Clintonian—it would not consist of 167 initiatives cobbled together. The president has been reading FDR and his fireside chats. Mr. Obama’s advisers believed they’d reached the right balance between candor about the crisis and optimism about our ability to meet it. (Close, but no unfiltered Lucky Strike in a tar-stained ivory cigarette holder. Mr. Obama doesn’t do jaunty. Something in his demeanor defeats joy; his default mode is mild indignation when his job is inspiration. He did not leave people thinking, Now I know we will defeat this calamity. But he did leave them feeling, Now I know someone’s in charge, finally someone’s taken ownership of the mess.)

Internal polling shows people are angry not only at bankers and CEOs, who were casually destructive of the economy and now have the gall to ask for money, but neighbors who were imprudent and got mortgages they couldn’t afford. The budget deficit is important structurally but can’t be a focus now, jolting the system is, stabilizing the situation is. As for the stimulus package, if they’d followed opinion polls, it would have been bigger, not smaller. Republicans made gains by opposing the stimulus, but only among their base. Independent and unaligned voters have been marginally more supportive of Mr. Obama since the stimulus battle and do not see the lack of GOP votes as a rebuke to the president.

How will we know when the Obama plan is working? When we see building projects underway. The White House is hoping for a future full of ribbon-cutting ceremonies—more optics. The public will judge the success of Mr. Obama’s plan by the answer to this question: Are we adding jobs and arresting bad trends? The White House believes the public will give them time, that people don’t expect a turnaround for two years or so.

The White House no longer uses the phrase “stimulus package.” They always say “recovery plan.” Stimulus is yesterday. When you say it, they give you a wonderfully blank-eyed look and two sentences later weave in the phrase “recovery program.”

*   *   *

I think the president, politically, has three big things going for him as he faces this crisis.

First, legitimacy. Our last two presidents were haunted by the circumstances of their election, and significant swathes of the country never fully accepted them. George W. Bush had the cloud of the 2000 recount, and his loss that year of the popular vote; Bill Clinton won in 1992 with only 43% , in a three-man race in which the other two were, essentially, Republican. But no one doubts Mr. Obama’s legitimacy. He won by seven points, with 53%. He’s the first president without the illegitimacy cloud since Bush I.

Second, we’re in the middle of an emergency. In times like this, Americans want their president to succeed. Politically the crisis works for Mr. Obama.

Third is an unspoken public sense that we cannot afford another failed presidency, that we just got through one and a second would be terrible. Americans know how much good a successful presidency does for us in the world, in the public mind. The last unalloyed, inarguable success was Reagan. We need another. Liberal? Conservative? That, to the great middle of America, would, at the moment, be secondary. They want successful. They want “That worked.” They want the foreign visitor to say, “I like your president.” They want to respond, “So do I.”

Monday morning, 11:30:39 Eastern Standard Time, and I had just hit send. I was in a wide-body 767, high above the continent. “This is so exciting,” I wrote to a friend. “I am on an airplane going over the Rockies. I am sending you an email. Down there the settlers went in covered wagons. Up here on American Airlines flight something to L.A., I am surfing the Internet. There are ruts baked into the soil down there from the heavy wagons pushing west. I have never been on Wi-Fi on a plane before. I am looking down at the Rockies. ‘These are the days of miracles and wonders.’ “ My friend, an Internet pioneer, a brave and steely-eyed entrepreneur, shot back a reply: “We fly higher than mere birds can fly.” When I got home, I taped our exchange to a bookcase near my desk. In hard times we should not forget the magic of life, and the mystery.

I thought on the plane, for the first time in a long time, of the feeling of awe I had in 1990 and ‘91 and ‘92. I heard a man named Nathan Myhrvold speak of a thing called Microsoft. I saw a young man named Steve Jobs prowl a New York stage and unveil a computer that then we thought tiny and today we’d call huge. A man named Steve Wozniak became a household god as my son reported his visionary ways. It was a time so full of genius and dynamism that it went beyond words like “breakthrough” and summoned words like “revolution.” If you were paying attention, if you understood you were witnessing something great, the invention of a new age, the computer age, it caught at your throat. It was like hearing great music. People literally said what had been said in the age of Thomas Edison: “What will they think of next?” What a buoyant era.

