Has Your Paradigm Shifted?

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 hearts and minds, and the propaganda reels that might be made--new stories, new heroes, new villains. It's not hard to imagine the movie treatments being hammered out on a thousand keyboards now: "It started as an ordinary September day..."

Pieties centered on individual rights have yielded to pieties of collective purpose and national security. In the Old Paradigm, flag waving was disapproved of and patriotism an embarrassment. You stood with everyone else, but never quite sang the anthem aloud. In the New Paradigm, the entire nation is festooned and flapping red, white and blue.

In the Old Paradigm, police were marginal blue blurs from the outer boroughs, and fire fighters merely the hired help. In the New Paradigm, they are Heroes Who Rushed into the Burning Buildings When Everyone Else Was Running Out.

In the O.P., machismo was a fault and the military an archaic and expensive nuisance. The N.P. admires strong men and manly virtues--courage and self-sacrifice. In the Vietnam years, the massive "daisy-cutter" bomb represented everything brutal and inhumane about the American war; in Afghanistan last week, it seemed just another useful weapon.

The Old Paradigm said Bush stole the election in Florida. In the New Paradigm, even many Democrats are grateful that Al Gore isn't sitting in the White House. In this sense, the N.P. is nonpartisan, though it tilts toward the conservative (when someone wants to blow up your country, you naturally want to conserve it). Bill Clinton is a relic of another time, like the 1920s party boy F. Scott Fitzgerald stranded in the landscape of the Great Depression.

O.P.: hyphen-Americans. N.P.: Americans, period. Nothing like a common enemy to unite and focus all that diversity. O.P. says it's not about Islam. N.P. says if it's not about Islam, why isn't every Muslim leader rising to condemn bin Laden? Under the O.P., racial profiling was abhorred, officially at least. Now racial profiling of male air travelers from the Middle East seems an inevitable piece of common sense; it is no longer a matter of pulling people over merely for Driving While Black. After Sept. 11, I was a guest on an African-American radio show in Detroit. Almost every one of the callers wanted to ship Detroit's entire Muslim community back to the countries they came from. The New Paradigm goes in for abusive political incorrectness that would have been censured under the Old Paradigm. The New Paradigm is not always a nice one. Wartime encourages a certain bracing ruthlessness. But be careful when the Constitution begins to seem like the Old Paradigm.

In truth, the New Paradigm is the way Americans are sharpening their wits in the presence of great danger. It is the reinstatement of an older model--a pre-Vietnam perspective. You hear that reinstated moral design in Bush's quaint--and artful--use of the word evil. He speaks of "the evil ones" and "the evildoers"--and at first it sounds like the vocabulary of professional wrestling. But Bush means to tell the evil ones that he is as willing as they are to deal in absolutes. The Old Paradigm dismisses the concept of evil as being an ignorant demonization of cultural differences. The New Paradigm says that evil is evil. On this matter, the New Paradigm is correct.

Evil has its physics. It is a current that passes through the world, and through the human heart. It manifests itself sometimes in violent acts; it often makes itself invisible, like an electromagnetic flow, a dark, humming force field. Evil is much more active and surprising than gravity, but like gravity, it is mysterious. It may hide itself in deep and ancient caves.