WE DIDN'T CHANGE after all. Things changed, yes. Flags waved. A president emerged. The economy slid. The enemy scattered. Politics cooled. The allies rallied. The allies chafed. Politics returned.

But we didn't change. We thought we would. After the shock of the bolt from the blue, it was said that we would never be the same. That it was the end of irony. That the pose of knowing detachment with which we went to bed September 10 was gone for good.

Not so. Before the first year was out, it was back, all of it. Irony. Triviality. Vulgarity. Frivolousness. Whimsy. Farce. All the things no healthy society can live without.

We returned to normality. No, not the "new normality," that state of suspended apprehension that followed the first weeks of shock and fear. The new normality dissipated into the ether with amazing speed. During its brief few months of existence, it seemed reasonable to deputize the postman and the milkman and the cable guy to snoop around your house looking for suspicious characters. Today that TIPS program seems slightly loony, as it should to true normality.

True normality. Can you doubt it is back when the culture king of 2002 is Ozzy Osbourne, now locked with Anna Nicole Smith in a race to the cultural bottom? It's all back: reality TV, Geraldo on the scene, "Sex and the City," and every sequel known to man: "Austin Powers," "Stuart Little," "Men in Black," and Yoda, flying no less.

Last year's summer tizzy was shark attacks. After September 11, it seemed absurdly, self-indulgently trivial. After a real catastrophe, we'd not succumb again to media-manufactured scares. We wouldn't? This summer it is the child kidnapping epidemic, an invention of insatiable 24-hour cable news (there has been no increase in incidence, just coverage) catering to our perennial need for a fright-of-the-season.

As for irony, it is back by the shovelful. Of course, there was the decent interval during which Jay Leno would look plaintively at the audience after a gag that fell flat and say, "What do you expect? I can't do any 'stupid Bush' jokes anymore." Now, not a night goes by without a "stupid Bush" joke. Reverence for a sitting president is unnatural, abnormal. It couldn't last. It shouldn't. It didn't.

Perhaps we should have known a year ago. After all, no one speaks of the American character having been changed by Pearl Harbor. True, the war changed America, catalyzing technological advance, internal migration, and the emancipation of women and minorities. But those were the products of four years of war, not of one day of infamy. They were the residue of exertion, not of shock.

National character does not change in a day. September 11 did not alter the American character, it merely revealed it. It allowed--it forced--the emergence of a bedrock America of courage, resolve, resourcefulness, and, above all, resilience. What the enemy did not know (nor at that time did we, fully) was that beneath the shallowness and the triviality, the outward normality of America in post-Cold War repose, lay the sleeping giant that Admiral Yamamoto knew he had awakened on December 7, 1941, and that Osama bin Laden had no inkling he had awakened on September 11, 2001.
Val:Y