And for a moment, as I sent and received my first airborne Wi-Fi emails, I was back there. And I was moved because I realized how much I missed it, how much we all do, that “There are no walls” feeling. “Think different.” “On January 24th, Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh. And you’ll see why 1984 won’t be like ‘1984.’ “ That was 25 years ago. The world was on fire.

It has cooled. And the essential problem with the crash we’re in is no one can imagine quite feeling that way again. People can remember it, but they can’t quite resummon it.

This isn’t like the stock market crash of 1987 or the collapse of the dot-com bubble in 2001. People are not feeling passing anger or disappointment, they’re feeling truly frightened.

The reasons:

This isn’t stock market heebie-jeebies, it’s systemic collapse.

It’s not just here, it’s global.

It’s not only economic, but political. It wasn’t only mortgage companies that acted up and acted out, so did our government, all the governments of the West, spending what they didn’t have, for a decade at least.

And at the center of the drama is your house—its worth, or its ability to see you through retirement, or your ability to hold onto it. An extra added angst bonus: Those thinking now about retirement are just old enough to remember America before the abundance, before everyone was rich, rich being defined as plenty to eat, a stable place to live, and some left over for fun and pleasure. For them, the crash has released old memories. And it’s spooking people.

Have you witnessed a foreclosure, or seen the growing log of pictures on the Internet? It happened to my family when I was a kid, and I didn’t know how much it was with me until a woman in Los Angeles the other day mentioned she had a new chocolate Lab she’d adopted from a shelter. He’d been left behind when a family was foreclosed on. “They left him in the house with a bowl of water and a tennis ball.” A neighbor heard him, saved him, and now he was hers. This story hurt like an old wound. There are a lot of such wounds out there. It’s part of why people are hunkering down.

The best report on how the young are experiencing it all came this week from the Web site Boing Boing, from the writer Cory Doctorow, who asked readers, “How are you coping with collapse-anxiety?” He wrote, “For me, I think it’s the suspense that’s the killer. What institutions will survive? Which ones are already doomed? Which of the items in my calendar are likely never to come to pass? Will my bank last?” He continued, “What are you telling yourself? How are you all sleeping at night? Are you hedging your bets with canned goods and shotguns, or plans for urban communal farming? Are you starting a business? Restructuring through bankruptcy? Moving back in with your parents?”

His readers wrote back, creating a stunning thread that said, essentially, all of the above, and more. They went from the wry—one reader is “drinking more . . . feeling disconnected from reality . . . watching more TV and movies”—to the tough—one said, “When the world turns crazy the crazy turn pro.” A number were moving in with relatives. In fact it sounded like the old days, before the abundance. Some were planting gardens. One said he was learning the ukulele so he could be a wandering minstrel. Mr. Doctorow told me the reaction was “stupendous” not only in terms of numbers but in terms of seriousness: These were people truly sharing their anxieties.

All of this hunkering down has stopped the great churning, the buying, selling and buying that was at the heart of our prosperity. In private equity firms, the churning was life. They bought a company, removed the fat, sold it at a profit, and bought another one. They kept moving. That’s over. No one is buying now, and no one can sell.

Perhaps the biggest factor behind the new pessimism is the knowledge that the crisis is not only economic but political, that we’ll have to change both cultures, economic and political, to turn the mess around. That’s a tall order, and won’t happen quickly. One thing for sure: Our political leaders for at least a decade, really more, have by and large been men and women who had fortunate lives, who always seemed to expect nice things to happen and happiness to occur. And so they could overspend, overcommit and overextend the military, and it would all turn out fine. They claimed to be quintessentially optimistic, but it was a cheap optimism, based more on sunny personal experience than any particular faith, and void of an understanding of how dark and gritty life can be, and has been for most of human history.

