Peggy Noonan

The indecipherable language of government has actually become dangerous to the well-being of the nation. As the federal government claims ever greater powers, its language has become vague to the point of meaningless and meaningless to the point of menacing.

The other day I was watching “Morning Joe” on MSNBC, and Kathleen Sebelius, the secretary of health and human services, came on from Washington to talk about health care. A reporter on the set, Andrew Ross Sorkin of the New York Times, asked a few clear and direct questions: What is President Obama’s health-care plan, how would it work, what would it look like? I leaned forward. Finally I will understand. Ms. Sebelius began to answer in that dead and deadening governmental language that does not reveal or clarify but instead wraps legitimate queries in clouds of words and sends them on their way. I think I heard “accessing affordable quality health care,” “single payer plan vis-à-vis private multiparty insurers” and “key component of quality improvement.” In any case, she didn’t answer the question, which was a disappointment but not a surprise. No one answers the question anymore.

As she spoke, I attempted a sort of simultaneous translation, which is what most of us do now when we hear our political figures, translate from their language to ours. “Access health care” must mean “go to the doctor.” But I gave up. Then a thought crossed my mind: Maybe we’re supposed to give up! Maybe we’re supposed to be struck dumb, hypnotized by words and phrases that are aimed not at making things clearer but making them more obscure and impenetrable. Maybe we’re not supposed to understand.

I shouldn’t pick too hard on Ms. Sebelius specifically. Most people in the administration, and many in government, speak as she speaks, and have for many years. In her case there’s reason to believe it’s a quirk. A New York Times profile recently had her recalling with self-deprecating charm the time her child ran a high fever and she caused a bit of confusion by forgetting to say, “We have to go to the hospital!” and announcing instead, “This unsustainable increase in body temperature requires immediate access to a local quality health-care facility!” I made that up, but it was believable, wasn’t it?

New Class gobbledygook, which is more prevalent than ever, is also more destructive than ever because the government itself is doing more than ever. The Journal this week had a front page story reporting that the Obama administration is attempting to come up with ways, including federal regulations and “moral suasion,” to change the way employees and executives are paid in the financial services industry “including at companies that did not receive federal bailout money.” This is rather stunning, and is just one very small area of the new activism.

But back to language. Lately it is as if the American government, having decided in its programs, assumptions and philosophy to become more European, has at the same time decided it would be amusing to speak to the American people only in French.

Which would give rise to a simple and wholly understandable suspicion that the government doesn’t speak clearly about what it’s doing for the reason that they know that if people fully understood they would say, “Oh that’s not a good idea,” or, “The cost of that will kill us.”

I think there are two major but not fully formed or fully articulated fears among thinking Americans right now, and the deliberate obscurity of official language only intensifies those fears.

The first is that Mr. Obama’s government, in all its flurry of activism, may kill the goose that laid the golden egg. This is as dreadful and obvious a cliché as they come, but too bad, it’s what people fear. They see the spending plans and tax plans, the regulation and reform hunger, the energy proposals and health-care ambitions, and they—we—wonder if the men and women doing all this, working in their separate and discrete areas, are being overseen by anyone saying, “By the way, don’t kill the goose.”

The goose of course is the big, messy, spirited, inspiring, and sometimes in some respects damaging but on the whole brilliant and productive wealth-generator known as the free-market capitalist system. People do want things cleaned up and needed regulations instituted, and they don’t mind at all if the very wealthy are more heavily taxed, but they greatly fear a goose killing. Economic freedom in all its chaos and disorder has kept us rich for 200 years, and allowed us as a nation to be generous and strong at home and in the world. But the goose can be killed—by carelessness, hostility, incrementalism, paralysis, and by no one saying, “Don’t kill the goose.”

Complicating all this is the fact that so many of the Obama people seem to be extremely bright and pleasant academic types with no particular and personal knowledge of business in America. They are not messy businessmen with a love for the system that lifted them. Mr. Obama himself, like John McCain, has shown no particular interest in making money in his life, with the latter preferring military and then political glory, and the former preferring political power.

