A Real Life Bad Guy In Town

America is yearning for the reassuring inanity of its advertisements. Nine out of 10 Americans want ads back on TV as before. The company, Writhlin Worldwide, says most Americans want advertising because it's a sign of normalcy, some say because it's essential to the economy, some to show the terrorists that they can't beat America. To get back at bin Laden, advertise. The sale signs will hit him harder than those wasted missiles. This war will be won or lost less in Afghanistan than in the giant malls of American suburbia.

At least some of the shock that still hovers over Americans comes not from the loss of lives but from knowing that a disaster can happen in America outside of Universal Studios. It was a violation of innocence, of what Americans genuinely feel is innocence. Bush said he was amazed to see the hatred for Americans in Islamic capitals. "I just can't believe it because I know how good we are," he said. Apparently, there is such a thing as the innocent American entirely disconnected from cia misadventures.

Americans have always known more about Martians than the Mujahideen. It came like an attack from aliens, and in turn America turned on the new aliens at home and outside. Right now, America is holding on to its institutionalised politeness, but just about. Anyone who looks an alien is under surveillance, much of it citizen surveillance. On the streets, in the trains, the eyes say it. That relationship with Martians was innocence; this now is the loss of that innocence too. It means, among other things, no more students from India knocking on the doors of US universities for some time.

The 'Navel-Gazing Years Are Over', said one of those typically introspective headlines of today's US. In those attacks, America lost so many, and with them its 'Disney-ed' sense of safety. Day after day now there is talk and more talk on TV for a nation tuning into a self-discovery channel, bewildered by the blow to its muscular optimism. A people crowded by the sickening truth that this Bad Guy is for real. A people whose lost innocence is leading to a cruel question: how does America become less American?