I end with a hunch that is not an unhappy one. Dynamism has been leached from our system for now, but not from the human brain or heart. Just as our political regeneration will happen locally, in counties and states that learn how to control themselves and demonstrate how to govern effectively in a time of limits, so will our economic regeneration. That will begin in someone’s garage, somebody’s kitchen, as it did in the case of Messrs. Jobs and Wozniak. The comeback will be from the ground up and will start with innovation. No one trusts big anymore. In the future everything will be local. That’s where the magic will be. And no amount of pessimism will stop it once it starts.

A moment last Monday, just after noon, in Manhattan. It’s slightly overcast, not cold, a good day for walking. I’m in the 90s on Fifth heading south, enjoying the broad avenue, the trees, the wide cobblestone walkway that rings Central Park. Suddenly I realize: Something’s odd here. Something’s strange. It’s quiet. I can hear each car go by. The traffic’s not an indistinct roar. The sidewalks aren’t full, as they normally are. It’s like a holiday, but it’s not, it’s the middle of a business day in February. I thought back to two weeks before when a friend and I zoomed down Park Avenue at evening rush hour in what should have been bumper-to-bumper traffic.

This is New York five months into hard times.

One senses it, for the first time: a shift in energy. Something new has taken hold, a new air of peace, perhaps, or tentativeness. The old hustle and bustle, the wild and daily assertion of dynamism, is calmed.

And now Washington becomes the financial capital of the country, of the world. Oh, what a status shift. Oh, what a fact.

If you want to feel the bruise of what’s happened, pick a neighborhood full of shops and go up and down the street. Here’s Second Avenue in the 80s. A jewelry and consignment store on 84th has a new sign on the window: “We Buy Gold.” Paul is at the counter, spraying the tarnish off a silver chain. How’s business? “No buyin’, no sellin’, no nothin’. It’s a joke. People scared. They’re in shock.” Nearby, an empty storefront, a bar that had been in business only 10 months. The sign on the window—you see it all over Manhattan now—says, “Retail Space Available.” Next door, in a small beauty salon, the owner says “We’re trying to survive.” In September business plummeted. It’s down “at least 30%,” she says. July and August had been surprisingly good; her clients didn’t go away on vacation. In the fall they were fired. “They lost the job, so they don’t need to cut and color so much.”

In a liquor store just off 82nd, the owner, from India, says volume is still high but profits are down. “In business, if you have a product under $15, is good. People used to spend $70, $80 on a bottle of wine, all the bankers, the young kids. Nothing moving more than $15.”

On 81st, the kosher restaurant has closed. On 79th, the Talbots is gone. “Left a few months ago,” says the doorman next door.

Turn down to Madison Avenue in the 80s. A high-end butcher who’s been in the neighborhood more than 30 years is moving to the West Side because his rent has been raised more than he can afford. Why are landlords raising rents in a recession? It’s not landlords, he says, you can reason with them, it’s co-op boards that own a building. The people in the apartments upstairs are paying high maintenance, and they’re worried about their jobs, their businesses, their bonuses. So they raise the rent on the shop downstairs to cut their maintenance. When the shopkeeper says he’ll move and who’ll take his place in this economy, the boards say, “It’s Madison Avenue, we’ll be able to rent it.” He says, “They will for a while. But not if it gets worse.”

The windows of the Jil Sander shop on Madison off 79th are newly covered in paper. A sign says they plan to relocate. How’s business in the small art gallery down the street? “It’s soft,” the owner says, discreetly. At 84th and Madison, a ladies boutique has a new sale: “Buy 2 sale items (already marked down 50% off) 3rd item Free!” The Boltons on 86th and Madison, gone. The shoe store three doors down, gone. The children’s boutique off 87th, gone. Not all the news is bad—there’s a new department store coming in—but people don’t close up shop when the immediate future is promising. And every day there’s a new surprise. Wednesday it was the little French dress shop on 91st and Madison. The sale sign in the front window said 80% off. “Is she moving?” I asked a woman in line for the dressing room. “She’s closing,” she said.