The second great fear is that the balance between those who pay taxes and those who need benefits will be left, after the great flurry, all out of whack. When this balance is deeply disturbed or distorted, when the number of those who need to take truly overwhelms those who need to make, a tipping point occurs. People become disheartened. Generations become resigned. Tiredness steps in. We will miss irrational exuberance.

Is anyone in the Obama administration watching this? If they are, they’re not saying, certainly not clearly. I continue to be astounded by how much Mr. Obama reminds me in his first few months of George W. Bush in his first few years. There is a sense with both men that they always pushed too hard, were always revolutionizing and doing “the work of generations,” as Mr. Bush put it. They appear to share an insensitivity to the delicacy of even so great a nation as ours, an inability to see limits, and to know at a certain point that what you do with a nation becomes what you do to it.

Do members of the administration speak obscurely because they can’t help themselves, or do they speak the way they speak because they really aren’t all that keen to have people understand them? Maybe they calculate that lack of clarity ensures maximum ability to maneuver. But maybe they should think less about maneuvering. They’re not helping the prevailing sense of national anxiety by speaking in a special lingo all their own. After all, it’s not their health-care system they’re reforming, it is America’s. It would be nice if America were allowed to know what exactly the plan is, and how it would work, and who would pay, and how.

*   *   *

As for the Republicans, the administration is giving them an opening. There could be gain in becoming the party that speaks with concrete honesty, and in a known human language, on the great issues of the day. The GOP could become the party that doesn’t make you translate, and doesn’t leave you giving up. I wonder if the party right now, for all the battering it’s experienced the past few years, is still quick enough to see an opening like this.

When word came of his death, I was literally planning the particulars of a trip to Washington for the inaugural conference of Pepperdine University’s Jack F. Kemp Institute for Political Economy. Jack’s papers will be there, and a chair in his name dedicated to the teaching of economics. This is good.

Much has been said since his passing, but more needs saying, or underscoring.

Kemp was the kind of person politics wants more of, the kind who remind us that it is a great profession, that at its best it is a calling, an actual vocation. We all know politicians who are cynical, and whose interaction with the public leaves them convinced them of their superiority. Kemp was the opposite. As his son Jimmy said this week, “My father didn’t think people were the problem but the solution.” He believed people had talent, dynamism, brilliance and hunger, and a good government was one that did not thwart but helped them, through sound policy, to become what God built them to be. “He wanted to unleash.” His trust in the people left him able to be daring. When he helped lift the American economy back in the 1970s and ‘80s, the old quarterback was throwing long. It is sentimental to put it this way but also true that the American people caught the ball, and crossed the end zone with it.

Jack knew how to lead. He spoke of ideas with affability and authenticity. He wasn’t angry and dark and simmering, didn’t glower. He had the power of the happy man. “Sometimes now the cost of admission into politics is bitterness, bile and guile,” said the pollster Kellyanne Conway. He was old-style, and humane. Ms. Conway got her first job in politics as an intern in Kemp’s office. “Who are you?” he once said. “I’m just an intern here,” she said. “No one is just an intern here,” he replied. He saw politics as a team sport, assigned, delegated and promoted from within. In all the years Ms. Conway knew him, she never heard him ask what the polls were saying. When he ran as Bob Dole’s vice presidential nominee in 1996, he flopped as a hatchet man. It wasn’t in his DNA.

He was an optimist not in the modern and prevalent sense of being too stupid to know things can go bad, but in a way that suggested an informed sunniness. If things get dark, and they might, we’ll have the brains, heft and resourcefulness to turn it around.

Some leaders are inspiring, and some are effective managers. Kemp was both. He knew how to execute and was a successful legislator. Persuasion is not enough, action and movement must follow. Ms. Conway: “There’s something about having been a quarterback that lets you understand the play clock is running, and if you don’t move forward you lose your chance.”

