A rattlesnake loose in the living room tends to end any discussion of animal rights. Turn loose anthrax and al-Qaeda in America, and look for a similar effect. In two months of a weird autumn, Americans have been shocked out of one country and into a strange new territory called the homeland--a cozy expression, vaguely British, that Americans have never used before. Up to Sept. 11, "homeland security" would have seemed a redundancy. Why shouldn't the homeland be secure?
We've passed through a paradigm shift. Over the weekend, the President's man Karl Rove went to Hollywood to talk to producers about...