Politicians keep saying, “People have to begin to understand we’re in bad shape,” and “People should realize it’s a crisis.” I think they know, Sherlock. Do you? Our political leaders are like a doctor who rushes to the scene of a terrible crash, bends over a hemorrhaging woman and says, “This is serious, lady, you can’t take it lightly.” She looks up at him: “Help me, do something, I’m bleeding out!” The doctor, to the local TV cameras: “I hope she knows she’s in trouble.”

There’s a sense that everyone’s digging in. President Obama has dug in on this stimulus bill: Pass it or see catastrophe. Republicans are dug in: Pass it and see catastrophe. The digging in is a way of showing certitude, and they’re showing certitude because they’re lost.

We hire politicians to know what to do about empty stores, job loss, and “Retail Space Available.” But they don’t, and more than ever we know they don’t.

*   *   *

And there’s something else, not only in Manhattan but throughout the country. A major reason people are blue about the future is not the stores, not the Treasury secretary, not everyone digging in. It is those things, but it’s more than that, and deeper.

It’s Sully and Suleman, the pilot and “Octomom,” the two great stories that are twinned with the era. Sully, the airline captain who saved 155 lives by landing that plane just right—level wings, nose up, tail down, plant that baby, get everyone out, get them counted, and then, at night, wonder what you could have done better. You know the reaction of the people of our country to Chesley B. Sullenberger III: They shake their heads, and tears come to their eyes. He is cool, modest, competent, tough in the good way. He’s the only one who doesn’t applaud Sully. He was just doing his job.

This is why people are so moved: We’re still making Sullys. We’re still making those mythic Americans, those steely-eyed rocket men. Like Alan Shepard in the Mercury rocket: “Come on and light this candle.”

But Sully, 58, Air Force Academy ’73, was shaped and formed by the old America, and educated in an ethos in which a certain style of manhood—of personhood—was held high.

What we fear we’re making more of these days is Nadya Suleman. The dizzy, selfish, self-dramatizing 33-year-old mother who had six small children and then a week ago eight more because, well, she always wanted a big family. “Suley” doubletalks with the best of them, she doubletalks with profound ease. She is like Blago without the charm. She had needs and took proactive steps to meet them, and those who don’t approve are limited, which must be sad for them. She leaves anchorwomen slack-jawed: How do you rough up a woman who’s still lactating? She seems aware of their predicament.

Any great nation would worry at closed-up shops and a professional governing class that doesn’t have a clue what to do. But a great nation that fears, deep down, that it may be becoming more Suley than Sully—that nation will enter a true depression.

All week the word I kept thinking of was “braced.” America is braced, like people who are going fast and see a crash ahead. They know huge and historic challenges are here. They’re not confident they can or will be met. Our most productive citizens are our most sophisticated, and our most sophisticated have the least faith in the ability of our institutions to face the future and get us through whole. They have the least faith because they work in them.

*   *   *

Tuesday I talked to people who support a Catholic college. I said a great stress is here and coming, and people are going to be reminded of what’s important, and the greatest of these will be our faith, it’s what is going to hold us together as a country. As for each of us individually, I think it’s like the old story told about Muhammad Ali. It was back in the 1960s and Mr. Ali, who was still Cassius Clay, was a rising star of boxing, on his way to being champ. One day he was on a plane, going to a big bout. He was feeling good, laughing with friends. The stewardess walked by before they took off, looked down and saw that his seatbelt was unfastened. She asked him to fasten it. He ignored her. She asked him again, he paid no attention. Now she leaned in and issued an order: Fasten the seatbelt, now. Mr. Clay turned, looked her up and down, and purred, “Superman don’t need no seatbelt.”

She said, “Superman don’t need no airplane. Buckle up.” And he did.

We all think we’re supermen, and we’re not, and you’re lucky to have a faith that both grounds you and catches you.

But during the part in which I spoke in rather stark terms of how I see the future, I think I saw correctly that the physical attitude of some in the audience was alert, leaned forward: braced. Again, like people who know a crash is coming. Afterward I asked an educator in the audience if I was too grim. He looked at me and said simply: No.