He cared about the poor. Politicians always claim to, but he did. Economic policy was social policy. If the rising tide didn’t lift the small skiffs, it wasn’t good enough. He cared about black America. He knew and worked with African-Americans all his life, they were his teammates, he and his wife socialized with them off the field. He saw us as the same. Noblesse oblige was not his style. He was neither wealthy nor Ivy League; life was not all abstract to him. And it is hard to feel or be patronizing toward a lineman who just sacked you and you went down hard. He didn’t come into politics in the 1960s carrying on his back the garbage of another era.

He became a symbol of inclusion. “The GOP was also the party of the Sunbelt strategy, the Southern strategy,” said Lloyd Green, a lawyer who served in George H.W. Bush’s administration. “Those are real components of real America, and if you are inside that tent, it can be warm. If you are outside that tent, it can be freezing or worse. Kemp, in my mind, was a walking reminder that the GOP was once the party of Lincoln.”

He was proof that the big tent has to be big. On spending his voting record tended to be to the left of Reagan’s budgets. Politics is about coalitions, and representing Buffalo, N.Y., is not the same thing as representing Orange County, Calif., back in the day.

He believed that economic freedom would lead to other kinds of freedom, and greater harmony too, if we worked at it. If we worked it right, everything that had been holding us back would break like a rusty chain. He thought someday we’d have a black president. When Barack Obama was elected, he wrote a letter to his grandchildren saying, “Is this a great country or what?”

He helped lead the old Republican party away from some of its narrower instincts, including a “green eyeshade” view of history: Democrats put forward spending bills and entitlements, reaping thanks and political rewards, Republicans act like accountants, responding, by reflex, with tax increases. In Kemp’s day it was called “root-canal economics”: tax, spend, and leave the taxpayer shrieking with pain.

The best brief history of what Kemp did to break the chain came from Bruce Bartlett, in Forbes. In the early ‘70s the new congressman from Buffalo read, questioned, studied the past. Reminded that the GOP had once been a tax-cutting party, he looked at JFK’s great tax cut, which reduced the top marginal tax rate from a destructive 91% to an improved 70%, and a painful bottom rate of 20% to 14%. Kemp asked the Congressional Research Service what followed JFK’s cuts. The answer: Federal revenues increased. Kemp set to work, putting together a bill patterned on Kennedy’s that cut the top rate from 70% to 50% and the bottom from 14% to 10%. He helped persuade Ronald Reagan in 1980 to embrace it, which wasn’t hard, since Reagan, when an actor, had suffered under the 91%. Both the Reagan presidency and the Kemp-Roth bill became reality in 1981, and “the seven fat years,” a phrase of the late Bob Bartley, editor of this page and a journalistic leader of Kemp and Reagan’s political movement, began.

Kemp was half of one of the most moving partnerships in modern American political history. “Some say Reagan wouldn’t have been Reagan without Kemp,” says Jimmy Kemp. “I don’t know, but I’ll tell you this: Kemp would not have been Kemp without Joanne Main.” She was his stability and support as he went “from passion to passion.” She was, is, a citizen, a maker of new communities and supporter of existing ones. She picked their first house because it was near her church, Fourth Presbyterian in Bethesda, Md. For 38 years she’s led a Christian study group that meets every Friday morning at her home. She did the same in Buffalo. “He was the power of political ideas, she was the power of spiritual ones,” says their son. She has devoted her time and energy to friends, neighbors, husband, Prison Fellowship, groups that advocate for the unborn, four children and 17 grandchildren. She is one of those who quietly make it possible for Washington to function, however imperfectly, as a real and coherent community.

Once before I was to give a big speech, I saw her in the audience and told her I felt nervous. “Then we must pray,” she said, and did, unselfconsciously, with focus, in a gray folding chair in a cavernous auditorium with hundreds of people milling about. That’s who was behind Jack Kemp. No wonder he did what he did.

