Ever since September 11, 2001, and the "war on terror" itoccasioned, the very quality of public events -- their grain, their tenor, theirstyle, if you like -- has seemed to undergo a certain deterioration, as if fromthat day forward history was being authored by a third-rate writer rather than amaster, or was being compelled, even as it visited increasing suffering on realpeople, to follow the plot of a bad comic book. Not the representation of theevents but the actual events, not the renderings of the characters involved butthose characters themselves, not the telling of the story but the story itself-- all seem to have become crasser, coarser, woven of shoddier materials.