A sign of the times: We had a good time at lunch. It is an era marked by deep cognitive dissonance. Your long-term thoughts are pessimistic, and yet you’re cheerful in the day to day.

*   *   *

On Wednesday, in an interview with Politico, Dick Cheney warned of the possible deaths of “perhaps hundreds of thousands” of Americans in a terror attack using nuclear or biological weapons. “I think there is a high probability of such an attempt,” he said.

When the interview broke and was read on the air, I was in a room off a television studio. For a moment everything went silent, and then a makeup woman said to a guest, “I don’t see how anyone can think that’s not true.”

I told her I’m certain it is true. And it didn’t seem to me any of the half dozen others there found the content of Cheney’s message surprising. They got a grim or preoccupied look.

The question for the Obama administration: Do they think Mr. Cheney is essentially correct, that bad men are coming with evil and deadly intent, but that America can afford to, must for moral reasons, change its stance regarding interrogation and detention of terrorists? Or, deep down, do the president and those around him think Mr. Cheney is wrong, that people who make such warnings are hyping the threat for political purposes? And, therefore, that interrogation techniques, etc., can of course be relaxed? I don’t know the precise answer to this question. Do they know exactly what they think? Or are they reading raw threat files each day trying to figure out what they think?

The bad thing about new political eras is that everyone within them has to learn everything for the first time. Every new president starts out fresh, in part because he doesn’t know what he doesn’t know. Ignorance keeps you perky.

*   *   *

On the economy, I continue to find no one, Democrat or Republican, who has faith that the stimulus bill passed by the House will solve anything or make anything better, though many argue that doing absolutely nothing will surely make things worse by not promising at least the possibility of improvement through action.

Meanwhile, the inquest on President Obama’s great stimulus mistake continues.

His serious and consequential policy mistake is that he put his prestige behind not a new way of breaking through but an old way of staying put. This marked a dreadful misreading of the moment. And now he’s digging in. His political mistake, which in retrospect we will see as huge, is that he remoralized the Republicans. He let them back in the game.

Mr. Obama has a talent for reviving his enemies. He did it with Hillary Clinton, who almost beat him after his early wins, and who was given the State Department. He has now done it with Republicans on the Hill. This is very nice of him, but not in his interests. Mr. Obama should have written the stimulus bill side by side with Republicans, picked them off, co-opted their views. Did he not understand their weakness? They had no real position from which to oppose high and wasteful spending, having backed eight years of it with nary a peep. They started the struggle over the stimulus bill at a real disadvantage. Then four things: Nancy Pelosi served up old-style pork, Mr. Obama swallowed it, Republicans shocked themselves by being serious, and then they startled themselves by being unified. But it was their seriousness that was most important: They didn’t know they were! They hadn’t been in years!

One senses in a new way the disaster that is Nancy Pelosi. She was all right as leader of the opposition in the Bush era, opposition being joyful and she being by nature chipper. She is tough, experienced, and of course only two years ago she was a breakthrough figure, the first female speaker. But her public comments are often quite mad—we’re losing 500 million jobs a month; here’s some fresh insight on Catholic doctrine—and in a crisis demanding of creativity, depth and the long view, she seems more than ever a mere ward heeler, a hack, a pol. She’s not big enough for the age, is she? She’s not up to it.

Whatever happens in the Senate, Republicans have to some degree already won. They should not revert to the triumphalism of the Bush era, when they often got giddy and thick-necked and spiked the ball. They should “act like they been there before.” They should begin to seize back the talking mantle from the president. And—most important—they must stay serious.

The national conversation on the economy is frozen, and has been for a while. Republicans say tax cuts, tax cuts, tax cuts. Democrats say spend, new programs, more money. You can’t spend enough for the Democratic base, or cut taxes enough for the Republican. But in a time when all the grown-ups of America know spending is going to bankrupt us and tax cuts without spending cuts is more of the medicine that’s killing us, the same old arguments, which sound less like arguments than compulsive tics, only add to the public sense that no one is in charge.