President Obama’s news conference Wednesday night was a bit of a masterpiece. The Obama Thinking Look was back, as he parsed questions, took notes, and offered up rehearsed answers in a way that made them seem not written by the Committee on Soundbites but natural to him, as if he were formulating answers in the here and now. On torture, he cited Churchill. He spoke of pro-lifers not with any of the appellations the left prefers but as pro-lifers. He dispatched the culturally radical Freedom of Choice Act as “not a top priority”; he said he doesn’t want to run auto companies and banks and would prefer, in fact, a smaller portfolio. His presentation was low-key, authoritative, and had the look and feel of moderation. When you can give this impression while some of your decisions—for instance, on the legitimate cost and reach of government—are not, actually, moderate, you are demonstrating a singular political talent.

He is subtle and likes to kill softly. As such, he is something new on the political scene, which means he will require something new from his opponents, including, first, patience.

*   *   *

I am wondering once again if Republicans in Washington fully understand what they are up against.

They have had a hard week. Someday years hence, when books are written about the Republican comeback, they may well begin with this low moment, and the bolting of Arlen Specter to the Democrats. It is fine to dismiss Mr. Specter as an opportunist, but opportunists tell you something: which side is winning. That’s the side they want to be on.

And so the latest round of What Should the Republican Party Do?

If it is alive, and it is, it will evolve, as living things do. Beyond that, a thought.

A great party needs give. It must be expansive and summoning. It needs to say, “Join me.”

A party that is huge, vital and national, that is truly the expression of the views of a huge and varied nation, will, by definition, contain within it those who are more to the right, and more to the left, and more to the middle. This creates a constant tension, a constant fight, but no matter. As Ronald Reagan said in China, in front of students at Fudan University, we are “a great disputatious nation.”

Great parties are coalitions, and coalitions contain disparate and sometimes warring pieces. FDR’s coalition contained Southern Democrats from Birmingham and socialists from the Bronx. They didn’t agree on much, but they agreed on some essentials, such as “the New Deal is good” and “government should be harnessed to help the little guy.” It was imperfect and in time evolved but its success demonstrated that a great party needs give.

The argument over the Republican party now always devolves into the question: Should it be less conservative? I say devolves because it is Democrats and the left who frame the question that way, and they do so because whatever the answer, yes or no, it will damage Republicans.

Another way to put the question is: Can the party, having accurately ascertained its position, and recognizing shifting terrain, institute a renewed and highly practical tolerance for the many flavors of Republican? Can it live happily and productively with all its natural if sometimes warring constituent groups?

It must.

All the metaphors here are tired, so let’s stick with the big tent. A big tent is held up by tent poles. No poles, no tent. No poles, all you have is a big collapsed canvas.

The poles that keep up the tent are the party’s essential beliefs. Republicans over the next few years should define what each of their tent poles stands for—a strong defense being an obvious pole, a less demanding and intrusive government being another, a natural affection and respect for tradition and for life being a third—and how many poles there are.

But also, the people inside can’t always be kicking people out of the tent. A great party cannot live by constantly subtracting, by removing or shunning those who are not faithful to every aspect of its beliefs, or who don’t accept every pole, or who are just barely fitting under the tent. Room should be made for them. Especially in those cases when Republican incumbents and candidates are attempting to succeed in increasingly liberal states, a certain practical sympathy is in order.

In the party now there is too much ferocity, and bloody-mindedness. The other day Sen. Jim DeMint said he’s rather have 30 good and reliable conservative senators than 60 unreliable Republicans. Really? Good luck stopping an agenda you call socialist with 30 hardy votes. “Shrink to win”: I’ve never heard of that as a political slogan.

Is it fully mature, and truly protective toward America, to be so politically exclusionary?

It is true that Republican unity would benefit now, or soon, from a great man or woman who can by the force of his presence, by the provable support of the people of his home state, by his ability to persuade, by his ability to seem somehow inevitable (as FDR and Churchill, Thatcher and Reagan all did), emerge and win the support of a plurality of the American people.

That is a wonderful and exciting thing when it happens.

But such a person may or may not emerge. People who resolve history just by showing up are few and far between.

We say of a great one, “That’s the sort of person who comes along once a generation,” but in fact when you look back on history you realize it’s a lucky nation that yields one up even that often. A lot of history is just making do, muddling through. A lot of history goes unmarked by conspicuous greatness.

Right now, Republicans have to muddle through and do their best. They are up against a talented and charismatic leader whom people want to succeed. His party is with him. Certainly it is hungry, and grateful to him for getting them back in the game.

Republicans are also up against themselves. On Capitol Hill they are up against the Bush era, when through fear of the White House or mindless opportunism they supported things they now decry. It will take them a while to seem credible again. The smarter of them know this. They’re waiting for time to pass and a new cliché about them to take hold. Old cliché: “They’re not a credible alternative.” Future cliché they hope for: “They’ve learned a lot in the wilderness.”

Republicans are trying to find themselves during a time of dramatic, rolling change, demographic change, younger voters who seem embarrassed to be associated with them, an aging and contracting base and, perhaps most ominously, what appears to be a new national openness to a redefinition of the relationship between the government and the governed.

The ground is shifting. It’s hard to get your footing in an earthquake. As Republicans on the Hill try, they must also try to steady their party. It needs a greater sense of realism about its predicament. It needs less enforcement and more encouragement. It needs to inspire the young and the politically unformed not with bloodlust but with ideas.

A great party allows everyone in, and allows prospective members to self-define. If they say they’re Republicans, they should be welcomed and helped to find a place where they fit. A great party has a lot of such places. A great party is expansive. A great party has give.

What makes it hard at the moment to write sympathetically of Barack Obama is the loud chorus of approbation arising from his supporters in journalism as they mark the hundred days. Drudge calls it the “Best President Ever” campaign. It is marked by an abandonment of critical thinking among otherwise thoughtful men and women who comprise, roughly speaking, the grown-ups of journalism, the old hands of the MSM who have been through many presidents and should know better. They are insisting too much. If they were utterly confident, they wouldn’t be.

In the area of foreign affairs, one of the arguments for candidate Barack Obama was that he would put a new stamp—new ways, new style and content—on America’s approach to the world. This might allow some in the world—occasional allies, foes, irritated sympathizers—to recalibrate and make positive readjustments in their attitude toward Washington. With George W. Bush, everyone got dug in, and the ground froze. After 9/11 he cut like a sword and divided: You were with us or against us. He launched a war that angered major allies. For seven years there was constant agitation, and the world was allowed to make a caricature of U.S. leadership. There was no capture of Osama bin Laden, the man who made 9/11 and whose seizure would have provided a unifying Western rallying point and inspired instructive admiration: Those Yanks get their man.

A second foreign-affairs argument for Obama is that we had entered the age of weapons of mass destruction (we’d entered it before 9/11, but only after that date did everyone know) under solely Republican rule. Which allowed anyone who wanted to, to perceive it, or play it, as a Republican war, a Republican drama. There were potential benefits in a change in leadership, one being that the Democrats would now share authority and responsibility for the age and its difficulties. They’d get the daily raw threat file, they’d apply their view of the world and do their best. A primary virtue of that: On the day something bad happened—and that day will come, and no one in the entire U.S. intelligence community will tell you otherwise—we would as a nation be spared, as we got through it, the added burden of the terrible, cleaving, partisan divisiveness of 2000-08. This would help hold us together in a hard time.

Is Mr. Obama putting a new style and approach on the age? Yes. On the occasion of the hundred days one can say: So far, so good. (We are limiting this discussion to foreign policy because in terms of domestic policy there are only so many ways to say “Oy.”) There is an air of moderation, a temperate approach. Mr. Obama shakes hands with everyone, as is appropriate, for if American presidents dined only with leaders of high moral caliber and democratic disposition, they’d often sit alone at the table of nations. Though the controversy was that Mr. Obama shook Hugo Chavez’s hand at the summit last week, the news was the desperation with which Mr. Chavez tried to get in the picture with him. It’s not terrible when they want to be in the picture with you. It all depends on what you do with the proximity and in the ensuing conversation.

*   *   *

But now a hard issue has arisen, and it may well have bad foreign-policy implications.

Mr. Obama has had great and understandable difficulty in balancing competing claims regarding how to treat government information on prisoner abuse. The White House debated, decided to release Bush-era memos, then said they wouldn’t allow anyone to be prosecuted, then said maybe they would. It was flat-footed, confusing. The only impressive Obama we saw on the question this week was the one described by “a senior White House official” in the Washington Post. He or she was quoted saying, of the internal administration debates, that “the president’s concern was that would ratchet the whole thing up,” and “His whole thing is: I banned all this. This chapter is over. What we don’t need now is to become a sort of feeding frenzy where we go back and relitigate this.”

Assuming the official spoke accurately of Mr. Obama’s attitude, the president was wise in his reservations.

A problem with the release of the documents is that it opens the way—it probably forces the way—to congressional hearings, or a commission, or an independent prosecutor. It is hard at this point to imagine that what will follow will not prove destructive to—old-fashioned phrase coming—the good of the country.

Torture is bad, and as to whether the procedures outlined in the memos constituted torture, you could do worse than follow the wisdom of John McCain, who says, “Waterboarding is torture, period.” This is something he’d know about. Abuse is wrong not only in a specific and immediate sense but in a larger one: It coarsens and damages the nation that does it while undermining its reputation in the world and its trust in itself. I freely admit it is easy to say this on a pretty day in spring 2009, and might not have been when 3,000 Americans had just been killed. In New York it took months for us to lose the terrible, burnt-plastic smell of the smoke. The earliest memos were written by men who still had the smell of smoke in their noses.

*   *   *

Why have reservations, then, about release of the memos and the investigations that will no doubt follow?

For these reasons. Prisoner abuse has been banned. Mr. Obama himself, as he notes in the quote above, banned it. It’s over. The press, with great difficulty, and if arguably belatedly, did and is doing its job: It uncovered and revealed the abuse. The historians are descending, as they should. Hearings, commissions or prosecutors would suck all the oxygen out of the room and come to obsess the capital, taking focus off two actual, immediate and pressing emergencies, the economy and the age of terror. Hearings, especially, would likely tear up the country as we descended into opposing camps. They would damage or burden America’s intelligence services, and likely result in the abuse of those who acted from high motives, having been advised their actions were legal. As for the memo writers, some of whose constitutional theories were apparently tilted to the extreme in favor of the executive, it is hard to see how it would help future administrations, or this one, to have such advice, however incorrectly formulated, criminalized.

Finally, hearings would not take place only in America. They would take place in the world, in this world, the one with extremists and terrible weapons. It is hard to believe hearings, with grandstanding senators playing to the crowd, would not descend into an auto-da-fé, a public burning of sinners, with charges, countercharges, leaks and graphic testimony. This would be a self-immolating exercise that would both excite and inform America’s foes. And possibly inspire them.

Meanwhile, a resurgent Taliban is moving toward Islamabad and, possibly, the Pakistani nuclear arsenal; Israel and Iran are at loggerheads; and Iraq and Afghanistan continue as live and difficult wars. And that’s just one small part of the world.

What a time to open a new front, and have a new fight, and not about what is but what was.

Hard not to believe it wouldn’t be better to leave this one to history, and the historians. Absent that, a commission is better than a public prosecutor with an endless prosecution, and a public prosecutor is better than congressional hearings. Really, almost anything would be better than that.

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.

*   *   *

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.

*   *   *

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.